Embracing Restlessness: Cultural Musicology 3487154242, 9783487154244

Table of contents :
Birgit Abels (ed): Embracing Restlessness
Contents
Acknowledgments
Birgit Abels: Restless, Risky, Dirty (An Introduction)
Birgit Abels: Sketching Cultural Musicology
Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten: It Slaps and It Embraces! On Psytrance, Immersion, and Potential Facets of a Transductive
Cultural Musicology
Lawrence Kramer: A Grammar of Cultural Musicology (Which Has No Grammar)
Charissa Granger: Bomb Tunes and Festival Fliers: Framing and its Usefulness for Cultural Musicology
John Richardson: Ecological Close Reading of Music in Digital Culture
Birgit Abels: The Academicist Malady Writ Large: Music Studies, the Writing of Polyphony and the Not-Quite-Post-Colonial Pacific Ocean

Citation preview

Göttingen Studies in Musicology | Göttinger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft

Göttingen Studies in Musicology Göttinger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft Volume 6

edited by Birgit Abels & Andreas Waczkat

Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim · Zürich · New York 2016

Birgit Abels (ed.)

Embracing Restlessness Cultural Musicology

Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim · Zürich · New York 2016

Cover Image: John o’Groats (Scotland), 1997. Photo credits: stephi.abels.

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Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abruar.

© Georg Olms Verlag AG, Hildesheim 2016 www.olms.de Umschlaggestaltung: Friedlind Riedel Satz: Schauplatz Verlag, Baden-Baden Reihengestaltung: Gīsan Mári Alle Rechte vorbehalten ISBN 978-3-487-42184-1

Contents Acknowledgments Birgit Abels Restless, Risky, Dirty (An Introduction)

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Birgit Abels Sketching Cultural Musicology

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Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten It Slaps and It Embraces! On Psytrance, Immersion, and Potential Facets of a Transductive Cultural Musicology

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Lawrence Kramer A Grammar of Cultural Musicology (Which Has No Grammar)

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Charissa Granger Bomb Tunes and Festival Fliers: Framing and its Usefulness for Cultural Musicology

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John Richardson Ecological Close Reading of Music in Digital Culture

111

Birgit Abels The Academicist Malady Writ Large: Music Studies, the Writing of Polyphony and the Not-Quite-Post-Colonial Pacific Ocean 143

Acknowledgments For comments on earlier versions of parts of this manuscript, I would like to thank Patrick Eisenlohr, Eva-Maria van Straaten and Wim van der Meer.

Birgit Abels

Restless, Risky, Dirty (An Introduction) As music scholars in the twenty-first century, we look back at a long chronicle of discussions about music studies’ epistemological scope and interest, and at an equally complex history of debates over disciplinary labels. In the aftermath of musicology’s long twentieth century, musicological ideologies abound, and tirades against or in favor of current (ethno)musicological practices have filled bookshelves in recent decades. This book doesn’t aim to add to that body of work, nor does it seek to address these issues among its core themes; yet, it does position itself in relation to these debates. Certainly, theoretical and methodological reflection and criticism rank among the very best of intellectual habits; beyond doubt, ethnomusicology’s somewhat ambivalent position within the array of humanities, and to a lesser extent cultural studies as well, has been one of its greatest strengths. Yet, especially with ethnomusicology, discussions have grown increasingly polemic (cf. Morris 2004) and self-centered, and deservedly, they have hence been reproached for unproductive and idle navel-gazing.1 Fueled by historical animosities and mutual resentments among musicologists, these debates have taken unjustified precedence, I believe, over the one thing that really matters: aspiring to better understand music(s). This is what cultural musicology cares about the most. It’s invested in a musicology firmly centered around music; at the same time, it’s invested in offering cultural studies new ways to listen and hence, to better understand, sonic cultural practices including music. That’s what this edited volume is about. The sonic may have moved to center stage in cultural studies, but our thinking, steeped in an eye-centered intellectual tradition and deeply devoted to language1

See, for instance, Stobart 2008, or the debate Greve 2002, Brandl 2003 and Klenke et al. 2003.

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based ‘discursivation’ of any and all experience as it is, has remained prosaically unmusical. The loss is musicology’s, for music as a mode of knowledge is so much more than a representational practice: by nature, music is irreducible to language. After all, that’s precisely why it matters so much. Clearly, the challenges of thinking musically and analytically at the same time are many, and they sometimes contest foundations of the North Atlantic academic tradition. Sound studies, with its radical and intellectually fresh commitment to the extraordinary yet fleeting efficacy of the sonic event, has in recent years already pointed at a number of lingering methodological issues that badly need addressing for anyone truly engaged with sound, and has opened up a much larger terrain than musicology considered to be within the scope of the field. These issues are related to some of those many challenges, and the weirdly difficult relationship of sound studies and musicology speaks of significant anxieties of epistemological nature on the part of the musicologists. These anxieties revolve around an utterly simple but often-avoided question: at the end of a long day, is there anything we can really know about music? (Cf. Bohlman 1999) Musicology has for a long time worked to devise tools to name, execute, canonize and thus control the very knowledge about music that it produced in the first place, and that it now believes to possess under the labels of music history, music theory, music cognition etc. In other words, it has attempted to discipline music (cf. Bergeron & Bohlman 1996). Yet, there is a common agreement even among musicologists that music’s efficacy lies precisely in the fact that its workings are evasive, fluid, and difficult to grasp. It’s exactly this evasiveness and fluidity that cultural musicology is interested in. With this, the central challenge immediately becomes tangible: if we can’t identify the obscure but clearly powerful aspects of a given musical experience, then how do we academically account for them without falling victim to arbitrariness, and hence to a scholarship that by any standard is dubious? One possible answer, this edited volume suggests, lies in attending to music’s complexity by embracing intellectual restlessness, a restlessness that in the long run enables us to address questions that open up seemingly huge terrains—what does music do to our being-in-the-world? How does the complex nature of our being-in-theworld intertwine with our music-making?—but at the time always inevitably pulls us back to the musically specific and the specifically musical. During the conference symposium in Göttingen in 2012 on which the contributions of this edited volume are based, Lawrence Kramer brought up the Levinas-inspired idea of intellectual

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restlessness, and in my understanding it is situated right at the heart of cultural musicology. A restless musicology looks for questions and perspectives rather than answers and presumed facts; refuses to rest content with anything we may find along the way; and remains eager to discover new approaches and ways to think about music. This is because it looks at our relationship to music as that which makes music meaningful (cf. Kramer 2016, 169ff.). Intellectual restlessness is interested in process, and specifically, in the process of relating to music. Gone, with this, is the clear distinction between theory and practice; gone is methodological exclusivity. Gone, then, of course, is academic authority. Towering tall, however, is the productive precarity of a musicology invested in the relationship between fleeting and ambivalent musicmaking practices and an intellectual pursuit that’s not invested in predictability and result but in curiosity and question. As it experiments with ideas and concepts, “cultural musicology is high-risk musicology or nothing at all,” as Nicholas Cook put it ever so aphoristically.2 In my appraisal, the benefits outweigh these risks, the presence of which I certainly acknowledge, by far. But in fact, the risks are intellectually necessary, for “the production of knowledge always puts something at risk” (Ray 2001, 47). Paul K. Feyerabend (1975), taking as an example the famous European case of Galilei, has shown that any scientific method has at some point in intellectual history been broken, arguing that intellectual conformity to a set of methods or theories “leads to a deterioration of our intellectual capabilities” (1975, 45). To prevent that, Feyerabend proposed theory and method proliferation: a pluralistic approach turning to alternative theories and methods in order to uncover both flaws in established theories and methods and in the empirical data approached by their means. No established theory or method has been able to ‘explain music’, and while cultural musicology doesn’t seek to ‘explain’, this fact alone necessitates restlessness in relating to music academically. This is because intellectual restlessness may allow us to draw nearer on the specifically musical workings manifest in sonic events as cultural practices—musical workings that form a mode of knowing in its very own right, for they are techniques of making sense of the world. And with this, cultural musicology has the potential to pave the road to better understanding sonic knowledge, a kind of 2

Nicholas Cook, remark as part of the lecture “Anatomy of the Musical Encounter: Debussy and the Gamelan, Again”, conference on “Premises, Practices and Prospects of Cultural Musicology”, Amsterdam, 24–25 January 2014.

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knowledge that has for the most part been ignored even by the various academic disciplines sailing under the flag of musicology. It’s a goldmine for the analytical study of human culture. In their foreword to the much-quoted edited volume The New (Ethno)musicologies, Phil Bohlman and Martin Stokes write that a “disquieting relation between the old and the new” existed in musicology; as Henry Stobart elaborates in his introduction to the same edited volume, musicology stood “at an interesting and important historical juncture.” There is something to be said for this view. But ultimately, I don’t think that this is an apt metaphor. Cultural musicology is much more rhizomatic than it is linear like paths leading you away from an “important historical juncture.” Again, embracing this rhizomatic nature and turning it into a strength— precisely because it very often feels like a lack of linearity and is therefore potentially unsettling in Feyerabend’s sense, both academically and personally—will continue to be one of cultural musicology’s greatest challenges and at the same time, one of its greatest strengths. Like music itself, the intrinsically critical practice of cultural musicology will continue to challenge what we think we know, deprive us of our taken-for-granted securities, and expose our limitations (in “knowing”, in “understanding”). All of this is old news—it’s nothing more than the bottom line of postmodern scholarship from the perspective of musical thought. But it’s a bottom line which cultural musicology takes serious. Hence, in proposing a cultural musicology, like others have before me, I do not propose to re-baptize ethnomusicology. I rather attempt to open up vistas of a more inclusive, less theoretically and methodologically constrained framework for the study of the world’s many musics and the world’s many musical logics (musico-logicas, as I will call them below). There can never be a singular path that represents cultural musicology, and there can never be a singular path that cultural musicology will take in the future. In keeping with this, this edited volume does not at all aim at explaining what cultural musicology is, let alone should be. There are numerous avenues, and numerous more will continue to open up. The perspective of academic music scholarship is, to a significant extent, a North-Atlantic one, and we are indebted to that tradition of thinking, whether we like it or not—a debt that mandates a certain critical responsibility for the current and future care of musicology as an academic field and for that which we as musicologists speak about: music and those who are musicking. Post-colonial studies have time and again called for an appreci-

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ation of modes of knowledge alternative to hegemonic North Atlantic ones. The world’s many musics all are sounding examples of such modes of knowledge, and cultural musicology is invested in making them resonate with the academic language alongside which we try to better understand music. But in order to make them resonate, we need to “do stuff ” (i.e., attend to music) rather than ruminate how we could or, even worse, how one should “do stuff ”. Quoting Nicholas Cook again, cultural musicology is a “dirty business”3 interested in the musically specific rather than the musically general. It’s a dirty business wary of theoretical and methodological orthodoxies, for orthodoxies shut our ears on music. Theory vs. Practice | Exercise And yet, cultural musicology is indebted to a great deal of theoretical writing. From this writing, it draws a significant number of sensitizing concepts rather than interpretative models. The crucial detail here is that theory isn’t the opposite of a “practice” to which it can be applied in some way or another. That’s how the terms have traditionally been used in the North Atlantic academy, and that’s how cultural theory tends to be, and that’s where the trouble starts, “applied” in musicology. The dichotomy of theory and practice in North Atlantic thought stems from the Aristotelian concepts of contemplative life versus active life (in their Latinized and more popular variety: vita contemplativa and vita activa). This set of opposites has always offered to the humanities a clear distinction between that which is related to the material we work with, and the methods we use for exploring our material, on the one hand (in other words, our practice); and the inductive reasoning with which we make our research results useful beyond our “case study,” and frame it academically, on the other. Conceived in this way, theory pre-structures our thinking, and inevitably pre-structures our research results in a way that is not particularly helpful in achieving our ambitious goal: to better understand music and ourselves through music. What’s more: when conceived in this way, theory lets a good deal of music’s innate potential to actually inform our understanding of what’s happening lie unused. As musicologists, perhaps we have the unique opportunity to conceive of cultural the3

Remark during the “Thinking through Music With … Nicholas Cook” Day 2013, Göttingen, 22 November 2013.

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orizing in a more musical way. Instead of applying theory to music, we can think through theory musically and think through music theoretically; and in this way, we can think beyond both. To me, that’s at the heart of the concept of musico-logica, on which I will elaborate below. Calling for a more musical approach to theorizing in cultural musicology like this resonates with one of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s most momentous ideas. In his book “You Have to Change Your Life,” (Sloterdijk 2009)4 Sloterdijk identifies exercising as a fundamental dimension of the conditio humana; one that has been neglected since the advent of modernity, he argues. There is something in between the clear-cut categories of theory and practice: something that is contemplative without being inactive, and something active that hasn’t lost its contemplative capacity. In an Aristotelian vein, Sloterdijk identifies this hybrid of theory and practice to be “exercising.” Exercising, he says, is a self-referential practice: its results do not impact on circumstances or objects, like “working” or “producing something” do, but instead exercising helps to form the person exercising, giving them a shape as a “subjectwho-can” (Sloterdijk 2010, 16). Exercising, in other words, does not produce knowledge as an object, but rather brings about qualities such as competence, habitus, excellence, fitness and effectiveness. Unlike theory and practice, exercising in the humanities is not about research findings; it’s about the process, act, and habit of finding and encountering. As such, exercising is also very much about being alive to that with which we occupy ourselves. In a more Foucauldian language, it is a technique of the self. The moment we stop theorizing and start exercising, our doing doesn’t care about yielding presumed authoritative research findings anymore; rather, it facilitates both finding new perspectives on musicking and the continuous process of being intellectually alive to music. As musicologists, we have the opportunity to draw closer to understanding musical experience by phronetically learning about the many dimensions of musicking instead of contributing to the production of a heavy, knowledge-constituting theoretical framework. “In addressing myself to music I have to become restless. I have to seek restlessness” if I want to be intellectually alive to music, as Lawrence Kramer elaborates in his contribution to this edited volume.

4

Also see Sloterdijk 2010.

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Restlessness, Otherness The notion of restlessness as it’s used in the title of this edited volume, then, is inspired by the work of phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas (1981, 1987), who in many ways paved the way for current day’s popular ideas about the relationality inherent in, among other phenomena, music. A key notion of his philosophy is the idea of ethical responsibility for the Other. Levinas proposes that responsibility precedes any “objective searching after truth.” Obviously, responsibility and its philosophical implications for academic inquiry is where Levinas and the activist agenda of decoloniality meet. For Levinas, it was the traumatic experience of the Shoah that made him radically question taken-for-granted ontologies and epistemologies of North Atlantic thought; for the decoloniality movement, it has been the experience and the legacy of colonial rule that made it impossible to continue along the lines of a system of thought that has enabled, or in any case tolerated, the colonial project. Levinas puts it painfully plain: we need to ask ourselves whether European philosophy with its learned habit of distinguishing between true and false, good and evil, own and other, hasn’t had a part in what happened in Nazi Germany. Hence his conviction that we must always make room for alterity, especially intellectually. Theory, for Levinas, is the result of the premature and hence often false conclusion that people, ways of being, or concepts have things in common. In bringing to the fore the ethical dimension of philosophy, Levinas stresses that which separates us and directs attention to relation rather than assumed unity. This relation is always unstable and it gestures at our responsibility to prioritize the Other at all times, and not prioritize third authorities such as law, order and, most dangerously, “morals.” Moralism, for Levinas, always harbors the danger of totalitarianism, and European philosophy may well have provided the intellectual preconditions for Western Europe’s great catastrophes including the shoah and colonialism. Theory as systematized knowledge, argues Levinas, represses alterity and in aiming for the general, tends to cede responsibility for the individual. But responsibility for the individual is what we have to respect, suggests Levinas, if we want to prevent catastrophes like the ones mentioned from happening. Levinas is always primarily interested in the encounter with the other, which reveals the other person’s proximity and their distance at the same time, for extreme closeness to the other is so immediate that it tempts us to try and take some distance, to

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step back from the encounter. In that sense, proximity always also implies a restlessness in approximating the other. Trying to understand music also yields proximity, for we cannot but relate to music as the human beings we are—see Lawrence Kramer and Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten’s contributions in this edited volume for a further discussion of the implications this has for cultural musicology, and John Richardson’s contribution for more on the analytical merit of putting this proximity to analytical work in what he calls “close(r) reading” of music. For Levinas, the ‘I’ always has one responsibility more than all others. As a cultural musicologist, my primary epistemology—cultural musicology—has one responsibility more than all others, a responsibility that is not a simple coexistence and rest, but non-repose itself, restlessness. Not an intentional movement tending to fulfillment, and which is in this sense always less than the plenitude of its fulfillment. Here it is a hunger, glorious in its insatiable desire, a contact by love and responsibility. Is love a pleasant, tactile sensation, or a way to still seek him who is nonetheless as close as he can be? […] Proximity is not a simple coexistence, but a restlessness. (Levinas 1987, 120–121)

As such, proximity is meant to indicate a relation to the other that cannot be rejected; a relation that by nature involves responsibility for the other. It is impossible to take some distance in order to limit the encounter. But, Levinas suggests, in the encounter with the other we are tempted to do just that, to limit the encounter by taking some distance. Hence, proximity also means a restlessness within oneself that “overwhelms” the distance one might want to take from the immediacy (Levinas 1981, 82). As far as I’m concerned, this very restlessness, part of which is intrinsically intellectual, is cultural musicology’s biggest strength. Its ethical implications align cultural musicology firmly with the agenda of decoloniality, for the notion of restlessness strongly resonates with Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of border thinking: Border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories […] and corresponding subjectivities. […] We are not, of course, looking to retrieve an authentic knowledge from Chinese, Arabic or Aymara; but, rather, we want to include the perspective […] of knowl-

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edge subjectivities that have been subjected in and by the colonial matrix of power. (Mignolo 2007, 493)

Restlessness, when it comes to cultural musicology, is a de-linking practice. It forms the core of a musical variety of thinking critically; of a critical variety of thinking musically. And here, Sloterdijk’s notion of exercising and Feyerabend’s proposal of theory and method proliferation become important again. If we try to conceive of cultural musicology as an epistemology rather than a “discipline”, then we need to restlessly exercise ourselves in understanding music rather than theorize it. This is a far-reaching step in that it requires us to let go of the notion of (our) academic perusals as potentially authoritative. The assumption inherent in disciplinary thinking that we are able to speak about our subject—here, music—authoritatively significantly contributes to closing our ears for that which makes music meaningful. For authority rests on imagined stability, whereas musical meaning is iridescent. It’s not before I let go of the institutionalized obligation to speak authoritatively that I can embrace my own restlessness in relating to music. That’s also the moment where I can better listen to, and learn much more from, the many musico-logicas of the world. As a cultural musicologist, I will only ever be exercising myself in understanding music, seeking fresh angles from which to listen and relate. This again resonates with Walter Mignolo’s ideas about de-linking: “(T)he de-colonial shift […] is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy.” (Ibid., 452) De-linking can amount to a strategy for decolonizing both the mind and the imaginary: The crooked rhetoric that naturalizes ‘modernity’ as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of ‘coloniality’. In order to uncover the perverse logic […] underlying the philosophical conundrum of modernity/coloniality and the political and economic structure of imperialism/colonialism, we must consider how to decolonize the ‘mind’ (Thiongo) and the ‘imaginary’ (Gruzinski)—that is, knowledge and being. (Ibid., 450)

The task at hand, then, remains similar to the one which post-colonial studies have defined as their central challenge: de-colonising knowledge and bringing alternative epistemologies to the fore. To me, that is one of cultural musicology’s most important

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potentialities. But decoloniality can never be a state of mind. It will always be a quest. Hence the eternal restlessness inherent in de-linking, which is not looking for new paradigms, but for other perspectives, other (hi)stories, and other epistemologies. The musics of the world as practices of sonic de-linking, are so meaningful to so many of us because they keep moving across and in-between these other stories and epistemologies—see John Richardson’s contribution on the close(r) reading of music. If we wish to understand music in more than just one, presumably authoritative, way, then we need to follow suit and markedly let go of our academicism, both musically and theoretically. We need to take more risks, also methodologically.5 This is in order for us to learn from the many musics of the world about other modes of knowing, modes other than the one(s) we have approached them with up to date; this is in order for us to be reminded of, and enable ourselves to react to, the extent to which taken-for-granted, and often times colonial, power structures are deeply engrained in our thinking and frame our doing (see Charissa Granger’s contribution to this edited volume). Like decoloniality, cultural musicology is bound to be a restless trade, for de-linking epistemologies is bound to always remain a process. I conceive of this restlessness as extremely rewarding, as it enables us to draw closer to the subaltern knowledge inherent in any musico-logica. “Otherness”, philosophically speaking, refers to the other of the two. The other of the two, in the context of cultural musicology, is not another, or: an “othered”, kind of musicological practice, for instance ethnomusicology. Instead, the other is always an-other epistemology, a musical epistemology, a musico-logica. Musico-logicas, in that sense, are cultural musicology’s alter egos, and this makes it necessary for cultural musicology to remain amorphous, as Lawrence Kramer once put it; and to 5

This is prominently advocated by a number of cultural analysis scholars. See for instance Bal 2002: “The field of cultural analysis is not delimited, because the traditional delimitations must be suspended; by selecting an object, you question a field. Nor are its methods sitting in a toolbox waiting to be applied; they, too, are part of the exploration. You don’t apply one method; you conduct a meeting between several, a meeting in which the object participates, so that, together, object and methods can become a new, not firmly delineated, field.” (Bal 2002, 4) Also see John Law’s exploration of the usefulness of messiness in social science research (Law 2004—the title of the book, After Method, already alludes to Paul K. Feyerabend). He suggests that the methods we choose, while ostensibly used to describe so-called realities, primarily help shape that which will then be called reality.

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remain in a constant state of flux, and in constant movement in relation to the other epistemologies it is interested in. Theory vs. practice | Exercising Musico-logicas are ways of making sense of the world with your ears. They are modes of knowing, and of being alive to, the world. Cultural theory can, at times, help shed a different light on specific musico-logicas, but primarily and importantly, it is a useful exercise to think of musico-logicas as epistemologies. Musico-logicas are about nothing other than musical meaningfulness and the ability to make this meaningfulness tangible. The concept of musico-logica is illustrated nicely by the concept of world hearing, which is a parallel to “world view”. Based on Rafael Jose de Menezes Bastos (1999), by world hearing I mean (world)ordering and simultaneously a musical perception of the environment corresponding to a particular world order, and a concurrent situation of the self in this world order. Hereby, musical meaningfulness, i.e., musico-logica, transforms music into a mode in which humans “know” in the broadest sense. In the words of Jacques Attali, [M]usic is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool for understanding. Today, no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer; it is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time—the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the most well-established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering. […] It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. […] An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge. (Attali 1985, 4)

Musico-logica is the system of knowledge and feeling that comes into being when music is a way of perceiving the world. Theoretical language, the language we use as scholars, is only a means to the end of making the particularities of musico-logicas academically productive. In treating musico-logicas as epistemologies and conceiving of itself as one, cultural musicology has the potential to one fine day feed into an academic practice which does more than lip-service to the possibility of decolonial-

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ity—and in fact, even of decolonization—in the academy. This is both ambitious and consequential. But it also has the potential of opening many a vista on musicking as a cultural practice. That’s why I believe it is currently the most important enterprise for us as musicologists to contribute to. And again, this is a de-linking practice, de-linking established academic ways of making sense of the world. De-linking doesn’t imply condemning North Atlantic epistemologies; rather, it amounts to a Feyerabendian strategy to crack open the monoculture of the mind6 in which all other epistemologies than those of the North Atlantic academy are peripheral. De-linking means de-centering taken-for-granted modes of knowing such as those predominant in mainstream North Atlantic musicology, and bringing to attention alternative epistemologies, “other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics” (Mignolo 2007, 453). Ultimately, then, cultural musicology doesn’t have an object of study anymore. It only has interlocutors: musico-logicas. With this, its value doesn’t lie in the presumed authoritative nature of academic knowledge that the North Atlantic academy feeds on, and on which it has built its rather massive regimes of power, but rather in its capacity to make music resonate with its own meaningfulness. The contributions The contributions to this edited volume restlessly revolve around the issues outlined above. Following a short history of the notion of cultural musicology (Abels, “Sketching Cultural Musicology”), which further contextualizes the ideas advanced in this introduction, Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten explores the usefulness of the concept of transduction as proposed by Gilbert Simondon for better understanding the experience of immersion in psytrance. Building on John Law’s notion of the methodologically slippery, she proposes the (intrinsically restless) transductive mode of thought as one possible way of entering what she calls the “fields of mutual desire” between cultural musicologist and music. Musicologists too are drawn to and repelled by music, she argues. We can learn from that. 6

“Monoculture of the mind” is an expression that to my knowledge has been coined by Vandana Shiva. See Shiva 1993.

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Lawrence D. Kramer, in his contribution, offers some thoughts on the agency of music in cultural production, which leads him to re-visit a number of key concepts typically mobilized in the literature addressing this issue. Staying “resolutely particular” because in this he sees the only way to make a productive contribution to that “cheerful cacophony” that is cultural musicology, he focuses on the cultural interpretation of music (taking place in, by, and about music)—which he considers to be one branch of cultural musicology. The simple insight that “to understand music is to respond to musical events” brings him to Levinas’ notions of proximity and restlessness, which he identifies as critically relevant to cultural musicology: “In addressing myself to music,” he writes, “I have to become restless. I have to seek restlessness; I have to marshal my entire experience as the subject of a language, a culture, and a world. I cannot do otherwise.” With Charissa Granger’s contribution, attention shifts from the agency of music toward the agency and power structures played upon in the knowledge production resultant of framing practices within the world music festival space, and also in cultural musicology. Exploring mainly paratextual matter used in framing world music festivals, Granger asks what framing as a concept might afford cultural musicology. With this, she looks at the discursive implications of framing world music and its connection to agency and responsibility, both for cultural musicologists and other cultural agents. Appealing to the musicologist’s responsibility as an agent in the postcolonial framing of music, she points to intellectual restlessness as a potential way out of the blatant ethnocentrism of institutionalized musicology. John Richardson’s contribution in many ways relates to Granger’s argument but takes a different direction. He, too, calls for heightened reflexivity and rigorous analytical attention to the (musically) specific in order for the study of music not to get lost in “big ideas.” His contribution is a dense meditation on close reading (of music)—that method which seems to be so ubiquitous that it has become everything and nothing at all, yet presents great analytical potential. In order to sharpen this analytical tool, Richardson proposes an “ecological close reading”, i.e. a close reading that “speaks above all to the salience of experientiality and frame-of-reference awareness to analytical pursuits”. Close reading—in fact, closer reading, as Richardson suggests—requires “knowledge of disparate epistemological traditions,” he argues, “the bridging of which has the potential to offer analysts and readers alike something greater than the sum of the parts.” Richardson’s “disparate epistemological

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traditions” are as tangible as they are in a constant state of transformation. Close(r) reading is a strategy to dig deep into aesthetic experience—and since the latter emerges from in-between disparate modes of experiential knowing, close(r) reading is bound to be restless in the sense of this edited volume. With the final contribution on the European history of writing (about) the music of the Other, we return to the initial call for more musicological de-linking. Re-visiting historical documents about Polynesian multi-part singing, I show to what extent today’s cultural cartographies still rest on taken-for-granted assumptions of colonial origin; in fact, how deeply colonial our own thinking is and perhaps always will be. The answer, however, is not to abandon North Atlantic traditions of knowledge production. In the spirit of intellectual restlessness, the answer is instead to loosen the grip of the above-quoted “monoculture of the mind” (Shiva 1993): to look out for, and analytically consider, alternative ways of knowing the world in and through music, and to critically facilitate an inter-epistemic production of knowledge. References Attali, Jacques. Noise. The Political Economy of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Bergeron, Katherine & Philip V. Bohlman, eds. Disciplining Music. Musicology and Ist Canons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Bohlman, Philip V. “Ontologies of Music.” Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook & Mark Everist, pp. 17–34. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Brandl, Rudolf M. “Si tacuisses Greve—der notwendige Erhalt der Musikethnologie.” Die Musikforschung 56 (2003): 2, 166–171. Feyerabend, Paul K. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. London: New Left Books, 1975. Greve, Martin. “Writing Against Europe: Vom notwendigen Verschwinden der Musikethnologie.” Die Musikforschung 55 (2002): 3, 239–251. Klenke, Katrin et al. “‘Totgesagte leben länger’. Überlegungen zur Relevanz der Musikethnologie.” Die Musikforschung 56 (2003): 3, 261–271.

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Kramer, Lawrence D. The Thought of Music. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Law, John. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Linges. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. —. Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. de Menezes Bastos, Rafael. “Apùap World Hearing: On the Kamayurá Phono-Auditory System and the Anthropological Concept of Culture.” the world of music 41 (1999): 1, 85–93. Mignolo, Walter D. “De-linking.” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 2, 449–514. Morris, Mitchell. “Musical Virtues.” Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew dell’Antonio, 44-69. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Ray, Robert B. How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. London: Zed Books, 1993. Sloterdijk, Peter. Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. — Scheintod im Denken. Von Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Übung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Stobart, Henry, ed. The New (Ethno)Musicologies. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2008.

Birgit Abels

Sketching Cultural Musicology When you study music, you study something that is very much alive and more often than not indifferent to categorization, theoretical models and academic narratives. In the introduction to this edited volume, I argued that we need to continuously exercise ourselves in understanding music rather than theorize it. This is a far-reaching step in that it requires us to let go of the notion of (our) academic perusals as potentially authoritative. It also requires us to embrace the intellectual restlessness which is needed to prevent ourselves from creating ever-new disciplinary orthodoxies. Perhaps, then, cultural musicology can best be conceived of as a motion. In this brief contribution, I will very roughly sketch the history of the term used to describe this motion, cultural musicology,1 in order to prepare the ground for the contributions to follow. Cultural musicology––the term The first systematic usage of the term “cultural musicology” that I am aware of is Fidelis Smith’s. The French musicologie culturelle appears in an issue of the French Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques2 dating from as early as 1936. However, the term is used in a slightly awkward manner here: it appears in the index, but not in the main text. Smith’s text therefore remains the earliest known suggestion of the term for the time being. In 1959, in an article published in Franciscan Studies 1 2

Cf. van der Meer & Erickson 2013. Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 2 (1936); index entry on p. 54. Thanks to Wim van der Meer for pointing me to this reference.

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entitled “The Place of Music in a Franciscan Vocation and Apostolate,” he wrote the following, which deserves to be quoted at some length: Musicology, as theory, historical research and critical analysis, cannot do without the reality of music itself, and not merely by itself but as understood in the total cultural web of its particular period. Yet this is not enough […]. In order to understand music fully, we must also do research and creative thinking in philosophy and the esthetics of world culture, in which music is an important factor. This brings one head on with a number of fascinating topics. One would need a background in philosophy but also a specialized study of the whole field of esthetics, in its historical perspective and in its problematic. As far as the present writer is aware, no one has attempted to name this branch of musicology. It is not so much a branch as a window from which one views the intellectual struggles going on all around and trying to absorb what one can into one’s speciality. In other words it is a question of trying to approach reality as it is: one gigantic and patterned entity, even though one does so from one’s own limited viewpoint. This type of musicology, which presupposes training in music, music theory and research techniques, perhaps could be called “speculative.” But that word has been worn rather thin. Another possibility would be “esthetico-musicology,” but a better term would be “cultural musicology.” One runs out of doxographical labels. […] In studying music and its philosophy, one faces reality in a creative way, whether as interpreter of the musical patterns of world culture, or as a composer who molds and creates new possibilities, be he a composer of thought or of sound or of both. In this way, musicology does not remain learnedly impotent but becomes existentially productive in a world culture, integrated in and centered upon the full reality of life. (Smith 1959, 161ff.)

Smith’s article is remarkable, and sometimes peculiar, on many levels. The reference to Hermann Diels, who coined the term “doxography,” is only one of the strikingly straightforward blows Smith directs at musicological traditionalists of the time, and it works on several levels in the text. Suffice it to note here that Smith somewhat polemically dismisses what he dubs a “learnedly impotent” musicology. One wonders where this barely veiled frustration came from, back in 1959—quite probably from a profound sense of rejection. When music historian Gilbert Chase proceeded to use the term in 1972, he probably wasn’t aware of Fidelis Smith’s usage. Like many before and after him, including Charles

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Seeger (cf. 1977, 115–116), Chase was uneasy about the term “ethnomusicology,” and more precisely the “ethno-” prefix, so he offered a terminological suggestion: The term “ethnomusicology” seems rather restrictive in the context of its wide geographical, temporal, and cultural scope. […] I favor the idea of an “ethnomusicology” of Western music; but I do not favor the terminology […]. What we need is a term of larger scope that will contain the same idea—namely, the sociocultural approach to musicology. For this I propose the term “cultural musicology”—by analogy with “cultural anthropology.” Paraphrasing the previously quoted description of the task of cultural anthropology […], we might describe the task of cultural musicology as being “to study the similarities and differences in musical behavior among human groups, to depict the character of the various musical cultures of the world and the processes of stability, change, and development that are characteristic to them.” Whether or not this terminology is adopted, I believe that the concept it represents is not only valid but essential if musicology is to take its rightful place among the sciences of man. (Chase 1975, 220)

A few decades later, Lawrence Kramer brought up the term again, this time addressing “the fast-aging new musicology” and renaming it “cultural musicology.” He, too, did not refer to the earlier use of the term, and he described the field of study as follows: Contrary to certain common objections, cultural musicology has never denied the existence of past interest in “extramusical” or contextual issues. Nor has it shown any lack of interest in, indeed fascination with, the internal dynamics of musical works or genres. But it breaks with earlier approaches, including the ethnomusicological approaches to which it has sometimes been compared by regarding music, not as a vehicle or reflection of a relatively stable set of social, cultural, or historical conditions, but as a form of human agency that shapes and intervenes in such conditions, and does so, not exceptionally, but as an ordinary consequence of musical practice. (Kramer 2003, 36)

That same year, Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton published a book whose original proposal stated the following:

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Birgit Abels A tendency towards increasing concern with “culture” has been manifested in music scholarship for some time, and in a variety of ways. It would be too much to say that the various trajectories are converging, let alone that all will crystallize into a single field of “cultural musicology.” Nonetheless, different approaches are interacting, and with increasing intensity, such that it is clear that a new paradigm may well be on the horizon. All the disciplines involved in the study of music will continue to be changed by this process, and some form of reconfiguration seems inevitable. (Middleton 2003, 1)

Some fifteen years later, cultural musicology is much more than on the horizon. The term itself has been in the air for more than half a century, and the ideas associated with it have naturally taken shape alongside twentieth-century intellectual history, most notably postmodern thought and, of course, New Musicology. But in recent years, the term cultural musicology has also been formally adopted by a number musicology departments across Europe (Amsterdam, Turku, Göttingen, Cambridge) and the US (University of California at Santa Cruz), and incorporated into departmental structures. As cultural musicology continues to be institutionalized, structural concerns are being voiced: does not the concept of a cultural musicology blur the distinction between historical and “ethno-”musicology, and by doing that, is it not questioning extant academic structures? Well, yes, and it’s about time that happens. Not for structural reasons, but in order for us to do more justice to the musical realities of the twenty-first century. References Chase, Gilbert. “American Musicology and the Social Sciences.” Perspectives in Musicology, edited by Barry S. Brook, Edward O.D. Downes & Sherman van Solkema, 202–226. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975. Kramer, Lawrence. “Musicology and Meaning.” Musical Times, Summer 2003. Meer, Wim van der & Rebecca Erickson. “Resonating Cultural Musicology; Sources, Streams and Issues.” Cultural Musicology iZine [http://culturalmusicology.org, last accessed 30 March 2016]. Middleton, Richard. “Introduction.” The Cultural Study of Music. A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton. London & New York: Routledge, 2003.

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Seeger, Charles. Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Smith, Fidelis. “The Place of Music in a Franciscan Vocation and Apostolate.” Franciscan Studies 19 (1959), 150–168.

Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten

It Slaps and It Embraces!1 On Psytrance, Immersion, and Potential Facets of a Transductive Cultural Musicology That you, that everything is right or something, everything comes together, everything, yeah these are the kind of peak experiences that one can have sometimes, that you really, you are totally closed off, you are totally in your, in your music, you are really in, in, in the music, you know. (Anonymous 1,2 sound sample 13) Because it flows in such an extraordinary way, and it can really, yeah, with all those electronic sound[s] in there, you can really subside into the music. (Anonymous 2, sound sample 2) I can also totally immerse in the music, and that feels even better, exactly really with my eyes closed, really just, eyes closed, like totally alone in the world, and the music, me in the music, and, you really feel it in your toes. (Anonymous 3, sound sample 3) 1 2

3

The title is a quote from Toni Morrison (in Gilroy 1993, 78). “It” is a direct reference to music. The full quote can be found in and is elaborated on throughout the chapter. This paper is partly based on fieldwork conducted in the Amsterdam psytrance scene between January and May 2011 as well as five years of prior experience in psytrance scenes in Europe and South Asia. My informants prefer to stay anonymous. The translations from the original Dutch, which can be heard in the provided sound examples, are mine. Throughout the paper, the reader will encounter references to sound samples. Please listen to these sound samples at the moment of their emergence within this article. The aural engagement with this track is explicitly part of the paper’s argument. URL: http://www.gwdg.de/~gsim/gs06/index.html

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The above accounts of a feeling of immersion in psychedelic trance music4 imply that its specific musical parameters afford listeners a direct, physical access to this music. Dancing the night away on psytrance apparently allows for a submerging into its psychedelic and flowing sounds. During interviews with psytrance participants, such accounts were usually accompanied by the interviewee closing the eyes, spreading the arms and moving them in a particular flowing motion, all in an attempt to mediate this sense of being-in-sound to me. Despite the “constructionist assertion” that “there exists no uncoded plane of experience to precede current mediated forms” (Richardson 2011, 207), psytrance is apparently able to convince its listeners otherwise. While aforementioned approaches take any perceived experience of reality to be a cultural construction (e.g. Baudrillard 1983; van de Port 2004; 2005), the opening quotes suggest that psytrance can allow its (academic) listeners a very real experience of being-in-sound.5 In his account on the biennial psytrance festival Boom, for example, St John suggests that “enthusiasts from a multitude of cities and regions make pilgrimages to Boom to become immersed in the identifiable timbral aesthetics of their obsession” (St John 2010, 2). Following a similar mode of thought, Rietveld proposes that psytrance participants are “immersing themselves in a musical representation of accelerated electronic culture” (Rietveld 2010, 72). Both of these accounts seem to take the indefensibility of psytrance participants’ ears (cf. Schwarz 2003) for granted, thereby reproducing an imagination of the ear as “always vulnerable […] a channel people think they cannot turn off and that opens into their innermost selves” (Helmreich 2007, 629). Such descriptive accounts of an apparently seamless immersion in psytrance ignore Schwarz’s (Schwarz 2003) critique that such notions of the ear are culturally and historically constructed and conflate hearing and listening. In this, they leave unexplored the complex processes through which psytrance participants come to experience themselves as immersed in sound. Asking how cultural musicology might attend to such processes, I think in, through and alongside of a musical “ontogenesis” (Simondon 1995) of one apparently inexpressible, and maybe ungraspable, “zone of immediacy” (Mitchell 2005, 214) that can allow for such experiences of immersion: the track Lex Rex Perplex (2005) 4 5

The genre “psychedelic trance music” is abbreviated as “psytrance” and will be used accordingly in this paper. Van de Port explores a similar tension in Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real (2011b).

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produced by Hux Flux (Dennis Tapper).6 I do so via the notion of transduction as introduced by Simondon (Simondon 1992; 1995), and interpreted by Mackenzie (Mackenzie 2002), Helmreich (Helmreich 2007; 2009; 2010) and Combes (Combes 2013). This critical examination of a transductive process through which immersion in psytrance can become experienced as seamless, resonates with—and, following Simondon (Simondon 1995, 261), becomes analogical to—my exploring an ungraspable and slippery quality inherent in music. As Toni Morrison phrased it: “Music makes you hungry for more of it. It never really gives you the whole number. It slaps and it embraces, it slaps and it embraces.” (Quoted in Gilroy 1993, 78). This tension between attraction and repulsion that is negotiated as (academic) listeners take on relations with music, is a crucial facet of the transductive cultural musicology I explore in this paper. Understanding music asrelational, in turn, necessitates an approach of music as becoming, which opens up questions regarding the academic project of knowledge production. If we accept that music is becoming rather than being, then where does that leave our academic desire for knowledge about music? If we indeed embrace restlessness as a crucial facet of cultural musicology, are “knowing”, “understanding” or “grasping” the verbs most suitable for our engagement with music? And if not, then how can we conceptualize our academic involvements with music in alternative ways? Following Law’s suggestion that “[p]erhaps we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigor, and find ways of [… relating to] the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight” (Law 2004, 3), I offer a transductive mode of thought as one possible mode of relating to music within cultural musicology. With this, I accept Ingold’s proposition that sound, and hence music, belongs “to the fluxes of the medium, not to the conformation of surfaces” (Ingold 2011, 134).7 This enables a transposition of Mitchell’s theory of medium, in which he conceptualizes the relationship between picture and beholder in terms of “a field of mutual desire” (Mitchell 2005, xv), onto music. Transductively comprehending of the music/cultural musicologist relation in terms of desire might allow for a re-thinking of the ontology of our necessarily complex, multi-layered and fluid relations with music. It creates room 6 7

Thanks to Dennis Tapper for giving me permission to use his track for this article. I want to thank Birgit Abels for pointing out the implications Ingold’s notion of sound as a medium of our perception might have for our mode of relating to music in academia.

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to explore the tensions between the musicological quest to somehow fully know music (this quest might be most clearly discernable in various forms of music analysis), and music’s explicit refusal to ever be fully known (which also becomes clearly perceptible in music analysis), in terms of a relation of mutual “desire rather than meaning or power” (ibid., 9). This emphasis on asking what music might want, rather than what music means or does, is not intended to exclude inquiries into meaning and power. Neither do I seek to provide the reader with one exclusive answer to this question, or any conclusive answer at all. Rather, in transductively approaching our relationship with a specific music as a relation of mutual desire, I propose a mode of thought that might make questions of power and musical meaning emerge in a slightly different fashion. That is, besides asking what music wants from us, an acknowledgement of such a relationship forces us to critically ask ourselves what we, as cultural musicologists, want from music. In addition, and paraphrasing Mitchell’s (Mitchell 2005) theory of medium, it also means to ask what music might lack, and hence what it might seductively invite us to fill in. Such emphasis allows for a critical engagement with the question of what desires we, as cultural musicologists, project onto music when we form that something we call ‘knowledge of music’. Furthermore, it enables an exploration of what shape “those desires take as they are projected back at” (ibid., 25) us and thereby form us. As I argue, this means exploring how we can transductively, rather than simply reflexively, enter such fields of mutual desire. Transductively exploring cultural musicologists’ many relations to musics might be one way to not only embrace but also to, every once in a while, be slapped by the restlessness advanced by this volume. In sum, the case study of transductive processes that can afford participants a sense of immediate immersion in psytrance’s allegedly psychedelic and flowing sounds, opens up questions regarding musicology’s comforting and self-legitimating modes of relating to music. Suggesting to unmake an academic “desire and expectation for security” (Law 2004, 9), I argue for an unsettling of cultural musicology’s comforting zone of immediacy. One way of unmaking this desire and expectation, can be by recognizing that we don’t think about, but rather think in, through, and alongside of the constantly transforming something we like to think we know as music. Acknowledging that thought and music only come to be perceived of as innately separate unities in and through processes of transductive individuation, might be a first step toward a transductive cultural musicology.

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Psytrance Psytrance is usually defined as a heterogeneous, underground electronic dance music genre. On dance floors around the planet, this genre is nostalgically narrated to be the twenty-first century successor of goatrance. This music developed in the 1980s and its “place of origin, and myth of roots, lies in what, for the West at least, still remains the exotic East, more specifically, the port of Goa […] which has been a mecca for western alternative lifestylers since the 1960s” (Cole & Hannan 1997, 1, italics original). In the early 1990s, travelers who came back home from India and were mainly seeking to recreate the experiences they had in Goa, started organizing goatrance parties in their primarily North Atlantic home countries. This lead to a dispersion of goatrance music from India’s beaches to underground dance floors all around the planet. Increasingly, its production also took place outside of India, mainly in home-based electronic music production studios (cf. de Ledesma 2010). The term psytrance was coined in around 2000, as an umbrella term that sought to grasp the many developing “sub-genres which were generically, if only in practice, slightly ‘psychedelic’” (ibid., 103). Contemporary psytrance parties vary in terms of amounts of visitors, geographical locations, musical styles, party spaces, preferences in psychoactive substance consumption, duration of the overall party and the role of the DJs and organizing crews. Parties range from thirty people dancing around a small sound system set up in the Finnish woods, two thousand people celebrating New Years Eve in a squatted building at the outskirts of Amsterdam, to week-long psytrance festivals hosting multiple stages, such as Ozora in Hungary and Vortex in South Africa, attracting tens of thousands of “global nomads” (D’Andrea 2007). Contemporary sub-genres of psytrance are often produced, sonically recognizable, and given meaning to in terms of a particular geographic locale, such as the Finnish Suomisaundi, but have a planetary audience due to the increased possibilities of electronic dispersion and the considerable mobility of psytrance DJs, organizing crews and audiences (ibid.; St John 2013). Musically, a complex multiplicity of influences can be found in psytrance. Amongst these, there are the so-called psychedelic sounds from mainly the 1960s and 1970s (cf. Whiteley 1990), as well as a variety of styles, sounds and music production techniques that have developed in and through Electronic (Dance) Music (EDM), such as disco, (acid) house, techno, industrial and avantgarde (Rietveld 2010;

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St John 2012). In addition, the genre is known for its eight-to-ten minute track duration, its use of sounds sampled from science-fiction, horror and cult movies, its beats per minute (BPM) of between 135 and 170, a four-to-the-floor bass drum constituting one rhythmic structure, a so-called “wobbly” bass line, its relatively thick and complex musical texture, clearly audible timbral manipulations, its exoticizing sonic references to Hinduism, Buddhism and India, so-called atmospheric breaks within the tracks, its synthesized arpeggios, and other quick, often phased, synthesized melodic movements. As such, it might be said that psytrance constitutes a constantly “shifting sonic quilt of genre influences as well as a diversity of national/regional populations and scenes in which recognisable sounds have emerged” (St John 2010, 1). Psytrance music and its production process have therefore been conceptualized as rhizomatic (Rietveld 2010; De Ledesma 2010). Without explicitly attending to the aforementioned ungraspable sense of immersion in psytrance, this brief introduction to the genre already illustrates the inherent difficulty in grasping the multilayered phenomenon known as psytrance. This problematic is illustrated in many, rather generalized, examinations of the diversity and complexity of musical styles and influences that might afford immersion in psytrance. Accounts tell us that “the musical structure of psytrance produces a cosmic sonic environment” (Rietveld 2010, 70) and that “its musical manifestations perpetuate idiosyncratic traits of humour, wit, technical flourish and an obsession with twisted and eccentric timbral contours, leaving a unique chromatic imprint which continues to re-connect with, and re-assemble, the Goa sonic legacy” (De Ledesma 2010, 107). The structure within a track, we learn from the earliest musicological account on “Goa trance” (Cole & Hannan 1997) that I am aware of […] reflects the idea of a journey, both in a mythological sense and as a representation of perceptions of the experience of taking LSD. Paralleling the archetypal hero setting out on his quest, the tracks start with subtle undulations of sound. These slowly intensify, with constant timbral evolution and accretion, carrying the listener along the narrowly defined pathway of the trance experience. As the hero meets challenges on the way, so too is the listener challenged by periodic breaks in the trance flow, often containing some mysterious textual quotation or sample, designed to involve the mind on a different level to that of the otherwise constant pulse of the music. (Ibid., 6–7)

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Instead of following such generalized discourse on psytrance’s musical characteristics, I concentrate on one particular psytrance track, namely Lex Rex Perplex as produced by Swedish producer and DJ Hux Flux (sound sample 4). I relate to this track in terms of its perceived immersive aesthetics, namely that of flow and psychedelic. Echoing Lawrence Kramer’s earlier suggestion that “music […] can sometimes be heard to lead the way in accentuating the mediate character of its own immediacy” (Kramer 1992, 10–11), I explore musical aspects that, on dance floors around the planet, may produce a zone of immediacy in which psytrance participants can, but do not necessarily have to, immerse themselves. This necessitates a critical exploration of the notion of immersion. Immersive psytrance aesthetics? Derived from the Latin immergere, “to plunge or dip into” (cf. Vanhoutte & Wynants 2010, 47), immersion has been mobilized in various ways in a number of academic disciplines, among others anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, architecture, spatial theory, and cultural theory. Usually, the term signifies an assumed resolving of distinctions between subject and object, often in relation to questions of knowledge production and legitimization (cf. Helmreich 2007; van de Port 2011b). Not seeking to give an all-inclusive overview of debates involving immersion, I rather develop my understanding of immersion in critical dialogue with the use of this concept within Electronic Dance Music Studies. In this field, the notion of immersive aesthetics, “an aesthetics of plunging, a calculated playing with the dissolution of distance” (Bieger 2007, 9)8 is mobilized to explain the feeling of being-in-sound this chapter started with. The immersive affordances of sound itself, however, are usually taken for granted within such studies. In the following, I build on Helmreich’s critical engagement with the notion of immersion (2007), to complicate such understandings of natural immersion in sound with the help of the notion of transduction. In his dissertation on intimacy and affect in Electronic Dance Music events, Garcia suggests that clubs are usually designed according to an “aesthetic of envelopment” in which music plays a crucial factor: 8

“Die Ästhetik der Immersion ist eine Ästhetik des Eintauchens, ein kalkuliertes Spiel mit der Auflösung von Distanz.” (Bieger 2007, 9, translation mine.)

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Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten [L]ow-frequency vibrations like sub-bass tend to propagate through a space in a more omnidirectional way than high-frequency ones, […] clubs almost invariably choose surround-sound arrangements for their speakers; sonic immersion or envelopment is thus a design goal of nightclubs. (Garcia 2011, 96)

In his account on clubbing, Malbon (1999) borrows Freud’s notion of the “oceanic experience” (Freud 1961) to describe the sense of immersion on the dance floor that can be felt when “the lightning appears to be linked to the music, which is now penetrating minds and bodies, going through rather than around clubbers as its intensity increases” (Malbon 1999, 105, italics original). In this moment of apparent sonorous penetration of the clubbers’ bodies and minds, the perceived boundaries between the clubbing subjects and their environment seamlessly evaporate, in order to make place for a “sensation of oneness” (ibid., 108). Similarly, Jackson’s account on the sensual experience of clubbing takes as a starting point: [T]he idea that our bodies are always immersed in the world and that this point of immersion is structured culturally, ideologically and emotionally so that it orders and even controls our capacity to perceive and experience that world […] [C]lubbing challenges this cultural codification of the flesh by taking us into a writhing, rhythmic and chemical realm of social encounters, virulent beats and seductive desires, which create a sensual landscape that generates its own modes of knowledge. (Jackson 2004, 2)

This notion of clubs as immersive sensual landscapes that allow for a re-negotiation of the perceived boundaries between inside and outside, or subject and object, resonates strongly with Ingold’s critique of Schafer’s notion of the soundscape (Ingold 2007; 2011; Schafer 1977). The notion of the landscape, Ingold points out, is suitable for understanding the lived experience of being-in-landscape, exactly because this notion is “not tied to any specific sensory register” (Ingold 2011, 136). The concept of the soundscape, however, is tied to the specific sensory register or hearing, and is therefore inherently unsuitable for grasping a lived experience of being-in-sound. In his argument against soundscape, Ingold proposes an alternative approach to sound, namely as a medium through which we experience ourselves as a part of the world. Sound, for Ingold, is “neither mental nor material, but a phenomenon of

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experience—that is, of our immersion in, and commingling with, the world in which we find ourselves” (Ingold 2007). Such a radical rethinking of sound, and hence music, as a medium of our perception, a medium through which we relate to, make sense of, and come to experience ourselves as immersed in the world, necessitates further elaboration, and maybe a slight complication, of the notion of immersion as mobilized in the above accounts. That is, if we accept music to be a medium of our perception, a feeling of immersion in music has to be understood as a sense of unmediated presence in a musical space, a musical space that is itself a medium in which and through which we experience ourselves as a part of, and relate to, the world. From this follows that we might want to ask how such immersion in psytrance, as a sense of unmediated presence in a mediated environment, is formed. That is, how is the rather “paradoxical attempt to mediate immediacy” (van de Port 2011a, 76) made musically? How does the combination of organized sounds constituting psytrance, mediate a sense of direct and unmediated access to this music and how might cultural musicology address such processes? One possible mode of relating to such processes of a musical production of a zone of immediacy, might be afforded to us by the above-mentioned notion of transduction. This concept has traveled into the humanities from the natural sciences, where it is deployed to outline processes of mediation through which one form of energy is transformed into another. Within the humanities the concept mainly emerged through (interpretations of) the work of philosopher Gilbert Simondon (Simondon 1989; 1992; 1995; 2005),9 who understands transduction to be an integral part of processes of individuation. In this philosophy of individuation, Simondon is interested in a radical “transmutation in how we approach being” (Combes 2013, 1). This search for radical transformation of ontology is born from Simondon’s realization that within philosophy, two notions of being are used without any explicit conceptual separation of the two, which confuses and obscures ontology. Simondon identifies the notion of being as:

9

Simondon’s work has only partly been translated into English. I mainly base my understanding of his philosophy of individuation on these translations combined with Combes’ interpretation of his work (Combes 2013).

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Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten ‘[…] being as such,’ which is to say, there is being, about which we can initially only confirm its ‘givenness.’ On the other hand, ‘being is being insofar as it is individuated.’ This latter sense of being […] is ‘always superimposed upon the former sense within the theory of logic.’ (Ibid.)

The root of the philosophical confusion of these two notions of being can be traced to the fact that “in privileging the constituted term, it [i.e., ontology] has ignored the operation constituting the individual, that is, individuation as process” (ibid., 2, italics in original). To overcome this problematic, and develop a mode of thought that might embrace the restless potentiality Simondon understands as a crucial part of individuation, “we must turn to the process wherein a principle is not only put to work but also constituted” (ibid.). This means asking how philosophical principles themselves come into being, as well as attending to the innately intermingled character of both notions of being, which only become conceived of as separate upon individuation. From this follows a necessary replacement of notions such as substance, form, and matter, which are inadequate for thinking through processes through which being individuates, with the concepts such as transduction and information as borrowed from thermodynamics. This does not mean that the prior are completely left behind, but rather that notions of “form and matter are now connected to an understanding of being as a system in tension, and are seen as operators of a process rather than as the final terms of an operation” (ibid., 5). Form, in particular, is rethought as information, designating “the very operation of taking on form, the irreversible direction in which individuation operates” (ibid.). Rethinking music in terms of information, or to follow lann hornscheidt’s (2012) performative and willingly irritating mode of writing10, in terms of in_formation, might enable 10

hornscheidt, a linguist, understands language in both written and spoken form as performative and thereby as instrumental in the re_production of power structures. In feministische w_orte (2012), hornscheidt seeks to make explicit the naturalized (and hence hidden) interdepending structures of discrimination inherent in, and re_affirmed by, the ways in which we use language. In and through, among other things, not using any capitals and by using underscores within words, hornscheid performs the agency of language: ant_w_orten translates as »answers«, but the underscores reveal the hierarchical ordering (categorization) of knowledge that is always necessarily involved in the construction of answers. With this, hornscheidt seeks to

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one way of moving beyond what Rose Subotnik critically identified as a historical mode of structural listening (1996). With this term, Subotnik critiqued a modernist approach to listening and music analysis, as advocated by Adorno and Schönberg, that considered “musical works as autonomous structures defined ‘wholly through some implicit and intelligible principle of unity’” (Dell’Antonio 2004, 2). Such structural listening presupposes a very specific, and highly disciplining, notion of listening that explicitly focused on, and valued aesthetically, musical form. To put it in Simondon’s terms, abstracted musical structures represented in scores were considered as final terms of an operation of musical composition, and the experiential (sound) dimension of music was explicitly rejected as aesthetically and academically relevant. This paper is one attempt to move “beyond structural listening” (cf. Dell’Antonio 2004) by understanding music as in_formation, as strongly in_formed by Simondon’s relational notion of knowledge. Simondon emphasizes the processual and relational aspect of individuations, processes of which thought is explicitly a part. One form of such individuation is transduction, which denotes […] a process—be it physical, biological, mental or social—in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given domain, by basing this propagation on a structuration carried out in different zones of the domain: each

give impulses for reflection about our use of language through an explicit stimulation of annoyance. That is, hornscheidt asks the reader to critically reflect on the irritation caused by the use of language in the book, since this irritation reveals a lot about readers’ naturalized assumptions about (categories of) knowledge production. Therein, hornscheidt performatively asks the reader to be open for a questioning of one’s own naturalized categorizations, and to take responsibility for one’s own continuous performative use of language (“ich will zu eigenen überlegungen an_regen, zur öffnung von fragen und zur über_nahme von ver_ant_w_ortung für das eigene kontinuierliche sprachhandeln.” (2012, 17). My use of in_formation throughout this paper similarly seeks to make explicit the naturalized assumptions about music as form still present in music analysis, and seeks to stimulate an active taking on of responsibility for thinking of, relating to, music as a process. This furthermore is meant to draw attention to and acknowledge the sometimes covert dynamics of knowledge and power at play in often taken for granted academic modes of relating to music.

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Hence transduction is also a “procedure of the mind as it discovers. This procedure consists in following being in its genesis, in carrying out the genesis of thought at the same time as the genesis of the object is carried out” (Simondon 1995, 32; quoted in Combes 2013, 7). Rather than distinguishing thought from processes of musical individuation, we can think alongside of, and hence are a part of these processes of musical ontogenesis, as much as they become part of us. With the notion of transduction, Simondon thus displaces “the problem of the possibility of knowledge, [… with] that of individuation of knowledge” (Combes 2013, 9), which results in “an entirely new way of envisioning the mode of relation obtaining between thought and being” (ibid., 6). This, so I suggest, potentially provides one alternative to selflegitimating master narratives still reproduced by some musicologists. For Simondon, we should avoid extracting a general statement from any transductive mode of thought “(of the type: ‘Being is relation’), for this would undermine the central postulate wherein a theory of individuation always and necessarily proceeds from cases” (ibid., 19). The focus should not be on the individuation of musics in general, but on the individuation of a particular music, and the specificities of a music’s individuation become apparent only upon its discrete study. The music (and thus not just “music”, which would indicate a general theory and thereby fall back onto and reproduce the thought/being dichotomy) as well as the knowledge may then be understood as an “‘activity of relation’. It is at once what acts in the relation and what results from it”; the music and the knowledge is “what is constituted in relation, or more precisely, as relation […] it is the being of relation” (ibid., italics in original). Such a mode of thought allows for a radical erasure of a preconceived and often naturalized boundary between subject and object, musicologist and music, and aforementioned disciplining relations of power and knowledge that are in turn naturalized through such assumed distinctions. In Simondon’s train of thought these cannot be conceived of as innately separate, but are rather part of processes of individuation through which they might or might not come to be conceived of as separate units of being.

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The parallelism between the operation of knowing and the operation known may be explained in the final instance as a modality of relation; this explanation allows us to correct the idea of separate, autonomous realities that the term parallelism might suggest: the distinct operations that constitute the knowing subject and the known object are in effect unified in the act of a relation that is called knowledge. (Ibid., 17)

As I propose, this radical rethinking of relations between thought and being as unified in the act of a relation categorized as knowledge, is crucial for the mode of thought the article suggests. It might become a slippery basis for a restless cultural musicology, and thereby provide an unsettling beginning of an unmaking of musicology’s desire for security and stability. Building heavily on Simondon’s work, Mackenzie (Mackenzie 2002) has taken up the concept of transduction in order to make sense of a double bind that for him defines human relation with technology. In a similar fashion to Simondon’s identification of two notions of being, Mackenzie proposes that, on the one hand, we, as well as our knowledge about ourselves, are always already entangled with, and hence mediated by, technology. On the other hand, Mackenzie finds a particular mode of abstraction in our thinking about this technology. He mobilizes the concept of transduction in order to elucidate “how technologies are both difficult to access in terms of subjects and societies, yet indissociably folded through collectives and cultures” (ibid., xi). For him, the “hallmark of a transductive process is the intersection and knotting together of diverse realities […] and it is a process that highlights metastability rather than stability in a given context” (ibid., 13–16). Analyzing transductive processes is, as Simondon also suggests, therefore necessarily asking about “ontogenesis rather than ontology […] how things become what they are rather than what they are” (ibid., 16) even though—and especially when—we perceive of them as given, natural and stable. Extending Mackenzie’s reading of Simondon’s notion of transduction, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich mobilizes the concept for his case study on sound’s role in creating a sense of underwater immersion in submarines. Opposing the aforementioned imagination of “the indefensible ear” (Schwarz 2003) with an understanding of the senses as themselves transductive media, Helmreich argues that “the idea of immersion depends on the fashioning of sensing as itself imperceptible”

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(Helmreich 2007, 629). Taking this imperceptibility of the senses’ mediating nature as a crucial characteristic of all transductive processes, Helmreich understands transduction as the “transmutation and conversion of signals across media that, when accomplished seamlessly, can produce a sense of effortless presence” (Helmreich 2010, 10). The veiling of the fact that our senses are in fact transductive media, for him, “permits the identification, for example, of absorption in music with immersion” (Helmreich 2007, 629). In a situation such as the psytrance dance floor, where, for some, there seems to be no other option than letting the music enter into or become one with one’s body, the concept of transduction can thus “be used as a device for recognizing the hidden conditions of immersion” (ibid., 631). It aids in the tracking of processes through which a sense of natural immersion in psytrance is produced musically. Following Simondon, for Mackenzie “transduction refers not only to a process that occurs in physical, biological or technical ensembles as they individuate. It also occurs in and as thought” (2002, 18). That is, in order to address transductive processes such as immersion in psytrance, we have to think transductively, which means to “mediate between different orders, to place heterogeneous realities in contact, and to become something different” in the process (Mackenzie 2002, 18). From this follows that we have to suspend any notion of the possibility of a closed off musical experience, such as the natural immersion in psytrance. Rather, we can attend to processes that allow this experience of immersion to appear as natural. These processes take place at the constantly changing intersection of diverse but entangled constantly individuating beings. The complexly transforming musical parameters that become experienced as aesthetics of psychedelic and flow on the psytrance dance floor as explored below, can in this mode of thought be understood as one of the various multifaceted elements that can afford a feeling of seamless immersion in psytrance on dance floors around the planet. Helmreich takes this transductive mode of thought one step further, by suggesting a transductive ethnography as one possible alternative for the vision-based reflexive ethnography prevalent in cultural anthropology. Helmreich imagines transductive ethnography as a […] mode of attention that asks how definitions of subjects, objects, and field emerge in material relations that cannot be modeled in advance [… O]ne idiom

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for thinking through anthropologies of sound [… A] transductive ear can help to audit the boundaries, to listen for how subjects, objects, and presences—at various scales—are made. (Helmreich 2007, 632, my italics)

Thinking transductively—in listening for how subjects, objects and presences are in_formed—is thus not envisioned as an all-inclusive method for doing ethnography, but rather one alternative mode of attending to the multiplicity of processes through which different realities come into being. In the following I explore how this mode of thought might allow me to address the questions posed in the introduction of this chapter in, through, and alongside of music. By listening to psytrance as it exposes itself as mediated, but at the same time veils that it is itself a medium through which we come to perceive ourselves as immediate beings-in-sound, I make audible and think alongside of the transductive process through which a perceived sense of natural immersion in Lex Rex Perplex can individuate.

Lex Rex Perplex The analysis below focuses on two aesthetic categories that, when experienced as present in a track, can afford seamless immersion in psytrance. The musical characteristics that have become perceived of in terms of these aesthetic categories— one could say these are currently “metastable states from which new individuations could eventuate” (Simondon 1992, 306)—of “psychedelic” and of “flow” are explored in some detail in and through the track Lex Rex Perplex (sound sample 4). Besides these particular musical characteristics, I want to emphasize that other individuating beings, such as psychoactive substances, space, visual stimulation and particular ideologies, are all in relations of becoming to these sounds; all are elements “in a much larger process of individuation” (Simondon 1992, 306), which however is outside of the scope of this paper to explore in depth. Furthermore, the music analysis is not meant to be all encompassing, but rather intended as a relational listening out for a musical ontogenesis of this sense of natural immersion in psytrance.

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The track (please listen to sound sample 4) has a relatively dense texture composed of multiple layers11 which are not always perceptible as distinct and feature often-repetitive sounds or sound patterns. Change over time within the track is typically created through the addition or removal of such layers. The shortest repetitive units in the track reside in the various percussive layers. The kick drum, for example, follows a typical four-to-the-floor kick drum pattern, with an attack on each beat. This kick drum pattern is absent only at the very beginning of the track, and during the few short breaks in the track that usually, but not always, last less than one measure. Another highly repetitive layer is the closed hi-hat (please listen to sound sample 5). This layer is repeatedly added to and extracted from the overall track as it progresses. The synthesized bass line is also highly repetitive, in terms of rhythm, in terms of pitch and in terms of intensity, and, in interaction with the kick drum, creates a characteristic sound pattern known as the “wobbly” bass (please listen to sound sample 6). In addition to these relatively short repetitive units that either sound on each beat, or equally divide each beat in two or four, various layers of the track consist of repetitive units longer than one 4/4 measure, thereby producing what Butler has termed repetitive “multi-measure patterns” (Butler 2006). The rhythmic pattern created by the snare drum, for example, is repetitive over two measures and thereby generates a feeling of a two-measure snare drum rhythmic unit. Changes in texture, such as the addition and removal of electronically manipulated, usually described as atmospheric, sounds, synthesized melodic patterns and sound samples, are repetitive in two, four or eight measures, thereby creating and reinforcing perceptions of various multi-measure patterns within the different layers of the track. This complex combination of musical individuations, allows for multiple listening experiences through aural funneling. That is, listeners can listen out for and hence take on a relation with (a combination of) specific sound patterns or layers, for example listening to and maybe moving the hands in a following of one melodic movement, in combination with a listening out for and moving the feet to the sounding of the kick drum. Thereby the track allows for multiple listening experiences, which might be 11

The notion of, and thinking about, psytrance in terms of sound layers is derived from electronic dance music production. Programs such as Ableton or Cubase that are used for EDMP, function through such sound layers, with each instrument, sample or atmosphere having its own layer in visual as well as auditory space.

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thought of in terms of Simondon’s notion of potentiality; the track has the potential to individuate in multiple ways upon taking on a relation with listeners such as ourselves. In the following excerpt of the track (please listen to sound sample 7), an open hi-hat marks the first beat of what can be perceived as an eight-measure unit, the clearly audible manipulations of timbre create units of four measures, and change in texture takes place after eight measures, thereby reinforcing the eight-measure unit created by the open hi-hat, again allowing for various aural funnelings. On the one hand, since they are electronically created and reproduced, these various repetitions can be taken to be exact repetitions. On the other hand, these repetitions can create relationships, simultaneously among themselves as well as with a listener who is listening out for these repetitions, which can create a particular expectancy within the listener. This expectancy, in turn, can influence the ways in which these repetitions are perceived. This strongly resonates with aforementioned understanding of the form of individuation Simondon calls transduction; where “each region of the constituted [musical] structure serves as a constituting principle for the following one” (Simondon 1995, 30, quoted in Mackenzie 2002, 16). These repetitions and differences, and repetitions of differences, are important building blocks of the track. This resonates with the aesthetic of flow as described by Hughes, “a sense of forward motion” (Hughes 2003, 16), interpreted by Richardson “as a result of the repetition of musical materials in a dynamic relation between perceptions of sameness and the realization of […] differences as time unfolds” (Richardson 2011, 129). This repetition of musical materials can either be repetition in one particular musical element, such as the bass drum in Lex Rex Perplex, or repetition of a complex musical patterning of repetition and difference; evoking “a flow of flows” (Hughes 2003, 18). Such a flow of flows, a repetition of a complex musical patterning in a dynamic relation between perceptions of sameness and realization of difference over time, is clearly audible in the analyzed aspects of repetition and difference in Lex Rex Perplex. Due to the repetitive elements, such as the almost constantly present kick drum, the bass line and the textural changes that take place within a particular frame of measures, the track evokes expectations, which it then plays with through the unexpected addition of new musical elements and the unanticipated removal of present elements, such as (almost) all the percussive layers (please listen to sound sample 8), creating, sometimes surprising, change over time. In combination with the structure of the

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track, starting with a low textural density and low intensity, both of which are gradually increased due to the addition of percussive, melodic and atmospheric layers, thereby not only increasing its textural density and dynamic intensity but also the complexity of the track, these musical elements constitute Lex Rex Perplex as a track that can be experienced, among others, as a musical flow of flows. This sense of flow is enhanced by the panning effect on multiple sound layers of the track. Due to electronic music production software and stereophonic sound systems, this electronic means of spatializing sounds is no longer solely dependent on “the acoustics of places (like concert halls) but [can be manipulated] by techniques of sound reproduction” (Helmreich 2007, 623). This allows for a contriving of, and at the same time a messing with, the listener’s “sense of space and place, and in each case this spatiality is critical to the recordings’ musical effect” (Doyle 2005, 4). That is, the repetitive low frequency bass pulses, rhythmical patterns, samples and frequency sweeps are quite literally kinetic—they seem to move unpredictably through the loudspeakers located around the dance floor (or in the case of the current analysis and maybe the reader’s listening experience, through the ear phones), thereby creating a very physical sense of a fluid musical space. This sense of movement is enhanced by a so-called echo effect on some of the synthesized melodic lines (sound sample 9). The melodic line is located on one side of the speakers, while its echo is located on the other side of the speakers, thereby adding to the sense of movement through—and space in—the track. This sensation is often enhanced by the use of digital delay, which generates a soaring sonic space that seems much larger than oneself (Rietveld 2010, 69). As such, with this particular spatialization of sound layers, the track affords its listeners a very physical experience of being in a fluid threedimensional musical space, evoking a sense of disordered and constantly changing space which the listener might experience “in an exhilaratingly re-formed, nonrealist configuration” (Doyle 2005, 3). It is this experience that is often described as psychedelic, as elaborated on in more detail in the following. Such “nonrealist” (ibid.) sonority is not only audible in and through these particular spatializations of the track’s many sound layers, it is also clearly audible in the timbral manipulations and frequency sweeps so characteristic of this genre. Developments in sound technology have made timbre in electronic dance music “as flexible as pitch and dynamic variations” (Fales 2005, 156). The manipulations of timbre that result in sounds specific to psytrance are not incidentally the sounds participants

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Fig. 1. Logarithmic visualization of spatialized timbral manipulation in Lex Rex Perplex 0:34–0:39.

Fig. 2. Logarithmic visualization of timbral manipulation in Lex Rex Perplex 0:51–0:54.

Fig. 3. Logarithmic visualization of frequency sweep in Lex Rex Perplex.

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give meaning to as “psychedelic” sounds. Let me therefore attend to a few timbre changes created by an electronic sound manipulation called frequency filtering; a filtering of particular frequencies of a sound that, according to McAdams et al., “has a clear perceptual result that is directly discernible from [its] representation” (McAdams et al. 2005, 160) (sound samples 10, 11, 12; also, figures 1, 2, 3). These sounds are created by an overtly audible and visible manipulation of the overtone spectra of various electronically produced sounds. These manipulations either very clearly emphasize particular overtones, thereby creating a few (layers of) new, high-pitched, melodic lines, as we hear and see in samples 10 (fig. 1) and 11 (fig. 2), or progressively filters particular frequencies of sounds possessing a scattered frequency spectrum (which is usually called noise), thereby creating a so-called frequency sweep, as in sample 12 (fig .3). In contrast with sounds that we perceive of as “real world sounds” (Fales 2005), sounds with an acoustic referent in what we have been auditorily socialized to perceive of as the real world, the sounds from samples 10, 11 and 12 lack such relatively stable timbre. Instead, these sounds can be understood as […] affectively provocative sounds; […] neither familiar nor imaginable, their metaphoric connection to acoustic referents tenuous […] these sounds play with the listener […] are sounds that are impossible, that could never exist in the perceptual world we so wholeheartedly believe in. (Ibid., 169–170)

That is, the abrupt and explicit change of timbral qualities of these already clearly audible electronic sounds violate the acoustic rules of what we perceive of as real world sounds. At a psytrance party, where the search for the psychedelic is central to the overall experience of the party, I argue that such sounds, perceived of as unreal, distorted and with constantly changing timbres, are likely to be perceived of, and given meaning to in terms of “psychedelic”. The perceived impossibility of these so-called psychedelic sounds, the surprising, changing and hence distorted spatialization of the sound layers, and the exact replication of the various repetitive musical materials, all explicitly expose Lex Rex Perplex’s technological origin. That is, the mediated character of the track’s aesthetics is clearly audible on the dance floor, and “the listener’s focus is thus directed not only toward what is mediated, but also toward the act of mediation itself ” (Brøvig-Hanssen

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2010, 159, my italics). Building on Mitchell’s (2005) argument that the fantasy and, if I may add, the sensory experience, of immediacy has to be understood as the direct result of the awareness of mediation, I propose that this “aesthetic of opaque mediation” (ibid., 159) in psytrance is exactly what allows for the sense of immersion within it. That is, following Mitchell’s theory of medium, the very moment we perceive of a phenomenon as mediated, we also “construct a corresponding zone of immediacy, of the unmediated and transparent, which stands in contrast with the medium itself ” (Mitchell 2005, 214). It is exactly this tension between what is perceived of as the lived, immediate reality of the listener’s immersion in Lex Rex Perplex’s sounds, on the one hand, and the explicitly mediated reality of this sound’s aesthetic of psychedelic and flow, on the other, that is of interest to me here.12 This can be understood as a tension between competing orders, which Simondon understands as the cause of processes of transduction; the “ambivalent form of tension and of incompatibility. […] the existence of potentials—that is also the cause of the incompatibility and the nonstability” (Simondon 1992, 314). The moment that listeners perceive psytrance’s aesthetics as mediated, which, as I argued, is likely to happen on the psytrance dance floor, a corresponding zone of immediacy is constructed, in which a fantasy and sensory experience of a direct, unmediated access to music seemingly becomes possible. Taking into account another aspect of psytrance’s aesthetic, namely its extremely high dynamic intensity that literally makes the dancer’s bodies vibrate on, or maybe along with, its beats, psytrance seems to not only seamlessly penetrate the vulnerable ears but also the, all of a sudden conceived of as vulnerable and fully permeable, body. Combining this with the before-proposed flow affording a sense of physical movement through a three-dimensional, fluid and perceptibly psychedelic musical space, we can begin to understand how the track affords the perceived boundary between self and sound to become blurred, “imperceptible, in-audible” (Helmreich 2007, 626). This perceived natural dissolving of the boundaries between self and sound results in a feeling of seamless immersion in Lex Rex Perplex, a feeling of immediate presence in sound which “we are no longer encouraged to comprehend, let alone experience, as transduced” by our senses (Helmreich 2007). 12

Richardson refers to a similar tension between virtual reality and lived reality in his account of virtual band Gorillaz (Richardson 2011).

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Summarizing, I propose that through the explicit aural unmasking of the mediated character of Lex Rex Perplex’s aesthetics of flow and psychedelic, this track seduces its listeners into forgetting about the mediating function of the senses, which allows participants to comprehend their experience as a natural, immediate immersion in sound. That is, positioned in, funneling the ears to, and moving the body to and through (specific elements of) the musical space of Lex Rex Perplex, listeners become “networked into a semiotic order that extends, modulates, and conditions our senses” (Helmreich 2007, 622) to such an extent, that the senses’ transductive character is forgotten. Lex Rex Perplex slaps and it embraces, it slaps and it embraces. Cultural musicology in_formation In this last part of the chapter, I suggest that the seductive and self-legitimating reflexive mode of thought prevalent in a part of contemporary academia, has in_formed an academic zone of immediacy in a manner similar to Lex Rex Perplex’s individuation into a zone of immediacy. In—and due to—this comfortable and self-legitimating zone of immediacy, a fantasy that we can somehow get to know a musical “really real” (cf. van de Port 2005, 2011a, 2011b) still seems to find fertile ground. I elaborated on this idea in relation to Lex Rex Perplex, and now argue against the possibility of fully knowing this musical really real. Instead, I follow Simondon’s understanding of knowledge as the individuation of a relation between two other individuating beings, namely of music and cultural musicologist. Hence, I suggest that the in_formation of knowledge about music, always takes place in and as relation to musics’ and musicologist individuations. Paraphrasing Mitchell (2005) in asking what musics could want, and what we might want from musics in the light of this proposition, I explore the potential such a mode of thought might hold for cultural musicology. My engagement with Lex Rex Perplex was an attempt to make audible some of the musical conditions that enable a mode of becoming that listeners experience as seamless auditory immersion. This attention to sound as an explicitly transductive medium in, through and in analogy with which I construct my academic argument, was an attempt to move beyond a rather paralyzing rhetoric of reflection prevalent in academia. As has been pointed out in anthropology, the tendency to mobilize this rhetoric as authenticator for an academic argument “merely reinforces the perspective and voice of the lone, introspective fieldworker” (Marcus 1998, 193). In the case

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of this article, this would be the per-auditive, a particular mode of listening out for certain musical parameters and elements during and conventionalized as music analysis, of the carefully listening, in the process maybe even constructed as knowledgeable and hence authoritative, cultural musicologist. The explicit ethical and political hierarchies such modes of (analytical) listening both presuppose and reproduce, have been critically explored by among others Kramer (1992), Tomlinson (1993), Subotnik (1996) and Dell’Antonio (2004), but as far as I am aware these debates on relations between music, knowledge and power have not lead to a similar critique on the paralyzing aspect of this practice of academic reflection within musicology. When, for example, reflecting on the methods applied in the case study, I could point out that everything argued is a reductive reconstruction of my subjective listening experience of Lex Rex Perplex, which I presented as knowledge about this music. I might point out that I used a man-made-machine to construct a spectrogram in order to ground my argument on timbral change, that I mobilized the audio recordings of my informants’ voices to immerse the reader at the beginning of the paper, as well as to illustrate the relevance of the case study. Furthermore, I could remind readers that I explicitly told them how to use their ears and interpret the sounds they heard during the analysis of various forms of repetition and difference within the track. I might additionally reflect on how these methodological decisions influenced the outcome of my analysis, and how my introduction to the psytrance phenomenon in terms of a complex heterogeneous and planetary music genre framed the music in particular ways. I might point out that I am aware that the meanings I constructed on the basis of my analysis are always already mediated, always framed by my very understanding of what music is, how it functions, by the questions I asked the music, by the ways in which the technologies I used are programmed, by the musical parameters I prioritize and so on. This would have made the reader explicitly aware that my argument is itself a mediated construction, and would have unmasked the fact that everything we consider to be knowledge about the musics we so clearly love (to study) is in fact a construction. Although I would have reproduced the distinction between being and thought as criticized by Simondon, for many readers this reflection would have legitimated my argument. As long as we reflect on the choices we make, all seems to be well in the academic universe. But Mitchell’s media theory has made me suspicious of such overt unveilings of mediation, and makes me wonder whether the reflexive turn has created a “corre-

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sponding zone of immediacy, of the unmediated and transparent” (Mitchell 2005, 214), a fantasy of the possibility to really know the music we study. As Kramer already pointed out over twenty years ago: “[I]mmediacy is a performative effect. What’s more, it is an effect which, when mystified or idealized, functions to empower the persons, institutions, and social groups in control of its production” (Kramer 1992, 9). Might this zone of immediacy then, exactly because it affords musicologists a fantasy of the possibility of knowing the musical “really real”, thereby seducing us into a relation with music, be a zone in which we can legitimize ourselves as “really real” musicologists? And isn’t this reflexive rhetoric, then, a performative equivalent of a medium, revealed for what it is, which in the process of being revealed, legitimizes and feeds into musicologists’ constant desire to again enter this zone of immediacy in which the musical “really real” can be known? Might this be what makes music so interesting to us as musicologists, this amazingly seductive capability to time after time make us move into its proximity, only to re-learn that we can never get comfortable there, never actually grasp this ephemeral phenomenon “as it is”? To once more echo the words of Tony Morrison: “Music makes you hungry for more of it. It never really gives you the whole number. It slaps and it embraces, its slaps and it embraces” (Toni Morrison, quoted in Gilroy 1993, 78). Why do we keep assuming that this seductive quality does not draw us under its spell, that we are different from any other listener? Music makes musicologists hungry for more of it, it slaps and embraces us, as we try to grasp, but never get hold of it. To be more precise, musics are not “simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp […] Rather, they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them” (Law 2004, 6). Musics as well as our knowledge of them doesn’t have form, both are in_formation. As soon as we do seek to grasp musical form instead of addressing processes of musics and knowledge’s in_formation, we deny them any other possibility of being addressed. We deny musics the potentiality inherent in individuation that allows for individual listening experiences and musical transformation, and allow ourselves to shy away from taking the responsibility that, following hornscheidt (2012), I think comes with listening, not only, but also as used in academic knowledge production. As Combes points out in her reading of Simondon: [T]he object of knowledge appears only upon the stabilization of the operation of individuation, when the operation, incorporated into its result, disappears. In

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this inevitable “veiling” of the constituting operation by its constituted result, Simondon finds the cause for the forgetting of the operation, which is characteristic of the philosophical tradition. Philosophy, having forgotten to take into account the operation of the real constitution of individuals, thus focuses its attention on the ideal constitution of the object of knowledge. (Combes 2013, 7)

Following this, maybe we have to ask ourselves, is reflexively identifying musical structures, forms and parameters, and thereby only addressing such an “ideal constitution of the object of knowledge”, really what we want from music, or what music wants from us? I propose here, that instead of letting music’s ungraspability, this seductive quality to never really gives us the whole number, get to us, we can take this seductive capacity as central to our thinking in, through and analogous to, music. As Simondon has pointed out, “[c]learly, transduction cannot be presented as a logical procedure terminating in a conclusive proof […] I see it as […] the course taken by the mind on its journey to discovery” (Simondon 1992, 314). Mitchell’s take on this relation, resonates strongly with this notion of transduction. For Mitchell, [… m]inds are media, and vice versa. Mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated, and is embodied in the whole range of material media. Thinking does not, as Wittgenstein put it, reside in some “queer medium” inside the head. We think out loud, at the keyboard, with tools and images and sounds. This process is thoroughly reciprocal. […] We not only think about media, we think in them, which is why they give us the headache endemic to recursive thinking. There is no privileged metalanguage of media in semiotics, linguistics, or discourse analysis. Our relation to media is one of mutual and reciprocal constitution: we create them, and they create us. (Mitchell 2005, 215)

How then, can we avoid thinking about, and start thinking in, the medium individuating as music? I would like to follow Combes’ reading of Simondon, who proposes that at stake in such processes of individuation, is […] placing knowledge of the operations of individuation at the heart of a new way of thinking about being and a new method of thought. Only an analogical

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Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten method turns out to be adequate to ontogenesis, however. The founding act of this method, the analogical act, is defined as a “putting into relation of two operations.” (Combes 2013, 9)

So how about cultural musicology doing exactly that, an analogical act of putting the individuation of knowledge about music and the individuation of music in a mutual relation with each other, and attending to the question of how this relation in_forms both the individuation of music, as well as our own individuation? This would allow cultural musicology to restlessly mediate between different experiential orders, to place heterogeneous realities in contact without presupposing any underlying unity, but rather acknowledging that these realities are always becoming something different in the process. If we can never know, understand, or grasp music in full, because the object of knowledge only appears upon the stabilization of its individuation, perhaps we need an alternative verb to capture what we do within cultural musicology. I would like to propose a relating to music and a being related by them. This does not mean reducing music to a logical system, structure or analyzable score or any other form, but rather to acknowledge that musics are individuating environments with whom we can take on a relation. Both musics as well as cultural musicologists consist in and through these relations, exactly as I became something different in my taking on a relation with Lex Rex Perplex, in such a way that we “may speak of a coindividuation of thinking and the beings [such as musics and cultural musicologists] thus known” (ibid., 12). If we cease to apprehend musics, ourselves, and our knowledge about musics as finished objects and subjects, a transductive cultural musicology might be in_formation. References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations, transl. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton & Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotexte, 1983. Bieger, Laura. Ästhetik der Immersion: Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild. “Opaque Mediation: The Cut-and-Paste Groove in DJ Food’s ‘Break’”. Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, edited by Anne Danielsen, 159–76. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

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Butler, Mark J. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Cole, Fred & Michael Hannan. “Goa Trance”. In: Perfect Beat 3 (1997): 3, 1–14. Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2013. Originally published in French in 1999. D’Andrea, Anthony. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. New York: Routledge, 2007. Dell’Antonio, Andrew. “Introduction: Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing.” Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 1–12. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. —. (ed.) Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Doyle, Peter. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900– 1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Fales, Cornelia. “Short-Circuiting Perceptual Systems: Timbre in Ambient and Techno Music.” Wired For Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, edited by Paul D. Greene & Thomas Porcello, 156–80. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents, edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. Garcia, Luis-Manuel. “‘Can You Feel It, Too?’: Intimacy and Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin”. Unpublished Dissertation. Illinois: University of Chicago, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London & New York: Verso, 1993. Helmreich, Stefan. “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography”. American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 4, 621–41. —. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009. —. “Listening Against Soundscapes”. Anthropology News Dec. 2010, 10. hornscheidt, lann. feministische w_orte ein lern-, denk- und handlungsbuch zu sprache

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und diskriminierung, gender studies und feministische linguistik. frankfurt: brandes & apsel verlag, 2012. Hughes, Timothy S. “Groove and Flow: Six Analytical Essays on the Music of Stevie Wonder.” Ph.D dissertation. Washington: University of Washington, 2003. Ingold, Tim. “Against Soundscape”. Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, edited by Angus Carlyle. Paris: Double Entendre, 2007. —. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2011. Jackson, Phil. Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2004. Kramer, Lawrence. “The Musicology of the Future”. Repercussions 1 (1992): 5–18. Ledesma, Charles de. “Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place”. The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance, edited by Graham St John, 89–113. New York: Routledge, 2010. Mackenzie, Adrian. Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London: Continuum, 2002. Malbon, Ben. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. Marcus, George. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. McAdams, Stephen, Philippe Depalle, & Eric Clarke. “Analyzing Musical Sound”. Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, edited by Eric Clarke & Nicholas Cook, 157–96. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mitchell, William J. T. What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005. Port, Mattijs van de. “Registers of Incontestability: The Search for Authenticity in Academia and Beyond”. Etnofoor 17 (2004), 1–24. —. “Circling around the Really Real. Possession Ceremonies and the Search for Authenticity in Bahian Candomble”. Ethos 33 (2005), 147–79. —. (2011a) “(Not) Made by the Human Hand: Media Consciousness and Immediacy in the Cultural Production of the Real”. Social Anthropology 19 (2011), 74–89. —. (2011b) Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011.

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Richardson, John. An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rietveld, Hillegonda. “Infinite Noise Spirals: The Musical Cosmopolitanism of Psytrance”. Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance, edited by Graham St John, 69–88. New York: Routledge, 2010. Schafer, Murray. The Soundscape. Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977. Schwartz, Hillel. “The Indefensible Ear: A History”. The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull & Les Back, 487–501. Oxford & New York: Berg Publishers, 2003. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter. New York: Zone Books, 1992. —. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. Originally published in 1964. —. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon, 2005. St John, Graham. “Psytrance: An Introduction”. The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance, edited by Graham St John, 1–17. New York: Routledge, 2010. —. “Experience, Tribalism, and Remixology in Global Psytrance Culture”. What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age, edited by Courtney Bender & Ann Taves, 248–75. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. —. “Total Solar Eclipse Festivals, Cosmic Pilgrims and Planetary Culture”. Pop Pagans: Pagans and Popular Music, edited by Donna Weston & Andy Bennett, 126–144. Bristol: Acumen Publishing, 2013. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. Deconstructing Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Tomlinson, Gary. “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer”. Current Musicology 53 (1993), 18–40. Vanhoutte, Kurt, & Nele Wynants. “Immersion”. Mapping Intermediality in Performance, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, & Robin Nelson, 47. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Whiteley, Sheila. “Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix”. Popular Music 9 (1990): 37–60.

Lawrence Kramer

A Grammar of Cultural Musicology (Which Has No Grammar) Cultural musicology, if there is such a thing, is a cheerful cacophony. A casual look at the two editions of a widely read recent book, The Cultural Study of Music (Clayton, Herbert & Middleton 2003 & 2012) will make that abundantly clear. Both editions are utterly diverse; the second is roughly twice as long as the first. About the only thing one can safely say is that numerous scholars, for some years now, have felt an imperative to bring their understanding of music and their understanding of culture into close proximity. There are too many possibilities for doing that to enumerate or to arrange in a closed system. To borrow the language of Deleuze and Guattari, cultural musicology is rhizomatic, not arborescent (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). So how best address the question of what cultural musicology is, or should, or can be? And how to do so without slipping into saying what it must be? One answer is to narrow the question: to ask how to advance one particular project, solve one particular problem. And one way to do that is to situate the project or problem at a limited site, or sites, on a continuum that runs between collective practices and individual actions, between the conditions of cultural production and the force of cultural products. For me, to do that has meant to ask how the products of one particular musical tradition, or the loose coalition of transatlantic traditions grouped under the rubric of classical music, can be understood culturally. My question has been how the works, events, and practices of classical music can be grasped as responses to and interventions in the circumstances amid which they emerged and again amid the changed circumstances in which the music continues to be played and heard. If the answers are effective, they should also be exemplary to a significant degree and have a ripple effect on other, cognate projects and problems.

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Accordingly this chapter is an essay about how to understand works of classical music as agents of cultural production—a process that does not, in this instance, refer to the preservation or transmission of customs, values, and practices, but instead to the real or imaginary transformation of such things. Or rather, since the project of understanding the music in these terms has been going on for quite some time, the chapter is a reflection on the conditions of possibility of such understanding. The course of that reflection will lead to the proposal that among the sites where cultural production and musical agency come together, three seem especially generative. The three sites are those of making music, listening to music, and conjoining music with moving images. A look at typical examples of what goes on at those sites will involve notes toward a reexamination of a series of key concepts, including context, norm, interpretation, and description—perhaps even of music itself. But that is for later. For now, and for the most part in what follows, “music” refers primarily to classical music (though without excluding other types where appropriate). And to prevent the implicit appropriation of “cultural musicology” in general by this one particular branch of it, I will pose my questions not about “cultural musicology” but about “cultural interpretation,” which, after all, is the heart of both my project and my problem. The idea is to take a particular cultural practice, that of absorbing oneself deeply in valued works of art, and to shift that practice from the aesthetic sphere, its place of origin, to the sphere of critical and historical hermeneutics, without, however, leaving the aesthetic wholly behind. There are, of course, other ways to think about classical music in cultural terms, some more oriented to the collective end of the spectrum, and some to a particularity that exceeds the particularity of the work—that of performance, for instance, something in which I also have an interest. But as I have already said, the only way to make a useful contribution to the general project of cultural musicology is to stay resolutely particular. So I will. Beyond context The cultural turn in musicology since the 1990s is commonly regarded as an effort to understand what were once taken to be autonomous musical procedures as meaningful in relation to the music’s “cultural context.” But placing music—or anything else—in what is supposed to be “its” context is no simple matter. How do we know what context is pertinent? And why do we suppose that any context is bounded, sta-

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ble, clear, or authoritative? The actual frame of reference in which we encounter musical works and practices, and, for that matter, anything else, is none of these things. Furthermore the effort as thus defined is circular. If music is actually a cultural agency, then it is already part of the “culture” employed to explain it. The idea that one can understand music by positioning it in “its” context—however we learn what that context might be—ignores the effects that music must already have had on the context involved. If this problem sounds familiar, it should. It is a variation on the famous hermeneutic circle in the circle’s classic form: that hermeneutics must always presuppose what it claims to discover. In an often-quoted passage from his Being and Time, Martin Heidegger famously denied that this circle was a vicious one. “What is decisive”, he wrote, is not to get out of the circle but to get into it in the right way. The circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move. [… ] It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. (Heidegger 1962, 153)

But what, exactly, is the right way? Heidegger never really said. Instead he warned against letting understanding be influenced by “fancies and popular conceptions” and admonished us to understand “in terms of the things themselves”—all of which is a good deal less than nothing. Heidegger’s principal heirs, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, are more explicit but also more constricting. They offer different forms of a model of accommodation that, like the generic maxim to understand things in context, is strongly over-idealized. The model, indeed, really just is that maxim in another form. Both Gadamer’s famous “fusion of horizons” and Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic arc” propose a process of approximation by self-correction (Gadamer 1996, 265–307; Ricoeur 1981). The interpreter forms hypotheses about meaning, tests them against what Heidegger called “the things themselves,” modifies the hypotheses accordingly, then turns the wheel again as often as needed. And what’s wrong with that? The hermeneutic circle in this form is a continuous feedback loop between constitutive detail and what Heidegger calls fore-understanding, starting with the latter. The points of turn and return identify the hidden flaw in

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the perfect circle, which is precisely the circle’s perfection. Regardless of whether it is vicious, the circle is closed. It is a circle in which all the details are integrated or subject to integration once the structure of fore-understanding has intervened to start the interpretive process. Its underlying assumption, and really its underlying rule, is that however remote the opening interpretive move may seem from the letter of the text (always assuming, further, that we can know what that letter says), the outcome of the intervention is an accommodation or reconciliation. The horizons of the text and the interpreter are ultimately, or even more or less proximately, continuous, or else the interpretation could not proceed at all. Gadamer even says that the two horizons are a heuristic illusion; there is really only one (Gadamer 1996, 306).1 The meaning produced cannot escape being a representation of a meaning already immanent in the text. Even if the hermeneutic circle does not absolutely determine the terms on which an interpretation is arrived at, even if (a point less easily granted) it avoids immunizing itself against ideological critique—Jürgen Habermas’s classic objection (Habermas 1977)—the circle nonetheless does determine that only certain kinds of understanding, certain kinds of discourse, are possible. Meanings are acceptable only if their origin falls along the circular path, which inexorably closes in on itself, like a noose. But that entails that only the safest and most static meanings are acceptable. Are those even meanings at all? Meaning exceeds its sources in principle, whether or not it does so in any given practice. Neither context nor method can contain meaning, or constrain meaning, nor, all the more, can they produce meaning. To follow, that is, to obey, the rule of the hermeneutic circle is to refuse excess meaning, which is tantamount to refusing meaning itself. The refusal is particularly marked when the meaning at stake is explicitly cultural, because—as the examples to come will show—culture depends fundamentally on the operation of meaning as excess. That inherent excess also belongs to language. Meaning may or may not turn in a circle, but it must pass through the figural density, associative vitality, and ambiguity of language. Interpretations are not ideas; they are discourses, extended speech acts. 1

The whole passage needs to be read closely. In brief, the distinct identities of the two horizons “supposedly existing by themselves” dissolve during a movement of retraction that occurs—is always already occurring—as “historical consciousness […] immediately recombines with what it has foregrounded itself from in order to become one with itself again in the unity of the historical horizon that it thus acquires.”

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They require reading and rereading and they always leave behind an unorganized remainder, not just contrary possibilities of understanding but dark matter: inert, uninterpreted and uninterpretable material, which serves to mark or testify to the interpreter’s necessary, energizing interposition. The result is not a fusion of horizons but a kind of lattice- or lacework with unfinished borders, a series of localizations within a totality that is not the whole. Another name for that porous totality is culture. To understand the cultural significance of anything is always to propose a cultural interpretation of that thing, sometimes informally, sometimes discursively. (As I argued in Interpreting Music, this process begins with acts of pre-interpretation in the form of descriptions that may, but need not, provide the nucleus of a full or proper interpretation (Kramer 2010, 52–66). Full interpretation is always an extended act of discourse, above all in writing; we will return to the question of writing before we are done). The question for music is how we can understand its participation in the activity of culture without reducing the music to the reproduction of a presupposition, however refined the presupposition might be. How, in other words, can we address the musical phenomenon, whatever form it takes, not as a sign or instance, not as the reflection of a cultural context, but as an event? The question applies even if we follow Heidegger in observing a positive continuity between knowledge and foreknowledge, and it applies even more strongly if we regard such continuity as something that, like hermeneutic circling, may but need not occur (and may not be something we want to occur). A more powerful operator than context is needed to support an understanding of music as a cultural agency rather than as example of a preconceived idea or prior condition. That operator can be found by adapting the concept of critique, in the philosophical sense of the term, in a form that somewhat resembles musical composition or improvisation. Critique in this sense, including self-critique, is the investigation of conditions of possibility. What I propose here is to combine this practice with an open and open-ended practice of interpretation. Such critical invention supports a model of understanding based on forms of cultural interpretation that limit the authority of context and that replace the traditional antagonism between musical and verbal discourse with a performative energy that understands each as a trope for the other. When I interpret some musical event, I propose that the event has certain connections and makes certain uses of them. Where this proposal comes from does not

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matter; what matters is what the proposal proves capable of producing. And if I want to address not a fixed idea and an example of it but a field of action, I need to focus on what makes the action possible. I need, that is, to ask two questions: first (though it need not come first), what are the conditions of possibility for the connections and their uses; what must I assume in order to think them and imagine them? And second (though it need not come second), what do the connections and uses thus made possible make possible in their turn? To what are they the conditions of possibility? In other words, I need to give my interpretation the force of a critique, though it does not necessarily have to take the form of a critique. Its form remains open to invention, not bound to any single protocol, because interpretation, as Schleiermacher claimed long ago while laying the foundations of hermeneutics, is an art [Das Auslegen ist Kunst (Schleiermacher 1977, 80)]. Like works of art, acts of interpretation cannot be verified or validated. They succeed insofar as they create a community of discourse, a grammar of understanding that becomes a qualitative part of the music—or anything else—that is being interpreted. Mehr Kunst als Wissenschaft: although knowledge of culture, history, customs, imaginaries, and so on are necessary for cultural understanding, understanding becomes cultural only when it goes beyond that knowledge. To have a cultural musicology, then, one branch of which is the cultural interpretation of music, we must first ask about the conditions of possibility for cultural meanings (in general, in particular) to permeate music, in every dimension of music: work, performance, genre, history, style, recording, memory—the list goes on and the dimensions overlap. An interpretation becomes cultural, or, we might say, explicitly or lucidly cultural, when the meanings it proposes appear in concrete relation to their preconditions. Of course all interpretation is “cultural” in the sense that the interpreter always acts from within a culture at some point in its history. But interpretation becomes cultural in its mode of understanding when it connects the meanings it proposes to their potential emergence from a habitus, an episteme, a network of practices. To make that connection it is necessary to have a description or inventory of the culture in question and of music’s place in it, but it is important not to confuse such an account with cultural interpretation itself. The interpretation, like whatever it interprets, is more intervention than reflection. In this connection it should be added that the questions and procedures typical of cultural interpretation are unlike those

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of traditional ethnomusicology. The interpretive project, found for example in the American “New Musicology” and its offshoots (even in its antagonists), does not fit music into a niche or a master narrative. It does not take a certain concept of culture as a stable point of reference for describing musical activity. Cultures sponsor action and understanding; “culture” does not exist. Instead, the cultural interpretation of music is part of a more general project of open interpretation. That project is conducted by and in music (for example) as well as about music and other cultural products. The boundary between participation and interpretation, practice and reflection, is permeable at every point. Its weakness is its strength. Or would be, because I am still not sure that I am talking about something that exists, or that at least has a home in university systems based on European models. And the same uncertainty applies to music, which is now so ubiquitous, so inescapable, that it no longer has a secure or characteristic location or identity. It can turn up anywhere and metamorphose into nearly anything. Making As for example in the streets of the metropolis, which here serves to exemplify the first of the three sites I mean to explore, the site of making. (“Making”: is that poeisis, fabrication, construction, reproduction, or …? Even this term is porous today; what is the difference between playing classical piano and compiling a playlist or composing a track from samples? The example may have something to say about this). Since 2008 the British artist Luke Jerram has been turning cities into musical performance spaces by distributing thirty or more pianos around prominent public sites for several weeks at a time. When the pianos turned up in London in the summer of 2009, they received wide press coverage and a warm welcome from the public; the event was repeated the following year in London and New York, and again in London in 2012, at which point the number of pianos had swelled to 50. The pianos were marked with the Alice-in-Wonderland-like inscription that is also the name of the project: Play me, I’m yours (Lyall 2009).2 And people did exactly that; young and old, they 2

The project continues to flourish. According to its website, http://www.streetpianos. com/, accessed 17 April 2013, Play Me, I’m Yours had installed street pianos in 35 cities around the world by the end of 2012, with installations in four more—Boston, Munich, Cleveland, and Omaha—following in 2013 starting in May. Mention

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thronged to the pianos and played everything from Chopin (lots of Chopin) to Van Halen. What kinds of event did these pianos encourage and/or make possible? What did their availability mean? How did the pianos transform public space? The news coverage suggests at least four distinct answers (there are surely more), which I will canvass briefly here while confining myself primarily to the 2009 London installation.3 1. The street pianos regularly became the nucleus of instant communities. Whereas buskers typically remain at a remove from their listeners (if they have any), many of the performers on the street pianos elicited warm if obviously passing relationships with the people around them. Conversation flowed. Participants shared anecdotes. People made requests (“Do you know any Chopin?”). One woman, on learning that the man playing Scarlatti sonatas near the Millennium Bridge was not doing it for money, left the scene briefly and brought back a bottle of water for him (it was a hot summer’s day). The pianos dissolved the social boundaries that normally govern street life. And in the exception to the “warm but passing” clause, a few of the pianos resulted in marriages; in one case the piano even became the altar.4 2. This blurring turned public spaces into pleasure grounds. Sites normally used for transitional movement became spots to gather and linger. The unexpected pianos acted as assurances of civility and promises of enjoyment. Their invitation to play even seemed to dispel the possibility of stage fright; the pianos relaxed inhibitions.

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should also be made of a similar program, Sing for Hope Pianos, which each year since 2011 has for a limited time distributed 88 artist-decorated pianos (one per key) around New York City. (The instruments are donated to schools and charities once the event runs its course). Anthony Tommasini, writing for the Times as a participant, reports social and musical behavior very similar to that elicited by Play Me, I’m Yours; see Tommasini 2013. The details to follow come from the Times article Lyall 2009, cited above, and from Saner 2009 (accessed online 17 June 2013 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/ jun/24/piano-art-installation-luke-jerram). Luke Jerram describes the marriages, together with much else, in a radio essay done for the BBC Radio3 Programme, accessible online (with slide show) at http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9OiuLtSJC7I. It is worth noting, as Jerram does, that the rate of vandalism of the street pianos has been close to zero.

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3. Perhaps as a result, the pianos revived dormant musical passions in some of the people who played them. The Scarlatti player, a visitor from Argentina, said he had not played in public since childhood: “I felt like I was a little boy again. I think it’s a beautiful idea, and it makes people nearer to the music.” At the other end of the spectrum, a 74-year old woman who had retired from playing jazz piano four years earlier got off her bike, flexed her fingers, and tossed off a ragtime number. “I think my friends were worried about me,” she told a reporter, “because I don’t play anymore. But I’m glad this has happened today because music is my life.” The reporter said she hoped the pianist would start playing again; in return she got a hug and a double “I think I will. I think I will.” 4. The pianos inspired a notable treatment—call it a revival or reclamation—of classical music as a source of elevation without pretentiousness. Freed from the protocol of the concert hall, the music became an embodiment of festivity. Thanks to the unqualified openness of the invitation Play me, I’m yours, pieces by Scarlatti, Ravel, Chopin, and Beethoven, among others, became “yours” not only to the players but also to the listeners—something shared out rather than passed down.5 The bright, whimsically ornamented pianos seemed to become a particularly noncoercive locus of consistency, clarity, and order, qualities also reassumed by the classical selections, even while—or is that “because”—the instruments remained continuously available for improvisation and festive play. Listening What happens when we move from such communal activity to the more cloistered space offered (we don’t always accept) by the musical work qua work of art? That 5

For a video of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in Times Square (2010), see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbaf8K6qbyU. Also in 2010, the pianist Ren Yuan played Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude, Op. 10, no. 12, on eight of the street pianos in London, including the one near Millennium Bridge; see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=b1iyZ-4AK2U. Not to be outdone in pianistic tumult, Beethoven turned up near the Millennium Bridge via the finale of the “Moonlight” Sonata played—from memory!—by a boy named George who looks to be about 10: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=uLg7lTB52WI. A young music student, happening to pass by the Millennium Bridge piano in 2009, stopped to play the first movement of Ravel’s “Sonatine.”

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move certainly tends to lead to classical music, where the work, in the traditional sense of the fully-scored composition, maintains a high degree of authority and even, sadly, reverential status. The elevation of the work persists despite a decade or more of vigorous criticism from scholars intent on elevating performance instead, and on using the instabilities of performance, adaptation, and so forth, to debunk the supposedly fixed, authoritative musical work and its supposedly fixed meaning.6 Those scholars are wasting their time, not because fixed authoritative meanings are finally too strong to be taken down but because they are so weak. True enough, there is a tradition of idealized musical authority that we are well off without, but that is just the point: we are already without it. The work these days (at least in the field of open interpretation, which is not confined to scholarly interpretation) is not an idol or a fetish. It is a perennial project. The notion that any interpretation can establish meaning once and for all is purely precritical; the moment one reflects on it, it falls apart. If it is possible to interpret a work or text, performance or action in one way, then it is possible to interpret it in another. The condition of possibility of interpretation is the plurality of interpretations. A text (inter alia) that clearly, decisively, and exclusively meant only one thing could not be interpreted at all; its meaning would preempt or supersede any interpretation. The only trouble is that (happily, happily) no such texts exist beyond “Yes” and “No” and not always even there. Every interpretation is an assertion of possibility, no more—but no less. The thing being interpreted may well have a scattering of fixed, authoritative meanings in or about it, but those meanings are not determinative. They are breadcrumbs, not pearls. It is usually important to recognize them, but it is more important to figure out what to do with them, which is something that they, the facts on the ground, will not tell you. 6

The most thoughtful critics of the work-concept, notably Lydia Goehr, Jim Samson, and Nicholas Cook, were interested in expanding the frame of reference not in debunking, but the appropriation of their initiative has tended to simplify its claims and to narrow (and thus mistake) its implications. Carolyn Abbate’s widely read polemic “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” (Abbate 2004), did, on the other hand, have debunking very much on its mind. See Goehr 1994, Samson 2003, and Cook 2003; for further critique, see the chapters “Performance” and “Works” in Kramer 2010, 241–57, 258–77.

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The instabilities revealed by performance thus precede performance, and performance is as subject to interpretation as the works (or scores, scripts, blueprints) that they perform. We did not need a heightened awareness of performance to tell us that musical works and their meanings are subject to entropy. The fact is that these things only survive through entropy. But this is a creative kind of entropy, in which loss in one area becomes gain in another. Another name for it is culture. So the project of cultural musicology rests on situating musical phenomena—let’s call them performance works and their support networks—within the dynamics of culture and its strangely positive form of entropy. To do that, moreover, requires doing a great deal more than putting these performance works in their “cultural context.” Context, too, is a weak concept, far weaker than it is usually thought to be. Its usefulness, like that of fixed meaning, which is only another version of context itself, is real but limited. To illustrate, consider the funeral march that gives Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 12 in A! major, op. 26, composed in 1802, its familiar nickname. Beethoven gave this movement a title, “Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe” [Funeral March on the Death of a Hero], and the title gives us both a context and a fixed meaning. The context is the discourse of heroism and heroic sacrifice; the fixed meaning is the generic identity of the music as a funeral march, which we would have recognized in any case from the musical details of register, melodic contour, tempo, and rhythm—more features with fixed meanings here, and all taken in swiftly, at a single stroke. But what do we do with all this? Neither the context nor the fixities can tell us. We can’t tell from them what kind of heroism is involved, or what value it has, or what the question of heroic memory is doing in a piano sonata, and more exactly in a piano sonata that is otherwise notably unheroic, and more exactly still in a fortepiano sonata, since sonority and performance matter too. We have to decide such things for ourselves. And when we decide, we do not abstract from the cultural field or stand outside it as an observer, even a participant observer. Instead we enter the field, act on it, change it, and continue its migration beyond the context and facticity that support it. The result, as I noted earlier, will be an assertion of possibility, but because being continually reminded of that fact is tedious, it will normally sound somewhat stronger. It will often leave an impression of positivity that is most likely the source of the frequent criticism that some interpretation or other is seeking to establish itself

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as the only way to understand its object. That dynamic will apply to the next few paragraphs as well, which, however, should also offer a demonstration that the course of an interpretation depends on an initial and initiating observation that has the force of a commitment, at least for the time being. One thing hard not to observe about Beethoven’s March is its key signature. The funeral march is rhetorically normal but tonally bizarre. Its key, A! minor, weighed down with seven flats, is virtually unheard of in 1802, and the harmony that flows from it here is unusually difficult, even perverse. The key can be rationalized, but the rationale is self-subverting. The sonata is in A! major. The first movement is a set of variations which, as usual, contains a minore variation, hence A! minor, which in this circumstance is ordinary, or at least expected; this is the place where a key overladen with flats or sharps would be reasonable. The key of the march can thus justify itself as an allusion to the variations. But Beethoven could perfectly well have cast the march in the relative key, F minor, without raising any eyebrows. By choosing the parallel minor instead, he expands the ordinary minore passage of the first movement into something fantastic and uncanny. (The classical Freudian formula applies: the key is now something familiar made strange.) The march moves and acts more or less the way a funeral march should, but in the wrong tonal place. Doubly wrong, one might say: as Hugh McDonald has shown, keys heavy on sharps or flats tend to be associated with sensuousness in the early nineteenth century, apparently on the basis of how it feels to negotiate the white and black keys on the piano keyboard (Macdonald 1988). But there is nothing sensuous about this march; sense experience is, so to speak, the furthest thing from its mind. One might try playing it with a certain stiffness and in its louder portions try pushing the limits of the instrument it was written for. This tonal dislocation results in or results from a further dislocation in the disposition of the harmony, which moves with haste (in contrast to the sober pace of the march as such) in four steps up the circle of fifths to the region of the tritone and then strands itself on a series of diminished-seventh chords. These chords are not problematical as expressions of mourning; if anything they are too available for the purpose. But given the way the chords are approached, they form too much a goal, too little an obstruction. The march is a kind of pretext to get to them, and to be haunted by them on the effort to get away. (Should they be played with restraint or a pointed lack of restraint?)

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Heroic memory thus occupies a place of alienation, unreality, and fantasy; it seems to lack all social foundation. The heroism invoked is military and sacrificial, but it does not belong primarily to the Vienna of 1802, which was enjoying a brief and obviously temporary respite from years of failed war against Napoleon. The heroism belongs more comprehensively to a vanished, probably classical age that haunts and taunts the modern world. The march is an act of cultural memory, of, if you will, cultural fantasy. The interpretation of this music begins, whether in the ear or at the keyboard, when we go beyond its rhetorical appearance and understand it as a symptom of a failure in its own culture’s production of effective rituals. Part of that failure involves the emergence of empty signifiers—of signs read against the possibility of their meaninglessness—as a cultural formation. The march is burdened with too many such signifiers. Their presence may portend the need for a wholesale reconceptualization of ritual, especially in relation to public mourning and remembrance. One might, for example, feel compelled to write a symphony on an unprecedented scale, a symphony with an extended funeral march at its core… Perhaps the sense of ritual in crisis is one reason this music is so compelling to me; I have written about it several times now (Kramer 1997; Kramer 2013). And, in the spirit of auto-critique, one has to ask what my fascination with the music has to say about my own cultural circumstances and the subjectivity that has to negotiate with them. Among the possibilities of hearing or playing this piece, why decide on these? Perhaps the ease with which signifiers may now be turned into empty tokens, almost without the pretense of being anything more (while we agree to act as if they were credible, for lack of any alternative), gives the music a power of foresight that can be grasped only in retrospect. The music is more contemporary now than it was when it was composed. But it is also possible that what appeals so strongly about this music is something quite remote from it: a nostalgia for a time when, or so we imagine, the danger of vacuous signification could be contained within boundaries tight and clear enough to hem the danger in. Conjoining The question of boundaries was also a motif in the discussion of Play Me, I’m Yours, though notably in the absence of danger; it will be a motif again, with danger restored, as we turn to the third site of cultural interpretation, the conjunction of music and

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moving images. Perhaps these motifs are more broadly symptomatic; perhaps they are a product of my own impulse to put a frame around this discourse. The question can be left open, at least for now. My examples form an unlikely pair: Max Fleischer’s My Merry Oldsmobile, a strikingly bawdy cartoon from the early sound era, and Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, one of the great European art films of the 1960s. The two items seem to come from different worlds—high art and low, the cultivated and the vulgar, the enigmatic and the blatant—but they are joined by a common logic that links music with a surplus of vital energy, at bottom a surplus of desire, that may be uncontrollable but that culture demands must be controlled. They are also joined by outrageous sex acts. My Merry Oldsmobile splits into seemingly unconnected halves, the first a grotesque cartoon adventure, the second an advertisement for the car company that sponsored the cartoon.7 The first half begins with a leering villain, a caricature of a stock figure of melodrama; he is peering through a window and becoming aroused as he watches a woman undressing. (We see her throw off one garment after another in a never-ending series; the image simultaneously satirizes the voyeur and extends the basis of voyeuristic desire to infinity.) The peeping quickly escalates; the villain breaks into the woman’s apartment with the clear intent to rape her. A hero appears to rescue her after a series of violent exchanges, but the dominant motif is the conjunction of sexuality and aggression. This is unusually strong stuff for a movie short of 1931. It is there to set the terms of a sublimating process—a certain popular Freudianism, typical of its time, is part of the cartoon’s frame of reference—that, as we will see, links this strange short feature to the equally strange but more cultivated Bergman. The controlling element turns out to be the car, the Oldsmobile, which allows the rampaging desires framed at the outset to be transformed into a romance ending in marriage. Buy the car, take a ride in the country, and instead of a grotesque outcast you can become a happy member of the community, which is even now singing along as you ride, following the text of the song (In My Merry Oldsmobile) as a bouncing ball travels from word to word on the screen. 7

The company was General Motors, which manufactured the high-end Oldsmobile brand from 1908 until 2004. The film’s title refers to the song, In My Merry Oldsmobile, which became a hit in 1905 and remained popular through the 1950s.

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The logic of this sublimation is spelled out in a curious saga involving a lock and a door. When the villain first breaks into the woman’s apartment, he tugs at her door and, failing to get in, smashes a large hole in the door panel. But after stepping through the hole, he turns around, locks the door, and swallows the key. When the hero, a pint sized figure suggesting a kind of alter ego to the villain, later arrives to save the day, he too tugs at the door despite the gaping hole right in front of his eyes. Then, paralleling his predecessor, he steps through the hole, turns around, and unlocks the door (don’t ask where the key comes from). The byplay with door and key suggests the futility of trying to lock up one’s raging desires; they will always break through and keep on acting even when one ignores the hole they make in the world around one (in Freudian terms, the return of the repressed, which in this case has never left; in Lacanian terms, the tearing of reality by the Real). The only way to deal with these impulses is to sublimate them. That happens literally here as the little hero beats the villain into the shape of a rising stairway, which hero and damsel then ascend until they reach a window—and out they go, defenestrating themselves into the waiting Oldsmobile and the metamorphosis it brings. The extended conclusion is a pastoral on wheels. The happy couple drives merrily through the countryside to the accompaniment of the tune while the audience in the movie theater, another instant community, sings along. Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, from 1961, tracks the descent of its sole female character into madness and incest. The incest occurs between brother and sister, Karin and Minus, and shortly after its consummation the two appear clutching each other in the hold of a wrecked ship while the melancholy, even keening Sarabande from Bach’s Second Suite for Unaccompanied Cello sounds as underscore. The scene is static and remote; the brother and sister are shown in long shot, barely visible amid the clutter of the hulk, as rain pours down through the wreck. Nothing else happens. Nothing moves but the music for over 30 seconds, a long stretch of cinematic time. As a result the scene is one we see by listening; we listen to see what the music sees. We have heard the Sarabande before. It appears four times in the film, for which its unremitting melancholy sets the tone while also imparting a sense of dignity and elevation to the dismal narrative. The dignity comes partly from music’s design, partly from the iconic status of Bach. The scene in the wreck draws heavily on both elements—and this is the scene in which the music assumes the greatest weight, since it is only here that image and the sound match each other in gravity and darkness. It

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is pointless to ask whether the music here is edifying or ironic, consoling or mournful; it is all that and more. To interpret the music, which we cannot avoid doing, we must see and hear an aspect of it independent of the meanings we impute to it. The music’s import lies not in what it signifies or expresses (though these might be important in other situations) but in how it affects the narrative. And with that the wreck becomes a melancholy Oldsmobile: the music sublimates the mess of desire and madness made visible in the hulk. It does so by substituting musical for narrative action, assured order for improvised disorder. The world of this film is still a Freudian world and the music acts in the classical spirit of Freudian sublimation. The music displaces desire upward, like the stairway in the cartoon; it elevates uncontrollable impulses from the order of desire to the order of culture. The question of just what to make of this is unanswerable. The film is in effect “about” two things, the absence of God and the destruction of a young woman by the three men—father, husband, brother—who claim to love her. In the scene of the wreckage, there is an implication that in the absence of God, Bach will almost do, a cliché that redeems itself by exposing the desperation that leads to it. But at the same time there is a realization, echoing in the sound of the music, that although Minus, unlike his father and brother-in-law, probably does love Karin in some genuine sense, that does not mean he can help her. His consoling clasp is no less futile, no less minimal (visually as well as narratively) than the displacement of his love into the act of incest that immediately precedes the scene. The independence here of the force of the Bach Sarabande from its meaning can serve as a prompt to further reflection. All interpretation requires that we go beyond what is apparent, but this is especially so with regard to music, where content of any sort is notoriously under-determined. In Interpreting Music I argued that the prominent necessity of this sort of response makes the interpretation of music paradigmatic for interpretation in general (Kramer 2010, 1–19; see also Kramer 2001, 145–72). To understand music is to respond to musical events in terms that acknowledge but are not bound by the apparent under-determination of the music’s content. At the same time—and this is really the same thing from a different angle—to understand music is to respond to musical events in terms that recognize but are not determined by the music’s contexts. (Context is not expendable, but it is not decisive, either. Virtually anything can be put in a context; virtually nothing can be reduced to its context. If it could, the world would be a much less interesting place.)

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But what is “response?” Is there any single form or practice, or even a coherent set of forms or practices, to which the word refers? And what is the distinctive, the particular modality of response typically invited by music, or, because there is no one “music” either, far from it, what is the modality on which all types of music, whatever their idiosyncrasies, must draw? Embracing Restlessness A perhaps unlikely source, Emmanuel Levinas, offers a clue. In connecting the ideas of response and responsibility, Levinas makes a provocative statement: “Proximity is not a simple coexistence, but a restlessness” (Levinas 1998, 121). “Proximity” here is my shared presence with another, “the neighbor.” Such proximity comes to me whether I want it or not, and it unsettles me even when I do want it. The restlessness it provokes is a primordial, pre-signifying weight of obligation, responsibility, indebtedness, and guilt imposed by the other’s exposure to possible harm. Music is distinctive for the way it both negates and affirms Levinas’ formula. On the one hand, with music proximity is never restlessness. The music absorbs me, envelops and orients the feelings and ideas it elicits in me; it constantly reels me back in if I try to move away from it. Whether the music itself is restless does not matter. So long as I consent to keep listening, my relationship with the music is always intimately in tune. On the other hand, in addressing myself to music I have to become restless. I have to seek restlessness; I have to marshal my entire experience as the subject of a language, a culture, and a world. I cannot do otherwise. A language, a culture, a world: the sequence is not merely rhetorical. Response is sensuous and intuitive as well as verbal and conceptual, but its articulation depends above all on language and, within language, on writing. Writing is both the primary medium of interpretation and the primary object of interpretation. Speech is less reliable as a cultural indicator. Although exchanges of speech are—obviously—an essential medium of cultural meaning, they are limited by their relative simplicity and lack of exactness, deliberation, and opportunity for revision. (This caution should be of special moment to sociologically-inclined “empirical” musicologists and their kin in other fields.) Of course the fact that writing has the advantage of reflective distance does not immunize it against it its own mode of unreliability under rubrics such as mystification and ideology, but those effects are themselves matters

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to be interpreted. Interpretation does not, or at least should not, address writing with any more credulity than it does speech. Along the Gadamerian lines that so often underpin modern hermeneutic practices, interpretation is understood to emerge from a fusion of the horizons of text and reader, impelled by the letter of the former and the fore-understanding of the latter. But although Gadamer takes a Heideggerian view of the world-constituting power of language, he tends to represent this process—and he is hardly alone—as if it were conceptual rather than textual. The interpretation appears as the outcome of a mental operation; it consists of ideas applied to language. (Gadamer takes all language as his province but he tends to avoid choosing examples from literary language, perhaps because its figurative drift and density would challenge the more rigid conceptual boundaries he prefers). This elevation of the concept is more often tacit than explicit, because Gadamer and others are perfectly aware that interpretations are not, and cannot be, purely ideational.8 Interpretations consist of language applied to language, of texts produced in response to a text. This remains true even when the “texts” involved are intermedial and it remains true regardless of whether these texts—either or both of them—are verbal, pictorial, imagistic, cinematic, musical, and so on. Reality, which concepts serve to organize, is precisely what is never interpreted. No more than in the “primary” text (taking the term in its widest sense) is the text of the interpretation the expression of a transparent and independent structure of ideas. The ideas and the language are inextricable, and the interpretation is the record or the script of a complex illocutionary action. In dealing with literary texts this recognition tends to be obscured by the conceptual pressure of language itself. The language of the primary text is inevitably saturated with traces of an underlying conceptual order, or several of them, to which the language of the interpreter must somehow be accountable. This surface determination, really a kind of context, is 8

Nonetheless, Gadamer continually returns to the dream of a language that transcends itself in the process of reaching an understanding. The argument cannot be made here but the following statement is representative: “If all understanding stands in a necessary relation of equivalence to its possible interpretation, and if there are basically no bounds set to understanding, then the verbal form in which this understanding is interpreted must contain within it an infinite dimension that transcends all bounds. Language is the language of reason itself ” (Gadamer 1998, 401).

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rarely more than preliminary, but even so it can often veil the independence and inventiveness of the interpreter’s language. The whole process—the default process— is deceptive, and from both ends. Whenever two texts meet, each interprets the other. The language of each always matters in its own right and always exceeds its nominal limits. When one moves over to music, which initially seems to lack the conceptual aspect of texts, and is often valued for lacking it, the constructive force of the interpreter’s language suddenly comes to the fore. Traditionally, this has served as a means of dismissing such language; nothing is worse than prattle about music. But all that is really happening is that the musical scenario exposes the underlying form of the interpretive scenario in general. The result is, or could be, a mandate to create consciously crafted verbal designs capable of both giving and receiving musical meaning. One only interprets music (as one only interprets dreams or the past) by interpreting the language that describes it. Hence, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, “[t]he theory of description matters most” (Stevens 1954, 345). Description is a kind of improvisation, a site of performative effectiveness in which language makes the world look—I would like to say be9—now this way, now that. Invention is a part of this; so is experiment; and so is socialization, because a good deal of social life rests on exchanging descriptions and negotiating about them. Anyone who has ever worked through the rehearsal of a piece of music will recognize the process, which is as essential to making music as it is to understanding it. Perhaps we should add a codicil to Stevens’ maxim: The theory of description is the practice of description. That practice, moreover, brings me to the neighbor, even when I am alone. Description is a practice of restlessness; mention of it brings us back to Levinas’ model of proximity. In listening to music, or making music, I am at the same time cured of restlessness and endowed with it—endowed, perhaps, with a form of restlessness no longer burdened by guilt or obligation. To understand music as cultural action is to bear witness to this experience as concretely as I can. In doing so I must not be afraid to interpret, resignify, and reimagine the music that arrests my attention. I must feel free to hear meanings and speak personally where doing so can advance understand9

On this stronger claim, and the role of description in musical understanding, see Kramer 2010, 52–66, and Kramer 2012, 1–31, 161–3.

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ing. I must not assume that the music should somehow tell me how to think before I think it, or that the music and its meanings can be circumscribed by a determinate and determining context or historical archive. What I say about music should be understood, not as a thesis or hypothesis based on specialized learning, no matter how much learning may be involved, but as part of a continuum of actions in which the members of a community of listeners gather around an imaginary street piano to negotiate the hazards and pleasures of proximity. That negotiation is a discussion, and that discussion is, was, will have been, part of the open practice of cultural interpretation that is one of the registers of cultural musicology. References Abbate, Carolyn. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 3, 505–36. Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert, & Richard Middleton, eds. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York & London: Routledge, 2003. —. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. New York & London: Routledge, 2012. Cook, Nicholas. “Music as Performance.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, 204–14. New York & London: Routledge, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer & Donald G. Marshal, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Continuum, 1996. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Habermas, Jürgen. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” In Understanding and Social Inquiry, edited by Fred R. Dallmayr & Thomas A. McCarthy, 334–63. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Kramer, Lawrence. “Eroica-Traces: Beethoven and Revolutionary Narrative.” Musik/Revolution, 3 vols., edited by Hanns-Werner Heister, 2, 35–48. Hamburg: von Bockel Verlag, 1997.

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—. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. —. Interpreting Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. —. Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. —. “Speaking of Music”. Speaking of Music, edited by Keith Chapin & Andrew H. Clark, pp. 19–38. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Language and Proximity.” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 109–26. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Lyall, Sarah. “All Around London, an Invitation to Make Music.” The New York Times, July 11 (2009). Macdonald, Hugh. “G-Flat Major Key Signature.” 19th Century Music 11 (1988): 3, 221–37. Ricoeur, Paul. “What is a Text? Explanations and Understanding.” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited by John B. Thompson, 145–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Samson, Jim. Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Saner, Emine. “The People’s Piano.” The Guardian, June 23 (2009). Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Edited by Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Stevens, Wallace. “Description without Place”. Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 339–346. New York: Knopf, 1954. Tommasini, Anthony. “88 Spots to Tickle the Keys and Your Fancy.” The New York Times, June 7 (2013).

Charissa Granger

Bomb Tunes and Festival Fliers: Framing and its Usefulness for Cultural Musicology The steelpan1 is brought to completion when an empty 55-gallon oil drum, with a thickness of 17–18 gauges, is stretched to accommodate space for the placement of pitches. The top surface of the barrel is sunken into a concave shape through manually hammering it with a six-pound sledgehammer;2 the depth depends on the particular voice of instrument that the builder is working on. When the required depth is achieved, the individual pitches are strategically drawn out with a piece of chalk or sharpie marker, known as ‘marking the notes’. The metal is then worked so that the surface area of the pitches is slightly convex. Hereafter, the outline of the pitches is indented with a flathead nail and a hammer; a process known as grooving. This procedure prevents interference between pitches. Once again depending on the voice of the instrument, the skirt of the barrel is measured and cut off with a cutlass. The skirt of the barrel has numerous acoustic functions, so that, the lower voices have longer skirts and the higher voices have shorter skirts. The steel is then subjected to heat. This process is called tempering, here the metal is heated and rapidly cooled and through this process the instruments are able to maintain their tuning. When the metal turns blue because of the heat, water is poured over it so that it cools. Here1

2

I do not seek to give a comprehensive delineation of the history of the instrument; instead I will outline particular socio-cultural circumstances that surround the instrument and the ways in which these were negotiated in framing practices at the Amsterdam Roots Festival 2010. For a more encompassing historical outline of the instrument’s development see Nurse 2007; Stuempfle 2005; Johnson 2011; Dudley 2002, 2008; Hill 1972. Pneumatic tools are also used to get to the required depth.

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after, tuning ensues. Tuning hammers are used to achieve the correct pitch. Overtones and fundamentals are strategically placed such that a particular timbral quality is attained. Strobe tuners are commonly used to ensure the precision of this process. After tuning, a protective coat of some sort is added for practical and aesthetic reasons. Usually a layer of chrome-, paint-, or a powder finish is used to prevent rusting and, for some, makes the instrument look more attractive. The instrument is now fine-tuned and blended with the other instruments in the steel-orchestra. This means that the tonal quality and the pitches of the pan are matched with that of the other instruments of the orchestra. Kim Johnson notes that “tuning a steelpan means actually manufacturing the instrument, which begins with selecting a drum and ends with making the notes vibrate at precisely determined rates” (Johnson 2011, 268). These processes were all developed and explored during a time of colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s, when musical expression was mostly restricted and often strictly outlawed through enforced ordinances. With drumming being banned, the steelband movement presented a time of musical discernment and exploration. Through instrument innovations most of the lower class identified with their common social struggles and instrument builders such as Winston “Spree” Simon, Neville Jules, Allan Gervais, Bertie Marshall, Elliot Mannette and Anthony Williams, were capable of asserting their own musical perspective and interest. At this time, steelpan builders and tuners may not have been consciously aware of the fact that they were creating a musical instrument that would attest to the post-colonial identity of an island and larger circum-Caribbean region. Most developers were however aware of the struggle that would take place against upper class hegemonic mentalities and ordinances imposed on cultural practices. At the Amsterdam Roots Festival 2010, Trinidad and Tobago based Pamberi Steel Orchestra was programed alongside performances such as Les Espoires de Coronthie from Guinea, Hanggai from Mongolia, Staff Benda Bilili from Congo, Kassav from Martinique and Guadeloupe, Lura from Portugal, and Izaline Calister from Curaçao during the course of three days. These musical acts were all invited to perform on various stages at the festival in the name and celebration of roots. For the 2010 promotional flier and at the festival’s website, Pamberi Steel Orchestra was described as “traditional oilbarrelsounds,”3 having the main goal of “warming up the public with 3

“Traditionele olievatensound”.

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bomp tunes [… T]he sunny and rustling pansound makes the Pamberi-team the perfect opening act for a wonderful day filled with amazing and surprising music from all cardinal points of the world.”4 Here, I put the word bomp in italics because the term normally used for these tunes is bomb-tunes, which are interpretations of EuroAmerican composed music, referred to as “the classics,”5 performed rhythmically and percussively in calypso style and tempo. The flier description of the instrument and the music-making of which it is a part presents a strikingly different story, in its framing, to the one presented in the above introduction. I see the festival flier that holds this description as paratextual matter, which is used in framing the festival. Here festival booklets, program notes, artist-, instrument- and music descriptions on websites, press releases, adverts and magazine articles are all considered as paratextual6 framing. Simon Frith observes “the way in which world music depended from the start on a displayed expertise. This is most obvious in record sleeve notes (and WOMAD Festival program notes), in the explanations and descriptions of particular musical forms and their roots in local traditions and practices, their wellresearched biographies of the artists involved” (Frith 2000, 307). Departing from the festival flier and its involvement in framing the steelpan performance, I argue that the steelpan is not a traditional oil barrel nor does it produce sounds akin to those of oil barrels. It is an acoustic instrument developed in the twentieth century using intricate instrument-making techniques as outlined at the beginning. But the paratextual framing of this performance remains most interesting. For this reason the present contribution will question what framing as a concept might afford cultural musicology by examining the practice of framing involved in pre-

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“Het publiek opwarmen met bomp tunes” and “De zonnige en ruisende panklanken maken het Pamberi-elftal tot de perfecte openingsact voor een heerlijke dag vol met verrassende muziek uit alle windstreken”. See http://amsterdamroots.nl/ (visited last in December 2010). See Dudley 2002. According to Genette and Maclean, the paratext is a “reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions” (Genette and Maclean 1991, 261), as a book’s preface it surrounds “the text and prolong it, precisely in order to present it, […] to make it present, to assure its presence in the world, its “reception” and its consumption” (ibid.). They make explicit that the paratext is “the fringe” and “provides […] a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading” (ibid., 261f.).

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senting steelpan at the Amsterdam Roots Festival. Having the above example of the festival flier as a springboard, this contribution considers the discursive implication of framing at the world music festival and its connection to agency and responsibility. My probing is grounded musically by employing the example of steelpan musicmaking, as described in the paratextual framing, in world music settings, thus steelpan and its framing at the festival will stand as a foundation. Herein, in order to discuss framing and explore both its conceptual and performative role within cultural musicology, I will turn to the practice of bomb-tunes as referred to in the paratextual framing of festival flier at the Amsterdam Roots Festival 2010 as an example. This step is taken towards further discussion of the implication of knowledge production in framing practices within the world music festival space and in cultural musicology. My reason for concentrating on this concept proceeds from the staged performances presented at world music festivals and the processes involved in staging music within the festival space. Within the performance of framing, meaning is negotiated in relation to that which is presented. Thus, framing alludes to the processes through which we compose particular conceptualizations of music and (re)form our thinking about musical performance. Reflecting on this concept will also highlight the way in which music might be able to contribute to cultural interaction and relation, and how these in turn can bear on the negotiation of musical meaning. Departing from this I will explore the potential usefulness of framing for cultural musicology. This case study remains suitable for exploring agency and responsibility within the event of framing musics and how framing practices contributes to their discussion in cultural musicology. I do so by illustrating how the act of framing produces a responseability in the negotiation of musical meaning. In sum, I take the paratextual framing of Pamberi Steel Orchestra as an example and employ the concept of framing to examine aspects of responsibility and modes of presentation in world music. On framing and cultural musicology Martin Stokes problematizes world music and draws our attention to the idea that within world music “[m]ulticulturalism may often have reduced rich musical traditions to mute tokens of otherness, to be noticed administratively or exploited commercially, but not engaged in meaningful, or lasting, dialogue” (Stokes 2012, 114). Consequently, Stokes states that

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world music discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s has, then, been characterized as the everyday popular music of people obscured (because colonized) by the Anglo-American mainstream, as a music of migrancy and hybridity, and as the bearer of a kind of authenticity, an antidote to Western modernity. (Ibid., 113)

As a response to the above, Stokes poses the questions: “[D]oes world music really deserve this kind of criticism? Were its consequences really so dire?” (Ibid.) And “can knowledge be shared equitably, or will it inevitably generate competition and rivalry?” (Ibid., 116) These questions remain present and relevant within world music studies. I will contribute a different perspective to these urgent queries and reflect on them in relation to the concept of framing by turning to the festival space. Following Mieke Bal’s (2002) thinking, I regard framing as a mode of presentation and a concept that affords active participation in bringing cultural phenomena into focus. It does so through acts of showing, presenting, staging, displaying and exhibiting, hereby, enabling a frame of reference through which meaning is both negotiated and consigned to cultural experiences. Thus the discussion of instrument making, as presented at the beginning, provides a different frame of reference and stands in stark contrast to that of the paratextual framing of the festival flier. This makes the need for an analysis of framing pronounced in studies attempting to make sense of music. Herein different modes of framing might be problematized through the concept, illustrating how framing provides that which is interpreted of music-making within the festival space. Framing highlights the process through which the act of music-making occurs, that is the particular act that brings music-making into focus, such as the flier does for the steelpan and bomb-tunes. Framing is a concept that embraces both practice and theory. Bal prepares the concept “to resolve the dilemma […] that binds theory and practice in a potentially deadly embrace” (Bal 2002, 16). This embrace is that between “(academic) concept” and “(cultural) practice” (ibid.). Bal notes, “the concept [framing] travels back and forth several times between (artistic) practice and (academic) theory, and between (academic) practice and (artistic) theory” (ibid.). Gregory Bateson introduced the concept of framing in A Theory of Play and Fantasy (first published in 1955). The concept has influenced thinking about communication, linguistics and interaction. Bateson shows that no act of communication, that is, both verbal and non-verbal, can be conceived of outside its relation to a metames-

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sage of that which is actually taking place. He therefore concentrates on the frame of interpretation and the way in which it applies to communicative action. Within sociology, Erving Goffman attended to the concept of framing in Frame Analysis: An essay on the organization of experience (1974). Here, Goffman arranges a tightly knit web of terms and concepts to explore the multilayered character of framing and the way it works in the composition of everyday interaction. In Forms of Talk (1981), Goffman attends to the manifold overlay of framing in everyday life, focusing more directly on language use and becoming increasingly attentive to the analysis of linguistic discourse. This is particularly important in relation to the paratextual framing and the analysis of textual framing. According to Bal the verb form ‘framing’—provisionally distinguished from the noun ‘frame’—solicits the question of its object. But, as a verb, it also predicates that object, not in the abstract void of theoretical reflection, but in time, space, aspect; it frames it. Thus, all by itself, even on the level of the word alone, ‘framing’ questions the object-status of the objects studied in the cultural disciplines. This questioning results in a repositioning of the object as alive, in ways that have to do with the ‘social life of things’ rather than with a metaphysical hypostasizing of objects or a rhetorical strategy of personification. (Bal 2002, 137)

In respect to music-making at the world music festival, I conceive of framing as a process within particular cultural and musical events that are produced by and presented to participants. Furthermore, the events and experiences that emerge are situated within relation to other relevant ways of being. This makes that which is highlighted in framing practices meaningful. In this relation, a particular knowledge is produced as within the festival space processes of selection, conceptualization and presentation of music take place; in this case the ‘traditional oilbarrelsounds’ in reference to steelpan. Thus information is communicated about the instrument and music-making, which will be interpreted towards the acquisition of knowledge. In addition to the above, then, framing might be seen as a vehicle that moves and directs knowledge through the festival space and, as will be considered, towards the production of knowledge within the field of cultural musicology. The delight is in the process, in the inquiring in, through and around framing and how it contributes to producing experiences of music at the festival. In this way framing

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acts as a prism through and by which meaning is negotiated and ultimately ascribed. Why do we need the concept of framing in cultural musicology? I conceive of cultural musicology as a field that brings various modes of knowledge including literature, philosophy, post-colonialism, and cultural analysis together. I think of it as a passage of creative re-focusing and reconstruction. It is a never-ending expedition of new scopes, of moving beyond. Homi Bhabha suggests that: “beyond” signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary—the very act of going beyond— are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the “present” which, in the process of representation, becomes disjunct and displaced. (Bhabha 1994, 5–6)

Bhabha’s thoughts give account for the necessity of cultural musicology. Since the act of going beyond is unknown, but also imprints evolvement and advancement, cultural musicological research remains but a mere introduction for the following attests on music and the negotiation of musical meaning. Soja sheds light on the fact that being in the “beyond”, then, is to inhabit an intervening space […] But to dwell “in the beyond” is also as I have shown to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space “beyond” becomes a space of intervention in the here and now. (Soja 1996, 144)

In keeping true to the concept of framing, cultural musicology does not want to put barriers or boundaries, be they methodological, theoretical, or other, on the study of music; rather, it seeks to offer dynamic frames for better understanding music as a cultural practice. I perceive these frames not as containing agents, but rather as propelling agents for novel formulations and beginnings. Cultural musicology engages a number of critical aspects. Firstly, it concedes a focus on interpretation. This involves how information is obtained and through interpretation creates and structures knowledge within its discursive practice,

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thereby contributing further to music discourse, comprehended here as that which is textually and linguistically produced about music. This characteristic is particularly crucial at this moment, for there is a continuous reception of information and the modes through which we obtain information are irresolute. Philip Bohlman says, “musicology not only describes but prescribes through its acts of interpretation” (Bohlman 1993, 432). Here, it is critical to acknowledge how we turn information into knowledge through the process of interpretation. This is one of the discernible values of cultural musicology as well as the concept of framing. Secondly, cultural musicology allows us to reflect on the interaction between music and the surrounding world within which music occurs and is experienced. This approach considers the two not as separate entities, especially in relation to movement, musical transition and transformation. The latter not only molds music but human lives, imaginations, creativity, aspirations and desires. Framing highlights the importance of responsibility of cultural musicology for furthering the way sense is made of music and as the world becomes known in and through music. To frame, is the active role—in the performative sense—that the (subject) agent undertakes when trying to bring, in this case, music into focus, thus making it more apparent and thereby problematizing and providing that which is set as an event to which interpretation is brought. It is here that the notion of responsibility remains crucial to this discussion, for the encounter that is generated is infused with responsibility: the festival flier in relation to the musical performance of steelpan and its historical situatedness makes its framing weighty and pregnant with agency. The aspect of responsibility emerges especially as this particular frame of reference is established on the behalf of both the festival organizers and the participants who engage with this frame of reference. Thus both assume responsibility for the prism through which music is encountered as well as the response to that encounter and the ability to respond. Put differently, the two, broadly conceived as organizer and participant, are responsible for the various meanings that are attributed to the staged musics. The paratextual description is a focalizer, and as such is partly responsible for how the musical performance is considered, interacted and engaged with. From this I suggest that the paratextual framing is responsible for rendering how meanings are ascribed, and so, I argue, the description of ‘sunny pansounds’ aids in conceptualizing how this act of framing structures this particular steelpan performance. Framing as mobilized towards understanding the paratextual description of steelband music-

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making in relation to musical performance is a “concept that is methodologically reasonable and responsible precisely because it opens up rather than shuts down possibilities of analysis across divisions of disciplines” (Bal 2002, 140). Herein the focalizer—“traditional oilbarrelsounds or sunny pansounds”—come into relation with that which it focalizes—the steelpan performance at a world music festival. Exploring this relation, as it emerges from the festival space, is also an activity most responsible for me as a researcher7 of world music performance practice. Bal acknowledges the nature of this responsibility as she explains: The act of framing […] produces an event. This verb form, as important as the noun that indicates its product, is primarily an activity. Hence, it is performed by an agent who is responsible, accountable, for his or her acts. (Bal 2002, 135; italics mine)

Thus the paratextual framing at the Amsterdam Roots Festival becomes innate in the process of connecting music to a particular mode of knowledge and negotiation of meaning. This relation is increasingly acknowledged in cultural musicology as a sphere to be critically engaged in afresh. Cultural musicology concedes to analysis of how a negotiation of musical meaning is facilitated in acts of framing, questioning the role of musical agency herein. Here it is not the cultural musicologist alone who holds agency but music as well. I conceive of music as possessing agency because it actively contributes to situating people in relation to the negotiation of meaning, as will be alluded to below in the analysis of bomb-tunes. Music allows us, as festival goers, to rethink and re-experience the nature of our socio-cultural interactions, our relation to our environment, that is, how we come to relate to others and the spaces within which we are located, as I will attempt to outline in the bomb-tune discussion. These processes are, in part, what cultural musicology is interested in. Thirdly, in keeping with responsibility and as mentioned above, framing is both a concept and a mode of presentation. Cultural musicology opens an interstitial space where a concept as a performance might give rise to negotiating new perspectives in musical meaning. It is within these conditions that I bring the concept of framing 7

See Bal 2002, 44.

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to bear on the usefulness of cultural musicology. Both as a concept and a mode of presentation, framing remains an act that produces an event and carries a particular articulation from and within which meaning is negotiated about its experience, thereby making the practice discursive. Framing and discourse In his essay Framing: Towards Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm, Robert Entman states that “to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman 1993, 52). The subject of salience is particularly essential within framing because it gives rise not only to the event and cultural experience that are presented, but highlights particular aspects of the event or object presented. In this case the instrument is involved in a framing in which the flier promotes a particular notion of it, which in turn is open to interpretation and evaluation. Within the scheme of making sense of music within the festival space through the field of cultural musicology, it is my contention that framing is a practice of negotiating meaning. That said I consider the concept of framing as able to give rise to several contrasting theoretical questions, arguments, and perspectives concerning music and the way meaning is ascribed and negotiated. Through the concept of framing a consideration of the way music and the instrument is positioned and the processes by which this comes to being is granted. From the foregoing, I argue that framing contributes to music discourse. I comprehend discourse in the sense of Michel Foucault, who outlines and describes five analogous interpretations of discourse (Foucault 2002) as: groups of statements belonging to a discursive formation; rule-bound practices; practices specified in archives; practices constituting objects; and, totalities determining subject positions. Discourse is “the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements” (Foucault 1972, 80). It is within these considerations that I posit the paratextual framing as discourse, formed by framing practices, actions and the results that infer on music. Herein, the question of how framing can convey knowledge and in doing so provides a modality in and through which we can understand how knowledge is acquired within the fes-

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tival space might come to be addressed. As mentioned, music discourse involves that which is articulated, in the present case of the paratextual framing, textually and linguistically, a part of which contributes to the negotiation of meaning. The festival’s framing of steelpan (the practice) positions music in such a way that allows for the concentration (conceptually) on the process of how meaning is negotiated as the instrument and music-making is established at the world music festival. Herein lies the usefulness of framing as a concept for cultural musicology, for in framing, the negotiation of musical meaning is decidedly called upon and motivated as it contributes to music discourse, making the practice of framing music discursive. The most intriguing characteristic of framing as a concept is that of agency, and consequently responsibility as it relates to the production of knowledge. For this case in purpose, I conceive of agency and responsibility as that which comes from one’s involvement as a cultural musicologist in the production, negotiation and regulation of musical meaning, or, as Foucault puts it, the ordering of discourse (Foucault 1981). The partial responsibility that disciplinary knowledge holds in the production of meaning inherently embodies agency. Whether or not agency is recognized, cultural musicology is positioned within a particular discourse as it produces knowledge, which contributes to further discourse. In the same way practices of framing steelpan within the festival space produce a particular knowledge. As a musicologist, I contribute to framing music, hereby enabling a particular way of relating to the festival space; it is within these negotiations that agency and responsibility play a principal and critical role. Herein, “there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by the knowledge that it forms” (Foucault 2002, 201). Agency, responsibility and cultural musicology As discussed, “[f]raming, in fact, is a form of performance” (Bal 2002, 173) and, further, “the act of framing produces an event. Hence, framing is performed by an agent who is responsible, accountable, for his or her acts” (ibid., 135). For the moment, I will focus solely on the relationship between agency, responsibility and discourse and on the manner in which they intercede within cultural musicology. So two expansive questions present themselves, namely, how do agency and responsibility function within the act of framing? And what is the implication of both in cultural

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musicology? Through the analysis and interpretation of information, musicologists hold a responsibility in not only interpreting but also in producing knowledge. Homi Bhabha posits that the “problem of cultural interaction emerges only at the significatory boundaries of culture, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated” (Bhabha 1994, 50). A cultural musicologist performs at this particular border of signification as one, embodying agency, who contributes to the production of musical meaning, or, the generation of discourse. Bhabha concentrates on cultural difference, and notes that it is the process of the enunciation of culture as knowledgeable, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification […] a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability, and capacity. (Ibid.)

This response-ability, that is the capacity to respond, in enunciation and the process of being critical of how meaning is negotiated and given, is what cultural musicology concerns itself with, when problematizing agency, hereby making cultural musicology a space, among several ones, that contributes to music discourse. Framing music, as a musicologist means being aware of the gamble and security and being critical of any accomplishment gained; it involves restlessness, which a consideration of framing practices facilitates. Here I consider framing in the sense of constructing and mobilizing knowledge about music. That is, the modes in which musicologists think, write, and speak about music. Conceiving of agency through the act of framing within cultural musicology gives rise to the aspect of responsibility, that is, being accountable in the presentation of music. In exploring agency within cultural musicology, I discern agents to be those who contribute to the structuring and maintenance of music discourse. An agent is not simply an individual who yields publications on the subject of music or to whom a particular thought and articulation on music is attributed. As a cultural musicologist who is attributed a certain degree of responsibility in the production of knowledge and an agency in contributing to music discourse, one also bears a responsibility within practices of framing. Bal’s concept of framing highlights this aspect of responsibility, which alludes to an initial engagement with music, the cultural values attributed to it, and the way in which one situ-

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ates both the self and consequently music within music discourse. What remains of interest here, is the responsibility of musicologists as agents who frame music. Foucault aptly calls this the authorfunction where, rather than focusing on the physical author, he concentrates on the authoritative and regulatory act of the author (Foucault 1991). In conceiving of responsibility in framing, Foucault’s thoughts on the author function might prove insightful. Here he makes clear that “we should say that in a civilization like our own there is a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the ‘author function’ while others are deprived of it.” (Ibid., 107) Thus in framing practices certain people are “endowed” with the author function (ibid.) and the responsibility that comes with it, as is clear from the festival flier’s description of steelpan music-making. Within the space of cultural musicology and the modes in which musical discourse is generated it is conceivable that agents are more than simply those in charge of the field of study or, usually by way of their position in the academic system, an authority on the subject of music. Agency within cultural musicology is the responsibility of having to engage with the formulation of theories, rituals, beliefs, cultures, perspectives and questions as well as a field in which others in turn can find a place for contriving novel ideas and perspectives. This makes embracing restlessness and agency within cultural musicology connected, for it is not just being responsible for one’s own work and contributing to musical discourse, but responsible for the production of something else: that is, the opening up of a space for new possibilities to emerge and for the development of other discourses to come. Within agency one is responsible for establishing endless possibilities of discourse, not just within cultural musicology, but one governs, frames, commands and is responsible for other knowledges to be produced—or not to be produced. The responsibility that one holds within cultural musicology exceeds one’s own work, and transcends the field of cultural musicology. Within agency, one contributes to the construction of discourse in completely different realms and thereby makes cultural musicology not only transdisciplinary, but also interdiscursive. This is a position of having not only the possibility, but also the responsibility of structuring discourse within different modes of thought, especially through the use of music. Here lies the precise point at which the concept of framing as proposed by Bal can undoubtedly elucidate the ability of cultural musicology to open a space and a way for a certain number of events, performances, and counterparts in other discourses. Musicologists in the broadest sense have

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a performative role in the act of framing music. I, for one, seek to comprehend music, not only by attempting to situate it in our world but to better understand our world through it. Thus, one produces knowledge, as well as discourse and power relations within which music resides. The construction of discourse and the power relation that the musicologist is a part of is not at all a negative position, providing that one remains self-critical, and in question of one’s agency and responsibility in practices of framing music. Here is where the main tenet of embracing restlessness plays a critical role and it is departing from this that I argue for and position the relevance to embracing restlessness, while illustrating the usefulness of framing as a notion. My insistence here is on changing the way in which musical practices are analyzed within the world music festival space. With this, I refer to the questioning of responsibility in framing as well as continuously asking different questions of and about music. This refers to a transformation in the way in which musicologists at large are involved in framing music. This emphasized shift is linked to my skepticism about traditional North Atlantic ethnocentric modes of critical thinking, which correspond to and affirm the same modes of presentation as some colonial discourses or as the example of the festival’s framing of the steelpan. As one takes part in framing music, one becomes a part of music discourse; it is in this capacity, as agents who present music, that one’s agency should be an attempt at presenting differently. This remains the crucial point where responsibility is charged, for one may see this as an opportunity to re-think one’s intellectual position within agency. The change in the way agency is engaged with critically within the act of framing, will facilitate critical reflection on not only agency but the researcher’s responsibility. In the pursuit of constantly asking questions and in offering a particular structuring of discourse, the position of discursive authority would no longer be a predicament, but an opportunity to maintain and generate a space for novel music discourse. Another aspect that brings responsibility to the fore is the notion that music also performs in the act of framing, thereby holding agency. Thus even through attempts at framing music, it is never fixed; this agency is insightfully articulated by Lawrence Kramer, who says on the one hand: music as organised sound independent of textual and circumstantial involvements. On the other: music as interrelationship, something readily intermixed with other media and with social occasions both public and private.

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On the one hand, music as aesthetic, disinterested, beyond good and evil; on the other, music—that is, the same music—as social, conditioned by human interests, a medium of responsibility and recognition. Music does not simply present both these faces at all times; this Janus-faced presentation is what constitutes it as music. (Kramer 2003, 2)

Departing from the example of framing practices involved in the festival flier’s description of steelpan, I suggest framing is in a continuous process of creating new meanings as novel meanings are brought into conversation with old ones. No one has complete control over music or musical meaning and the ways in which it is negotiated. Here, the notion of being responsible clarifies the principle that, though in possessing agency one contributes to and structures music discourse, discourse also carries connotations over which no one has complete control, and these marginal or submerged meanings come to the surface, allowing different meanings to be constructed and different perspectives to be viewed and expressed. Kramer gives further observation on agency in stating that Cultural Musicology often draws largely on postmodernist models of knowledge that take a skeptical (but not dismissive) view of conceptual synthesis and aesthetic autonomy. It treats culture itself more as a fragmentary, quasi-improvisatory process than as a relatively fixed body of values and traditions; more as a proliferation of forking and often crossing paths (between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ in art and society, the Western and the non-Western, the musical and the non-musical) than as a system of boundaries and distinctions; and more as a vehicle for the production of individuals, the bearers of subjectivities in which certain ideals are realized or thwarted, than as a warehouse of common customs. Music bears directly on all of these matters, but especially on subjectivity, and it seems fair to say that Cultural Musicology is above all a continuing effort to understand musical subjectivity in history. (Ibid., 1)

In this view, responsibility remains a fundamental principle, because this act of performance influences the manner in which musicologists listen to, speak of, think, and write about music, in short, present music through being performing agents. Framing has the capacity to carry out reactions that contribute to music discourse, instead of

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proposing or explaining them. Here, it is both music and the way in which we speak and write about, stage and research music that remains part of the performative act of framing—as musicologists, journalists, performers, fans, and listeners. In framing, the goal is not to argue or promote the act of presenting music, nor is it to fix music within so-called academic disciplines; it is, rather, a motion to create a space within which the performing agent is constantly in a state of self-questioning and self-criticism. The task of self-criticism is not to highlight music’s relationship with the one engaged in the act of framing, nor is it to recondition an experience through musicological discourse, but rather to analyze music through its complex configuration, its form, and the internal relationships that the cultural musicological space provides. In short, agency provides these aspects and cultural musicology as a field is the space within which this act can take place. In viewing cultural musicology as a space of presentation, a particular impression of musicologists as agents is formed. Cultural musicology is not simply an element in music discourse, then. Rather, it embodies a particular mode of conduct with regard to discourse, assuring a constructive function. Cultural musicology permits the grouping together of a number of musical statements, it interprets, translates and defines them, it makes distinctions between them and examines them in contrast to each other. Additionally, cultural musicology has the capacity to construct a relationship between the multiplicity of discourses. Cultural musicology characterizes a particular way of being in and engaging with music discourse. This mode of discourse is not the quotidian articulation that casually appears and disappears; it is not instantly usable. Instead, it is an articulation that is received in and through certain negotiations of power and that in a given space, place and time, receives currency by being established as truth. Herein, cultural musicology has the potential to further different perspectives in comprehending music. Cultural musicology ignites and manifests the impression of specific discursive properties and negotiates the state of discursive formations in music. The capacity of one who embraces agency is distinctive of the mode in which discourse exists, disseminates, and operates within musicology. In cultural musicology, what is the function and responsibility of those who hold agency? That is, what is the task of the cultural musicologist as one who engages in framing music? How do we define a discourse that is bound up with the aspect of agency? And in what ways is cultural musicological discourse different from other musicological discourse?

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Discourse moves, and the way it is formulated is an act that is ever changing and has no ownership. This is in line with music, including musical meaning as well as the concepts with which one engages to facilitate novel perspectives in the presentation of music. I hereby contend that in cultural musicology, responsibility is agency. Cultural musicologists frame music, that is, provide the basis to not only think through the existence of diverse events in a musical performance, but also their transitions and their different modes of modification. One does this through personal experience, the perseverance of a distinctive perspective, and through criticism and analysis of one’s own socio-cultural position. Cultural musicology is a determinant of musical articulation that in various forms is mobilized in musicological writing, research, speaking, and thought. The plurality of the framing agent within music discourse remains exciting, for all discourse graced with responsibility carries the multiplicity of the performing agent. Within this mode of thought, it is possible to conceive of cultural musicology as a fore bearer, and in some aspects, one of the key players in music discourse; it makes visible certain perspectives and continues to do so, it creates a possibility for something other than music discourse to come about. Yet these remain centered around perspectives belonging to the engagement with music. To embellish on a distinct type of discourse such as music as is done within cultural musicology, is not to give fixity, but rather to radically open it up and make it available to a number of other conceivable pertinences. Cultural musicology is not artlessly a discipline or a science; it is a discursive performance, a process. Its theoretical efficacy is defined in relation to what it gives rise to. With this I mean, that what materializes within cultural musicological discourse is not located in the spaces that are defined by the field of study; rather, it is the modes of the discourse, which allude to its foundation, back to what it seeks to mobilize. We can hereby come to comprehend the critical necessity within the course of music discourse, for cultural musicology is responsible for a change in our perspective of and approach to music. In doing so, it establishes a persuasive and necessary chore of changing the practice of music discourse itself. Reconsidering the approach to the way in which researchers take part in the practice of music discourse may modify and even renovate the way considerable aspects in musical meaning are understood, but it will never be able to change music by its very nature. Cultural musicology and the discursive practice it engages in are not two different entities; as a field involved in the study of music and what it gives rise to these are not jointly circumscribed modes of operations. I have

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tried to shed light on the fact that agency involves a multiplicity of deciding constituents when trying to explore it within a field of study. Through all this, I wish to stress the significance in continuously remaining critical of our agency in the framing of both music and cultural musicology in order to avoid a discourse that stands in line with, or emulates colonial narratives of music. It is exactly within the above practice that intellectual restlessness comes into the discussion. This is a call to reconceptualize agency as not only listeners and researchers who contribute to and frame performances but as musicologists attempting to continuously generate novel perspectives, knowledge and discourse on music. We can no longer sit idly by and conceive of cultural musicology as studying music as it ‘appears’ in culture. Cultural musicology is much more than that. It is an agent itself in constituting musical discourse, both on a verbal or literary level as well as on the music-making level. According to Bal “it seemed crucial to make framing work as both an act and a concept, to ‘speak’ only by means of retrospective connotation, not through actualized, explicit, denotative speech” (ibid., 170). So that, both the verbal and the musical are conceived as discourse. Bal’s concept of framing proves to be suitable for exploring agency within cultural musicology, for it illustrates how the act of framing produces a response in the musical analysis of culture. Framing and the way in which it engenders a response illustrates that music discourse is inclusive of the way we, as cultural musicologists embodying agency, are a part of discourse. How do we reflect on our own agency in the framing of music? It is through criticism and problematizing that we can consider our own position as cultural musicologists, and try to negotiate musical meaning within this nexus. If we consider this in relation to responsibility, we might come to understand that this is the space within which cultural musicology allows us the discretion to take a step back from our acts of framing and critically consider what we do, and the circumstances under which we come to perform in framing and the particular musical response to the different ways in which we frame, in other words, the effects our conduct might have. If we understand framing as a performance, we may conceive of its performance as contributing to discourse and come to understand music as discursive, for these performances create effect within music discourse. An example of this is the framing of world music stages, where the act of naming the festival and stages may seem like a mundane act. Analyzing these framing practices over a period of time may come to show certain aspects that extend into discourse and thus a recognition and con-

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stitution of issues takes place. To illustrate this, below I will discuss the example of the framing of bomb-tunes at the Amsterdam Roots Festival. From this example I argue that statements are made about music that stands in relation to other statements, these share a mutual space and establish a particular prism through which music is encountered and comprehended. Framing practices and the references they enable are never monolithic. They change as music moves, and so statements, being, “the function of existence that properly belongs to signs, on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether they make sense or not,” (Foucault 2002, 97) change continuously. Framing bomb-tunes on the world music stage I have so far discussed the relation between framing and music discourse. However, music discourse is not only that which is articulated about music, that is, not only linguistically and textually. This is only one fraction that involves the negotiation of meaning. Music discourse is also the capacity of music, in its own character and on its own terms to give rise to particular positions in how meaning is ascribed. In sum, music discourse goes beyond the paratextual framing, song text and lyrics. With this, music is also conceived as having agency in ever changing socio-cultural settings. It is in itself a form of agency that contributes to shaping its own discourse and interceding in the formulation of the social, cultural, spatio-temporal and historical. Thus musical performance is also involved in framing. It is within these considerations that I explore music discourse also as the discourse of music itself, formed by agency. Herein, we might come to address the question of how music can be conceived as knowledgeable, that is, able to produce knowledge, and in doing so provides a modality in and through which we can understand how knowledge is acquired within steelpan music making. Offering an elaborate understanding of music discourse opens up an advantageous avenue to question musical meaning, as it affords the recognition of the importance of knowledge, and the explicit relation between framing and the production of knowledge. Far from being simple inert communication, I see discourse—specifically music discourse—as a location within which a multitude of negotiations take place. Here I acknowledge a negotiation of power relations, responsibility, the acquisition and production of knowledge and agency as those phenomena that interact

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and are involved in music discourse. In his writings Foucault makes clear that the knowledge and truth produced by disciplines, are intrinsically connected to power because of how they are used to order and categorize individuals (Foucault 1995; 2002). A cultural musicologist holds agency, and is herein situated within the discursive formation of music—through the analysis, critiques, enunciations and the theories produced, which carry knowledgeable equity. In respect to music, this implies that, musical meaning does not simply or spontaneously come into being, but is produced partially through—in this case—cultural musicology as a field which engages with music or through framing practices at the world music festival. The paratextual framing, as previously outlined, through the example of the festival flier, does not consider the historical implication of the described music-making. However, to consider music’s agency and its contribution to music discourse is to also acknowledge history (cf. Bohlman 2003). For this reason I return to my festival flier story in order to question how musical performance opens up the matter of discursive formation and presentation of the steel-orchestra. I will enter by way of taking a closer look at the bomb-tunes, mentioned in the festival flier as bomp-tunes, which I have touched on before. The bomb-tunes arose out of the bomb competition, which was held on jouvert.8 In the 1950s the bomb was a secret competition, that is, the various ensembles did not know what piece their rivals were going to present and neither did the judges. In this manner a bomb was said to have dropped. The repertoire consisted of pieces that were predominantly European composed music. Steelband arrangers ordinarily chose the more popular European composers. In this way the procession repertory was usually based around the canonic European composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, and Chopin. At this time in the development of the instrument, steelpan innovators wanted to ascertain their work by colonial cultural standards, yet at the same time maintain their own cultural identity.9 In this way, dancing was and has remained an intrinsic part of the demonstration. Here I argue that the bomb-tunes served as a moment or process that was 8

9

Jouvert is derivative of Jour d’ouvert. Jouvert is a carnival procession that takes place early Monday morning (before Ash-Wednesday) and goes into day break; it also serves as the opening event of carnival. See Dudley 2002; 2008.

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produced in the articulation of cultural difference. The intentional interaction with European composed music and its incorporation in the given space and place illustrate the negotiation of cultural difference but also recognizes and highlights the commonalities that lie within human music making. Here the matter of power relations also comes into discussion. In examining the bomb-tunes we gain perspective into the musical identities and apparitions of current musical developments, something left unaddressed in the paratextual framing. Bohlman, in discussing the historiography of music through the colonial encounter suggests that music represented culture in two ways; as a form of expression common to humanity, and as one of the most extreme manifestations of difference. On the one hand, the essence of a universal culture was borne by music, that is, the commonness that the colonizer and the colonized shared. On the other hand, the fact that music might embody profound differences, accounted for the ways it was totally incompatible with the culture of the colonizer. (Bohlman 2003, 47)

Herein, the story of the bomb-tune and the influences of European composed music, is not simply about how Afro-Trinidadians implemented elements of Euro-American music to give pungency to their own creation. Rather it is about a more expansive musical interaction. In the bomb-tune a negotiation of and demand for selfhood was made, whereby identification also came into question. Bhabha annotates that, “the possibility of producing a culture which articulates difference and lives with it could only be established on the basis of a non-sovereign notion of self ” (Bhabha 1990, 212). In this, we may embrace the realization of cultural cohesion and hybridity that exhibits itself without individual preponderance. I consider the bomb-tune to be a prime example of music-making as a subversive act and thus as having agency, through its performance, in framing. According to Dudley at the Port of Spain carnival of 1881, neighborhood stickfighting bands, animated by drumming and singing joined together to defend themselves against a police attack, and the incident was used by the authorities to push for greater restrictions on carnival performances. Three years later, in 1884, the colonial legislature passed the Peace Preservation Ordinance, which among other things restricted drumming during carnival. The rest is history, as drums were replaced during

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The subversive potential of music is radically visible within this case study, as musical expression was precariously situated by noise ordinances and bans on instruments. This is described by Johnson as he notes: When the Casablanca Steel Orchestra10 wanted to learn a piece of music, they would listen outside a party to how the regular dance bands played it. Each youth would take the part of a particular instrument, and they would then tramp back to their panyard, each one singing the lines of their chosen instrument, until they could transfer what they had learned onto their pans. (Johnson & Gay 1998, 62)

This exemplifies the process of identity cohesion that took place and continues to take place within the steelband movement. These musical practices are directly responsible for the corresponding musical identification. The post-colonial identity of this music is, I argue, the experience of going through the development of steelpan while dealing with adverse reception and social strife. In keeping with this, subject formation was clearly negotiated through experimentation with the steel-orchestra. Together with the development and struggle for constituting the instrument as such, an individual as well as collective accord emerged. The instruments were primarily rhythmic dull sounding metal (because of undeveloped tuning practices that were later developed). They progressed to playing lullabies, choruses and interpreting European composed music. This technical amelioration epitomizes not only a constant burgeoning complexity of the orchestra, but likewise the complexity of communal coherence. As the number of pitches on the steelpan abounded and the range of the instrument voices extended, so did music discourse, part of which is silenced within the paratextual framing. Here a parallel aggrandizement between the instrument and the people involved in its development that it nurtured is highlighted. At the Amsterdam Roots Festival 2010 koras, balafon, the steel-orchestra and a variety of drumming (including djembes or samba batucada lines) are collectively 10

Casablanca was one of the early steelbands.

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involved in framing and perform together on the same festival platform and sometimes at the same time in the same park space through parallel programing, creating a space inhabited by an unabbreviated or lumped sound—world music. Steven Feld speaks of an anxiety, where world music variously reduces cultural equity or creates deeper cultural cleavages and hierarchies. It is the anxiety that world music—whatever good it does, whatever pleasure it brings—rests on economic structures that turn intangible cultural heritage into detachable labor. It is the anxiety that this detectability marginalizes, exploits, or humiliates indigenous originators and stewards. (Feld 2012, 41)

The above discussion of Feld is exemplified in this particular framing of this steelpan performance. Because discourse constructs theories, cultures, spaces, and political formations, the promotional flier might potentially highlight the effect discourse has on the negotiation of musical meaning, which might be further explored in cultural musicological research. In this construction, music and meaning are continuously moving and transforming as further contributions are made to discourse, for example within acts of framing the bomb-tune. As music-making takes place, physical and emotional movements come into being. Framing expresses and situates those involved in music-making in different ways. In this positioning a number of questions float to the surface including: what does it mean to understand music as discursive and thereby considered to be a part of discourse, contributing to how meaning is ascribed? How does music convey knowledge? And how does this knowledge stimulate us sensually, emotionally, physically and intellectually? Simply put what does music do in order to move us? Festival producers, journalists, promoters, artists, vendors, musicologists, and participants all hold agency, wherein they contribute to musical discourse and further to musical transformation; lest we forget that discourse conveys a distinct manner for comprehending experience. Within the practice of framing world music, music discourse remains a socio-cultural construct created by specific conditions in a particular structure, place and period, always inhabited in a space of multiplicity. Musical practices are influenced by and are understood through several contending discourses. Herein, the construction of above stated discursive formations not only collaborates in the processes of change, but also reflects shifting music-making and

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expressions as illustrated in the discussion of the instrument’s development and the newness that emerged in the practice of bomb-tunes. According to Foucault, Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation. (Ibid., 41)

Dominant discourse inflects upon culture; the festival flier also contributes to a particular dominant discourse within steelpan, one that was established by steelband detractors.11 Following this, it is crucial to concentrate on the competing discourse presented by and within performance. As music moves and transforms, so does music discourse, and this attests to the multiplicity of discourses that surround music. Cultural musicology and the implication of interpretation and knowledge The final question I wish to raise is one that seems to partially underlie this volume as a whole, namely, the call for embracing restlessness in the way cultural musicologists engage with music and in considering cultural musicology as a platform for this effort. In using the concept of framing to explore the need for restlessness within cultural musicology, the question of context vs. framing will clarify why it is necessary to undertake this process at all. To elaborate on what a critical engagement with music entails, I return to Bal again, who conceives of concepts as entities that are “brought to bear on cultural practices” (Bal 2002, 133). Bal describes concepts in respect to movement and travel, thereby establishing how connections and cessation between diverse uses of concepts incite meaning within disciplines. In the spirit of traveling concepts, then, for the concept to have any critical or practical efficacy is contingent, in part, upon how one situates it temporally. That is, framing embraces quite disparate meanings based on how it is located historically and within various other disciplinary contexts. That said, the concept brings with it numerous advan-

11

See Hill, 1972.

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tages for expanding research within (world) music studies; in return, the concept will have further implications as it emerges from music and situates itself within cultural musicology. Concepts emerge from music and are not brought to bear in an imposing fashion on music. Herein, cultural musicology contributes new luggage to the concept’s journey. In the case of framing, music highlights the fact that the process is not involved with the salience of objects as such but experience. This makes my first question: Why should the concept of framing be considered in preference to the concept of context within cultural musicology? The concept of context flounders in the cultural analysis of music because, as Bal points out, “context, or rather, the self-evident, non-conceptual kind of data referred to as context, is often invoked for the interpretation of cultural artifacts such as art works, in order to uncover their meaning. In effect, though, its development serves to confuse explaining with interpreting” (Bal, 134). Here, it is critical to acknowledge how we turn information into knowledge through the process of interpretation, an approach I have actively attempted to exemplify in my discussion of bomb-tunes and steelpan music-making. I shall begin, therefore, with a brief consideration of these two concepts, as well as the aspect of conflating explaining with interpretation. In interpreting instrument building and music-making, I am attempting to highlight how knowledge is produced as sense is made of the world through steelpan music-making. However, in interpreting I can never state the impeccable meaning, or essence of steelpan music. With this fact in mind, we can yet engage in interpretation in order to further comprehend what message music might potentially convey as well as attempt to grasp what this message could possibly mean. To explore the act of interpretation in relation to framing is necessary, for knowledge is an effect or a response to the interpretation of information we have come into contact with. Here, the relation between knowledge and power should not be forgotten. According to Foucault power can only be made sense of “through its connection to forms of knowledge and discursive practices” (Schirato, Danaher & Webb 2012, 45), he posits that “any relation of power can be resisted, if only because it necessarily constitutes and reproduces, in that relationship, oppositional categories, dispositions and forces” (ibid.). On the account of knowledge and power Foucault suggests that “power produces knowledge […] power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power

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relations” (Foucault 1995, 27). For this reason, framing is important and useful in cultural musicology, for the act of framing is attentive to an array of nuances for consideration in the interpretation of music and in the analysis of attributed meanings. Bal unravels the meaning of framing as “‘to set up’” (Bal 2002, 141). This notion is critical to cultural musicology for it calls attention to factors that circumscribe music as a cultural object, it underscores music not as an object but first and foremost as experience. The concept of framing remains useful in defining the parameters of the multidimensional aspects that produce both the musical stage as well as the progress of music discourse. I conceive of meaning and its negotiation in steelpan music-making as abundant and its material existence set up through its inevitable movement, interaction, transition and transformation. The fundamental rule that the act of framing provides is to do away with one’s own voice. In doing so, music can be engaged in away from disciplinary confinement, projection, acts of explaining, factualities, fixity and is able to move towards trying to get a sense of music, which is the primary and overarching concern of cultural musicology. Why is undertaking the concept of framing necessary for cultural musicology then? To speak of a context appears invariably to be the articulation of facts that are contingently connected to preconceived notions of meaning. To speak of framing instead, refers to the plan or design of analysis, to describe music in an actual type of frame that may or may not change in relation to time, space, and place. Here, it is the particularity of music and its agency together with the structure of the frame that sets it up, which gives rise to attributed musical meanings. In the former case, there is an allusion to a fortuitous antecedent circumstance of the appearance, actualization and meaning of music. In the latter case, however, there is an allusion to distinguishing characteristics of music itself, and to be interpreting these, in terms of music’s embodiment of a particular course, and thus in terms of its capacity to negotiate meaning. In its performance, framing remains a multilayered discursive practice. According to Foucault “we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive” (Foucault 2002, 145). Furthermore, the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events […] it is that which, at the very root of

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the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability, […] it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning. The archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge […] it is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements. (Foucault 1972, 145–46)

In framing world music, statements made, are events. Herein, interpretation in the event of framing gives rise to a multiplicity of statements of and on music. As a “system that establishes statements as events” (Foucault 2002, 145) while being an event itself, framing is a mode of presentation and a concept within music discourse. Framing, not only through its capacity, process and mechanism in the constitution of a particular statement, but as an event, concedes to a conceptual performance. This aspect is also the governing characteristic that the concept of framing embodies, one that context, as a concept, does not. In discussing the analysis of music as a cultural experience in consonance with musical meanings, I favor Foucault in his conclusion that discourse is to be treated as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak, and not as groups of signs’’ (Foucault 2002, 54). Framing affords focus not just on the musical experience that is being interpreted, but on the principal or popular convention authorizing the conduct of the issues or themes with which the music is concerned. It is crucial that cultural musicology remains engaged in an intended act of questioning music. This questioning is an integral part of embracing restlessness. Questioning might function here as a mode of resistance within the knowledge/power relation. Within cultural musicology then, and through the act of framing, the event of questioning is the resistance that Foucault broaches, which is integral to power relations. In the same way as bombtunes were part of the resistance in the relation of power emergent in the colonial rule and ordinances placed on music-making. The aspect of questioning and by extent the embracing of restlessness might be regarded as modes of resistance in the power/knowledge dynamic. Within this dynamic, both knowledge and power are constantly in reproduction, in questioning; new perspectives might arise that challenge the relation of power and knowledge. Framing techniques are assets used by all cultural musicologists whether we are aware of it or not and whether it is intentional or not. These modes of presentation and acts that construct how meaning is

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negotiated are resources that are used to not only draw consideration to, but to direct the processing of knowledge. In doing so, a specific reading of the event comes to command further comprehension. This brings me to my central contention on framing and cultural musicology. According to Bal the concept of framing “is not simply a change of terminology, but of implication” (Bal 2002, 134). It is this specific implication that cultural musicology affords an exploration into. I tried first of all to argue that in order to be able to interpret musical meanings and contribute to the discursive formation within which knowledge is formed, it is necessary to consider the concept of framing. In doing so, we acknowledge not only music but that which is other, such as the paratextual, but our own participation as festival participants and researchers. I have thus been concerned with shifting the emphasis of the discussion off the idea of music as a fixed, inactive and explainable object as in the example of the paratextual framing, and on to the idea of music in terms of itself, accessible for analysis as I attempted to do in the discussion of bomb-tunes. Bal argues further that, “the agent of framing is framed in turn. In this way, the attempt to account for one’s own acts of framing is doubled […] one makes explicit what one brings to bear on the object of analysis: why, on what grounds, and to what effect. Then one attempts to account for one’s own position as an object of framing” (ibid., 135–36). This “double self-reflection” is what I will address further in relation to music discourse and brings me to my second argument in the relationship between framing as a concept in cultural musicology. It is fact that any agent is distinctly and decidedly in a situation of privilege when making statements about his or her object of study and the meaning that may or may not be involved in its framing. Conclusion: cultural musicology, critical thinking and modes of framing music “[…] we are only where the music takes us.” (Frith 1996, 125)

With the example of framing bomb-tune in mind, I would like to go back to the question quoted by Stokes at the beginning of this contribution: “[D]oes world music really deserve this kind of criticism? Were its consequences really so dire?” My answer is yes, world music does deserve criticism, and cultural musicology proves to provide a space for this while reflecting on and criticizing agency. Through its restlessness, cul-

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tural musicology calls the multidimensional aspects of music discourse into question. In doing so, it potentially has the ability to subtend the anxiety that Steven Feld talks about or the dire consequences that Martin Stokes skeptically questions. Framing within world music demonstrates how discourse and presentation have come to shape and sustain meaning systems that have gained status and currency, and dominate how both music and the socio-cultural world are defined and organized, whilst other alternative discourses have remained unheeded and circumvented—even though potentially these framing practices present sites where hegemonic practices can be questioned, disputed, denounced and withstood. Discourse analysis recognizes those structures and affiliations that underpin utterance, and thus highlight not only that which is communicated, but the modes in which communication, information, technology, thoughts, sounds and images are circulated, valued and regarded as meaningful. The discourse that these thematic frames establish functions to bring about and normalize performance practices. Thus, the use of certain themes gives credibility to certain regions and particular musical acts, and thereby, simultaneously, neglects certain musics according to conventional certainties about what, at different times, spaces, and places, determine and defines ‘world music’ or ‘music’. In reflecting on our active role as cultural musicologists in framing I argued that in a post-colonial world, music has a very specific political function in acknowledging and bringing forth the constitutional structures of thoughts of the relation between words, ideas, images and the world—in short, making sense of the world musically. I would like to suggest that through continuous criticism of our framing we participate in creating a space inhabited by a multiplicity of frames, and thereby contribute further to performance, discourse and musical meanings. Herein, a musical space is opened where music is recognized as an actant and as having a subversive nature. As alluded to throughout this work, those who hold agency and the location where power to make sense of music is distributed structure the space in which world music is made sense of. This act of structuring is in part responsible for not only the way music is related to within the festival space and scholarly studies, but the value bestowed upon it as well as the resultant ascribed musical meanings. In and through music “we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others” (Bhabha 1988, 22), by questioning our agency, embracing restlessness and exploring music-making as a political act, “[…] we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves” (Bhabha 1994, 56).

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It remains unclear what characteristics such performances as Pamberi Steel Orchestra, Les Espoirs de Coronthie, Staff Benda Bilili, and Indian Harmony Experience have in common aside from them being labeled as world music and sharing the fleeting summer experience of coincidentally being on the same festival stage (Amsterdam roots festival, 2010, for example). To say that these performances are all examples of “world music” shrouds more than it concedes the different musical characters, genres, and performance practices associated with these displayed musics (cf. Byrne 1999). This thread of framing is an important focus of my work: How does one think about framing as an act of presentation? How does one work with agency in relation to the act of framing? How do you negotiate the phenomena of responsibility? Cultural musicology provides a platform for thinking of these interstitial musical spaces that are occupied with transformation, self-reflection, self-criticism and endless questioning. The contemporary use of concepts, to establish particular modes of interpretation and knowledge about music, is extremely important in negotiating musical meaning. What concepts and the different discourses that go along with them communicate, is the burden of effect on musical meaning. Concepts serve as a drapery of inquisition and it is through them that cultural musicology rationally engages with music. Here, the concept of framing gives diligence and eagerness, and has to be conceived as being part of the question of agency as a whole in being continuously productive and innovative. The way ideas of agency, discourse, responsibility, presentation, and musical meaning, are being put forth in a conceptual based practice such as cultural musicology, is really to create a sphere of effectual questioning. Herein, it is the mobilization of an identificatory structure within musicological research that I sought to highlight. My general commentary on the concept of framing is one that I feel is a state of mind and by extent a state of knowledge production that we as cultural musicologists are all concerned with. I have attempted to rethink the act of framing and the agency in our modes of presenting music. There is no doubt that analysis could uncover still many more characteristic traits of cultural musicology. I have limited myself to the three presented here however, because they seem both the most visible and the most important for my purposes. They can be summarized as follows: Firstly, cultural musicology affords the opportunity to concentrate on interpretation and the formation of knowledge and to a larger extend the contributing to discourses not only within cultural musicology but other disciplines. In this way, there is a space to ques-

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tion our responsibility as cultural musicologists in the process of turning information into knowledge. Secondly, agency is linked to the institutional structure that encompasses, determines, and articulates the nature of music discourse; it is not defined by the extemporaneous ascription of a discourse to its producer but, rather, by a series of specific and complex operations; it does not refer solely to one agent, it gives rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects and positions that can be occupied. Lastly concepts emerge from music, as such, cultural musicology gives rise to an apprehension of music through concepts and of concepts through music. To conclude, I would like to review three reasons why I attached importance to what I have stated. An analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide a new perspective and approach in particular to agency, where responsibility within cultural musicology is undertaken through constant inquiry. Cultural musicology allows us to analyze music discourse not only on the level of its articulacy or disciplinary transitions, but in consonance to the way in which it inhabits a space of musical knowledge. The manner in which discourse is mobilized, the importance attributed to it, its incorporation and appropriation into different frames of thought varies within each discipline, and is consequently modified within each. The modes of expressing music discourse according to the relationships brought forth throughout this work, can be further comprehended, I believe, in the exertion of framing and the agency that goes along with the act. This is why I have called for a reconsideration of the responsibility of the framing subject. As cultural musicologists, we must reflect on the questions posed throughout this work in the pursuit of recognizing the agent’s applicability, conduct, and reliance. In doing so, we no longer raise traditional questions about methodologies, understanding a multiplicity of reasoning on the prefix of Ethno-, or the ethnocentrism that belies the current discipline of ethnomusicology. Instead, we should be raising these questions: How, under what circumstances, and in what way can a cultural musicologist appear in the structuring of music discourse? What place can cultural musicology occupy in other discourses? In sum, it is a matter of recognizing and comprehending the mechanics involved in agency as framing takes place, and of being responsible for constituting particular modes of music discourse. Another question to ask is: How can we through this concept of framing curtail the troublesome situation we confront with presentation, that is, musical presentation, which is a constant threat? A step towards an answer might be: We can diminish it by focusing our attention on agency. That is not only in the

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sense of musicologists as a subject but musical agency. Reflecting on agency will limit the mutation of explaining music and musical meaning within a fixed mode of discourse, as does the paratextual framing. The agent has the prime responsibility in not only presenting music, but is principle in the generation of how musical meaning is negotiated. As a result, as agents we must completely reconstruct the way we see ourselves as researchers within the provided space of cultural musicology and keep asking those questions that will engender both new perspectives and novel music discourses. We must contend that our responsibility lies in the fact that, as soon as we speak about music in whatever capacity and for whatever format, we propagate and (re)produce musical meaning which contributes to a particular music discourse infinitely. So that, in the case of the Amsterdam Roots Festival, the paratextual framing of the steelpan performance makes an authoritative statement of and on culture (Bhabha 1994, 50) as well as agency and responsibility even more prevalent. It also gives rise to questioning “our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general” (ibid., 19). The same remains relevant for the paratextual framing of musical performances within the festival space. My goal has been to bring awareness to the multiplicity of connections at work between music and framing practices. I have stressed that recognition must be granted to the fact that in the simple act of staging musical performances, framing takes place. It is therefore imperative to grant critical attention to the consequences of these acts. As mentioned before, framing bears heavily on the generation of meaning and on the discourse that surrounds the musics being performed. Framing promotes a particular movement in the presentation of the musics of the world, here a point of emergence, departure and change is visible. The matter at hand is an expressed musical movement, where moving musics meet temporarily, embody a space, a time, a period, and are reinstated with novel luggage and meanings as the practice of bomb-tunes illustrates. Bal clarifies this ever-turning circle in saying that “framing cannot become a concept if it doesn’t travel through the practice it was called upon to help structure. This is how a concept theorized a practice, and, […] a practice theorized a concept” (Bal 2002, 141). World music festivals have become increasingly popular within the Euro-American setting, especially during the summer months. The framing of Pamberi Steel Orchestra at the Roots stage involves the concurrent organization of an idea of musical and cultural heritage and its transportation as a style of world music. The concept of framing as a presentational performance helps

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us to understand agency in the form of journalists, musicologists, producers, festival promoters, artists, participants, vendors, and the circulation in which the different musical cultures are fashioned and categorized. I see cultural musicology as a threshold in the study of music and musical meaning that may not be ignored. I perceive of cultural musicology itself as a discontinuity (Foucault 2002, 34). The quote of Simon Frith to this conclusion furthers the idea of embracing our restlessness for, “we are only where the music takes us”. Herein we must remain in question of agency, responsibility, and the capacity in which we negotiate as cultural musicologists, bringing not only music to mean in our modes of framing, but as it were, in performance, aspects of meaning to music. References Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Bateson, Gregory. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” The Game Design Reader: A rules of play anthology, edited by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman. Cambridge: MIT press, 2006. Bhabha, Homi. “The Commitment to Theory.” New Formations 5 (1988), 5–23. —. “The Thirdspace: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 207–221. London: Lawrence & Wishart Limited, 1990. —. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bohlman, Philip V. “Musicology as a Political Act.” The Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 4, 411–436. —. “Music and Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture.” The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, 45–56. New York: Routledge, 2003. Byrne, David. “Crossing Music’s Borders: ‘I Hate World Music’.” The New York Times, October 3, 1999. Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, eds. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003. —. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Dudley, Shannon. “Dropping the Bomb: Steelband Performance and Meaning in 1960s Trinidad,” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1, 135–164. —. Music from Behind the Bridge: Steelband Spirit and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Entman, Robert. “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43 (1993), 51–58. Feld, Steven. “My life in the Bush of Ghosts: ‘World Music’ and the Commodification of Religious Experience.” Music and Globalization Critical Encounters, edited by Bob White, 40–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Frith, Simon. “Music and Identity.” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall & Paul du Gay, 108–127. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1996. —. “The Discourse of World Music.” Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, edited by. Georgina Born & David Hesmondhalgh, 305–322. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1972. —. “The Order of Discourse.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, edited by Robert Young, pp. 48–78. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. —. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An introduction to Foucault’s thought, edited by Paul Rabinow, pp. 101–120. London: Penguin Books, 1991. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. —. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2002. Genette, Gérard & Marie Maclean, “Introduction to the Paratext.” New Literary History 22 (1991): 2, Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre, 261–272. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974. —. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. Hill, Errol. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a national theatre. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972. Johnson, Kim & Derek Gay. “Notes on Pans.” TDR, 42: 3 (1998), special issue: Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, 61–73. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Johnson, Kim. From Tin Pan to Taspo: Steelband in Trinidad, 1939–1951. Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2011. Kramer, Lawrence. “Musicology and Meaning.” Musical Times 144 (2003).

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Nurse, Myrna. Unheard Voices: The rise of Steelband and Calypso in the Caribbean and North America. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2007. Schirato, Tony, Geof Danaher & Jen Webb, eds. Understanding Foucault: a critical introduction. 2nd edition. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2012. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Stokes, Martin. “Globalization and the Politics of World Music.” The Cultural Study of Music: A critical introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, 2nd ed., 107–116. New York: Routledge, 2012. Stuempfle, Stephen. The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad and Tobago. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

John Richardson

Ecological Close Reading of Music in Digital Culture Close reading is one of the most ubiquitous yet also one of the most widely misunderstood and misrepresented approaches to research on the arts. In my understanding, almost any combination of detailed analysis with discussions of cultural meaning can be called close reading, yet the term is notoriously difficult to define and is likely to arouse suspicion among those who approach research on the arts and entertainment differently from those trained in what I will tentatively call “native disciplines”—by which I mean arts subjects like musicology, art history, literary criticism and film and television studies.1 These disciplines have traditionally adopted close reading, approaching the products of culture as objects or events that are worthy of academic study in their own right—either according to formal criteria or, more recently and less problematically from the standpoint of cultural research, as con.

1

While I agree with some of the criticism of disciplines as bastions of traditional “aestheticizing” (in a Kantian sense) or isolating rather than integrative or “cultural” thinking, the focus they offer on sensory domains (implying a different definition of aesthetics, focusing on sound in musicology; images in art history and criticism; language and texts in comparative literature) and the very corpus of accumulated disciplinary knowledge (not necessarily wisdom) that makes them sometimes problematic is also a compelling rationale for their continued existence (see also Heinonen 2014). I agree wholeheartedly, moreover, with Mieke Bal when she writes, “[a]t a time of economic crisis, the interdisciplinarity inherent to cultural studies has given university administrators a tool with which to enforce mergings and cancellations of departments that might turn out to be fatal for the broad grounding cultural studies needs” (Bal 2002). My tentative defence of disciplines is therefore pragmatically as much as it is epistemologically justified. In other circumstances, much can be said for removing obstacles to close collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.

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cretely articulating social relations and affective alignments more than being symptoms of them. As might be surmised from the above, close reading has traditionally been a highly discipline-centred activity and, as such, it has remained to some extent mysterious to those not possessing the requisite training. This situation has been changing, however, at least since the “cultural turn”, which highlighted many of the shortcomings of existing paradigms while bringing into sight the benefits of the overarching perspectives on culture offered by “general” disciplines such as cultural studies and cultural history, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, and media studies. Scholars working in these areas have long advocated transdisciplinarity with varying degrees of tolerance and acceptance being shown towards the interdisciplinary research being undertaken in traditional arts discipline settings.2 True interdisplinarity (implying stronger disciplinary foundations than the near synonymous transdisciplinarity), I would contend, requires knowledge of disparate epistemological traditions, the bridging of which has the potential to offer analysts and readers alike something greater than the sum of the parts. When it comes to close readings, the aim of such interdisciplinary inquiry will generally be to elucidate the aesthetic experiences and attendant cultural meanings of the objects, events, or performances that are its principal focus. In what follows I will set out some basic principles for a practice of close reading that lends itself to the analysis of musical sounds in their physical and discursive cultural settings, and which responds to initiatives in neighbouring disciplines towards similar forms of analysis. As indicated in the title of this essay, I will refer to this mode of close reading as ecological close reading (alternatively closer reading), a broad and inclusive designation that speaks above all to the salience of experientiality and frame-of-reference awareness to analytical pursuits. For more on this same topic and case studies illustrating the relevance of this approach in ecocritical research, see my companion essay ‘Closer Reading And Framing in Ecocritical Music Research’ (Richardson 2015). The present primarily reflective discussion will require a few sideways glances in the direction of disciplines and traditions where close reading is firmly established, as well as some background knowledge of how the term has 2

For the most part, acceptance has been forthcoming, although the mainstream of popular music studies is a significant area where musicologists are consistently marginalised. Sometimes this is their own fault, but frequently it is not.

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been employed in existing interdisciplinary music research. The meanings and status of close reading have changed over the years, I will contend, as we move from an age in which printed media held the highest prestige to one in which digital media are the dominant cultural form and, more recently, as the notion of the (socially and culturally) transcendental artwork has been widely discredited. Critiques of close reading fall into two primary types. First, there are those who argue that close reading belongs to an outmoded mind-set that has its roots in the historical patterns of thinking referred to above: spawned by printed media (as indicated by the term “reading”) in the context of no longer relevant and perhaps elitist ideas about aesthetic autonomy. I’ll return to these objections, which are themselves culturally grounded, in the section on digital culture. (Needless to say, I consider such commentary not entirely accurate as far as the current situation is concerned.) A second objection, which might be classed “methodological” and which has arguably caused the greatest disaffection among musicologists and arts scholars working in an interdisciplinary terrain populated by scholars from the general disciplines listed above, is the perception that close readings are fuzzy, essentialising (a paradoxical combination as essentialising implies the removal of the preceding category of fuzziness in assignations of meaning),3 intuitive and under-theorised. When compared to the assumed empirical objectivity of ethnographic observation or the systemic rigor of methods like Critical Discourse Analysis, close reading certainly suffers. Perceived weaknesses might easily be turned into strengths, however, if one is willing to recognise how close readings respond to the fine grain of experi3

The essentialism argument is easily disentangled if one understands the various approaches to cultural analysis as occupying a position within a continuum between essentialism end of the scale end and determinism at the other. The essentialist considers objects as possessing attributes that are inseparable from the object itself— either they are recognised and correctly decoded (according to an existing theoretical view or historical precedent) or the analysis is deemed unsuccessful. Determinism here refers to social or cultural determinism (epitomised by sociologist Emile Durkheim’s social determinism): the view that an object’s meanings, or the uses to which a socially constructed subject puts it, are fully determined by social context. This second view, like the first, places a heavy emphasis on pre-existing assumptions: either the meanings of objects are fixed or the meaning of society and culture is fixed and the object is defined accordingly. Neither of these views is satisfactory in an interactive view of cultural analysis.

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ence while allowing scholars to investigate the myriad ways in which works of art and entertainment are entangled within complex cultural configurations. The context of this discussion is a global one in which humanities studies, especially studies of the arts, are under growing institutional and governmental pressure to account for their ways of producing knowledge. People are increasingly asking: what are arts disciplines for? What do they produce that is distinctive and valuable? Knowledge in the abstract no longer convinces and the status of methods native to non-humanities fields of study, such as the highly systematic research paradigms found in the social sciences or natural sciences, is often held to be inherently stronger than methods endemic to arts fields. The main motivation for this work, therefore, is my conviction that close reading has hitherto been inadequately represented in cross-disciplinary discussions and that this situation needs to be rectified.4 Close readings, I argue, provide qualitatively rich knowledge that promotes deeper understanding of the human condition and therefore has a valuable role to play in education and society at large. I would, furthermore, agree with the editor of this volume (private correspondence) that close reading should be an indispensible starting point for any and all cultural analysis to the extent that interpretations should be grounded in experiences. A guiding premise of close reading is, therefore, that our experiences of art are inseparable from the actuality of art as art, even while we recognise that musical experiences are demonstrably interwoven with worldly factors like performance setting, the subjective and inter-subjective backgrounds of actors and socio-cultural milieu. Close readings attend, therefore, to the meanings that result from our encounters with objects, performances or events in cultural settings. Analysts who do them 4

Research will often benefit from using mixing methods. It is remarkable, however, how often close reading is neglected in interdisciplinary guidebooks on qualitative methods. Martin Bauer and George Gaskell’s Qualitative Research with Text, Image and Sound (2000) is a prime example. It includes Bauer’s own chapter on the analysis of sounds, which nevertheless rejects much of the relevant research employing close reading. Educational psychologist John Creswell’s book, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, & Mixed Methods Approaches (2014), similarly deals with research on sound only from the standpoint of ethnographic observation. I am possibly looking in the wrong places for adequate surveys of research methods. Experience tells me, however, that these examples are a fair representation of what many scholars in other fields actually think.

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cannot be indifferent to the qualitative nature of these encounters. Close reading is nevertheless sometimes characterised as a stronghold for traditional views about the transcendent artwork and for arcane and technically mystifying epistemological regimes. Recent humanities approaches to close reading complicate any such assertion, however, by their insistence on including the experiences of cultural actors in analyses. This interest in situation is evidenced in the recent turn towards research on performance in music studies and the prevalence of work on inter-art forms, like films, gallery installations, environmental sound art, virtual reality, and so on, which demand that the analyst attend to cross-modal exchange whilst remaining open to the full range of musical and cross-artistic configurations available in different cultures. Idealised encounters in which experiences are neatly compartmentalised are relevant only to the extent that they are recognised as such and unpacked in critical analysis. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review all of the instances of close reading to be found in the interdisciplinary literature on music research over the past few decades (although I will perhaps offer such a survey elsewhere). To state the matter quite reductively, a great deal of what went on under the aegis of “critical musicology” in Britain following the “cultural turn” of the 1990s, and correspondingly in North America, was close reading, whether this took place in the disciplinary contexts of musicology (including the so-called “new” or cultural musicology), ethnomusicology or popular music studies. The main criterion for labelling a study as close reading was, back then as it is now, the combination and successful integration of cultural theory and some form of analytical interpretation. Many publications produced at this time seemed to shout out “close reading” even when they weren’t explicitly identified as such. Much of the writing of Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary in the United States, starting with Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (1990), falls into this category. This book’s opening chapter remains among the most concrete set of instructions for how to undertake close readings. However, direct references to close reading in the musicological study of classical music are relatively rare.5 The volume Reading Pop, edited by Richard Middleton (2000), contains several relevant contributions, each of which tackles the problem of close reading head on, from the analysis of song texts to music analysis. A handful of scholars working in popular 5

Exceptions include Blum 1992; Richardson 1999; Cook & Everist 1999.

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music studies were relatively early or consistent adopters of the term, including Adam Krims (2000), Lori Burns and Melissa Lafrance (2002), and Carol Vernallis (2004). Perhaps because of their close ties to film studies, film music and musical multimedia, scholars have produced a large quantity of work in this vein, starting with Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), and including work by Caryl Flinn, Kathryn Kalinak, Anahid Kassabian, Robynn Stilwell, Miguel Mera and many others. An almost random selection of scholars working in the vein includes the likes of Stan Hawkins (especially 2001), Freya Jarman (2011), Mitchell Morris (2013), Derek Scott (2003), Alan Moore (2012), Michael E. Veal (2007), Mark Katz (2004), Birgit Abels (2011, 2012), and Nicholas Cook (2013). Emerging fields like gaming sound studies (Cheng 2014; Miller 2012), sounds studies and the analysis of video art-music (Rogers 2013) have already produced work of this type. Since I currently work in Finland, it would be negligent of me to ignore the close readings of colleagues like Susanna Välimäki (2002), Yrjö Heinonen, Tarja Rautiainen, Anne Sivuoja, Markus Mantere, Helmi Järviluoma, Meri Kytö and Juha Torvinen (2014). My interest in close reading goes back to Ph.D dissertation, published in 1995 (republished in revised form in 1999), and encompasses work I’ve done on popular music, experimental classical music, and film music. Yet despite this lengthy engagement with the term (more than two decades), and probably because of the nature of the beast (the seemingly intuitive nature of close reading), I haven’t thought about explicitly theorising my approach until recently (especially Richardson 2012a; 2012b). I am inspired to do so now partly because of the re-emergence of new readings in recent humanities research (especially that of Bal 2002; Hayles 2012), and because of the apparent need for justification in an age of heightened academic competition and, perhaps not unrelated to this situation, what I take as worrying signs of retrenchment in university politics back to what might tentatively be called “hard values.” Close reading or close analysis? Analysis—sometimes referred to as close analysis (e.g. Thompson 2013)—is held by some to be synonymous with close reading, but in practice writers tend to favor one term over the other. Reading, if not taken literally, implies interpretation: an experiential, reflective and even representational level of discussion that goes beyond technical considerations while not excluding them altogether. In order for an analysis to

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qualify as a reading it must interrogate, or at least recognise and disclose for contestation, its underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions. In contrast to more structurally focused modes of analysis, close readings are (even more) selective and attend to meaning-producing details rather than attempting to relate all the parts back to the whole or to blandly paraphrase the entirety of a work. What distinguishes close readings in recent humanities research from some earlier approaches to analysis is the fact that they are connective and open-ended. Analyses almost always contain elements of reading or interpretation, and readings contain elements of analysis. In some cases it will be hard, even irrelevant, to distinguish which of the two is dominant. Analysis might be present in the background of a reading (a cue list of a film, for example, or an analysis of song structure that is the point of departure for a critical reading), but it needn’t always be brought to the fore. Elsewhere I have described both analysis and interpretation (reading) as aspects of the larger project of academic criticism, which also encompasses description (or elucidation) and evaluation (Richardson 2012b, 140–41). It might be useful in some contexts to parse out the various activities of the cultural critic in such a way. In the same piece of writing, I claimed that the 2000’s witnessed a swing from interpretation to description that might be understood as evidence of a new phenomenological orientation (ibid.). A truer representation of these categories, however, might see evaluation as embedded within the critical project rather than regarding it as something that can be neatly parsed out or separated from it. Similarly, it can seem artificial to separate analysis from interpretation. Conversely, description might be understood as a prerequisite in any adequate form of analysis (thereby preventing excessive abstraction), as well as any cultural reading that is sufficiently rooted in experience to satisfy stringent academic criteria. Reading (or interpretation) has sometimes been contrasted with writing (the graphia of ethnography), perhaps misleadingly, since writing invariably involves an aspect of interpretation—it is never neutral documentation.6 When taken as something other than fanciful extrapolation, reading involves description as a core element, in much the same way as ethnographic observation does. For this reason some schol6

My appreciation goes here to Derek B. Scott, who helped me dig deeper on this point during a presentation I gave on this subject at the MA Master’s Seminar on Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds in spring 2014.

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ars have compared their analytical work to autoethnography (see Jarman-Ivens 2011, 38). Although it should be emphasised that the aim of most critical readings is not to focus attention on the individual analyst but rather to argue using sufficiently detailed description combined with consideration of cultural situation for a greater degree of generalizability.7 Description has made its home in phenomenology (the branch of academic inquiry concerned with accounting for experience) (Merleau-Ponty 2002, x; Glendinning 2007, 16–17), but also in Clifford Geertz’s (1993) “thick description” (events described and interpreted as part of a web of culture; the ethnographic comparison once again), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “imaginative close reading” (2003) (a mode of cultural analysis that emphasises sensory and affective response), and Lawrence Kramer’s “constructive description” (description informed by historically contingent concepts) (Geertz 1973; Titon 2003; Sedgwick 2003, 145; Kramer 2003, 128; Richardson 2012b, 140–41). As in phenomenological analysis, researchers doing close readings will often use case studies as their primary expository vehicles, progressing from particularities to generalities using inductive reasoning whilst remaining mindful of the unique “thingness” of the individual case (see Torvinen 2008, 11). Close reading in this understanding is a form of cultural analysis (cf. Bal 2002, chapter 1), the imaginative or constructive part of the reading process arising from how the descriptions connect with reflective and conceptual layers of experience. Bal elaborates: The qualifier cultural in “cultural analysis” indicates […] a distinction from traditional disciplinary practice within the humanities, namely, that the various objects gleaned from the cultural world for closer scrutiny are analysed in view of their existence in culture. This means they are not seen as isolated jewels, but as things always-already engaged, as interlocutors, within the larger culture from which they have emerged. It also means that “analysis” looks to issues of cultural relevance, and aims to articulate how the object contributes to cultural debates. (Bal 2002, 9) 7

Other areas of ethnographic research can overlap with close reading or precede it, including phenomenological fieldwork and virtual fieldwork (sometimes called internet ethnography). At a time when cultural studies and ethnomusicology are approaching one another, it is likely that such common ground will become increasingly evident. See several of the essays included in the collection Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Barz and Cooley 2008).

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So while it can be stated that cultural analysis “helps us to understand the object better on its—the object’s—own terms” (ibid.), those terms are ultimately viewed through the lens of the wider entity we call culture, and analyses of this type are consequently evaluated in terms of the extent to which they bring to the fore cultural relevance. Nevertheless, close analysis in recent humanities writing will inevitably be compared to its former incarnations. Writing in the late 1990’s, Adam Krims homed in on the anxieties surrounding traditional ideas of close reading when he wrote: “close reading of music brings with it the specter of closed reading, a reading that isolates and essentializes the social/historical practice of music” (Krims 1998, 4). In recent humanities approaches, however, certainty about the precise nature of the object of study is regarded as unattainable, insofar as statements about separateness are understood as resulting from the agencies of cultural actors who have defined its meanings and admissible parameters. It is this chain of events that makes autonomous music a “mentality”, as Nicholas Cook has put it, more than being something natural or inevitable (Cook 2013). Like other aestheticized objects, the autonomous status of music is a matter of negotiation within specific cultural parameters rather than something given and universally understood. Working with frames This brings us to framing, another of Mieke Bal’s (2002) concepts, but with a lineage that extends back to the philosopher Jacques Derrida (Bal’s main inspiration), particularly his critique of Kantian autonomy and the concept of the “parergon”, which designates a problematic liminal area at the edges of the inside/outside binarism. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) has worked with the similar idea of “frame analysis,” an experiential approach to everyday social encounters that takes a critical view on the unseen hierarchies and models of acceptable behaviour that shape our lives.8 Goffman’s work was influenced in part by Gregory Bateson’s meticulous investiga8

Goffman’s frames are found primarily in everyday encounters, including the elaborate mesh of societal conventions that govern how face-to-face communications are conducted. Similar to Bal’s notion of framing is the level of analytical detail found in Goffman’s descriptions of social situations; his accounts are close readings in an obvious sense. Not unrelated is the experiential basis of Goffman’s work, which also characterises close reading in recent humanities research.

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tions into psychological framing in play, fantasy and daily life in the book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1972, 183–98; Goffman 1974, 10).9 Bal’s view of framing implies both the agency of the framer and that of the person whose experiences are governed by frames—framing in this view is something cultural agents do rather than something that simply exists (Bal 2002). Frames implicitly link the work or performance to the outside world as much as they constitute an unequivocal cut-off point from the world. It is easy to see where this is leading if we return for a moment to the example of autonomous music (ibid.). In different times and places, people have been responsible for constructing and reconstructing ideas about aesthetic autonomy (from Kant’s and Hanslick’s “disinterested contemplation” to Schaeffer’s “focused listening”). Working with frames like these involves ritualised performative re-enactments—in language and musical performances—that anchor conventions in place and define what falls outside the frame as much as what lies within its bounds. This is as true of the various forms of autonomous or “absolute music” that have been envisioned in western music contexts as it is of any of the other experiential domains in which frames come into play. Each has a boundary element that confounds straightforward assertions about content or context, whether it is a window in a building, a picture frame or some other element deemed external or decorative or inconsequential, such as programmatic content or dance rhythms in music. Other frames relevant to music research include tonality; the circumscribed performance (as something that takes place on a stage or extends beyond the “fourth wall” to the auditorium); performers’ and listeners’ bodies; the physical and sonic relationships between soloists and ensembles; performance events and their audiences who belong to communities; the relationship between audience and communities and the environment. Any discussion of culturally conditioned frames in music research should include Jeff Tod Titon’s and Mark Slobin’s “music-culture perform9

Bateson (1972, x) understands framing ultimately as an evolutionary process that represents a step away from first-hand experience towards reflexive consciousness, a kind of Edenic fall from grace that humans and other animals have undertaken. In this view, like those of Goffman and Bal, tensions or correspondences between simultaneously experienced frames of reference are not uncommon. Of strong relevance to studies of contemporary music are Bateson’s observations concerning “the vast array of complications and inversions in the fields of play, fantasy, and art” (1972, 188), where uncertainty reigns regarding the rules of the game.

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ance model” (2002) from the book Worlds of Music, where they represent the primary foci of music research in terms of a series of concentric circles or “components,” which are depicted much like a series of Russian matryoshka dolls, each enclosed within another larger entity, starting from the sounding music itself and its attendant affects at the centre. The frames of this model expand centrifugally to encompass performance and performers, audience and communities, and, on the outermost level, the spaces and times in which musical performances take place as well as the underlying culturally informed memories and histories of musical actors (in Christopher Small’s (1998) terminology, the “musickers”). Titon and Slobin’s experientially orientated music-culture performance model is as good a place to start as any when it comes to accounting for how musical experiences are situated within culture (Titon & Slobin 2002; see also Richardson & Välimäki 2014, 25–27; Fig. 1). A sociological study might focus on the outermost circles, an ethnographic study might linger around the intermediate circles, while musicological research might concentrate more on the centre, but the centrality of musical affect is hard to deny from any of these perspectives when it comes to accounting for the motivations and culturally informed responses of listeners. Still, the frames are embedded within one another and the levels are fluidly interdependent. In the most recent edition of the book, the levels of the model are colour coded with the centre level represented as red (hot?) and the outermost level as green (cool?). If one takes this also as an ecological model, in Bateson’s sense of the word, it is possible to envisage this green level as representing an environmental frame of reference. A similar, although more heavily bracketed, example is found in the work of the electroacoustic composer and music theorist Simon Emmerson (1999, 137; Fig. 2), where he theorizes the various sonic settings in which music is encountered. He writes: the simple application of the idea of frame (a defined area of interest) applied progressively from the largest to the smallest scale: from a landscape (bounded by the acoustic horizon), part of which we designate an arena, within which we find a stage, upon which we frame an event. (Ibid.)

The value of this conceptualization is the way in which it implies the separability of sound from other (cultural) spheres, even while the outermost edges of the frames

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Fig. 1. Titon and Slobin’s (2002, 16) music-culture performance model conflated into a single diagram (originally two separate diagrams).

Fig. 2. Simon Emmerson’s model of sound field frames (Emmerson 1999, 137).

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converge to the extent that they become indistinct. From a standpoint of previous research on frames, it is possible to read into this model a desire on the part of the musical agents involved, or equally of some unrecognized cultural force, to separate what is from a quite different standpoint (that of the model’s top left edge) held to be inseparable. The presence of the different perspectives highlights an important principle of frames: their embeddedness in cultural conventions. Typically, classical music with its roots in the European tradition has been considered primarily in terms of the work frame (see especially Cone 1968, who compares the composition to a framed picture, the frame being made up of both the surrounding silence and the sounding music), so any shifting beyond that specific frame of reference is likely to expose valuable new levels of understanding. Similar mappings of performance space that imply various types of framing are common in the fields of performance studies (e.g. Schechner 2002) and social anthropology, ranging from the relatively abstract to the concrete. Indeed, the wide variety of definitions of space and place in popular music studies over the past few decades illustrates the abundance of ways in which sound can be categorized in terms of implied or concrete spatial frames. Sound can communicate both physical and symbolic space to listeners, and in this way it becomes a framing device in itself. Space might refer to a stage, performance venue or arena, or it might equally represent a district or town, region or nation, a mode of passage between locations (as in Birgit Abels’ work on sea-nomadic and Pacific musical cultures: Abels 2011; 2012), or a means of uniting people from different backgrounds and geographical situations (such as Paul Gilroy’s work on the “black Atlantic”). Space and time are perhaps the most obvious and most fundamental categories available for framing experience—for this reason they are valuable analytical tools. Many existing approaches might be understood in these terms. Audiovisual analysis can be defined as the branch of scholarly inquiry that investigates the relationship between sounds and visual images: it frames its principal area of inquiry using these and other concepts, such as the spatial distinction between onscreen and offscreen or acousmatic sounds. An area of study in which space and time converge that is very relevant indeed to conceptualizations employing frame theory is interdisciplinary research on remediation and adaptation. Another productive way of framing research is in terms of authorship and the larger concept of agency. The traditional understanding of classical music is author or composer-centered. However, the emphasis in recent research on performance and the

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participatory practices associated with the digital turn are motivating scholars to reassess traditional assumptions about how authorship should be framed. As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that the status of the author has shifted significantly in recent cultural research. Both the New Critics in the field of literary criticism—most notably W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, who are known for their influential theorisation of the “intentional fallacy” (1954),—and the poststructuralists after them (Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault), downplayed the role of authorial agency, preferring to elevate the role of the reader, the listener or the audience. A good part of what makes songs, performances, and other sonic experiences meaningful, however, to a large subsection of listeners is precisely how they connect with attributions of agency. What was this cultural agent, musician, or composer, trying to get across? What does the music say about their view of the world or the pleasures they value? How does this music-making agent resemble similar agents and thereby encourage identification? How can musicians “own” or take possession of the music (in a symbolic as well as a legal sense)? The last of these questions is especially salient in our age of recycling and remix culture (see Katz 2004). Agency in a cultural view of analysis cannot, therefore, be ignored, even if one accepts that meanings are afforded more than they are determined, not an intrinsic quality of objects so much as a potentiality than can be realised in different ways in different cultural circumstances.10 Bal (2002, chapter 1), on the other hand, considers frames something that can be “bracketed” out of analyses. This is, of course, the case; there is no direct line between authorial intention and decoded meanings as cultural studies since Stuart Hall’s (1980) foundational work have strenuously argued. Instead, attributions of authorship are invariably “framed by structures of understanding” (my emphasis; ibid. 130). Authorship does, however, matter to most of us to the extent that we build up images of the various creative agents involved in expressive pursuits in our heads that inform experiences in varying degrees. Frames of whatever sort invariably impose on objects preconditions (or cultural premises), which in turn impact on their capacity to afford meanings. The notion of framing, moreover, calls into question naturalised assumptions about “text” and “context” insofar as the act of recognising a frame implies expansion beyond that 10

On James Gibson’s notion of affordance in music research and the related notion of ecological perception, see Moore 2002, 243–248, Clarke 2005.

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frame of reference to a larger, more reflexive one. A frame recognised as such alters what was initially framed. Goffman was well aware of this reflexive dimension when shifting between competing frames of reference, as can be seen in the introduction of Frame Analysis, where he rhetorically shifts his argument to several successive higher levels of abstraction to prove his point about the mobility of framing strategies (Goffman 1974, 16–20). One gains insights into agency and cultural meaning precisely in the process of shifting between cultural frames of reference, as the reader zooms in and out from one level of an analysis to the next. Many of us employ framing even without explicitly acknowledging that we are doing so. Anahid Kassabian has written on the role of different levels of attention in encounters with “ubiquitous music” (2013). Along similar lines are Joseph Lanza’s (2013) concepts of “foreground” and “background music,” defined by the extent and robustness of the frames we choose to wrap around the sounding music and its relation to other activities. The field of soundscape studies is all about extending an aestheticized sonic frame of reference beyond musical works to the environment. Perhaps perceptual flickering between co-existing frames of reference, some nested and others overlapping, is the most helpful way of thinking about how frames function in real-world situations. Goffman’s concept of “lamination” or layering of frames (Goffman 1974, 82) implies much the same thing, although his writing tends to err towards a level of social determinism that is in conflict with recent ideas about complex distributed and networked agencies such as those proposed by Kassabian. Frames can be perceived both within individual works or performances as well as extending beyond their boundaries. An example of the former is the prevalence in surrealism of apparently incongruous and overlapping frames of references (see Richardson 2012a). Such framing activities can have a distinct critical edge. At the other end of the scale, Gregory Bateson’s use of framing in connection with the concept of ecology opens up enticing possibilities for understanding music against a broader environmental backdrop. I deal with this question in greater depth in the companion book chapter on ecocriticism and close reading, which I mentioned in the opening section of this essay. While the present essay is mainly theoretical, this other chapter illustrates how the concepts I propose here might be employed in actual readings. Understanding how we deploy frames in scholarly practice and how the people we study deploy them or engage with them goes to the heart of not only how we conceive of disciplines and practices, but the very nature of the phenomena we

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study. Frames are, at the risk of laboring the point, crucial in understanding the cultural meanings of artifacts and practices. They never simply demarcate exteriors but constitute the objects they contain. Between critical reflection and experience The discussion of framing has brought into sight one of the fundamentals of close reading that differentiate it from a more traditional or bracketed conception of analysis. Close reading, as mentioned above, can be distinguished from close analysis by the inclusion of critical reflection, a concept that is fundamental to the identity of cultural studies. Critical reflection connects cultural studies to philosophy, a cognate field that had a substantial impact on the interpretations of the Frankfurt school scholars in the early days of cultural studies as well as French poststructuralists and, subsequently, much of Anglophone research. Without this level of meta-analysis it’s difficult to say anything authoritative or probing in an interpretation about meaning or experience. We have seen already how the terms critical and criticism have been a part of musicological research based on cultural assumptions for some time (see also Richardson 2012b). Aside from Joseph Kerman’s “music criticism” (1985), which many regard as the foundational text of cultural musicology, this is reflected most directly in the label “critical musicology” (see Hawkins 2001), critical reflection being one of its defining features. (For many musicologists the terms cultural and critical musicology are interchangeable, and the more controversial, originally pejorative and long since inaccurate “new musicology” has all but fallen into disuse in discerning scholarly writing.) So far this discussion has been relatively abstract. What, then, do I mean more concretely when I write of criticism? Perhaps the best way to explain the term is to equate it with a level of socially engaged reflection that removes discussions from uncritical engagement and places them in a more connected and expansive register. Critical inquiry (not coincidentally the name of a leading cultural studies journal) goes beyond supposedly unmediated documentation by asking difficult questions beginning with interrogatives like why? and who? What precisely is going on here that might not be immediately apparent? Who benefits from the social arrangement and who pays? What is the role and meaning of pleasure in social arrangements? These questions needn’t be abstract. Indeed they might be quite immediate or im-

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manent, as in discussions of materialism, which asks probing questions about which materials and whose labor, or gender studies’ preoccupation with the body and how it articulates power relations. Critical reflection often problematizes concepts as its principal means of engaging with cultural phenomena. While traditional theory places a strong emphasis on interpreting the world with reference to an entire theoretical apparatus, which implies a level of predictability in the resulting interpretations, Mieke Bal concentrates on a lower hierarchical plane: that of concepts. More specifically, she writes of “travelling concepts”, which can never be exhaustively or finally defined and which shape-shift in the passage between disciplines and when applied to qualitatively different phenomena. By placing experiences before theory (in the exaggerated sense of “Grand Theory”), and by working with concepts in flexible and open-ended ways, she argues that we can lay the foundations for research that is more responsive to the object of study and therefore also more responsible. Concepts precede not only theories, on this view, but also methods. A fixed methodological apparatus, much like a fixed theoretical paradigm, can distort observations by imposing on them existing prejudices. Obviously, there will be some consistencies across studies that form the basis for generalisations, and it is these consistencies which are gathered in inductive research to form the relatively stable interpretative frameworks we call theories. Humanities scholars today, however, are often more comfortable with a broad range of theory and methods than in the past. A scholar might mix methodologies like a studio engineer mixes audio or a DJ vinyl records: a thesis these days might well comprise a small amount of semiotic analysis here, a soupcon of fieldwork here, some discourse analysis scattered around here, and so on. Such combinations are perfectly acceptable as long as the scholar is comfortable working in each way and as long as the study is directed by clear research questions and is clearly organised. A natural outcome of mixed methods plasticity is that the concepts that serve as points of reference in an interpretation can never be taken entirely for granted. Bal regards this a natural and even a productive state of affairs. Critical reflection is essential in these circumstances as a means of ensuring the suitability of concepts, which are tested in readings against previous uses (across different fields, studies and individuals). In close readings, concepts can be visible in how studies are organised. A traditional (or formally directed) approach to close reading might approach the object of

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study sequentially, perhaps taking for granted its work status (or perhaps subjecting it to critique). Such studies would typically approach a novel according to its chapters, an album according its songs, a symphony its movements, a film its scenes, an individual song or music video its structural attributes (such as verse, chorus, and bridge). I have taken this approach myself on several occasions (e.g. Richardson 1999). It is commonplace in audiovisual analysis, including the study of music videos (Vernallis 2004), although often it is more illuminating to combine formal criteria with discussions of relevant concepts and break down chapters and sections accordingly. Thematic analysis works in a similar way although the approach is not in such cases so obviously linear. Alternatively, a study might be broken down according to one or several of the frames of reference discussed above: such as soloist, ensemble, audience interaction, or reception, and so on. Another way to approach close reading is to start out from concepts and to approach things in a considerably less systematic manner. Such research might divide articles or monographs according to categories like voice, authorship, performativity, ethnicity and so on. Certain subjects might seem themselves to propose a certain line of inquiry. This is a good sign that the reader is approaching the subject with sufficient sensitivity. As can be seen, there is considerable flexibility in how one might approach a close reading, which makes it hard to categorize as a method in the traditional sense. For this reason, many scholars regard it as a practice more than a method (see Kramer 1990); close readings shape themselves both to the object of study and the predilections of the researcher and therefore cannot be easily contained within a fixed methodological regimen. Those who would criticize close reading on this count are largely missing the point, which is to stay responsive to the object at hand rather than imposing on it a priori assumptions. Theory-driven models or models employing strict methodological procedures have in recent years increasingly been critiqued on the grounds that they produce results that are predictable, tautological and disingenuous with respect to people’s tastes and experiences (theories of mass culture especially and much of the early critical tradition—the so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion”). Theories and the methods they engender (often they are explicitly linked) compel analysts to make reductive choices. This isn’t an entirely bad thing as selection is integral to analysis. Theories come loaded with prior experiences and hypotheses, embedded layers of argument and counterargument that can be useful sources of knowledge and accumulated wisdom. But they can be difficult to unpack because of

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their entanglements with some larger entity that is more difficult to get at. The point isn’t that theory should be discarded altogether, but rather that it should be tested in specific cases so as to take as little for granted as possible. For this reason Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick endorses what she calls “weak theory” in opposition to the traditional preference for strong theory and its critical ends, which can direct it along a “paranoid” interpretative trajectory (Sedgwick 2003; see also Richardson 2012a). Weak theory and its corresponding reparative reading strategy, by contrast, is experientially guided and emphasises immersive intimacy and connectivity over critical distance. Given the manifold challenges and distractions of the digital age, it has become an urgent concern to account for experiences in all their sensory particularity, and for this purpose closer reading strategies, in the sense of being more immediate and reflective of the subjective rewards of cultural experiences, might be called for. This move towards weak theory and a concomitant emphasis on the detail of experience is one of the main reasons why I refer to closer reading as an alternative to ecological close reading in the opening section of this article. Hayles uses the similar term “surface reading” to denote approaches that concentrate on overt messages rather than something hidden within or behind phenomena (Hayles 2012). Contrasted with the “symptomatic reading” some critics have used in discussion of critical theorists like Jürgen Habermas, and their tendency to consider meaning as something in absentia (hidden meanings lurking beneath treacherously pleasurable surfaces), surface reading will restrict its focus to the textures, materiality or surface-level grain of phenomena and the affective responses they afford (ibid.). Like Sedgwick, however, I would argue that surface reading is only of use when it is combined with different analytical levels, never content to remain for long in a weak or a strong, a critical or reparative register. Closer reading in my understanding is first and foremost an ecological mode of understanding that operates across, as much as within, experiential levels. For this reason, it is most accurate to call this form of analysis ecological close reading, in the sense in which Bateson and others have used this term. Close reading and digital culture Earlier I averred how close reading is a culturally situated activity, rooted in the textual preoccupations of the New Critics but in the wake of the “cultural turn” casting off its formalist shackles and taking on a far more connective and experience-based

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aspect. In writing on recent digital culture, close reading has once again become a prominent theme as the argument about its relevance and value in education and to society at large has gained momentum. How, then, has close reading changed in the twenty-first century and is it still a viable way to approach the cultural meanings of expressive actions? In her book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Hayles 2012), N. Katherine Hayles approaches these issues in terms of three primary strategies, close reading, hyper reading and machine reading. Hayles’s division between the first of these categories and the remaining two closely resembles what another digital humanities scholar, Lev Manovich, calls narrative and database thinking. In The Language of New Media, Manovich (2001) distinguishes between traditional narrative ways of organising information and the database means of information storage that are more typical of digital culture. Narrative is best suited to illuminating causal relations, exploring complex temporalities, and developing empathic skills that help us to comprehend how other minds work. Databases, conversely, organize information into types and enable data elements to be flexibly interconnected in different, non-linear ways (Hayles 2012, chapter 3; Manovich 2001, 190–212). While Manovich recognizes the strengths of both of these organisational regimes, he nevertheless argues that database thinking has won in contemporary digital culture, with narrative consciousness currently occupying only a marginal position.11 Hayles’s work is similar insofar as she optimistically argues for the integration of human-machine capabilities in a form of prosthesis whereby the machine is understood as radically extending and working in consort with human thinking. This is most evident in her last category, machine reading, which includes all those forms of machine-based 11

Manovich’s database thinking is roughly equivalent to Nicholas Cook’s (2013) “multimedia mentality”, which he contrasts with “autonomy mentality”. Cook’s multimedia mentality (ibid.) represents the dominant cultural modality in current life and describes an interactive and citational bias that is reflected in cultural practices and stands in contrast to traditional engagements with art works and the world that require a supposition of separation in order to facilitate a close and attentive mode of apprehension and organisation. Because of the value Cook places on autonomy mentality, his emphasis is almost diametrically opposed to that offered by Manovich. Perhaps Hayles’s model represents the middle ground between these two points of view.

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research where databases are used to collect and, up to a point, also analyse otherwise unmanageable amounts of data.12 Overall, Hayles’s discussion is more even-handed than Manovich’s, as she bemoans the ill effects of discarding techniques associated with close reading even while nevertheless celebrating the potential of new synergist strategies which combine the three approaches. In Hayles’s account, the strengths of close reading include how it facilitates deep understanding through sustained attention to the written text, which allows readers to perceive connections both within its duration and across its hierarchical levels. Because of the repetition involved in extended textual exposition, close attention to the unfolding narrative promotes strengthening of long-term memory processes. Close reading is additionally context rich and encourages readers to search for allusions, citations and inclusions independently rather than having them explicitly indicated by digital hypertexts. Hayles pursues the same line of reasoning as Manovich, however, when she argues that close reading entrains readers to empathise with others because of the level of detail and immersive involvement afforded by traditional narrativization techniques. For this reason and others, close reading has become an important life skill drawn on everyday interactions, even beyond its more particular uses in scholarly research. Narrativization, of course, was recognised in poststructuralist critical theory as something of a mixed bag, involving such deleterious characteristics as aggrandizement of the autonomous hero at the expense of “secondary characters” and modes of suture (or stitching into the story) that discourage the more participatory modes of engagement typical of digital practices. In short, narrative encouraged us to accept the story as it was told, with all of its hierarchical and hegemonic place-holders in tact. In addition to close reading, the term hyper reading was introduced in studies of digital culture in 1990s in response to the prevalence in early digital culture of hyperlinks and hypermedia (James Sosnoski 1999, 163–72). These two terms describe a reader-directed (rather than text or author-driven) approach to reading that is screen based, requiring the use of computers as interfaces rather than printed media. Hayles (following Sosnoski) enumerates practices such as “search queries” (as in a Google

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Manovich reports on precisely this type of research in an article in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Manovich 2013).

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search), filtering by keywords, skimming, hyperlinking, “pecking” (pulling out a few items from a longer text), and fragmenting, as distinct from hyper reading. Some of the research on digital culture stresses the superficiality of reading strategies of this kind while pointing towards its deleterious effects on subjectivity. However, several forms of humanities research, including archiving, benefit from data-intensive means of assessment like visual scanning (including so-called F-pattern reading, where the reader scans the first words of lines and initial lines of a text) and skimming as a fast way to glean information about relevance and context. Concerns arise when deep and sustained attention to sources is replaced altogether with free-roving techniques of this sort, which could lead to a situation where reading and writing occupies an ever more marginal position in societies, and the skills needed to produce and evaluate texts are in short supply (Hayles 2012, chapter 3). The overriding tone of Hayles’s thesis is optimistic, however. By working across the close-hyper-machine reading divide in new synergistic ways it might in her view be possible to operate more effectively in present-day cultural realities. There might be advantages to learning to function effectively within the snakes and ladders world of hyper reading, moving freely between surface-level and associative strategies rather than being pressed into a default way of being. In much the same way as Hayles, Kassabian (2013) envisions a post-Cartesian alliance of human and machine capabilities in which each becomes a dense node in a sprawling network rather than constituting self-contained and hierarchical systems. The resulting “distributed subjectivity” operates in her view similarly across organic and technological subsystems, forming compound subjectivities characterised by “mobile terrain of ebb and flow, of power and information” (ibid., xxvi). This terrain of ebb and flow (on flow in digital culture, see also Richardson 2012a) extends to sonic, audiovisual, and other complex spheres as well as the more obvious computational and communicational ones. This matters because it allows us to understand processes of artistic production and “decoding” as implicated in these far-reaching social and technological processes. Reading is simultaneously writing and vice versa. Both take place within the same cultural climate, which extends beyond organic parameters to encompass all experience. Perhaps recent humanities strategies of close reading require precisely this sort of synergistic thinking. The ability to move freely between co-existing frames of reference and to prioritise problematized concepts over overarching theoretic frame-

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works, as described by Bal and adumbrated in the work of Bateson and Goffman, is structurally and affectively homogeneous with the characteristic modes of consciousness of the digital age. There is undoubtedly a need to adapt close reading practices to present-day circumstances, but also to resist dominant cultural tendencies (which Manovich considers database logic to be) and their attendant modes of being to the extent that these are unrewarding or constitute a narrowing of consciousness. This is the big picture of this essay, but close reading is nothing if it is not concrete. The final section is a brief overview of how these principles and tendencies might translate into specific actions in close readings of musical sounds. How to do a close reading: towards a praxis of cultural analysis The preferred medium in close readings is language. The temporal flow of writing can lend itself to the description of experiences, although the goals of close readings are typically more layered than in tightly bracketed phenomenological descriptions. Sometimes it is helpful to complement written language with illustrations, taxonomies, tables, cue lists, analytical charts and other similar elements. Presentational and methodological diversity of this kind can challenge the linguistic bias of traditional approaches and has the potential to illuminate structural relations and textures more convincingly than words alone. The main pitfalls of overreliance on such techniques are if they are left to “speak for themselves,” substituting for raw data, or if they are savoured for the wrong—aesthetic or technical—reasons, rather than being at the service of a guiding argument. Used judiciously, this sort of analysis can increase the level of precision in a study and improve intelligibility. Some forms of methodological mixing, as I call it, can be understood as precisely the sort of dynamic interaction between different reading strategies that Hayles proposes. While close reading is best thought of as a practice rather than as a method, it can be productively combined with other methodological apparatuses and in some studies will be secondary to them. Ethnographic methods (including interviews and netnography), discourse analysis, structural analysis (including different forms of music analysis, from semiotics to cognitivist approaches), various forms of intertextual analysis, social interaction theory and grounded theory, phenomenological analysis and other existing qualitative and quantitative approaches might fruitfully be combined with close reading. Close readings can, moreover, be informed by the concepts,

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foci and outlooks of existing research traditions, including research on cultural identities, which has been central in cultural studies for decades, with research into gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age or generation, local, national and transnational identities occupying key positions in countless studies. Often something will be gained by adopting an intersectional approach that looks into how categories like ethnicity, “race”, class and gender overlap to produce aggregate meanings. Technology has been an illuminating perspective from which to approach cultural practices as well as overarching social structures like the modern, the postmodern and the digital since the early days of cultural studies. Research focusing on economic systems (like capitalism) has similarly been integral to the development of the field and is a motivating factor underlying numerous studies. Interdisciplinary paradigms such as postcolonial studies, youth studies, queer studies, and ecocriticism offer a variety of productive new angles from which to approach relevant phenomena. These and the conceptual assumptions they bring to the table will invariably colour the outcomes of readings. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the particular model a researcher adopts will inevitably come into dialogue with the concepts, analytical frames and the stylistic register of the reading. In other words, the notion of ecology itself in ecocritical (or ecomusicological) reading is a frame of reference that can affect the observations and interpretations a researcher makes. Similarly, queer theory with its suspicion of dominant cultural constructions of gender and sexuality is likely to open markedly different angles on any given phenomena (a song, performance or musician) than the choice of almost any other theoretical point of departure. In a very real sense, the reading begins already with the choice of topic and its corresponding conceptual framework, which is likely to be seen and heard differently from the outset. Readings are rarely systematic in the strict sense in which the term is often defined in the social and natural sciences (if they were they’d be insufficiently responsive to their sources), but they need to be well organised (thematically, conceptually, chronologically, structurally, and so on). Even if they are not systematic, they might rely upon earlier, more systematic research either by the same author or by others. The use of cue sheets in film music studies is an example of this. Assumptions about intersubjectivity underpin almost all close readings (see Bal 2002, chapter 1), except those that consciously take a more phenomenological tack by revelling in individual subjectivity (in gender and queer studies this approach has been common and the tone of such

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work will often resemble philosophy more than more strictly empirical sciences). This philosophical element is, however, present in the majority of close readings and forms the basis for a level of critical reflexivity that elevates social engagement. Style matters. An oft-repeated platitude about much poststructuralist and postmodernist research, and indeed about much critical and cultural musicology, is that “it’s all style and no substance.” This may be true in some cases but usually it is not. Style helps the researcher to convey the finer grain of experience and should be as nuanced in tone, conceptually precise and engaging in a writerly sense as befits the task. It shouldn’t, however, be gratuitously difficult or intentionally obfuscate. When this happens (and we’ve all done it) it’s usually a sign that the writer hasn’t completely come to grips with the subject or they haven’t succeeded in formulating an argument. Description in the banal sense can, moreover, be a sign that the writer is treading rhetorical water while trying to figure out what they wish to say. In general, academic writing should be precise, elucidatory, to the point (i.e., at the service an argument), while conveying something of the nature and meanings of the object of study. A keen sense of style and avoidance of inappropriate styles and registers, like journalese, dry or technical writing styles (which are more endemic to the natural sciences and vocational education), writing from a position of assumed authority (the emeritus complex), and so on, is not generally to be recommended. Close readings are often preoccupied with the significance of small details as meaning-producing elements. This too might be thought of as a kind of reframing (or unframing) strategy analogous to the alternation of establishing shots, medium shots and close ups in film. Lawrence Kramer, Richard Middleton, Stan Hawkins, Susan McClary, Alan Moore, and others have written on this matter. I will not rehearse their arguments here, except to state that any given moment in a musical performance or work can seem to unlock something integral to its nature and attendant cultural meanings. A shift in perspective is typical of such moments, which should be faithfully recognised in the direction of the reading. While these moments can be textual or structural, in the sense in which Kramer has commented on at length, typically such moments are performance based: they rely as much on the manner of the performance as the content (in the traditional senses) of what is expressed—that high note the singer hits, the intensity of the aggregate instrumental force at a particular moment, a sudden drop-out in the instrumentation, the correspondence of a visual gesture to a musical one, the way the rules of the game change at a particular

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moment. “Content” can matter profoundly, however, and should not be brushed aside, but it is always situation dependent (rather than context dependent, since situation has the capacity to become content). There is no compelling reason not to keep the two (content and situation) in balance: a reading needn’t be overly technical to convince (although attention to technical organisation can lend an analysis authority depending on the questions one is asking). Most people, however, understand art, literature or music on some level and should be capable of writing about its expressive facets. Research on any subject shouldn’t be restricted to experts in a given field as background training can create blind spots just as much as it has the potential to offer vistas onto the conventional means and habits that accrue in any given set of practices. It is sometimes the case, moreover, that researchers unfamiliar with a given intellectual or expressive terrain will underestimate or miss relevant details, or seem naively unaware of an argument that has been comprehensively played out already in a field more familiar with the terrain. To return briefly to the metaphor of recording or mixing multitrack musical recordings, something is required initially to get a study on track. What Kramer (1990) calls “hermeneutic windows” are especially useful when it comes to the romantic classical repertory, which is an art of understatement (or underdetermination). There one must consciously seek out relevant details that offer windows onto the expressive totality or which bring to the surface neglected or implicit layers of cultural meaning. These windows help the reader to get on track with their analytical work. Popular culture doesn’t always work in quite the same way. The “track” the analysis pursues can be any number of things. When studying cultural uses of music technology, one is required to attend to how technology mediates meanings, and the track might in this case be a certain vocal sound or technique, a vintage instrumental sound, or the use of virtual or real recording space. The queer studies scholar correspondingly will attend more to markers of gender and sexuality in a given expressive act. These are the productive biases or “prejudices” that give a study direction. While details matter, so do generalities—put differently, meaning can reside on different planes of experience. The greatest conceit in scholarly research for much of the twentieth century has been the assumption that everybody hears and experiences as we do—the “we” being trained academics or musicians. As I have commented before, the assumptions behind any reading need to be unpacked, and while our own experiences undoubtedly matter, they might be a symptom of our training as much as

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representing a broad intersubjective view. It is always relevant to ask, who hears this way? Or for whom does this music matter? More precisely, what are the circumstances that led to this mode of listening/reading and which allow it to continue and to resonate with others as a cultural practice? Factors that might be missed in approaches focusing on details or expressive content are the overall affective tone of an object or event—a mood or intensity that might carry through from the beginning of a performance to its end, or the perceived centre of an object to it boundaries. The material and sensory level of an experience is often the first to vanish in analytical reductions but it can be of fundamental import to listeners. Bodily actions and responses are blind spots in traditional analysis; the physical and sonic environments in which performances take place have similarly long been neglected. It is hard to overemphasise the value of this point. The primary focus of close reading and cultural studies more generally is usually the contemporary world and its recent history. This is true even in encounters with historical materials (classical music from earlier periods for example). Again, while this might seem a weakness upon first examination, another way of looking at it is as a sign of scholarly humility. Interpretations which aim to unpack expressive meanings are always guided to some extent by the affective responses and critical evaluations of the researcher. Historiography (especially certain areas of research like studies of cultural memory, microhistory and Foucault’s archeology) has brought a reflexive dimension even to the study of history, where the researcher acknowledges his or her historical positionality, just as the emic-etic (or insider-outsider) debate in anthropology has long highlighted the importance of recognising that the unavoidable fact that the researcher speaks and writes from a given cultural position rather than being neutral or transparent. In order to say anything of value in a cultural reading of the arts, however, it is necessary to connect on some level with the object of the study; to move in sympathy with it and to allow it to shape your subjectivity as much as projecting your prejudices onto it (in a philosophical sense). In order to feel, however, it is necessary to feel in the present tense. This is inescapable. As Antonio Damasio (quoting T. S. Eliot) puts it, “you are the music while the music lasts” (1999, 172). This chapter is in some ways antithetical to the aims of close reading. Overflowing with generalities and appeals to authority, its limitations are all too apparent to me and perhaps they will be to others. Maybe such shortcomings are inevitable, however,

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in writing as reflexive as this. Whenever attempting to account for prior actions in reflective argumentation, it is necessary to look beyond the big ideas to the actual world of substances and actions from which they derive.13 Crossing that horizon towards experience will remain an as yet unfulfilled promise in this particular piece of work. References Abels, Birgit. “Introduction.” Austronesian Soundscapes. Performing Arts in Oceania and Southeast Asia, edited by Birgit Abels, 15–22. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. —. “For the Love of Soundscapes. Sama Dilaut Cultural Identity, the Sensory Experience of Travelling at Sea, and the Acoustic Claiming of Space.” Oceans of Sound: Sama Dilaut Performing Arts, edited by Birgit Abels with Hanafi Hussin & Matthew Santamaria), 97–108. Hildesheim: Olms, 2012. Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Barz, Gregory & Timothy J. Cooley. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1972. Bauer, Martin W. & George Gaskell. Qualitative Researching, with Text, Image and Sound. Los Angeles: Sage, 2000. Blum, Stephen. “In Defense of Close Reading and Close Listening.” Current Musicology 53 (1992), 18–54. Burns, Lori & Melissa Lafrance. Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity & Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2002. Cheng, William. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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On the rootedness of concepts in physical experiences, see Lakoff and Johnson 1999. On the inseparability of both physical experiences and extended (reflexive) consciousness from affective responses, see Damasio 1999.

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Clarke, Eric. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Cone, Edward T. Musical Form and Musical Performance. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1968. Cook, Nicholas. “Beyond Music: Mashup, Multimedia Mentality, and Intellectual Property.” The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman & Carol Vernallis, 53–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cook, Nicholas & Mark Everist. “Preface.” Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook & Mark Everist, i–xii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Creswell, John W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, & Mixed Methods Approaches. International Student Edition. Los Angeles: Sage, 2014. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage Books, 1999. Emmerson, Simon. “Aural Landscape: Musical Space.” Organised Sound 3 (1999): 2, 135–40. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Glendinning, Simon. In the Name of Phenomenology. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1974. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis, pp. 128–38. London: Hutchinson, 1980 [1973]. Hawkins, Stan. “Musicological Quagmires in Popular Music: Seeds of Detailed Conflict.” Popular Musicology Online 1 (2001). Accessed May 22, 2014. http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/01/hawkins.html. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

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Heinonen, Yrjö (ed.). Taide, kokemus ja maailma: Risteyksiä tieteidenväliseen taideiden tutkimukseen [Art, experience and the world: meeting points in interdisciplinary arts research]. Turku: Utukirjat, 2014. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: California University Press, 2013. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Kerman, Joseph. Musicology. London: Fontana Press, 1985. Kramer, Lawrence. Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. —. Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Krims, Adam. “Postmodern Musical Poetics and the Problem of ‘Close Reading’.” Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, edited by Adam Krims, 1–14. OPA: Amsterdam, 1998. —. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic, 1999. Lanza, Joseph. “Foreground Flatland.” The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman & Carol Vernallis, 622–27. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. —. “Museum Without Walls, Art History Without Names: Methods and Concepts for Media Visualization.” The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog & John Richardson, 253–78. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge, 2002. Middleton, Richard, ed. Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Miller, Kiri. Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Moore, Allan F. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Morris, Mitchell. The Persistence of Sentiment Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Richardson, John. Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. —. An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. —. “Music Moves. Musical Dynamics of Relation, Knowledge and Transformation.” Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek Scott, edited by Stan Hawkins, 139–58. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. —. “Closer Reading and Framing and Ecocritical Music Research.” Music Moves, edited by Gerlinde Feller et al. Göttingen Series in Musicology. Hildesheim: Olms, forthcoming. Richardson, John & Susanna Välimäki. “Ääni [Sound].” Taide, kokemus ja maailma: Risteyksiä tieteidenväliseen taideiden tutkimukseen [Art, experience and the world: meeting points in interdisciplinary arts research], edited by Yrjö Heinonen, 21– 76. Turku: Utukirjat, 2014. Rogers, Holly. Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art Music. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd edition. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2002. Scott, Derek. From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The meanings of Performing and Listening. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Sosnoski, James. “Hyper-readers and Their Reading Engines.” Passions, Pedagogies, and Twenty-First Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP; Urbana: Natl. Council of Teachers of English, 1999. 161– 77. Thompson, Kristin. “Good, Old-fashioned Love (i.e., Close Analysis) of Film.” 2013. David Bordwell’s website on cinema, accessed 23 May, 2014. http://www.david-

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bordwell.net/blog/2013/06/12/good-old-fashioned-love-i-e-close-analysis-offilm/. Titon, Jeff Todd. “Textual Analysis or Thick Description?” The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, 171–80. New York & London: Routledge, 2003. Titon, Jeff Todd & Mark Slobin. “The Music Culture as a World of Music.” Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World’s Peoples, 4th edition, edited by Jeff Todd Titon, 1–33. Belmont: Shirmer/Thomson Learning, 2002. Torvinen, Juha. “Fenomenologinen tutkimus: lähtökohtia kriittiseen keskusteluun [Phenomenological research: points of departure for critical debate].” Musiikki 1 (2008), 3–17. —. “The Ecology of the Northern Tone: a Phenomenological Approach with Examples from Erik Bergman and John Luther Adams.” Music and the Idea of the North, edited by Rachel Cowgill et al. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Välimäki, Susanna. “Musiikkianalyysi musiikkikritisisminä [music analysis as music criticism].” Synteesi 2 (2002), 67–87. Veal, Michael E. Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing Music Videos: Aesthetic and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Wimsatt, W. K. & Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954.

Birgit Abels

The Academicist Malady Writ Large: Music Studies, the Writing of Polyphony and the Not-Quite-Post-Colonial Pacific Ocean The history of music studies1 as a European-derived academic discipline is usually written along a series of turning points which are widely accepted as having been of seminal importance to the development of both the field’s epistemological interest and its disciplinary emergence.2 One of the most revered of these turning points continues to be the publication of Guido Adler’s The Scope, Method and Aim of Musicology, an article originally published in German in 1885. In this text, Adler famously proposed a disciplinary model according to which “musicology” consists of historical and systematic musicology, comparative musicology being a sub-discipline of systematic musicology. He distinguished between the “science of music” (Musikwissenschaft), and the “study of music” (Musikologie), equating the science of music to historical musicology and the study of music to comparative musicology. Adler’s use of “the science of music” versus the “study of music” is crucial: in inquiring into the -logy of music, Adler suggested that (comparative) musicology was about difference in the many musics of the world. Dutch ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst would bring up the term musico-logica in the mid-twentieth century when introducing the con1

2

As the term musicology has come to mean different things on both sides of the Atlantic, I use the expression “music studies” in this text in order to refer to all the so-called sub-disciplines within music(ology) departments around the world. It is an inclusive term referring to the “varied but connected disciplinary approaches” within the study of music broadly conceived. See Nooshin 2008; Cook 2014: 256. I wish to thank Eva-Maria van Straaten for her thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this piece.

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cept of ethnomusicology to a wide academic readership,3 thereby stressing the meaningfulness inherent in relating to the world through music. Adler, in his 1885 text, was far from Kunst’s reasoning. Yet, unlike many who would quote and use his text in the decades to come, Adler did not categorically distinguish specific musics on the basis of then-dominant cultural geography—for instance “European” versus “extra-European” musics—as numerous generations of musicologists after him including Kunst would. In fact, in my reading, he was even veering towards considering music as what in current-day terminology is usually called a cultural practice. Ethnomusicology is that branch of music studies commonly taken to engage most concretely with music as a cultural practice, and while today it naturally is a highly diversified field, it has traditionally been considered to refer to that area of music studies occupied with a) non-European and b) so-called folk music, which includes music of European local traditions. According to this dated but still common definition, European-composed music, for instance, does not fall within the scope of ethnomusicology, and for a long time, popular music was considered to be out of its epistemological reach as well. Such definitions amount to a zoning, I argue, of academic responsibilities and assumed competences, but they also amount to a division of our planet into ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’—a mindset we should have left behind long ago. But we haven’t. Quite possibly because in continuing to write about music along the west/rest divide, cast into disciplinary structures, we reify a world order within which we, musicologists trained for the most part in the North Atlantic academic system, feel safe. With this, musicology is standing in a long line of writing about the musical Other in a particular way. In this contribution, then, I shall particularize this discursive tradition and show to what extent it matters greatly, and certainly much more than we’re typically inclined to acknowledge, even in current-day academic practice, which is one more reason to embrace the intellectual restlessness advanced by this edited volume: a 3

Kunst was not the first though to use the term ethnomusicology, and in spite of his lax reasoning behind the re-naming—“The original term ‘comparative musicology’ […] fell into disuse, because it promised more—for instance, the study of mutual influences in Western art-music—than it intended to comprise, and, moreover, our science—does not ‘compare’ any more than any other science,” ethnomusicology was far more than a renaming of the field formerly known as Comparative Musicology (Kunst 1959: 1).

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powerful one. I shall do so by turning to the example of European traveler-scholars’ writing about multi-part singing on the Pacific islands in the late eighteenth century, that is, prior to the formal institutionalisation of musicology back in Europe. Around the turn of the twentieth century, comparative musicology grew directly out of, among other things, this tradition of writing about, and conceiving of, the musics of the world; in other words, out of a need for a musical cartography of the world. I shall link this exemplary history of writing about the ‘Other polyphony’ to a malady that continues to plague a good deal of current-day musicological reasoning, namely, academic ethnocentrism and the long-term effects of the North Atlantic thinking habit of disciplining the mode of knowledge that is music, which is irreducible to language, so as to fit and conform to language-based academic discourse. To illustrate this, I shall refer to current ethnomusicological work on so-called Pan-Pacific Pop before I conclude with my own take on the far-reaching implications of all of this for present day music studies and specifically, cultural musicology. While this chapter is based on several years of research in the Pacific, I do not explicitly and extensively draw on specific ethnographic data; this is primarily to ensure transparency of the main arguments and readability, and in keeping with the essayistic style of the text. The writing of ‘polyphony’ James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 were immensely significant for eighteenth-century European cultural history. During his second voyage (1772–1775) on board the Resolution, one of Cook’s missions was to probe speculations that had been around for centuries: was there a mystical continent to the south of the known world awaiting discovery? Cook and his crew mapped a considerable chunk of the, from a European perspective, hitherto unexplored part of the planet. They also collected a significant number of musical instruments. In addition to this, Cook’s second journey proved important for music studies due to the wide circulation of the many descriptions and even transcriptions of the Pacific Islands’ music that resulted from the journey. While these weren’t the first descriptions of Pacific Islands musical practices to arrive in Europe, they were met with considerable interest, especially in elite circles. James Burney (1750–1821), son of Charles Burney, Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) and his son, Georg Forster (1754–1794), are among the traveler-writers whose impressions and descriptions of the performing arts in the

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South Pacific of their time were widely read and discussed. All three accompanied Cook on his second journey and provided descriptions of Polynesian music in the 1770s. Also, all three, albeit in different ways, had received enough training in European music that they were able to verbalize their musical experiences in the Pacific. Johann Reinhold Forster, for instance, described music he heard on Tonga as follows: Their voices were far from disagreeable and what is still more remarkable, they were accompanying one another harmonically. When these had done, an opposite set of singers took them up, and at last they all chorused. (Forster 1982, 379)

His son, Georg, for his part, was especially impressed by the details of Maori multipart singing: Of this tune they continue to sing the two first bars till the words of their song are at an end, and then they close with the last. Sometimes they also sing an under-part, which is a third lower, except the two last notes, which are unisons. (Forster 1777, 615)

Descriptions like these, sometimes accompanied by their authors’ transcriptions of the music into staff notation, had strong repercussions among the educated European public. They challenged the prevailing notions of cultural world order and musical cartographies. Contemporaries were bewildered by the existence of multi-part singing on the one hand and assumed savagery on the other. The term of choice, in fact, was usually “polyphony” rather than “multi-part singing”; it would take until the mid-twentieth century for this to be reconsidered.4 As the news of the music of the South Pacific circulated widely, profound debate about the implications gathered steam in Europe.5 The ensuing discussion was fueled by primarily two well-known forces: attraction and repulsion. As fascinating as the news from the South Pacific was, it was also un4 5

See, for instance, Clarke 1948, 35–36; Wachsmann 1967: 110–12; Kolinski 1973: 279; Malm 1972: 247–49. For a much more detailed historical account of the repercussions the discovery of Oceanic multi-part singing had among intellectuals in Europe, see Agnew 2008.

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settling; as much as it was alluring, it was also appalling. Like Charles Burney (see Agnew 2008, 90ff.), August Wilhelm Ambros was amazed by the descriptions of Polynesian music he had encountered, and by the fact that multi-part singing should exist on the Pacific Islands, of all places: The triad these singers produced and this little tattoo-piece in thirds are curious in their own way because these children of nature without effort seem to have found that which remained concealed to all of the ancient world, and until the 10th century also the Christian world: harmony, even if only the very first seeds thereof. In any case it is striking to encounter this powerful element of musical art even here already.6

The islands of the Pacific Ocean were not the only areas, from a European perspective, that were being discovered at the time. Yet, the islands quickly acquired a special position in the emerging evolutionist thinking. The reasons for this are complex, but for my present purpose one particular aspect may be singled out as especially significant. Elsewhere, local traditions and music were apparently conceived of as more compatible with the extant, hierarchically organized classification systems that were significant for European thinking of the time. Pacific Islands cultures, treated as one generic category, associated as they were with the origins of humankind and romantically idealized concepts like that of the noble savage, seemed to run counter to the basic premises of this world view: if the Pacific Island cultures which had been described by the Forsters and James Burney were supposed to be at a primal stage of sophistication, then how was it possible that these people could demonstrate this powerful, presumably exclusively European symbol of musical sophistication, namely multi-part singing, when not even the ancient Greeks had it? In the late 1770s, Johann Nikolaus Forkel clothed his bewilderment at the new testimonies of Polynesian music that had reached him as follows: 6

“Der Dreiklang jener Sängerinnen und dieses in Terzen erklingende Zapfenstreichstückchen sind in ihrer Art eine Merkwürdigkeit, weil die Naturmenschen wie im Traume gefunden haben, was der ganzen antiken Welt—und bis in’s 10. Jahrhundert auch der christlichen verborgen blieb—Harmonie; wenn auch nur gleichsam die ersten Keime davon. Jedenfalls ist es interessant, diesem mächtigen Faktor der Tonkunst selbst hier schon zu begegnen”. (Ambros 1862: 10)

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Birgit Abels We still have to mention a second musical curiosity which Mr. Forster encountered during his third visit to New Zealand. It must seem curious that harmony, or multi-part music, which, as we now generally believe for good reasons, was not even known to the resourceful and distinguished Greeks, should be found among barbarians isolated from the remaining world.7

“Primitive people” with “sophisticated” music—how could this be? The riddle turned into a nagging question the implications of which would become a painful threat in much of the musical discourse of late eighteenth-century’s Europe. In 1787, ten years after the Forsters’ and Burney’s observations had reached Europe, Friedrich Arnold Klockenbring (1742–1795) wrote in his essay Something About the Music in the Newly Discovered Southern Lands: Even though the New Zealanders are tremendously more tough, martial and passionate than the inhabitants of the islands situated closer to the equator and under milder skies: their music surpasses that on Taheite and Anamoka greatly in terms of variety and softness of sounds.8

What exactly was to be the nature of these connections that Klockenbring drew between the alleged culture-specific characteristics and musical structures and features? This question (and his aching inability to find a satisfactory answer) led Klockenbring to complain about a fundamental shortcoming in the majority of the travel reports he had been able to see at the time—they included little substantial infor-

7

8

“Wir müssen noch als seine zwote musikalische Seltenheit anführen, was dem Hrn. Forster bey seinem dritten Besuch in Neu-Seeland aufgestoßen ist. Es muß seltsam scheinen, dass Harmonie, oder mehrstimmige Musik, die, wie man jetzt allgemein glaubt, und aus guten Gründen glauben kann, nicht einmal den erfinderischen und feinen Griechen bekannt gewesen ist, bey gewissen von der übrigen Welt ganz abgesonderten Barbaren gefunden werden sollte”. (Forkel 1778, 318) “Obgleich die Neuseeländer ungemein viel härter, kriegerischer und heftiger von Leidenschaften sind, als die Bewohner der näher nach dem Aequator zu, unter mildern Himmelsstrichen gelegenen Inseln: so übertrifft doch ihre Musik an Mannigfaltigkeit und Sanftheit der Töne, die Musik auf Taheite und Anamoka gar sehr”. (Klockenbring 1787, 93)

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mation on music and dance. Klockenbring’s stance was clear: this had to change. Music, after all, was of great interest because it was the oldest and most universal form of art. It had a profound impact on “primitive” people, Klockenbring maintained: the closer these people were to nature, the more closely their music was connected to their morality. Like many of his contemporaries, including Charles Burney, Klockenbring’s interest in the notes of James Burney and the Forsters was inspired by a quest for the “primal origins of music”, which, a century later, would breathe life into the thenemerging academic discipline of comparative musicology and would haunt Erich von Hornbostel and his colleagues. In eighteenth-century encounters with musics other than those the explorers had encountered during their travels across the Pacific Ocean, the close connection between “primal music” and generally low “cultural development” seemed manifest. Wasn’t it almost a miracle, asks Klockenbring rhetorically and in a slightly sharp-tongued manner, that the Maori had a “national music” which had never come close to the “hands of art”, as he put it, and yet displayed an intervallic structure that was comparable to the one that had gained a foothold in Europe after the ancient Greek modal system had faded? Wasn’t it a miracle, in other words, that European “artificiality” possessed an antipodal New Zealand “naturalness”—and wasn’t it even more of a miracle that they weren’t entirely unlike each other? In his text, a fascinating document of its time in many regards, Klockenbring concluded from all this that due to their immediate relationship to moral and value systems, the world’s musics needed to be studied thoroughly—a comparative musicologist call avant la lettre. And indeed, in the decades to come, interest in the musics of the world and their (assumed) relationship to their respective social and cultural contexts would grow steadily. Yet, the riddle revolving around Pacific multi-part singing remained, and other unsettling examples from various parts of the world would soon follow suit. In the light of this long series of unsettling news in the eighteenth century, the need to re-negotiate the established European world order became ever more important. As speaking about the world’s many musics turned into speaking about the taken-for-granted world order, the discussions about the world’s musics became ever more political. Accordingly, in the opinion of Vanessa Agnew, it was only “[b]y disavowing or downplaying certain characteristics of Polynesian music, [that] scholars could uphold the singularity of Western music” (Agnew

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2008, 174). As the colonial expansion of European powers proceeded, speaking and writing about other musics, much like Orientalist travel literature and painting, grew into potent discursive strategies undergirding European domination. (Writing about) Multi-part singing, comparative musicology and ethnomusicology The seed that was slowly growing into the formative period of comparative musicology and its well-delineated area of inquiry had been planted well before eighteenthcentury voyaging brought home information about music that had hitherto not been heard (of). However, it was not primarily the characteristics of these others musics —here their multi-part texture—that were disconcerting to eighteenth century intellectuals. Rather, it was their implications: the existence of multi-part singing among Pacific Islanders undermined the culturally hierarchical world order which formed the backdrop of then-current music history writing in Europe. This was not entirely news at the time as there had been earlier reports; but what was new was that for the first time the discussion stepped out from the recondite world of intellectuals and became an essential public question that was challenging established notions of European cultural supremacy, which had been taken to be clearly manifested in music. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘other’ multi-part singing would become an important milestone toward the establishment of comparative musicology as an academic discipline. This was the case exactly because it brought established notions about European music into question, while bringing concepts of cultural identity and difference to the fore. Suddenly, it became evident that in talking about other musics, one’s own identity was at stake: “Polynesian music was not dissimilar enough” (ibid., 114) from European music to allow proponents of the sophistication of European music to avoid questioning their position. Even after ethnomusicology had dropped comparative musicology’s latent evolutionist frame of thinking, this concept of the musical “other”—and inherently the musical “own”—remained central, if not fundamental to the discipline. Ethnomusicological research is still primarily preoccupied with musical “others”, imagined or otherwise, analyzing them, reifying them, attempting to preserve them; processes that sometimes even result in what might be termed the ethnomusicological stewardship and preservationist safeguarding of a given musical “culture”. In the twentieth

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century, numerous ethnomusicologists have grappled with the necessity to theorize about change in so-called traditional music, hybridity, and musical flows across national borders. They have even struggled with the question of whether or not to study popular music at all, and if so, how. This shows the extent to which we, as current-day music scholars, are sometimes inclined to detach from the realities of contemporary life-worlds. We have come a long way since Oceanic multi-part singing challenged the foundations of the enlightened musical worldview, but the structures and mechanisms underlying the reception of Polynesian singing are not dissimilar from the mechanisms that, until recently, made it difficult for musicologists to think about traditional music as music that is very much alive, capable of accommodating structural change. In the following, I will illustrate this difficulty by looking at musicological appraisals of current so-called transnational popular music on the Pacific Islands; appraisals which at times covertly, at times less covertly, tie in smoothly with the European history of writing about Pacific multi-part singing as briefly outlined above. In doing so, I shall emphasize the necessity for a heightened awareness of how we as musicologists are part of, and contributors to, discursive formations and even dispositifs which are highly political (cf. Charissa Granger’s contribution to this edited volume). This will support my case for more theoretical and methodological restlessness in music studies. Pacific Island musics in the twenty-first century and the tenaciousness of the music(ologic)al cartographies of the world In spite of the prevailing romantic image of isolated islands covered in coconut trees and ringed by white sand beaches far across the sea, and in spite of eighteenth-century ideas about remoteness and cultural isolation, the Pacific Islands have not been existing in a vacuum. According to all the evidence we have—mainly linguistic and archaeological in nature—Pacific Islanders have developed and utilized trade and communication networks ever since they first settled there. On a more global scale, the nation-state is considered to be the backbone of a political order; from this perspective, these Pacific networks have to be described as “transnational”. Networking across vast spaces, some of them now divided by national boundaries, has always been central to the Pacific Islander identity. According to Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa:

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Birgit Abels So much of the welfare of ordinary people of Oceania depends on informal movement along ancient routes drawn in bloodlines invisible to the enforcers of the laws of confinement and regulated mobility. (Hau’ofa 1993, 11)

Hau’ofa, who passed away in 2009, regularly spoke of the South Seas as “the ocean that links us all”. He saw the vast expanse of sea enveloping the Pacific Islanders as a pathway rather than a boundary. Multiple identifications and overlapping spheres of action link this huge area, and by doing so they constitute cultural identity, he argues; and they did so long before the onset of the so-called globalization. It was not until the emergence of the above-mentioned concept of national music, which rapidly gained currency in Europe in the eighteenth century, that nationhood as a discourse became a primary point of reference—even framework—for the construction of musical identity. In the course of the colonial project, a primarily nationstate-based order was imposed on the rest of the world as well: as is well known, colonizers would sometimes even enforce this order by defining national borders where there had previously been none at all. They were literally placing their own colonies on the map, and painting their world order on paper. The boundaries that have subsequently emerged have not necessarily encouraged or inhibited cultural flows, and do not necessarily do so today. Considered against this backdrop, and read against the blueprint of eighteenthcentury discourse about multi-part musical textures, the notion of musical transnationalism appears in an ambiguous light when it comes to musics in the Pacific Island world. Addressing this ambiguity, in the following I will therefore share a few thoughts on musicological constructions of spaces, primarily in the postcolonial and neocolonial contexts. Specifically, I will draw attention to the so-called Pan-Pacific Pop and explore how Pan-Pacific Pop has been constructed musicologically as a transnational musical ‘genre’. Who negotiates the musical flows that are associated with Pan-Pacific Pop, and whose boundaries, in this case, turn a musical flow into a transnational musical flow? Between the lines, an implicit but pressing question will emerge: outside of the realm of North-Atlantic popular music, does not that ubiquitous tendency in cultural studies to relate transnational musical phenomena primarily to very narrow postcolonial contexts and identity constitute a domesticated and academic reiteration of the colonial project? If this is possible, then how can we musicologists act on this? These considerations, and my answer to the last-mentioned

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question, will lead to another call for intellectual restlessness, this time supported by Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of de-linking as an analytical strategy: de-linking as in de-centering taken-for-granted modes of knowing such as those predominant in North Atlantic music studies, and bringing to attention alternative epistemologies, “other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics” (Mignolo 2007, 453).9 Considering alternative epistemologies, here, does not refer to, for instance, taking into account so-called indigenous knowledge, which should be a matter of course (even though in my view it has often times been (mis)used to help construct ethnomusicological authority). Rather, I will call for more audacity in exploring the spaces in-between epistemologies, and in situating musicological inquiry right there. In other words, for intellectual restlessness. Musical transnationalism in the ‘post-‘colonial Pacific The term Pan-Pacific Pop, by definition, describes what is often termed a transnational musical practice, as the Pan-Pacific is divided by many national boundaries. “Transnational” is usually used to describe a constitutive feature of another term that is often used vaguely: globalization. At times, the term globalization is even used as a metonym for the present, a present in which the concept of nationhood merges into one global economy-scape and in which an unprecedented intensification of time and space perception is taking place. Globalization, according to this definition, is an important and sometimes even useful concept, but in connection with PanPacific Pop it may actually have a blinkering effect. Planetarity has been proposed, most prominently perhaps by Gayatri Spivak,10 as an alternative mode of thinking 9

10

The quote immediately brings to mind Korsyn 2003. Clearly, the key issues Korsyn raises in his book are related to the one I outline in this text, especially in their concern about the presumed authority to speak about music. “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere […]. To talk planet-talk by way of an unexamined environmentalism (is) referring to an undivided ‘natural’ space rather than a differentiated political space […] to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous”. (Spivak 2003, 72)

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through mobile processes and dynamics of various kinds, as it accommodates a more sensory and less political conceptualization of the material world; the human place in it; and, perhaps most importantly, human responsibility within the world. Spivak suggests that we think of ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, as subjects inhabiting a planet that is only on loan to us, rather than possessed by us (Spivak 2003, 72). In proposing the concept of planetarity, Spivak paves the way, I argue, for a de-linking of the political and economic structures within which we move from the spaces within which we act, not categorically, but in order to facilitate a different perspective. Accordingly, thinking of the cultural flows in the Pacific Islands in planetary rather than globalized terms might seem to allow for a more mobile understanding of the dynamics of Pan-Pacific Pop, and of that facet which is often termed the “transnational” aspect of that music. The adjective transnational is generally used to describe phenomena and processes that span across several countries. In speaking about transnational music, a political construct—the nation-state—is therefore referred to as a referential framework for the description of the spatial dissemination of music. It is assumed, if not taken for granted, that the nation-state constitutes the primary discursive, and hence interpretive, framework for these musical flows. But in “Most of the World” (Chatterjee 2004), which is that part of the world that in the course of its history has been colonized and sometimes still is, colonial powers have inscribed these territorial boundaries onto the earth. This cannot be undone, regardless of whether or not these boundaries are still relevant to contemporary political world order. As such, these inscriptions are part of the present because they contributed to its coming into being. In this sense—and only in this sense—there will never be postcolonial spaces: colonial constraints have been formative to the emergence, and therefore to the nature, of both political and academic postcolonialism. In this, they continue to inform our thinking about the many musics of the world, and the example of Pan-Pacific Pop illustrates this, regardless of whether we analyze these musics in global or in planetary terms. According to the not-so-extensive academic literature on the musics of Oceania, Pan-Pacific Pop is the result of the musical influences of Christian missions on local music, of influences from rock and country music from the United States of America, and of inter-island musical influences stemming primarily from popular varieties of the Hawai’ian hula (Kaeppler 1998, 127, 137). Pan-Pacific Pop emerged, according

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to established musicological interpretations, in the first half of the twentieth century (ibid.); a name for the core repertory of Pan-Pacific Pop was “stringband music”. The label Pan-Pacific Pop exists, but the term stringband is much more widely used on the Pacific Islands. However, it does not primarily denote a genre; rather, it serves as an elastic container term for a specific instrumentation consisting mainly of guitars and ukuleles, the predecessors of which were brought to the islands by European seafarers. A wide range of musical practices trade under the musicological label of PanPacific Pop, practices as disparate as Papua New-Guinean stringband music and the so-called “new kava song” on Tonga (which is also accompanied by an ensemble predominantly consisting of stringed instruments). New kava song is part of the Tongan kava ceremony. Kava is an intoxicating drink made from pepper root, and the kava ceremony, in the course of which political decisions are made, is built around a ritualized sequence of kava drinking, political speeches and singing. Listening to new kava song, one can easily identify harmonic progressions, and indeed, both the multipart singing and the stringed instruments contribute to a musical texture that can be interpreted as being based on harmony. New kava songs are distinguished from old kava songs, the so-called faikava repertoire, by—among other things—the instrumental accompaniment. Faikava was described extensively by travelers in the eighteenth century, who gave detailed accounts of their listening experience. Two of these descriptions stem from the pens of Johann Reinhold Forster and James Burney, respectively: two or 3 women began a Song which had something very cadenceful & musical in it and certainly ran through a greater variety of notes than at Otahaite and the Isles where all their Tunes are a variation of 3 notes only & at N. Zealand of 5. To the song they beat time, with snapping the second finger & thumb, holding the other 3 fingers erect. Their voices were far from disagreeable & what is still more remarkable they were accompanying one another harmonically. When these had done[,] an opposite set of singers took them up, & at last they all chorused. (Forster 1982, 378) They sing in parts, keeping the Same time and varying the 4 notes without ever going beyond them. [S]o many singers & so few notes you always hear the whole

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Other sources, including local and regional oral history, confirm that this singing tradition has a long history that includes detailed Tongan music theorizing, such as descriptions of the musical function of the individual voices, a systematic explanation of the names of these voices, an elaborate system of rules governing the provisions for melodic movement of the individual parts and a contextualization of musical structures with cosmological and ethical systems of thought. By Forster and Burney’s time, Tongan multipart singing was a system of thought and values that could not be communicated in any medium other than music. This system of thought and values—this epistemology, as it were—has normative and pedagogical implications and scope. It is authoritative. And it is a discursive space in which traditional knowledge and traditional values are continuously being negotiated. Musicological literature barely offers any information on the respective multipart textures of old and new kava songs. In the early twentieth century, stringed instruments were added to the vocal ensemble, resulting in the emergence of what is now called new kava song. This has prompted musicologists to classify new kava song as Pan-Pacific Pop—together with, for instance, Papua New Guinean stringband music, but not ‘old’ kava song, from which new kava song has directly emerged. New kava song and Papua New Guinean stringband music share barely more than the fact that stringed instruments are used for accompaniment. What is it, then, that determines whether a musical practice is classified as Pan-Pacific Pop? Apparently, parts of these traditions can be considered as having been influenced by a presumed outside source, in this case the use of European-derived musical instruments. There is no mention of how these instruments are used or of any other characteristics of these musics beyond this somewhat isolated feature. The second determinant that becomes apparent is that these musical practices happen to be taking place in a geographical area that fits into someone else’s sense of world order: the “Pan-Pacific”. In this case, this world order is the most comfortable one for the North-Atlantic academy, more specifically to North Atlantic humanities and social sciences. The term Pan-Pacific Pop opens up a discursive space that is intrinsically political because within this space, “cultures” can be, and are being, defined, ordered, and related to

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one another. This space is also a sphere of action because within this space, agents —those who hold power—can impact the structures facilitating this very negotiation. By contributing to the categorization of the musics of the world in the ways that I have just described, North Atlantic music studies has very concretely been contributing to the negotiation and affirmation of hegemonic world orders: through evolutionist narratives in the eighteenth century just as much as through globalist narratives in the twenty-first century. This shows painfully how colonial power is potentially maintained in and through musicological discourse. Outlook The Pacific Islands are home to a great number of popular musical practices. Nationstate borders are certainly not irrelevant in the Pacific, but when it comes to music as a cultural practice, it becomes clear very quickly that some of these borders have been created on someone else’s drawing board and that many musical practices are not necessarily influenced or impacted by these political borders. They move happily and freely across the borders that exist in our minds and on our maps; they de-link musicological cartographies musically, for instance by combining synthesisers, I-IVV chord progressions, traditional song and ukuleles. With this, they also unmask the concept of “transnationalism” as universalist and euro-centric, for it is primarily the North Atlantic academy’s map of the world on which these practices are “trans-” in any way. This illustrates the significant extent to which music studies too is a fundamentally political sphere of action, in which some spaces are recognized, defined, or affirmed, while others are not. It is a sphere of action in which, through representation, cultural world order continues to be (re)produced, well after the writing culture debate. Clearly, transnationalism is a most useful concept in some contexts; but not in others, such as that of Pan-Pacific Pop. Postcolonialism remains a buzzword, but in the North-Atlantic academy, postcolonial thinking at times continues to be profoundly colonial at heart, such as when we construct spaces and cultural belonging the way that musicologists have in connection with Pan-Pacific Pop. This is partly so, I believe, because even postcolonial theory has not been able, or maybe not in a radical enough manner, to fully reach beyond the constraints of European(-derived) intellectualism. Pleading for de-colonial rather than postcolonial aspirations, Walter D. Mignolo says that “the de-colonial

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shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy” (Mignolo 2007, 452; also cf. the introduction to this edited volume). The dichotomy may not be as stark as Mignolo paints it here, even though I find the gist of his statement convincing. For Mignolo’s ideas about de-linking do resonate, in my view, with Spivak’s notion of planetarity, which itself can be read as enabling a de-linking practice: Spivak suggests it is worthwhile to attempt to conceive of this theorizing as a planetary rather than a global phenomenon in order to enable ourselves to reach beyond the structures of our own thinking. De-linking doesn’t mean putting aside North Atlantic epistemology; rather, it seeks to make room for alternative ways of knowing and to put into perspective the dominant infrastructures of knowledge production in which all other epistemologies are peripheral. Likewise, planetarity does not and cannot deny globalization; rather, it enables an alternative perspective. Spivak says: Today, when these class divisions have altered the demographics of the former colonies and their diasporas, the metropolitan [musicologist] must imagine planetarity, displace the ‘primitivism’ of the colonizer into the subaltern of the postcolonial, existing now in a cultural formation historically compromised by centuries of delegitimization; through the transforming work of imagining the impossible other as the figured other imagines us. (Spivak 2003, 98)

Imagination, for my present purpose, is the keyword here: the possibility of thinking that, and of thinking about things differently. This is central to cultural musicology, and this is the point where thinking planetarily becomes a de-linking practice. We (academics) have long realized that we are in desperate need of more pluralistic and more accommodating ways of conceiving of the world’s cultural flows. As musicologists, listening is what we do best, so this might as well be our answer to that need: for instance listening out for multi-part singing in Tonga, how it has transformed over the last centuries, and how it accommodates musical strategies that can be considered a sonic de-linking,11 for example when guitars are used in ways similar to

11

Referring to Mignolo, the term sonic de-linking has been suggested by Johannes Ismaeil-Wendt (2011)

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the ways local drums are used, or when the melodic interaction of the singing voices, toying with the rules of Tongan multi-part singing, playfully disguises harmonic progression in ways that evoke a sense of instability for the listener relying on chord progressions for listening orientation. These are practices of sonic de-linking because they break up entrenched, and colonial, associations: if chord progression is European-derived and this specific type of multi-part singing is “traditionally” Tongan, then new kava song is, in the words of Edward Soja, both-and-also. It de-links this musical practice from, among other things, the narrative of colonial musical “influence” and the “indigenous adoption” thereof. Decolonization will perhaps forever remain an ideal. Yet, on the intellectual level as well, to me, de-linking seems to be the one option for us to escape from the century-old fallacies of our own intellectual tradition, which I have tried to sketch with reference to multi-part singing in the Pacific and Pan-Pacific Pop. In the introduction to this edited volume, I suggested that cultural musicology has the opportunity to bring alternative epistemologies to the fore. New kava song is one such alternative epistemology. So, to begin with, instead of domesticating a PanPacific, perhaps we need to listen to musical flows in Oceania in more planetary than global terms; and instead of contributing to the decades-long soul-searching and egopolitics of ethnomusicology, perhaps we need to prioritize close listening practices (cf. John Richardson’s contribution to this edited volume) over disciplinary territorialism: close listening practices that enable us to listen out for practices of sonic de-linking, and naturally, re-linking. Identifying sonic de-linking practices, in turn, has the potential to enable inter-epistemic communication and therefore insights into what all, and how, the musics subsumed under Pan-Pacific Pop mean to whom. References Adler, Guido. “Guido Adler’s ‘The Scope, Method and Aim of Musicology’: An English translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary.” Trans. by Erica Mugglestone, Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 (1981), 1–21. Originally published as id. 1885. “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft.” Vierteljahresschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1, 5–20. Agnew, Vanessa. Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Ambros, August Wilhelm. Geschichte der Musik: vol. 1: Die Anfänger der Tonkunst. Breslau: F.E.C. Leuckart, 1862. Burney, James. With Captain James Cook in the Antarctic and Pacific. Edited by Beverly Hooper. National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1975. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Clarke, Henry Leland. “The Missing Term between Polyphony and Homophony.” Bulletin of the American Musicological Society 11/12/13 (1948), 35–36. Cook, Nicholas. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. “Etwas von der Musik der um den Südpol herum wohnenden Völker, aus Cooks Reise um die Welt.” Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek 2 (1778). Forster, Georg. A Voyage round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook during the Years, 1772, 3, 4, and 5. Vol. 2. London: B. White, J. Robson, P. Elmsly and G. Robinson, 1777. Forster, Johann Reinhold. The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster (3): 1772–1775, edited by Michael Hoare. London: Hakluyt Society, 1982. Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by E. Waddell and E. Suva. Fiji: The University of the South Pacific, 1993. Ismaeil-Wendt, Johannes. tracks’n’treks. Postkoloniale Musik und Postkoloniale Analyse. Münster: Unrast, 2011. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. et al. (eds.). Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Volume 9: Australia and the Pacific Islands, 127, 137. New York: Routledge, 1998. Klockenbring, Arnold. “Etwas über die Musik in den neuerlich entdeckten Südländern, besonders über den Unterschied zwischen dem Intervallsystem dieser Völker und dem unsrigen”. Aufsätze, verschiedenen Inhalts. Hannover: Im Verlage der Schmidtschen Buchhandlung, 1787. Kolinski, Mieczyslaw. “How about ‘Multisonance’?” Ethnomusicology 17 (1973): 2, 279. Korsyn, Kevin. Decentering Music: a Critique of Contemporary Musical Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kunst, Jaap. Ethnomusicology: a Study of Its Nature, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities to Which Is Added a Bibliography. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959.

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Malm, William P. “On the Meaning and Invention of the Term ‘Disphony’.” Ethnomusicology 16 (1972): 2, 247–49. Mignolo, Walter D. “De-linking.” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 2, 449–514. —. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 2012 (2000). Nooshin, Laudan. “Ethnomusicology, Alterity, and Disciplinary Identity: or ‘Do We Still Need an Ethno-?’ ‘Do We Still Need an –ology?’.” The New (Ethno)Musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 71–75. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Wachsmann, K. P. “Multi-Part Techniques.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 19 (1967), 110–12.