The Cambridge History of World Music 0521868483, 9780521868488

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: world music’s histories
Part I - Histories of world music
1 - On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship
2 - Music cultures of mechanical reproduction
3 - Western music as world music
Part II - The history of music before history
4 - Foundations of musical knowledge in the Muslim world
5 - Indian music history in the context of global encounters
6 - Native American ways of (music) history
Part III - Music histories of global encounter and exchange
7 - Encounter music in Oceania: cross-cultural musical exchange in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyage accounts
8 - Music, history, and the sacred in South Asia
9 - Music, Minas, and the Golden Atlantic
Part IV - The Enlightenment and world music’s historical turn
10 - Johann Gottfried Herder and the global moment of world-music history
11 - Tartini the Indian: perspectives on world music in the Enlightenment
12 - The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology
Part V - Music histories of the folk and the nation
13 - Korean music before and after the West
14 - Folk music in Eastern Europe
15 - A story with(out) Gauchos: folk music in the building of the Argentine nation
Part VI - Asian music histories
16 - Four recurring themes in histories of Chinese music
17 - On the history of the musical arts in Southeast Asia
18 - Musicians and the politics of dignity in South India
Part VII - Institutions and politics of representation
19 - Images of sound: Erich M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive
20 - Music in the mirror of multiple nationalisms: sound archives and ideology in Israel and Palestine
21 - Repatriation as reanimation through reciprocity
Part VIII - The globalization of world music in history
22 - Landscapes of diaspora
23 - Sufism and the globalization of sacred music
24 - Global exoticism and modernity
Part IX - Musical discourses of modernity
25 - Encountering African music in history and modernity
26 - The politics of music categorization in Portugal
27 - The world according to the Roma
Part X - Musical ontologies of globalization
28 - Disseminating world music
29 - Musical antinomies of race and empire
30 - Globalized new capitalism and the commodification of taste
Part XI - Beyond world-music history
31 - The time of music and the time of history
32 - The ethics of ethnomusicology in a cosmopolitan age
33 - Toward a new world? The vicissitudes of American popular music
Afterword: a worldly musicology?
Index

Citation preview

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

WORLD MUSIC Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected religions, cultures, languages, and nations throughout world history. The chapters in this History take readers to foundational historical moments – in Europe, Oceania, China, India, the Muslim world, North and South America – in search of the connections provided by a truly world music. Historically, world music emerged from ritual and religion, labor and life cycles, which occupy chapters on Native American musicians, religious practices in India and Indonesia, and nationalism in Argentina and Portugal. The contributors critically examine music in cultural encounter and conflict, and as the critical core of scientific theories from the Arabic Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Overall, the book contains the histories of the music of diverse cultures, which increasingly become the folk, popular, and classical music of our own era. PHILIP V. BOHLMAN

is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and Honorary Professor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. A pianist, he is the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret and ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago. Among his honors are the Edward Dent Medal, the Berlin Prize, the Derek Allen Prize from the British Academy, and the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. He is currently completing the volume Ethnomusicology for the Cambridge Introductions to Music series.

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

WORLD MUSIC * EDITED BY

P H I L IP V . B O H L M A N

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521868488 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge history of world music / edited by Philip V. Bohlman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-86848-8 (alk. paper) 1. World music – History and criticism. I. Bohlman, Philip Vilas. ML3545.C26 2014 780.9–dc23 2013043745 ISBN

978-0-521-86848-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For our teachers, from whom we learned to value the histories of world music.

Contents List of illustrations xi List of tables xiv Notes on contributors xv Acknowledgments xxiv Introduction: world music’s histories 1 PHILIP V. BOHLMAN

21

PART I HISTORIES OF WORLD MUSIC

1 . On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship BRUNO NETTL

2 . Music cultures of mechanical reproduction

55

PETER MANUEL

3 . Western music as world music

75

NICHOLAS COOK

PART II THE HISTORY OF MUSIC B E F O R E H I S T O R Y 101

4 . Foundations of musical knowledge in the Muslim world

103

STEPHEN BLUM

5 . Indian music history in the context of global encounters BONNIE C. WADE

6 . Native American ways of (music) history BEVERLEY DIAMOND

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155

125

23

viii

Contents

PART III MUSIC HISTORIES OF GLOBAL E N C O U N T E R A N D E X C H A N G E 181

7 . Encounter music in Oceania: cross-cultural musical exchange in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyage accounts 183 VANESSA AGNEW

8 . Music, history, and the sacred in South Asia

202

JAIME JONES

9 . Music, Minas, and the Golden Atlantic

223

SUZEL A. REILY

PART IV THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND WORLD M U S I C ’ S H I S T O R I C A L T U R N 253

10 . Johann Gottfried Herder and the global moment of world-music history 255 PHILIP V. BOHLMAN

11 . Tartini the Indian: perspectives on world music in the Enlightenment 277 SEBASTIAN KLOTZ

12 . The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology 298 BENNETT ZON

PART V MUSIC HISTORIES OF THE FOLK A N D T H E N A T I O N 319

13 . Korean music before and after the West

321

KEITH HOWARD

14 . Folk music in Eastern Europe 352 TIMOTHY J. COOLEY

15 . A story with(out) Gauchos: folk music in the building of the Argentine nation 371 BERNARDO ILLARI

Contents

ix

PART VI ASIAN MUSIC HISTORIES

395

16 . Four recurring themes in histories of Chinese music

397

JONATHAN P. J. STOCK

17 . On the history of the musical arts in Southeast Asia

416

MARGARET KARTOMI

18 . Musicians and the politics of dignity in South India

441

KALEY MASON

PART VII INSTITUTIONS AND POLITICS OF R E P R E S E N T A T I O N 473

19 . Images of sound: Erich M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive 475 LARS-CHRISTIAN KOCH

20 . Music in the mirror of multiple nationalisms: sound archives and ideology in Israel and Palestine 498 RUTH F. DAVIS

21 . Repatriation as reanimation through reciprocity

522

AARON A. FOX

PART VIII THE GLOBALIZATION OF WORLD M U S I C I N H I S T O R Y 555

22 . Landscapes of diaspora

557

TIMOTHY ROMMEN

23 . Sufism and the globalization of sacred music

584

REGULA BURCKHARDT QURESHI

24 . Global exoticism and modernity

606

W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD

PART IX MUSICAL DISCOURSES OF MODERNITY

25 . Encountering African music in history and modernity GREGORY BARZ

635

637

x

Contents

26 . The politics of music categorization in Portugal

661

SALWA EL-SHAWAN CASTELO-BRANCO

27 . The world according to the Roma

678

MICHAEL BECKERMAN

PART X MUSICAL ONTOLOGIES OF G L O B A L I Z A T I O N 703

28 . Disseminating world music

705

TRAVIS A. JACKSON

29 . Musical antinomies of race and empire

726

WAYNE MARSHALL AND RONALD RADANO

30 . Globalized new capitalism and the commodification of taste

744

TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR

PART XI BEYOND WORLD-MUSIC HISTORY

31 . The time of music and the time of history

765

767

MARTIN CLAYTON

32 . The ethics of ethnomusicology in a cosmopolitan age

786

KAY KAUFMAN SHELEMAY

33 . Toward a new world? The vicissitudes of American popular music 807 RICHARD MIDDLETON

Afterword: a worldly musicology? MARTIN STOKES

Index

843

826

Illustrations 0.1

Transcription of Tupinamba melody in de Léry 1578 page 15 5.1 South Asia in Asia perspective. Joseph Schwartzberg, A Historical Atlas of South Asia, Digital South Asia Library, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Courtesy of the Digital South Asia Library, http://dsal.uchicago.edu 126 7.1 Tupaia, [Musicians of Tahiti, June 1769] Four Tahitians: two dressed in the mare playing the nose flute; two dressed in the tiputa beating drums. British Library, London. Add. MS. 15508, f. 10 189 7.2 Engraving by F. Bartolozzi after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, A View of the Inside of a House in the Island of Ulietea [Raiatea], with the representation of a dance to the music of the country (Hawkesworth 1773, II, pl. 7 [fp. 265]) 190 7.3 Engraving by John Record after John Frederick Miller [Tools and instruments from the Society Islands] (Hawkesworth 1773, II, pl. 9, p. 213) 191 7.4 William Sharp, A Night Dance by Men in Hapaee/ J. Webber del.; W. Sharp sculp., London: s.n., 1784 193 9.1 Church of Our Lady of the Pillar, Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. Courtesy of Antonio Marciano Ribeiro 231 9.2 A page from the manuscript of “Maria Mater Gratiae” by Marcos Coelho Netto, showing his signature and date. Courtesy of the Museu da Inconfidência 233

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List of illustrations

9.3

9.4

9.5 9.6 9.7 10.1a and 10.1b 10.2 10.3 10.4

10.5 10.6 14.1

14.2 14.3 16.1 16.2 16.3

José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita, Antiphona de Nossa Senhora, measures 22–31. Francisco Curt Lange, ed. 1951. Mendoza, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo 236 Manoel Dias de Oliveira, “Bajulans,” measures 1–8. Adapted from Mauricio Dottori, ed., n.d., unpublished manuscript 238 A “passo” in Campanha, Minas Gerais 239 The candombe drums. Courtesy of the Arturos (photo by Lúcio Dias) 246 Vissungo no. 29, collected by Aires da Mata Machado Filho 247 “O sanctissima!” – Sicilian sailor’s song (from Herder’s Nachlaß) 260 Herderian polymath identities 264 Additional Herderian polymath identities 264 Woodcut from the 1869 edition of Herder’s Cid translation – “El Cid in Valencia and in death” (romance 49) 266 Lines 783 and 784 from the Poema de Mio Cid 271 Herder’s Cid, romance 68, lines 49–54 273 Béla Bartók recording songs in Zobordarázs (Dražovce), Slovakia, with a wax-cylinder recorder, 1907. Photograph by Gyula Kósa and housed in the Bartók Archives of the Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest 356 “Ozwodna” (c. circle dance), sung by Krzysztof Trebunia-Tutka, Zakopane, Poland, 2003 360 “Ganga,” sung by Azra Bandic´, Mevla Luckin, and Emsija Tatarovic´ 361 Yang Yinliu’s A Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music 400 Musicologist Shen Zhibai (photo by Zhao Jiaqin; published in Shen 1982, n.p.) 409 Section of a score for the nanyin chamber music genre 413

List of illustrations

18.1

18.2

19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.6

19.7 19.8 19.9 22.1

22.2 22.3 22.4

27.1 27.2 27.3 27.4

M. T. Manoharan performs on the oboe-like kurum kul al for a local Hindu teyyam at a sacred grove in ¯ Kannur District, Northern Kerala, March, 2004 (photo by Kaley Mason) 446 Religious festival organizers serve Malayan musicians in Kannur District, Northern Kerala. January, 2004 (photo by Kaley Mason) 455 Carl Friedrich Stumpf 476 Erich Moritz von Hornbostel 478 Three galvanos and copies made from them (photo by Dietrich Graf ) 482 Transcription by Carl Stumpf – “Siamese Nationalhymne” 483 Transcription by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel 483 Edison phonograph for the home (c. 1905) (photo by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz) 484 The “Hornbostel Black Box” 487 Measurements from a xylophone from Burma by Hornbostel 488 Typescript of Hornbostel’s unpublished manuscript on experiments with music psychology 489 First Landing of Columbus, Theodore de Bry, 1596. Copper engraving, tinted. From H. Benzano, Amaricae Retectio, Frankfurt 1596. akg-images. Used with permission 558 Flyer for Caribbean Festival ’07 (Philadelphia) 571 Poster for Philly Carnival ’07 572 “Landfall of Columbus,” Roots junkanoo group on parade, Nassau 2004 (photograph by André J. M. Major). Used with permission 580 The Czigany melody from the Uherská collection 682 Score of “Černý cigán” 690 Cover of original “Černý cigán” (1922) 691 Score of “Cigán” 692

xiii

Tables 4.1a Species of melodic and rhythmic composition (Cleonides, Kindī) page 109 4.1b Fārābī’s classification of melodic frameworks (alh ạ̄ n) 109 4.1c Avicenna’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics 109 4.1d Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī’s classification of Shudūd 109 4.2 The seven divisions of harmonics (Aristoxenus and al-Kindī) 115 16.1 Summary of historical primary sources compared in this chapter 398 31.1 Interpretations of cosmic symbolism 770

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Contributors V A N E S S A A G N E W is Associate Professor in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where she works on the cultural history of music, the history of science, postcolonial theory, travel, and historical reenactment. Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (2008), her monograph on Charles Burney and musical travel, received the Kenshur Prize for EighteenthCentury Studies and the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. Major fellowships include those from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, Australian Research Council, and National Maritime Museum. Her current book project deals with a 1925 collecting expedition to Angola. G R E G O R Y B A R Z is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University and Professor at the Odeion School of Music, University of the Free State, South Africa. General editor of “African Soundscapes” (Temple University Press), he co-edited The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing in Music and the Arts (2011) and Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2nd edn, 2008). He published Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda (2006), Music in East Africa (2004), and Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania (2003) and is a Grammy-nominated producer for Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda (2007). M I C H A E L B E C K E R M A N is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music at New York University and Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University. He is the author of numerous books, including Janáček as Theorist (1994) and New Worlds of Dvořák: Searching in America for the Composer’s Inner Life (2003) and is currently writing on such subjects as composition in Terezín, musical middles, the way stories about disability affect performance, and the genesis of “Happy Birthday.” S T E P H E N B L U M teaches in the music doctoral programs of the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the consulting editor for music of the Encyclopaedia Iranica and is currently completing a short book on Ethnomusicology and Music Theory to be published by Oxford University Press in the series “Theory in

[xv]

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Contributors

Ethnomusicology.” A Persian-language collection of his writings on Iranian musical practices will be published by the Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art in Tehran. P H I L I P V . B O H L M A N is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and Honorarprofessor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. A pianist, he is the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret and ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago. Among his honors are the Edward Dent Medal, the Berlin Prize, the Derek Allen Prize from the British Academy, and the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. He is currently completing the volume Ethnomusicology for the “Cambridge Introductions to Music.” S A L W A E L - S H A W A N C A S T E L O - B R A N C O is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Her field research in Egypt, Portugal, and Oman resulted in publications on cultural politics, musical nationalism, identity, music media, modernity, and music and conflict. Recent publications include her edited four-volume Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX (2010) and her co-edited Music and Conflict (2010). With Dieter Christensen she wrote Traditional Arts in Southern Arabia: Music and Society in Sohar, Sultanate of Oman (2009). She has served as Vice President of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2007–9) and of the International Council for Traditional Music (1997–2001, and 2009–13). She was elected President of the International Council for Traditional Music in 2013. M A R T I N C L A Y T O N is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Durham University. He has published widely on topics including North Indian classical music, rhythm and metrical theory, interactions between Indian and Western music, and the history of ethnomusicology. He is the author of Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre, and Form in North Indian Rāg Performance (2000) and Music, Time, and Place: Essays in Comparative Musicology (2007), and the co-editor of The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (2nd edn, 2012). N I C H O L A S C O O K is 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. His books include Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which has appeared in fourteen different languages, and The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (2007), which won the Society for Music Theory’s 2010 Wallace Berry Award. His most recent book, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, appears in 2013. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of Academia Europaea.

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xvii

T I M O T H Y J . C O O L E Y is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses on Polish and North American vernacular and popular musics. His book, Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians (2005), received the 2006 Orbis Prize for Polish Studies. He served as the Editor of the journal Ethnomusicology from 2006 to 2009. His current research considers how musical practices are combined with lifestyle sports to create meaningful affinity groups with global reach and is the subject of his forthcoming book, Surfing about Music. R U T H F . D A V I S is Reader in Ethnomusicology and Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on the music of the Arab and Jewish Mediterranean and the wider Middle East, especially on her fieldwork in mainland Tunisia and the island of Djerba. Her most recent volume, A Musical Ethnography of British Mandate Palestine, 1936–1937, based on Robert Lachmann’s “Oriental Music” archive and broadcasting projects in Jerusalem, is published with A-R Editions (2013). She has recently held positions as a Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy. B E V E R L E Y D I A M O N D is the Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland where she established the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place. Her research on indigenous music has ranged from Inuit drum dances, and Sámi joik, to indigenous audio recording and expressive culture in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools. She co-edited Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges (2012). Among her other publications are Native American Music in Eastern North America (2008) and Music and Gender (2000). She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2008, named a Trudeau Fellow (2009–12), and a Member of the Order of Canada (2013). She is President of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2013–15). A A R O N A . F O X is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he served as Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology from 2003 to 2008 and as Chair from 2008 to 2011. His research broadly focuses on language and music relations, working-class and popular culture, music and social identity, issues of place and subjectivity, ethnographic methodology, and semiotics and poetics. His recent work engages issues of cultural and intellectual property and the repatriation of Native American cultural resources. He is the author of Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (2004).

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Contributors

K E I T H H O W A R D is Professor of Music at SOAS, University of London. Currently researching Korean dance and North Korean music, he has written or edited seventeen books, including Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage (2012), Singing the Kyrgyz Manas (with Saparbek Kasmambetov, 2011), Korean Kayagum Sanjo (with Chaesuk Lee and Nicholas Casswell, 2008), Zimbabwean Mbira Music on an International Stage (with Chartwell Dutiro, 2007), Creating Korean Music (2006), Preserving Korean Music (2006), and Korean Pop Music (2006). He founded and managed the SOASIS CD/DVD label and OpenAir Radio, and is editorial chair of the “SOAS Musicology Series” (Ashgate). B E R N A R D O I L L A R I has taught at the University of North Texas since 2001, where he specializes in Latin American music between 1600 and 1800. He is the author of Doménico Zipoli: Para una genealogía de la música “clásica” latinoamericana (2011), and the editor of Juan Pedro Esnaola’s Cuaderno de música (1844) (2009) and Música barroca del Chiquitos jesuítico (1998). He has published articles in the Revista Argentina de Musicología, of which he was founding co-editor, Revista de Musicología, Música e Investigación, and Resonancias, among others. He is the recipient of a career recognition award from the Konex Foundation (2009) and the Premio de Musicología “Casa de las Américas” (2003). T R A V I S A . J A C K S O N is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (2012). His other writings include essays on jazz history and historiography, intersections between jazz and poetry, Duke Ellington’s “travel suites” and world music, the politics of punk, and popular music and recording technology. He is currently conducting research for a monograph on post-punk music, graphic design, discourses of branding, and attitudes regarding race and empire in the United Kingdom between 1977 and 1984. J A I M E J O N E S is a College Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University College Dublin, where she also coordinates the Masters in Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow of the Humanities Institute of Ireland and the Chair of ICTM Ireland. Her research has focused on music and religion in India. She is currently writing a book that addresses the performance and positioning of devotional Hindu musics in Maharashtra state, India. M A R G A R E T K A R T O M I is Professor of Music in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Australia’s Monash University, where she pioneered the study of Asian music and other aspects of ethnomusicology from 1969, was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and was awarded the Order of Australia and

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the Centenary Medal for services to music. Her books include On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments (1990), The Gamelan Digul and the Prison-Camp Musician Who Built It (2002), and Musical Journeys in Sumatra (2012). S E B A S T I A N K L O T Z is Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Leipzig. His research interests are broadly interdisciplinary, including music and knowledge cultures, ecological theories of auditory perception, music and the technological unconscious, and comparative musicologies of the metropolis. He is the author of “Music with Her Silver Sound”: Kommunikationsformen im Goldenen Zeitalter der englischen Musik (1998) and Kombinatorik und die Verbindungskünste der Zeichen in der Musik zwischen 1630 bis 1780 (2006). He is the editor of Musik als Agens urbaner Lebenswelten: Musiksoziologische, musikethnologische und organologische Perspektiven (2008). L A R S - C H R I S T I A N K O C H is Head of the Department of Ethnomusicology and the Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Museum of Ethnology, Professor for Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne, and Honorary Professor for Ethnomusicology at the University of the Arts in Berlin. His research focuses on the theory and practice of North Indian raga-music, organology, Buddhist music, the aesthetics of music in intercultural perspective, music and medicine, media and ethnomusicology, popular music and urban culture, historical recordings, and music archeology. Most recently, he is the author of My Heart Sings: Die Lieder Rabindranath Tagores zwischen Tradition und Moderne (2012). In 2012, he was the co-recipient of the Bruno Nettl Prize for the History of Ethnomusicology from the Society for Ethnomusicology. P E T E R M A N U E L has researched and published extensively on musics of India, the Caribbean, and Spain. His several books include Cassette Culture: Popular Musics and Technology in North India (1993) and Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey (1988), as well as two documentary videos on IndoCaribbean music. Formerly an amateur performer of flamenco guitar, jazz piano, and sitar, he has served as editor of Ethnomusicology and teaches ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. W A Y N E M A R S H A L L has held postdoctoral fellowships at MIT, the University of Chicago, and Brandeis University, and he currently teaches in the Music Department at Harvard University. His work deals with media technologies, public spheres, and cultural politics vis-à-vis hip-hop and reggae and their global circulations. An active blogger at wayneandwax.com, he has published in the Journal of

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Contributors

Popular Music Studies, Popular Music, and The Wire, among others, and co-edited Reggaeton (2009). K A L E Y M A S O N is Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently finishing the book The Labor of Music: South Indian Performers and Cultural Mobility, which examines how a subaltern performer caste merged feudal traditions of ritual servitude with modern practices of musical work in the Indian state of Kerala. He is also engaged in research that traces the relations between radical socialism and song in Malayalam popular music. He is the co-recipient of a fellowship from the Neubauer Family Collegium at the University of Chicago, which will be dedicated to the archeological analysis of early recordings of Indian music. R I C H A R D M I D D L E T O N is Emeritus Professor of Music at Newcastle University. Having taught for many years at the Open University, he works principally in the areas of popular music and the cultural theory of music. Recent publications include Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music (2006), Musical Belongings: Selected Essays (2009), and a revised edition of The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (co-edited with Martin Clayton and Trevor Herbert, 2012). He is a Fellow of the British Academy. B R U N O N E T T L has taught since 1964 at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where he is now Professor Emeritus of Music and Anthropology. His research interests have been Native American music, the music of Iran, improvisation, and, recently, the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Among his several books, the best known is The Study of Ethnomusicology (revised edition, 2005), and the most recent is Becoming an Ethnomusicologist: A Miscellany of Influences (2013). Recipient of several honorary doctorates, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2012, received the Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies. R E G U L A B U R C K H A R D T Q U R E S H I is Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Alberta, where she is also a member of the Religious Studies Advisory Council, a Research Fellow at folkwaysAlive!, and the Director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology. Her research interests include musical agency, poetics and politics, diaspora and globalization, South Asia, Canada, and Islam. Among her major publications are Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (1986, 1995), Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics (2002), and Master Musicians of India: Hereditary Sarangi Players Speak (2007). She is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Society.

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R O N A L D R A D A N O teaches ethnomusicology at the University of WisconsinMadison. His books include New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (1993) and Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (2003). He is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled Properties of Animation: The Racial Feeling of US Black Music, and on a co-edited collection, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. He co-edits the book series “Refiguring American Music” (Duke University Press) and “Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology” (University of Chicago Press). S U Z E L A N A R E I L Y is a Reader in Ethnomusicology and Social Anthropology and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Forum at Queen’s University Belfast. Her publications include the monograph Voices of the Magi: Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil (2002), and the edited volumes Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities (2000) and The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking’s Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century (2006). She has produced a website/ CD-Rom based on John Blacking’s ethnography of the Venda girls’ initiation school. T I M O T H Y R O M M E N is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the music of the Caribbean, with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical theory, ethics, mobility studies, diaspora, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. He is the author of “Mek Some Noise”: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (2007), which was awarded the Alan P. Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2008, and of “Funky Nassau”: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (2011). K A Y K A U F M A N S H E L E M A Y is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her recent publications include Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (co-edited with Sarah Coakley, 2007), Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora, a special double volume of the journal Diaspora (co-edited with Steven Kaplan, 2011), and Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World (3rd edn, 2013). Her 2009 article “The Power of Silent Voices, Women in the Syrian Jewish Musical Tradition” was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology Jaap Kunst Prize. She was the national Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar for 2010–11. W . A N T H O N Y S H E P P A R D is Professor of Music and Department Chair at Williams College and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

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His interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century opera, film music, vocal timbre, and cross-cultural influence and exoticism. He has received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, the Kurt Weill Prize, and the Alfred Einstein Award, and his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is author of Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (2001) and is completing Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination. J O N A T H A N P . J . S T O C K is Professor and Head of the Department of Music at University College Cork, Ireland, having recently served at the University of Sydney as Associate Dean for Research, Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His current research interests include the history of Chinese music, everyday musical life in Taiwan, and research ethics. He is author of two books on music in China and one world-music education textbook, as well as articles in these subject areas and in the fields of English traditional music, music analysis, and fieldwork methods. M A R T I N S T O K E S is King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College, London. He is also Honorary Professor of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests lie in Europe and the Middle East, particularly in Turkey and Egypt. His The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (2010) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. T I M O T H Y D . T A Y L O R is Professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (2001), Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (2007), and The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (2012), and is the co-editor, with Mark Katz and Tony Grajeda, of Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (2012). He is currently writing a book on capitalism, music, and social theory. B O N N I E C . W A D E is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California at Berkeley. She has published widely on India, including Music in India: The Classical Traditions (1979), Khyāl: Creativity within North India’s Classical Music Tradition (1984), and Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India (1998). She has held the Chambers Chair in Music and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies, and has twice served as Chair of the Department of Music, as well as Dean of the College

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of Letters and Science at Berkeley. She is a past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology. B E N N E T T Z O N is Professor of Music at Durham University. He is General Editor of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press) and the book series “Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain” (Ashgate). His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical culture, with particular interest in British science, theology, and intellectual history. He has published The English Plainchant Revival (1999), Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (2000), and Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2007), and is currently writing Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge University Press).

Acknowledgments History books are themselves the products of long and complex histories, and The Cambridge History of World Music is no exception. The origins of the book responded to discussions during the 1990s about whether world music, still regarded by many as a music without history, could be contained by and in a volume of history or histories. Initial discussions about the shape and contents of the book inevitably navigated a series of queries about where the sources of history might be. Would the volume’s narratives borrow from world or universal history? From the world domination of the West and the response of postcolonialism? From national folk musics or transnational popular musics? From the institutions that mass produce music on a global scale or those that disseminate knowledge about all musics? Because the common models of historiography and music historiography, not least because of their dependence on the privileged position of music literacy in the histories of Europe and North America, offered few answers to these questions, it became necessary to reframe the questions, indeed, the very ways in which we think about the ontologies of music historically. Questions and discussions, therefore, accompanied this book at every stage, newly posed by each contributor, most often with substantial doubt about the viability of any kind of history of world music. So it was that the book grew, not out of the ascription of order to music already occupying a place in a history whose outlines were familiar to the West. The challenge embraced by the contributors was that of moving beyond the familiar outlines to explore the writing of music history and music historiography anew. It is the ways in which this challenge was embraced by the many who shaped this book that I gratefully acknowledge here. At the moment of my first conversation with Penny Souster of Cambridge University Press at the 1997 IMS Congress in London, she expressed an unwavering conviction that the Cambridge Histories would provide a home for world music, not because of the familiarity of parallel projects, but rather because of the possibilities of rethinking music historiography that a history of world music would set in motion. I have been no less indebted for the strength of conviction from Cambridge University Press to Victoria Cooper, Penny’s

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successor, both at the Press and in her stewardship of this project. Vicki truly believed in this project, and I can only hope the book honors her belief. I express my deepest gratitude to both Vicki and Penny for their support. That support has also depended on the marvelous assistants in Humanities at the Press, whose patience I tested far too often. In its final stages, the book has benefited enormously from the assistance of Fleur Jones and Jessica Ann Murphy, whose practicality and wisdom I gratefully acknowledge. During copyediting I was very fortunate indeed to work with Jan Baiton, whose attention to detail and generous spirit always made the book better. Two institutions – one historically old, the other relatively young – have been particularly important for the ways in which they provided the intellectual foundations for CHWM. As the book took shape, it was my privilege to work increasingly at the Phonogram Archive at the Berlin Ethnology Museum. So steeped in the historical reassessment of world music since the rise of recording technologies is the Phonogram Archive that research at the archive, in Berlin and beyond throughout the world, provides a laboratory for historiography itself. I benefited from remarkable hospitality in Berlin, especially in the projects in which I share with the director, Lars-Christian Koch. The study of world music at the University of Chicago began in earnest in the late 1980s when ethnomusicology was established in the Music Department. As ethnography took students and colleagues farther afield into the world, the historical grounding upon which we all stood also responded. The historiographic imagination of former and current students and colleagues from Chicago (among them, Vicki Cooper) fills the pages of CHWM, and I should like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude. I am particularly indebted to my Chicago colleagues in ethnomusicology: Melvin L. Butler, Travis A. Jackson, Kaley Mason, and (as ever, even in London) Martin Stokes. As the book took shape, I also benefited from a series of marvelous graduate assistants, and I could not be more grateful to them: Suzanne Wint, Jaime Jones, Rachel Adelstein, Andrea F. Bohlman, Rumya Putcha, and Michael A. Figueroa. The contributors to CHWM have shaped its histories and multiplied its historiographies to a remarkable degree. They bring their own disciplinary alignments, and they write of world musics in distinctively different ways. Some have felt a conviction that a larger historical project for world music was long overdue; others have remained suspicious of such a project even as they helped to shape it. The book that they have collectively realized is massive in scope and sweeping in erudition. My heartfelt thanks go to all the contributors, for your patience and for your willingness to take on history so boldly.

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The pages of the present book powerfully bear witness to the ways in which music histories are ultimately histories of human beings, their labors and their loves, and the ways in which music is intimately and indelibly imprinted upon labor and love. In the historical longue durée of my personal music history, the labor and love of Ben, Andrea, and Christine accompany me every day. Philip V. Bohlman Oak Park and Berlin

Introduction: world music’s histories PHILIP V. BOHLMAN

I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift. Derek Walcott, “The muse of history” (1990) How little is really civilized in a civilized people? And how might we account for this condition? And to what degree does this provide a measure of happiness? That is to say, to the happiness of individual beings, for the abstraction that an entire people can be happy, when any part thereof suffers, is a paradox, or more to the point an illusion that reveals itself as such, even when we first observe it. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit

The paradox of history and world music There are those who believe that world music does not and cannot have history. In the division of the world between the West and the rest, so these naysayers would have it, history is the domain of the West, and even when history is extended to the rest, it is a history that is not their own. Similarly, the music of the West, at least as it is imagined, performed, ordered, taught, and inherited by the generations, is a music that is inherently historical, if not for the very fact that it survives in notated and literate forms, however conventional or experimental (see, e.g., Taruskin 2005, which takes the commitment to literacy as its point of historical departure). The questions of inheritance and survival are different, so the belief in an alterity that parses the world between the West and the rest has it, when they pertain to world music. The oral is coupled with the traditional, not least in the commitment to oral tradition, and context is valued even more than text. World music may also possess its own forms of temporality, but they do not cohere around the canons of historiography that privilege both the West and the modernity it has claimed as its own since the rise of printing in the fifteenth century. [1]

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The paradox attending the assertions and anxieties that world music does not have history is the purview of neither the West nor the rest, but rather of the common ground of history they share and the connections between them that, in the twenty-first century, but surely long before, have ceased being a matter of reasonable debate (Nettl and Bohlman 1991). History is a matter to be “celebrated” and “proclaimed,” if we take seriously the etymology of the Greek root in the name for the muse of history, Clio (κλείω). By extension, we might observe that historians of Western music are primarily interested in celebrating selfness – their music history, the world wherein they live – and the historians who engage with world music, barely removed from their more accustomed designations as ethnographers (and ethnomusicologists), are primarily interested in proclaiming otherness – recognizing the integrity of the music in worlds inhabited by others. The paradox is evident the moment a historical project shifts beyond the celebration of selfness, as the Cambridge History of World Music does. There is no grand narrative that accelerates as individual chapters move from our past to our present. There is no body of repertory or canon of theoretical treatises that the contributors to this volume share or, for that matter, that provides any measure of underlying unity to what world music at a given historical moment meant to any given self or other. The paradox of a history of world music also mutes the celebration that might accompany this volume as the considerable undertaking that it is. Cautionary tales fill every chapter; self makes an appearance only to be subject to criticism. Rather than Clio singing celebratory praises, the muses whose voices resonate in the following pages come from times and places in which the historical narratives were unsettled and multivalent. The muses who proclaim world-music history may possess the attributes of sacred avatars, who move between cosmological and lived-in worlds in South Asia or between the earth and the dreamworlds of indigenous peoples. The muses of world-music history must also bear witness to the West, proclaiming the injustices of the past but seeking a narrative of reconciliation borne by remembering the violence of racism and colonialism. In Derek Walcott’s figuration in the opening epigraph, Clio gives way to the new muse of history, who seeks a language that liberates the past from enslavement (Walcott 1995). In modern Jewish historiography, drawing upon biblical allegory, it is the “angel of history” who enters as the promise of modernity disintegrates into racism and oppression in the twentieth century. For a twentieth-century critic like Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), confronting history during the rise of fascism, it is not so much a speech-act that reroutes the relation of Jewish to European modernism, but rather the struggle necessitated by wrestling with

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the angel, not unlike the prophet Elijah with the Angel of Death (Benjamin 2010; see also Mosès 2009). The allegorical muses who enunciate world history, thus, embrace the paradox whereof they are born, searching narrative for action and investing historiography with the power to suture parts to a greater whole. And so, too, the Cambridge History of World Music was born of the paradox that there are still those who want world music to have no history. The history constituted by the chapters that follow may contain different narratives about different musics and music cultures, but it is not difference that provides the overarching method of the volume. Taking the chapters together, the volume gathers narratives from which history emerges – as action, as historiography. Accordingly, we bear witness to a shift in narrative strategy that connects the disciplines dedicated to the study of world music: in order to rescue world music from alterity, we shift our efforts from history to historiography. The contributors insist that the paradox of world-music history can be productive because it opens possibilities for a music historiography that reaches far beyond simple celebration and proclamation. As a whole, this volume represents the common ground, liberated from the schism between the West and the rest, yet contested by the histories lived by the many rather than the few.

Moments of world-music history History does not become world history by chance, but rather there are moments in which the subject formations of history acquire global dimensions. In the history of world music, the early twenty-first century has been one of those moments. The chapters of this volume reflect what I should like to call history’s global moment. Contact and encounter are particularly critical for the emergence of global moments. The circulation of culture between the Mughal expansion into South Asia, for example, formed moments of exchange, which, in turn, led to the historical conditions necessary for Indian classical music, not least the canonization of a music theory based on mode, or rāga, and the musician lineages, gharānās, that provided the foundations for the transmission of classical music knowledge and practice, thereby investing it with history (see chapter by Wade in this volume). The encounter between Africa and the Western Hemispheres, too, calibrated history and music history in different ways, mapping it onto the historical contact zones of the Black Atlantic and Golden Atlantic (see Rommen and Reily). Moments of encounter were disruptive, but they also led to new forms of connection, with history flowing in several directions across these. The spread of music theory in the medieval Islamic world (see Blum) and sacred musical practices in Islam until

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the present (see Qureshi) were historiographically significant for the new types of narratives they made possible. Global moments of music history also arose during the displacement that results from power imbalance, the attempts of one culture, nation, or empire to remake the world in its image (see chapters by Beckerman, Castelo-Branco, and Kartomi in this volume). The spread of empire created many of the global moments that we attribute to the making of the West. Critically, however, the spread of music and music history often accompanied the spread of empire (see Cook, Cooley, Jones, and Zon). With attributes of both exchange-value and use-value in Marxian terms, African, Indian, and African American musics flowed as commodities along the borders of empires, reinscribing them for the history of world music (see Manuel, Mason, and Marshall and Radano). The contact zones exposed by colonial expansion also provided possibilities for the rise of indigenous narratives of music history, which might lead to revitalization, revival, and resistance (see Diamond, Illari, Barz, Fox, and Middleton). The power of national narratives of music is by no means a privilege of the West, for their contribution to world history may be to serve as the models for national music histories outside the West, as in the cases of Korea and China (see the chapters by Howard and Stock in this volume; cf. also Sheppard). Historiography, too, has had global dimensions, in the twentyfirst century no less than at earlier global moments. Music entered Arabic writing on music in various forms, as theoretical structure and narrative discourse (see Blum), but also in sweeping attempts to write universal histories; for example, that of the fourteenth-century polymath and Muslim intellectual Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), whose Muqadimmah (prolegomenon), or introduction to universal history, contains some of the most incisive observations about the musics of different African peoples in comparison with the music of Islam prior to the rise of the West (Ibn Khaldun 1958). For Ibn Khaldūn the historical task coalesced around the philological and the ethnographic – in other words, the impulse to collect music in many forms and fragments: At the beginning of Islam, singing belonged to this discipline . . . Abû l-Faraj al-Isfahânî wrote a book on songs, the Kitâb al-Aghânî. In it, he dealt with the whole of the history, poetry, genealogy, battle days, and ruling dynasties of the Arabs. (Ibn Khaldun 1958)

As Stephen Blum richly illustrates in his chapter in the present volume, the history of Muslim peoples and places has never been without music history. Global moments, such as the 1932 Cairo Congress on Arab Music, are not merely the products of colonial encounter, but rather the moments

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at which Muslim musicians and intellectuals turn their historical gaze on the West (see Congress of Cairo 1934; see also Koch on Hornbostel in this volume). A historiography of world music necessarily embraces the universal histories written from the perspectives of other worlds, even universes. The great Bengali writer, musical scholar, and intellectual Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840–1914) wrote extensively about all aspects of South Asian music, especially in books on rāga and organology, but he devoted himself also to an understanding of world music; for example, in his own sweeping Universal History of Music (Tagore 1963), which includes a history of European music that is no less detailed than it is seemingly idiosyncratic for the Western reader. In a historiography of world music, nonetheless, the views on universal history that we gather from Ibn Khaldūn and S. M. Tagore are just as critical to a historical discourse as any others (see Nettl in this volume). Global moments bear witness to the force of materiality and commodity exchange, conditions particularly evident in the history of world music. The world musics that reached Europe during the Age of Discovery, for example, did so not in small measure because of the rise of print technology and the subsequent revolution in the representation of music (see, e.g., Fig. 0.1). The history of recording technology unfolds in relatively strict counterpoint with the history of world music itself, anchoring it in the materiality of wax cylinders, long-playing records, magnetic tape, audio and video cassettes, and the digital media of CDs and MP3s (see Manuel and Taylor, this volume). The foundation of sound archives not only followed the transformation of recording materials, but also stimulated innovation and experimentation (see Koch), which in turn led to the new materials that revolutionized the dissemination of world music (see Jackson). The Cambridge History of World Music bears witness to the global moment of music history that we encounter and shape as our own. The globalization of world music has not effected the end of history (see, e.g., Bohlman 2002), but rather it has made it possible to muster new historical discourses and turn them toward different historiographic ends. The conflict at postcolonial contact zones, the unequal distribution of power, the atavism of racism, and the worldwide exchange of musical materials, all these remain conditions in a world history of the present. If the history of world music that follows succeeds in focusing criticism on the contact zones that converge as the global moment of our own era, and if its authors point toward the ways in which action can be meaningful, we shall have made considerable progress toward a historiography that takes all the musics of the world as its subject matter.

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Technologies of subject formation Technology – old, new, aging, changing, alienating, mediating – provides one of the most persistent accompaniments to the production of world-music history. Every chapter in this volume bears witness to technology as a critical mode of historical change. In some chapters, technology functions indirectly to transform the object “music” to the subject “music history”; for example, when recordings are gathered in archives or produced for distribution as global commodities. In other chapters, the technologies of reproduction and dissemination are implicit in the definition of new musical objects; for example, as a three-minute piece on a wax cylinder but explicit in the formation of new musical subjects, the religious rites or dances of the colonized organized as discrete cultures. In still other chapters, technology has a presence so direct that the historical narrative follows technological change in the first order, musical change in the second. The diverse forms and conditions of technology that connect these chapters notwithstanding, all are linked because technology makes music historical by locating it in time and place. If, indeed, we speak of multiple technologies and multiple musics, their multitude nonetheless suggests the very possibility of a common ground afforded by history in the contexts of the global. From a historiographic perspective, technology acquires historical potential because of the ways it combines the objective and subjective qualities of music, and it is because of this potential and the attempts to realize it that we can speak about the narrative influence of technology across the longue durée of world-music history. In the broadest sense, the most fundamental transformation wrought by technologies is that from oral to written tradition (and in this transformation, too, ethnomusicologists would insist on the multiple forms of orality and literacy). Acts of writing, transcribing, printing, sound recording, and reproducing all result from the ways in which technology is permitted to intervene (see Brady 1999). By transforming the oral to the written, those employing technology recalibrate the relation of music to time, making it possible to represent and describe music in new ways, with speech or images about music, which combine to create discourse about music. Technology repositions music, not only from the moment of performance to the symbols on paper that are meant to approximate it, but also from one place in the world to another. Already in the intervention of technology at this fundamental stage of historical discourse, the acts that render the oral as literate reveal the persistent belief that technology can and should advance and improve. It changes because of a belief that it mediates in order to close the gap between the oral and the written, the distant and the intimate, the musics

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of the other and those we claim for the self. These acts on music become the stuff of world-music history. That the acts on music technology makes possible are both local and global, individual and collective, personal and political, is critical to the ways in which the contributors to this volume examine the impact of technology on world music. In North American ethnomusicology, the possibilities opened by wax-cylinder recording equipment launches history by recording the acts of early collector-scholars – Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore best known among them – responding to the initial endeavors of Walter Fewkes, recording Passamaquoddy music in 1889, and Benjamin Ives Gilman, recording Javanese, Turkish, Kwakiutl, and South Sea Islander music at the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893 (see Nettl 2010, 3–21). During the four years between these first acts of recording, the move from the metaphysics of technology that gathered individual songs to those capable of contextualizing music as a global narrative could not be more direct. At the end of the nineteenth century, the technologies of wax-cylinder recording created both past and future for the musics of the world (see Klotz 1998). For the collector and the archivist – for example, Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, founders of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in 1900 (see Koch and Jackson in this volume) – it was this metahistorical potential that transformed new uses of technology into new discourses of world music. For Carl Stumpf, educated as a psychologist, the technologies of the archive led to a type of experimentation, a reconfiguration of parts and wholes from throughout the world as local recording endeavors near Berlin were archived together with the recordings from colonial and other expeditions. For Hornbostel, the transferral from wax cylinders to the copper galvanos on which field recordings were stored – and thereafter the destruction of the wax cylinders in order to negate the seemingly reverse historical direction produced by disintegrating surfaces – suggested new possibilities for making world music available for future generations (see Ziegler 2006). From 1900 to 1913, Hornbostel reproduced recordings from the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and packaged them for distribution as the Demonstration Collection, above all sustaining their function for scientific comparison and study, complete with fieldnotes, commentary, and transcriptions (see Hornbostel 1963). Drawing upon the same archival materials a generation later, Hornbostel compiled the set of recordings known as Music of the Orient, which were disseminated commercially in 1934 on 78 rpm discs on the Odeon label, intended for more general consumption (see Hornbostel 1979). Both sets were later re-recorded on LP technology by the Ethnic Folkways label, extending their historical scope in the second

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half of the twentieth century to a growing public interested in the folk-music revival, but especially the expanding discipline of ethnomusicology. If Hornbostel’s Berlin recording projects became a history of world music in and of themselves, with technology providing the historical discourse in which they lived and changed, the work of early Jewish-music scholars turned to technology to provide the musical data that would speak for themselves in oral and written forms. The recording projects of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and Robert Lachmann provide the historical contexts in Ruth Davis’s chapter in this volume, both foundational for the understanding of the past and present histories of the Jewish people, for millennia in diaspora, but in the twentieth century gathering in Israel. Both Idelsohn and Lachmann depended on the technological discourses emerging in Berlin – Idelsohn more indirectly, but Lachmann in close association. From 1911 to 1913, Idelsohn conducted fieldwork in Jerusalem, largely within Jewish communities from across the North African, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian diasporas, which he systematically transcribed, with the aid of early tone measurement technologies, mapping the two-millennia diaspora in the printed volumes of the Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies (Idelsohn 1914–32). From the perspective of the reception history that followed, it might be possible to say that Idelsohn “invented modern Jewish music” from the recordings of the past, for this is how his recordings (e.g., in archival and library collections in Israel) were often used; in the twenty-first century, CD technology, once again, makes it possible to analyze and study the Idelsohn recordings, and to place them in a new history of world music (Lechleitner 2005). In her chapter, Ruth Davis shows how technology enabled Robert Lachmann to create a different historical discourse, in which Jewish musicians (and communities) interacted with neighboring musical practices not only in the diaspora but also in the historical and modern lands of Israel in the Levant (Lachmann 1940; cf. Davis 2013, and Davis in this volume). Recording technology served Idelsohn and Lachmann, working with related materials at the same moment in history, in very different ways, generating historical discourses about Jewish music, ancient and modern, that provide very different contexts for Middle Eastern history, even in the twenty-first century. Technology played a particularly important role in the mid-twentieth century, when the disciplinary heterogeneity of comparative musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft) underwent the transition to the relative disciplinary unity that would be called ethnomusicology in the early 1950s, soon thereafter becoming the name for the field devoted primarily to world music. This foundational moment followed the global devastation of World War II and the rapid path into the postcolonial era, but the paradigm shift that accompanied the rise of

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ethnomusicology was also closely allied to the technological revolution made possible by long-playing records and magnetic tape recording in the 1940s. These two technological innovations together made it possible 1) to do fieldwork in vastly more intensive and extensive ways and 2) to disseminate the results of ethnographic work in recorded anthologies that could be analyzed scientifically, stored in archives throughout the world, and experienced by listeners with very different interests and needs. Just as printed collections of folk song proliferated after Herder’s late eighteenth-century anthology (see the chapter by Bohlman in this volume), so too did recorded collections of world music proliferate rapidly as the postcolonial era was ushered in. The discourses of object and subject – what ethnomusicologists study and how they go about studying – follow surprisingly disjunct paths in the foundational years of ethnomusicology. Disciplinary discourse takes shape cautiously in the Ethno-Musicology Newsletter (Vol. 1, December 1953), the publication that documented and consolidated the membership of what would become the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1955, but as a historical text it provides an interesting focus of the debates about gathering world music and distilling a common historiography from its many forms. The discussions that fill the pages of the Society of Ethnomusicology’s earliest publication most commonly concern themselves with institution-building. That the early discourse of the SEM was about the “who” rather than the “what” of ethnomusicology, marking a shift from object to subject, is increasingly apparent in each consecutive mimeographed Newsletter. The number of individuals receiving the Newsletter increases issue by issue, expanding to 472 in the fourth number (April 1955). Alan P. Merriam, the editor, endeavors to be as inclusive as possible, with reports, comments, and letters in French and German as well as English. Bibliographies, field reports, and descriptions of technical problems appear together, providing discursive witness to the eclectic scholars allying themselves with the call for an in-gathering that appears on almost every page. Not surprisingly, it is in the final issue of the mimeographed Newsletter in 1955 that the call for the foundational meeting of the SEM appears. It was telling that, instead of a keynote address, there would be an ethnographic film to symbolize and formalize the foundational moment itself: ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING. There will be an organizational meeting for the purpose of forming an ethno-musicological society, at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 17–19, at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel, Boston. The meeting will be held in the evening, Friday, November 18, in Parlor 133 at the hotel, following the American Anthropological Association banquet and the showing of an ethnographic film.

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As the Newsletter has depended on its readers’ contributions of news, ideas and bibliography, so any organization will depend on their presence and help in selecting officers and an editorial board to continue ETHNOMUSICOLOGY and to implement any other enterprises the society may undertake. (Ethno-Musicology Newsletter [1955], 1)

Object and subject continue to occupy different levels of discussion in the early years of the Society for Ethnomusicology, even with the establishment of the society itself and the transformation of the Newsletter as a medium of communication into a forum for the publication of research. In Ethnomusicology Newsletter 7, Willard Rhodes writes “On the Subject of Ethno-Musicology” (Rhodes 1956). It might have seemed as if Rhodes should refer to object rather than subject, thus taking a step toward clarifying what the members of the new society would study, hence, what kind of world music. Rhodes does, however, mean “subject,” and after a historical summary of fundamental queries of comparative study, he explicitly stakes out a subjective position that many maintain until the present – ethnomusicology is what ethnomusicologists do, and what they do worldwide: What of the future of ethno-musicology? The answer lies with every worker in the discipline. We can make it what we will. The world is our laboratory and the achievement of the past, though notable, is small in relation to that which remains to be accomplished. The vastness of our subject matter with its worldwide distribution offers unlimited opportunities for the specialist. (Ibid., 7)

In a survey and census of the central disciplinary writings in the Newsletter and the journal during the foundational years of the Society for Ethnomusicology, we rarely encounter discourse that limits and focuses the object of study. There are articles that on their surfaces would seem to call for more focused approaches to well-defined objects (e.g., Mieczyslaw Kolinski’s “Ethnomusicology, Its Problems and Methods”; Kolinski 1957), but these reveal themselves to be open calls for more breadth rather than increased specification. This was true also of the frequent discussions of technology that provided the base for much discussion in the Newsletter, for it was the kind of recording machine the ethnographer brought to the field, and the technical guidelines in which recordings were made, that in turn led to the translation tools that turned object to subject. Whether or not the discussions of object and subject, technology and transmission, really constituted a discourse of world history is difficult to say. The contributors to the early newsletters and journals were deliberately cautious about building their field around a discourse that was too narrow. Their caution may have grown from their experiences in other scholarly

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societies; for example, a growing centrality of Western art music in the American Musicological Society that seemingly pushed non-Western musics to the periphery. It is also possible that they intentionally redirected their definitions from the center to the peripheries, where they developed as discourses of in-betweenness, accommodating multiple disciplinary possibilities and searching for ways in which the gap between object and subject might best be closed. The expansion of technology provided one crucial way in which that search was carried out. There are media theorists, nonetheless, who claim that technology widens rather than narrows the gap between object and subject, and the influence of such theorists has left its impact on the history of world music. The alienation of the art object that Walter Benjamin attributed to the “age of mechanical reproducibility” (Benjamin 2008), in which technology produced commodities that are the same, seemed capable of spreading across the soundscapes of world music (cf. Sharma 2000; Das Gupta 2007; Suisman and Strasser 2010). World music, especially when reduced to the commodities circulated by transnational recording industries, would increasingly bear witness to a media culture accessible only through technological means. Any history of world music, it followed, would be reduced to temporal stasis, in which object and subject had no other connection than the mediation of the reproducing technology. As modernism modulated to postmodernism in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the question of technologies’ capacity to connect object to subject shifted to the growing possibility of an even greater alienation and displacement (Greene and Porcello 2005). R. Murray Schafer described the fissures of postmodern soundscapes as schizophonia (Schafer 1977), and Steven Feld took the criticism of technological alienation several steps farther, applying it as schizmogenesis to the popular musics called variously “world beat” and “world music” (Feld 1994). Neither Schafer nor Feld blamed technology itself for bringing about the ruptures opening in the history of world music, even as they observed that, to a certain degree, world music had inevitably become a phenomenon of multisitedness. Therein, once again, lay the historical paradox; in this case, whether technology would connect the sites or short-circuit them. Mark Katz (2010) has argued most convincingly for a force of global change that leaves its impact on the very ontologies of music in the twenty-first century. Whereas music changes, according to Katz, the subject positions of both musicians and listeners, producers and consumers, change along with music. Timothy Taylor, however, draws upon extensive media data to illustrate the ways in which internet sites determine how and to which world musics any given use of media technologies might be connected, that is, to consume the music that

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a “music supervisor” determines suits the taste of the world-music consumer (Taylor 2012; see also Taylor in this volume). As the contributors to the Cambridge History of World Music seek to expand the narratives that contribute to a larger understanding of the history of world music, technology shapes method and discourse alike. Historiography, again, opens up within the soundscapes of in-betweenness, with the narratives of music empowered, through technology and the many media that reproduce sound and other qualities of music, multiplying the possibilities of experiencing music inside our histories and the histories of others.

Music history and its others The ethnomusicologists whose historical work is examined in this volume were united by the common cause of discovering and representing the meaning of a music that belonged to those different from themselves: their others. As the contributors to this volume make clear in chapter after chapter, the alterity and difference implicit in distinguishing peoples unlike ourselves assume many forms, always, however, investing the history of world music with politics and power. Many chroniclers were motivated at the point of encounter by the strong desire to offer history – some form of Western history – to those who, to use Eric Wolf’s phrase, were “people without history” (Wolf 1982). Otherness was a condition rendered by the absence of history, making it impossible to abandon myth for the narratives of modernity, be these religious, cultural, or economic. The question of owning history remained open, not least because the earliest chroniclers – and ethnomusicologists today, as we witness in the chapters by Beverley Diamond and Bernardo Illari – were unsure who should and could represent their own music histories, and for whom they should be producing them. The discourses of alterity may have appeared to produce and reproduce a dialectic of self and other, but, in fact, alterity has never been dichotomous in the history of world music. That which has been “self and other” in the English-language tradition has already shifted to the conditions of ownership and alienation in the German Eigenes und Fremdes (one’s own and that of the foreign). The crucial question that remains is whether the desire to give history to those whose cultures are sounded through world music is actually condemned to alterity by the very narratives that are meant to rescue them from the fate of lacking history. Kofi Agawu, as noted in numerous instances in this volume, has argued forcefully for what he regards as a deafness to similarity resulting from an obsession of hearing other music cultures as different; for example, in the obsessive concern for the essential principles

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of African rhythm (Agawu 2003). Martin Clayton, following a similar vein in his chapter, describes the degree to which Western observers find cyclical time patterns in South Asian music and then connect that seemingly cosmic temporality to Indian music history, something Indian musicians themselves do not do. The others we study may not, therefore, desire the narratives we use to describe them. For the distant music cultures appropriated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by British imperialism – for example, the “isms” (developmentalism, evolutionism, polygenism, etc.) that Bennett Zon interpellates in his chapter – held little meaning and provided no means of tracking their way to anyone’s history, their own or that of the well-meaning West. The others of world-music history may reject the narratives devised from the self, or they may simply find them false, irrelevant to the narratives with which they understand their own musics and music cultures (see Fox and Jones in this volume). It is with these unsettling questions about the concern for alterity as a condition of world music that I turn in this section from the music history of otherness to the music historiography of otherness, which is itself more properly the subject of the present volume. The music historiography of otherness reroutes the narratives of world music, through politics and ideology (e.g., Castelo-Branco, Manuel, and Middleton in this volume) or ethics and religion (e.g., Shelemay, Jones, and Qureshi). Historiographic alterity does not so much exit into or from history, but rather it challenges us to resituate power and relinquish power when writing the history of world music.

Missionized and colonized alterity The missionary and colonial endeavors that led to the first encounters with those who performed world music were founded on many motivations, most of which began with an attempt to reconcile the relation between self and other, albeit by privileging the position of the former and by confronting the latter with narratives of the West (see Agnew 2008). Historiographically, it is important to remember that the first moment of encounter was not motivated by destruction and erasure; these would come later, when the other failed to yield to the self. Broadly speaking, missionaries sought to save souls, and colonial officials sought to utilize the lands they entered to extract raw materials that would produce global commodities. Music was a catalyst for both the saving of souls and the production of commodities (see Reily in this volume). As a catalyst, moreover, music could close the gap between self and other, but it could be effective only by foregoing its catalytic role, moving into history as an accompaniment to a violence that enforced the hegemonic narratives of the West.

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Music entered the history of colonial encounter as a record of loss and death. In his volumes of folk song, “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder (Herder 1778/1779), or world music as Philip Bohlman refers to it in his chapter, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) uses musical fragments taken from the encounter of early modern Europe to formulate a history that accrued at an accelerating pace from the earliest sections of the collections to the final sections, which appeared posthumously in print four years after Herder’s death in 1803. The teleology of Herder’s representation of encounter is powerfully eschatological, by no means surprising for, as a Lutheran pastor, by training and profession, Herder was acutely aware of the need for ethical underpinnings to the missionary encounter with otherness. Folk songs – the music of the many parts of the world to which he turned for his examples – were imbued with history and with ethical meaning that reflected moral practice. Increasingly, as we move through his collections of songs previously gathered in the colonial encounter, the number of laments and songs of death proliferates. The laments record sadness and terror, the loss that occurs at moments of encounter. In the posthumously published appendix, the violence of colonial encounter overwhelms Herder’s folk songs, particularly in the concluding folio of songs from and about the colonization of Madagascar, eleven songs – vocal commentaries in various genres – that Herder has translated from the songs from Madagascar by the French colonial official, Count Évariste de Forges de Parny (1753–1814). The terror in colonial Madagascar is that of encounter with the armies and the missionaries of the Europeans, the racialized “white people” whose presence is vilified in the songs. In the first anthology of folk songs as world music, Herder captures the lament, the Totenklage, for the fallen son of the King of Madagascar, sung by King Ampanani himself, and in call and response by the people of Madagascar: Ampanani: My son has fallen in battle! Oh, my friends, weep over the son of your leader. Take his body to the place in which the dead live. A high wall will protect him, for there will be the heads of bulls on that wall, which will be armed with threatening horns. Respect the place in which the dead live. Their sadness is terrible, and their revenge is gruesome. Weep over my son. The Men: Never again will the blood of the enemies turn his arm red. The Women: Never again will his lips kiss those of another. The Men: Never again will fruit ripen for him. The Women: Never again will his head rest on a tender bosom. The Men: Never again will he sing, resting under a tree thick with leaves. The Women: Never again will he whisper new enticements to his beloved.

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Ampanani: Cease, now, with your weeping over my son! Happiness should follow the mourning! Tomorrow, perhaps, we too will follow to the place he (Herder 1807, from Parny; in Herder 1973, 540–1) has gone. The history of encounter is one of subjugating and resistance to subjugation, yielding violence. Amartya Sen argues that violence results when encounter is between monolithic systems, the self and other as irreconcilably different entities resulting from what Sen calls the “illusion of singular identity” (Sen 2006, 175, and passim). Whereas encounter should bring “civilizations together,” it only heightens the gap between them, yielding Aimé Césaire’s “infinite distance” (Césaire 1972, 11). Critical to the recognition of violence as a persistent trope in the historiography of alterity is the reality that violence returns again and again to mark the music of encounter. For the Protestant missionary evangelical hymnody becomes the music of a Christianity going off to war on a global scale. Turkish music enters Europe with the sound of an invading army. Resistance resounds in the music of civil war and insurgency. Where there is violence at encounter, there is also music. The search for alterity in early modern Europe challenges us to recognize a discourse that becomes particularly historical, for the violence of music at encounter is unidirectional and teleological. The violence of music at encounter has the power to silence otherness. Once the colonized and the missionized become the same, once they become mere stereotypes, it becomes impossible to experience their music as theirs. We witness this in the very first transcription of music from colonial encounter, published by Jean de Léry (1536–1613), the Calvinist missionary writing of the Tupinamba in the region around the Bay of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-sixteenth century. Observing music and ritual carefully, de Léry acts to inscribe the music of the other as his own, through the image and iconography of Christian chant, sacred in its melodic aura (see Fig. 0.1). Crucial for the themes in the present volume, Jean de Léry’s descriptions and transcriptions of musical alterity entered the early history of world music.

Fig. 0.1 Transcription of Tupinamba melody in de Léry 1578

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It was de Léry’s missionary encounter with the Tupinamba that provided Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) with a model for his essay “De Cannibales” (Of Cannibals; see Montaigne 1587), in which form it would provide a model of alterity for early modern historiographers, reaching eventually Johann Gottfried Herder, who employed it as a model for folk song as world music. The ciphers of otherness are too often reduced to sameness in music, for they inhabit the music history of the West, sounding the sonic Orientalism of Occidental selfness. It is in this projection of self and other in historical encounter that African bodies must make music by always dancing, thereby failing to enter history (see Barz in this volume); South Asian music is endowed with a universal and cosmic spirituality (see Clayton and Jones in this volume); exoticism levels the modal richness of East Asia; from perspectives politically both neoliberal and neoconservative, Latin American is always already hybrid; Islam comes to be constituted as radical, fundamentalist, extreme (see Qureshi in this volume). The history of encounter has so brutally violated otherness that it is hardly surprising that the music of otherness enters world-music history in such troubling ways. The paradox, nonetheless, remains that, because the violence of encounter refuses to subside, it becomes ever more pressing to turn ethnomusicology toward a music historiography of alterity.

Conclusion – the labor of history For this purpose I wish to collect data about the history of every historical moment, each evoking a picture of its own use, function, custom, burdens, and pleasures. Accordingly, I shall assemble everything I can, leading up to the present-day, in order to put it to good use. Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 But our goals are far more ambitious: We want to uncover the deepest recesses of the past and to reveal the full and timeless sweep of the present. In other words, we want to encounter everything there is to know about the historical and aesthetic foundations of music. Erich M. von Hornbostel, “Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft” (1905)

I turn toward the conclusion of this introductory chapter with two epigraphs, both enunciating the goal of world-music history at global moments of particular significance: the collection of folk songs that began with the Enlightenment and the founding of a comparative musicology made possible by recording technology. In these two epigraphs, Johann Gottfried Herder and Erich M. von Hornbostel draw attention to a shift in historical voice, from proclamation to celebration. The shift in historical voice is paradigmatic not because it

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celebrates the object, world music, but rather because it emphasizes the refocus of historiography on the task at hand: the labor of music history. Writing in his fieldnotes from a sea journey in 1769, almost a decade before the first collections of folk songs will appear, Herder has an epiphany about collecting songs (see Herder 1997). Whereas previously he had gathered songs from publications and the areas of the Baltic lands in which he spent his youth (roughly from Königsberg/Kaliningrad to Riga, but including also some areas in modern Estonia), Herder discovers the ethnographic impulse as his ship bears him farther from Europe, as it makes its way into a world notable because he did not know it. If still inchoate, he recognizes that his own journey draws him into a world in which world music reflects the subject formations of musicians and peoples who have spread across the world. The study of that music, by Herder and those who followed, would require agency and action, which, in turn, would produce the narratives of a new, more global music history. The history of world music, as envisioned by Herder, must put the music of the past “to good use” in the present. Hornbostel’s goals were indeed ambitious, dizzyingly so, as we witness in his celebration of the world-music history now possible because of the rapid advancement of recording technology (Hornbostel 1986). The disciplinary labor that Hornbostel would muster, too, advances beyond that of Herder, the solitary Enlightenment intellectual on his ship crossing the North Sea, for Hornbostel speaks now of the collective, the “we” whose challenges are no less than encountering “everything there is to know about the historical and aesthetic foundations of music.” Hornbostel’s “we” also extended to the collectors who, by 1905, were beginning to send the music – as sonic object, as subjective representation – that the Demonstration Collection would make available. The collector and the collection were becoming the connections that made new collectivities possible because of the description and analysis of their musical coordinates. By extension, the action of collectors, musicians, and collections not only recognized the mobility between and among collectives, but it also contributed to realizing that mobility (see Koch in this volume). Both Herder and Hornbostel turned to history because of the ways it effected connections of many kinds: between past and present; object and subject; perception and analysis; among the production, dissemination, and consumption of sound. By searching for and creating these connections, they, and the growing collectives around the world, interested in musics shared across borders, encouraged – and celebrated – the historiographic turn toward world music. The narratives of labor that produced the historiographic turn toward world music fill the chapters of the Cambridge History of World Music. The fundamental contribution of individual musicians to the values of self and

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society is perhaps the most persistent theme underlying the entire volume (Jones, Kartomi, Manuel, Marshall and Radano, Mason, Middleton, Reily, Shelemay). The rupture of encounter and the repair wrought by subsequent revitalization through musical labor form another historiographic leitmotiv (Agnew, Barz, Clayton, Diamond, Illari, Qureshi, Rommen). The disjunctures of colonialism, followed by the labor invested in retrieving voices lost to history, raises common themes both unsettling and hopeful (Beckerman, Castelo-Branco, Howard, Klotz, Stock, Stokes, Wade). Finally, the labor of music historiography itself, intensified by the modern reconfiguration of world music’s subject formations, provides connections among the chapters that collectively narrate histories of histories (Blum, Bohlman, Cook, Fox, Jackson, Koch, Nettl, Taylor, Zon). As the history of world music coalesces around the labors of those who form the collectives of musicians, listeners, travelers, and scholars whom we encounter in the Cambridge History of World Music, it remains to be seen which of Clio’s two forms of historical enunciation holds sway: proclamation or celebration. Or will the paradoxes of Derek Walcott’s muse of history and Walter Benjamin’s angel of history sustain the challenges of encountering and gathering a world music that is not one’s own? If less enchanted than Herder on his sea voyage, and more measured than Hornbostel in his embrace of the technologies of modernity, the contributors who join together as a collective in this volume chart new possibilities for the labor of the historiographer, as it includes, ineluctably in the twenty-first century, the musics of the world.

Bibliography Agawu, V. K. (2003) Representing African Music, New York: Routledge Agnew, V. (2008) Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds, New York: Oxford University Press Benjamin, W. (2008) The World of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. M. W. Jennings, B. Doherty, and T. Y. Levin, trans. E. Jephcott et al., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2010) Über den Begriff der Geschichte, vol. 19 in Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Raulet, Berlin: Suhrkamp Bohlman, P. V. (2002) ‘World music at the “end of history”’, Ethnomusicology, 46, 1: 1–32 Brady, E. (1999) A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Césaire, A. (1972, orig. publ. 1955) Discourse on Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press Congress of Cairo (1934) Recueil des travaux du Congrès de musique arabe, Paris: Imprimerie nationale, Boulac

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Davis, R. (2013) Robert Lachmann’s Oriental Music Broadcasts, 1936–1937: A Musical Ethnography of Mandatory Palestine, Middleton, WI: A-R Editions Das Gupta, A. (2007) Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Kolkata: Thema Ethno-Musicology Newsletter (1955) ‘Organizational meeting’, 5 (September): 1 Feld, S. (1994) ‘From schizophonia to schismogenesis: On the discourses and commodification practices of “World Music” and “World Beat”’, in C. Keil and S. Feld (eds.), Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, University of Chicago Press Greene, P. D., and T. Porcello (eds.) (2005) Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technology in Sonic Cultures, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and the University Press of New England Herder, J. G. (1778/1779) ‘Stimmen der Völker in Liedern’ and Volkslieder, 2 vols., Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung (1973) ‘Stimmen der Völker in Liedern’ and Volkslieder, modern, expanded edn, Stuttgart: Reclam (1997) Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, in vol. 9/2: Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed. R. Wisbert, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Hornbostel, E. M. von (1986, orig. publ. 1905) ‘Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft’, in C. Kaden and E. Stockmann (eds.), Erich Moritz von Hornbostel – Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze zur Musikethnologie und Musikpsychologie, Leipzig: Reclam, pp. 40–58 (1963, orig. 1900–13) The Demonstration Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, 2 LPs and booklet, Ethnic Folkways FE 4175, (1979; orig. 1934) Music of the Orient, 2 LPs and booklet, Ethnic Folkways FE 4157 Ibn Khaldun (1958) The Muqadimmah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols., New York: Pantheon Idelsohn, A. Z. (1914–32) Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz, 10 vols., Berlin: Benjamin Harz et al. Katz, M. (2010) Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. edn, Berkeley: University of California Press Klotz, S. (ed.) (1998) Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler, Uckerland: Schibri-Verlag Kolinski, M. (1957) ‘Ethnomusicology, its problems and methods’, Ethnomusicology Newsletter, 10 (May): 1–7 Lachmann, R. (1940) Jewish Cantillation and Song in the Isle of Djerba, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press Lechleitner, G. (ed.) (2005) The Collection of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1911–1913), 3 CDs and CD-ROM, plus booklet, Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften de Léry, J. (1578) Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil, La Rochelle: Antoine Chuppin Montaigne, M. de (1587) Essais de Messir Michel, seigneur de Montaigne, Paris: I. Richer Mosès, S. (2009) The Angel of History: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Scholem, Stanford University Press Nettl, B. (2010) Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Nettl, B., and P. V. Bohlman (eds.) (1991) Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press

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Rhodes, W. (1956) ‘On the subject of ethno-musicology’, Ethnomusicology Newsletter, 7 (April): 1–9 Schafer, R. M. (1977) The Tuning of the World, New York: Knopf Sen, A. (2006) Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, New York: W. W. Norton Sharma, B. R. (2000) Music and Culture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Peter Lang Suisman, D., and S. Strasser (eds.) (2010) Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Tagore, S. M. (1963) Universal History of Music, Compiled from Divers Sources, Together with Various Original Notes on Hindu Music, 2nd edn, Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Taruskin, R. (2005) The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols., New York: Oxford University Press Taylor, T. D. (2012) The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture, University of Chicago Press Walcott, D. (1995) ‘The muse of history’, in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. A. Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge Wolf, E. R. (1982) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press Ziegler, S. (2006) Die Wachszylinder des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs, Berlin: Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

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PART I

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HISTORIES OF WORLD MUSIC

. 1 .

On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship BRUNO NETTL

No publication can narrate, in the most comprehensive sense, the total history of the music of the world. There are, nevertheless, many works that endeavor, in one way or another, to do this, works that appear to claim such an accomplishment, or that engage this issue in various ways. And there are traditions of scholarship and thought that take the concept of a “world-music history” as a point of departure. In this opening chapter I contemplate from a historical perspective some of the concepts and processes that are suggested by the rubric “world music,” trying to examine certain fundamental issues suggested by this line of inquiry, and discussing a sampling of the relevant literature. To a large extent, this has to be unabashedly an enterprise principally concerning Western and Western-derived traditions of scholarship. The world’s societies, however, have a variety of conceptions of music, of history, and of the world, and such conceptions have naturally changed over time. We begin with a consideration of these fundamental concepts, go on to examine early scholarly literature, return to central issues such as processes in which twentieth-century works that set out to narrate and comment on the “history” of “world music” are based, and close with the role that the world-music concept, viewed historically, has played in the recent history of music scholarship.

Fundamental questions Music and musics So, we ask, first: what is music? Dictionary definitions in European languages are not too helpful, as they inevitably foreground the art music of Western culture. It is difficult to take as a point of departure, however, anything other than Western music, because the holistic concept of “music” is in fact not shared with all or even many other societies. In European languages (but perhaps more Some material in this chapter appeared in a different form in Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (Nettl 2010)

[23]

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in English than in some others), music is an enormously overarching concept, including meaningful sounds made by humans and contrasted with speech, but extending further to sounds made by animals that remind us of music, sounds (e.g., industrial noises or silences) defined by musicians as music for the occasion, and further, to metaphorical extensions such as pleasant sounds of any sort. In contemporary Anglo-American use, all things considered to be music are music to an equal degree; they may not be equally good or valuable, to individuals or to society, but one does not speak of one piece being “very much music” and another one being “barely music.” Even in some other European languages, this unity does not quite apply – as in the distinction in German between Musik and Tonkunst (art music) and between Musikant (vernacular musician) and Musiker (practitioner of art music, and, along the same lines, between Czech muzika and hudba, and muzikant and hudebnik). In Persian, the distinction between musiqi (normally instrumental, metric, composed, often ensemble music) and khandan (lit., read, recite, sing; applied to vocal, usually improvised, nonmetric, soloistic) provide a continuum along which various sounds could be designated as very or slightly musical. In many of the world’s cultures, terms for music at large do not exist, but the entity that the English-speaking world considers to be music is represented by a variety of concepts or terms. There appears to be no definition of music that would be accepted by all cultures; and our task here is not to look for one. Inevitably, we take as a point of departure the English form of discourse about music, but throughout our considerations, the variegated nature of the conception around the world ought to be kept in mind. For some two centuries, beginning perhaps with Johann Gottfried Herder in the late eighteenth century (1778–9; see Bohlman 2002) and in any event with Ellis (1885) in the late nineteenth century, we have believed that each of the world’s societies has its own music – that is, that the world of music comprises a number of discrete musical systems most recently called “musics.” One might argue about the nature or requisite size of the culture group whose “music” deserves to be considered “a music”; for example, whether Native North Americans are members of one culture unit, or of a thousand. But the concept of “our” music being familiar and natural, while that of other peoples is strange, weird, perhaps ugly, most likely unintelligible, has been around for a long time. Only in the 1970s did ethnomusicologists begin to use the plural of music to specify this characteristic of their subject. It is a term that should have seemed easily acceptable, music and musics being analogous to language and languages, or to culture and cultures. It was, nonetheless, resisted by academics for several (not necessarily justifiable) reasons: foreign musics can be appreciated more easily than foreign languages; a music is not as coherent a system

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as a language; the user of the word “musics” is “othering” the music of others. Maybe most important, in some possibly indefinable way, the musics of the world have more to do with each other than languages, and it behooves us to emphasize their unity more than the boundaries between them. I have believed that the music/musics terminology is explanatory and dignifies the musical systems of the world’s cultures. Whether musical systems leak at the borders or not, languages are not all that coherent, being subject to constant change, and failing in the test of precise geographic borders. Whether there is something still to be said for the concept of music as the universal language of mankind, and whether enjoying the sounds of a foreign music is identical with understanding may be argued. The issue is not “one” or “many,” but in what ways the notion of music and musics provide insight. A history of world music should, if it does not come down on one side or the other, show how the two perspectives provide different interpretations of what happened.

Origin and origins Theories of the origin of music play a role here, for a formulation of history may well be molded by the attitude taken to the question of origins. Thus, scholars and scientists coming from Western culture and seeing music as basically a unit were, while perhaps using as a basic assumption that each society has its own “music,” inclined to feel that at some level, all of the world’s musics are one, and that whatever the differences among them, in some respect they must have had a common origin. This is surely true of the older theories of the origin of music, formulated in the nineteenth century or soon after: music had a single origin. The options included imitation of animal sounds, communicating over distances with the use of sustained pitches, producing sounds that support rhythmic labor and make it more efficient, the abstraction of emotional or formulaic speech. In general, these theories assumed a human society, with culture and language more or less in place, while music came along to help, fulfilling specific needs. Later on, additional suggestions were made: the invention of music as a way of communicating with the supernatural (Nadel 1930); music as a biological adaptation signifying fitness to mate (Miller 2000a; Wallin et al. 2000); an adaptation resulting from soothing sounds made by mothers to young babies (Dissanayake 2000); and adaptation supporting cohesion of a society (Freeman 2000). A history of world music, if in some sense it applies to all the world’s music, present and past, would have to take the origins of music into account. “World music” and origins of music, as concepts, connect significantly when we consider the question of “music” versus “musics.” Did music originate once,

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and then split into the musics of cultures, subcultures, idiolects? The alternative possibility, of multiple origins, has received far less attention. Yet I must confess to being attracted to the idea that music originated in one prehistoric society as virtuosic singing signifying fitness to mate; and in another, as group vocalization to help a group of not particularly organized people feel unified; and in a third, to frighten enemy hordes elsewhere by developing powerful unison sounds; and in a fourth, developing a chant to address a fearsome deity. Of course, all of these might successively have appeared in one society, whose people might not have considered them to be the same thing at all, to have no sense that somewhere else, in the distant future, these would all be considered as “music.” Since these different wellsprings might have resulted in some considerable variety of sounds or styles, the term “history of world musics” might be preferable to the singular even from the beginning. I would propose to replace the usual – often simply implied – model in which a single origin – invention, adaptation – of music gradually split into varieties of styles, genres, functions. There is a widely accepted chronology following on the single-origin theory in which a single moment of invention leads to inexorably increasing levels of complexity, from ditonic and tritonic melodies to pentatonic, heptatonic, chromatic; or from monophony to simple harmony to homophony and counterpoint, and eventually to dissonance. I am more persuaded by the suggestion that various kinds of sound communication were established at different times, in different societies or proto-societies, sometimes preceding and sometimes following the development of language, and that all of these were eventually many millennia later united under the concept of music in only a few cultures. Which of the kinds of music – mating calls, war cries, lullabies, and the rest – came first, in the overall chronology, or in the history of an individual society of early humans? Of course we shall never know – which is why many ethnomusicologists around 1950 came to consider delving into origins as useless speculation. But the forms of proto- or pre-music that came, chronologically, second, third, or fourth, probably were developed by peoples who had no inkling of the earlier developments elsewhere. Yet if they had had this awareness, the suggestion that these kinds of probably contrastive sounds, different in function, performing personnel, and social context, might together be molded into a unified concept could well have seemed quite strange to them. Clearly, this is all speculation, but it leads to a different model of the world’s musical history – one in which a diversity of social function and variety of musical style are there from the beginning.

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Culture and cultures History is written by the victors, so we are told, and as an extension, the interactions among musics have ordinarily been described and interpreted by scholars whose “own” music replaced or changed or strongly affected the music and musical lives of other societies. Thus, histories of non-Western music by European and North American scholars have normally looked at their subject matter as artifacts and activities moving from a distance to proximity to the Western models of styles and contexts. Music changes to become sounding more Western, peoples change their music by adopting Western practices and repertories, traditional perhaps religious functions of classical traditions may have been replaced by “art for art’s sake” and “great art for all time.” There may be a conventional view of world-music history: music came into existence after humans had other aspects of culture to provide for certain needs. For the people whose culture turned into Western civilization, music was then developed inexorably to greater complexity until it reached various kinds of climax in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other societies dropped off along the way, remaining stuck in monophonic, aural, functional practices until, recently, beginning in various ways to be reunited with the mainstream. Of course, other societies may look at the history of the world’s music – from its origins onward – quite differently. In the context of a discussion of the histories of world music, the view of music history in various parts of the world ought at least to be touched upon (Allen 1939; Harrison 1973; Wiora 1965). Two brief examples, which in different ways see the emergence of music as preceding the coming of human culture – or “the rest” of culture. They involve a complex of myths found in both North and South American indigenous cultures, in which a woman is taken to a distant place – the sky, or under water, or a land in which the sun lives – and then returns to her people, bringing the gift of music or enabling her people to learn the fundamental songs of their culture. Central to it is a story studied by Stith Thompson (1953) and labeled the “star-husband” tale, although Thompson did not emphasize its relation to music. In a myth of the Amuesha people of Bolivia (Smith 1971), a woman meets a stranger and agrees to marry him. He reveals himself as a star and takes her to live with him in the heavens. After a time, homesick, she asks to be allowed to return to her people. Her star-husband agrees but says that before she departs, he will teach her something essential; and he teaches her to sing, and songs. She returns to her people, who have all along been living in a state of noncivilized chaos, and teaches them to sing, after which they begin to live orderly

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lives; in other words, they have acquired culture and its values and requirements. Now, it is not clear whether this applies to the Amuesha alone, or to all peoples; many origin myths are essentially ethnocentric or at least culture-specific. A related case comes from the Blackfoot myth that tells the origins of the beaver medicine bundle (Nettl 1989, 130, 134; Wissler and Duvall 1909, 79). This bundle, the most important complex of religious artifacts, is actually a group of perhaps close to two hundred objects that are kept wrapped together and opened for ceremonial purposes. The objects are the dressed bird and animal skins of all the local wildlife, plus a few other objects and a large number of sticks representing the songs that accompany the bundle. It is associated with the beaver, who is a kind of lord of the part of the world below the surface of water; and thus it is one of the principal ceremonies of the Blackfoot religious system. Before the bundle was opened and its ceremony carried out, the following story was told. I summarize: A great human hunter has killed a specimen of each animal and bird, and their dressed skins decorate his tent. While he is hunting, a beaver comes to visit his wife and seduces her, and she follows him into the water. After four days she returns to her husband, and in time gives birth to a beaver child. Affairs were unforgivable in Blackfoot society, but the hunter continues to be kind to his wife and the child. The beaver, visiting, expresses pleasure at this and offers to give the hunter some of his supernatural power as a reward. They smoke together, and then the beaver begins to sing songs, each containing a request for a particular bird or animal skin. The hunter gives the skins, one by one, and receives, in return, the songs of the beaver and the supernatural power that goes with them, and thus, the principal Blackfoot ritual, which may be seen as a principal emblem of Blackfoot – and in traditional society – human culture.

This myth suggests important things about Blackfoot thinking about music. Here are some. Music comes from the supernatural. Songs come as whole units, and you learn them in one hearing, and they are objects that can be traded, as it were, for physical objects. The musical system reflects the cultural system, as each being in the environment has its song. Music reflects and contains supernatural power. It is something that only men use and perform, but women are instrumental in bringing its existence about. Music is given to a human who acts morally, gently, in a civilized manner. It comes about as the result of a period of dwelling with the supernatural, after which a major aspect of culture is brought, so in a way it symbolizes humanness. In the contemporary Blackfoot view of the history of world music, songs came about as told in myths. The world of music today contains many other kinds of songs and styles, principally of white (Western) origin, but also including other Native

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peoples. But the basic conception is that these musics, like the peoples who brought them, came into history later. It is a view not too different from that of early Western historians of music, who saw primordial humankind as having music somewhat like that of Native Americans (or as the historians imagined these to be), while the things that characterize Western music came later. The conventional Western view of world-music history, nonetheless, provides for gradual unification under the umbrella of functional harmony. The Blackfoot view sees the (“their”) world of music as becoming increasingly diverse.

Landmark publications and their authors before 1915 Philip Bohlman (2002) makes a case for the invention of world music by Johann Gottfried Herder, whose “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” (1778–9) may be the first work to propose that each people has its music – that there is such a thing as folk song, Volkslied, which is peculiar to each people, but some of whose characteristics all peoples have in common. Not the first to notice musical diversity, Herder may indeed have been the first who prominently made the point and suggested a term. His works of 1773 and 1778–9 proposed a new approach to the understanding of music, introducing the concept of oral tradition, but these works also appeared in a period in which a major principal tradition of music historiography had its first flowering with the virtually simultaneous publication of some of the earliest expansive histories of European art music (see Bohlman on Herder in the present volume). The following paragraphs summarize some of the landmarks among the early works that may claim in some way to be, or were considered to be, histories of world music.

Charles Burney The 1770s formed a major period in the history of musicography. In 1776, Charles Burney and John Hawkins published the two earliest influential histories of Western music. Burney’s, thought by some to be the less scholarly and more popularizing, has always received more attention. It sees music as a feature of human culture, but in its excellent and proper form, it is specific to certain peoples. It contains no mention of India or China, nor of Africa or Native North America, but there is a large section – approximately 20 percent of the total work – devoted to “ancient” music with chapters on Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek music, all of these presented as complex systems. Burney does opine on the origins of music, asserting that “the art or practice of music cannot be said to have been invented by any one man, for that must have had

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its infancy, childhood, and youth, before it arrived at maturity” (Burney 1776–89, 164). And also, “the first attempts must have been rude and artless: the first flute, a whistling reed, and the first lyre, perhaps the dried sinews of a dead tortoise” (ibid., 165). There is a concept of music as something that developed gradually, but it is not true music until it has a conceptual body of theory and, so Burney implies, at least a rudimentary system of notation. And further, Burney, rather in concert with modern evolutionists but also with Native American tribes, suggested that the origins of song are “coeval with mankind . . . This primitive and instinctive language . . . is still retained by animals” (ibid.). Burney and Herder thus represent two viewpoints that have divided music scholarship, though not necessarily scholars, some of whom try to mediate between the two: 1) All peoples have their own music, or 2) all music is part of a single development leading to – well, is it Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or high-tech? Actually, the concept of a “world” of music made occasional appearances before Burney and Herder. One of the high points in musical thought is Rousseau’s dictionary of 1768, in which the musical world is illustrated by three notations – Chinese, Native Canadian, and European folk music – a harbinger of the dominant division of musics under the purview of comparative musicology before c. 1950. The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth provide the earliest important reports on the musics of Asian cultures: most prominently the works of Amiot (1779) and du Halde (1735) on Chinese music, of William Jones (1784) on the Indian rāga system, and of Raphael Kiesewetter (1842) on Arabic music. Taken as a group, these examples, along with numerous less prominent others, show that in the consciousness of European scholars the concept of music as a world of musics began to grow. These works, and some others like them, seem to have had an effect on the authors of some nineteenth-century works that claim to be “histories” of music.

Johann Gottfried Herder Philip Bohlman has discussed Herder in a number of publications (see, e.g., Bohlman 2002, Bohlman 2007, Bohlman 2010, Bohlman 2011, and in the present volume) and lists him as an inventor – sometimes the inventor – of world music. There are a number of ways in which Herder deserves that title: by paying attention to the music of the ordinary and rural people in addition to the art music of court and church; by considering and collecting the folk music of diverse peoples in Europe – and by adding, late in life, some interest, as Bohlman (2007, 4) points out, to non-Western music; perhaps most important,

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by coining the term Volkslied, which labeled a genre that all peoples were thought to possess, the common core of a world music. Surely he had ideas of what the history of music, and of the folk music of the world’s cultures, might have been, but in his day this subject was not one of the issues of scholarship. Suffice it to say that were he writing today, he might, like many others, have been of two minds: music had a single origin – he considered it coeval with speech, something inherent to humans (“hard-wired” one would say today), its character represented by what the world’s folk musics more recently, perhaps in his time, had in common. But also, each “Volk,” each nation, had its own distinct folk music with its own long history. Although he was principally concerned with the words of songs, he was a competent and active musician; and his work pointed the way for a number of disciplines – folklore, philology, literary scholarship, historiography, and even ethnomusicology. He speaks to us from another age, virtually another culture, but the musical issues that he illuminates – universals versus cultural diversity, music as isolated art versus music as a mainstay of life – are in various ways still with us. His importance to humanistic scholarship, nonetheless, was so great that many articles in standard reference sources (e.g., Encyclopedia Britannica) hardly mention his interest in folk music and do not credit him as a seminal figure in the discipline of folklore.

August Wilhelm Ambros The first author who seriously confronted the issue of music and musics was August Wilhelm Ambros, whose Geschichte der Musik, which began publication with its first volume in 1862, is regarded by many scholars as a major landmark in the history of musicology. The first volume (of what was intended as five volumes) is entirely devoted to non-Western music, the music of the ancient Near East, and the classical cultures of Greece and Italy. His discussion of non-Western musics, based almost entirely on second-hand apprehension of theoretical sources along with quotation of a small number of transcriptions (made, naturally, without the use of recordings) does more than pay lip-service to a world-music concept. He sees the world of music as consisting of a number of areas that developed as a result of diffusion from culture centers – China, South Asia, and the Arabic world, to which he adds, by implication, the ancient Greek–Egyptian culture that led to Western music. Claiming that the ability for “musicking” is – using the modern term – imprinted in humans, he describes a series of situations (Ambros 1862, 3–4) – conflict, child-rearing, expression of joy or sorrow – that as a group look like a precursor to the multiple-origin concept (cf., however, ibid., xvi–xvii). Ambros suggests that the non-Western art musics should be seen as parts of his overall chronology because 1) the music

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of non-Western cultures should be acknowledged as ancient, perhaps predating the origins of Western culture, but 2) that their development was truncated at a certain point, and they were overtaken by Western music, which continued to develop further. Without explicitly claiming to be writing about world music, Ambros tries to establish it in both geographic and chronological frameworks.

Carl Engel On a somewhat parallel track, the older of the two unrelated Carl Engels’ active in music research followed Herder as a precursor of twentieth-century ethnomusicology with its concern for the musics of the world. Engel (1818–82), who lived largely in England, pursued a number of interests in his career, including organology and piano music, but it is for his work on “national music” that he is best remembered. In his principal book on the subject (Engel 1866), he defines national music as music “appertaining to a nation or tribe, whose individual emotions and passions it expresses, which distinguish it from the music of any other nation or tribe” (ibid., 1). Rendering it as equivalent to Volksmusik, he nevertheless avoids throughout the work issues that later came to dominate scholarly thinking about folk music, such as its presumed (and required) great age (as both style and repertory), its association with particular social classes, its rural provenance, and the question of authenticity; rather, he discusses a great deal of music that in the twentieth century would have been labeled as vernacular – functional folk songs, hymns, patriotic songs, some European and a lot of non-European popular art music. Engel’s Introduction to the Study of National Music is not a work that could today be used as documentation of ethnographic or historical research. Yet it is astonishingly broad and broad-minded. There are abundant notations, mainly from published sources, but many other transcriptions made by ear, and while the emphasis is on Europe (and mainly England, Germany, and Central Europe), Engel tries to include music from many cultures, managing to present examples and comments on music of Africa, Native America, Persia, India, Central Asia, and China. Engel’s principal purpose was to demonstrate that each culture has its own music. But following upon the heels of that aim is an insistence that the world’s musics have a lot to do with each other. He tells us that among nations and even continents there are significant parallels in performance practices of many kinds, in social functions, and even in specific tunes. He works hard at providing ways for comparing musics, and even when these, in retrospect, turn out to be wrong-headed or of dubious relevance (e.g., ibid., 174, a table indicating percentages of songs in major and minor in

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twenty-two European nations and ethnicities), they show Engel as a uniquely forward-looking scholar. Arguably, this is the first general book about world music. It is worth mentioning, as virtually contemporary to Engel’s, the work of Wilhelm Tappert (Tappert 1968), whose small book, Wandernde Melodien (Wandering Melodies), suggests that we look at the world not only as a group of musics, but also as a group of melodies each of which has diffused throughout the world (at the very least, throughout Europe) and maintained its integrity while taking up, in each venue, significant characteristics of local music.

Guido Adler If musicologists agree that they have a disciplinary father, it is likely to be Guido Adler, who was the author of the most influential article laying out the field (Adler 1885) and principal editor of the first successful musicological journal. The field that was to become ethnomusicology, with its concern with the musics of the world, makes a cameo appearance in Adler’s outline, but it is there as “Musikologie – Untersuchung und Vergleichung zu ethnographischen Zwecken” (Musicology – investigation and comparison for ethnographic purposes). The music of the world is there for more than just a speculative introduction to Western art music. The journal, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (Musicological Quarterly) (1885–95), in its first two volumes, makes a stab at looking at the entire world, or at least the part of it to which musicologists had access. Thus, besides studies of music from European history to c. 1800, there are articles on ancient Indian music, music of Native Americans, medieval Arabic music, and related materials – for example, psychology of music and the origins of music – and there are reviews of Alexander Ellis’s pioneering 1885 article and of publications on folk music. One might maintain that the Vierteljahrsschrift qualifies as the first journal to use a world-music perspective, despite its grounding in the European canon. The only thing conspicuously missing is discussion of recent music (e.g., folk songs collected in the 1860s, Asian music in more or less contemporary manifestations, and, most surprising, Mozart, Beethoven, and nineteenth-century opera). Forty years and many research projects later, at the age of almost seventy, Adler had moved away from a broad world view, editing an influential compendium, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924), which very clearly interprets the history of music as the history of Western music. In the second edition, there is a brief chapter (about thirty pages, 2.5 percent of the book) by Robert Lach, titled “Die Musik der außereuropäischen Natur- und orientalischen Kulturvölker” (Music of the non-European natural and oriental

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peoples) (1930), which looks at the history of world music as a sequence of increasingly complex scales, avoiding separation of nonliterate from Asian high cultures, and beginning with several pages on origins. Evidently, it was Adler’s view that there is a history of music; even the individual nations of Europe are not accorded separate histories until the modern era, from 1880 to 1924. Folk music is mentioned occasionally, but the concept of folk song as a point of departure for art music, perhaps on a national basis, does not come to the fore. Adler’s collection is characteristic of many larger histories of music published in the seventy years after the 1885 breakthrough.

Sourindro Mohun Tagore The first prominent book that interprets the world of musics as a group of musics, each with its own history, though not neglecting interrelations, is by a scholar who worked outside the European scholarly canon, though he was significantly influenced by Carl Engel’s work – the Bengali intellectual Sourindro Mohun Tagore. Tagore’s Universal History of Music (first published in Calcutta in 1896) is perhaps the earliest book in which some measure of equality is given to the treatment of the various continents. This is one of Tagore’s last publications, as it follows a long series of scholarly and hortatory works on Indian music and other subjects; much of his work is discussed in publications by Charles Capwell (especially Capwell 1987 and 1991; see also Bohlman’s introduction to this volume), who also describes his involvement in the creation of a national anthem appropriate to India as a constituent part of the British Empire. Active in many projects developing musical life in Bengal, Tagore organized his ambitious history of world music principally by discussing each of a multitude of nations, but he consistently emphasizes, as well, the ways in which music crosses national boundaries. Thus, he begins by pointing out that “the primitive tones of the human voice are much the same in all countries” but quickly moves to assert that “the Moors have exercised a perceptible influence upon the music of Spain” and “the well-known German ‘Dessauer March’ is of Italian origin” (Tagore 1896, 11). Tagore’s Universal History, based on fragmentary secondary and tertiary sources (except when dealing with South Asian subjects), is valuable principally for its perspective: it tries to tell some important things about the music of every nation. Beginning with “The Savage Nations” (tribal societies of the Americas and North Asia), it devotes about one hundred pages to Asia (forty of them unsurprisingly on India – subdivided by regions – but devoting several pages each to China, “Siam,” Japan, Korea, Tibet, Persia, etc.); about 45 pages to Africa, 115 to Europe, 35 to the Americas, and 25 to Oceania. In each case there is some account of older traditions currently still

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practiced, instruments, and a few assorted (and not very organized) facts on history. Often, the matter of national anthems comes up, as does the use of foreign musics (e.g., Italian music performed in Germany). There is a brief account of opera in Germany (ibid., 217), and Tagore provides a few words about Mozart (and a list of six major works) and mentions minor figures such as Louis Spohr and Gyrowetz. The main point is that there are actually chapterlets on such obscure regions as Iceland, Borneo, Tyrol, and Dahomey. No doubt, Tagore knew that his information was spotty and superficial, but he considered it important to make a gesture, showing that all nations had their music, that each deserved appropriate attention, and that the universe of music consisted of these separate, though interrelated, musics. Tagore’s was a viewpoint that did not become prominent until several decades after his death in 1914. An Indian successor to S. M. Tagore’s universal history, almost a century later, is Music of the Nations by Swami Prajnanananda (1973), who presents his book as a comparative study of the “musical systems of the civilised nations of the world.” With chapters on India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, on Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Burmese, and Korean music, and on Russian and Western European musics, it cannot claim great authority. It is worth mentioning, nonetheless, as a modern attempt by a non-Western scholar to write about world music, and, parallel to its Western counterparts, it does so from an Indian perspective, devoting its longest chapter to Indian music, and providing a separate chapter on the influence of Indian music on the rest of the world. I do not know whether Swami Prajnanananda was inclined to irony, but it seems that he might have been saying, “If you Europeans think I’ve provided an unbalanced, Indo-centric view of world music, this may tell you how we are usually made to feel.”

Hugo Riemann In his long career as a musicologist and theorist, Hugo Riemann touched on an immense variety of musical subjects. Central to his output was his Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, a five-volume publication more or less contemporary to Tagore’s. Enormously erudite and in control of the voluminous European literature on music, Riemann devotes the entire first volume of the work to ancient Greece, beginning with a thorough account of Greek and Roman sources, but he starts out with several caveats. Extolling the recent development of “musikalische Ethnographie” (musical ethnography; see Riemann 1904, vi, for perhaps the earliest use of this term), Riemann maintains that this is not history, but rather observation of the present, from which, he warns in a precursor of more recent thought, one must not extrapolate earlier stages

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of history. He further points out (ibid., 1) that while it has been customary to include Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian music as a prologue to the history of Western music, because these cultures were well advanced at the time of the flowering of ancient Greek culture, he feels that they should not be seen as part of Western music history. Chinese music is too distant, Egyptian music known only from depictions of instruments, and Indian music a mix of materials of ancient provenance with influences from the beginning of the Islamic period in South Asia. Thus these and other non-Western cultures are only mentioned at various points in passing. Trying in a sophisticated way to separate history from other disciplines of musical scholarship and recognizing that nonWestern music is interesting not only for what it might tell about the West’s earlier past, Riemann can only be blamed for little more than claiming inclusivity in his title, a fault that he shares with most scholars before and many long after his work.

The twentieth century The world changed after World War I, so many historians tell us, and musicology did as well at the same time, though it is hard to make a case for causality. Indeed, the defeat of the German-speaking countries of Central Europe seems to have been accompanied by a virtual hegemony of German-speaking musicologists. While most of the world’s music scholars were engaged mainly in the study of their own national musics, it was German and Austrian scholars, more than others by far, who undertook studies in what were for them the most far-flung musical cultures. Whimsically, one might ask whether this was a kind of compensatory victory, but we know better, as German polity was not for long content with the designation of “nation of poets and thinkers.” Yet it was the notion of musicology as a discipline interested in all kinds of music everywhere, a kind of German invention, that characterized the field for decades and is ultimately perhaps responsible for the notion that we have, in the field of music scholarship, of a concept that may be labeled as world music. As musicology turned a corner soon after 1900, we turn once more to the basic concepts and definitions that undergird these pages.

Definitions and concepts revisited The term “world music” provides the point of departure for Philip Bohlman’s short but influential eponymous book (Bohlman 2002), and Bohlman goes on to take an almost immensely broad view – the way in which music of the world’s cultures exists in each culture’s “world,” going on to provide a discussion of alternative meanings. On these pages, and particularly in

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transitioning to consideration of the concept in the twentieth century, we are taking a somewhat narrower perspective. It may indeed be tempting virtually to equate world music with the term “music” – “world music” then meaning “all music, everywhere, and everything about it.” In fact, the term “world music” did not enjoy widespread use in English until the 1960s, when it began to be used – coined, we are told, by Robert E. Brown – as an alternative term for ethnomusicology in the curricula of Wesleyan University, to distinguish it from what was usually meant by music in higher education. The need to say “world music” when one means “all music” continued through twentieth-century American academic practice, in the shadow of an odd paradox. In my institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an introductory course on Western art music is titled simply “Introduction to the Art of Music,” while an introductory course on all music is titled “Introduction to World Music.” Just as the term began to gain some currency in American use, the issue became confused by the introduction of world music to mean a branch of popular music in which intercultural influences were particularly emphasized. The enthusiasm with which the term and what it implied were accepted ignores the fact that most Western popular music back to the early twentieth century had an intercultural base. The naive definition of world music as all of the world’s music leads to concepts with a number of different emphases. This chapter began with the assertion that the world of music may be thought to consist of a group of discrete musics that are somewhat coeval with culture units and languages. What then defines “a music?” It may be a repertory, a group of pieces or songs shared by a people. Or it may be a distinctive group of stylistic characteristics, perhaps a set of rules to which members of a society must adhere in order to create a sense of belonging. Or a set of ideas, perhaps including concepts such as “genius” in Western society, or supernatural creation in some Native American cultures. Or a set of requirements for use (e.g., music belonging or not belonging in certain social contexts). There are more along those lines, but there are also criteria involving music in society. For example, does “a” music comprise what the members of a society accept, or should it include anything that any member of a society anywhere includes in his or her cognitive map as music? The sounds of certain nonhuman species, the silence required in John Cage’s famous work, industrial sounds, music that exists only in dreams or on the pages of literature? These issues play a role in our contemplation of the way in which various authors and various societies have used the concept of world music when writing history, sometimes by trying to write history explicitly, sometimes to provide a context for narrower concerns.

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World music as context for the great historical compendia As they look at the history of music comprehensively throughout most of the twentieth century, Western scholars have rarely done what S. M. Tagore tried to do – take a stab at writing the history of all of the world’s cultures or nations. Mainly, if they touched on the music of the world at all, they did so in order to provide a context for understanding the history of Western art music. In the forefront of twentieth-century literature are several large compendia, a number of which covered the issue in essentially parallel fashion. Leaving aside some comprehensive histories of European music, such as the first edition of The Oxford History of Music (Hadow 1901–5), the first serious attempt to assemble this kind of compendium may have been the Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, ten volumes edited by Ernst Bücken (1927–31), which includes volumes on periods in European music history along with others devoted to overarching issues (e.g., performance practice) and narrower subjects (e.g., Lutheran church music). One volume is devoted to four parts, paginated separately (and possibly once available separately for purchase): “Instrumentenkunde” (Organology, the longest part), “Musik der aussereuropäischen Natur- und Kulturvölker” (Music of non-European natural and cultured peoples), a brief introduction to music of antiquity, and, perhaps surprisingly, “Altslavische Volks- und Kirchenmusik” (Old Slavic folk and church music), which seems to be included because it, like the non-Western section, is seen as part of this volume of exotica, even though it comprises European cultures from Russia to Bulgaria and Serbia. This volume seems to have been intended as a supplement to the other nine. World music, in Robert Lachmann’s section on non-Western music (thirty-three pages), consists essentially of two parts and two types – “primitive” and “Asian cultured” peoples and musics; each of these is presented as an essentially homogeneous corpus with stylistic and functional similarities (Lachmann 1929a). Illustrations for a particular point in the first part may be taken from African, Melanesian, and Native American, and in the second from Chinese, Javanese, and Indian cultures. It would be foolish to impute to Lachmann the attitude that all this music was just one big mix. But to him (as seen also in his book Musik des Orients [Music of the Orient] 1929b) the similarities and relationships among the world’s musics (Europe excepted) are the most important touchstones of insight. Peter Panoff’s section on Slavic music is the only one in the entire set that has a part devoted explicitly to folk music. The understanding of popular music as a separate genre does not come into play at all. A somewhat different approach was followed, a couple of decades later, by The New Oxford History of Music (Westrup et al. 1957–65), which departed substantially from its predecessor, The Oxford History of Music, a set that began

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with the establishment of polyphonic music in medieval Europe, thereby perhaps making a unique statement defining what music truly is. The New Oxford begins with a first volume (of ten) on “Ancient and Oriental Music” with chapters on “primitive” music (Marius Schneider), the Asian high cultures (Arnold Bake, Henry George Farmer, and Lawrence Picken), ancient Greece, Jewish and Islamic traditions, altogether by a total of eight specialists. The introduction, by Egon Wellesz, dwells on the essential difference between this volume and the others. It is surprising to read these rather uninsightful lines from the pen of the distinguished scholar of Byzantine music and student of Arnold Schoenberg: “In the East music has . . . still preserved its ritual, even its magic character . . . To the Western musician conciseness of expression, clearly shaped form, and individuality are the highest criteria . . . The Eastern musician likes to improvise on given patterns, he favors repetition, his music does not develop” (Wellesz 1957, xviii). It would seem that the editors of The New Oxford were more interested in fulfilling an obligation to appear modern than in providing a kind of world-music background for their concentration on Western art music. While much of the data on African, American Indian, and Asian musics in these chapters comes from recent sources, there is no attempt to show that these musical cultures are part of the modern, twentieth-century world of music. Shortly thereafter, and in some respects parallel to The New Oxford, appeared the Histoire de la musique edited by Roland-Manuel as part of the series “Encyclopédie de la Pleiade.” The first (2,000 pages in all) of two volumes, published in 1960, includes a chapter on music in myth and ritual in nonWestern (read: primitive) societies by Marius Schneider (approx. eighty-five pages), preceded by a fifteen-page chapter of speculative prehistory by Constantin Bra˘iloiu. Chapters on Africa, Bali, China, Japan, India, and Vietnam occupy two hundred pages; and after chapters on Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Jewish, and Greek music, there are three on “Musique dans le monde Musulman” (Iran, the Arabic world, and Turkey, 165 pages). While the survey of non-Western musics occupies a small proportion of the total volume, it is really quite large, easily the equivalent of a well-sized volume. These chapters discuss the musics of their respective cultures holistically, looking at ancient as well as recent developments, including folk and art musics. In most cases, one gets the feeling that ancient practices continued with only slight changes until Western musical culture intruded. If these chapters provide a context, then the message of the Roland-Manuel collection may, by both organization and tone, be that in ancient times – perhaps the times of the ancient Greeks, putting it very generally – the various musics of the world were in a certain sense equal, but later on, the non-Western cultures

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stayed behind while Western music advanced. It does not present nonWestern musics as manifestations of earlier stages of Western music. Appearing in a new incarnation after fifty years, Bücken’s Handbuch of c. 1930, titled Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft (1984–92) and edited by Carl Dahlhaus, moved somewhat more closely to an even treatment of the world’s cultures, devoting three of its twelve volumes to non-Western and European folk and popular music, with a thirty-page chapter on “Jazz, Rock, und Popmusik.” This is the first large compendium to include folk music in the concept of music history, and while “folk music” is separated from art music, its role in history and its historical components are given attention in a separate chapter. Lip-service, at least, is paid to popular music and, perhaps more significantly, to jazz, whose ambiguous place in the standard taxonomy has stood in the way of its inclusion in comprehensive accounts of music. In contemplating the place of non-Western and folk music in large publications devoted principally to the history of art music, it seems appropriate to mention briefly encyclopedias, of which the most prominent, The New Grove (second edn, 2001), comes closest to providing even-handed treatment of the world’s cultures. It does so by providing survey articles on large world regions (Africa, Middle East) and concepts (folk music), as well as an article on each of the world’s nations. The same is true of the recent edition of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the major German-language encyclopedia of music. The presence of world music has increased in this genre through the last one hundred years, but the cleavage between Western art music and all the rest continues to be quite obvious. The latest among the compendia approaching a history of world music, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (Porter and Rice 1998–2002), takes a more ethnographic than historical perspective. While earlier works emphasize history but provide a bit of ethnography (mainly for cultures in which source material is largely contemporary), the Garland has a few chapters of specifically historical interest. In the volume on Europe (and to a small extent in others), the history of Western art music is given attention as simply one of many traditions. All this suggests a very gradual move toward increasingly even-handed treatment of the world’s musics in works whose titles imply that this is what the reader should expect. At the same time, historical treatments of Western music – such as the six-volume The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin (2005), but going back to Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization (1941) – restrict themselves to Europe and increasingly avoid introductory lip-service to the great non-West. In the late twentieth century, we also see a shift from the concept of music as a single unit with one history

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to multiple “histories.” Garland, New Grove 2, and to some degree Dahlhaus’s Neues Handbuch (1980–2) move in the direction of emphasis on the differences among the world’s musics. It would have been a short hop from the recognition of the national and culture-specific histories to the idea that each culture also has, as it were, its own musicology – that the world of musicology is really a world of many “musicologies.” While this concept has been discussed (e.g., by Regula Qureshi) principally from a theoretical perspective, its application was attempted in a large compendium only once, in a project that was never completed. Under the leadership of Barry Brook, a project titled Music in the Life of Man, later changed to Music in Human Experience, was planned, with the support of UNESCO. Each of a dozen volumes was to include histories of regions and nations throughout the world, each written largely by scholars from that region. The usual distinction – historical treatment for Europe, ethnographic for all other regions – was to be replaced by an essentially historical perspective for all. This would have been, surely, one very distinctive sort of “history of world music.”

Some twentieth-century culture heroes of the history of world music Many authors of “histories of music” in the twentieth century paid lip-service of one sort or another to the concept of world music as a context for Western music history, or as something that precedes the history of Western art music. A few scholars, however, devoted themselves substantially to the notion that there is a world history of music in which Western music plays an important (or maybe not even so important) role. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Johann Gottfried Herder and S. M. Tagore, in quite different and certainly idiosyncratic ways, were their predecessors. In the twentieth century, the scholars in question were members of the newly established discipline or subdiscipline of ethnomusicology. I take the liberty of commenting on the work of three of them.

Curt Sachs The career of Curt Sachs could almost be described as a history of world music. In any event, in a number of his publications, Sachs wanted to present the history of music, and of dance as well, as a world event. His Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (1943), which is part of the so-called Norton Series in which each of the volumes is devoted to a period in Western music history, is largely about non-Western music; only some 75 of its 300 pages are about Greece and Rome. If one had eliminated this, one would have been

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left with a 175-page account of non-Western music, with a historical slant, rather idiosyncratically oriented (the music of “Islam” is presented largely as a preserver of ancient Greek traditions). That this was not done suggests that the editors and author considered non-Western music of interest only insofar as it could be shown relevant to the history of European music. Sachs ends with a short chapter on “Europe and the Road to Major and Minor.” For Sachs, the world of music today shows a number of historical strata, and Western music represents a tremendous leap forward that began in the Middle Ages. The concept of the present as a group of phenomena that represents historical strata goes back, in Sachs’s work, to his Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente (1929), in which the distribution of clusters of instruments throughout the world is interpreted, using the approaches of the Kulturkreis (theory of culture areas) school of historical reconstruction, as a group of twenty-three stages in the history of instruments. More than half of Curt Sachs’s The History of Musical Instruments (1940) is devoted to non-Western societies, and the notion of a single-stranded history leading to the superiority of Western technology is essentially abandoned, except in the order in which the cultures are presented (cf. Kartomi 1990). The notion that all cultures have their own histories becomes evident when we see Asian and European cultures appearing in the sections on antiquity and on the Middle Ages. Sachs’s World History of the Dance (1937) consists of two sections: a survey of dance throughout the world, thematically organized with examples from many societies including Western; and a history that touches briefly on “stone age” cultures, even more briefly on “evolution to the spectacular dance and the oriental civilizations,” and a section occupying almost half of the book on the history of dance in Europe. Sachs wrote about the musics and particularly the instruments of many cultures, but in his view of the history of world music, he mainly comes down on the side of a homogeneous beginning moving to a group of diverse branches, all of which ceased to develop at some point, with the exception of the Western, which, for reasons of technology, social organization, and a certain kind of energy, kept moving forward after others ceased to make progress. It is a widespread view in the literature on music, one ethnomusicologists no longer accept. Actually, it seems that Sachs, in his last book, The Wellsprings of Music (published posthumously in 1962), was beginning to take a different view, moving away from the concept of a single unified history of world music, beginning with the suggestion (based on the “logogenic” and “pathogenic” concepts Sachs had previously used to describe the simplest musics) of two kinds of origin – the “tumbling strains” which suggest a genesis from emotional expression, and “one-step

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melodies” which suggest a development from speech. A series of stages in which many cultures participated – types of scales, polyphony, rhythmic complexity, professionalization of music – is followed by a brief critique of the concept of “progress” to the European harmonic, dissonant, and technological models, and suggests that the interaction of the world’s musics may be the future.

Alan Lomax Alan Lomax was outstanding among the scholars who tried to contemplate all of the world’s music. While he did not attempt to narrate the history, his development of a technique for making comparative descriptions of musical styles and his theories of the determination of musical styles suggest a specific view of how music history works. He recognized that each of the world’s societies had a music with which it principally identified (the “culture’s favored song style”), and that all were equally worthy of attention. In most of his work, he viewed these musics from a synchronic perspective. Chronology was not absent from his considerations, as, for example, in his 1959 delineation of folk-song styles, he viewed the soloistic and virtuosic music of the kingdoms and empires in his “Eurasian” musical area as developments from earlier, more participatory cultures, and his “modern European” song styles were more recent developments than the “old European” of the outskirts of Europe. But if Lomax is viewed as a historian of world music, it is mainly in his concern with determinants of musical style. He famously stated that “a culture’s favored song style reflects and reinforces the kind of behavior essential to its main subsistence effort and to its central and controlling social institutions” (Lomax 1968, 133). Lomax did not see the world of music as a single unit but as a group of musics, the growth of each of which was determined by its unique social and economic history.

Mieczyslaw Kolinski To some extent a predecessor of Lomax, Mieczyslaw Kolinski devoted much of his career to trying to establish systems for the comparative study of musical style traits. While not directly concerned with chronology or diachronic considerations, he does ask, “What is the world of music like?” – or more specifically, in separate publications, what scales, melodic contours, tempos, rhythmic structure, consonance and dissonance are like, in world music. The implication throughout his work is that music is one kind of thing in which the character of stylistic parameters varies freely.

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Concepts and processes: comments on developments since 1950 A book on the history of Europe usually does not discuss the history of each nation, and the author of a “history of the United States” would be nonplussed if confronted with the question, “You mean ALL of the states?” The European historian would concentrate on those factors that significantly affected most or much of the population of Europe, and on those trends that a number of nations had in common, or on the peoples with the largest populations; or on concepts and processes that involved, or could be comprehended by, interrelationships among nations and peoples. Similarly, the history of world music can mean many things. It is widely believed that the term “world music” was coined by Robert E. Brown, who joined the faculty of Wesleyan University in 1960 and moved to establish authentic instruction in the performance of a number of non-Western musics. Realizing that the term “ethnomusicology,” already in use, meant, to most people, a focus on the study of music in culture, and academic rather than artistic study, Brown began to use “world music.” It would have been reasonable to expect the Wesleyan department to introduce the study of “all” musics of the world – though, when I wished to introduce a course titled “Introduction to World Music,” I was asked, with some seriousness, whether I would deal with all musics. What was meant, however, was that within the framework of this curriculum, all musics were eligible for inclusion. There is no doubt that as the twentieth century passed, musicians in many of the world’s cultures, as well as music scholars, began increasingly to think of the term “music” as including all imaginable music; that the scope of the term meant that all kinds of music, the music of all societies, historical periods, subcultures, idiosyncrasies, were eligible for inclusion. Well, that is an ideal, but hardly a practical suggestion for a discipline. What now should the term “world music” imply, as distinct from simply “music?” What should we talk about when we consider world music?

Universals? If we see the musics of the various world cultures as essentially one music, one system, what are the features that identify it? At the end of the twentieth century, one could claim that most of the world’s people had access to the same music, could hear, on radios and through other media, the same songs. Everyone knew The Beatles and Elvis, and everyone could be surrounded by functional harmony on guitars; perhaps everyone had heard and seen the

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eighty-eight-key keyboard. But that is a recent development. Are there concepts that could be (could have been) used to identify music as a single world phenomenon in earlier times? Let me comment, without drawing conclusions, on a few. In the period from c. 1960 to 1985, ethnomusicological activity surged briefly toward an interest in universals, asking, in a good many articles and special issues of journals, whether there were such things, whether musical universals could be heard, and what conclusions one might draw from them (Wachsmann 1971; Blacking 1977). Conclusions? There might be evidence for a “psychic unity of mankind” or evidence for the origins of music, or for the characteristics of a very early stage in human music history – an early stage of world music. Going through that exercise required one to look at music as a discrete set of musics, each of which could theoretically be tested for the presence or absence of presumably universal traits. When it came to enumerating universals, we found that there really were not many of these, that the world’s musics were really more divergent than alike; that the only thing truly universal was the properties of music itself – in other words, that all that the world’s musics had in common was simply the fact of being music – and that certain simple styles such as the existence of two- and three-tone scales everywhere amounted to a mere enumerative, not an intrinsic, feature. The most widespread uses of music – its ubiquitous use in religious practices, the exhibition of virtuosity, the concept of common participation – might shed light on ultimate origins and support arguments for multiple origins. In all of this comparative work, nonetheless, the identification of commonality comes from Western perspectives of music. Thus, the fact that two musics use the same tone inventory – for example, G–A–D – may seem to be a very significant commonality, but to the peoples of these musics, such tone inventories may be coincidental similarities in otherwise totally divergent forms of the art.

Families and types as unities of musical creation We tend to think of “a music” as being defined by stylistic traits, and that those style traits that all musics share are the universals. But the differences between the musical style of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Arapaho vary in only insignificant ways. Members of these tribes, nevertheless, could distinguish their musics and separate them from those of their neighbors. The same, to a much greater extent, must have been true of the tribal groups that represented the 1,100 distinct languages (see Nettle and Romaine 2000) spoken in Papua New Guinea, each by a tiny tribe; or of the hundreds of tribes that comprised the million or so Native Americans in aboriginal California.

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Although songs could be learned from neighbors, each tribe thought it had its music, defined by its repertory. “Our songs may be the most important thing we Blackfeet have,” but songs are taught across tribal and national borders, and they can usually still be recognized even though their words are translated (or, usually, changed more drastically) and their style traits – scale, rhythm, singing style – also changed. So, we could argue that the world of music consists of a large number of units – melodies, rhythmic patterns, harmonic sequences – each of which has a distribution beyond, perhaps far beyond, the musical system in which it began. The concept of “wandering melodies” was recognized in the nineteenth century by Wilhelm Tappert (1868), and carried forward by Walter Wiora (1953). So we could argue that the fundamental stratum of a world music is a group of tunes, with their variants, with enormously wide geographic distribution. Tune-plus-variants, one way of defining the concept of tune family, may be expanded to the concept of tune type, in which the question of genetic relationship is laid aside. The notion that there is a limited number of tune types that occupy the world has been suggested, particularly by T. Leisio who argues that there are ten “grammars,” a term he used as synonymous with tune type, that dominate the world’s music and suggest the earliest developments (2005). There is something to be said for the concept of the world of music consisting of a group (larger or smaller) of musical ideas, each of which, in transformed manifestations, is widely distributed among societies and nations.

Interrelations: what unites the world’s musics The late twentieth century developed the phenomenon known as world music, a group of musical styles based largely on a variety of confluences of Western, African, and secondarily South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American styles widely distributed and heard throughout the world. In the sphere of Western and Western-derived art music, elements of other musics – Indonesian, African, Indian, and much more – play a major role and work toward a kind of concept, if not style, of world music. The classical musics of many cultures, largely Asian, have incorporated elements of Western music, particularly including instruments, technology, and the system of functional harmony, as well as concepts such as the hegemony of large ensembles and notation. While this syndrome of interrelations would seem to be a twentiethcentury phenomenon, it is actually much older. It might explain how the prehistoric world of a vast number of small societies, each with its own language and music, changed to a small number of reasonably homogeneous

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cultural and musical areas. The spread of musical artifacts – instruments, tunes, style traits – as individual diffusions or as parts of culture complexes are documented throughout recorded history and conjectural prehistory. We sometimes say that culture is “what people in a society agree on,” but also, “what people in a society argue about,” suggesting that processes of various sorts are the defining components of what unifies a society. Taking this as a cue, we might also define the world of music as a group of processes that effects the interrelations of discrete musics and works, determining cohesion or diversity. As musical systems confront each other in the lives of individual societies (speaking of music as if it had a life of its own), we can use the metaphor of debate to observe ways in which musics (and the people who create and use them) persuade each other with the results, conquest, standoffs, and compromises. A good many processes, sometimes labeled by their result, have been listed in many publications, processes invoked by societies to preserve their traditions in the face of musical and cultural competition from the outside, and to find ways of mediating between competing musical systems that seek attention from the same people – among them are abandonment, reduction, consolidation, diversification, and development of syncretism (see Nettl 1985), also transculturation, artificial preservation, compartmentalization, nativistic revivals, pluralistic coexistence (of music), as suggested by Kartomi (1981). The point here is not to explain or illustrate these, but to suggest that one way of seeing the world of music is in terms of processes that bring about the global interrelations of musics.

Histories of individual domains of world music In the course of the twentieth century, several publications addressed individual components of musical systems. Let me mention three influential works. In his Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Melodie, Bence Szabolcsi (1959) presents the history as consisting of two processes. In the first, melody moves from two-tone to tritonic, pentatonic, and heptatonic, and eventually to domination by the major–minor dyad. The sequence is discovered in contemporary manifestations of music because various societies, so to speak, got “stuck” at specific stages and ceased moving forward. Szabolcsi believed, citing Bartók, that all “folk music of the entire world . . . is fundamentally based on several original forms, types, and styles” (ibid., 29). To Szabolcsi it’s one history. Hugo Riemann (1904), generally also inclined to see human music history as one process, nevertheless questions whether the music of tribal societies is actually old enough to show the earliest stages of music, and whether contemporary Chinese and Indian music have much to do with the music of

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ancient Greece, surface similarities notwithstanding (ibid., 1). Szabolcsi (1959) proposes a second way of examining the history of melody: by analysis of melodic types and their variants, which he labels as the “māqam principle,” suggesting that not only musical style but melodic content – identities of tunes – may be traced, somewhat in the manner of the tune families or types suggested by Wiora (1953). Curt Sachs’s history of rhythm and tempo (1953), unsurprisingly, is largely devoted to Western music, and provides a chronological treatment. About one-third of Sachs’s history is devoted to world music outside Europe, and while we still get the idea that tribal societies, and then Asian high cultures, in their contemporary guises, represent earlier stages of music, Sachs is not able to make much of a case for increasing complexity as he discusses the Middle Eastern īqā’–usul system and the Indian tālas, and thus does not give us a single, unidirectional history of rhythm. Tying the origins of musical rhythm to body movement and to the rhythm of speech, he suggests that in many tribal societies – and thus perhaps in early humanity – men and women sang (and, he argues in his World History of Dance [1937], also danced) differently. These differences, originally markers of gender, became widespread categories in rhythmic typology, and thus Sachs might be saying that these are really two or perhaps more separate but gradually merging histories of rhythmic behavior.

World music in music education, the significance of minorities, and the decline of authenticity The idea of a world music and the term itself became widespread after c. 1980, but actually there are multiple concepts, and in each of these is embodied a conception of its history. In a book significantly informed by pedagogical aims, Peter Fletcher, in World Musics in Context (2001), follows a somewhat idiosyncratic approach. His title suggests multiplicity of musics, and from the beginning a number of different origins of music are suggested, but the structure of early history suggests the development of diverging traditions from common, not completely specified, roots. Thus, a strand of history begins in Egypt and Mesopotamia and diverges into a) European and African, and b) South (and Central) Asian branches. European art music is not seen as a culmination, but only as one, quite specialized development. And the diversity of musics found, with the use of recording devices, in the period since 1900 is simply treated as a contemporary phenomenon, and its isolated forms are not seen as remnants of “stone-age culture” or evidence of early developments. For Fletcher, the history of the world’s musics is one of ever-increasing diversification.

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Fletcher, a composer, conductor, and educator, considered this book as primarily a contribution to music education, a field that has had to define its own conception of world music in both theoretical and practical ways. The main thrust of the history of music education since c. 1970 in the United States and elsewhere has been the expansion of subject matter. It is probably correct to assume that in most systems of music teaching, pupils and student-musicians were taught what was considered in some way the student’s (or maybe the teacher’s) own culture; music teaching was, on an individual basis and in the classroom, the passing on of a defined heritage, never mind that the teachers’ and the pupils’ – or their parents’ – definition of the heritage may have differed. Around 1970, music educators as a profession began to be aware of the diversity of the world’s music, and thus to participate in the interest in multicultural education. Two contrastive thrusts could be identified, both expanding the curriculum from the emphasis on Western classical (or classicalderived) music from 1720 to 1920. On the one hand, recognizing the cultural diversity of the pupils, one wished to make it possible for each of them to be exposed to his or her “own” music. I was told by a music teacher, for example, that she had a large number of children from India in her class and thus felt obliged to teach Indian music. And then there was the opposite: teach all pupils something about the music of the world, emphasizing those they did not already know. I believe the first was the alternative more frequently chosen. What is the concept of history that underlies these changes in orientation? The traditional Western-art-music approach looked at the classical tradition as something from a grand past that needs to be preserved and nurtured; “normal” music was music composed long ago, and music composed recently must prove itself worthy. The multicultural approach suggests that what is being taught is not music of earlier times – of the Stone Age or the Asian Middle Ages, as Curt Sachs’s presentations often suggest – but the contemporary music of distant societies, or of people in class. The emphasis is on the notion that the world’s musical diversity is a present-day phenomenon. Much of the cross-cultural content of music taught in schools might not easily be recognized in its original home as the culture’s normal music. Thus, gamelans in American schools might include some instruments only remotely like those of the Javanese or Balinese originals. A world-music concert by a sixth-grade choir might include songs of African, Caribbean, French, Chinese, and Central Asian origins, all of them arranged for diatonic scales with functional harmony piano accompaniment. Clearly, the purpose here is not so much to introduce students to the diversity of the world’s musical sounds, but rather to persuade them that all of the world’s people have music that can be comprehended; that all of the world’s musics have a lot in common. We are back to universals.

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Ethnomusicologists and folk-music scholars before c. 1950 devoted a lot of effort to the study and nurturing of authenticity. Authenticity is a difficult concept. In the 1950s, it was widely used by folk-music scholars (including the International Folk Music Council) and folklorists to designate artifacts and works of art that could be said to belong, truly, to a society, and would be accepted as such by all of its members, and also artifacts that had reached a certain age. The difficulties in making the necessary definitions were not sufficiently recognized. It seemed important, for example, to distinguish a Child ballad sung by an Appalachian miner and learned from his grandmother from the same ballad sung by a trained singer, such as John Jacob Niles, or arranged by a composer of art music, such as Carl Loewe. Clearly, however, many scholars before 1950 worked on the basic assumption that music was normally unchanging, and that changes, imposed from without, decreased its authenticity. After 1950, one aspect of history concerns the value and significance of what is being studied; most music historians, for example, wish to study “significant” composers, or to elevate less significant ones to higher levels of accreditation. Beethoven was preferable to Antonio Salieri. The great composers defined the music around them for the historian; they were the most authentic of their periods and nations. In ethnomusicology, where individual musicians played less of a role, a certain canon emerged after 1950 – gamelan music, Indian classical music, African and Native North American music. I do not speculate here why these areas became prominent – there are different reasons for each – but it was assumed that no matter what an ethnomusicologist’s specialty, he or she ought to have some command of these areas. Beyond that, however, authenticity meant: 1) assumed representativeness to a society; 2) homogeneity; and 3) absence of mixing with other musics. Cultural mix is one of the major characteristics of popular music in the age of mass media, beginning early in the twentieth century, though to a smaller extent than is true in late twentiethcentury “world beat.” Still, ethnomusicologists before but also somewhat after 1950, for whom authenticity was a major criterion of acceptable research, avoided popular music as inauthentic and polluted, contradicting their interest in what music was considered normal by each society. After 1950, the ethnomusicological view of normal history was gradually revised; change came to be seen as the norm, and the study of music in the process of change, of peoples undertaking changes in their musical culture, became the main focus of this field. The basic assumption, therefore, changed from music as essentially static to characteristically dynamic; and scholars, having once worked hard at developing methods of description and analysis and ethnography that would show musical culture in repose,

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began developing concepts that would show music in motion (Rahn 1983; Tenzer 2006).

Conclusion We accept that there is such a thing as world music. But it is many things – all music of all peoples everywhere at all times; the conglomeration of the principal musics of all cultures; the world’s musics, which have something to do with each other; that music or those musical styles and genres that are accepted by, which speak to, the world’s cultures. Scholars of music – particularly ethnomusicologists, who have an interest in looking at music as widely as possible – have not often overtly constructed a history of world music, but their attitudes and conclusions, and their individual methodologies, have often suggested a music-historical worldview, and it is that larger historical worldview that underlies the present volume (cf. Merriam 1964; Nettl 2005; Nettl and Bohlman 1991). The history of ethnomusicology seems to me to have been guided by the interfacing of two principal attitudes frequently mentioned in this chapter: music as one whole, with one origin, the most important elements of which are the universals or commonalities that characterize the world’s music in their diversity; or music as a diverse group of phenomena, perhaps with multiple origins, intelligible primarily from the standpoint of the individual culture. In the course of the past 125 years, both perspectives have provided significant insights.

Bibliography Adler, G. (1885) ‘Umfang, Methode, und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1: 5–20 (ed.) (1924) Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, Berlin-Wilmersdorf: H. Keller. Allen, W. D. (1939) Philosophies of Music History, New York: American Book Company Ambros, A. W. (1862) Geschichte der Musik, Breslau: F. E. C. Leuckart Amiot, P. (1779) Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, Paris: Chez Nyon l’ainé Blacking, J. (1977) ‘Can musical universals be heard?’, World of Music, 19, 1–2: 14–22 Blume, F. (ed.) (1949–79) Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Cassel: Bärenreiter Bohlman, P. V. (2002) World Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2007) ‘Becoming ethnomusicologists: On colonialism and its aftermaths’, SEM Newsletter, 41, 1: 4–5 (2010) ‘Herder’s nineteenth century’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7, 1: 3–21 (2011) ‘Translating Herder translating: Cultural translation and the making of modernity’, in J. F. Fulcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 501–22

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Bücken, E. (ed.) (1927–31) Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, Wildpark-Potsdam: Athenaion Burney, C. (1776–89 [orig. publ.], 1935) A General History of Music, from the Earliest Times to the Present Period, ed. F. Mercer, New York: Harcourt Brace Capwell, C. (1987) ‘Sourindro Mohun Tagore and the national anthems project’, Ethnomusicology, 31: 407–30 (1991) ‘Marginality and musicology in nineteenth-century Calcutta: The case of Sourindro Mohun Tagore’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 228–43 Dahlhaus, C. (ed.) (1980–2) Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, Laaber Verlag Dissanayake, E. (2000) ‘Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interaction’, in N. Wallin et al. (eds.), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 389–410 Ellis, A. J. (1885) ‘On the musical scales of various nations’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 33: 485–527 Engel, C. (1866) An Introduction to the Study of National Music: Comprising Researches into Popular Songs, Traditions and Customs, London: Longmans, Green Fletcher, P. (2001) World Musics in Context, Oxford University Press Freeman, W. (2000) ‘A neurobiological role of music in social bonding’, in N. Wallin et al. (eds.), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 411–23 Hadow, H. (ed.) (1901–5) The Oxford History of Music, London: Oxford University Press du Halde, J.-B. (1735) Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, Paris: P. G. Lemercier Harrison, F. L. (1973) Time, Place, and Music: An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observation c. 1550 to c. 1800, Amsterdam: Frits Knuf Herder, J. G. (1778–9) ‘Stimmen der Völker in Liedern’ and Volkslieder, 2 vols., Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung Jones, W. (1784 [orig. publ.], 1964) ‘On the modes of the Hindoos’, Asiatick Researches, in S. M. Tagore (ed.), Hindu Music from Various Authors, Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, pp. 88–112 Kartomi, M. J. (1981) ‘The processes and results of musical culture contact: A discussion of terminology and concepts’, Ethnomusicology, 25: 227–50 (1990) On Concept and Classifications of Musical Instruments, University of Chicago Press Kiesewetter, R. G. (1842) Die Musik der Araber, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel Lach, R. (1930) ‘Die Musik der außereuropäischen Natur- und Kulturvölker’, in G. Adler (ed.), Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 2nd edn, vol. 1, Berlin-Wilmersdorf: H. Keller, pp. 3–34 Lachmann, R. (1929a) ‘Musik der außereuropäischen Völker’, in E. Bücken (ed.), Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, Wildpark-Potsdam: Athenaion (1929b) Musik des Orients, Breslau: Jedermanns Bücherei Lang, P. H. (1941) Music in Western Civilization, New York: W. W. Norton Leisio, T. (2005) ‘Unpublished oral presentation’ Lomax, A. (1968) Folk Song Style and Culture, Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science Merriam, A. P. (1964) The Anthropology of Music, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

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Miller, G. (2000) ‘Evolution of human music through sexual selection’, in N. Wallin et al. (eds.), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 329–60 Nadel, S. (1930) ‘The origins of music’, Musical Quarterly, 16: 531–46 Nettl, B. (1985) The Western Impact on World Music, New York: Schirmer Books (1989) Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press (2005) The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts, new edn, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (2010) Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Nettl, B., and P. V. Bohlman (eds.) (1991) Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press Nettle, D., and S. Romaine (2000) Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages, Oxford University Press Porter, J., and T. Rice (eds.) (1998–2002) The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 10 vols., New York: Garland Publishing Prajnanananda, S. (1973) Music of the Nations, New Delhi: M. Manoharlal Rahn, J. (1983) A Theory for All Music, University of Toronto Press Riemann, H. (1904) Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, vol. 1, pt. 1, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel Roland-Manuel (1960) Histoire de la musique I: Des origines a Jean-Sébastien Bach, Paris: Gallimard Rousseau, J.-J. (1768) Dictionnaire de musique, Paris: Chez la veuve Duchesne Sachs, C. (1929) Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente, Berlin: J. Bard (1937) World History of the Dance, New York: W. W. Norton (1940) The History of Musical Instruments, New York: W. W. Norton (1943) The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West, New York: W. W. Norton (1953) Rhythm and Tempo, New York: W. W. Norton (1962) The Wellsprings of Music, The Hague: M. Nijhoff Sadie, S. (ed.) (2001) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan Smith, R. C. (1971) ‘Deliverance from chaos for a song: A preliminary discussion of Asmuesha music’, unpublished paper, Cornell University Szabolcsi, B. (1959) Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Melodie, Budapest: Corvina Tagore, S. M. (1896 [orig. publ.], 1963) Universal History of Music, Compiled from Divers Sources, Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office Tappert, W. (1868 [orig. publ.], 1890) Wandernde Melodien, 2nd edn, Leipzig: List und Francke Taruskin, R. (2005) The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols., New York: Oxford University Press Tenzer, M. (ed.) (2006) Analytical Studies in World Music, New York: Oxford University Press Thompson, S. (1953) ‘The Star-Husband Tale’, Studia Septentrionalia, 4: 93–163 Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1885–95) Wachsmann, K. P. (1971) ‘Universal perspectives in music’, Ethnomusicology, 15: 381–4 Wallin, N. L., B. Merker, and S. Brown (eds.) (2000) The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Wellesz, E. (ed.) (1957) Ancient and Oriental Music, vol. 1: The New Oxford History of Music, London: Oxford University Press

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Westrup, J. A., et al. (eds.) (1957–65) The New Oxford History of Music, London: Oxford University Press Wiora, W. (1953) Europäischer Volksgesang, Cologne: Arno Volk-Verlag (1965) The Four Ages of Music, New York: W. W. Norton Wissler, C., and D. C. Duvall (1909) Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, vol. 2, pt. 1, New York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History

. 2 .

Music cultures of mechanical reproduction PETER MANUEL

Popular musics are best understood as comprising those genres whose styles have evolved in an inextricable relation with their dissemination via the mass media and their marketing and sale on a mass-commodity basis. While much popular-music activity takes place independently of the mass media, other essential aspects of popular-music production and marketing are inevitably inseparable from technologies of mechanical reproduction, which perforce condition aspects of music culture in general. Hence, just as one could speak of military cultures based around the stirrup, or later the firearm, or agrarian cultures based on the hoe, the ox, or the tractor, so do diverse means of mechanical reproduction form the cores of technocultures with their own attendant characteristic forms of production, exchange, meaning, and even specific musical features. The advent of recording has tended to promote, among other things, the popularity of the three- or four-minute song, an unprecedented standard of perfectionism in performance, and, in a genre like early jazz, a preference for some instruments and techniques (such as slap-bass playing) over others (such as the drum-set, which did not record well) (Katz 2010). The history of popular musics is in many respects a study of how producers and consumers, as active agents, form music cultures conditioned by the distinctive limitations and opportunities presented by specific forms of technologies. In this chapter, I use the notion of technocultures to suggest some broad perspectives on the historical development of popular music, especially outside the mainstream West, and to look at a set of distinctive music subcultures based around specific uses of extant technologies. In his dense, erudite, and widely cited Studying Popular Music, Richard Middleton (1990) sketches a rough history of Western popular music in terms of three “moments” – really prolonged stages – of “radical situational change” (in Gramsci’s use of the term). The first of these is the nineteenthcentury era of “bourgeois revolution,” marked, among other things, by the “spread of the market system through almost all musical activities,” with musical production increasingly mediated by commercial music publishers and concert and theater impresarios. New forms of bourgeois song and social

[55]

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dance emerge, together with commercialized versions of traditional musics, all representing forms of bourgeois synthesis. From c. 1900, the spread of recording technology inaugurates “a second major situational fracture,” characterized by the growing internationalization – and especially Americanization – of music culture, in which corporate entities use capitalintensive, predominantly “one-way” mass media (records, radio, and especially film) increasingly to monopolize marketing and production, at the expense of local, small-scale, grass-roots producers. In the decades after World War II, an affluent baby-boom generation cultivates a youth counterculture, whose dramatically new tastes in popular music, combined with the advent of cheaper recording technologies (based especially on magnetic tape), stimulate a third moment – that of “pop culture” and especially rock music. In this period, the oligopolistic music industry, although challenged and forced to diversify in control and product, is able to adapt and expand, even in offering musics associated with auras of rebellion and sensuality (Middleton 1990, 12–15; see also Middleton in this volume). The acuity of Middleton’s scheme, coupled with its specifically Western focus, naturally invites questions as to what extent it might be applicable to music cultures elsewhere. An obvious obstacle to such a broadened application lies in the sheer diversity of non-Western cultures in terms of their trajectories of socioeconomic development, and the absence of any culture that closely resembles the West in this respect. The presence, nevertheless, of certain general affinities – including the uses of some of the same technologies of mechanical reproduction – do afford some minimal use of Middleton’s scheme as a template; and further, the very differences that emerge may stand out more clearly when contrasted with such a scheme. One parallel that does stand out, in the prehistory of popular music both in the West and elsewhere, is the use of printed chapbooks and broadsheets of song lyrics, constituting an early form of mechanical reproduction, not of music per se, but surely of one of its dimensions. Such publications, disseminated by street-hawkers, constituted in many ways appendages to, rather than bases of, extant performance traditions, whether of traditional oral narrative ballads or of emerging proto-bourgeois song forms. But insofar as they stimulated production of certain new genres, with new sorts of commercial lyricists and new forms of marketing and performance, one can also begin to speak of new cultures of mechanical reproduction associated with them. The role of broadside ballads in popularizing British Music Hall music in the latter nineteenth century is well known. In Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868) and to the early 1900s, commercial publishers mass produced cheap songbooks (complete with advertisements for local

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products) of old and new genres, initiating a commodification process characteristic of popular-music industries later emerging (Groemer 1995/ 1996). In Spain, similar chapbooks were called pliegos de cordel (“strap-bound folders”), as marketed by blind hawkers who sang excerpts of the songs, including not only traditional long-winded romances, but also fandangos and topical songs that fed the evolution of commercial popular musics in the early twentieth century. In India, one of the foremost genres of publication in the explosion of vernacular-language printing in the 1800s and early 1900s consisted of songbooks, whether traditional epic ballads, devotional bhajans, or commercial Parsi theater songs. Among East Indian singers of “local classical music” in Trinidad and Guyana, something of a “subculture of mechanical reproduction” still remains intact around these dog-eared and now rare turn-of-the-century lyric anthologies, which are zealously prized as sources of exclusive repertory by competitive semi-professional vocalists (Manuel 2000, 77–82).

Moment one: “bourgeois revolution,” or the emergence of a commercial public sector? In Richard Middleton’s outline of Western popular-music history, such songbooks and broadsheets constituted one aspect of the extension of commercial capitalist modes of production throughout many aspects of musical life. Such penetration was itself a ramification of a much broader socioeconomic, cultural, and technological revolution linked to the triumph of bourgeois capitalism and modernity in general. Of Middleton’s three moments, this is the least broadly applicable outside the mainstream West, in that nowhere else did such an extensive capitalist socioeconomic revolution occur during the nineteenth century, with the partial exception of Edo period and early Meiji Japan. Although Japan’s industrial revolution commenced only belatedly in the 1870s, since well before that period Edo/Tokyo did indeed host a lively urban commercial music scene, formed around theater songs, courtesans, and patronage by an idiosyncratic sort of local bourgeoisie consisting of the rising merchant class. Elsewhere in the developing world, however, one can find only pockets of local bourgeois culture, typically consisting of comprador merchants, petty bourgeois clerks and entrepreneurs, and modernizing members of traditional elites constituting urban progressive sectors embedded in and coexisting with otherwise premodern and precapitalist socioeconomic milieus. In many cases, the musical activities of these islands of bourgeois culture might be oriented toward mimicking the culture of their Western colonial masters.

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As such, rather than seeking counterparts to a broad bourgeois revolution outside the mainstream West, it may be more appropriate and constructive to focus on those limited, emergent, urban sectors of colonial-era societies in which specific kinds of commercial music production and dissemination took place. The crucial dimension here is the commercial exchange of music in a free market, unmediated by traditional patronage obligations and premodern social hierarchies. During the dawn of the recording era, such exchanges tended to occur in specific kinds of milieus. One of these was music theater, as performed not as an obligatory offering to some bejeweled feudal prince, but as a commercial venture marketed to a ticket-purchasing, proto-bourgeois urban public. Such music theater was well established in Edo-period Japan, and emerged in the decades around 1900 as a lively aspect of urban music culture in such places as Shanghai, Havana, and Bombay. Music genres used in these contexts were typically mixtures of extant traditional styles (e.g., in India, ghazal, lavni, and others) and new forms of through-composed topical songs that prefigured and often evolved into the commercial popular-song styles of subsequent decades. While live performance remained at the heart of music theater, mechanically reproduced chapbooks of lyrics (e.g., in Tokyo and Bombay), sheet music (e.g., in Havana), and from c. 1900 commercial phonograph recordings became important ancillary components of composite music-theater cultures. Another social setting for the commercially mediated but socially “free” consumption of music involved the diverse sorts of performers generically classified or regarded as courtesans. Such women can in many ways be regarded as relics of premodern society, and it may be customary, and not entirely inappropriate, to regard them as socially “unfree” in terms of their specific and delimiting social status in traditional societies. In the early twentieth century, however, courtesans could also embody a certain sort of modernity in being professional performers who were in many ways markedly free from premodern forms of patronage, and who marketed their skills as free agents in an emerging capitalist entertainment scene. In many cases, such a performer might not have engaged in any particular financially mediated sexual liaisons with clients, such that – as may have been the case with celebrated Indian songstress Gauhar Jan – the label “courtesan” constitutes little more than a catch-all category for a socially independent female professional performer (of unknown or irrelevant hereditary caste). Gauhar Jan, like counterparts elsewhere in the developing world, also enhanced her fame and fortune by commercial recordings, for whose production she charged prodigious sums. Courtesan performers, furthermore, were often closely allied with music theater, and the music genres they recorded were accordingly seminal in the

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emergence of commercial popular idioms. The existence of a lively courtesanbased performance scene in Oran, Algeria, from the early twentieth century contributed to that city’s role as a crucible of a lively popular-music culture centered around raï. A third social milieu was that of the lumpen proletariat, which served as the crucible for genres as varied as Greek rebetika, the Argentine tango, and South African marabi. Again, the distinguishing characteristic of this subculture was a certain sort of freedom – not only from premodern forms of patronage and exchange, but also from elite, including bourgeois, musical tastes and inhibitions, which could be limiting in their own way. As with courtesan and theater music, access to commercial recording technology provided a catalyst for the evolution of modern commercial popular musics out of what would otherwise have remained “urban folk” genres. Thus, in the absence of an all-encompassing “bourgeois revolution” in non-Western societies, it was particular and limited sociomusical milieus – such as were provided by music theater, courtesans, and lumpen classes, together with emergent pockets of bourgeois culture – that constituted some of the primary crucibles for commercial popular musics once they interacted with the mass media. Although “revolutionary” in constituting free markets for the commercial production and exchange of music, they were in some cases islands of modern capitalist culture rather than constituents of a broader bourgeois revolution such as characterized the developed West.

Moment two: mass culture If Middleton’s first moment – that of bourgeois revolution – finds counterparts only in limited pockets of societies outside the mainstream West during the turn-of-the-century decades, his second moment – that of “mass culture” – does indeed characterize much developing-world music production in the period after 1930. As Middleton notes, Western popular-music culture from the early twentieth century was marked by a trend toward oligopolistic corporate ownership, capital-intensive “one-way” media (with little or no scope for direct consumer input or interaction), and, in many respects, a streamlined and narrow stylistic spread conditioned by formulaic approaches to production. The concept of mass culture was trenchantly invoked by Adorno, Marcuse, and others to highlight the undemocratic, alienating, and politically conservative nature of an entertainment industry increasingly monopolized by corporate elites during a period of European fascism and subsequent Cold War conformism (Marcuse 1964; Adorno 1976; Adorno and Horkheimer 1944 [1987]).

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The epoch of mass culture in the West naturally accommodated a fair amount of diverse and independent commercial musical activity at its margins and interstices, especially as represented by “indie” (independent) record companies and grass-roots producers and entrepreneurs. Similarly, the first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of diverse commercial popularmusic styles – from Nigerian jùjú to the Spanish cuplé – catalyzed by local recordings, whether marketed by growing multinationals or by local producers. If, however, the monopolistic mass-culture model does little justice to the organic, grass-roots ways in which such genres evolved, the same period was also characterized by the emergence of a set of pan-regional music genres, most typically embedded in commercial cinema, whose patterns of production and marketing epitomized the mass-culture model even more radically than did counterparts in the developed West. Film, in the form of melodramas with inserted music and dance scenes, was especially widespread as a medium for popular-music dissemination in regions where most consumers were too poor to afford records and record players, but could afford occasional cinema tickets. These developments were not ubiquitous, universal aspects of the developing-world music scenes, but were instead associated with a finite set of production centers. In the Arab Middle East from the early 1930s, Cairo became the center for the production of cinematic musicals, whose popular songs became cherished and set stylistic standards throughout the region. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, Buenos Aires and Mexico City emerged as twin lodestars, offering, respectively, sentimental tango-based films (especially featuring Carlos Gardel) and the swashbuckling “charro” films featuring rancheras and ballads sung by Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, and others. Yet by far the most long-lasting and vast music cinema center has been Bombay (Mumbai), which has continued to generate over seven hundred cinematic musicals annually, decades after such films went largely out of style in other regions. Film culture – such as that centered around Bollywood – constitutes a quintessential “culture of mechanical reproduction.” For hundreds of millions of enthusiasts in South Asia – and elsewhere – Indian film constitutes a major source and inspiration for fantasy, fashion, moral values, and styles of discourse; one can similarly speak of film-music culture, based around production, consumption, and also rearticulation of film songs, as South Asians recycle film melodies in local style with new lyrics and incorporate songs and dances into live amateur and professional performances. Bollywood cinema – especially the Hindi-language cinema that dominates North India – also epitomizes the most positive and negative aspects of mass culture, illustrating the applicability of Middleton’s second “situational conjuncture” outside the West. On the one

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hand, film-music culture is enriching, exposing rural Indians, with their often quite limited range of traditional melodies and styles, to an unprecedented breadth of repertory, as produced by teams of highly skilled Bombay composers, arrangers, and vocalists. On the other hand, Bollywood music culture can be also seen as epitomizing the smothering, homogenizing, and arguably alienating aspects of mass culture. Rather than reflecting the extraordinary diversity of vocal styles, languages, lyrics traditions, and song topics found throughout India, mainstream Bollywood cinema has tended to superimpose a relatively homogeneous song style, as generated by a tiny coterie of producers and sound-alike singers, in a single language (Hindi), and generally about a single topic (romantic love). Hence many commentators in India came to regard film music as a menace insofar as it undermined diverse local traditions and replaced them with the songs and dances embedded in the glittery escapist fantasies produced by far-off Bombay studios (see Manuel 1993, chap. 3; see, also, Mason in this volume). Accordingly, production of film music has traditionally been highly monopolistic and undemocratic, dominated as it has been by a coterie of producers linked to the capital-intensive film industry and marketed, for around forty years, primarily by a single multinational: the British-owned multinational with the appropriate logo of “His Master’s Voice.” Film music produced in this fashion, allied to the expensive, one-way media of vinyl records and cinema, also thoroughly dominated the Indian popular-music scene in general from the 1940s to the 1980s, in accordance with HMV’s monopoly of the nation’s recording industry.

Moment three: modern modes of mechanical reproduction Indian film culture and film-music culture, which continue to flourish vigorously today, reflect the persistence of the mass-culture mode of production in specific regional centers even in the new millennium. The continued domination of much of the world’s recording industry by a handful of multinationals (including EMI, Polygram, SONY, and RCA) also reflects a certain sort of oligopolization, although it should not necessarily be taken to imply homogenization of content or superimposition of Western music. In other respects, the flowering of diverse non-Western popular-music cultures since the mid-twentieth century has exhibited a variety of forms of ownership, concentration, and modes of production, most of which depart significantly from the mass-culture model. In Middleton’s analysis of Western popular-music history, the postwar decades inaugurated a third “situational change,” that of “pop culture,”

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marked by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, a baby-boom youth counterculture, and the spread of electronic (and magnetic-tape-based) rather than electromechanical means of production. Like the bourgeois revolution moment, these features apply only in a limited and uneven fashion to popular-music cultures outside the mainstream West. The rock revolution certainly became a global phenomenon, as forms of rock music, whether inflected with local stylistic features or not, came to be widely consumed and even produced throughout much of the world, typically retaining associations with social freedom, modernity, sensuality, and the West. In other respects, however, such as the role of a specific baby-boom generation, Middleton’s framework is clearly more applicable to the West than to any broad spectrum of global societies. What is more evident in this period, and as a global situational change, are the exponential expansion of the regional and transnational recording industries and the concomitant flowering of innumerable syncretic popularmusic genres. While the “Big Five” record multinationals grew in size and extended their presence worldwide, so were innumerable diverse regional popular-music styles able to emerge and thrive, whether disseminated by these conglomerates or by small independent producers. Hence, throughout urban Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, records and record players, while still beyond the reach of many consumers, were able to catalyze the emergence of dynamic new genres, from highlife to cumbia. In Latin America and the Middle East, cinematic musicals declined in popularity, opening the way for a greater diversity of regional or class-based genres to thrive. Democratization of production was further stimulated by the advent of cassette technology, which, in contrast to the capital-intensive, one-way nature of the “old media” like records and film, lent itself to small-scale, grass-roots production. By the late 1970s, cassettes were the dominant medium of music marketing in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, precipitating the flowering of innumerable local genres that would not have been represented on the corporate old media. The cassette revolution was perhaps most dramatic in India, since import restrictions delayed its advent until the mid-1980s, until which period the mass-culture hegemony of EMI film-music culture had continued. The marked decentralization of the music industry brought by cassettes ended this hegemony, and led to the emergence of several hundred cassette producers, large and small, throughout the country, marketing a variety of music genres which included many regional grass-roots syncretic idioms, and revitalizing innumerable local traditions previously ignored by the capital-intensive commercial mass media. With local entrepreneurs recording and marketing modernized versions of regional folk and folk-pop for local, often lower-class consumers, in

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local dialects, one could speak of a particular cassette culture, or set of cassette cultures, based on distinctively democratic-participant and often subaltern modes of production (see Manuel 1993). The notion of cassette culture – implying its distinctive modes of production, exchange, and consumption – would connote a variety of phenomena. These could include the Rajasthani village enthusiast recording local folk musicians, duplicating copies on his backroom rickety machine, and marketing them on the street. It would include the entire culture – including modes of dance, song, and notions of fashion – based around genres like Andean chicha and Sundanese jaipongan that arose in connection with cassettes. It would embrace the young Hmong Americans who circulate cassettes of courtship songs via the mail to find spouses (Catlin 1992, 50). It encompassed the progressive Latin Americans living under right-wing dictatorships in the 1970s, who circulated cassettes of nueva trova singers Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez, or Palestinians on the occupied West Bank exchanging cassettes of Marcel Khalife and others. And it would include the cassettes distributed by right-wing Hindu fundamentalists in the early 1990s containing speeches and songs that were effectively used to incite pogroms against Muslims. Meanwhile, needless to say, popular musics disseminated via cassette encompassed an infinitely wide range of styles, target audiences, and recording techniques. In some cases, the recorded genre might be essentially a studio art form, as with elaborate recordings of Hindi film songs that were not meant to duplicate the sound of any particular live performance idiom. Other recorded genres, like Greek bouzouki music, were largely conceived as replicating ideal forms of live performance styles. Another approach would be represented by Algerian raï, whose recording process would typically commence with an a cappella vocal track, resembling in style, structure, and (lack of) instrumentation the traditional folk songs that constituted ancestors of the genre. The techno-pop, electrified accompanying tracks would be added later, and live performances in clubs would generally try to reproduce that studio sound. Cassettes, however, were not the only medium for decentralized popularmusic production, nor did they entirely eliminate vinyl records. In many locales, small-scale production of vinyl records by independent labels formed the nuclei of regional popular-music cultures, as in the case of Texan-Mexican (tejano) and norteño musics before the CD era, or African urban genres like Congolese soukous. Elsewhere, vinyl records continued even into the new millennium to be preferred formats, to some extent because of their special capabilities. The use of record players as musical instruments in hip-hop, dating from c. 1980, is well known, with its special techniques of scratching, juxtaposing, or superimposing tracks from disparate songs, and repeating

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passages (especially instrumental breaks) as dance music and/or to accompany rappers. Jamaican dancehall music culture illustrates two distinctive sorts of production and performance technique based on distinctive uses of vinyl records. One of these is what I have called the “riddim method,” in which a given instrumental accompaniment track, or “riddim,” is recycled in dozens of songs, used as a backing over which vocalists (or deejays) sing or “voice” their original songs. Thus, at any given time, around a dozen riddims are in vogue, and numerous deejays will sing – whether in live performances or on recordings – their own songs over popular riddims. A given song might also be heard over different riddims, whether in a studio remix or a live performance in which the vocalist must sing over whatever riddim the “selector” is playing. In this riddim method, vocalization and instrumental tracks can exist as detachable entities rather than as parts of a unique and autonomous song. Although often produced on CDs today, the system derives from the practice of deejays at sound-system dances, vocalizing over instrumental tracks of hit reggae songs, found on the B-sides of vinyl singles. Such records remain a preferred medium in Jamaica itself, especially insofar as they are used by the over two thousand sound systems, who might offer amateur or established vocalists chances to “chat” over riddims on B-sides of records (Manuel and Marshall 2006). Another distinctive Jamaican subculture of mechanical reproduction centered around vinyl records is the institution of the “sound clash,” featuring a duel between two or more sound systems. Each system has its own equipment, personnel, and, above all, its exclusive collection of vinyl acetate “dub plates,” in which known artists, hired by the system, sing new lyrics praising that system, typically set to the tune of one of their hit songs. Sound clashes are unique performance events, whose innovative use of exclusive recordings illustrates how, as Middleton notes, there can be a continuum, rather than a sharp dichotomy, between formats of recorded music and live performance, especially in the sense that recordings can play roles in diverse live performance formats. Some of the most distinctive music subcultures have been based not on particular genres, but rather around particular uses of modes of mechanical reproduction that further blur distinction between performers and audiences. One of the most widespread and best known of such formats is karaoke, which, after emerging in Japan in the early 1970s, has spread throughout East and Southeast Asia and their diasporic communities in the United States and elsewhere. In the typical karaoke format, amateur solo singers, in taverns, rented karaoke halls, or private homes, croon familiar pop songs to the accompaniment of commercially marketed accompanimental tracks, often with the

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song lyrics and romantic video scene projected from a television monitor (see, e.g., Lum 1996). Karaoke is a social as well as musical event, and as such constitutes yet another subculture of mechanical reproduction, using a modified music technology in a distinctive manner. Yet another music subculture involving a distinctive use of technology is that based around Mexican sound systems and deejays called sonideros. New Yorkarea sonidero events, as described by Ragland (2003), are attended primarily by Mexican-American, predominantly male, migrant workers, most of whom are separated from their families in the homeland. The deejay, after playing a section of introductory, synthesized “space-age travel” sounds, plays a series of cumbias, while animatedly reading, into an amplified mike, dedications to loved ones at home written on scraps of paper by those present, only some of whom actually dance. After his set, audio cassettes or CDs of the show, complete with dedications, are duplicated on the spot, purchased by attendees, and then sent by the attendees to their relatives at home. The sonideros also travel to Mexico and perform there in the same communities whence the migrants come; both they and their dances serve as conduits for ties between otherwise painfully separated individuals. At such events, far less important than the actual music played is the way the deejays and attendees use the amplification and recording technology – and the postal system – to reaffirm links to loved ones abroad. Sonidero subculture can be seen as a particular variety of deejay-based popular-music scenes that have emerged in various sites worldwide, which center not around live musicians but around sound systems with their distinctive record collections and charismatic “mike-men” (in Jamaican parlance). In some cases, the music featured by such systems may not even be of local creation, as in the case of the Afro-pop played in Atlantic coast Colombian picó dances, in which dancers may not even know the origin of the music selected (see Pacini-Hernandez 1993).

Moment four: the digital age Middleton’s Studying Popular Music was published in 1990, when the digital revolution in communications and music was in many ways just gathering steam. In the developed West, personal computers had come into wide popular use only a few years earlier, and MP3 file-to-file sharing technologies did not emerge until the late 1990s. As of the early years of the new millennium, however, it is clear that a new situational change, resulting from a technological development, has taken place, constituting a new moment in the history of world popular musics. From a sociomusical perspective, the intensified

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phenomenon of globalization – including transnational flows of people, ideas, money, media, and technologies – can itself be said to have inaugurated a new situational conjuncture in world popular music, but in these pages I restrict my comments more specifically to the ramifications of new technology-driven modes of musical production and exchange, in particular those associated with digital technology. If the advent of electrical and electromagnetic technologies – including records, cassettes, and magnetic tape – were part of a second industrial revolution, digital synthesizers, computers, and MP3 software can well be seen as creating a third revolution, with dramatic effects on music culture. Many practices associated with this revolution – from burning compact discs (CDs) to using synthesizers to replace live performers – may involve forms of cost-cutting attractive and useful outside the developed world. At the same time, much of the most distinctive and basic features of digital culture – such as personal computers – involves technologies that, for economic reasons, are far less widespread in the developing world than in the West. Hence, it is important to maintain a global perspective on the digital revolution, aspects of which are only beginning to affect music culture outside the industrialized nations and may never become as pervasive as they are in the latter regions. Ultimately of interest is the manner and extent to which new technologies have influenced, or even created, new sociomusical practices of production, dissemination, and consumption, both in the developed world and elsewhere. Perhaps the first digital technology to make a marked impact on music production worldwide was the synthesizer, including in its simpler forms of Casio keyboards. By the mid-1980s, synthesizers had come to be widely used in a diverse set of international popular-music genres. Although relatively expensive compared to many regionally produced acoustic instruments, synthesizers could naturally be used in place of live musicians and hence had obvious economic utility in the developing world. Thus, one obvious use was to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments, as in many North Indian “version” cassettes that offered cover versions of classic film songs, sung by sound-alike vocalists accompanied by synthesizer-generated imitations of the original large ensemble backings. In Indo-Trinidadian soca-chutney music, the difficulty of amplifying the dholak barrel drum in live performances constituted a further incentive to replace it – both in the studio and live – with a suitably programmed drum machine. In other cases, synthesizers have been used not to imitate extant traditional instrumentation, but to generate distinctively new and clearly synthetic timbres. Hence, the standard timbres that soon became familiar in genres like Algerian raï, Andean techno-huayno (Romero 2002), Mexican techno-cumbia, and Jamaican dancehall reggae (and especially ragga)

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in the wake of the 1985 “Sleng Teng,” which was the first hit using a synthetically generated riddim. Such distinctively studio-produced timbres naturally convey an aura of modernity and fashion, but they also can come to be widely regarded as cheap, “cheesy,” and tinselly in comparison to other kinds of productions – as with version Hindi film songs in relation to standard ones – which continue to use live ensemble musicians. Accordingly, in some genres, as with the horn-driven salsa ensembles, synthesizers have made no inroads in replacing acoustic instruments, and a genre like the Mexican banda illustrates a surprising resilience of traditional instrumentation even in the most contemporary pop circles. In the realm of recording, much of the impact of digital technology has constituted less the introduction of completely new techniques than the dramatic simplification of practices already possible, though difficult, with extant analog or magnetic-tape-based technologies. Sampling constitutes an obvious example, especially as used to loop repeated excerpts in rap and dancehall accompaniment tracks. Samples highlighting synthetic alterations of familiar vocal or instrumental sounds often reflect an aesthetic postmodernism in their generation of playful simulacra – that is, media images (or in this case, sounds) that have no counterpart in real life – but they can nevertheless be used to affirm ethnic identity or other more quintessentially modernist agendas. Hence, for example, the tassa drum is cherished by Trinidad Indians as an icon of ethnic identity; in pop chutneysoca songs one often hears synthetically generated tassa-like rolls played at absurdly and inhumanly fast speeds, at once constituting a whimsical blank parody of the original sound and affirming and rearticulating its role as an icon (Manuel 1995). CDs have in many respects served to intensify the processes – earlier stimulated by cassettes – of decentralization and democratization of the music industry. By the 1990s, CDs had rapidly replaced vinyl records in the developed world, but their adoption beyond upper-class sectors of poorer countries was delayed by their relatively high cost. In the years after 2000, however, costs of production, duplication, retail products, and players (especially walkman-style) dropped to the level of cassette products and even below. With their superior audio fidelity, convenience of playback, and adaptability to computers and internet sources, CDs are increasingly coming to replace cassettes throughout most of the developing world. In countries such as the Dominican Republic in which cassettes never took strong root, the preferred format has changed directly from vinyl records to CDs. A recent parallel development has been the spread of cheap MP3-format CDs, which can accommodate several hours of recorded music, playable either on a computer

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or an inexpensive walkman-style MP3 player. Like cassettes and standard CDs, MP3 CDs are particularly hospitable to use by pirates. The first decade of the new millennium witnessed the extraordinary spread of another new medium, the video compact disc or VCD, which, like the DVD, accommodates moving pictures and sound (as in a music video), but is considerably cheaper than a DVD. Like the technologies discussed in the previous paragraphs, VCDs have not served to invent a new performance format – in this case, the music video – but have made it incomparably less expensive and thus suitable for production and dissemination on an unprecedented scale, even in association with lower-class rural musics in poor countries. In fact, a particularly distinctive feature of VCDs is that despite being a modern digital technology, they are common primarily in the developing world, and especially in association with lower-class genres within those countries. Their adoption in the developed West and Japan was actively suppressed in the 1990s by entertainment corporations concerned about unauthorized duplication, during which period the DVD format became more firmly entrenched. While the music video format per se may not be new, VCD technology has served to stimulate music video production among genres that were never previously marketed in such fashion, including Nigerian jùjú, Andean chicha, Thai-Malay shadow puppetry, and Cuban timba. The music videos may present a range of styles, variously showing concert footage, studio performances (generally in lip-sync) replete with cheap computer-enhanced graphics, or – a standard in Indian rural folk-pop – a few dancers and singers cavorting (again in lip-sync) in a local park. Unlike MTV music videos, VCD videos are not produced primarily to promote record sales, nor are they isolated song-and-dance scenes in a feature cinematic musical, but rather are marketed as mass commodities in themselves, and are priced accordingly. In India, for example, a low-end Bhojpuri or Punjabi popular music VCD might involve a video production cost of the rupee equivalent of around $1,700, with editing done on a used PC available for $350 and a CD writer ($20), with the finished discs sold wholesale to shopkeepers for around 60 cents and retailing for under one dollar. Consumers can listen to the discs on walkman-style CD/VCD/MP3 players which sell for around $16; for video viewing, a patch cord can be connected to a black-andwhite television, itself available for $25 and able to run off a car battery. VCDs can thus entertain viewers in villages lacking regular electric power, and whose only other television options might consist of dreary government-produced programming. In Peru, where despite poverty computers are widespread, a remarkable parallel development is the popularity of viewing music videos and performances of campesino-oriented music on YouTube.

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Another recording technique dramatically facilitated, though not necessarily inaugurated, by digital technology is the multisite production of recordings. It was and remains not an uncommon practice for master tapes to be produced in more than one locale, as with a recording of a Bob Marley song that might commence as a set of tracks laid down in Kingston, Jamaica, and then sent to London to be enhanced with further tracks. Such transnational production techniques have been especially useful to diasporic communities, such as Albanian cassettes with tracks variously recorded in Kosovo, Germany, and New Jersey – and subsequently marketed in all three locales and elsewhere (Sugarman 2004). The ability to send digital files electronically, however, has made such practices incomparably easier and more common. Digital technology has also had a dramatically democratizing effect on standards and forms of musicianship, often making musical literacy unprecedentedly irrelevant. While keyboard facility has attained a new sort of prominence, virtuoso technique per se is often unnecessary, and even the piano-style keyboard is optional. Using MIDI sequencers, a producer can now generate synthetic versions of drum parts, bass lines (including idiomatic features like slaps), and other effects by entering data on graphic charts, and at his or her leisure rather than in real time. Guitar is the one instrument that has proved most resistant to being eliminated in this fashion. As simple cellphones enable one to construct jingles in different styles by selecting various elements in a composite set of tracks, even teenagers in the developed world develop a basic facility in the elements of digital song production. As with other new audio technologies, such developments blur distinctions between consumption and production, and offer users new kinds of choices and ability to personalize their environments; for example, by selecting or even creating ringtones. At the same time, there is no doubt that such technologies are unevenly spread in the world, being concentrated in the developed countries and the more affluent and modernized sectors of other societies. Personal computers remain prohibitively expensive for most people in Asia and Africa. The effects of digital technology on modes of dissemination and exchange have been equally dramatic, although similarly concentrated in wealthier and modernized societies or pockets of societies. The development of the MP3 format in the latter 1990s has been especially revolutionary. In the West, as is well known, music is increasingly obtained through the internet, whether via amazon.com, iTunes, or peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file-sharing sites, which pose new challenges to copyright enforcement and, say some, to the basic functioning of the commercial music industry (extensively debated topics which we will not explore here). Traditional forms of promotion and popularization have been supplemented, and to some extent even replaced, by new

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ones. In the United States today, a fledgling rock band, without even a constituency in its own neighborhood, can establish a national audience by placing its music, band member profiles, and other data on MySpace sites and selected other websites like purevolume.com frequented by certain sorts of listeners, who may download certain songs and, if inspired, purchase others via iTunes and/or amazon.com. An aspiring hip-hop or dancehall “beatmaker” – who learns composition and marketing techniques on chat sites like futureproducers.com – may create “beats” or riddims in her or his bedroom studio, consisting of a MIDI and a computer, and market and distribute them entirely on the internet. Communities of aficionados of specialized genres – from fado to pop flamenco – can exchange, purchase, and discuss new recordings from their home computers, illustrating yet again how new technologies can offer greater choice and access to consumers, and contrasting with the one-way, capital-intensive modes of production and dissemination once associated with the old media of cinema and long-playing records. New consumption formats continue to exert their own influences on music form itself: in Japan, as cellphones become able to download music, combining the functions of internet computers and iPods in the West, song producers have begun to tailor their output to the production of short refrains that can be used as ringtones; in other cases, bands and composers commence by composing and marketing only ringtones, and prepare a full song only if the ringtone catches on (Manabe 2007). Like earlier forms of mass media oriented toward home usage, the new digital technologies have in some ways intensified trends toward the privatization of music culture. In earlier decades, television was similarly accused of replacing a rich public sphere of taverns, evening strolls, cinema and concert attendance, and other forms of collective recreation with a culture of atomized families staring silently at televisions in their homes. The advent of the walkman and, more recently, the iPod have extended such trends, in which users – whether the commuter on the sidewalk or the teenage daughter at the dinner table – isolate themselves from those around them and experience the world through a private soundscape. Another form of atomization takes place as commercial and amateur recordings are generated not by the creative and social interaction of musicians in the studio but by the hermetic individual at his MIDI. Even such a minimally public act as going to a record store is increasingly obviated by the ability to obtain music online. For its part, the internet itself in many respects intensifies our habituation to experiencing the world in the form of simulacra and cyber-images rather than first-order reality, with its online communities offering what some have described as a mere “illusion” of presence in a digital ghost town (see Lysloff 2003, 23, 32).

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At the same time, as Lysloff and others have noted, digital technologies, and especially internet culture, have created new, significant, and unprecedented forms of links between individuals, and new forms of communities with their own validity (Lysloff and Gay 2003). The internet user, whether in Nairobi, New York, or rural Nebraska, can enjoy access to an infinite world of musics, via amazon.com or file-sharing networks. He or she can cultivate interests in specialized niche musics – from death metal to Afro-pop – in ways which have no parallel in earlier decades. And while such specialization might conceivably lead to a narrowing of personal tastes, many consumers attest to the degree to which they are exposed to new musics in the internet, whether via recommendations of internet acquaintances, MySpace lists of favorite groups, or specialist sites. Moreover, via chat rooms, listservs, and other forms of specialist websites, music enthusiasts and producers establish new sorts of internet communities. While these cyber-communities are “virtual” in some respects, in other ways they are quite real, offering their own sorts of social interaction, stimulation, and group identity. Lysloff (2003) provides an ethnography of one such internet community: the “mod” scene in which techno-pop producers exchange and, in many cases, modify each other’s creations, in a manner free from commercial concerns, but with its own notions of community, creativity, compositional authority, and sociability. Like other aspects of digital technoculture, nevertheless, such intensive internet communities remain largely limited to the industrialized world and pockets of affluence and modernity elsewhere.

Concluding perspectives Mechanical modes of reproduction, although originally created by individuals, can soon come to constitute inherited and all-enveloping technocultural environments within which artists and consumers often find themselves obliged to operate. To rephrase Marx, individuals can create music history, but they do not choose the conditions under which they do so. At the same time, individuals and communities may cultivate their own distinctive uses of extant technologies in ways that reaffirm human agency and community sensibilities. Both the limitations imposed by technologies and the distinctive opportunities they present constitute bases of unique music technocultures, which may be more specific but in other ways comparable to familiar entities like print culture, film culture, or internet virtual culture. One aspect of such technocultures is the way that a mode of mechanical reproduction can affect actual music itself. As has often been noted, notation – especially as printed on a mass basis – tended in Western art music to limit

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improvisation and stimulate the use of symmetrical, sectional throughcomposed forms like the sonata. The mass media introduced their own sorts of influences on music structure, most evident in the realm of popular music. Vinyl records promoted the creation of tightly constructed three- and four-minute songs rather than open-ended structures, in a format that has long outlasted the dependence on vinyl. At the same time, ingenious performers, such as Jamaican deejays, have found ways to use such extant technologies – in this case, seven-inch singles – to create stylistically new genres. Digital technologies, from MIDI hardware to ringtones, have all exerted their own diverse influences on musical styles. Subcultures of mechanical reproduction have also developed their own distinctive norms of what constitutes musicianship and performativity – which may depart dramatically from earlier norms. For the Afro-Colombia picó deejay, it may constitute a flair for acquiring, selecting, and playing a certain style of record; for the karaoke singer, it may be a question of singing familiar songs to prepackaged recordings. Perhaps most conspicuous is the manner in which technocultures can inaugurate new modes of consumption and exchange, effectively transforming the public sphere. Dancing to a recording in a club in Kinshasa, watching a film song-and-dance sequence in a theater in Mumbai, or listening via the internet to a streamed radio show from across the world all involve distinctive forms of dissemination and exchange, which themselves constitute aspects of unique subcultures of mechanical reproduction. Modes of mechanical reproduction and their particular uses constitute basic aspects of popular-music cultures worldwide, whether in affluent, industrialized societies or elsewhere. Music cultures outside the mainstream West, nevertheless, do not lend themselves to such a convenient historical framework as in Middleton’s three-part scheme. Aspects of his three moments – and perhaps especially the intermediate stage dominated by mass-culture oligopolistic media networks – do find marked parallels in parts of the developing world, but in other respects the global popular-music scene requires a more flexible and nuanced interpretation. Socioeconomic development in the developing world has been strikingly uneven, and even today is marked by the coexistence of highly modernized urban elites – who may be active participants in the postmodern world of the internet – alongside impoverished rural and urban underclasses who perpetuate many aspects of premodern cultures. The extension of capitalist media cultures to such classes – whether via cinema, cassettes, or other technologies – further confounds any attempt neatly to categorize broad historical trends; for example, in terms of a bourgeois revolution. What instead emerges from a global perspective is the striking

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diversity not only of media, but also of uses of media, and a concomitant rich heterogeneity of media-based popular-music subcultures.

Acknowledgments For input on VCD uses worldwide, I thank Rebecca Bodenheimer, Amy Catlin, Scott Marcus, Kayla McGhee, Kevin Miller, Richard Miller, Lawrence Ross, Anna Stirr, Julie Strand, Joshua Tucker (especially regarding YouTube), Andrew Weintraub, and members of the SARAI collective in Delhi.

Bibliography Adorno, T. W. (1976) Introduction to the Sociology of Music, New York: Seabury Adorno, T. W., and M. Horkheimer (1944, [orig. publ.], 1987) Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum Catlin, A. (1992) ‘“Homo Canteus”: Why Hmong sing during interactive courtship rituals’, in idem (ed.), Text, Context, and Performance in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, vol. 9: Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, pp. 43–60 Groemer, G. (1995/1996) ‘Edo’s “Tin Pan Alley”: Authors and publishers of Japanese popular song during the Tokugawa Period’, Asian Music, 27, 1: 1–36 Katz, M. (2010) Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. edn, Berkeley: University of California Press Lum, C. M. K. (1996) In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Lysloff, R. (2003) ‘Musical life in Softcity: An internet ethnography’, in R. Lysloff and L. Gay (eds.), Music and Technoculture, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 23–63 Lysloff, R., and L. Gay (eds.) (2003) Music and Technoculture, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Manabe, N. (2007) ‘Ring my bell: Impact of cell phone technologies on the Japanese music market’, in M. McClelland (ed.), Internationalizing the Internet, New York: Routledge Manuel, P. (1995) ‘Music as symbol, music as simulacrum: Pre-modern, modern, and postmodern aesthetics in subcultural musics’, Popular Music, 1, 2: 227–39 (1993) Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, University of Chicago Press (2000) Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Manuel, P., and W. Marshall (2006) ‘“The Riddim Method”: Aesthetics, practice, and ownership in Jamaican dancehall’, Popular Music, 25, 3: 447–70 Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press Middleton, R. (1990) Studying Popular Music, Buckingham: Open University Press Pacini-Hernandez, D. (1993) ‘The picó phenomenon in Cartagena, Colombia’, America Negra, 6: 69–115

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Ragland, C. (2003) ‘Mexican deejays and the transnational space of youth dances in New York and New Jersey’, Ethnomusicology, 47, 3: 338–54 Romero, R. (2002) ‘Popular music and the global city: Huayno, chicha, and technocumbia in Lima’, in W. A. Clark (ed.), From Tejano to Tango: Latin American Popular Music, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 217–39 Sugarman, J. (2004) ‘Diasporic dialogues: Mediated musics and the Albanian transnation’, in T. Turino and J. Lea (eds.), Identity and the Arts in Diaspora Communities, Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press

. 3 .

Western music as world music NICHOLAS COOK

Music of hegemony The transformation of Western music into world music might be seen as quite simply the musical dimension of a much larger historical process: what Ramsay Muir, in his classic book on the subject, termed the expansion of Europe (Muir 1917). As, from the final years of the fifteenth century, explorers and colonizers began to radiate out from Europe, they took music with them, initially to North and South America, India, and East Asia, and thereafter to Australasia and Africa, where settlement around the Cape goes back to the seventeenth century, though the interior was penetrated only in the nineteenth century. On the basis of contemporary documentation, Ian Woodfield has traced the role of music from the very earliest stages of this process: on board the ships, at the first encounter with indigenous inhabitants, and in symbolic “Acts of Possession.” He refers to “the strategy of using musicians as shoreline ambassadors,” with trumpets and drums playing the leading role, while drums also served to punctuate the main divisions of the working day in early colonies (Woodfield 1995, 112, 137). Another early site of music in the new worlds that opened during the sixteenth century was missionary activity, from Hispanic Florida and California to Japan, where Portuguese missionary activity began in 1541 and developed with such success that within forty years there were over 100,000 Japanese Christians (Koegel 2001; Harich-Schneider 1973, 445, 457). Instrumental music, particularly for keyboard, proved as effective an aid to conversion as plainchant, and in 1577 Father Organtino Gnecchi wrote from Kyoto that “if only we had more organs and other musical instruments Japan would be converted to Christianity in less than a year” (Harich-Schneider 1973, 457). Indeed, virginals and organs proved such acceptable gifts to local potentates that Woodfield speaks of “oriental keyboard diplomacy” (Woodfield 1995, 199). Western music was also firmly embedded in the culture of more mature colonies, from the religious institutions of seventeenth-century Cuzco

My thanks to Christine Lucia for her very helpful comments on a draft of this chapter.

[75]

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(in Spanish Peru) to the secular concert life of eighteenth-century Calcutta – where Haydn’s symphonies were heard as early as the 1780s – or nineteenthcentury Lagos, where a “Handel Festival” was held in October 1882 (Baker 2003; Woodfield 2000, 220; Agawu 2003, 12). Far-flung reaches of the British Empire in effect attempted to replicate the musical life of a provincial English or Scottish town, generally with difficulty, but the role of music as an instrument of colonial and imperial regimes went much further than that. It took the form of events, such as the 1911 Delhi Durbar, which included music for a twenty-piece fife and drum corps, and three bagpipes; Elgar’s The Crown of India, a commemoration of the Durbar first performed in the following year at the Coliseum Theatre, London, celebrated “the glory and rightness of British rule in India,” so conveying the imperial message to a home audience (Richards 2001, 65). It took the form of buildings: it was again in 1911 that the Hanoi Opera House was completed, a bold though foolhardy attempt to replicate French metropolitan culture in East Asia (McClellan 2003). Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo depicts an attempt to build an opera house at just this time in Iquitos, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest; though this is fictional, opera was performed in Iquitos, at the Grand Hotel Malecon Palacio, while a dedicated opera house had been built in 1892 at Manaus, five hundred miles downstream (Fletcher 2001, 496). Then again, it took the form of education, whether through the establishment of colonial conservatories (in Adelaide, for example, the Elder Conservatorium dates back to 1883), or through links between the colonies and the metropolis, as in the case of the procession of South African musicians who trained at the Royal College of Music, London (van der Mescht 2005). Linked to this were the colonial examination systems. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM), established in 1889, exerted a direct influence on music education throughout the British Empire, its political dimension being thrown into relief when, shortly before the Afrikaaner victory in 1948 and as a result of nationalist pressures, the University of South Africa (Unisa) set up its own examination system (Unisa n.d.). The ABRSM, however, survived the collapse of the British Empire, making a highly successful transition to the economic order that replaced it: at the end of the twentieth century, 50,000 students a year were sitting its examinations in Hong Kong alone (Fletcher 2001, 665). Under such circumstances there is every reason to see the so-called “common practice style,” in effect the music of hegemony, as an integral part of the machinery of empire, an ideological construct whose very name embodies a claim to universality. Western music was also intimately involved in developments outside the colonial possessions of the enlarged Europe that came to define itself as

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“the West.” In Japan, the early missionaries had been expelled by 1639, and Western music was not reintroduced in any extensive way until the 1860s, when a Western-style military band was established at the Meiji court (the British band leader John Fenton was engaged to train it), and thereafter a small orchestra, also trained by Fenton, which played light music such as waltzes and polkas on ceremonial occasions (Harich-Schneider 1973, 534–7). Astonishingly, the musicians charged with learning Western music were the same gakunin who were simultaneously involved in inventing (under the guise of reconstructing) the ceremonial court music known as gagaku, and their concerts mixed Japanese and Western styles. This formed part of the Meiji program to reverse Japan’s previous isolationism and develop the country along the lines of a Western nation-state; in Judith Herd’s words, “Western music was selected not for its artistic merit but for the promise of social adaptability” (Herd 2004, 40). By 1880, Western music, complete with staff notation, had been introduced into all Japanese schools, and thereafter it began to attract an audience among the bourgeoisie, while a conservatory was established at Tokyo in 1890 (Harich-Schneider 1973, 540–2; Fletcher 2001, 659). As Japan acquired colonies of its own, again following the Western model, similar educational policies were implemented: in Korea, for example, which was under Japanese rule from 1905 to 1945, not only was Western music introduced in the schools, but also formal performances of traditional Korean music were forbidden, and Korean composers went to Japan to train just as South African composers went to London (Everett 2004, 6; Sang-Mann 1991, 251). In China, the development of Western music was not initially statecontrolled, rather it was taken up by the cosmopolitan middle classes, such as Fou T’song’s family, with the Shanghai Conservatory being established in 1927 (under the name National College of Music). The Central Conservatory (Beijing) was established in 1950, the year after the formation of the People’s Republic, under which Western music assumed considerable ideological importance. There were, for example, widespread debates over the significance of Beethoven’s music during the Cultural Revolution (I shall return to this) (Kraus 1989). Again, anniversaries of Western composers were commemorated in a highly selective manner that reflected current political allegiances (Chopin but not Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov but not Verdi) (Yang 2007). Western music also became a means of national self-representation abroad, much in the manner of the “ping-pong diplomacy” of the 1970s: Chinese performers achieved prominence through winning major international competitions, the first being Fou Ts’ong, who in 1955 won the fifth Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. (Like some of the Chinese ping-pong players, Ts’ong subsequently defected to the West.) And what might be termed the Shanghai

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Conservatory’s prodigy division became a regular stop on foreign dignitaries’ itineraries; a bilingual souvenir brochure issued by the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1980s contains a photograph with the caption “Outside the practice rooms of the Primary School, Isaac Stern exclaims, ‘There is a talent inside every window’.”1 Nor was the use of Western music for purposes of political representation restricted to the People’s Republic. One of the ways in which Hong Kong demonstrated its evolution from oriental sweat-shop to cosmopolitan modernity was through the regular participation of its composers at international festivals of new music, with the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) World Music Days being held there in 1988. The development of Western music within East Asia – in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan – has been so effective that on many indicators these, together with Israel, might be seen as the heartlands of classical music in the twenty-first century (and without their East Asian students, European and North American conservatories could not survive in their present form). But the introduction of originally European musical styles formed only one side of Western music’s role as an instrument of national or postcolonial identity outside the West. Equally important was the way in which, all over the world, Western approaches transformed indigenous musical cultures. The Cairo Congress on Arab Music, sponsored in 1932 by King Fa’ud of Egypt, aimed at “reviving and systematizing Arab music so that it will rise upon an artistic foundation, as Western music did earlier” (Fletcher 2001, 628–9); it advocated a program for the standardization of intonation, the adoption of Western staff notation, and the establishment of conservatories in which Western and Arab music would be taught side by side – a program that was put into effect not only in Egypt but also elsewhere in the Arab world (El-Shawan 1980). Much the same pattern was followed in Indonesia after World War II, where the foundation in 1950 of the Konservatori Karawitan Indonesia in Surikarta had a further aim, in Judith Becker’s words, “to make gamelan traditions acceptable to nonJavanese . . . The hope was that the faculty . . . would combine elements of the music of non-Javanese Indonesians with the gamelan traditions, resulting in a truly Indonesian national music” (Powers 1980, 31).2 Ten years later, the Ghanaian National Dance Ensemble was formed, again bringing together different ethnic traditions and so establishing, as Kofi Agawu puts it, “a transethnic canon, a classic collection of cultural artefacts”; the same idea was taken a stage further with the establishment of the Pan-African Orchestra, whose members play traditional music from all over Africa from 1 The practice rooms are arranged around a courtyard (where Stern is standing), with windows through which the young musicians can be observed. 2 For conservatories and traditional music more generally, see Stock 2004, 31–3.

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carefully notated scores (Agawu 2003, 19; Scherzinger 2004, 591–2). A further example of such syncretism is the Chinese orchestras that first developed in the 1930s and are now found across the Chinese-speaking world. Organized very much along the lines of a Western orchestra, these are made up of Chinese instruments that would not play together in traditional repertories (which is a reminder that modernization involves the relationship of different traditions with one another, not just with the West); they play a combination of arrangements of Western orchestral standards, such as Pung Siu-Wen’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, arrangements of Chinese traditional music, and original compositions. These orchestras have also stimulated the development of graded families of traditional Chinese instruments, on the model of Western orchestral strings, and indeed instrument design represents another sphere in which traditional musics have been modernized (Stock 2004, 20–2). The most fundamental aspect of musical modernization, however, arguably lies in the influence of Western aesthetic values. Fundamental to the t ̣arab culture of traditional Arab music is an intimate performing situation in which performers can interact in an improvisatory manner with their listeners: the big Arab orchestras, which like Chinese orchestras bring together disparate instruments on a Western orchestral model, play from scores, and in this way (in Habib Hassan Touma’s words) the musicians “have relinquished their dual function as creators and performers and have become one hundred percent interpreters in the Western sense” (Racy 1998; Touma 1996, 145). Again, the qin is by tradition the instrument of the Chinese scholar, to be played for oneself or before a small group of discerning friends; in today’s Hong Kong, virtuosos of the instrument perform in large concert halls with amplification. Even traditional African music is frequently presented in Western concert style, played by professionals before a paying audience. In all these contexts, then, elements of traditional musical culture have been reconfigured in accordance with the values of Western concert music, that is to say, music that expresses an original compositional vision and is understood as inherently meaningful rather than grounded in social context. Indeed, one might say that in East Asia, possibly through the lingering influence of Romain Rolland’s once enormously influential writings, Romantic aesthetic values of heroism and transcendence retain a currency that they can hardly be said to have in the West. Much the same story of the assimilation of Western music and the values underlying it, and of its interaction with indigenous traditions, might be told of popular music, though I do not have space here to join the dots. Brazilian popular music represents an inextricable combination of Native American,

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Portuguese, African, and North American styles, and has itself had a major influence in North America and Europe. Afropop is the outcome of complex interactions between traditional African musics, Christian missionary singing, and international popular musical styles. Cantopop developed in Hong Kong as a consequence of the emigration of nightclub musicians from Shanghai in 1949, cross-fertilizing with successive waves of British, American, and Japanese popular music, and has now become so widespread throughout the world of the Chinese diaspora that it would be hard to see any principled reason for not calling it a “world music” (Lee 1999). But that term, of course, has a quite different connotation and history, reflecting the transition of First World hegemony from the political domain of colony and empire to the more purely economic domain of global capitalism. As is well known, the term has its origins in a series of meetings held in a London pub during summer 1987, at which representatives from a number of London-based record companies agreed on a collective name (others considered were “World beat,” “Tropical,” and “Hot”) and a marketing strategy for a variety of international popular or semi-popular musics: the perceived problem was that record retailers did not know where to file these items, and potential customers did not know where to look for them, so a total of £3,500 was spent on a publicity campaign and pack.3 This spectacularly successful investment did not simply have the effect of multiplying sales for existing products: it effectively reconfigured the entire market and had far-reaching commercial, musical, and (for Third World musicians) personal consequences. What the participants in the “Empress of Russia” meetings could not do, however, was satisfactorily define the label they had invented. In the words of their second press release, “Trying to reach a definition of ‘WORLD MUSIC’ provoked much lengthy discussion and finally it was agreed that it means practically any music that isn’t, at present, catered for by its own category e.g.: Reggae, jazz, blues, folk.” The press release weakly concluded, “Perhaps the most common factor unifying all these WORLD MUSIC labels is the passionate commitment of all the individuals to the music itself.” As many commentators have said (Taylor 1997, 16–17), world music – I shall omit the scare quotes from now on – is easier to define in terms of what is excluded: not only the genres mentioned in the press release, together of course with Western classical music, but also Cantopop, karaoke, Bollywood, and to a large extent the “classical” cultures of Asian music. World music is, in short, a commercial construct, open to analysis as a merchandizing of Third World

3 The minutes and press releases are at www.frootsmag.com/content/features/world_music_history/ minutes/ (all websites accessed December 22, 2007).

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commodities on the basis of First World business structures, similar, for example, to coffee and posing comparable issues of fair trade. It can also be seen in the terms in which Agawu has characterized the impact on Africa of European music in general: it “colonized significant portions of the African landscape, taking over its body and leaving an African dress, transforming the musical background while allowing a few salient foreground features to indicate an African presence” (Agawu 2003, 6). As Agawu’s use of the words “background” and “foreground” might suggest, this is an ideological analysis that can be pursued in strictly musical terms: the Western pop basis of world music – the real “common practice style” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century – provides a structure that is as ubiquitous and universal as Western science and engineering, while local elements merely add exotic color. Music, as I said at the beginning, is just a dimension of a larger historical process.

Contrary representations Or maybe not “just.” While the grand narrative of Western music’s transformation into world music may be one of social, economic, and political determinism, there is within this framework a multiplicity of little narratives in which music may form a countercurrent to social, economic, and political processes, or act as an agent for the negotiation or transformation of personal or group identity. Sometimes music may embody resistance to political ideologies; Martin Stokes writes of the multiplicity of ethnic identities embodied in the musics of the Mediterranean area “where official ethnicities are defined through opposition to a pernicious otherness embodied by neighbouring states, this celebration of ethnic profusion in what we might loosely call the popular musics it seeks to control is always a potential threat” (Stokes 1994, 16–17). Perhaps more commonly, at least in the case of “art” music, it has served as a vehicle for national identity. Either way, the same analyses that reveal the ideological embeddedness of world music can bring to light the complexities of cultural action and interaction. The second section of this chapter, then, offers a second pass over much of the terrain outlined in the first, but now with a focus on music’s contribution to the negotiation of an often problematic identity. To start where I started before, music offered an arena for the sharing of experience on terms that belied the hierarchical relationship between colonizer and colonized. Both indigenous and Spanish musics were performed on ceremonial occasions in the missions of sixteenth-century Florida, while “European visitors frequently commented on the general excellence of Indian

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musicians, singers and instrumentalists” (Koegel 2001, 40). And in contrast to traditional, cathedral-centered accounts of music in seventeenth-century Cuzco, recent research demonstrates the extent to which indigenous communities not only embraced Western music, but also used it for purposes of social advancement or the contestation of power relations (Baker 2008). But one of the most striking examples of music acting as a countercurrent to the colonial hierarchy is provided by British India during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, where a number of Anglo-Indians, particularly women, worked closely with Indian musicians to transcribe their music for harpsichord.4 The resulting notations, known at the time as “Hindostannie airs,” are a bizarre stylistic amalgam in which the principles of the common-practice style have been sacrificed without being replaced by anything recognizable to us today as stylistically Indian. That was also the reaction of musicians back in London or Edinburgh, where successive editions of the airs eliminated or corrected their anomalous features to the point that only the titles remained to indicate their exotic origins. (Recall Agawu’s metaphor of body and dress.) Yet the accounts of contemporary Anglo-Indians, who had heard Indian music at first hand, constantly emphasize how authentically like the Indian originals the Hindostannie airs were. There is even an account of a masquerade in Calcutta, at which one of the most prominent collectors, Sophia Plowden, performed some of these; everyone wore local dress, and, as Plowden wrote to her sister, “many people insisted on our really being Indostanis.” Two conclusions can be drawn from this picturesque tale of musical and racial crossdressing. The first is that the very deficiencies of the original transcriptions, with their deviations from the common-practice style, show them to be the traces of a genuine – if ultimately unproductive – attempt to penetrate an alien musical culture, and to this extent a bracketing of the colonial hierarchy. The second is that the transcriptions proved unintelligible outside their original context precisely because local dress, to borrow Agawu’s image, was not adequately supported on the body of the common-practice style. For this reason, the Hindostannie air was without any real influence on the history of Western musical depictions of the colonial or exotic other. The arguably all-too-intelligible tradition of such depiction that developed within European music during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was precisely one conforming to Agawu’s description: in such works as Bizet’s Pearl Fishers (first performed in 1863), Sullivan’s Mikado (1885), Ketèlbey’s “In a Persian Market” (1920), and Puccini’s Turandot (1926),

4 The following is based on Cook 2007, where further references (principally to the work of Ian Woodfield and Gerry Farrell) may be found.

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a common-practice musical structure was clothed with what became a stereotypical, all-purpose set of signifiers of exotic alterity (arabesques, parallel fourths and fifths, augmented seconds, and so forth). Such music is vulnerable to criticism on much the same grounds as commercial world music, and was indeed one of the principal targets of Edward Said’s critique of orientalism. There were, however, during this period some examples of an alternative approach, one based on a perhaps more genuine interest and certainly greater knowledge of non-Western musical traditions, and on a greater willingness to rethink common-practice principles in light of cross-cultural encounter. An early example is Henry Cowell, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and who described his work as “not an attempt to imitate primitive music, but rather to draw on those materials common to the music of all the peoples of the world, to build a new music particularly relating to our own century”; accordingly, he wrote of his United Quartet, which combines an approach to structure based on rhythmic patterning with quasi-oriental scale formations, that it “should be understood equally well by Americans, Europeans, Orientals, or higher primitives; or by anybody from a coal miner to a bank president . . . It may be said that it concerns human and social relationships” (Everett 2004, 2; Nicholls 1995, 199).5 Such sentiments are redolent of the postwar Weltmusik movement associated with Karlheinz Stockhausen, according to whom “Every human being has the whole of humanity within him- or herself. A European can experience Balinese music, a Japanese music from Mozambique, and a Mexican music from India” (Stockhausen n.d.). After 1945, a more progressive tradition of cross-cultural composition became well established in the works of, for instance, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Benjamin Britten, Lou Harrison, and George Crumb. But while such music may be interpreted as “a form of social protest against the hegemony of European musical culture” (Everett 2004, 203, citing Catherine Cameron), Björn Heile’s study (2009) of Weltmusik shows how the problems of exoticizing representation evident in the prewar orientalizing tradition did not go away. As in the first section, it is when Western musical style comes to be used outside the West as a means of self-representation that these issues become most complex. The postwar European and American composers I have just mentioned were mirrored, so to speak, by Asian counterparts such as Chou Wen-Chung, who emigrated from China to the United States in 1946, or in Japan Toshiro Mayazumi and Tōru Takemitsu. The case of Takemitsu is perhaps the most revealing, because his early compositional identity was resolutely Western, in part as a reaction against the nationalist style of the 5 For Cowell’s background in San Francisco see Rao 2004.

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previous generation, which incorporated traditional Japanese elements within an essentially Western compositional framework, paradoxically very much along the lines of the Western orientalists. According to Takemitsu (1989, 199), it was only through the detour of Cage’s music and aesthetics that he came to realize the compositional potential of traditional Japanese music, and in this sense he came upon it from the position of an outsider. His aim in bringing together aspects of Western and Japanese culture might be seen as exactly the opposite of the prewar nationalists’: to create a music of primarily Western elements but informed by a distinctively Japanese aesthetic. As Takemitsu himself put it, “in writing Western music . . . I learn and absorb something from traditional Japanese music’s denial of the ego, and its yearning toward a union of sound with nature” (Takemitsu 2004, 205). Using Western musical style to construct a non-Western identity: this is the delicate balancing act attempted in many countries during the twentieth century. In China, both pre-Revolutionary works such as Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata (1939) and communist-period ones such as Chen Gang and He Zhanhao’s Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto (1959) could be rationalized according to the old principle of “letting foreign things serve China” (Li 1991, 209). In effect, this principle draws a distinction between Westernization and a process of modernization seen as available to all countries regardless of geography or history; it is closely related to the principal opposition that informed debate about Western music during the Cultural Revolution, between, on the one hand, those who saw national self-realization in scientific progress and advocated Western-style music as embodying such progress and, on the other hand, those who identified progress with revolutionary ideology. The debate that raged over Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for instance, revolved around how far Beethoven’s music could be seen as transcending its origins in a feudal society and so achieving permanent ideological value (Cook 1993, 95–7). The same tensions can be discerned behind the curiously stop–go history of rock music in China, as illustrated by the career of Cui Jian, its only exponent to have achieved a significant profile outside of China. Cui, at that time a professional trumpet-player with the Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra, shot to prominence in 1985, six years after the government first officially endorsed rock music and the same year that the China News Agency announced that China had an estimated ten million guitarists (Fletcher 2001, 656). He was at the height of his popularity at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, during which he was frequently seen with the students, and was thereafter forced into hiding in the provinces (‘Cui Jian’ n.d.). For the next ten years he was unofficially banned from giving public concerts in Beijing, though appearances elsewhere were tolerated. At one level a response to Cui Jian’s

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actions (e.g., his perfomance in 1990 of “A Piece of Red Cloth,” a song strongly associated with the Tiananmen Square protests), the Chinese government’s indecision as to how to handle rock can also be seen as reflecting larger, unresolved tensions regarding the relationship between Western music, modernization, and revolutionary sentiment. Similar stories might be told of Indonesia or the Middle East, for instance, and the outcomes largely reflect the degree of confidence felt by different countries in their own musical traditions (to generalize wildly, high in Japan and Indonesia – and even more so in India – but low in China and the Middle East). But I shall restrict myself to two examples, both of them countries seeking to construct their own identity in relation to a hegemonic other. In the interwar period, reacting against the long established dominance of German music in Norway, the composer Geirr Tveitt sought to construct a distinctively Norwegian musical identity through embracing French influences (Aksnes 2002), based on what one might term the following logic of alterity: French = not-German = Norse. In the same way, attempting to create a distinctively Australian musical identity in the late 1960s, Peter Sculthorpe reacted against the British-dominated past of Australian music and his own training at the University of Oxford by means of close engagement with Balinese music, for example, in Sun Music II and III: here the syllogism is Balinese = not-British = Australian. The interesting question, of course, is why Sculthorpe drew on Balinese rather than aboriginal music in his attempt to forge a distinctively Australian musical identity. One answer might be that the desired identity was as much Australasian as Australian, which on a generous interpretation might include Indonesia. But that does not fit with the fact that Sculthorpe had from the first incorporated native Australian titles and texts into his compositions: it is the music itself on which he did not draw until the 1970s, as if he came to realize its compositional viability only through the detour via Bali. There is a comparison with Takemitsu’s discovery of traditional Japanese music via Cage. In my second example South Africa, issues of Western music and local identity took on a sharper political edge, both during and after the period of apartheid (1948–94). In some ways the basic objective, and therefore the compositional strategies adopted to achieve it, remained unaffected by the birth of the “rainbow nation”: to represent South Africa as an autonomous entity rather than a colonial extension of Europe, an entity defined by both internationalism and the African heritage. It is not surprising, then, that the white South African composer Hans Rosenschoon could claim that, even before the end of apartheid, “South African creative artists, many of them composers, voiced their conceptual rejection of apartheid not only verbally, but also, and perhaps more deeply,

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via the elemental voice of their art” (Rosenschoon 1998a, 265). But an examination of Rosenschoon’s own composition Timbila (1985), for Chopi xylophone orchestra and symphony orchestra, reveals sensitivities that belie so confident an assertion. In his account of the composition of Timbila, Rosenschoon’s starting point is what in terms of Western “art” music might be seen as a skills deficit: the Chopi do not read music, he says, and therefore he “was obliged to use one of their pieces of music with which they were familiar,” which could then be incorporated within his composition (Rosenschoon 1998b, 291). His choice fell on Mtsitso No. 3 by Venancio Mbande, the leader of the Chopi xylophone orchestra from the Wildebeestfontein North Mine, which falls into three sections (ABC) and features a simple “do-re-mi-do” motif. The following extract from Rosenschoon’s account illustrates both the kind of interactions he devised between the indigenous and the Western symphonic components of the composition and the way in which such interactions are open to being interpreted in a manner contrary to Rosenchoon’s declared inclusiveness: While the Chopi are busy with their B section, the symphony orchestra tries to “impose” the “do-re-mi-do” motif, and eventually they succeed in convincing the Chopi to follow suit . . . The “do-re-mi-do” motif leads, as far as I am concerned, towards its logical conclusion in the rendering of “Frere Jacques” by the horns. (ibid., 292)

Rosenschoon’s “as far as I am concerned” conveys a certain defensiveness, and indeed the way he made Mbande’s music culminate in a European nursery song was criticized by several reviewers. Alain Barker, for example, claimed that “No structural, organizational or melodic elements have been absorbed and integrated into the orchestral body except for the simplistic use of an underlying three-note theme. As the piece progresses, the European orchestra magnifies the theme, finally ending up with a triumphant (universal?) rendering of a recognizable cliché” (Barker 1996, 71).6 This is the context for Rosenschoon’s insistence that: musical composition is, and must ever remain, an entirely subjective statement about one’s approach to art and life . . . Having a conscience about the South African situation in the sociopolitical sense is a personal crux, while addressing such topics in one’s music is a matter of choice . . . But to place the fact that one is or is not doing so above quintessential issues like the artistic integrity of one’s work is, to me at least, utter nonsense. (Rosenschoon 1998, 268)

Not everyone would see the invocation of artistic integrity as a satisfactory response to questions about cultural sensitivity, although it is only fair to

6 See also David Smith, who refers to “the aristocratic Chopi music (which eventually flows alongside ‘Frère Jacques’!)” (1995, 61).

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recognize that, in Barker’s words, “Timbila” represents “an anticipatory positioning,” an early endeavor “to come to terms with the future of a predominantly black South African cultural mainstream” (Barker 1996, 71). It is also fair to recognize that there is a Catch-22 situation here, one, moreover, that is not restricted to white musicians. If a South African composer of European extraction incorporates indigenous elements, then she is open to criticism on grounds of patronizing or appropriating local culture; if an indigenous composer does so, he is open to criticism for perpetuating a stereotypical view of “African” composition, a kind of musical apartheid. At the same time, if a composer of European extraction composes in an advanced Western style, then she is open to criticism on grounds of disregarding national identity, while if an indigenous South African composer does so, she is open to criticism on grounds of disregarding cultural heritage. From whatever geographical or ethnic perspective the problem is approached, most people are likely to agree in principle on the solution: neither to ignore nor to imitate local music, but rather (in the words of the British composer Geoffrey Poole, who lived in East Africa from 1985 to 1987) “to understand how [indigenous] music relates in its own terms . . . to African sensibilities and feeling, to custom, and to fundamental spiritual needs – and then to try and see how the warmth of that relationship might be transferred to the benefit of our own post-everything situation” (Poole 1998, 332). But that raises the question of how such estimable principles are to be translated into practice. Jürgen Bräuninger discerns a solution in the last of the German composer Reinhard Febel’s Four Pieces for Violin and Orchestra, which is based on the South African gumboot dance, itself a Western-African hybrid: “by first ‘reclaiming’ and then transforming and recontextualising gumboot dance – just as local groups do,” he says, “Febel pre-empts possible accusations in relation to ‘ethical problems’” (Bräuninger 1998, 11). Martin Scherzinger sees solutions in the compositions of Michael Blake and Kevin Volans (Scherzinger 2004, 609–10). Moving north, Agawu sees them in the work of the Nigerian composers Akin Euba and Joshua Uzoigwe (Agawu 2003, 17). The issues concerning the relationship between Western and local music that I have presented in terms of (self-)representation can also be seen in terms of ownership. Braüninger’s principal criticism of Timbila is that Rosenschoon does not credit Mbande, even though the latter “is responsible for at least half of the composition” (Bräuninger 1998, 6). In a more traditional musical context, Christopher Cockburn argues that there is a long-standing black tradition of communal performances of choruses from Handel’s Messiah that are close in style to the Victorian versions in which the work was introduced to South Africa: the traditional British performance style has been appropriated within African culture, and as a result attempts (e.g., by choral adjudicators) to impose

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a more historically informed performance style, which in Europe might be a purely aesthetic issue, challenge what has become an indigenous tradition (Cockburn 2003, 8–9). As Grant Olwage has shown, similar issues arise in relation to vocal production (Olwage 2005); there is also a parallel with what Euba and Kwabena Nketia call “African pianism,” which appropriates a highprestige Western technology to African musical ends – a case of letting foreign things serve Africa.7 In the South African context such issues of the ownership of tradition have arisen most conspicuously in the debate prompted by Graceland, the 1986 album on which Paul Simon collaborated with a number of South African musicians, in particular the male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and which brought an unparalleled international visibility to black South African music. On the one hand, Simon could be seen (and in South Africa generally was seen) as “an invasive outsider” in a neocolonial mold, while, on the other, he opened up new markets to black musicians; on the one hand he appropriated African tradition within a Western musical framework in the manner of world music (this was the year before the “Empress of Russia” meetings), while on the other Graceland stimulated interest in African traditions among white South Africans, so contributing to what Louise Meintjes calls a possible “White African (as opposed to colonial) identity” (Meintjes 1990, 50, 67). As Meintjes argues, Graceland is a “composite polysemic sign vehicle” whose musical, textual, and contextual dimensions allow for a multiplicity of interpretations, which is how it was able to structure and sustain a prolonged debate on issues of ownership and identity both within and outside South Africa (ibid., 69). Agawu writes of the Founder’s Day celebrations at the Ghanaian school he attended in the 1970s that “the self-consciousness with which these African students performed African traditions was no different from the selfawareness with which they played Bach on the violin or sang Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’.” Musics of Western and other traditions intersect at locations where issues of cultural ownership are contested and identities negotiated. Something of this kind was going on, however blithely, at the Calcutta masquerade where Sophia Plowden and her friends played for an hour or two at being Indians. It was going on in the traditions of blackface minstrelsy that lasted throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries in the United States and Britain (and in some other colonial centers, too). It continued in what might be termed the blackvoice minstrelsy of British rock from Eric Burdon to Amy Winehouse. And here the little narratives of 7 Euba wrote in 1970 that “the Piano already displays certain affinities with African music, and by creating a type of African Pianism to blend with African instruments it should be possible to achieve a successful fusion” (quoted in Omojola 2001, 156).

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musical countercurrents to larger social, economic, and political processes with which I have been concerned in this section give way to a story so big that it seems easy to overlook it. Scherzinger argues that the contribution of Africa – though not, one might observe, Asia – to twentieth-century Western art music has been “systematically under-narrated” (Scherzinger 2004, 611), but as Paul Gilroy (1992) has shown, what might be termed the twentieth-century Africanization of popular music – one might almost say the Africanization of world music – represents a massive countercurrent to the established hegemonies of global capitalism. When Peter Fletcher writes that “Whether we like it or not, the music of Europe is now dominant in most of the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world,” one might reasonably ask which planet he is thinking of (Fletcher 2001, 610). Only, of course, to call it “Africanization” is to oversimplify. Beyond the interactions I mentioned between African tradition and missionary music, today’s dominant styles of popular music have been shaped in the Caribbean and in both North and South America, exported to Europe and Asia, and back to Africa, and that’s just for starters. We are talking about an intermingling of Western and world elements so comprehensive that reverse engineering it is unimaginable, a music in the formation of which all continents except Antarctica have played an active role. The conclusion is inevitable and illustrates what I meant when at the beginning of this section I spoke of music’s exposing the complexities of cultural action and interaction. On the one hand, what we call “world music” is a Western construct par excellence, a marketing category invented by the London-based record industry; defined any other way, the term is impossibly inclusive, given that Beethoven, Tan Dun, reggae, Cantopop, and Tuku beat are all consumed worldwide (since the invention of the internet, what isn’t?). On the other hand, “Western music” refers to a classical tradition now most strongly rooted in Asia, and a popular tradition that is in reality a global hybrid. But these paradoxes are hardly surprising. The concept of “the West,” at least as used in those parts of the world that have styled themselves that way, goes back no further than the late nineteenth century and its ostensibly geographical definition is given the lie by such formulations as “pre-Western” (Bonnett 2004); the term is probably best thought of as an implicit claim to socioeconomic domination in a world in which power is actually shifting rapidly to Asia. And as much as its antonym “non-Western,” it is an essentializing term, suggesting a homogeneity that is largely spurious. The concept of “Western music” is then as much in need of scare quotes as “world music,” reflecting the fact that “Western” is a paradigmatically relational term. Unless you are at the North or South Pole, everywhere is west of somewhere.

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Practical utopias It is in music’s power to act as an unambiguous signifier of place. World music can be seen as a form of aural tourism, as illustrated by the extension of the Rough Guide series of travel books to include world, popular, and even classical musics. Sugo Music advertises its “Cultural Exploration” series of CDs, “You don’t need to leave the country to learn about other cultures. Why, you don’t even need to leave your house. Music is a perfect way to experience the world in a whole new light and learn about people and customs from another land. Spice up your life a bit while you experience the wonderful songs on these amazing collections of world music.”8 Among these “collections of world music” is one called “Destination Vienna,” which includes selections from a Haydn horn concerto and piano concertos by Mozart and Beethoven. It is classical music as world music in the most literal sense, since to find it you must look in the world music bins of record stores. And while Vienna sells itself as “City of Music,” so asserting its ownership of the classics, Poland provides an example of something more extreme: a national identity constructed round a single composer. When you board the Lot Polish Airlines plane at London Heathrow, Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 is already playing over the sound system; two and a half hours later you land at Warsaw Frederic Chopin Airport. Arriving serendipitously at the recently refurbished Frederick Chopin Museum, you sign the visitors’ book and see testimonials in Japanese and Korean as well as Polish, English, and other European languages; one reads “As soon as I saw Chopin’s personal possessions and the scores he wrote, I burst into tears.” A world composer, Chopin has been adopted as a national symbol with an intensity explicable only by reference to Poland’s long history of partition and subjection: the composer whose works crystallized Polish identity but were mostly written in Paris. Yet the technologies that brought world music into being have acted powerfully to neutralize its signification of place. Paul Théberge refers to the Emu Proteus/3 World synthesizer, which came out in 1991, as “the world in a box” (Théberge 1997, 201). But in a sense there has been a succession of musical worlds in a box. The first was the piano, a playback device for musical souvenirs – such as Les musiques bizarres à l’Exposition, a book of arrangements of the world music heard at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Benedictus 1889; Fauser 2005, chap. 4) – or romanticized evocations of musical never-never lands such as Amy Woodforde-Finden’s “Four Indian Love Lyrics” of 1902. (The surprising thing about the “Four Indian Love Lyrics” is that they were actually written

8 http://sugomusic.com/show_album.php?albumid=16.

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in India; they were particularly popular in Anglo-Indian homes, prompting questions of how the colonials imagined the country in which they were actually living.) The second was the gramophone, from the first a global technology. In 1901–2 the Gramophone Company, at that time called the Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd, sent Fred Gaisberg to collect recordings and assess the potential for local businesses in India, Burma, Thailand, China, and Japan (Gronow and Saunio 1998, 12). Because sound recording is a less obviously interventionist technology than notation – because it does not reconstruct or Westernize the original as overtly as Les musiques bizarres inevitably did – it acted even more effectively to give a life to music divorced from context. As illustration, the contents of the fifth volume of the Folkways series “Music of the World’s Peoples,” issued in 1961, are listed as “U.S.A.: Cajun; South-West Asia; Malaya; Burma; Syria; Afrikaans; Poland; Bolivia; Morocco; Copts of Lebanon; Fiji; Scotland; Jamaica; Asturia; African Bushmen; Honduras; Byelorussia; Algeria; Zulu; Hawaii; Haiti; Ethiopia”;9 small wonder that a reviewer commented, “the reason for putting together these particular items escapes me” (Krader 1961, 227). Actually the reason may not be so hard to find, considering the universalist beliefs of Henry Cowell, who compiled the series. Electronic technology, mainly from Japan, created the third kind of world in a box, as exemplified by the Proteus/3 World with its built-in samples ranging from didjeridoos and bagpipes to celtic harps and gamelan instruments. Designed for what Laurent Aubert calls “those laboratories of universal syncretism that are Parisian and British studios” (Aubert 2007, 53) (and nowadays teenagers’ bedrooms around the world), these devices opened up the possibilities of composing, layering, and fusing global sounds on a purely aesthetic basis, without regard to their cultural or geographical origins. Such musical practices are further reinforced by today’s playback technologies, which deliver the world via broadband (the box is now obsolete), and by the movement away from coherently designed musical wholes such as the record album to individually mixed and matched tracks. What might be termed playlist culture is largely invisible, instantiated in ten million iPods, but radio programs such as BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction provide a tangible illustration. Late Junction, which styles itself as “a laid-back, eclectic mix of music from across the globe,”10 includes a feature called “Your 3,” in which contributors are invited to submit a sequence of three recordings which “works as [a] whole very much in the spirit of a Late Junction playlist. The listener should be taken on an 9 Taken from http://libweb.uoregon.edu/music/Discographies/worlddisco/worldiscocol.html; Folkways FE 4508. Thanks to Anthony Seeger for this point. 10 www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/.

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exciting yet smooth musical journey . . . Ideally the 3 pieces should segue together, i.e. where they run seamlessly together without the need for presentation.”11 For example, on June 22, 2006 Fergus Simpson submitted a sequence consisting of trance music from El Fayyum (Egypt), Pharoah Sanders’s album Jewels of Thought, and a track from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook’s “Night Song” (released by Real World Records, Peter Gabriel’s world-music label) – or as Simpson himself summarized it, “from an Egyptian oasis to a modern electronic re-mix via sixties Black America. Enjoy.”12 Other contributions juxtapose Purcell and Victor Cerullo (“I especially love ancient music and electroacoustic music”), or Dave Brubeck, music of the qin, and Jerry Garcia (“totally personal . . . they are all tracks off records that have mysteriously disappeared over the years from my collection . . . They are all cool and beautiful too”).13 As David Clarke comments, “Your 3” contributors “tend overwhelmingly to connect tracks through those tracks’ phenomenal appearance as free-floating, quasi-autonomous particulars. Only rarely are tracks related on the basis of cultural or historical delineations” (Clarke 2007, 96 pars, para 54). The result is a world musical culture in which geography has been collapsed into personal preference. Ross Daly, the Irish world musician now resident in Crete (“a virtuoso of Eastern musical instruments, he plays the Cretan lyra, Afghan rabab, tarhu, laouto, kemence, oud, saz and tanbur”),14 lambasts this culture: “I have met world music freaks kitted out with all the latest hi-fi gadgetry, surrounded by hundreds of CDs, records, cassettes and DAT recordings, who listen to West African Griots one minute, Japanese Koto music the next and then Bengali music – and when you talk to them about the music, you realise that they don’t understand the first thing about the music, that they haven’t got a clue about the cultural and human background” (quoted in Aubert 2007, 55). He goes on to pin the blame squarely on technology: “If we are going to be able to appreciate fully the wide variety of music which exists in the world, we should forget all these recordings and drastically increase the amount of live music we listen to.” And surely it is easy to believe that it is through actual interpersonal work, through face-to-face collaboration, that the potential of world music for bridging cultures is to be realized. Meintjes observes of Graceland that it did not just symbolize cross-cultural interaction but enacted it. As she says, “the musical collaboration both points

11 www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/your3/guidelines.shtml. 12 www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/your3/06july20.shtml. 13 www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/your3/05april04.shtml, www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/latejunction/your3/ 05april18.shtml. 14 www.rossdalymusic.com/biography.htm.

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to and is isomorphic with social collaboration” (Meintjes 1990, 48). Others have made the same point in different South African contexts. Bräuninger shrewdly asks of Timbila, “Has not a good chance for collaborative composition been wasted?” (Bräuninger 1998, 6). Andrew Tracey, who attended the first performance, recalls “how bored the Chopis were, sitting in the middle of the orchestra” (Lucia 2006/7).15 In effect, Tracey’s complaint is that Rosenschoon treated Chopi music as a sound source, the human equivalent of a Proteus/3 World sample, and not as the social action and interaction of real people: that, perhaps, lies at the core of the issues of sensitivity to which I referred. Bräuninger also quotes Timothy Taylor’s suggestion that “what Volans really needs in order to enact musically his desire for reconciliation is a collaborative model of music making, where his individuality isn’t foregrounded” (Bräuninger 1998, 6–7).16 But the point of course applies far beyond Africa. Intercultural collaboration is both symbolized and memorably enacted in music such as the New Zealand composer Jack Body’s Paradise Regained, one of a series of compositions commissioned by the Indonesian pianist Ananda Sukarlan in memory of the victims of the 2000 Bali bombing, in which Body collaborated with the gangsa (Balinese metallophone) player and composer I Wayan Gde Yudane. When in the first few seconds of the piece the piano’s repeated notes are taken up by the gangsa, a direct contact is established between alien sound worlds, creating an effect like the arcing of an electric current and evoking Stockhausen’s description of cross-cultural encounter: “The great shock occurs when someone who approached an unfamiliar culture with harmless curiosity is so moved by this experience that he or she falls head over heels in love with it” (Stockhausen n.d.). Paradise Regained is effective, especially in live performance, because the sound worlds are so palpably those of Bali and the West. Yet Daly’s complaints are testimony to music’s power to transcend place, and this perhaps applies particularly to instrumental music of the Western classical tradition. Nowhere is this more evident than in Seoul, where classical music permeates everyday life: on one subway line announcements are preceded by a snatch from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, on another by Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso Op. 3 No. 6. And at the Changdeokgung Palace, the sonic backdrop for an exhibition entitled “The Lifestyle of the Korean People” is Handel’s Water Music. There is no anomaly here, for in the everyday life of Seoul, Handel’s Water Music is no more perceived as English than the Japanese soldiers

15 Tracey adds that after the performance, “when the audience was already standing up to leave and the musicians were packing up their instruments, Venancio thought, ‘To hell with it’ and he started playing for real. The audience and the orchestra all crowded round, ‘This is what it really should be!’” 16 Timothy Taylor has discussed the concept of collaboration at length, with particular reference to Bill Laswell, in Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (2007, chap. 4).

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who went off to war with the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in their ears perceived that as German.17 There is a parallel with Brasilia, the modernist architecture of which does not represent an act of homage to Europe, but rather a claim to global modernity; like architectural modernism, and irrespective of how far this might be considered an ideological deception, classical instrumental music signifies autonomy, the availability of values not tied to time and place. Whereas, in Seoul, traditional Korean music signifies a specifically national heritage, and commercial world music retains the vestiges of place through its words if not its purposeful exoticisms, Western classical music carries no such connotations. It is a form of musical utopia and can therefore act as world music in a way that “world music” cannot. Together, collaboration and utopia constitute a powerful force. On the “Vision” web page of his “Silk Road Project,” which coordinates a wide range of intercultural workshops, concerts, and festivals, Yo-Yo Ma writes that: we live in a world of increasing awareness and interdependence, and I believe that music can act as a magnet to draw people together. Music is an expressive art that can reach to the very core of one’s identity . . . As we interact with unfamiliar musical traditions we encounter voices that are not exclusive to one community. We discover transnational voices that belong to one world.18

Such idealism, reminiscent of Cowell’s universalism, may sound vacuous. But another project in which Ma played a critical role, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra created by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, suggests a way in which such sentiments might be given practical application. In physical terms, the orchestra brings together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians on the neutral ground of Andalusia, where the Barenboim–Said Foundation is located, but in imaginative terms the neutral ground is that of the classical orchestral tradition. Physically it is a “parallel place without checkpoints, soldiers, identification cards,” but imaginatively it is – in Said’s words – a “practical utopia whose presence and practice in our riven world is sorely needed and, in all sorts of ways, intensely instructive” (Ramzi Aburewan, quoted in Patner 2006; Said 2003). Many commentators have observed the paradoxes of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It is built frankly on belief in the autonomy of absolute instrumental music of the Western classical tradition, on the idea that there

17 In 1944 the Ninth Symphony was performed at a concert in honor of Tokyo University students joining the war, the aim according to one of the organizers being that they should “carry to the battlefield memories of something close to us, something that symbolized our homeland” (Kurisaka 1982, 480). 18 www.silkroadproject.org/about/vision.html.

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can be such a thing as music that transcends society and consequently creates a neutral zone that facilitates transformation, even the overcoming of intractable national histories. In that sense, it represents an imposition upon its Middle Eastern participants of a distinctively Western conceptual framework, one that is clearly ideological in that it is taken as self-evident, naturalized; though it seems strange to say this of Said’s initiative, its invocation in the context of Arab–Israeli reconciliation seems oddly asymmetrical, if not in its own way a form of orientalism. As Rachel Beckles Willson points out, history and geography both press in upon the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: “Its ‘democracy,’” she writes, “is rather obviously an enacting of western Enlightenment musical culture as it evolved in nineteenth century Europe,” and this history is also expressed in its “formidably strong hierarchical structure, and an omnipotent leader whose position is maintained by a mystified religiosity” (Beckles Willson 2009, 17). That last point, of course, has become the more salient since Said’s death. It is in this way hard to find a middle way between a dewy-eyed admiration for the orchestra’s work on the one hand, and on the other, an awareness of its limitations that borders on cynicism: many of the players do not come from the Middle East at all, while others see it as a way of securing a life in the West. It is also criticized for parachuting in and attracting both attention and funding from lower-profile, local organizations that seek to promote reconciliation at a more local and sustainable level (Beckles Willson 2009). Yet behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra there is a compelling rationale. In the joint words of Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, “An orchestra requires musicians to listen to each other; none should attempt to play louder than the next, they must respect and know each other. It is a song in praise of respect, of the effort to understand one another, something that is crucial to resolve a conflict that has no military solution” (Barenboim and Said 2002). When the participants make music together, then, it becomes the essential agent in creating a space within which reconciliation is not only symbolized but, to however modest a degree, enacted – a reconciliation choreographed by the nuanced, shared temporality of live music. Like the South African recording studios that Meintjes has studied (Meintjes 2003), the orchestra is, in other words, not just a metaphor but a metonym of the world beyond the music, a little bit of reality within which reconciliation is enacted. The question, of course, is how long the reconciliation lasts after the music stops, how far what is done in musical time survives the transition to the world beyond music. Music has the ability, in Ian Cross’s (2012) phrase, to manage social uncertainty, to enable concerted action by multiple participants even though their individual perceptions, including the meanings they ascribe to the music

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they are making together, may be radically different: seen this way, music may be more a way of temporarily patching up differences, or of sweeping them under the carpet, than of confronting and solving them. One might also ask whether the nature of this musically mediated community is really so different from that created by participant sports, in which case (as suggested by UEFA president Michel Platini) might an Arab–Israeli football team not be at least as effective a means of promoting reconciliation (Associated Press 2009)? And, in practice, have orchestras historically been the prejudice-free zones that the Said–Barenboim ideology would imply? Mahler’s experiences with the Vienna Philharmonic, to cite just one example, would suggest not. Perhaps the truth is that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is after all more significant as a symbol than as an enactment of reconciliation. But even if that is so, the most touching, because realistic, assessment of its achievement comes from Barenboim, who writes of the orchestra’s historic concert of 2004 in Ramallah, the orchestra’s first in an Arab country, that “This concert, as you surely know from the coverage in the newspapers, did not end the conflict. Yet, at least for a couple of hours, it managed to reduce the level of hatred to zero” (Barenboim n.d.). A couple of hours: music may not be able to achieve more than that. Yet it is already quite a lot.

Bibliography Agawu, V. K. (2003) Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge Aksnes, H. (2002) ‘Perspectives of musical meaning: A study based on selected works by Geirr Tveitt’, PhD dissertation, University of Oslo Associated Press, The (2009) ‘UEFA president: Football can bring peace to the Middle East’, Haaretz.com, October16, www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119184.html Aubert, L. (2007) The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age, trans. C. Ribeiro, Aldershot: Ashgate Baker, G. (2003) ‘Music in the convents and monasteries of colonial Cuzco’, Latin American Music Review, 24: 1–41 (2008) Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Barenboim, D. (n.d.) ‘Speech given by Daniel Barenboim upon receiving the BuberRosenzweig Medal at the Week of Fraternity 2004’, http://west-easterndivan. artists.warner.de/ (see Articles section) Barenboim, D., and Said, E. (2002) ‘Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said upon receiving the “Principe de Asturias” Prize’, http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de/ (see Articles section) Barker, A. (1996) ‘Timbila: Orchestral works inspired by elements in African music’ [review], South African Journal of Musicology 16: 71–3

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Beckles Willson, R. (2007) ‘The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’, British Academy Review, 10: 15–17 (2009) ‘The parallax worlds of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 134: 319–47 Benedictus, L. (1889) Les musiques bizarres à l’Exposition, Paris: Hartmann Bonnett, A. (2004) The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Bräuninger, J. (1998) ‘Gumboots to the rescue’, South African Journal of Musicology, 18: 1–16 Clarke, D. (2007) ‘Beyond the global imaginary: Decoding BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction’, Radical Musicology, 2, www.radical-musicology.org.uk/ Cockburn, C. (2003) ‘A distinctive politics: Handel becomes historically informed in South Africa’, South African Journal of Musicology, 23: 1–11 Cook, N. (1993) Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Cambridge University Press (2007) ‘Encountering the other, redefining the self: Hindostannie airs, Haydn’s folksong settings and the “common practice” style’, in M. Clayton and B. Zon (eds.), Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 13–37 Cross, I. (2012) ‘Music as social and cognitive process’, in P. Rebuschat et al. (eds.), Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, Oxford University Press, pp. 315–28 ‘Cui Jian’ (n.d.) Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_Jian El-Shawan, S. (1980) ‘The socio-political context of al-mūsīk¸a al-carabiyyah in Cairo, Egypt: Policies, patronage, institutions, and musical change (1927–77)’, Asian Music, 12: 86–128 Everett, Y. U. (2004) ‘Intercultural synthesis in postwar Western art music: Historical contexts, perspectives, and taxonomy’, in Y. U. Everett and F. Lau (eds.), Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 1–21 Fauser, A. (2005) Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, University of Rochester Press Fletcher, P. (2001) World Musics in Context: A Comprehensive Survey of the World’s Major Musical Cultures, Oxford University Press Gilroy, P. (1992) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Gronow, P., and I. Saunio (1998) An International History of the Recording Industry, trans. C. Moseley, London: Continuum Harich-Schneider, E. (1973) A History of Japanese Music, London: Oxford University Press Heile, B. (2009) ‘Weltmusik and globalization of new music,’ in B. Heile (ed.), The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 101–21 Herd, J. A. (2004) ‘The cultural politics of Japan’s modern music: Nostalgia, nationalism, and identity in the interwar years’, in Y. U. Everett and F. Lau (eds.), Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 40–56 Koegel, J. (2001) ‘Spanish and French mission music in colonial North America’, Jounal of the Royal Musical Association, 126: 1–53 Krader, B. (1961) ‘Henry Cowell: Music of the World’s Peoples Volume 5’ [review], Ethnomusicology 5: 226–7 Kraus, R. (1989) Pianos and Politics in China, New York: Oxford University Press Kurisaka, Y. (1982) ‘A song of sympathy and gladness’, Japan Quarterly 12: 479–83 Lee, S.-M. (1991) ‘South Korea’, in H. Ryker (ed.), New Music in the Orient: Essays on Composition in Asia since World War II, Buren, The Netherlands: Frits Knuf, pp. 249–64

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Lee, J. (1999) ‘China/Hong Kong, pop and rock: Cantopop and protest singers’, in S. Broughton and M. Ellingham (eds.), Rough Guide to World Music, Vol. 2: Latin and North America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, London: Rough Guides, pp. 49–55 Li, H. (1991) ‘People’s Republic of China’, in H. Ryker (ed.), New Music in the Orient: Essays on Composition in Asia since World War II, Buren, The Netherlands: Frits Knuf, pp. 189–215 Lucia, C. (2006/7) ‘Spirit of Africa: An interview with Andrew Tracey’, South African Music Studies, 26–7: 127–43 McClellan, M. (2003) ‘Performing empire: Opera in colonial Hanoi’, Journal of Musicological Research, 22: 135–66 Meintjes, L. (1990) ‘Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the mediation of musical meaning’, Ethnomusicology, 34: 37–73 (2003) Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, Durham, NC: Duke University Press van der Mescht, H. (2005) ‘South African students and other South African connections at the Royal College of Music in London between the end of the Anglo-Boer War and the formation of the Union of South Africa, 1902–1910’, Muziki, 2: 26–47 Muir, R. (1917) The Expansion of Europe: The Culmination of Modern History, 2nd edn, London: Constable Nicholls, D. (1995) ‘Henry Cowell’s United Quartet’, American Music, 13: 195–217 Olwage, G. (2005) ‘Discipline and choralism: The birth of musical colonialism’, in A. J. Randall (ed.), Music, Power, and Politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 25–46 Omojola, B. (2001) ‘African pianism as an intercultural compositional framework: A study of the piano works of Akin Euba’, Research in African Literatures, 32, 2: 153–74 Patner, A. (2006) ‘Oh Amigos! Oh Hermanos!’ [blog], posted August 10, http://westeasterndivan.artists.warner.de/ Poole, G. (1998) ‘Black-white-rainbow: A personal view on what African music means to the contemporary Western composer’, in M. Floyd (ed.), Composing the Music of Africa: Composition, Interpretation and Realisation, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 295–334 Powers, H. (1980) ‘Classical music, cultural roots, and colonial rule: An Indic musicologist looks at the Muslim world’, Asian Music, 12: 5–39 Racy, A. J. (1998) ‘Improvisation, ecstasy, and performance dynamics in Arabic music’, in B. Nettl with M. Russell (eds.), In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, University of Chicago Press, pp. 95–112 Rao, N. Y. (2004) ‘Henry Cowell and his Chinese musical heritage: Theory of sliding tone and his orchestral work of 1953–1965’, in Y. U. Everett and F. Lau, Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 119–45 Richards, J. (2001) Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953, Manchester University Press Rosenschoon, H. (1998a) ‘Keeping our ears to the ground: Cross-culturalism and the composer in South Africa, “old” and “new”’, in M. Floyd (ed.), Composing the Music of Africa: Composition, Interpretation and Realisation, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 265–90 (1998b) ‘Timbila’, in M. Floyd (ed.), Composing the Music of Africa: Composition, Interpretation and Realisation, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 291–3 Said, E. (2003) ‘Excerpts from a lecture given by Edward W. Said January 2003 entitled’ [sic], http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de/ (see Articles section)

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Sang-Mann, L. (1991) ‘South Korea’, in H. Ryker (ed.), New Music in the Orient: Essays on Composition in Asia since World War II, Buren, The Netherlands: Frits Knuf, pp. 249–64 Scherzinger, M. (2004) ‘“Art” music in a cross-cultural context: The case of Africa’, in N. Cook and A. Pople (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, pp. 584–613 Smith, T. (1995) ‘Rosenschoon, Hans: “Mantis” and other African-inspired works’ [review], South African Journal of Musicology, 15: 59–61 Stock, J. P. J. (2004) ‘Peripheries and interfaces: The Western impact on other music’, in N. Cook and A. Pople (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, pp. 18–39 Stockhausen, K. (n.d.) ‘WELTMUSIK (World Music)’, trans. T. Nevill, rev. Suzanne Stephens, www.stockhausen.org/world_music.pdf Stokes, M. (1994) ‘Introduction: Ethnicity, identity and music’, in M. Stokes (ed.), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–27 Takemitsu, T. (1989) ‘Contemporary music in Japan’, Perspectives of New Music, 27, 2: 198–204 (2004) ‘Tōru Takemitsu, on Sawari’, trans. H. de Ferranti and Y. U. Everett, in Y. U. Everett and F. Lau, Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 199–207 Taylor, T. (1997) Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, London: Routledge (2007) Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Théberge, P. (1997) Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press Touma, H. H. (1996) The Music of the Arabs, trans. L. Schwartz, expanded edn, Portland, OR: Amadeus Press Unisa (n.d.) ‘A brief history of the Department of Music of Unisa’, www.unisa.ac.za/ default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=2019 Woodfield, I. (1995) English Musicians in the Age of Exploration, Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon (2000) Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society, Oxford University Press Yang, H.-L. (2007) ‘Power, politics, and musical commemoration: Western musical figures in the People’s Republic of China 1949–1964’, Music and Politics, 1, 2, www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2007–2/yang.html

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PART II

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THE HISTORY OF MUSIC

BEFORE HISTORY

. 4 .

Foundations of musical knowledge in the Muslim world STEPHEN BLUM

The term “musical knowledge,” in its broadest sense, refers both to knowledge of musical disciplines transmitted through speech and writing and to knowledge that is learned and remembered with recourse to rhythm, melody, and movement. Strictly speaking, the latter category would encompass both the practical knowledge of singers, instrumentalists, and dancers, and the values and insights meant to be transmitted or attained through sung poetry, instrumental music, and dance. This chapter does not attempt such a broad view, but concentrates on some of the leading ideas about music articulated in Arabic and Persian writings between the second and eighth centuries of Islam; in other words, between the eighth and fourteenth centuries of the Common Era.1 Much of the writing considered here was produced by figures of major importance in the “Islamicate” culture that was shared among Muslims and non-Muslims in societies dominated by Muslims. Some writings deal primarily with what musicians ought to know, and some treat the art of singing (Arabic, ghinā’) and the scientific discipline of music (mūsīqī or mūsīqā in Arabic, adapted from Greek mousikē ) more generally, as domains of human activity and accomplishment. A central focus of both the science of music and the art of singing is coordination, in composition and performance, of tone-relationships (Greek, harmonía), structured movement (Greek, rhythmos), and language. Muslim writers on music and song recognized that Greek discussions of this topic were relevant to their cultural situation. Moreover, the engagement of Muslim philosophers with their readings of Plato and Aristotle provided a strong impetus for further reflection on the nature of music and poetry.

Literary genres and speech genres Lines of inquiry and types of knowledge In the first centuries of Islam, Arabic writings on music followed three principal lines of inquiry: music as a branch of mathematics, music making as a topic 1 For consistency with the rest of the book, only the Common Era dates are given in this chapter.

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of belles-lettres (adab), and the forms of listening that are legitimate from various religious perspectives.2 Assimilation of existing knowledge in several fields of learning – with an initial emphasis on astrology, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine – required the efforts of several generations of scholars and translators, working with texts in Middle Persian (Pahlavi), Greek, Syriac, and other languages. The new ‘Abbāsid capital of Baghdad was the center of this activity, from the second half of the eighth century through much of the tenth. For music as a branch of mathematics, as for philosophy, the Greek texts that were made available in Arabic (often by way of Syriac versions) provided the indispensable framework for further work, including reflection on differences as well as similarities between the Greek discipline of mūsīqī and the indigenous theory and practice of the Arabs and neighboring peoples. The technical terminology developed in translations of such works as the Sectio canonis (Division of the Monochord) attributed to Euclid differed from the vocabulary of practicing musicians; the Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabir (Great Book on Music) of the philosopher al-Fārābī (d. 950) owes its distinction, in large part, to Fārābī’s deep familiarity with musical practice as well as with the pertinent philosophical and scientific literature. Each direction of inquiry was pursued in different genres of writing. Encyclopedic surveys of the sciences in which music is treated as a branch of mathematics extend from the Mafātīh al-‘ulūm (Keys to the Sciences) (c. 985) of al-Khwārizmī to the Irshād al-qās ̣id (Guidance of the Searcher) of Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 1348) in Arabic, and from the Dānesh-nāme (Book of Knowledge) of Avicenna (980–1037) to the Jāme‘ al-‘olum (Compilation of Sciences) of Fakhr al-Din Rāzi (d. 1209) and Dorrat al-tāj (Pearl of the Crown) of Qotḅ al-Din Shirāzi (d. 1311) in Persian, the latter limited to the mathematical and philosophical sciences. The “theoretical” (nazarī ) and “practical” (‘amalī ) branches of the subject receive varying degrees of weight in the treatises (often called risāla, “epistle”) that are wholly devoted to music. Writings categorized as adab string together anecdotes and bits of information deemed useful to boon companions of rulers and other courtiers, as in the ‘Iqd al-farīd (The Unique Necklace) of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, who was active at the court of Córdoba in the tenth century. The richest source of anecdotes about celebrated musicians is also a remarkably ambitious compilation of Arabic poems that had been set to music, with indications of the appropriate modes: the Kitāb al-aghānī (Book of Songs) of Abū’l-Faraj al-Isbahānī (897–967), a vast work that could only have been undertaken by an author whose memory was exceptionally well stocked with information amassed over 2 For an illuminating overview of all three categories, see the preface to Shiloah 1979.

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several decades of extensive interviewing and reading. Al-Is ̣bahānī’s principal successor in compiling biographies of musicians is Ibn Fad: lallāh al-‘Umarī (1301–48), whose Masālik al-absar (Routes toward Insight) reproduces information on fifty-nine musicians from the Kitāb al-aghānī and adds biographies of over twice as many later figures. The centrality of music in the cultural life of courts is made clear in attempts at universal history, such as the Murūj al-dhahab (Meadows of Gold) of al-Mas‘ūdī (d. 956) and the Kitāb al-‘ibar (Book of Examples) of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) with its famous Muqaddima (Introduction), a searching investigation of reasons for the cohesion or disintegration of human societies. Tracts that defend the legitimacy of samā‘ (listening with spiritual intent) include eloquent accounts of the aims pursued through ceremonial music and movement by members of various Sufi orders. This literature emphasizes the importance of appropriate preparation, if music making is to enhance a listener’s spiritual growth. Lawful and unlawful uses of singing and listening are carefully distinguished in the Ihyā al’ulūm (Revival of the Religious Sciences) of Abū Ḥ āmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) and its Persian abridgement, Kimiyā-ye sa‘ādat (Alchemy of Happiness). A concern with rules and norms governing the behavior of listeners and performers is evident in the literature of adab as well as in that on samā‘. The underlying assumption is that musical meaning emerges in the course of performance from the motivations and actions of participants. Conceptions of the nature and potential value of musical knowledge are inevitably formed in relation to ideas about the nature and relative value of other areas of learning and other spiritual or artistic disciplines. Major topics in discussions of this set of issues include the social roles of those who may appropriately acquire and exercise the various types of knowledge; the media and genres of communication deemed suitable for transmitting musical knowledge; and the divisions or branches of musical knowledge. Each genre of speech or writing presupposes certain kinds of knowledge shared by speaker and listener, writer, and reader. A compilation of song lyrics may name the rhythmic mode (t ̣arīqa) and possibly the melodic mode of each composition, on the assumption that readers who have not learned the songs by ear might know the pertinent modes and be capable of applying them to the lyrics. Throughout the Muslim world, orally transmitted lore has continually found its way into treatises with scientific pretensions, thereby gaining an aura of authority that makes it all the more useful in oral pedagogy. Writing on music readily incorporates such familiar speech genres as aphorisms, anecdotes, concise lists, and classifications developed from polarities. In their conversations with living musicians, ethnomusicologists can recognize

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metaphors, topoi, and narrative-types with a long history of circulation in writing as well as in speech.

Aphorisms and capsule narratives Aphorisms and anecdotes that were recorded in writing are occasionally framed as utterances presented on a particular occasion, a notable example being the wedding feast at which guests supposedly delivered the sayings in two compilations that were translated, respectively, by the Nestorian Christian scholar Ḥunayn ibn Is ̣hāq (d. 873) and by his son, Is ̣hāq ibn Ḥunayn (d. 910): the Kitāb nawādir al-falāsifa (Book of the Aphorisms of the Philosophers),3 and the ‘Uns ̣ur al-mūsīqī (Element of Music) attributed to one “Būlos.” A genre well suited to both oral and written communication is the capsule narrative that credits a single protagonist with a significant discovery or innovation. In an adaptation of the legend in which Pythagoras finds that a blacksmith’s hammers of the appropriate weights will produce harmonious intervals, al-Khalīl of Bas ̣ra (d. c. 791) was said to have begun his analysis and typology of sixteen poetic meters after hearing the multiple rhythms hammered out by coppersmiths in the bazaar. The adoption of selected features of Byzantine, Syrian, and Persian music in the idioms cultivated at the courts of the Umayyad caliphs (r. 661–750) was efficiently depicted in accounts of the travels of two singers who died c. 715, Ibn Misjāh ̣ and Ibn Muh ṛ iz. Narratives attributing major innovations to celebrated figures of the distant or more recent past have continued to be created and transmitted up to the present.

Lists Another format suited to both oral and written communication (with a bias toward the latter) is a concise roster of items or skills, such as a cycle of seven songs, a system of seven or eight modes, or the set of competencies expected of a certain type of performer or, indeed, of any competent musician. The song cycle on seven fortresses composed by the celebrated singer Ma‘bad (d. 743) established a pattern that was adopted by other court musicians, such as the successors of Ibn Suraij (d. c. 726) who arranged seven of the master’s songs into a cycle.4 The belief that musical resources are best organized as systems of seven or eight modes was widely held in West Asia during the eighth and ninth

3 Ḥunayn’s work is best known in the Hebrew translation of al-Ḥarīzī (1170–1235), which was first published in 1562; see Adler 1975, 147–55. 4 Neubauer 1997, 317–18 also mentions cycles of five, seven, and ten songs in the Persian-Turkish repertory of c. 1500.

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centuries. The philosopher al-Kindī (d. c. 866) regarded the eight rhythmic modes of Arab music as an achievement comparable to both the pre-Islamic modal system of Persia (called by other writers the seven “royal modes,” al-t ̣urūq al-mulūkīya, of the minstrel Bārbad) and the Byzantine oktōēchos, “eight modes” (ustukhūs ̣iya and al-alh ạ̄ n al-thamāniya in Kindī’s Arabic), which he regarded as a comprehensive system encompassing all conceivable melodies, even the braying of donkeys and neighing of horses.5 This claim resulted from Kindī’s equation of the Greek term ēchos “voice” with Arabic lah ṇ (pl. alh ạ̄ n), which denoted intonations or outright errors that marred the Arabic of certain speakers before it was appropriated as a general term for “melody.” According to the Qur’ān (47.30), hypocrites can be recognized by the lah ṇ of their speech, and from this usage the term was extended to the melodic aspect of any speech act. Lists of four, seven, eight, or twelve items are easily correlated with other lists having the same number of entries. Kindī and the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (Brethren of Purity) (second half of the tenth century) associate the four strings of the lute with several other tetrads: seasons, elliptical arcs, quarters of the twenty-four-hour day, elements, humors, faculties of the soul, poetic genres, and so on. Some affinities are articulated as metaphors (e.g., sounds on the highest-pitched string of the lute are like fire), and some as metonyms (e.g., sounds on the highest string enhance the humor of yellow bile and alleviate that of phlegm). Correlations like those delineated by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ have been continually reproduced in writing and in the speech of musicians, up to the present. The configurations that writers and music teachers have chosen to correlate with systems of seven modes include the seven “planets” and a line of seven prophets beginning with Adam; systems of twelve modes are often correlated with the zodiac. Such associations can nourish a powerful awareness of a musical system’s primordial roots and a sense of gratitude toward the donors and discoverers of musical knowledge.

Polarities Classification through manipulation of polarities and dichotomies is fundamental to much theorizing about music, both in speech and in writing. Individual sounds and combinations are characterized in many languages as either “light” or “heavy,” “bright” or “dark,” “penetrating” or “absorbing,” “compact” or “diffuse.” Among the contrasting attributes of sounds listed in Fārābī’s Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr are s ̣afā‘ “clarity” and kudra “muddiness”; ̣ ad und 5 Neubauer reviews references to ten systems with varying numbers of modes, in ‘Al-Ḫalīl ibn Ah m die Frühgeschichte der arabischen Lehre von den “Tönen” und den musikalischen Metren’ (Neubauer 1995–96, 275–8). On the early history of oktōēchos systems see Jeffery 2001, 370–3.

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malāsa “smoothness” and khushūna “coarseness”; na‘ama “softness” and shidda “forcefulness” or s ̣alāba “hardness.” Fārābī also mentions qualities created by different types of vocal production: rut ̣ūba “wetness,” yubs “dryness,” ghunna “nasality,” and zamm “fastening” the lips so that air passes entirely through the nose. He argues that an adequate description of vocal music must go beyond differences in acuity (h ̣idda, cf. Greek oksytēs) and gravity (thiql, cf. Greek barytēs) of pitch, just as optics cannot be limited to the concepts of geometry. Al-Ḥasan al-Kātib (eleventh century) quotes and expands on Fārābī’s inventory of vocal timbres in his Kitāb kamāl adab al-ghīnā’ (The Perfection of Musical Knowledge), one chapter of which identifies twenty-one types of voice. A binary opposition becomes a trichotomy when a neutral point, zero, is posited between values of “plus” or “minus.” “Higher” and “lower” pitches can be perceived in relation to a central tone, and durations can be defined as “longer” or “shorter” with reference to a central value. This is the fundamental structure of the doctrine of ēthos, which may well antedate the Greek writings that were the main sources for its subsequent development in the Muslim world and the Latin West. Kindī describes three species (anwā‘, sing. nau‘) of composition (ta’līf) with Arabic equivalents for the tripartite classification of ēthos given by Cleonides and Aristides Quintilianus and presumably reproduced in the Byzantine and Arabic writings that were available to Kindī: al-bast ̣ī “the expansive” for diastaltikon “stimulant”; al-qabd: ī “the contracting” for systaltikon “depressant”; and al-mu‘tadil “the temperate” for hēsychastikon “calming” (Table 4.1a).6 To arouse the appropriate movement of the soul (h ̣arakat al-nafs), verses adorned with a melodic framework (lahṇ ) of one species should be set to the corresponding metric cycle or “meter” (īqā‘, pl. īqā‘āt): quick (khafīfa) to inspire delight, slow (thaqīla) for melancholy, moderate for a sense of the sublime, the munificent or the beautiful. Kindī takes note of subdivisions (aqsām or again anwā‘) within these tripartite classifications, and he describes the tones that ascend or descend from a central tone as “the acute side” (al-jānib al-ahadd) and “the grave side” (al-jānib al-athqal), respectively. Kindī’s terms for expansive and contracting melodic frameworks connect musical experience with rhythms on which human life depends – the dilation (inbisāt ̣) and contraction (inqibād: ) of heart and lungs – and with processes that are fundamental to the entire created order: “God brings about contraction and dilation” (w’Allāh yaqbid: u wa yabsut ̣, Qur’ān 2:245). The distinction is closely related to oppositions of “tense” or “hard” versus “slack” or “soft,” a relation that is as central to Arabic as to Greek writings on music. To lessen the

6 See the translation of Cleonides’s text in Treitler 1998, 46; the translation of Aristides Quintilianus in Barker 1989, 432–3, 445; and al-Kindī’s Risāla fī khubr s ̣inā‘at al-ta’līf, in Shawqī 1969, 111–12.

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Table 4.1 Comparison of five typologies Negative Direction

Center

Positive Direction

a. Species of melodic and rhythmic composition (Cleonides, Kindī) Greek: systaltikon “depressant” Arabic: al-qabd: ī “the contracting” (al-muh ẓ in “melancholy”)

hēsychastikon “calming”

diastaltikon “stimulant” al-mu‘tadil “the temperate” (al-madh ̣ al-bast ̣ī “the “praise” al-jalāla “the sublime” alexpansive” karāma “the munificent” al-jamīla (al-mut ̣rib “the beautiful”) “delight”)

b. Fārābī’s classification of melodic frameworks (alh ạ̄ n) al-mulaiyina “soft”

al-mu‘addala “moderate” al-istiqrāriya “calming”

al-muqauwiya “strong”

c. Avicenna’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (i)

Qualities of Melody (Lah ṇ ) tawussut ̣a “moderateness” jazālata “eloquence” Imaginative Representation (Takhyīl) dhamm “satire”← ← mut ̣ābaqa “correspondence” → → madh ̣ “encomium” [to reality] layina “softness”

(ii)

d. Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī’s classification of Shudūd h ụ zn “sadness” futūr, “lassitude”

bast ̣ ladhīdh, latīf “refined pleasure”

Buzurg Rāhawī Zīrāfkand Zankūla Ḥusaynī

Rāst Nawrūz ‘Irāq Is ̣fahān

quwwa “strength” shajā‘at “courage” bast ̣ “delight” ‘Ushshāq Nawā Busalik

tension on a string is to lower the pitch it will yield, and once the pitches obtained by raising or lessening the tension on a string are themselves perceived as relatively “tense” or “slack” the distinction can be transferred to intervals and to different species of tetrachord. Aristoxenus (b. mid-fourth century BCE) explained that the variable tones within tetrachords are “compressed,” brought closer together, as one moves first from the hard or

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tense to the soft diatonic genus, then from the tense to the hemiolic and to the soft chromatic, and finally to the softest or most compressed of all, the enharmonic. Claudius Ptolemy (second century CE) retained this classification in his Harmonics and also contrasted tone and semitone as, respectively, “hard” (sýntonos) and “soft” (malakós). He further described the character (ēthos) of melodies in a relatively “hard” genus as diastatikōteron “more inclined to expand,” and the character of those in a relatively “soft” genus as synaktikōteron “more inclined to draw together.” Kindī adopted this set of concepts and extended the opposition of “hard” versus “soft” to the major and minor thirds: heard in relation to the first degree of a general scale, the major third is “strong” (qawwī), “rough” (khashin), and “masculine” (mudhakkar), creating an impression of courage (shajja‘a); the minor third is “weak” (nāqis) and “soft” (laiyin), disposing the listener to sadness (ah ẓ ana). For Kindī and many of his successors, a classification of the units available for the composition (ta’līf) of modes, metric cycles, and pieces is also a description of their effects (af ‘āl, sing. fi‘l ) on performers and listeners. The engagement of theorists writing in Arabic with Greek theory, along the lines laid out by Aristoxenus and his followers, entailed a concern with several types of composite entity; the Greek term synthesis became ta’līf in Arabic (and compositio in Latin). Cleonides, in his summary of Aristoxenus’s theory, had listed seven-octave species, which he called eidē (sing. eidos) and which Ptolemy, offering the same list, called tónoi (a term that Aristoxenus and Cleonides had used in a different sense).7 The Arabic equivalents of Greek tónos (lit., “tightening”) were tanīn (pl. tanīnāt), shadd “tightening,” and lah ṇ “melody.” One plural form of lah ṇ , alh ạ̄ n, served many writers as a one-word definition of mūsīqī, often with the sense of “melodic models”; a second plural form, luh ụ̄ n, commonly designates “melodic idioms.” Composite entities such as intervals, tetrachords, octave species, poetic feet, and metric cycles can be evaluated as “regular” or “irregular,” “consonant” or “dissonant.” Both polarities may retain their musical associations in other areas of inquiry, notably in the classification of types of pulse developed by the Greek physician Herophilus (c. 330–260 BCE) and further elaborated by Galen (second century CE). Reflecting on the “musical nature” of the human pulse in his Qānūn fī’l-t ̣ibb (Canon of Medicine), used by generations of physicians, Avicenna compares the consonance or dissonance of pitch intervals and of the ratios between different timespans in metric cycles with the “rhythmic proportion” (nisba īqā’iyya) between the timespans marked off by successive 7 For Aristoxenus and Cleonides, tónos was one of thirteen (later fifteen) “positions (topoi) of the voice,” in other words ranges, each beginning a semitone higher than the last. Arabic tanīn is an adaptation of tónos as used in Ptolemy’s Harmonics; see Mathiesen 2002, 125–7.

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pulses, which may be regular or irregular. The musical nature of the pulse became a topos shared by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian authors.

Uses of the Aristotelian heritage Classification of the sciences As the first Muslim philosopher whose encyclopedic interests embraced most fields of learning, Kindī accepted the pedagogical ordering of disciplines developed by the Aristotelians of Alexandria and assimilated by Syrian Christians. Aristotle’s works on logic, arranged according to the Alexandrian ordering that included the Rhetoric and Poetics, were understood as essential preparation for the study of physics, mathematics, and metaphysics: equipped with the tools of logic, students would advance from the material to the spiritual. By following this scheme in its pure form, the four parts of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-shifā’ (Book of Healing) deal in turn with universals of three fundamental types: logical, material, and intelligible. In Fārābī’s more comprehensive classification, the sciences of language are added before logic; mathematics comes before rather than after physics; and metaphysics is followed by politics, jurisprudence, and theology. An alternative classification identifies the disciplines added to the Alexandrian scheme by Fārābī as “Arab” sciences in contrast to the “foreign” sciences acquired through assimilation and critique of the Aristotelian heritage. Khwārizmī adopted this scheme in his Mafātih ̣ al-’ulūm, in which music is the last of the four branches of mathematics. The opposition of “Arab” versus “foreign” became “new” (i.e., Muslim) versus “ancient” in the Persian Nafā’es al-fonūn (Treasures of the Sciences) of al-Amolī (d. 1352) and “traditional” versus “intellectual” in Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima, with music retaining its place among the “ancient” and “intellectual” sciences. In the Muslim world, as in the Latin West, Aristotelian logic enabled music theorists to distinguish between “essential” and “incidental” attributes of musical resources, most notably in identifying embellishments and modifications of fundamental structures. At the beginning of the section on music in his Kitāb al-shifā’, Avicenna rejects correlations of the sort posited by Kindī and the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ on the grounds that they are not essential. Questions of what belongs to what, and what should be deemed incidental, are continually raised and treated with great lucidity, in the texts of Fārābī and Avicenna. Several of Fārābī’s memorable formulations are quoted time and again by subsequent theorists.

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Terms and concepts Aristotle classified harmonics with the “applied” rather than with the “pure” branches of mathematics, thus emphasizing its connections to physics. Those connections are of fundamental importance in Fārābī’s Kitāb almūsīqī al-kabīr, as Max Haas has pointed out,8 particularly in Fārābī’s sustained attention to progressions (nuqla, intiqāl ) from tone to tone. In his treatment of rhythm in the Kitāb al-mūsīqī and in two subsequent treatises wholly devoted to rhythm, Fārābī is concerned with both the articulatory and the auditory aspects of music making, and with the variation techniques that performers necessarily apply to basic structures. The attack or stroke (qār‘) that initiates a sound and the stroke that initiates a subsequent sound delimit a timespan (zamān, pl. azmina); each attack, lacking a measurable duration, is but an “instant” (ān) falling between a past and a future. Fārābī also speaks of the progression (nuqla) from a musician’s “motion” (h ạ raka) to produce a sound, through the ensuing “rest” (sukūn) as the sound continues or decays, to the next motion, and so on. Avicenna interprets our experience of the timespan delimited by two attacks as a process in which pleasure at the inception of the first sound yields to disappointment as it fades but is renewed by the arrival of the second attack. Fārābī’s rhythmic theory is a rigorous development of concepts outlined in the rhythmics of Aristotle’s pupil, Aristoxenus. The shortest perceptible timespan (comparable to the prōtos chronos of Aristoxenus) is produced by the quickest possible motion making two strokes. The distinction of “light” (khafīf ) and “heavy” (thaqīl ) refers to the “quick” or “slow” rate at which attacks succeed one another. The basic, unornamented form of each “light” metric cycle (īqā‘) is composed of timespans with the minimal duration. Doubling that value yields the basic unit of “moderate” (mutawassit ̣) or “light-heavy” cycles, and doubling the moderate value yields the basic unit of the “heavy” cycles. (Fārābī and his successors use the syllables ta, tan, and tanan to represent these three durational values.) Successive occurrences of an īqā‘ may or may not be separated by a pause equal to twice the duration of its basic unit; when they are so separated an īqā‘ consists of two cycles (adwār, sing. daur), just as each line (bayt ) of a poem in classical Arabic has two symmetrical halves. In the first sentence of the Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr, Fārābī defines melody (lah ṇ ) as an ordered succession of tones (naghmāt ) that is or is not combined with voweled and unvoweled consonants. He describes six types of melodic 8 The foundational passage for this conception is Aristotle’s Physics, 194a. Haas further notes that, in the Latin West, Boethius treated music as a branch of pure mathematics; see Haas 1984, 643–6.

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movement (intiqāl), expanding on the typologies given by Cleonides, Aristides Quintilianus, and Kindī. Fārābī devotes the last two surviving sections of the book to the composition, first of melodies conceived independently of poetry, then of the more perfect melodies that are designed in relation to verse. He classifies the frameworks of the more perfect melodies as “strong” (muqauwiya), “temperate” (mu’addala), or “soft” (mulaiyina), extending the polarity that also serves to classify tetrachord species as relatively “strong” (i.e., diatonic) or relatively “soft” (with less distance between their smallest intervals) (Table 4.1b). Fārābī names four emotional states evoked by strong frameworks – enmity, cruelty, anger, and boldness – and four evoked by soft frameworks – fear, compassion, anxiety, and cowardice – without arranging the emotions along a continuum from strongest to weakest. Avicenna’s account of tetrachord species is heavily biased toward the “strength” of the diatonic. He maintains that if a tone is not followed by a second tone at a “strong” interval, conditioning born of customary use (ādāt) leaves us disappointed, according to the degree of “loosening” (arkhā’) and the consequent compactness. Hence, the soft genera should be combined with strong genera through modulation. Ḥasan al-Kātib agrees that modulation is essential but argues that listeners find it painful to hear several strong melodies in succession if musicians do not alleviate the accumulated tension with soft melodies.

Human communication Discussion of human communication through music, by Fārābī and others, is informed by commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, Poetics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Fārābī’s conception of music as an art (s ̣inā‘a) that can engage our faculties of sense perception (h ạ ssāsīya), imagination (takhayyul) and intellect (‘aql) is one application of Aristotle’s view that the exercise of the intellect presupposes imagination, which in turn presupposes sense-perception (De anima, III, 3). Some musicians, Fārābī acknowledges, can merely replicate melodies they associate with concrete material realities; others can imagine new melodies without the support of familiar circumstances; and the most complete musicians can reason about all the products of their imagination. Fārābī and Avicenna emphasize the imagination’s power to take apart and recombine the images retained from sense-perception, as well as the intellect’s power to identify reasons for preferring, tolerating, or rejecting any given combination of elements. According to Fārābī, experienced listeners imagine the likely course of a melodic progression, which then proves itself either “faithful” (wafīy) or “deceptive” (khātil) with respect to the listener’s expectations.

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Speculating on the origins of music and poetry as they summarize and comment on the Poetics, Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroës (1126–98) follow Aristotle in reflecting on what is natural for humans as we create and respond to poetic utterance, considered as an imaginative representation (takhyīl) or imitation (muh ạ̄ kāh) that, in Avicenna’s words, generates wonder (ta‘jīb) and pleasure (ladhdha) in the listener. It does this by virtue of an enhancement of speech, namely melody (lah ṇ ) of a type that complements the poetic theme (gharaz) in its “eloquence” (jazālata) or “softness” (layina), or possibly in its “intermediacy” (tawussut ̣a) between these poles (Table 4.1c.i). Avicenna attributes the importance of sung poetry in human life to “the pleasure of imitating” and to our “natural love of harmonious combinations and melodies,” noting that poetic meters are “analogous to melodies.” Commenting on Aristotle’s remark (Poetics VI, 4) that the language (lógos) of tragedy is enhanced by rhythm, tone-relationships (harmonía), and melody (mélos), Avicenna distinguishes between “the rhythm (īqā‘) of the verse” and the “additional rhythm” that enhances it in performance. Ḥasan al-Kātib spells out one criterion for such enhancement: The metric cycle (īqā‘) of a composition should contrast with the meter (wazn) of the verses. Ḥasan al-Kātib may have derived the classification of melodies offered in his Kitāb kamāl adab al-ghīnā’ from Aristotle’s discussion of the possible combinations of rhythm, language, and tone-relationships (Poetics, I, 1): the most perfect (h ạ zmī “bundled”) are composed of all three constituents, with “rhythm” (īqā‘) understood as “metric cycle”; those lacking either metric cycle or language are bast ̣ī “expansive”; and those lacking both metric cycle and language are khat ̣t ̣ī “linear.” Avicenna’s commentary on the Poetics also reviews possible combinations of the three components that constitute poetic utterance: meter (wazn), language (kalām), and melody or “tone” (lah ṇ ). Avicenna follows Aristotle in observing that dance may be limited to meter alone, though more powerful effects are obtained when appropriate tunes are joined to the meters of dance. Imaginative representations are said to occasion responses of attraction or repulsion, depending on the performance genre and mode of address. Aristotle’s remarks on the origins of tragedy and comedy are interpreted in terms of an opposition that is more meaningful in Arabic and Persian poetry: encomium versus invective, or eulogy versus satire (Table 4.1c. ii). Other genres can be explained as specialized developments of these. Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroës all agree that eulogy requires the use of long poetic meters. Fārābī credits the Greeks with being first to assign a specific poetic meter to each poetic genre, though in listing twelve Greek genres he does not identify their meters. His list is reproduced by Avicenna and, five centuries

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later, by the author of the so-called Mubārak Shāh Commentary on the Kitāb al-adwār of Ṣafi al-Dīn, written for Shāh Shojā‘ (r. 1358–84).

Tone-systems, modes, and modulation “What must a musician know?” is a topic commonly addressed by writers on music, whose answers often take the form of a list, as in Plato’s Philebus (17c–e), where Socrates observes that competent musicians know the number and quality of the intervals, their combinations, and the corresponding movements, meters, and rhythms. The more formalized list of disciplines given by Aristoxenus embraces harmonics (with seven subdivisions), rhythmics, metrics, and “organics” (knowledge of instruments); Kindī’s Arabic equivalents for the seven subdivisions of harmonics according to the Aristoxenians are shown in Table 4.2. According to Ibn al-Ṭah ḥ ạ̄ n, an author of the mideleventh century, the great singer Ish ạ̄ q al-Mausilī (d. 850) likewise named four disciplines or “domains” (h ụ dūd, sing. h ạ dd) as indispensable to the musician’s art: tones (nagham), the harmonious arrangement (ta’lif) of tones, the apportionment (qisma) of tones to song lyrics, and metric cycles (īqā‘, pl. īqā‘āt). Ishāq is said to have written a treatise on tones and metric cycles, the Kitāb al-nagham wa’l-īqā‘. It has not survived, nor have an earlier book on tones by the musician Yūnus al-Kātib (d. c. 765) and one or two books on tones and metric cycles by the prosodist al-Khalīl of Bas ̣ra. Ish ạ̄ q’s doctrines must be reconstructed from a Kitāb al-nagham by a pupil of one of his pupils, Ibn al-Munajjim (d. 913), and from accounts of his metric cycles in writings of Fārābī and others. Ibn al-Munajjim contrasts “old philosophers” knowledgeable in mūsīqī with Ish ạ̄ q and other representatives of Arabic song (ghinā’), who combined knowledge (‘ilm), compositional art (s ̣inā‘a), and expertise in performance (‘amal ).

Table 4.2 The seven divisions of harmonics (Aristoxenus and al-Kindī) Cleonides, reordered from: Aristoxenus

al-Kindī

1. φθόγγοι 2. διαστήματα 3. γένη 4. συστήματα 5. τόνοι 6. μεταβολή 7. μελοποιία

as ̣wāt, anğām “notes” ab’ad “intervals” ajnās “genres” jumū’, anwā’ “systems” t ̣anīnāt, Arabization of “tónoi” intiqāl, istihālāt as-s ̣autīya “modulation” ta’līf al-alh ̣ān “melodic composition”

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The doctrines of the two groups differ, first of all, in enumeration of the available tones: eighteen from the perspective of mūsīqī but only ten in Ishāq’s pedagogy, based on a system of eight diatonic modes that can be demonstrated on the third and fourth strings of the ‘ūd. The system uses three species of tetrachord composed of two Pythagorean whole-tones of 204 cents and one limma of ninety cents: T L T, T T L, and L T T.9 Description of tone-systems and modes, generally with reference to tuning and fretting of the ‘ūd, became the primary concern of theorists writing in Arabic and Persian from the tenth century onward, several of whom followed more or less closely the arrangement of the divisions of harmonics established by Aristoxenus: tones (nagham), intervals (ab‘ad), tetrachord species (ajnās), and their combination in systems (jumū‘), modulation (intiqāl), and composition (ta’līf). Western theorists and scholars interested in music of the Islamic world have also concentrated their attention on these topics. Fārābī was the first theorist to describe the third associated with the lutenist Zalzal, produced with the middle finger on a fret between those for the major and minor thirds. Zalzalian thirds are incorporated in some of the octave species described by Fārābī, Khwārizmī, and Avicenna, notably in the scale that Avicenna called Mustaqīm “Upright, regular” rather than Rāst, the equivalent term in Persian by which this scale came to be known. Avicenna’s chapter on music and the Persian poems of his contemporary, Manūchehri Dāmghāni (d. c. 1040), are among the earliest sources in which octave species or modes are identified with proper names, such as the four mentioned by Avicenna: Mustaqīm, Nawā, Is ̣fahān, and Salmakī. Proper names of this sort have presumably served as “handles” to help musicians remember constraints on the sequencing of modes and metric cycles in performance. At the courts of the early ‘Abbāsid rulers in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the ordering of rhythmic and melodic modes in a performance resulted from the choices of the participating musicians, who were seated in a circle (dawr) and performed in turn (nawbat). The terms dawr and nawba eventually came to designate suites with prescribed sequences of movements. Advice on the behavior expected of musicians in a Persian “mirror for princes,” the Qābus-nāme of ‘Ons ̣or al-Ma‘āli Keykāvus (eleventh century), indicates that a performance should open with something in the mode (parde) of Rāst and continue in some, or possibly all, of the nine additional modes named by the author. In the Qābus-nāme and other texts, the underlying rationale for such constraints is the certainty that a musician’s listeners will differ in age, gender, ethnicity, physique, temperament, vocation, and 9 The octave species described by Kindī and by Ibn al-Munajjim are compared in Neubauer 1994, 397–402.

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familiarity with music. Hence, lore drawn from the pseudo-science of physiognomy (‘ilm al-firāsa) may find a place in a musician’s education, as in Kaykāvus’s recommendation that musicians play mainly on the lowest-pitched string for listeners who are “pale-skinned, corpulent, and sweaty.” The simplest sequencing rule calls for songs in “heavy” metric cycles, addressed to the older and more serious male listeners, to be followed by songs in “light” cycles, which would appeal to younger men. By the twelfth century, a melodic mode’s proper name was apt to connote its emotional effect. A masterpiece of Persian literature, Nezāmi’s narrative poem Khosrow va Shirin (completed 1181), includes a scene in which two musicians alternately perform verses in a coherent sequence of eight modes (including Rāst, Nawā, and Is ̣fahān) in order to express the changing emotions signaled to them by Khosrow and Shirin. The sequence concludes with two “soft” modes associated with passion, Rāhavī and Zīrafkand. The tone-system and modal theory outlined in the Kitāb al-adwār of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmāwī (d. 1294) quickly gained wide acceptance as the indispensable basis for further theoretical work. With reference to the monochord rather than to the ‘ūd, the treatise describes a general scale with eighteen degrees in an octave, separated by either a limma of ninety cents or a comma of twenty-four or twenty-two cents. Intervals of the general scale that are available for constructing trichords, tetrachords, and pentachords are classified in three categories, represented by the letters B (either a limma or a comma), J (either limma plus comma, or minor whole-tone of 180 cents) and T (whole-tone of 204 cents). Exact sizes of intervals may have been less significant than these three categories, which are used in spelling out the acceptable species of tetrachord and pentachord. Those species, in turn, are used to construct modal entities of three types: twelve shudūd (sing. shadd) with proper names, six āwāzāt (sing. āwāz) also with proper names, and several unnamed “combinations” (murakkabāt, sing. murakkab). The twelve shudūd are classified in three groups according to their effect (ta’thīr) on the soul, interpreted through the conventional terms of “strong” or “assertive” versus “soft” or “acquiescent,” which had long been applied to tetrachords and melodic frameworks (Table 4.1d). The three shudūd in the first group, composed of two conjunct diatonic tetrachords of the same species, are said to evoke strength (quwwa), courage (shajā‘at), and pleasure (bast ̣); hence they are suited to the temperament of Turks, Abyssinians, black people, and mountain dwellers. By implication, the four shudūd in the second group appeal to more refined tastes, evoking a pleasure (again, bast ̣) that is now qualified as “delightful” (ladhidh). They are likewise composed of conjunct tetrachords of the same species and owe their effect, in part, to the Zalzalian

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thirds between the first and third, and the fourth and sixth scale degrees of each shadd in the group. Two shudūd in this group have eight pitch classes rather than seven. The five shudūd in the final group are associated with “sadness” (h ̣uzn) and “lassitude” ( futūr). Only one of them is composed of conjunct tetrachords of the same species, two have conjunct tetrachords of different species, and two (also with eight pitch classes) are composed of a pentachord with an upper tetrachord or a tetrachord with an upper pentachord.10 The increasing use of proper names for species of tetrachords, pentachords, and octaves as well as for modal entities of various types opened new possibilities for theoretical accounts of melodic progression and modulation (both covered by the term intiqāl). From the thirteenth century to the present, many theorists have organized modal repertories on the model of a lineage or a tree, with such categories as “primary modes,” “branches,” “further derivatives,” and the like. An influential alternative to Ṣafī al-Dīn’s scheme of twelve shudūd plus six āwāzāt split the twelve into four primary modes (‘us ̣ūl) plus eight branches (furū‘) plus six awāzāt, each of the latter connected to one pair of the twelve ‘us ̣ūl and furū‘ (often referred to as twelve bardāwāt). This scheme appears in the poem Jawāhir al-nizām (The Well-Ordered Jewels) of al-Khatīb al-Irbilī (composed 1329), in the Durr al-naẓīm (The Well-Arranged Pearl) of Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 1348), and in the Muqaddima fī qawānīn al-anghām of al-Mārdīnī (d. 1406). From the fourteenth century onward, discussion of cycles of distinct movements became increasingly prominent in theoretical writings, notably those of the Persian composer-theorist ‘Abdolqāder Marāghi (d. 1435), who is credited with adding a fifth movement to the conventional four when he composed a new suite (nawbah) for each night of the month of Ramaḍān in 1379. The prescribed sequence of movements in the nawbah called for settings of poetry in both Arabic and Persian. Cyclic forms have been cultivated, in conjunction with hierarchical arrangements of modal entities, down to the present in the musical practices of Iraq, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Central Asia. With the expansion of Islam in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, the Arabic word ‘ilm “knowledge” was applied to highly diverse disciplines, some of which involve skills in vocal or instrumental performance (e.g., Indonesian ilmu karawitan “knowledge of instrumental and vocal music”). The diversity makes it impossible to generalize about the types of knowledge that have been

10 Some manuscripts of the Kitāb al-adwār include Ḥijāzī. The structure of the shudūd in each of the three groups is carefully analyzed in Wright 1978, 81–6.

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cultivated, though most Muslim social formations have required specialist performers capable of praising those who exercise religious or temporal authority.

Bibliography I Inventories of writings in Arabic and Persian Massoudieh, M. T. (1996) Manuscrits persans concernant la musique, RISM, B XII, Munich: Henle Neubauer, E. (2002) ‘Arabic writings on music: Eighth to nineteenth centuries’, in V. Danielson, S. Marcus, and D. Reynolds (eds.), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 6, The Middle East, New York: Routledge, pp. 374–82: ‘Editions of Arabic sources’ Shiloah, A. (1979/2003) The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings c. 900–1900. RISM, B X and B XA, 2 vols., Munich: Henle

II Arabic texts, translations and commentaries (in approximate chronological order) [Euclid], Kitāb al-Qanūn, ed. and Ger. trans. with Greek original and commentary E. Neubauer as ‘Die Euklid zugeschriebene “Teilung des Kanon” in arabischer Übersetzung’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 16 (2004–5): 309–85 Ḥunayn ibn Is ̣hāq, Kitāb ’ādāb al-falāsifa, Heb. trans. Judah b. Solomon al-Ḥarīzī, musical passages in I. Adler (ed.), Hebrew Writings on Music, RISM B IX/2, Munich: Henle (1975), pp. 147–55; Heb. text and Eng. trans. E. Werner and I. Sonne, ‘The philosophy and theory of music in Judeo-Arabic literature’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 17 (1942–43): 514–32 Būlos/Paulos, Kitāb ‘Uns ̣ur al-mūsīqī, facs. and Ger. trans. with commentary E. Kazemi, Die bewegte Seele: Das spätantike Buch über das Wesen der Musik, Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, The Science of Music in Islam, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 5 (1999); commentary F. Rosenthal, ‘Two Graeco-Arabic works on music’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 110, 4 (1966): 261–8 al-Kindī, Kitāb al-mus ̣awwitāt al-watariyya, in Z. Yūsuf (ed.), Mu’allafāt al-Kindī al-mūsīqiyya, Baghdad: Mat ba‘at ̣ Shafīq (1962), pp. 67–92; Eng. trans. of sections on rhythm with commentary in Sawa, Rhythmic Theories, pp. 80–93 Risāla fī khubr s ̣inā‘at al-ta’līf, ed. and Eng. trans. Y. Shawqī, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub (1969); facs. with Eng. trans. C. Cowl, The Consort, 23 (1966): 129–66 Risāla fī’l-luh ̣ūn wa’l-nagham, ed. Z. Yūsuf, Baghdad: Mat ̣ba‘at Shafīq (1965); Fr. trans. A. Shiloah, ‘Un ancien traité sur le ‘ūd d’Abū Yūsuf al-Kindī’, Israel Oriental Studies, 4 (1974): 179–205 Risāla fī ajzā’ khabariyya fī’l-mūsīqī, facs. and ed. M. A. al-Ḥifnī, Cairo: Mat ba‘at ̣ al-Amīn (n.d.); Eng. trans. H. G. Farmer, Transactions of the Glasgow University Oriental Society, 16 (1957), 29–38; repr. in H. G. Farmer, Studies in Oriental Music (see below), pp. 443–52

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Ibn al-Munajjim, Kitāb al-nagham, facs. in E. Neubauer, Arabische Musiktheorie, pp. 113–26, with Ger. trans. and commentary, pp. 88–111 (repr. from Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 10 [1995–96], 300–23); commentary O. Wright, ‘Ibn al-Munajjim and the early Arabian modes’, Galpin Society Journal, 19 (1966): 27–48 Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, Kitāb al-‘iqd al-farīd, ed. A. Amīn et al. Cairo: Lajnat al-Ta’līf wa’lTarjama wa’l-Nashr, ch. on music VI (1949), pp. 3–81; Eng. trans. H. G. Farmer, Music: The Priceless Jewel, Bearsden: The author (1942); repr. in Farmer, Studies in Oriental Music (see below), pp. 5–33 al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr, ed. Gh. ‘Abd al-Malik Khashaba and M. A. al-Hifnī, Cairo: Dar al-Kātib al-‘Arabī (1967); facs. of ms. 953, Köprülü Library, Istanbul, Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, The Science of Music in Islam, Series C, 61, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science (1998); Fr. trans. R. d’Erlanger, La musique arabe, i and ii, Paris: P. Geuthner (1930 and 1935); Eng. trans. of chs. on rhythm with commentary in Sawa, Rhythmic Theories, pp. 120–235 Kitāb al-īqā‘, facs. in E. Neubauer, Arabische Musiktheorie (see below), pp. 165–84, with Ger. trans. and commentary, pp. 128–64 (repr. from Oriens, 21–2 [1968–69], 196–232); Eng. trans. with commentary in Sawa, Rhythmic Theories, pp. 236–315 Kitāb ih ̣s ̣ā‘al-īqā‘, facs. in E. Neubauer, Arabische Musiktheorie, pp. 257–310, with Ger. trans. and commentary, pp. 185–255 (repr. from Oriens, 34 [1994], 103–73); Eng. trans. with commentary in Sawa, Rhythmic Theories, pp. 316–420 Risāla fī qawānīn s ̣ina‘at al-shi‘r, ed. and Eng. trans. A. J. Arberry, Rivista degli studi orientali, 17 (1935): 266–78; Eng. trans. V. Cantarino, Arabic Poetics in the Golden Age, Studies in Arabic Literature, 4, Leiden: Brill, 1975, pp. 110–16 al-Is ̣bahāni, Kitāb al-aghānī, Cairo: Tab’ah Khāssah Tusdiruhā Dār al-Sha‘b, 1969–82, 31 vols.; Ger. trans. of excerpts G. Rotter, Und der Kalif beschenkte ihn reichlich: Auszüge aus dem “Buch der Lieder”, Tübingen: H. Erdmann (1977) Ikhwān as-Ṣāfā‘, Rasā’il, ed. Kh. ad-Dīn Ziriklī, Cairo: al-Mat ba‘at ̣ al-Arabīya (1928), I, 132–80; Eng. trans. A. Shiloah as The Epistle on Music of the Ikhwān al-Sāfā’, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University (1978) al-Khwārizmī, Mafātīh ̣ al-‘ulūm, ed. G. van Vloten, Leiden: Brill (1895), chap. on music, pp. 235–46; Eng. trans. H. G. Farmer, ‘The science of music in the Mafātīh al‘ulūm’, Transactions of the Glasgow University Oriental Society, 17 (1957–58), 1–9; repr. in Farmer, Studies in Oriental Music (see below), pp. 453–61 al-Ḥasan ibn Ah m ̣ ad ibn ‘Ali al-Kātib, Kitāb kamāl adab al-ghinā‘, ed. M. A. al-Ḥifnī and Gh. ‘Abd al-Malik Khashabah, Cairo: al-Hay’at al-Misriyat al-Āmma li ‘l-Kitāb (1975); Fr. trans. with commentary A. Shiloah as La perfection des connaissances musicales, Paris: P. Geuthner (1972) Avicenna [Ibn Sīnā], Kitāb al-Shifā’, I, al-Mantiq, 9, al-Shi’r, ed. A. Badawī, Cairo: al-Dār al-Misriyyah li al-Ta’līf wa ‘t-Tarjamah (1966); Eng. trans. I. M. Dahiyat, Avicenna’s Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle, Leiden: Brill (1974) Kitāb al-Shifā’, III, ar-Riyaziyāt, 3, Jawāmi‘ ‘ilm al-mūsiqā, ed. Z. Yūsuf with A. F. Al-Ahwani and M. A. Al-Ḥifni, Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale (1956); Fr. trans. R. d’Erlanger, La musique arabe, II, Paris: P. Geuthner, (1935), pp. 103–245 Kitāb al-Najāt, ch. on music ed. and Ger. trans. with commentary, M. El Hefny, Ibn Sina’s Musiklehre, Berlin: Otto Hellwig (1931)

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Ibn al-Ṭah ḥ ạ̄ n, Hāwī al-Funūn wa salwat al-mah ̣zūn., facs. of funūn 539, Dar al-Kitāb, Cairo, Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, The Science of Music in Islam, Series C, 52, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science (1990) al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid, Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, Cairo: Mu‘assasat al-Halabī (1967–68), vol. II (1967), pp. 342–90; Eng. trans. of chs. on samā‘ D. B. MacDonald, ‘Emotional religion in Islam’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1901), 195–252, 705–48; (1902), 1–28 al-Tifāshi, Mut‘at al-asmā‘ fī ‘ilm as-samā‘, chs. 10–11, ed. M. ibn Tāwīt al-Tanjī, Majallat al-Abhāth 21 (1968): 93–116; Eng. trans. B. M. Liu and J. T. Monroe, Ten HispanoArabic Strophic Songs in the Modern Oral Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press (1989), pp. 35–44 Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī, Kitāb al-adwār, facs. of ms.3653, Nuruosmania Library, Istanbul, Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, The Science of Music in Islam, Series C, 6, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, (1984); ed. Gh. ‘Abd al-Malik Khashabah and M. A. al-Ḥifnī, Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Mis ̣riyya al-‘Āmma li-‘l-Kitāb (1986); Fr. trans. within an extended commentary R. d’Erlanger, La musique arabe, vol. 3, Paris: P. Geuthner, (1938), pp. 183–566 Ar-Risāla al-Sharafiyya, facs. of ms. A 3460, Topkapı Saray Library, Istanbul, Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, The Science of Music in Islam, Series C, 6, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, (1984); Fr. trans. R. d’Erlanger, La musique arabe, vol. 3, Paris: P. Geuthner, (1938), pp. 1–182 Ibn al-Khat īb ̣ al-Irbilī, Jawāhir al-nizām fī ma‘rifat al-anghām, ed. ‘Abbās al-‘Azzāwī in Al-Mūsīqā al-’irāqiyya fī ‘ahd al-mughūl, Baghdad: Shirkat al-Tijāra wa ‘l-Ṭibā’a al-Mah ̣dūda, pp. 106–13 Ibn al-Akfānī, Irshād al-qās ̣id, section on music, ed. and Fr. trans. A. Shiloah, ‘Deux textes arabes inédits sur la musique’, Yuval, 1 (1969): 236–48 Al-Durr al-naẓīm fī ah w ̣ āl al-‘ulūm wa’l-ta‘līm, section on music, ed. and Fr. trans. A. Shiloah, ‘Deux textes arabes inédits sur la musique’, Yuval, 1 (1969): 236–48 Ibn Fad: lallāh al-‘Umarī, Masālik al-abs ̣ār fī mamīlik al-ams ̣ār, Frankfurt: Publications of the Institute for Arabic-Islamic Science, Series C, 46 (1988), vol. 10 Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, ed. Y. A. Dāghir, Tarikh al-allāma Ibn Khaldūn, vol. 1, 2nd edn, Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnanī (1961), pp. 758–67 (singing), 1097–110 (poetry); Eng. trans. F. Rosenthal, 2nd edn, 3 vols., Princeton University Press (1967), vol. 2, 395–405 (singing); vol. 3, 373–91 (poetry) al-Shirwānī, Majallah fī‘l-mūsīqī, facs. of ms.3449, Ahmet III Collection, Topkapı Saray Library, Istanbul, Publications of the Institute for the History of ArabicIslamic Science, The Science of Music in Islam, Series C, 29, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, (1986); Fr. trans. of a longer version R. d’Erlanger, La musique arabe, vol. 4, Paris: P. Geuthner (1939), pp. 1–255 al-Lādhiqī, Risāla al-fathīyah, Kuwait: al-Majlis al-Watanī, 1986; Fr. trans. R. d’Erlanger, La musique arabe, vol. 4, Paris: P. Geuthner (1939), pp. 257–498

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III Persian texts, translations and commentaries (in approximate chronological order) Ebn Sinā, Dānesh-nāme ‘alā’i, chap. on music, in T. Binesh (ed.), Seh risāle fārsi dar musiqi, Tehran: Iran University Press (1992), pp. 3–29; Fr. trans. M. Achena and H. Massé in Le livre de science, Paris, (1955–8), vol. 2, pp. 217–39 al-Ghazali, Abu Ḥamid, Kimiyā-ye sa‘ādat, ed. M. ‘Abbāsi, Tehran: Ṭolu‘ va Zarrin; Eng. trans. of chap. on music by Muh ạ mmad Nur Abdus Salam, Al-Ghazzali on Listening to Music, Chicago: Kazi (2002) Ons ̣or al-Ma‘āli Keykāvus ebn Eskandar ebn Qābus ebn Voshmgir, Qābus-nāme, ed. Gh. H. Yusofi, Tehran: Enteshārāt-e ‘Elmi va Farhangi (1994), pp. 193–7 (chap. on music); Eng. trans. by R. Levy, A Mirror for Princes, New York: E. P. Dutton (1951), pp. 186–90 Neyshāburi, Moh ạ mmad, Risāle mūsīqī, ed. with commentary A. H. Pourjavādy, Ma‘āref 12, 1–2 (1995): 32–70 Rāzi, Fakhr al-Din, Jāme‘ al-‘olum, chap. on music ed. with commentary, A. H. Pourjavādy, Ma‘āref 10, 2–3 (1994): 88–110 [Hasan Kāshāni, attr.] Kanz al-Tuh ̣af, ed. T. Binesh in Seh risāle fārsi dar musiqi, Tehran: Iran University Press, 1992, pp. 55–128 Qotb al-Din Shirāzi, Dorrat al-tāj: music section in vol. 2, ed. S. H. Mashkān Tabasi and N. Taqvā, Tehran: Chapkhāneh Majles, 1945, part 4 (paginated separately) ibn Gheybī al-Marāghī, ‘Abd al-Qāder, Jāme‘ al-alhān, ed. T. Bābak Khazrā’i, Tehran: Iranian Academy of Arts, 2009 Maqāsed al-alhān, ed. T. Binesh, 2nd ed., Persian Texts Series, 26, Tehran: Bongāh-e Tarjome va Nashr Ketāb (1977) Shahr-e Adwār, ed. T. Binesh, Tehran: Iran University Press (1991) ‘Abdorrah m ̣ ān Jāmi, Risāle musiqi, in Bahāristān va rasā‘el-e Jāmi, Tehran: Mirās-e Maktub, pp. 193–220 ‘Ali ebn Moh ạ mmad al-Me‘mār al-Banā’ī, Risāle dar musiqi, facs. of ms. dated 1484, Tehran: Iran University Press, 1988

IV Secondary literature Adler, I. (ed.) (1975) Hebrew Writings on Music, RISM B IX/2, Munich: Henle Barker, A. (ed. and trans.) (1989) Greek Musical Writings, II, Harmonic and Acoustic Theory, Cambridge University Press Braune, G. (1990) ‘Puls und Musik: Die Wirkung der griechische Antike in arabische medizinische und musikalische Traktaten’, Jahrbuch für musikalische Volks- und Völkerkunde, 14: 52–67 Endress, G. (1990) ‘Der arabische Aristoteles und die Einheit der Wissenschaften im Islam’, in H. Balmer and B. Glaus (eds.), Die Blütezeit der arabischen Wissenschaft, Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine, pp. 3–39 Farmer, H. G. (1929) A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century, London: Luzac (1997) Studies in Oriental Music. 2 vols. Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science: The Science of Music in Islam, 1–2, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science

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al-Faruqi, L. I. (1981) An Annotated Glossary of Arabic Musical Terms, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Gutas, D. (1998) Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries), Abingdon and New York: Routledge Haas, M. (1989) ‘Antikenrezeption in der arabischen Musiklehre: Al-Fārābī über musikalische Fantasie’, in W. Erzgräber (ed.), Kontinuität und Transformation der Antike ins Mittelalter: Veröffentlichungen der Kongressakten zum Freiburger Symposium des Mediävistenverbandes, Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, pp. 261–9 (1984) ‘Griechische Musiktheorie in arabischen, hebräischen und syrischen Zeugnissen’, in T. Ertelt, H. von Loesch, and F. Zaminer (ed.), Geschichte der Musiktheorie, vol. 2, Vom Mythos zur Fachdisziplin: Antike und Byzanz, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 635–716 (1995) ‘Modus als Skala – Modus als Modellmelodie: Ein Problem musikalischer Überlieferung in der Zeit vor den ersten notierten Quellen’, in J. Raasted and C. Troelsgård (eds.), Paleobyzantine Notations: A Reconsideration of the Source Material, Hernen, The Netherlands: Bredius Stiftung, pp. 11–32 Heinrichs, W. (1978) ‘Die antike Verknüpfung von Phantasia und Dichtung bei den Arabern’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 128: 252–98 Jeffery, P. (2001) ‘Oktōēchos’, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 18, London: Macmillan, pp. 370–3 Kemal, S. (1991) The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, 9, Leiden: E. J. Brill Kirkpatrick, H. (2003) Making the Great Book of Songs, London: Routledge Curzon Manik, L. (1969) Das arabische Tonsystem im Mittelalter, Leiden: E. J. Brill Mathiesen, T. J. (2002) ‘Greek music theory’, in T. Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Cambridge University Press, pp. 125–7 Neubauer, E. (1994) ‘Die acht “Wege” der arabischen Musiklehre und der Oktoechos’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften, 9: 373–414 (1995–96) ‘Al-Ḫalīl ibn Ahmad und die Frühgeschichte der arabischen Lehre von den “Tönen” und den musikalischen Metren’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabischislamischen Wissenschaften, 10: 255–323 (1997) ‘Zur Bedeutung der Begriffe Komponist und Komposition in der Musikgeschichte der islamischen Welt’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabischislamischen Wissenschaften, 11: 307–63 (1998) Arabische Musiktheorie von den Anfängen bis zum 6./12. Jahrhundert: Studien, Übersetzungen und Texte in Faksimile, Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science: The Science of Music in Islam, 3, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science Peters, F. E. (1968) Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam, New York University Studies in Near Eastern Civilizations, 1, New York University Press Reinert, B. (1990) ‘Die arabische Musiktheorie zwischen autochthoner Tradition und griechischem Erbe’, in H. Balmer and B. Glaus (eds.), Die Blütezeit der arabischen Wissenshaft, Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine, pp. 79–108 Rosenthal, F. (1956) ‘From Arabic Books and Manuscripts VI: Istanbul Materials for al-Kindî and as-Saraḫsî’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 76: 27–31

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Sawa, G. D. (2004) ‘Baghdadi rhythmic theories and practices in twelfth-century Andalusia’, in J. Haines and R. Rosenfeld (eds.), Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 151–81 (1989) Music Performance Practice in the Early ‘Abbāsid Era 132–320 A.H./750–932 A.D., Toronto: Institute of Mediaeval Studies (2002) ‘Theories of rhythm and meter in the Medieval Middle East’ and ‘Classification of musical instruments in the Medieval Middle East’, in V. Danielson, S. Marcus and D. Reynolds (eds.), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 6, The Middle East, New York: Routledge, pp. 387–93 and 395–99 (2009) Rhythmic Theories and Practices in Arabic Writings to 339AH/950CE: Annotated Translations and Commentaries, Musicological Studies 93, Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music Shehadi, F. A. (1995) Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 67, Leiden: Brill (1999) ‘The influence of philosophy on music theory and performance in medieval Islam’, in C. Asmuth, G. Scholtz, and F.-B. Stammkötter (eds.), Philosophischer Gedanke und musikalischer Klang: Zum Wechselverhältnis von Musik und Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 69–77 Shiloah, A. (1981) ‘The Arabic concept of mode’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34: 19–42 (1990) ‘Techniques of scholarship in medieval Arabic treatises’, in A. Barbera (ed.), Music Theory and Its Sources: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 85–99 (1993) The Dimension of Music in Islamic and Jewish Culture, Variorum, Collected Studies Series, 393, Aldershot: Variorum (1995) Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural Study. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press (2007) Music and Its Virtues in Islamic and Jewish Writings, Collected Studies Series, 875, Aldershot: Ashgate Treitler, L. (ed.) (1998) Source Readings in Music History, New York: W. W. Norton Ullmann, M. (1979) Wa-hairu l-hadītī mā kānā lah ṇ an, Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 9 Werner, E., and I. Sonne (1941) ‘The philosophy and theory of music in Judeo-Arabic literature’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 16: 251–319; 17: (1942–43), 511–73 Wright, O. (1978) The Modal System of Arab and Persian Music, A.D. 1250–1300, Oxford University Press (1983) ‘Music and poetry’, in A. F. L. Beeston et al. (eds.) Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, Cambridge University Press, pp. 433–59 (1992) ‘Music in Muslim Spain’, in S. K. Jayyūsi (eds.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 555–79

. 5 .

Indian music history in the context of global encounters BONNIE C. WADE

Introduction The history of music in the Indian subcontinent is extremely long, and the territory of “India” so vast, that any representation of it must be understood as the result of draconian choices. Were it not for certain Indic practices, however, hardly any representation would be possible, for Indian music has always been, for the most part, a sounding tradition unrecorded in musical notation. The importance of the Indic intellectual tradition of systematizing knowledge and recording it in a translocal, universalist language (Sanskrit), across a considerable timespan, cannot be overstated. Another Indic intellectual practice is the preservation of theoretical thinking by repetition from one author to another – a tradition of memory through re-narration. That is complemented by an equally important custom of commentary from the perspective of contemporary practice and thought. So remarkable are the treatises resulting from these practices that tracing Indian musical history usually falls into the pattern of accounting for it through the Brahmanic Sanskrit treatises. There is other complementary documentation. Sculpture is a significant source for the history of several centuries, presenting as it does mostly stable iconographies of religious symbolism, including instruments, musical activity, and dance. Paintings are an excellent source although pictorial content is less stable than sculptural and therefore more difficult to use with precision. Numerous other sources, such as poetry, prose, plays, official chronicles and similar types of records, diaries, journals, and other personal accounts, are useful for considering specific time periods. My choice for presenting something of Indian music history here is to take the perspective of positioning India in its spheres of contact. Global encounters are nothing new in South Asian music history. The subcontinent’s almost central locus in Eurasia guaranteed its position as a vast bazaar in the exchange of material and ideational commodities (see Fig. 1).

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Fig. 5.1 South Asia in Asian perspective. Joseph Schwartzberg, A Historical Atlas of South Asia

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The Harappan era Documented Indic cultural history begins in the Indus River valley with its first major urban civilization called Harappan, after one of its two major sites – Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in present-day Pakistan. From c. 2500–1500 BCE these two cities, which are 350 miles apart, and more than sixty smaller towns and villages, across an expanse of more than one thousand miles, flourished on the banks of the Indus and its tributaries and along the coast of the Arabian Sea as far south as the Narbada River. The Harappan peoples used copper and bronze and were literate, although no linguistically analyzable tool, such as a Rosetta stone, nor a library has been found to permit translation of the script; thus, very little is known of the civilization’s nonmaterial culture, original settlers, and historical development. We do know that these Indus communities traded across great distances from at least 2500 BCE and possibly several centuries earlier. One of its major trading partners was Mesopotamia, and seaborne trade with Sumer likely brought an exchange of ideas as well as goods, although there is scant documentation for it. The layout of the cities suggests a highly centralized administration, which could order large amounts of tribute in grains, and a sufficiently large labor force to build expansively and allow for leisure and for the various specializations that characterize civilizations. The inhabitants lived in well-planned urban spaces with sophisticated attributes like community sanitation. They built large structures of burned brick and also carved statues and seals in a distinctive style; remnants of these include musicians and instruments on engraved stone seals and one small statuette of a dancing girl. From a pictograph on one of the seals, there is a possibility of a surviving instrument – an hourglass-shaped drum – with a sacred meaning related to the Harappan civilization (Roche 1996).

Indian encounters from the north and west: the Vedic era The demise of Harappan civilization has been the subject of much scholarly debate, though there is consensus that it resulted from several factors, including destructive floods and possibly resultant deforestation, lessened agricultural production, incursions by hill tribes from the north and west, and concomitant social disorder. But the final blow came when successive waves of charioteers and bowmen moved southward from eastern Iran across the Indus valley between c. 1500 and 1200 BCE. Their military might subdued, and then destroyed, the nonmilitary Harappan societies. These warriors spoke an Indo-European language considered ancestral to Sanskrit and called

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themselves “Aryan.”1 Theirs is the first known, but by no means the last, movement of peoples into the area from the plains of Central Asia, through the mountain passes of modern-day Afghanistan. Like later invaders from the north and west, they came to stay. The language that the Aryans brought with them, which has been exhaustively studied through the great texts, was the basis for classical Sanskrit, “the polished tongue that flourished for more than a thousand years and still serves as the lingua franca of Indian scholarship” (Rowell 1992, 19). The first millennium of the Aryan presence witnessed the creation of the great oral texts that formed the basis of what is called Vedic civilization. Between 1300 and 1000 BCE, the hymns of the Rgveda were composed; between 1000 and 500 BCE, the three later Vedas (Atharva, Yajur, and the Samaveda, the chanting of which is generally thought to have been the origin of Indian classical music mainly because it uses seven pitches) appeared alongside complementary texts: a body of Vedic commentary, the Brahmanas, and treatises called the Upanishads. The thinking and feeling expressed in the Upanishads became popularized by two important religious leaders who lived in the latter part of the sixth century BCE: Mahavira, founder of Jainism, and Gautama Buddha (c. 563–486/483 BCE). The two major religious philosophies of Jainism and Buddhism challenged the Vedic religious system and philosophy, and it was during this 500–300 BCE time frame that a distinctive Indian civilization emerged and some of the earliest layers in a corpus of musicological literature is thought to have been created. I shall return to this below. Little is known about Aryan penetration into eastern and southern India until c. 800 BCE, with evidence of large-scale agriculture and centralized kingly states that began to dominate in the Ganges valley to the east. By c. 600 BCE, whether by battle or settlement, Indo-Aryans controlled the area from the Arabian Sea on the west to the Bay of Bengal on the east, as far south as the Vindhya mountain range, and by the sixth century BCE they absorbed or established control over the small states of northern India. The center of India’s polity and society had effectively shifted from the Indus eastward to the Gangetic plain, making it henceforth South Asia’s major center of cultural activity and home to its most powerful kingdoms, such as Kosala and Magadha in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Feeling Aryan pressure, earlier ethnically diverse inhabitants of the subcontinent, such as the Baluchi in the northwest, eventually became assimilated. Others, for example the Dravidians, migrated more deeply toward the south; since little documentation is available, speculative consensus is that the north was being gradually Aryanized.

1 The ethnogeographical term “Iran” is derived from “Aryan.”

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Global encounters among the major ancient civilizations in South Asia, West Asia, and North Africa ebbed and flowed during the Vedic period. Between 1500 and 500 BCE, West Asia was home to a chain of great civilizations – Akkadian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian – and in North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, and Axum anchored the southwesterly quadrant of a great trading zone, in which South Asia was a major player. International commerce was reinvigorated when overseas trade resumed with Babylon shortly after 800 BCE. Ships plied the Indus and Ganges and likely the Indian Ocean to East Africa and Southeast Asia. After the sixth century BCE, trade expanded, possibly due to the introduction of coinage for commerce – a result of the Persian conquest of the Punjab. The quest for empire was a major factor in this next interaction between India and Iran from c. 550 BCE, when Cyrus the Great emerged from the southwestern part of the Iranian Plateau, pacifying most of West Asia. In 525 BCE his son Cambyses conquered Egypt and the Persian Empire extended from the Nile to the Oxus. Cambyses’s premature death brought to the throne a disputed claimant, the Achaemenid Darius I (aka Darius the Great; 522–486 BCE), who conquered the Gandhara region in India’s northwest, and promoted maritime contact and trade between West Asia and his distant, richest satrapy. Darius dispatched a Greek sea captain to explore the Indus River and sea routes that could be linked with his other territories and even speculated on building a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea to facilitate shipping between the Mediterranean and the southern seas. We have little evidence about any enduring results of the Persia– India interchange at this time, but the speculation is tantalizing. “Doors” to India were certainly kept open. Over the next few centuries, the Gangetic plains remained the most powerful region in India, while the Indus valley, part of which was still under Persian control, further declined. The Gangetic kingdom of Magadha had already subdued most of northwestern India by 327 BCE, when Alexander the (Great) Macedonian invaded the subcontinent; within one year he claimed lands down to the mouth of the Indus River at the Arabian Sea. Alexander sought out Brahmin Indian philosophers and left an impression on the Indian imagination up to the Mughal period, more than a millennium later. Soon falling ill, Alexander turned homeward (d. 323 BCE) but left behind several thousand Greek soldiers, who built Greek cities in the region of present-day Afghanistan and in the Indus valley. Historians and other writers on India have ruminated about the possible nexus between Indian music and the music of other ancient civilizations. The nexus is narrated by most as an influence from East to West, seemingly a relatively recent idea, spurred by the writing of British Indologists and travelers who resided in the subcontinent and took considerable interest in music. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the West set out to

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possess India intellectually as well as economically. India became, with Greece, Rome, and Egypt, an ancient civilization to be studied, discussed, and dissected in detail, an Asian adjunct to the classicism that formed a basic tenet of European philosophical and artistic thought. Sanskrit quickly became part of the scholarly fabric of the West. A key figure in this enterprise was Sir William Jones (1746–94), who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 and whose studies in philology led to his discovery of the link between Sanskrit and European languages (the IndoEuropean family of languages). Jones also authored the first major Englishlanguage treatise on the music of India, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindus” (1792). Ignoring the centuries-long assimilation of cultures from the north and west, Jones participated fully in the orientalist veneration of India’s Hindu past. He was the first to draw attention to the wealth of Sanskrit treatises on music that are discussed below (Bor 1988, 55). As an aspect of interpreting the greatness of that past, Jones chauvinistically compared it musically to other ancient civilizations: “Amongst Hindus of early ages music appears to have attained a theoretical precision at a period when even Greece was little removed from barbarism” (as cited uncritically by Pingle 1962, 26). A century after Jones, Captain C. R. Day, another Englishman resident in India, continued the practice of commenting on the nexus of India’s ancient culture with that of Greece, but with a more balanced tone: “The historian Strabo shows us that Greek influence extended to India, and also that Greek musicians of a certain school attributed the great part of the science of music to India, a statement which is deserving of attention. And even now most of the old Greek modes are represented in the Indian system” (Day 1894, 48). That Indian influence on Greek music achieved authoritative status is suggested by the fact that it was taken up in the mid-twentieth century by notable Indian writers (Pingle 1962, 27; Gosvami 1957, 250), some embellished by statements on the means of transmission. Although this is not a documentable reality for specifics in the history of Indian music, it is a theme that seems to have enriched the sense of pride in a venerable history for some Indian musicologists: Indian music has influenced foreign music from very early times. Strabo in Bk X iii says that the Greeks attributed to India nearly all their science of music. Alexander the Great took with him to Greece a South Indian musician. The term sa graama gave rise to the word gamut. (Sambamoorthy 1963, 268) In the beginning of the classical period (600–500 BCE), Indian music traveled to other ancient countries such as Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Assyria, and Chaldia. In particular, the music of Greece was indebted to Indian music, which was introduced to Greece by Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. It is said that Pythagoras visited India (two centuries after Alexander) and returned

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to Greece, carrying with him the cultural, religious and philosophical ideas of India. (Prajnanananda 1963, 110)

The practice of Indian scholarly reference to early English and European writers on Indian music continues. One more recent author took the narrative of Indian influence one further step toward the West, tracing references to another nineteenth-century mode of European writing: early comparative music history. His immediate source for the contemporary author is Sourindro Mohun Tagore (Tagore 1963, 93), who drew on the work of François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871): Fetis holds the view that music of ancient Persia bore a close resemblance to that of India. This will appear less surprising in view of the fact that the Indians and Persians come from common Aryan stock and there were many common links between the two people in the fields of language, religion and culture . . . There were close trade relations between the two countries long before the birth of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Since India had commercial ties with Greece and Rome also, it is said that Indian music reached Persia through Greece. (Bhatnagar 1997, 49)

Others narrate the nexus of musics in antiquity as an influence from West to East, specifically with regard to instruments. K. Krishna Murthy writes: “The harp spread from ancient Egypt to China and [was] evidently the prominent stringed instrument in India” (Murthy 1985, 12). Without clearly asserting the point of origin of the harp, S. Krishnaswami adds this more precise perspective: “Archaeologists have discovered musical instruments similar to the yazh of the ancient Tamil country in Egypt and Babylon. Representations of priests playing these harps in the tomb of Ramesus III show instruments . . . [whose] construction and beauty are reminiscent of descriptions of the yazh in ancient Tamil works” (Krishnaswami 1965, 35). Murthy notes: The lyre . . . remained a rare specimen in India (with sole specimen in Gandhâra sculptures) . . . Around 2000 B.C. some country in or near Asia Minor produced the lute, consisting of a resonance body with a neck on which the various notes of the melody were “stopped” by pressing the fingers on the proper places of one string or two. This family, from which derive the lutes all over the central belt, from Japan to Spain, became particularly important because it led to the discovery of an exact mathematical fixation of musical intervals. (Murthy 1985, 12)

Murthy’s reference to the mathematical fixation of musical intervals brings us to the very matter that continues to invite comparison among the music of ancient civilizations: theory, most particularly melodic theory. The primary factor that permits even speculation about it is that

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[A] corpus of [Indian] musical thought spanning roughly a thousand years between 250 and 1250 CE has preserved in fossilized form large quantities of material that may reasonably be attributed to authors as early as the fifth century BCE and which may, like many other important documents of ancient Indian civilization, have first been formulated in an oral tradition and have been transmitted from teacher to student in the same way before finally becoming fixed in the form of a written text. (Rowell 1992, 22)

Among those documents are formal treatises and a wide range of literature, including plays, poems, many genres of technical literature, and two great epics: although the war on which it was based was fought c. 1000 BCE, the Mahabharata was composed somewhere between 400 BCE and 400 CE and the Ramayana between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Shortly after Alexander’s departure, Chandragupta Maurya (ruled c. 322– 298 BCE) united the Ganges and Indus valleys into India’s first great empire, based on the remains of the Magadha kingdom, and established his capital near modern-day Patna, in Bihar. Under his grandson Ashoka (ruled c. 273– 232 BCE), the empire reached its apex, controlling all of the subcontinent except for a small part of the far north. Known for his tolerance and support of Buddhism, Ashoka also perceived himself a universal ruler (an idea that could have come from Achaemenid Persia), and was, like his father and grandfather, a philhellene, adhering to the Greek idea of the supremacy of the state over all aspects of human activity.

The first millennium CE: Indian (musical) encounters east and south By c. 185 BCE, the last Maurya was driven from the throne by a usurper, along with the almost simultaneous arrival of more invaders into the subcontinent, again from the northwest. The first new arrivals were Greek rulers of Bactria but the previous trend of movement of peoples across oases and steppes from west to east began to reverse. Tribes of Sakas, moving west from the steppes of Central Asia, settled in western India. Another nomadic people, the Yuezhi, ethnically Turkish but speaking an Iranian language, were forced out of the Central Asian steppes and established the Kushana kingdom (c. first century BCE–third century CE), which at its height controlled parts of Afghanistan, Iran, and, in the subcontinent, land stretching from modern Peshawar, Pakistan in the northwest to Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) in the east and Sanchi (Madhya Pradesh) in the north. The Kushanas were patrons of Gandharan art (a significant synthesis between Greek and Indian styles) and Sanskrit literature.

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By the first century CE, the consolidation of a Kushana empire, forging a link between Iran and China, completed a chain of empires that extended all across Eurasia from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Heretofore, sea lanes offered an easy highway between South Asia and the West, as well as a more limited link to the East. Regular land contact across Asia began in the first century BCE with the opening of the legendary Silk Road across Central Asia by powerful military empires in China and Persia, firmly connecting South Asia to the East by trade. The trans-Eurasian trade routes that flourished during the first millennium of the Common Era were crowded with missionaries as well as merchants (often one and the same). Buddhism, having risen to prominence under Ashoka, flourished on the subcontinent and spread through Central Asia to China in the early centuries CE; it was perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Silk Road. Indian Buddhists were among the first people to venture forth as diasporic trading colonies in Central Asia and in China – traveling out much the same way that earlier invaders had traveled in. Oasis-based city-states, dependent on trade and thus anxious to provide congenial surroundings for their foreign guests, were not only generally tolerant of foreign faiths but also showed no reluctance to adopt new faiths or to incorporate elements of them into local syncretisms. From China, Buddhism spread in the late fourth century CE to Korea and Japan. Around the seventh century, Buddhistinfluenced cultures extended from Java to Nepal and from Afghanistan to Japan. Pali, the language of canonical Buddhist texts, was and remains today the canonical and ritual language of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Sanskrit texts spread throughout East and Central Asia and were translated into Chinese. Canonic texts translated into Tibetan still stand as the Buddhist language of the Himalayan areas of Mongolia and Siberia. Unfortunately, Buddhist ideas and practices are not documented in the writings of musical theorists who belonged to Hindu religious and cultural traditions. According to Ter Ellingson, however, attempts at reconstructing early Buddhist vocal and melodic theories have led scholars to conclude that they were relatively similar to those found in the later treatises of Indian music theory (Ellingson 1979, cited in Tarocco n.d., 550). Wherever Buddhism traveled, teachings were preserved and transmitted by collective musical vocalization (generally called chants). In the chant, the melodic phrases begin and end together with the text phrases, and rhythm and melody seem to depend on the syllabic patterns of the Pali canon texts. Choral chanting is embedded in monastic liturgical practice, although the style of chant became somewhat changed in different places. One significant example of global encounter that resulted from the dissemination of Buddhism resides in a musical instrument: the ovoid-shaped lute

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that we know as the oud/pipa/biwa, which originated at the far western end of the Silk Road. Surviving sculptures from the second century BCE to the seventh century CE show that this instrument type flourished in ancient India – that is to say, a plucked lute with an ovoid-shaped resonating chamber and a short neck appears to have been present. There, by undocumented steps, it became disassociated from its West Asian cultural origins and became linked with Indian religion. Iconographically it was associated with Buddhism and particularly with gandharvas, the lowest-ranking of devas in Buddhist theology. Gandharvas are known for their skill as musicians and have the power of flight; consequently, in iconography the lute is held in the hands of heavenly musicians, who manage to hold the instruments in playing positions while in flight. Linked with Buddhism, however, the instrument-type seems to have left India; that is, it did not remain in India as part of the sustained instrumentarium from ancient times. Along with the persistent Indian association of music and religious thought from Vedic times, and with the imagery of heavenly musicians, the ovoid-shaped, short-necked lute was carried – even by real travelers – north and east from India along the Silk Road to China.

The first millennium CE: within the subcontinent Around 150 CE, the Dravidian South emerged as a potent force. The Tamil lands have been traditionally divided into three kingdoms since the early first millennium CE: the Chola (Coromandel Coast), Kerala aka Cera (Malabar), and Pandya (the southern tip of the peninsula). The ancient Tamil were important seafarers, reaching Sri Lanka earlier than the second century BCE and shortly thereafter Southeast Asia. In the first century CE, they were in close contact with Egypt and the Roman Empire and maintained a flourishing trade with the West. In the south-central regions, new kingdoms appeared, and in the northwestern Deccan, the Andhras – centered in modern-day Paithan – rose from the ruins of the Mauryan Empire and survived for more than 300 years until the third century CE, its power extending eventually coast to coast. In the north, by mid-third century CE the Kusana Empire had been reduced to a small kingdom, a satrapy of Persia’s rising Sassanian Empire (c. 224–651 CE). In 320 CE the next great Indian empire arose – the Gupta – eventually extending from Assam in the east to Punjab in the west. The reign of Chandra Gupta II (376/380–415 CE) is perhaps the high water mark of ancient Indic culture. At its height, the Gupta era was probably the most prosperous and peaceful in the world. The Roman Empire was nearing its end, and China was passing through troubled times between the Han and T’ang empires. The Indian numeral system (sometimes erroneously attributed to the Arabs, who took it

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from India to Europe where it replaced the Roman system) and decimal system are Indian inventions of this period. Buddhism still flourished and, replacing the old sacrificial Brahmanism, Hinduism appeared in a form not greatly different from recent centuries. In the last years of the reign of Chandra Gupta II’s son, Kumara Gupta (415–454 CE), new enemies appeared from Central Asia, the Hunas (White Huns), possibly a branch of the Turkic-Mongol peoples then threatening Europe, or of Iranian ethnicity. Struggles between Hunas and Guptas ensued until c. 550 CE, when a new Gupta line, Gupta feudatories, Gupta inheritors, and Gupta hereditary enemies divided up areas of northern India. In 606 CE, King Harsa succeeded in partially restoring Gupta glory; the only area he was unable to control was the recalcitrant south. Despite his increasing adherence to Buddhism, the religion continued to decline while certain elements of Hinduism were strongly in evidence and tantric cults were growing. When Harsa died without heirs, his empire disintegrated. Beginning in the eighth and ninth centuries, the hegemony of northern India was divided between the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty of Kanauj and the Pala dynasty of Bihar and Bengal, noted for their patronage of Buddhism, which flourished under their three centuries of rule and from there was introduced into Tibet – another encounter to the north of enduring importance. We can place musical instruments and music theory against this political backdrop. From the seventh to the thirteenth century CE, an instrument type other than the ovoid-shaped, short-necked lute appears in Hindu religious sculpture. Sarasvati, Hindu goddess of music and learning, is portrayed iconographically with a stringed instrument of another type – a zither, consisting of a stick with one or more strings and often with bowl-shaped resonators or supports – which replaced the ovoid-shaped lute in sculpture. In music theory, approximate dates ranging from 200 CE to fifth or sixth century CE are assigned to two works beginning the venerable body of Sanskrit language music theory that excited Sir William Jones and other Indologists. The Nātyasāstra, attributed to the sage Bharata, is a treatise on classical theater, with six (or in some editions, seven) chapters on the ancient musical system, with elaborate descriptions of the music as it relates to dramaturgy. It is not known who Bharata was, as the identifications given in various Indian musicological sources vary widely. The following example demonstrates the nature of this conjecture, not to mention an indirect articulation of the deeply felt significance of the very having of a long history. Prajnanananda takes the identification back to 600–500 BCE and to schools of thought rather than “an author,” identifying four main schools of music, dance, and drama: 1) Brahmā or Brahmabharata and Siva or

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Sadasivabharata; 2) Gandharva Narada (Narada being the foremost person conversant with dance and music among the semi-divine Gandharvas who were, “it is said,” the inhabitants of Gāndhāra – modern Kandahara in the northwest frontier of India (and the area most heavily influenced by early Greek culture)); 3) Muni Bharata, author of the Nātyasāstra; and 4) Nandikeshvara. “In fact, three or four schools of the classical period seem to be genuine. It is said that Narada composed a book on dance, drama, and music . . . but this book is not available now . . . The two later schools of Bharata and Nandikeshvara were indebted to that of Brahmā” (Prajnanananda 1963, 112–13). The attribution of treatises to an author seems to have become important, although the author was likely to have been a compiler or a receiver of oral tradition: “Specially Bharata has admitted the debt of Druhina Brahmā in his Nātyasāstra, and he called it a ‘collection’ or ‘samgraha-grantha’ . . . It is said that he, for the first time, composed the Nātyasāstra which was known as the Brahmabharatam on scientific basis, and it contained the laws and formulas of dance, drama, hand-poses and music” (ibid., 112–14). The Nātyasāstra includes a discussion of microtones (twenty-two sruti, from which pitches were derived), scales (grāma, of which there were two main ones), modal patterns ( jāti ), and modal functions. Detailed instruction on how to adjust the tuning on two stringed instruments to achieve the scales has intrigued music theorists ever since. One chapter classifies instrument types and functions. The schema dividing instruments, according to the primary sound-producing medium, into strings (mentioning the bow harp and ovoid-shaped lute, both of which are thought to have come to India from the West), wind, idiophones, and drums, was taken up in the nineteenth century to become the basis of the most widely used international classification system to the present (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961). Dattilam (c. 200 CE), a concise manual of ritual music composed by the otherwise unknown author Dattila, offered independent confirmation of the doctrines in Bharata’s Nātyasāstra (Rowell 1992, 20). Dating of treatises from the first half millennium CE continues to be refined. It has been primarily on the basis of scales and modes – and the fact that monophony prevailed – that scholars have compared the musical systems of the ancient world and ruminated on the possibility of influences among them. Lewis Rowell dismisses the acculturation theory: There are no indications that similarities among these musical systems are the result of the spread of culture from one region to another; there were cultural contacts . . . but the scales and modes described in early Sanskrit treatises were conceived in such a radically different way that the differences far outweigh the similarities. (Rowell 2000, 140)

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At approximately the same time as the creation of the Nātyasāstra and Dattilam, another great epic poem, the Cilappatikaram (“The Anklet”), composed in Tamil (a Dravidian language), was edited from oral tradition and set down in the form in which it is presently received. Like the Nātyasāstra but unrelated to dramaturgy, the Cilappatikaram refers to tuning, musical scale and modal system, instruments, genres, forms, and rhythm (see Rowell 2000). Drawing on Parthasarathy (1993, 318), Rowell contextualizes it as having been written at a time when the Aryans were penetrating farther into southern areas of the Indian subcontinent: [I]ts material almost certainly reflects the cultural friction between indigenous Dravidian musical concepts and the Sanskrit system brought by the new settlers . . . We do not know the age of the musical system whose details it records. The most that can be said is that the Tamil system apparently arose as an independent tradition, but subsequently came under the influence of the central Sanskritic musical tradition, with which it shared or came to share many common features. (Rowell 2000, 139)

Music theory, as developed by Indo-Aryans within a Brahmanic intellectual tradition, then, became the theory of ancient India – so widespread that it is assumed that musicians and theorists throughout the subcontinent shared one system. Considering the incursions of peoples other than Aryans into the subcontinent, as well as periodic political turmoil, it is fascinating to think of local conditions that would have permitted a slow but steady diffusion and absorption. That the musical system was changing in the first millennium CE became obvious in another treatise, the Brhaddesī, whose composition or compilation is attributed to the sage Matanga of the seventh or eighth century CE. The first published edition of this work was based on two incomplete manuscripts from Kerala, on the southwestern coast of the subcontinent. Its surviving portions reproduce, augment, and supplement material in the Nātyasāstra, which was clearly available and regarded as a treasure of tradition: The Brhaddesī, on the other hand, registers a point of departure from tradition. It is revolutionizing; it does not reconcile with the past, but allows the present to stand out with its own set of values. Matanga develops two quite new ideas: one, as regards the philosophical concept of the theory of the musical sound, “Nāda”; and the other, about the scientific definition of melody, “Rāga.” (Sarmadee 2003, xii)

Sarmadee’s reference to nāda refers to theories of sound based on the growing influence of the metaphysical and psychological theories of tantra (as noted above in the period of Harsa Gupta) and yoga. Emphasizing inner sound,

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interest was in sound as it is conceived and produced in the individual, and, to a lesser extent, sound as it is perceived by the hearer. Further, Matanga introduces the term rāga, with the specific observation that it had not been discussed “by Bharata and others.” The relationship between rāga of the Brhaddesī and jāti of the Nātyasāstra has never become clear, but to most theorists it seems more likely that two distinct modal traditions are represented. Another important aspect of the Brhaddesī is the identification of rāga with desī. Sarmadee provides a translation of Matanga’s statement about desī: “Be it a child, a young maiden, a cowherd or a reigning monarch that which is naturally hummed or sung by everybody, in accordance with his or her own wish and with affection, in one’s own country or region, is known as desī” (Sarmadee 2003, xii). Whereas earlier theory had given a sense of melody as it worked within a genre (i.e., musical practice in theater), in the Brhaddesī the names of ragas, such as Gurjarī, Saurāstrī, Saka, and Saka-Tilaka, give us a sense of the local – of place and perhaps of different communities of people, notably in regions of India that were related by politics in and prior to the Gupta era. The Brhaddesī was also revolutionary in the use of notation for musical pitches. A rock inscription carved c. 650 CE into the wall of a cave temple in South India’s Tamil Nadu state is considered among the important world monuments of early musical notation (Widdess 1980 and 1995). Matanga’s Brhaddesī, however, is the earliest of the extant treatises to include musical notations in scale degree letters. In terms of recording musical thought that was probably close to contemporary practice, Matanga’s Brhaddesī was the theoretical highlight of the second half of the first millennium CE.

Bridging the first and second millennia CE After the seventh century CE, the Indian Ocean became a large-scale economic zone, featuring well-articulated trade networks. Enter Islam, which began as the faith of a small community of believers (Muslims) in seventh-century Arabia and spread rapidly. Its initiatives were both trade and conquest. Islam first came to South Asia with Arabs who conquered Sind in 712 CE. Its first infusion was short-lived, since eighth-century Arab rule weakened and died – but not for long. By the ninth century, Arab merchants established a fixed residence in port cities along Malabar on India’s southwestern coast, an area rich in spices – pepper, cardamom, and ginger – and strategically located at the midpoint of Indian Ocean trade routes. Early in the second millennium CE yet another people, the Turki, pushed into northwest India. From this period, the invaders are more likely to be referred to in narratives as “Muslim” than by their ethnicity. Soon the

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Northwest Frontier, the Punjab, and Sind, where Arab culture remained, were in the hands of those Turki peoples, who ruled from Afghanistan while the rest of northern India retained its independence, with indigenous families ruling various areas. Strikingly, it was farther north in Kashmir – which had withstood Islamic intruders in the eighth and tenth centuries – where the Shaivite philosopher Abhinavagupta produced a “massive and brilliant commentary” (Rowell 1992, 20) on Bharata’s Nātyasāstra, the Abhinavabhāratī, c. 1000 CE. As Rowell notes: “Although scholars are still attempting to solve the numerous textual problems and determine more precisely what Abhinavagupta had in mind, his interpretations of the ancient treatises are regarded as authoritative and represent the commentarial tradition at its highest level of virtuosity” (ibid., 20). With the eighth-century Brhaddesī, probably produced in Kerala (southwestern India); the tenth-century Abhinavabhāratī in Kashmir; another Sanskrit treatise, the Bharatabhāsya, from Mithila at the India-Nepal border a century later; and the Mānasollāsa, 1131 CE, from Chalukya, the waning Deccan kingdom (ibid., 20–1), it is clear that the Brahmanic tradition of theorizing in the field of music was widespread in South Asia.

Continuing encounters in the second millennium CE By the thirteenth century, three major trade systems existed, one of which was the Asian system via the Indian Ocean. It was subdivided into three routes, one of which overlapped with the southern West Asia route that connected the Red Sea and Persian Gulf with the western coast of India. The ports of Gujarat (near Mumbai) in the north and on the Malabar (pepper) coast in the southern part of the subcontinent held merchant colonies of Muslims from West Asia who, like Buddhist merchant/missionaries a millennium earlier, were intermediaries who spread their religion and business practices wherever they went. India’s global encounters continued to be significant – by sea as well as overland. The second subroute in the Indian Ocean trade was based on the Coromandel Coast in eastern India and was far less influenced by Muslim Arab and Persian traders. Indigenous Indian merchants were intermediaries for most of the sea trade eastward through the Straits of Malacca to Chinese ports in the third subcircuit. All ships traveling between India and China had to pass through the narrow sea that separated Sumatra and Java from the Malay Peninsula. Monsoon winds reversed at the Straits, so long layovers were required for boats traveling in both directions. Permanent colonies of merchants drawn from points throughout the Asian circuit coexisted in Malacca, thus giving it a cosmopolitan quality.

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At the same time, during the first three centuries of the second millennium CE, power in the southern part of the subcontinent was centered in Chola country on the southeastern Coromandel coast and the Deccan (widely referred to as in both the north and the mid-subcontinent). The Chola Rajaraja I (1012–44) conquered Sri Lanka, spread his land power to the mouth of the Ganges, and dispatched a fleet to occupy parts of Burma, Malaysia, and Sumatra. When the Cholas fell in the thirteenth century, their territory was divided between two other competing southern dynasties. In the Deccan the Western Chalukyas were the dominant power, competing with the Cholas, and they had numerous feudatories, among them the Yadava dynasty. Situated approximately in the middle of the subcontinent on the Indian Ocean side, with its capital at Devagiri, the Yadavas declared their independence in the mid-twelfth century. At their peak they ruled presentday Maharashtra, northern Karnataka, and parts of Madhya Pradesh. They attracted learned scholars, and the Marathi language and literature were developed in their court. It was at the Yadava king Singhana’s court in the thirteenth century that a theoretical treatise composed in Sanskrit gave evidence of profound changes in the musical system of the subcontinent – even to the point that “music in South Asia” was no longer unitary. The Sangīt Ratnākara is attributed to the scholarly royal accountant and ayurvedic physician Sarngadeva (Rowell 1992, 21). As tradition dictated, it accounts for both historical theory and current practice. For instance, the first of seven chapters discusses sound – its generation, microtones and intervals, scales, and scale degree patterns, as well as the ancient modal patterns (jāti). The second chapter discusses rāga (melody type) in both “doctrinal” and current terms. The third chapter is miscellaneous, dealing largely with performance practice, including ornaments, improvisation, and ensembles. The fourth chapter is on vocal composition and comprises discussion of meters, form, and songs in vernacular languages. The fifth chapter deals with tāla (time cycle), both doctrinal and current. “Tāla had made tremendous strides. Bharata mentions only five tālas . . . of eight and six mātrās [counts] respectively, whereas the Sangīta Ratnākarā mentions 108 tālas” (Gautam, 1980, 9). The sixth chapter discusses instruments and gives rāgas and drum syllable patterns for particular melodic instruments and drums. The seventh chapter is on dance. Significantly, a different instrumental technique on the then-prevalent one-string stick zither (eka-tantrī vīnā) is described, which should be correlated in some way with an equally radical change in the underlying concept of pitch relationships. On open-string instruments (such as the bow harp) the basic pitch collection has to be tuned in advance. Any pitch is potentially as important as any other, and in different musical contexts

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different pitches will assume the central role . . . A stopped-string instrument differs in that all the stopped pitches can easily be conceived as a function of the pitch of the open string, and ultimately as subordinate to it. That a conceptual change moving towards the notion of a single system tonic had occurred is explicitly confirmed early in the medieval period, but it may have been well under way during the last centuries of the ancient period. (Powers n. d.)

A millennium earlier, the ovoid-lute known in India was a stopped-string instrument, but the bow harp had prevailed at the time. As mentioned above, the stick zither type of instrument replaced the ovoid-shaped lute in Hindu sculptural iconography. The melodic systems recorded in the Sanskrit treatises suggest that melodic theory derived from melodic practice on the harp prevailed until the use of the stick zither became sufficiently widespread to change melodic practice and thereby melodic theory – or, as Powers put it, “during the last centuries of the ancient period” (ibid.).

The last major encounter before the modern era While these events were unfolding on the subcontinent, a new ruling house – one that would be decisive for the culture of North India – emerged in Afghanistan. In 1192 the Ghorid dynasty, Persianized ethnic Turks who had only recently converted to Islam in Central Asia, arrived in Delhi and in 1206 Qutb-ud-din Aibak, a freed slave, established the Afghan, or Slave, dynasty (1206–90), the first in a succession of strong Turki-Afghan Muslim dynasties known as the Delhi Sultanate (thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries). Its greatest leaders, Iltutmish and Balban, successfully resisted an incursion by the Mongols under Chinggis Khan, solidifying their regime, while regions with sharply defined natural boundaries, such as Kashmir, Nepal, Assam, and Orissa, retained their autonomy. A thirteenth-century chronicle, the Tabakāt-i-Nasirī, relates the use in India of the heralding ensemble (naubat, or naqqara khana), an extremely important West Asian symbol of power for rulers. In 1231, Sultan Shams-ud-Din Iltutmish acquired the stronghold of Gwalior after an eleven-month siege and after withdrawing from before the fortress, “placed the camp at about the distance of a league from the foot of the walls in the direction of Dihlī, the capital; and, at that halting ground, the imperial naubat five times daily was assumed” (Tabakāt-iNasirī 1970, 619–21). The heralding ensemble was in India to stay. A century later, the important Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara was founded (1336) in the south and soon established hegemony over the entire peninsula from the Krsna River southwards. Notably, the fifteenth-century commentary on the Sangīt Ratnākara, the Kalānidhi, was written (c. 1450) “in peninsular

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India” by a scholar named Kallinatha, who had apparently observed musical practice in Vijayanagara. In several places he identified fifteenth-century equivalents of rāga names still in use and implied that the system tonic had already been prevalent in the early thirteenth century (Powers n. d.). Shortly before the establishment of the Vijayanagara kingdom, the Deccan began to feel the force of Turkic Islamic conquest. Alauddin Khalji (1296–1315) of the second Sultanate dynasty, the Turkic Khaljis (1296– 1320), subdued the Deccan kingdoms and took Islam deep into southern parts of the subcontinent. It was in his court that the great Indo-Persian poet, historian, and musician Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (1251–1326) was engaged. From his writings, we know that some aspects of Indian and Persianate culture were becoming greatly synthesized. [O]f his knowledge of and devotion to Indian music there can be no doubt. Whether or not he invented the devotional qavvālī singing of the Muslim Sufi orders and introduced the singing of ghazal [a Persian-language vocal genre], he certainly established and legitimized them as South Asian musical items. He was also a friend and disciple of the great Chisti saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya, who successfully argued the priority of using music for Sufi devotions, taking the case against the Muslim divines to the sultan in the early 1320s. (Powers n. d.)

In the next Sultanate dynasty, the Turkic Tughluq period (1320–98), the first known Persian-language book on Indian music was written: the Ghunyātu’l Munya (The Pleasure of Desire). Sarmadee contextualizes the anonymously authored book by providing insight into both the role of music in the patron’s life and the extent to which Indian and Persian elite culture intermingled at the time: In AH 776/A.D. 1374–75, Malik Shamsu’d-dīn Abū Rajā was appointed to the governorship of Gujarāt and he undertook the administration of that territory . . . When he felt the strain of hard work, he found relaxation in listening to Persian Samā’i Pārsī [Persian songs] and Hindavī Sarūd [Indian music] . . . On other occasions, he would elaborate with great ability on the intricacies of music. [Now citing Mrs. Khursheed N. Hasan, who presented a paper on the book to the Indian History Congress, Delhi, 1961.] Seeing the ignorance of his companions about music, Malik Shamsu’d-dīn asked the author to undertake a work in elaboration of the intricacies of music . . . His patron had brought together at his Court, from far and near, numerous experts of the Hindavī language, groups of singers and musicians, players of different instruments and exponents of various forms of music. Apparently the author consulted them for his work. The following standard books composed by Indians were also made available to the author: Sangīt Ratnākara, Sangita Ratnāvalī, Sangīta Vinoda, Sangīta Mudra, and Rāgārnava. (Sarmadee 2003, xv)

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The Ghunyātu’l Munya provides considerable insight into musical practice at the time: current rāgas and their historical connections, the origin of the pakhāvaj drum, details of dance style, and other topics. The author offers evidence of contemporary cultural life of the Tughluq court in Delhi, with its lively concerts of various musics, both Persianate and Indian, and relates the expectation that the qawwāls (Muslim singers) be “fully conversant with and able to exercise adequate control over surs [pitches, svaras] and rāgas and the development and sustenance of songs and their different types” – including, of course, their devotional Sufi songs (ibid., xxxiv). Other fourteenth-century literature suggests a similar multicultural expectation for a person knowledgeable about music. In the Tūtī Nāma (Tales of a Parrot), a compendium of fifty-two “oft-told tales” collected and retold by a Persian-language writer in the court of the Delhi Sultanate, the storyteller Nakhshabi wrote: O Nakhshabi, playing the tar [a Persian plucked lute] with skill is a rare art . . . To play the tar and sing, one must originate new themes. A person should know . . . out of how many Indian melodies one Persian melody can be formulated, or how many Indian melodies are contained in one Persian melody. He must know which of these [Indian] melodies is masculine and which is feminine . . . He should know who the originators and the masters of this science were. (Nakhshabi 1978, 98)

Such Persian-language works have much to contribute to the Muslim-Hindu culture meta-narrative in the telling of Indian music history. Fortunately, more attention is gradually being paid to them. In addition to Hindu and Muslim documenters of Indian music history, the Jains, a minority group whose religion is not based on the Vedas but whose cultural practices have much in common with those of Hindus, have a long and deep intellectual tradition. Slightly after the Sangīt Ratnākara was written, but likely representing a tradition of theory independent of it, the Jain Sanskrit treatise Sangītopanisat-sāroddhāra was completed in 1350 by Sudhakalasa, also in Gujarat. Its great importance is as a link between ancient and modern phenomena. Firstly in its chapter on tāla, both the arrangement (by length of time cycle) and the association of a particular configurative drum pattern with each particular tāla point towards modern Hindustani usage. Secondly, the rāga chapter provides the oldest known set of verse iconographies for melody types – six rāgas, each with five sub types. (Powers n. d.)

The verse iconographies presage the emergence of the poetic and artistic rāgamāla classification system; very early extant rāgamāla paintings are found

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in the Jain tradition, in illustrations in a palm-leaf manuscript from Western India (1475). As for the configurative drum patterns – now called theka – they are evidence of musical synthesis and are recognized to have come to North India from West Asian musical practice. Even as Indian and Persian cultural synthesis deepened, battles raged on the subcontinent. The Tughluq period ended with a destructive raid on northern India and the sack of Delhi in 1398 by Timur, ruler of a Persianate Central Asian kingdom with its capital at Samarkand. In the fifteenth century, Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, became the capital of the Timurid Empire and the cultural center of the cosmopolitan Persian-speaking world. Also during the fifteenth century, essentially independent rulers of Bengal, Jaunpur, Gujarat, and Gwalior – both Muslim and Hindu – were the chief patrons of music in the north on the subcontinent. Sultan Husain Sharqī of Jaunpur is often credited with the invention, or revival, both of a number of rāgas and of the musical form of khyāl. The last of the Sultanate dynasties, the Afghani Lodi clan, centralized power in Delhi from 1450 to 1526, but they were threatened from within by the powerful Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga of Mewar, southwest of Sultanate territory, and from without by Babur, the Central Asian leader then in control of Kabul. Babur’s heritage was formidable, descending on his paternal side from Timur, and on his mother’s side from the Chaghatai Mongol Chinggis Khan. In 1526 Babur vanquished Ibrahim Lodi, establishing a new regime in Delhi, and the following year defeated the Rajputs. The Delhi Sultanates ended, the Mughal Empire began. Documentation of Indian history from the time of the Mughals is rich, including a variety of sources ranging from Babur’s memoirs to official court histories, to commissioned new books during the period, to poetry and paintings. The Mughal (derives from Mongol) Empire lasted three and a half centuries (1526–1858) and during its first two centuries was ruled by six “great” rulers: Babur and five worthy descendants. At Babur’s death (1530), his son Humayun, who in his early years had been driven from India, returned to win control of the realm. The empire was expanded and stabilized under Humayan’s son Akbar (ruled 1556–1605). Called “the Great,” he regularized tax collections, won a working relationship with the indigenous Hindu landowning and warrior classes (Rajput), and was an enormously important patron of the arts. The Mughals were almost exclusively land-based and made little attempt to control the seas, thus allowing Europeans to establish fortified bases along the Indian coast to safeguard their goods and persons. Little by little Europeans increased their influence, their enclaves becoming more and more important as

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increasing numbers of Indians produced cotton cloth and other goods for sale to Europeans. The southern Vijayanagara Empire made contact in the early fifteenth century with Europeans, Portuguese traders arriving first; a century later, Vijayanagar would deal regularly with the Portuguese settlement at Goa. Travelers such as Domingo Paes and Fernão Nuniz reported about Vijayanagar and its elite, who were generous patrons of architecture, literature in the three primary Dravidian languages (Kannada, Tamil, Telugu) and Sanskrit, and music. Sixteenth-century Vijayanagar was the home of Purandara Dasa, a composer of devotional songs in the Kannada language that are still sung today; he is considered the “father” of the Karnatak system of music due to his having formulated a systematic pedagogy. The Vijayanagara kingdom lasted until 1565, when Rama Raja, the de facto ruler, was defeated by a coalition of Deccan sultans. In the seventeenth century, Akbar’s son Jahangir, grandson Shah Jahan, and great-grandson Aurangzeb maintained an effective central government at Delhi and extended the empire southward so that, on Aurangzeb’s death (1707), it included almost the entirety of the Indian subcontinent. During this time, Portuguese traders were gradually replaced by French and British trading companies, which began to recruit small garrisons of Indian soldiers (sepoys) to guard their fortified shore stations; trained by Europeans, they became far more effective than the Mughal military. In southern India, during the post-Vijayanagara period, the small “state” of Thanjavur (Tanjore) was vital for patronage of music. “The familiar equation of Hindustani-Karnatak with Muslim-Hindu, thence hybrid-pure, and ultimately foreign-native, is a result of the fact that the radial centers of the latest phases of the two styles were Muslim Delhi and Hindu Thanjavur” (Powers n. d.). Its rulers emigrated from Telugu- and Marathi-speaking areas of India, and, although they ruled in Tamil-speaking territory, they chiefly patronized Telugu culture and Sanskrit-language work. Powers superbly tracks theoretical treatises, including the Caturdandī – prakāsikā by Venkatamakhin, which established the seventy-two melakarta rāga system of scale-types, nineteen of which were recognized as necessary for the rāgas of his time (ibid.); thus continued the ancient highly systematic Indic intellectual tradition, part of the intellectual fabric of South Indian music today. Other surviving sources also show that the present rāgas, improvisatory techniques of Karnatak music, and the extant tradition of devotional Krishna bhajan (song) are traceable to seventeenthcentury Thanjavur (ibid.). Before returning to Hindustani (North Indian) music during the tremendously vital Mughal period, I would like to offer some context by examining factors that have dominated perceptions of the history of Indian music under

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“the Muslims” – perceptions to which Powers refers. One is that, whether by lack of knowledge or inattention, Persian-language sources on music during the Mughal period have been largely ignored. The model for this appears to have been “the other side of the coin” of William Jones’s appreciation for ancient Indian music: Although Jones was clearly aware of contemporary practice in Indian music, he denies the massive contribution of Persian culture to the development of North Indian classical music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He cites texts the most recent of which was 160 years old, making no distinction between the northern [Hindustani] and southern [Karnatak] systems of music that had developed at the time. The texts which Jones referred to display what Widdess has called “an archaizing didactic intent,” which had little relevance to contemporary practice. (Farrell 1997, 11, citing Widdess 1980, 136)

Furthermore, Jones made it known that “since the Mohammedan conquest it has declined” (cited in Farrell 1997, 13). French traveler and botanist Pierre Sonnerat reached a similar conclusion (Bor 1988, 58). While Farrell focused on this as a view that would inform Western musicological thinking well into the nineteenth century, it also lingered as a historical discourse in Indian writing in the twentieth century. I suggest that the glorification of the Brahmanic tradition resulted in an oft-repeated, uncritical historical summary, evident, for example, in how Sharma begins his section on the history of the medieval period (early thirteenth to the eighteenth century): By this time, the Afghan invasions were steadily marring the northern culture . . . Waves of invading people of foreign cultures swept across Northern India, and eventually mohammadan rulers took over control of that section of the country. Many scholars and musicians, disheartened by the situation, left the North and got settled in other parts of India. Many of them fled to the South . . . In the post-Ratnakar period, sometime after the mingling of the Hindus and Persian cultures in the North, there developed two schools of the North and the South – Hindustani and Karnatic. South preserved the purity of the old music and the North combined the Muslim and Indian music. (Sharma 1997, 8–9)

In the introduction to his translation of the Ghunyātu’l Munya, Sarmadee felt compelled to respond to that discourse: This has given an impetus to misgivings which have in their turn transgressed all limits; so much so, that stray extremist opinions have found it possible to hold that “the dark age of a century or more (after) about the eleventh and twelfth century irretrievably broke the continuity of tradition, and with it the whole structure of the science of music.” (Sarmadee 2003, xxxv, citing Sastri 1954, 18)

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Regarding the “purity of the old music,” musicologist Brahaspati argues convincingly, in his article on Venkatamakhi’s scale-type system, that the southern (Karnatak) system thoroughly adopted the Persian and Turkish modal (makam) system, as did the northern (Hindustani) system (Brahaspati 1979, 79–102). Countering this, Prajnanananda notes, Captain Day is of the opinion that the most flourishing age of Indian music was the period of the native princes, a little before the Mohammadan conquest. With the advent of the Mohammadans its decline commenced. Indeed it is wonderful that it survived at all. Such is also the decision of Capt. Willard, when he says that with the progress of the theory of music arrested, its decline was speedy, although the practice, which contributed to the entertainment of the princes and nobles, continued until the time of Muhammad Shāh of Delhi, after whose reign, history of music is pregnant with facts replete with dismal scenes. But all these opinions should be reviewed with care and justice. (Prajnanananda 1963, 11–12)

Other writers countered elements of that discourse, as well: The centuries from roughly 1400 to 1800 are remarkable for what appears to be a new efflorescence, a vital energy that animates a variety of cultural and socio-political forms in South India . . . In order to comprehend the works of this new phase and the institutional complex within which it is embedded, it is essential to conceive of a South Indian landscape that embraces Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu, as much as Kannada, Marathi and Persian, where contacts and conflicts with the powers of the Deccan (be they the Sultanates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Mughals and Marathas thereafter) open up a new frontier of ideas and forms. (Rao et al. 2003, 249)

In the Mughal period, what is referred to as “Persian culture” is in reality the values, practices, and artifacts of multiple cultures, many of them local. There was a strong connection, for example, with the city of Herat, the cosmopolitan capital of the Safavid Persian court with a continuing strong heritage of Timurid culture. Akbar’s chronicler, Abu’l Fazl, identified musicians who came from many places (primarily from the north and west of India), as resident in Akbar’s court. Paintings commissioned by the sovereign and other elites during the Mughal era offer substantial details about that very cosmopolitan court culture (Wade 1998). Throughout the reigns of Akbar through Aurangzeb, but particularly for Akbar, illustrated manuscripts constituted a significant means for communicating with the hugely diverse ethnic population that surrounded him. Artists fulfilled a role rather like official photographers and book illustrators do at present. The scenes in which music making occurs are formal court scenes, numerous battles, celebratory festivities of military victories,

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coronations, princely births, processions of royal retinues, greetings of distinguished visitors outside or inside a royal residency, male leisure activities and sporting events, ceremonies, unusual dramatic events, Sufi gatherings, and miscellaneous scenes occasioned by the content of the particular manuscript they illustrate. Two musicians are honored with portraits: Naubat Khan, a rudra vīnā player holding his instrument, and the great singer Tansen, leaning regally on a staff. In miniature paintings produced under Akbar’s patronage, most of the instruments shown are those of Persianate and Afghani culture – plucked lutes of several varieties, including an Afghani rabāb (precursor, it is thought, to the modern sarod), the bowed spiked-lute (ghichak), the box zither (qanun), the vertical flute (na’i), two kinds of double-reed shawms (surnā, one of which might be indigenous), the frame drum (daf/da’ira), the bowl-shaped, stick-played drum (naqqara), and the heralding trumpet (karnā). The Indian instruments that recur are the C-shaped horn (sīng) in the heralding ensemble, the stick-zither (rudra vīnā) and double-headed barrel-shaped, hand-played pakhāvaj – the former shown in court scenes, the latter in scenes of dance by Indian women – hand cymbals (tala), and double-headed cylindrical drums (dhol). We get a sense of ensembles, seeing the frame drum with whatever non-Indian melody instrument is being pictured, and – with the exception of the Indian hurukīyā couple – gender-specific ensembles in gender-specific settings unless for purposes of depicting locations outside the subcontinent. Jahangir favored small vignettes and portraits as well as scenes depicting meditation and consultation with holy men in a quiet place. A Persian plucked lute (tāmbūr) is shown to be adopted as a drone-keeping instrument with singing.2 Shah Jahani paintings show magnificent royal gatherings as well as differences in the instruments of the naubat heralding ensemble – smaller drums that seem to be played with more complicated technique, perhaps from dance drumming, and trumpets with larger bells. They also show fewer Afghani rababs and spiked lutes, but rather a large plucked lute called dhrupad rabāb and, significantly, more instruments that are probably indigenous, such as a sārangī-like bowed lute, more sophisticated rudra vīnās, and groups of women singing together. Musical synthesis was slow to appear in artistic depictions of court life, but there was definitely a gradual transformation in the direction of Indianization. Deepening Mughal involvement in the mid-subcontinent Deccan was no doubt a factor in that process. Musical intellectual activity continued all the while.

2 No Akbari scene found by the author shows an instrument explicitly devoted to keeping a drone, although the performance practice appears to have existed in South Asian music beyond the Mughal court.

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After Aurangzeb’s death (1707), the Mughal Empire endured for another 150 years, with few exceptions, under inept rulers. Early in the eighteenth century, power struggles within the Mughal family coincided with the rising authority of nonfamily leaders who backed factions at court. One of the few later Mughal sovereigns of substance was Muhammad Shah (ruled 1720– 48). A generous patron of poets, painters, and musicians, he is credited with fostering more popular forms of music and dance – most specifically, khyāl, a developing vocal genre, and patronage of the best-known singer and composer of the era, Na’mat Khan. Qawwālī singers were hugely popular at court and in urban Delhi. Thanks to an important contemporary commentary, Muraqqa-e Dehli (1739) by Dargah Quli, it is established that the plucked long-necked lute sitār was known in its fully developed form in Delhi. Its origin is perhaps in the Kashmiri setar, an instrument directly traceable to the Persian setar, which found its way into courts and also regional use in North India, according to Miner (1997) and Pacholczyk (1978). Despite the relatively brief imperial revival under Muhammad Shah, he and the empire were stripped of military might, major land and material resources, and political influence, with the destructive attack on Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739. Muhammad Shah continued to support the arts for the remainder of his reign but thereafter the history of music in North India becomes one of dispersion from the Mughal court itself to urban centers such as Delhi and elsewhere in the empire. Muhammad Shah’s successors were faced with another Afghan incursion into the northwest, including Kashmir, as well as with increasingly powerful leaders, including the Marathas – an eighteenth-century power in the western Deccan – in various sections of the subcontinent and increasingly aggressive European, especially British, interests. After the death of Alamgir II in 1759, what began as a gradual exodus of musicians from Delhi became a veritable flood. The Afghan leader Ali Muhammad of the Rohilkhand region east of Delhi, for instance, offered patronage to some of Delhi’s musicians. In Rohilkhand there was a flourishing cultivation, albeit nonprofessional, of performance on Afghani-style rabab, and those musicians experienced Hindustani mainstream court music with the great sitarist Firoz Khan, who moved there sometime before 1760.3 The nearby new city of Rampur also became a cultural center. In Varanasi to the east and Rajasthan to the west of Delhi, high levels of patronage continued under Hindu rājas. It was probably in the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the sitār was taken to Jaipur in Rajasthan (Miner 1997, 36). 3 The emergence of the modern sarod, however, occurred after the Mughal Empire.

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A painting (c. 1745) from the Punjabi hill court of Jasrota by the Mughal artist Nainsukh, who had lately arrived from the court of Delhi (Stewart 1974, 7), depicts a paired hand-played drum. That drum, the tablā, would very gradually edge out the pakhāvaj as the accompanying instrument of choice in Hindustani music. Significantly, the conceptual differences behind the playing of the two drums, pakhāvaj and tablā, reveal the deep and lasting influence of West Asian music that began so long ago in South Asia. Here, we observe musical synthesis at the deepest, that is, conceptual, level – in this case, in the organization of time. From the analysis of drumming patterns, Stewart arrives at the following conclusion: Two distinct metric traditions exist in North India today, the second of which has almost completely replaced the first. The first is primarily confined to the pakhavaj. It applies totals which a) are linked with the quantitative, versederived structures still popular in South India such as 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, 2 + 1 + 2 and their extensions; b) display internal structures which are not delineated through an hierarchy of accents and c) are not conceived in terms of nuclear or skeletal drum patterns the express function of which is to outline their structure. The second is primarily confined to the dholak, naqqara and tabla. It applies to tals which a) are linked with qualitatively expressed poetic, dance and instrumental structures (found also in the neighbouring Muslim countries) such as 3 + 3, 3 + 4, and 4 + 4; b) display internal structures which are delineated through a hierarchy of primarily pitch and stress accentuation and c) are conceived in terms of skeletal drum patterns the express function of which is to outline the structure of the tal. (Stewart 1974, 100–1)

The region of Awadh, with its capital first at Faizabad then in Lucknow, also became a cultural magnet. Here the Persian (from Central Asian Khurasan) nawab-vazirs, who were a focal point for Shi’ism on the subcontinent, welcomed intellectuals and artists. India’s global encounters continued: “Fyzabad had risen to a height of unparalleled prosperity . . . and almost rivaled Delhi in magnificence; it was full of merchants from Persia, China and Europe, and money flowed like water” (Neville 1928, 223). There was a revival of dhrupad, the genre of Mughal courts since the sixteenth century, but instrumentalists on dhrupad rebāb and a new instrument, the sursingar, were notable (Wade 2003, drawing on Miner 1997), and religious chanting was strongly patronized (Qureshi 1981, 46). Masit Khan, a sitarist who chose to remain in Delhi during the reign of one of the few other capable Mughal rulers, Shah Alam II (ruled 1759–1806), contributed significantly to maintaining Delhi’s high culture. The introduction of the gat-toda genre of sitār music is attributed to him; Masitkhani gats were imitative of dhrupad in some respects, such as speed, but they were clearly

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meant for solo music. Shah Alam II himself is said to have had good knowledge of music. In 1797 he had a collection of Persian, Hindi, and Punjabi songs made under the title of Nadirat-e-Shahi. From the texts of the large number of taranas (settings of Urdu couplets along with Persian verses, and emphasizing rhythmic syllabic play), it appears that various Muslim and Hindu festivals were celebrated with equal enthusiasm in Delhi (Ahmad 1984, 74–8, 128–9). In the twilight of the Mughal period, the last Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah II (ruled 1837 until forced into exile in Burma by the British in 1858), patronized Ghalib, the brilliant poet of Urdu. Simultaneously, during the reign of Wajid Ali Shah (ruled 1847 until he was exiled to Calcutta by the British in 1856), the court of Awadh in Lucknow experienced a period of extravagant refinement in all the arts – clothing, etiquette, architecture, music, Kathak dance, and poetry (Urdu). There, and in nearby Rampur, a style of sitār performance emerged that is known as Purab baj. With the waning of the Mughal Empire and centralized cultural hegemony, in North India the number of smaller courts that emulated Mughal patterns of artistic patronage increased. This had two quite different effects. On one hand, localized developments were generously fostered. On the other hand, with so many courts being too small for rulers to retain a large number of musicians, the custom of a concert circuit developed. This effectively put into place a mechanism for both local specialization and a pan-Hindustani style that was not imposed by politico-cultural hegemony. In South India, music continued to flourish under the patronage of the Maratha kings in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Thanjavur, the principal seat of Karnatak music before Madras gained that reputation. The three most important composers of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, known to posterity as the “Trinity” – Syama Sastri (1762–1827), Tyagaraja (1767–1847), and Muttusvami Dikshitar (1776–1835) – thrived in the district of Thanjavur (Tanjore) but not in the court. Eschewing royal patronage, thereby embodying the South Indian ideal of a musician who sings for divinity instead of royalty, the Brahmin musicians composed many songs in the kriti genre. Some of these, especially those of Tyagaraja, remain in singers’ repertories to the present. The eighteenth century saw other global encounters in the sphere of music. The violin arrived with the British. Weidman recounts four versions of the initial history of South Indian musicians’ interest in the violin. For a brief period in late century, interest in the “Hindostannie air” flourished on the part of English society in India. The “Hindostannie Air” was a genre of short solo keyboard pieces derived from transcribed Indian songs. At the height of this trend, pieces were performed regularly – mostly by women – at the fashionable soirees of Calcutta society (Woodfield 1994).

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Three of the stories place it in the Thanjavur area, and one in Mysore (Weidman 2006, 29–31). European tunes were attractive as well: “[T]he violin was not only a physical sign of the colonial presence but also the vehicle for a kind of translation of Western music into Karnatic music” (ibid., 32). By the mid-nineteenth century, the dispersion of power and cultural hegemony from the Mughal center and the consolidation of British rule had effectively put in place transformative conditions of possibility for the history of music in the subcontinent. Many authors have written about changes in the system of patronage – that is, in the gradual concentration of artistic activity in the urban centers of modernity. That most powerful of all forces resulted from and constituted responses to South Asia’s ongoing global encounters.

Bibliography Ahmad, N. P. (1984) Hindustani Music: A Study of Its Development in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, New Delhi: Manohar Publications Ayyangar, R. R. (1972) History of South Indian (Carnatic) Music From Vedic Times to the Present. Published privately in Madras Bearce, G. D. (1965) ‘Intellectual and cultural characteristics of India in a changing era, 1740–1800’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 25, 1: 3–17 Bhattacharya, S. (1968) Ethnomusicology and India, Calcutta: Indian Publications Bor, J. (1986/19877) ‘The voice of the sarangi: An illustrated history of bowing in India’, Quarterly Journal, Bombay National Centre for the Performing Arts, 15, 16: 1–183 (1988) ‘The rise of ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian music c. 1780–c. 1890’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 20: 51–73 Brahaspati, K. C. D. (1979) ‘Muslim influences on Venkatamakhi’, in G. Kuppuswamy and M. Hariharan (eds.), Readings on Music and Dance, Trivandrum: B.R. Publishing Corporation, pp. 79–102 Davies, C. C. (1959) An Historical Atlas of the Indian Peninsula, 2nd edn, London: Oxford University Press Day, Capt. C. R. (1894) ‘Notes on Indian music’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 20th Session (1893–4): 45–66 Ellingson, T. J. (1979) ‘The mandala of sound: Concepts and sound structures in Tibetan ritual music’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison Farrell, G. (1997) Indian Music and the West, Oxford: Clarendon Press Gautam, M. R. (1980) The Musical Heritage of India, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications Gosvami, O. (1957) The Story of Indian Music: Its Growth and Synthesis, Bombay: Asia Publishing House Hornbostel, E. M. von, and C. Sachs (1961) ‘Classification of musical instruments’, A. Baines and K. P. Wachsmann (trans.), Galpin Society Journal, 14: 3–29; orig. publ. as ‘Systematik der Musikinstrumente’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 46 (1914), 553–90

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Jones, W. (1792) ‘On the musical modes of the Hindus’, in S. M. Tagore (ed.), Hindu Music from Various Authors, Calcutta, 1875/R, pp. 123–60; orig. publ. in Asiatick Researches, 3: 55–87 Krishnaswami, S. (1965) Musical Instruments of India, Delhi: Government of India Miner, A. J. (1997) Sitar and Sarod in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Murthy, K. K. (1985) Archaeology of Indian Musical Instruments, Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan Nakhshabi, Z. (1978) The Cleveland Museum of Art’s ‘Tuti-nama’: Tales of a Parrot, trans. by M. A. Simsar, The Cleveland Museum of Arts Neville, H. R. (1928) Fyzabad, A Gazeteer, Allahabad: Government Press Pacholczyk, J. (1978) ‘Sufyana kalam, the classical music of Kashmir’, Asian Music, 10, 1: 1–16 Parthasarathy, R. (1993) (trans. and ed.) The Cilappatikaram of Ilanko Atikal, New York: Columbia University Press Pingle, B. A. (1962) History of Indian Music with Particular Reference to Theory and Practice, Calcutta: Susil Gupta Private Ltd. Powers, H. (n. d.) ‘History of classical music’, in R. Qureshi, et al., ‘India’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ subscriber/article/grove/music/43272pg2#S43272.2 (accessed 12 November 2012) Prajnanananda, S. (1963) A History of Indian Music, vol. 1: Ancient Period, Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math Qureshi, R. B. (1981) ‘Islamic music in an Indian environment: The Shi’a Majlis’, Ethnomusicology, 25, 1: 41–71 Rao, V. N., D. Shulman, and S. Subrahmanyam (2003) Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, New York: Other Press Roche, D. (1996) ‘Devi Amba’s drum: Mina miracle chant and the ritual ostinato of spirit-possession performance in southern Rajasthan’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley Rowell, L. E. (1992) Music and Musical Thought in Early India, University of Chicago Press (2000) ‘Scale and mode in the music of the early Tamils of South India’, Music Theory Spectrum, 22, 2: 135–56 Sambamoorthy, P. (1963) South Indian Music, vol. 4, Madras: The Indian Music Publishing House Sarmadee, S. (2003) Ghunyatu’l Munya: The Earliest Persian Work on Indian Classical Music, New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research Sastri, K. V. (1954) The Science of Music, Tanjore: Research Publications Sharma, S. (1997) A Comparative Evolution of Music in India and the West, Delhi: Pratibha Prakashan Stewart, R. M. (1974) ‘The tabla in perspective’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles Tabakāt-i-Nasīrī. A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, Including Hindustan; from A.H. 194 (810 C.E.) to A.H. 658 (1260 C.E.) (1970) trans. by Maj. H. G. Raverty, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Tagore, S. M. (1963, orig. publ. 1896) Universal History of Music, Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office Tarocco, F. (n.d.) ‘Buddhist music’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/ 04254 (accessed 12 November 2012)

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Viswanathan, T., and M. H. Allen (2004) Music in South India: The Karnātak Concert Tradition, and Beyond, New York: Oxford University Press Wade, Bonnie C. (1998) Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India, University of Chicago Press (2003) ‘Music and dance’, in Z. Ziad (ed.), The Magnificent Mughals, Karachi: Oxford University Press, pp. 229–68 Weidman, A. J. (2006) Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Widdess, D. R. (1980) ‘The Kudumiyāmalai inscription: A source of early Indian music in notation’, Musica Asiatica, 2: 115–50 (1995) The Ragas of Early Indian Music: Modes, Melodies and Musical Notations from the Gupta Period to c. 1250, Oxford: Clarendon Press Willard, N. A. (1962) ‘A treatise on the music of Hindoostan: Comprising a detail of the ancient theory and modern practice’, in W. Jones, and N. A. Willard, Music of India, Calcutta: Susil Gupta Private Ltd., pp. 1–87; orig. publ. as monograph, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1834 Woodfield, I. (1994) ‘The “Hindostannie Air”: English attempts to understand Indian music in the late eighteenth century’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 119, 2: 189–211

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Native American ways of (music) history BEVERLEY DIAMOND

Conceptualizing a history of Native American song and dance traditions As many scholars have discussed in recent decades, the way people think about the past is framed and experienced in a variety of ways (see, e.g., de Certeau 1988; Misztal 2003). Many conceptual issues that complicate historical work on the song and dance traditions of the indigenous people of North America, for instance, can be usefully considered within larger frameworks of how specific Native American groups or even individuals conceptualize “memory” and “history” more generally. A complication in studying Native American historical frameworks is the Euroamerican stereotype that indigenous people are not merely very old, but somehow timeless and ahistorical.1 As Trigger (1985) wrote several decades ago, this stereotype led to the disciplinary bounding of “history” as European focused and “anthropology” as Other focused. It also led to the description of precontact culture as “prehistory” as if “‘real’ history does not begin until Europeans arrive” (Doxtator 2001, 39). Aboriginal historians, such as Deborah Doxtator, have subsequently demonstrated persuasively how parallel systems of historical record existed and interacted. Recognition of parallel histories is integral to indigenous-centered theory and methodology, an area that has flourished in the early twenty-first century.2 A growing number of scholars of indigenous descent have recovered indigenous contributions that were previously ignored in the historical record (e.g., Dickason 1992; Doxtator 2001) or addressed processes of

1 Much writing about Native American cultures that could have documented when music traditions emerged in specific locales, for instance, often did not prioritize such chronological precision, nor identify the individuals or events that enabled the emergence of cultural tradition. Certain types of ethnographic work, including a great deal of late twentieth-century ethnomusicology, furthermore, was explicitly ahistorical. 2 Indigenous theory emerged strongly in literary studies in the 1990s (see, e.g., Warrior 1995) but has become become more interdisciplinary and international as anthologies such as Battiste (2000), Bruchac (2010) and Denzin et al. (2008) demonstrate. Special issues of journals (e.g., American Indian Quarterly 2004) have focused on traditional knowledge. Indigenous-centered education has been a priority for others (Chrétien 2012; Cajete 1994).

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decolonization (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). Many have used frameworks that come from indigenous experience or local tradition (e.g., Alfred 2009; Borrows 2010; Wilson 2008). Many have emphasized relationality as an influential model for shifting perspectives. Philip Deloria’s (2004) theorization of “expectation” and “anomaly” as a framework for recasting the colonial relations between indigenous people and colonizers in the Americas, for instance, has been widely cited by ethnomusicologists.3 Other studies, however, have recognized the incommensurability of ways of history. Ethnomusicologist Chad S. Hamill, for instance, recognizes that “[i]n approaching song as the embodiment of prophecy and catalyst for spiritual power, I dispense with ineffective ‘intellectual methodologies’ and accept the reality of visionary experience by resituating indigenous ontologies within the framework of academic scholarship” (2012, 13). Frameworks for understanding past, present, and future, then, may be relational, complementary, and/or irreconcilable. Anthropologist Peter Nabokov has done extensive work on Native American concepts of time.4 He begins his important comparison of cultural “ways of history” with a Navajo story that initially suggests a rather stark division: “Navajo and Euro-American modes of communicating what is significant about distant origins appear to be genres passing in the night” (Nabokov 1996, 2). As his lengthier comparison5 of “different modalities of accounting for and interpreting” unfolds, however, with attention to a variety of narrative genres, including creation stories, folk tales, descriptions of contemporary events, prophecy, oratory, and ritual, Nabokov nuances the interaction of different modes of historicity in a complex manner. He emphasizes the “plasticity” of Native American historical narratives and considers how place and material objects, among other things, may be vehicles of history. He notes ways in which these vehicles of history mediate encounter. He asks important questions about the purposeful nature of history: “[W]hen is it necessary, permissible, or culturally appropriate for Indian historicity to come to life?” (2002, 34). Like Doxtator, he considers how multiple histories can coexist and asks what serves to validate historical accounts in different cultural contexts.

3 This model contrasts markedly with the concept of acculturation that was widely used in some earlier ethnomusicological studies. 4 Ethnohistorical models have also been explored by other historians, in almost every instance with an emphasis on the variety and local diversity of such models (Ortiz 1977; Fogelson 1974; Fowler 1987). Folklorists beginning with Dorson (1961) have similarly looked at the historicity of narratives and myths. 5 His book, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (2002), expanded on the issues raised in his 1996 article.

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While only a few ethnomusicologists and other scholars of Native American and Aboriginal Canadian music have, as yet, explicitly worked with the modes of historicity that Nabokov articulates, there are traces of these concepts evident in much of our work. The present chapter explores how First Nations, Inuit, and Métis music history is beginning to be reconceptualized, by recognizing localized “ways of history” within indigenous communities. As scholars of Native American song and dance cultures rethink historical paradigms, there is growing acceptance that different cultural views of history should be regarded as complementary.

Whose history? And the question of agency Like “mainstream” history (if there is such a thing at this juncture), written histories of Native America have privileged political events, war, and, consequently, the narratives of leaders and warriors. Some such leaders (e.g., Membertou, Wovoka) had a huge impact on song culture, but many tradition bearers have been storied outside of these privileged historical foci. A number of (auto)biographies of both male and female traditional song carriers (especially Frisbie’s work with Frank and Rose Mitchell [Mitchell 1978; Mitchell and Frisbie 2001]), or Levine’s work on Arzelie Langtry (1991) complement the picture. Vander’s (1988) work with five Shoshone song carriers is an important instance of tracing a century of history by focusing on the agency and explanations of individuals of different generations. Other studies of both traditional and contemporary musicians (e.g., Nettl 1968; Young Bear and Theisz 1994; Bissett Perea 2012) demonstrate how individual life stories carry the traces of complex intercultural historical interactions. Scholars have made contributions to the growing body of work demonstrating how women experienced colonialism very differently from men, particularly along the Atlantic seaboard (see, among others, Green 1975; Mihesuah 1993; Perdue 2001). Of particular importance for music scholars is the fact that many women served as cultural mediators as both visual artists in the context of trade and tourism since the mid-nineteenth century6 and performers.7 In the past couple of decades, oral historical work (including many published interviews with culture bearers)8 has proliferated, providing a very different picture of human agency within the period of living memory.

6 See Phillips (1998) for a particularly wide-ranging exploration of “trading identities.” 7 McBride’s biographies of Molly Spotted Elk (1995, 1999) and Lucy Nicolar (2001) are cases in point. 8 One instance is the 2012 anthology Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, co-edited by A. Hoefnagels and B. Diamond. Interviews and “conversations” appear alongside academic articles, in an explicit effort to explore processes of knowledge production.

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Nonindigenous scholars often find the modes of telling life histories challenging for various reasons. The difficulty of understanding how life stories interweave with narrative and song was addressed by anthropologist Julie Cruikshank in Life Lived Like a Story (1990), and by her former teacher Robin Ridington in Trail to Heaven (1988). A second challenge may be that, as Nabokov and others have observed, the historical reference points in many Native American contexts are often individual experiences. Our consultants and teachers are often careful to indicate that a story is their version, or perhaps that they learned that from a specific person. A good illustration in recent ethnomusicology might be found in an interview that Franziska von Rosen (2009) conducted with Passamaquoddy singer Margaret Paul, who often started her descriptions of the past with reference to a specific version of that past: “The way Mike described it” (ibid., 59), “this friend of mine, she said” (ibid., 61), “That’s what that spirit told me when I went into that sweat lodge in Alberta” (ibid., 62). Because of the authority that individual experience is afforded, multiple versions of the past more easily coexist in Native America than in Euroamerican “ways of history.”9 Any study of agency must explore the complexity of power dynamics. Recent music scholarship helps to demonstrate that the power relationships between colonizers and Native Americans were fluid and complex. Interactions between Native Americans and missionaries have been a particularly fruitful sphere for examining the power dynamics of colonizers and indigenous hosts and for exploring the role of singing in cross-cultural negotiations of control. It must not be denied that Christian churches were complicit in running boarding and residential schools that were genocidal in intent and often physically, psychologically, and sexually abusive. Recent research, nonetheless, firmly debunks earlier assumptions that missionaries were necessarily in control of these encounters.10 Anne Morrison Spinney (2005) looks closely at the relationship between missionaries, shamans, and political contexts in Penobscot history, arguing persuasively that Aboriginal medicine people made alliances or, alternatively, maintained antagonistic relations with Christian priests, in order to achieve political ends. Christian hymnody played a role in this process. Luke Lassiter’s work on Kiowa hymnody similarly reveals that “what often emerges in the stories of missions in Indian country is a complicated narrative dominated by negotiations and accommodations on all sides” (Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay 2002, 116). He notes that “[w]hen one listens to Kiowa people talk about Indian

9 It is all the more regrettable that many early records and modern interpretations of them are often unable or unconcerned with identifying the specific Aboriginal participants especially in everyday post-contact encounters. 10 This work carries much further earlier work on hymnody that explored localizations of the texts and functions of hymns by Aboriginal performers (Diamond 1992; Keillor 1987; Whidden 1985).

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hymns . . . models like assimilation do more to obscure encounter and experience than to elaborate on it” (ibid., 117). Similarly, Chad Hamill asserts that missionaries to the Salish underestimated the “ingenuity and resilience of the cultures they encountered” where old medicine ways and new hymns “both contributed to a sense of collective indigeneity” (2012, 4). Ethnomusicologists have studied instances of dual religious belief (Powers 1987), indigenization of Christian practices (Diamond 1992), and syncretic religious rites such as the Native American church (McAllester 1949). Related to agency is the incompleteness of human-centered historical accounts. Creation stories are important texts of Native American history, as are many other types of narrative and mythology. These texts, with their numerous nonhuman characters, early time periods (or timeless ones), chronological discontinuities, and unquestionable “truth” value, pose one of the greatest challenges to Eurocentric constructs of history.11 One aspect of that challenge is, of course, the very scope that is “thinkable” within certain “ways of history.” The tendency is for those who work with print to equate history with the written records of colonizers and to describe earlier events as prehistory. Mythic time is not so constrained. Giants and spirits, birds and animals, are historical agents in this context. A larger-than-human agency demands, however, that we assess the purposes and priorities of history. Nabokov asks whether history should prioritize “facts and chronologies or themes and attitudes” (Nabokov 2002, 67). Many of the examples cited in the present chapter emphasize that themes of regaining balance or renewing beliefs, for instance, are more central to Native American (music) history than exact chronology. Humans are often not the agents, in the sense of instigators or creators, but the mediators for teachings, which may include song. This is particularly true of communities where songs are received (not consciously created) in dreams or during fasts. The Innu of Labrador and Northern Quebec, for instance, along with many other Algonquian-speaking First Nations, regard all traditional nikumana as emanating from dreams (Armitage 1992; Diamond 2008). In some communities, dreams also validate an individual’s right to undertake certain work: hunting in a certain territory or even making a drum (see Audet 2012). The temporality of dreams is, of course, not congruent with chronological frameworks. Environment as agent is a particularly noteworthy trope in the history of Native American traditional narrative. There are now many scholars who are looking to indigenous narratives that relate to dramatic environmental events in human history. Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank, in her groundbreaking book 11 Nabokov (2002, 67) reminds us of the mid-twentieth-century debate between anthropologists Robert Lowie (who felt that Indian narratives were historically useless), John Swanton, and Roland Dixon who were more interested in what such narratives might convey about pre-contact times.

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Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (2005), not only expands the purview of history to environments, but also looks at divergent historical narratives about environmental change in the Yukon. She reminds us that both indigenous people and environmental historians “advise us to examine nature as a continuing force in history, not in a determining role but as one actor in relation to others” (ibid., 9). While those who study expressive culture might initially think her work is remote from the work they do, the role of expressive culture in mediating the relationship between human societies and nature is a significant one. In one instance, she describes how First Nations travelers on dangerous glaciers,12 which might have surged or receded unexpectedly, marked their journeys with song, as well as with respectful practices such as remaining quiet in certain contexts or not consuming grease in the vicinity of the glacier: Songs, such as the Marching and Resting and Dancing songs that Copper River people composed during their migration toward the coast, play an important role in clan histories. K’áadasteen spoke to Swanton in 1909 about the mourning songs his ancestors sang to commemorate companions lost in fog on this journey. Forty years later, in 1949, Sarah Williams sang the same songs for Frederica de Laguna, and she contrasted these dirges with the joyful songs clan members composed when they actually discovered Icy Bay: “They danced down from that mountain. They were happy when they were coming on this side. Lots of things happen[ed] there and there are songs” [about those events]. (Cruikshank 2005, 34–5)

Cruikshank sees such songs as historical sources, but she also recognizes how they not only mark events but also reflect emotional relationships, themes, and attitudes. In forging a relationship to the dramatic and changeable landscape that humans traverse, these songs are performative like, but not quite like, creation stories and mythologies that speak of primordial times. They constitute a different historical layer.13 They mark events or places, as in Cruikshank’s example (after Swanton and de Laguna). Or they may recreate those events and places using mimesis.14

The shape of history: pathways? circles? layers? With memory components that simultaneously function as prophecy Native American historical narratives often blur lines between past, present, and 12 The quote refers to the Malaspina Glacier. 13 In some Native American cultures, the distinction between classic myths (atnuhana in the Innu aimun language, for instance) and stories (tipatishimun in Innu aimun) may be something like this distinction. 14 Song and movement traditions may imitate the sounds and energies of local environments as Mi’kmaq elder and museum curator Stephen Augustine emphasized in a recent conversation (Diamond 2008, 27).

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future. In part, this is a matter of language, as Benjamin Lee Whorf struggled to understand in the 1930s when he wrote, “the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’, or to past, present, or future” (1956, 57). The recursiveness of Native American history – its nonlinearity, its simultaneous use as prophecy and reflection – has challenged Euroamerican scholars to think about the very shape of historical accounts. As Nabokov observes: Comprehending the meanings of the past through Indian eyes and narratives requires one to pay close attention to the diversity of ways in which among different Indian peoples temporal “phasings” and historical “commentaries” can extend backwards into primordial eras and forward to embrace remembered individuals and recent events. (Nabokov 1996, 9)

Some scholars, such as Mircea Eliade (1959) and Ake Hultkrantz (1987), attempt to deal with recursivity by contrasting cyclical with linear histories. Cyclical shapes are also emphasized in Native American discourses of the medicine wheel and other circular pathways. Ultimately, however, the binary is an over-simplification. Ethnomusicologists are among those who have challenged its reductionism by drawing attention to the embedded relationships of cyclical thinking and linear chronology, with an emphasis on recontextualization and revitalization. Victoria Lindsay Levine articulates this interconnection clearly when she writes: Native American attitudes toward history and change are embedded in the sacred narratives and oral traditions of each tribe, which reveal that many Indians perceive time as operating through cyclical recurrence rather than linear chronology; thus change involves adoption, adaptation, and syncretism rather than displacement, radical innovation, or succession. These concepts have important implications for the methods Indians have developed to construct music history and to shape musical change. Native American processes of musical change include the adoption or adaptation of music performed by other peoples, the blending of indigenous and external idioms, and the revitalization and recontextualization of repertories that have become moribund or have been temporarily discontinued. (Levine 1998, 19)

Adaptation and renewal are, at the same time, both cyclical and linear. The focus of Native American historical work on renewal and revitalization seems to resonate with Aboriginal performance traditions as ways of remembering. Revitalizations have often served as responses to particular historical events or community needs: the establishment of the Longhouse religion among the Haudenosaunee in the wake of the visions of Handsome Lake at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ghost Dance of the late

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nineteenth century (see Vander 1997), or indeed the many revitalization initiatives across North America that have occurred since the 1960s.15 The revitalization theme, however, also helps to account for histories of renewal that take place over longer periods of time. Nations have been inclusive in their adoption of new musical traditions, particularly in the east, where more attenuated colonial contact, aggressive missionization, and deterritorialization disrupted earlier ways of life so severely that the contemporary “distinctiveness” of the nations includes a mixture of borrowed and reinvented elements. The Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada, for instance, make intertribal traditions such as the powwow their own, through the symbolism of their regalia and the incorporation of local social dances such as kojua. They learn from neighboring communities both far and near, indigenous and nonindigenous (Tulk 2008). Levine’s statement wisely advises us to value such recontextualization and borrowing within our historical accounts. Tulk’s aforementioned study corroborates a growing emphasis on intertribal cultural movements, such as the powwow tradition, as important sites of renewal and revitalization. Powwow scholar Clyde Ellis (2003) sees the southern powwow as a strategy of adaptation, both to outside forces and to internal ones. He quotes L. G. Moses, who wrote that Wild West shows were among the forerunners of contemporary powwows, not as simple depictions of “‘pioneer’ virtue triumphing over ‘savagery’” (Ellis 2003, 17) but that “Wild West Indians were spokespersons for the right of Indians to be themselves” (ibid.). With regard to the powwow as a vehicle for cultural renewal, Ellis states: On the Southern Plains, few things seem more suited to mediating cultural and community identity than the powwow. Although it is true that powwows reflect complicated and contested interpretations of social memory and action, it is also true that such debates notwithstanding, powwows remain extraordinary for their power to mold and express identity. (Ibid., 26)

In other regions, highly esteemed individuals traditionally had social roles that facilitated connection between past, present, and future. In some cultures, such as that of the Dane-zaa of British Columbia, with whom anthropologist Robin Ridington has worked throughout his career, individuals known as Dreamers “were fine orators, and they were the keepers of wisdom and knowledge” (Ridington and Ridington 2006, 26). Ridington describes how, in their dreams, they followed the yagutunne or “trail to heaven,” the pathway of their departed loved ones associated with the Milky Way: 15 Between the late 1940s and 1960s, both the United States and Canada struck down a series of discriminatory laws, enacted since the 1880s, laws that made Native American ceremony and dance illegal.

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When they returned they awoke with a song, a story, a prophecy. The Dreamers also predicted many changes for the Dane-zaa people. They warned about the loss of land, the destruction of animal habitat, the earthquakes, the giant snakes (pipelines), and the burning matchsticks (flare stacks). The storied land is now being industrialized; the prophecies are becoming a reality. (Ibid.)

The Ridington family, however, worked with the community to create a website for archival material that respects protocols while making the knowledge of previous generations of Dreamers and others in the community accessible in the future.16 Again, the technological recontextualization of this material is a means of keeping present generations connected to those of the past. The web, itself, then, becomes yet another tool of revitalization.17 Ethnomusicologists have struggled to find the right concepts to describe how song can simultaneously reference present, past, and, in some instances, future. The image of layers has become a “shape” that many find resonant with Aboriginal discursive traditions. Scholars have observed concepts in Native American languages that point to this. Nabokov notes that the Navajo word for “the tribe’s past” is atk’idaa, the literal meaning of which is “on top of each other” (Nabokov 2002, 42); David Samuels’s 2004 book Putting a Song on Top of It conveys the related Apache concept not only in its title but also in many experiences he shared with the San Carlos Apache. In one instance, Samuels describes a musician who explained the phrase bee nagodit’ah during a band rehearsal: [H]e told me he liked it when I turned the fuzz box on in the middle of the guitar solo. He said it added something to it. He called it “bee nagodit’ah,” “nagodit’ah,” “inagodit’ah.” I asked him what that meant, and he said it means “something being put on top of something else.” (Samuels 2004, 184)

Samuels realizes that this timbral transformation18 is conceptualized as a layering of present and past, whether the past was the last time he played the guitar solo or an earlier point of time. Singing a popular song of the past evokes a pleasure in remembering earlier singers and earlier events. Specific repertory can recover the past and bring the feeling of past and present together. The reference points bring “vagueness, ambiguity and indeterminacy into play” and this enriches understanding. Samuels is critical of studies that search primarily for coherence, arguing, “[t]he establishment of coherence as 16 See www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Danewajich/. 17 Evidence of how important this has become is the fact that, at the time of writing, Aboriginal self-representations constitute a large proportion of the forty-nine websites devoted to “Aboriginal Art, Culture and Traditions” in the Virtual Museum of Canada. 18 Others who have studied how recording technologies have changed traditional Native American performance practices include Scales (2012), Perea (2012), and Diamond (2005).

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the thing to be discovered by anthropology dictates certain agendas and approaches and designates some communities and some issues more worthy of study than others” (2004, 14). Ann Morrison Spinney also finds the metaphor of layering apt for describing Passamaquoddy song traditions. Her work demonstrates that several types of repertories were used to enact encounters with outsiders. Some genres, such as welcoming songs and dances, were nevertheless multivalent. She notes that “the ceremonial actions of the welcoming ceremonies encode layers of meaning: histories of warfare and alliance, social structure, spiritual beliefs, and cultural pride” (Spinney 2010, 95). The concept of layers and “adding on” is useful when considering how different types of performance and narrative may cumulatively reinforce but also refine the meaning of the past. It is also useful in that it allows variant histories (and performances) to coexist, mutually enriching one another. While each variant may be right for an individual, family, or whole nation, the fact that there are other variants elsewhere is not a discrediting of the accuracy of local narratives. This issue is expanded in the section on performance as history below. The metaphor of layers, then, facilitates a better understanding of the plasticity of history. While “variants” of narratives about song or dance histories, ceremonial creation stories, or opinions about social change may coexist in local contexts, they are rarely positioned as right and wrong.

Vehicles of history, repositories of memory The previous section has already demonstrated how memory may be evoked in the retellings of narratives, ceremonies, and songs. The present section deepens the consideration of Native American vehicles of history and repositories of memory. Retellings, as well as embodied forms of history (images, stories, places, objects), should be contextualized in two different ways, both of which are elucidated by Doxtator (2001). First, she observes that while Europeans relied mostly on words, and especially writing, as a means of recording history, Native Americans had a wider array of documentary forms. Words have the disadvantage of being language specific and thus exclude those who speak or write another language. Images, places, and objects, however, facilitated a shared history (ibid., 43). Second, she points to individual experience as the means by which knowledge is authenticated. Participation in performance, where not only singing, dancing, and ritual but also the witnessing of these actions is valued, is a way of renewing knowledge and connecting past with present and future.

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Ceremonies and public performance as history Given that renewal and revitalization are central to so many Aboriginal ways of relating past, present, and future, it is not surprising that ceremony is often oriented specifically to these purposes. Renewal can take place on various levels. In many instances, individuals remember and renew their lives periodically. Innu women in Quebec, for example, add a ring of beads to the traditional multisectional hats they wear to represent their First Nation identity. The hat’s wedges are sometimes seen as marking the four directions – in turn, a sort of passage. A new ring of beadwork has been described to me as a symbol of a new year in the life of a family (Diamond 1994, 154). An Inuit hunter in Nunavut might recall encounters with animals on the land by composing a pisiq, or drum song, or he might add verses to an existing song (Cavanagh 1982). Many First Nations mark the unfolding of the agricultural year with ceremony celebrating rebirth, return, and thanksgiving for the gifts of the earth. In the agricultural heartlands of Ontario, Quebec, and New York State, the members of the Haudenosaunee Longhouse religion maintain an annual cycle that gives thanks for each new gift of the earth. While each community may embellish the cycle, the ceremonies generally mark seasonal changes, such as midwinter (the most powerful time of renewal), maple syrup, thunder, seed planting, strawberries, green corn, or harvest. They also include powerful rites of remembering, such as a Feast for the Dead and the Code of Handsome Lake. But at events that are regarded as social rather than ceremonial and hence shared with outsiders, similar references to the return of certain birds or animals or to historic gifts of song and dance from other Aboriginal people abound. Renewing, thanking, and celebrating are all intertwined processes. In many Native American communities, ceremony may involve the reenactment of a creation story or other classic narrative. As Doxtator notes, “One’s personalized experience of the mythic or spiritual is shaped by the collectively determined practices surrounding rituals and specialized interpretations of dreams” (2001, 45). Numerous ethnomusicological studies of ceremonial practices illustrate this, but only a few examples will be mentioned here. Orin Hatton, for instance, offers a cultural analysis of the Gros Ventre war dance complex in relation to the creation story of that nation. He relates structural elements to the actions of Earthmaker, demonstrating that, because Earthmaker’s “instrumental acts that resulted in transformations were preceded by an announcement of his intention,” creative works similarly precede “acts of transformation” with “formal statements of the thought informing such behaviour” (Hatton 1990, 54).

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Similarly, he describes how song may mimic the utterance “Youh, hou, hou,” with which Earthmaker completed the creation of the earth (ibid.). Still more far-reaching is his paradigmatic analysis of different kinds of speech activity – thought, breath, speech, crying, and singing – each a different means of communication between Gros Ventre and the Supreme Being. He notes temporal connotations of each mode: “The power of thought is infinite and precedes all other instrumental behaviour. Breath shares this infinity, and Earthmaker combined thought and breath when he revived the creatures in the pipe-bundle at the time of creation” (ibid., 47). Speech, however, is constrained by different contexts of “respect and familiarity, solemnity and intensity” (ibid.). Crying mediates between speech and singing, relating to prayer as a means of gaining access to the Supreme Being. Finally, singing is related to the recreation of the Gros Ventre universe at the beginning of the present stage of the world: “As the most solemn form of utterance, singing reiterates the original act of creation and intensifies the instrumental nature of crying. Singing too is mediation, but in the sense of communicating specific human concerns to the Supreme Being” (ibid., 52). Similarly, song may bring the pantheon of Navajo deities into the human realm. In her study of Kinaaldá, one of the Blessing Way ceremonies, Charlotte Frisbie explains how each Navaho Girl’s puberty ceremony is a recreation of the kinaaldá of the mythic Changing Woman. She notes that “themes such as the ceremonial dressing, molding, racing, singing, use of a specific number of songs, notifying the Gods for the original ceremony, and the relation between Kinaaldá and Blessing Way are mentioned in more than half of the myths” (Frisbie 1967, 16). She observes that this recreation of the basic elements of the narrative does not preclude variation from one telling of the story to another and from one ceremonial performance to another. This space for creative adaptation and recreation, then, is not at odds with “the concept of harmony obtained through orderly human effort – the concept which has been and still is the foundation of Navaho religion” (ibid., 392). The cultures of the northwest coast of North America have developed some of the most elaborate forms of reenactment in conjunction with potlatch ceremonies. A mimetic performance of moiety and clan structures, the potlatch enables participants to witness important points of social change, such as the passing of a chief and the installation of a new leader. At the level of mythology, it incorporated dances that replicated myths and brought spirit beings into the world of humans. The feasting, dancing, and giving of gifts from one family and moiety to another is itself evocative of historical struggles in the colonial period. All such expressive activities were legally banned in both Canada and

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the United States in 1885 and not made legal again until after 1947. Hence, its contemporary performance is shaded by the marks of the colonial past and enlivened by the testament it offers to cultural resilience and revitalization. Smaller-scale instances of public performance as history abound. In social contexts and contemporary musical praxis, specific songs performed in new contexts may evoke memories of the past. While ethnomusicologists have demonstrated that this is true in many cultural contexts throughout the world, the distinctiveness of some Native American practices may be the discursive emphasis on resignifying history through song. Anthropologists Robin and Jillian Ridington convey this in the title of their 2006 book, When You Sing It Now, Just Like New. The phrase they cite is from one of the Dreamers of the Dane-zaa, Tommy Attachie, who traveled on the trail to heaven (the pathway of the departed) to bring back songs that help sustain communities in the present and future. As Robin Ridington explains, “each new oral performance authorizes the song or story anew” (Ridington and Ridington 2006, 22). Ridington and his collaborators have worked with the Dane-zaa for decades, and so the remarkable longevity of their study of the Dreamers’ oral traditions allows for a detailed exploration of this process, one that folklorist Amber Ridington calls “oral curation” (A. Ridington 2012). The narratives about specific dreamers’ songs that are shared among the singers are localized and reinvented with each performance, thus preserving the song but adding to or shifting its meaning in the present context. In the case of a “Prairie Chicken Song” (recorded a number of times by the Ridingtons between 1966 and 2008), which is now accessible on their website,19 Amber explains how the oldest singer’s commentary names and comments on the deceased person who was helped on the “trail to heaven” by this song, as well as those who helped her by singing this song. Decades later the same song was sampled in a pop arrangement, now narrated without the specific historical context or the sacred connotations. Far from interpreting this as a loss, however, she recognizes the emergent nature of the tradition and the importance of new performances in keeping alive the teachings of the past. A compelling example of layered meanings in the study of a narrative and song is anthropologist Julie Cruikshank’s (1998) study of Pete Sydney’s “song,” part of a larger story of a Tlingit man named Kaax’achgóok, as told by his mother, the Tagish/Tlingit elder Angela Sydney, on a number of different occasions. Angela’s awareness of different audiences, times, and places enabled her to change the range of meanings of the stories relative to the context of each retelling. On one occasion, she emphasized the relationship to the epic past and clan history; on 19 See www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Danewajich/.

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another, it was the journey of her son overseas as a soldier during World War II and her gift of the song from this story on the occasion of his return. The same story, then, might reference very different historical events. Cruikshank explains how Angela’s retelling might comment on concepts of clan ownership or serve as a form of commemoration. She concludes: Her [Angela’s] point is that oral tradition may tell us about the past, but its meanings are not exhausted with reference to the past. Good stories from the past continue to provide legitimate insights about contemporary events. What appears to be the “same” story, even in the repertoire of one individual, has multiple meanings depending on location, circumstance, audience, and stage of life of narrator and listener. (Cruikshank 1998, 43–4)

While Amber Ridington and Julie Cruikshank both explore the recontextualization of traditional materials, ethnomusicologists who study new musical genres, especially popular-music genres or contemporary uses of older material created by indigenous musicians, writers, and other artists, often imply that these new styles and genres function in a similar way. They offer new means to reflect on past experiences. John-Carlos Perea (2012) has looked at the song that originated in the Native American church and was transmitted through the family of Creek jazz musician Jim Pepper, eventually becoming the theme of his hit recording “Wichitai Tao.” The song’s trajectory embodies changing notions about traditional protocols for access to traditional material, changing audiences, and identity constructs charged with changing aesthetics. David Samuels provides many examples of the way specific songs “accumulate evocative and indexical meanings by being linked to personal biography and history as well as to local place” (Samuels 2004, 130). Johnny Horton’s “Whispering Pines,” for instance, recalled the San Carlos Apache days at a residential mission school. Big Bell’s rendition of Cookie and the Cupcakes’ “Mathilda” (a minor hit in its own day) was meaningful because it was performed by someone who had social relationships within the community. The memory of who learned it from whom and of performances through several decades is evoked and sometimes described. As Samuels states, “[t]he song, like so many, acts as a memory box, not only for people, but for places as well” (ibid., 136). He has been asked if this is not the way everyone responds to oldies. He argues that genre is less important for the Apache. Rather, non-Apache songs “evoke in listeners these feelings for the Apache past” (ibid.). They add a new layer to that past. Other scholars of Native American popular music have similarly viewed new creative forms as layers that may comment on the past, in lyrics at times, or in samples of archival material in some cases. They may also perpetuate

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community values and styles of social interaction within new spaces, such as recording studios (Scales 2002; Diamond 2005), or trace the migrations of different First Nations within North America through such elements as vocal timbre (Diamond 2002). Like earlier “traditions,” popular music may be a site where different histories of “alliance” are embodied (Diamond 2007). Popular-music studies, furthermore, demonstrate how performance changes can speak to issues of social change. Studies of contemporary powwows have benefited from explorations of emergent social contexts: university-based powwows, LGBT powwows, New Age powwows, or powwows outside of the Americas (see Browner 2002, 2009; Ellis et al. 2005) or Native American women’s diverse responses to traditional proscriptions on their participation around the drum (Hoefnagels 2007) all illustrate this.

Objects as histories Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind with the subheading “Objects as histories” is archeology, where the shards of the past provide tangible evidence of ways of life. My concern here, however, is about objects as embodiments of historic relationships or changing sociopolitical or religious affiliations. There are classic examples, such as wampum, where patterns symbolized political alliances and social relationships or marked significant historical events for many nations in the northeast. Other well-known instances are a variety of built structures. As Nabokov has observed: The buildings of Native Americans encoded not only their social order but often their tribal view of the cosmos. Many Indian narratives tell of a “Distant Time” or a “Myth Age” when a “First House” was bestowed upon a tribe as a container for their emerging culture. Some tribes likened the creation of the world itself to the creation of a house, strengthening the metaphoric correspondence between dwelling and cosmos. Thereafter Indian peoples held the ritual power to renew their cosmos through rebuilding, remodeling, or reconsecrating their architecture. (Nabokov 1989, 38)

Like ceremonial performance, then, objects could reference history through mimesis and could embody change in a process of revitalization and renewal. Some objects are visual shorthand of a similar nature: Iroquois condolence canes, Anishnabe song scrolls, and medicine bundles of Plains people, to name a few. Levine (2002) includes some examples in her compilation of song transcription, most of it in Euroamerican form, but with a section devoted to “Native Notations and Transcriptions,” most of which served mnemonic purposes. An exhaustive study of objects that are relevant to song traditions as records of historical definition and social relationship is anthropologist/ ethnomusicologist Charlotte Frisbie’s (1987) landmark study of jish, the

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medicine bundles of the Navajo. An important observation to note about her detailed documentation is her selection of what to include for discussion. While she explains how songs are used to renew and purify the bundle and describes certain aspects of the ceremonies that accompany the creation or transfer of a bundle, she does not disclose the texts of the songs, the exact contents or meanings associated with objects in the bundle. Certain elements of these historical records might come to light appropriately in performance but not in the covers of a print publication. Instead, she writes about the “lives of medicine bundles” (ibid., 393), focusing on their acquisition, transmission, and disposition in the past and present, as the book’s subtitle indicates. Frisbie is sensitive to Nabokov’s question previously cited about “when is it necessary, permissible, or culturally appropriate for Indian historicity to come to life” (Nabokov 2002, 34). On a more personal level, clothing, including dance outfits, and objects, such as musical instruments, may embody memory and history. One of the most extensive studies of a musical instrument, Thomas Vennum Jr’s The Ojibwa Dance Drum (1982), explores how the drum’s lifetime – its origin story, its flourishing and eventual decline – record Anishnabe history. In the course of the SPINC20 project of the 1980s, a research team learned how museum objects embody historical significance. Even their imprisonment in museums was a subject of comment by Aboriginal consultants who often criticized aspects of caretaking in these alien environments. The materials, construction, and images told other stories. Sometimes these were explicit stories of individual pathways, as was the case of a horn rattle (Diamond et al. 1994, 160), with images that related to “traditional” spiritual practice carved on one side and images relating to Christianity carved on another. In some instances, images were added to musical instruments to mark an event. One hand drum even had the names of a hockey team inscribed on it. In other cases, changes in construction provided evidence of changes in intercultural relationships; the means of securing the cone-shaped bark of a moose call, for example, indicated whether or not the instrument had been commissioned for the growing craft market in the early or mid-twentieth century. We noted that elders’ discourses about musical instruments (like the discourses of medicine bundles such as the Navajo jish that Frisbie studied) often emphasized the life cycles of the object itself (the life of the instrument) or the meetings of the lives of birds, animals, fabric, trees, or stones that contributed to its structure and meaning. 20 Sound Producing Instruments in Native Communities. The project team consisted of Sam Cronk, Franziska von Rosen, and myself. We documented collections of musical instruments in twenty-four museums and shared that documentation with Native American communities and individuals, who helped us to understand many things about how objects embody meaning. See Diamond et al. 1994.

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The concept of layering was evident on instruments that had been repainted with different colors or adorned with new materials at different points in time. Here, while the exact meanings were often undiscoverable, there were things added, processes of renewal, as with retellings of narratives. Documents (print publications, audio recordings, etc.) are, of course, objects, as well. Archivists Judith Gray (1999) and Laurel Sercombe (1999) have not only produced comprehensive catalogues of such materials but have explored their complex histories, shedding light on the way that the discipline of ethnomusicology emerged from colonial encounter, and on the challenges of repatriation. The nature of documents is a tricky business. The role of print documents created by Euroamericans often fixes things. Consider, by comparison, such records as Osage or Omaha “song counting sticks,” Haudenosaunee Condolence canes, Passamaquoddy Wampum Records, Navajo jish, or Anishnabe “song scrolls.”21 They record historical practices in order not to establish a record for posterity but to perpetuate practice by stimulating memory. They do not describe details but include images that, in an abbreviated form, symbolize processes of receiving knowledge (through dreams, for instance), relationships, or ritual forms, the substance of which is kept only in living tradition. While an Osage counting stick may have a notch for each song and may indicate song groups by the arrangement of notches (Levine 2002, 157–8), an Anishnabe (Ojibwe) song scroll may depict a figure that recalls some aspect of the song text (e.g., Walter James Hoffman’s documentation, reproduced in Levine 2002, 165–71). They serve as mnemonic aids in performance situations, thus not fixing but enabling the renewal and re-performance of historical reference points.

Geography as history Scholars of Native American culture have long asserted that place marks and stimulates memory of the past. Anthropologist Keith Basso, particularly in his influential book Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), is among the many non-Native scholars who have written about the importance of topography as a repository for stories about the past. “Apache constructions of place,” he writes, “reach deeply into other cultural spheres, including conceptions of wisdom, notions of morality, politeness and tact in forms of spoken discourse, and certain conventional ways of imagining and interpreting the Apache tribal past” (ibid., xv). Basso’s collaborators uttered a place name as shorthand for entire

21 Photographs and detailed documentation of several of these are published in Levine 2002, 157–76.

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stories of events that took place at that location, events that also revealed principles of moral behavior and respect. Migration narratives, such as those of the Anishnabe, are other instances of place narrated as part of a tribal history. As Thomas Vennum (1978) has documented, songs were an integral part of that classic narration, which is at the core of Midewiwin ceremony, past and present. Song, including Christian hymns, also sustained those who endured enforced migration, particularly the historic removals of nations in the southeast to Indian Country (the name for Oklahoma from 1835 to 1906). The Trail of Tears of the Cherokee was marked by specific hymns like “One Drop of Blood.” In their new locale in what is now Oklahoma, new stomp-dance grounds were established, marking the space as theirs in both sonic and tactile ways. In other cases, travel or pathways are recorded in song as a sort of mnemonic trail of experiences. Inuit drum dance songs are a case in point (Cavanagh [Diamond] 1982; Nattiez 1999). They often begin with a series of place names that outline the hunting route of the male dancer. No explanations are given, but each name evokes senses and stories, serving as a topographic mnemonic. Unlike repertory received in dreams or visions or from earlier generations, this repertory is situated chronologically with considerable precision. Composers of drum-dance songs are recognized and named, and the origin of specific songs is frequently traced to personal events of significance. Some singers add to their song as their experiences unfold, hence treating a pisiq as an unfolding expressive record – not a fixed “piece.” Others identify rather precisely the age and origins of a pisiq with references to a specific event or the age of a family member.

Shared histories and other paradigms The strengths of the “ways of history” discussed thus far is enormous, in my view, but there are dangers lurking if the nuanced exploration of Nabokov is cited superficially (as I have arguably done in this chapter). It is very easy to fall into the trap of essentialism, dichotomizing historical approaches to avoid looking at them relationally. Relative to ways of history that are related to traditional indigenous knowledge, I am struck by the fact that a number of music or dance scholars of Aboriginal descent choose more mainstream types of history and more critical stances about new forms and encounters. Choctaw ethnomusicologist Tara Browner, who has explored the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “Indianist” movement in classical composition (Browner 1997), does not regard the appropriation of Alice Fletcher’s Omaha transcriptions as another layer that creates contact between past and present. Rather, she reads loss:

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Though Baudrillard describes the phenomenon of mass production in industrial societies, his theories resonate when they are applied to the methodology of “collecting” Native songs and reproducing them for a mass audience outside traditional tribal contexts. At each stage of the collection process a song degrades: first by being recorded (more so in the days of the Edison cylinder); then by being transcribed into a system of musical notation whose traditions of interpretive nuance are not those of Indian music; and, finally, by being altered to fit into the Western diatonic system in order to make the music “accessible” to the greater society. What is diabolical about reproduction in this instance is the music lost at each stage of removing Native musics from their original models, a practice necessitated by the need for accessibility – a requirement for mass consumption. (Browner 1997, 280)

Of course, this comment reflects on the mediation of print, not the process that Amber Ridington’s term “oral curation” describes. The crucial element is not orality or print but the power relations of participants. In relation to recent collaborations between First Nations, Inuit, and nonindigenous classical ensembles, Dylan Robinson (2012) has similarly studied power relationships, noting instances where arts organizations may be more concerned about demonstrating a commitment to diversity than actually doing the hard work of developing equitable collaborative practices. The concept of oral curation, which seems to work well within communities, and cross-culturally if undertaken by skilled communicators such as Angela Sidney, may be double-edged; its application beyond the boundaries of communities or beyond the lifetimes of culture bearers may have less positive results. At any rate, Browner’s and Robinson’s work emphasizes the importance of assessing power relations in any historical or contemporary study. Historians such as L. G. Moses have argued in a similar manner about the change in valence that Native American music and dance was given in the course of the twentieth century. He notes that many powwows were instituted during the very period when nation-specific performances were suppressed and that, again in the late twentieth century, professional singing emerged at a point when the audio recording industry was interested in Indian music and where liner notes “created a system of classification where none had existed previously (except perhaps in the language of the ethnomusicologist)” (Moses 2002, 198). He goes on, “singers and dancers are now symbolic of the continuation of American Indian cultures that do not threaten, but rather enrich, the dominant culture. Whereas once Indian ceremonials were dismissed as heathenish or suppressed as being dangerous, the relatively benign acceptance of Indian pageantry allowed adaptive Indian cultures again to flourish” (ibid., 199). This particular transformation suggests that “we look at performance not only for its window

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into cultural change and persistence, but also for the ways it reveals the workings of power, domination, and resistance in Indian-American relations” (ibid.). Other problems of pastness may be illuminated by historical methodologies more conventionally associated with Western music theory. Thomas Vennum has traced the history of a song form, in this case one that underpins contemporary powwow music. Browner (2009) has emphasized the importance of close listening in her analysis of an acoustic geography of intertribal powwow songs, providing a more detailed history of regional styles in order to challenge the reductionist categories of northern and southern styles that are used at most contemporary powwows. In similar fashion, Tulk (2008) has explored Mi’kmaq phrase structure to determine how intertribal musics have been localized. Scales (2002, 2012) has unpacked the levels of meaning embedded in details of powwow recording practices that constitute a new historical era in Native music history.

History for what? In Native American communities, the marking of memory as history may commemorate, legitimate, or bear witness. It might bring warmth and meaning to those who live in the present or enable individuals to feel part of a larger pattern, a lineage perhaps, a network or circle, an added layer. When embedded in performance, in objects or places, it may recreate the narratives of the past while also revealing negotiations of power and restoring social balance and harmony. Performance may equally reveal power relations that shift or simply assume new guises. If history is both a reflection on the past and an indicator of appropriate responses to social or environmental change, however, it seems clear that the next challenge is not to differentiate ways of history but to figure out how to use them in a complementary and relational fashion, a project that Cruikshank in particular has pioneered. While oral history and written documents, as well as culturally diverse individuals and communities, will never be fully reconcilable, there are points of coincidence and multiple narratives that bear comparison. Rather than ask who or what we believe about the past, I suggest that we explore how and why particular shapes, vehicles, and performances of history are the way they are. Those questions seem to me more useful as a means of building the momentum for change.

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Armitage, P. (1992) ‘Religious ideology among the Innu of Eastern Quebec and Labrador’, Religiologiques, 6: 64–110 Audet, V. (2012) ‘Why do Innu sing popular music?: Reflections about a musical movement of identity and cultural assertion’, in A. Hoefnagels and B. Diamond (eds.), Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, pp. 372–407 Basso, K. H. (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape, and Language among the Western Apache, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press Battiste, M. (ed.) (2000) Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press Bissett Perea, J. (2012) ‘Pamyua’s Akutaq: Traditions of Inuit musical modernities in Alaska’, MUSICultures, 39, 1: 7–41 Bloechl, O. A. (2008) Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, Cambridge University Press Borrows, J. (2010) Drawing Out Law: A Spirit’s Guide, University of Toronto Press Browner, T. (1997) ‘“Breathing the Indian spirit”: Thoughts on musical borrowing and the “Indianist” movement in American music’, American Music 15: 265–84 (2002) Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-Wow, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (2009) ‘An acoustic geography of intertribal pow-wow songs’, in T. Browner (ed.), Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 131–40 (ed.) (2009) Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Bruchac, M. et al. (eds.) (2010) Indigenous Archeologies: A Reader on Decolonization, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Cajete, G. A. (1994) Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, Asheville, NC: Kivaki Press Cavanagh, B. (1982) Music of the Netsilik Eskimo: A Study of Stability and Change, Ottawa: National Museums (see also Diamond, B.) Champagne, D. (1994) Native America: Portrait of the Peoples, Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press Chrétien, A. (2012) ‘Moose trails and buffalo tracks: Métis music and aboriginal education in Canada’, in A. Hoefnagels and B. Diamond (eds.), Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 174–93 Cruikshank, J. (1990) Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press (1998) The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (2005) Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, Vancouver and Seattle: University of British Columbia Press De Certeau, M. (1988) The Writing of History: European Perspectives, New York: Columbia University Press Deloria, P. (2004) Indians in Unexpected Places, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas Denzin, N. et al. (eds.) (2008) Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, Los Angeles: Sage

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Diamond, B. (1992) ‘Christian hymns in Eastern Woodlands communities: Performance contexts’, in C. E. Robertson (ed.), Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text and Performance, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 381–94 (2002) ‘Native American contemporary music: The women’, The World of Music, 44, 1: 9–35 (2005) ‘Media as social action: Native American musicians in the recording studio’, in P. D. Greene and T. Porcello (eds.), Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technology in Sonic Cultures, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and the University Press of New England, pp. 118–37 (2007) ‘Music of modern indigeneity: From identity to alliance studies’, European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 12: 169–90 (2008) Native American Music in Eastern North America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, New York: Oxford University Press Diamond, B., M. S. Cronk, and F. Von Rosen (1994) Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of First Nations Communities in Northeastern America, Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press Dickason, O. P. (1992) Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Dorson, R. M. (1961) ‘Ethnohistory and ethnic folklore’, Ethnohistory, 8, 1: 12–30 Doxtator, D. (2001) ‘Inclusive and exclusive perceptions of difference: Native and Eurobased concepts of time, history and change’, in G. Warkentin and C. Podruchny (eds.), Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700, University of Toronto Press, pp. 33–47 Eliade, M. (1959) Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York: Harper Ellis, C. (2003) A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas Ellis, C., L. E. Lassiter, and G. H. Dunham (2005) Powwow, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Fogelson, R. D. (1974) ‘On the varieties of Indian history: Sequoyah and Traveller Bird’, Journal of Ethnic Studies, 2, 1: 105–12 Fowler, L. (1987) Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History, 1778–1984, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Frisbie, C. J. (1967) Kinaalda: A Study of the Navaho Girl’s Puberty Ceremony, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (1987) Navajo Medicine Bundles or Jish: Acquisition, Transmission, and Disposition in the Past and Present, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press Gray, J. (1999) ‘Returning music to the makers’, Cultural Survival Quarterly 20, 4: 42–4 Green, R. (1975) ‘The Pocahontas Perplex: Images of American Indian women in American culture’, The Massachusetts Review, 16: 698–714 Hamill, C. S. (2012) Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press Hatton, O. T. (1990) Power and Performance in Gros Ventre War Expedition Songs, Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization Hoefnagels, A. (2007) ‘The dynamism and transformation of “tradition”: Factors affecting the development of powwows in Southwestern Ontario’, Ethnographies, 29, 1–2: 107–42

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Hoefnagels, A., and B. Diamond (eds.) (2012) Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press Hultkrantz, Å. (1987) Native Religions of North America: The Power of Visions and Fertility, San Francisco: Harper & Row Keillor, E. (1987) ‘Hymn-singing among the Dogrib Indians’, in J. Beckwith (ed.), Sing Out the Glad News, Toronto: Institute for Canadian Music, pp. 33–43 Lassiter, L. E. (1998) The Power of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography, Tucson: University of Arizona Press Lassiter, L. E., C. Ellis, and R. Kotay (2002) The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Levine, V. L. (1991) ‘Arzelie Langley and a lost pantribal tradition’, in S. Blum, P. V. Bohlman, and D. M. Neuman (eds.), Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 190–206 (1998) ‘American Indian musics, past and present’, in D. Nicholls (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Music, Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–29 (ed.) (2002) Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements, Middleton, WI: A-R Editions McAllester, D. (1949) Peyote Music, New York: Viking Fund McBride, B. (1995) Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (1999) Women of the Dawn, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (2001) ‘Lucy Nicolar: The artful activism of a Penobscot performer’, in T. Perdue (ed.), Native American Women’s Lives, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 141–59 Mihesuah, D. A. (1993) Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Misztal, B. A. (2003) Theories of Social Remembering, Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press Mitchell, F. (1978) Navajo Blessingway Singer: The Autobiography of Frank Mitchell, 1881–1967, Tucson: University of Arizona Press Mitchell, R., and C. J. Frisbie (2001) Tall Woman: The Life Story of Rose Mitchell, a Navajo Woman, c. 1874–1977, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press Moses, L. G. (2002) ‘Performative traditions in American Indian history’, in P. Deloria and N. Salisbury (eds.), A Companion to American Indian History, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 193–208 Nabokov, P. (1996) ‘Native views of history’, in B. G. Trigger, W. E. Washburn, and R. E. W. Adams (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, North America, Part 2, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–60 (2002) A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History, Cambridge University Press Nabokov, P., and R. Easton (1989) Native American Architecture, New York: Oxford University Press Nattiez, J. J. (1999) ‘Inuit throat games and Siberian throat singing: A comparative, historical, and semiological approach’, Ethnomusicology, 43, 3: 399–418 Nettl, B. (1968) ‘Biography of a Blackfoot Indian singer’, Musical Quarterly, 54, 2: 199–207 Ortiz, A. (1977) ‘Some concerns central to the writing of “Indian” history’, The Indian Historian 10, 1: 17–22 Perdue, T. (ed.) (2001) Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives, New York: Oxford University Press

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Perea, J. C. (2012) ‘The unexpectedness of Jim Pepper’, MUSICultures, 39, 1: 70–82 Phillips, R. B. (1998) Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press Pisani, M. (2005) Imagining Native America in Music, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Powers, W. K. (1987) Beyond the Vision: Essays on American Indian Culture, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press Ridington, A. (2012) ‘Continuity and innovation in the Dane-zaa Dreamers’ song and dance tradition: A forty-year perspective’, in A. Hoefnagels and B. Diamond (eds.), Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, pp. 31–60 Ridington, R. (1988) Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press Ridington, R., and J. Ridington (2006) When You Sing It Now, Just Like New: First Nations Poetics, Voices, and Representations, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Robinson, D. (2012) ‘Listening to the politics of aesthetics: Contemporary encounters between First Nations/Inuit and early music traditions’, in A. Hoefnagels and B. Diamond (eds.), Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 22–48 Samuels, D. W. (2004) Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, Tucson: University of Arizona Press Scales, C. (2002) ‘The politics and aesthetics of recording: A comparative Canadian case study of powwow and contemporary Native American music’, The World of Music, 44, 1: 41–60 (2012) Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains, Durham: Duke University Press Sercombe, L. (1999) ‘Ten early ethnographers in the northwest’, in W. Smith and E. Ryan (eds.), Spirit of the First People: Native American Music Traditions of Washington State, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 148–68 Spinney, A. M. (2005) ‘Medeolinuwok, music and missionaries in Maine’, in P. V. Bohlman, E. W. Blumhofer, and M. M. Chow (eds.), Music in American Religious Experience, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–82 (2010) Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs: Aesthetics and Survival, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press Trigger, B. G. (1985) Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered, Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press Tuhiwai Smith (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books Tulk, J. E. (2008) ‘“Our Strength is Ourselves”: Identity, status, and cultural revitalization among the Mi’kmaq in Newfoundland’, PhD dissertation, Memorial University of Newfoundland Vander, J. (1988) Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (1997) Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Vennum, T. (1978) ‘Ojibwa origin-migration songs of the Mitewiwin’, Journal of American Folklore, 91, 361: 753–91

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(1980) ‘A history of Ojibwa song form’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, 3, 2: 42–75 (1982) The Ojibwa Dance Drum: Its History and Construction, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press Von Rosen, F. (2009) ‘Drum, songs, vibrations: Conversations with a Passamaquoddy traditional singer’, in T. Browner (ed.), Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 54–66 Warrior, R. A. (1995) Tribal Secrets: Recovering Native American Intellectual Traditions, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2005) The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Weaver, J., R. A. Warrior, and C. S. Womack (2006) American Indian Literary Nationalism, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press Whidden, L. (1985) ‘Les hymnes, une anomalie parmi les chants traditionnels des Cris du Nord’, Recherches amérindiennes au Québec, 15, 4: 29–36 Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Wilson, S. (2008) Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Young Bear, S., and R. D. Thiesz (1994) Standing in the Light: A Lakota Way of Seeing, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press

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PART III

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MUSIC HISTORIES OF GLOBAL

ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE

. 7 .

Encounter music in Oceania: cross-cultural musical exchange in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyage accounts VANESSA AGNEW

Fringed by extensive mainland coasts and comprising tens of thousands of islands, the Pacific Ocean may be thought of in the terms proposed by one of its well-known writers: a “sea of islands” (Hau‘ofa 1993, 8). This singular geography accounts for the region’s predominantly maritime character and its great cultural diversity. Yet Oceania is also marked by patterns of cultural influence and exchange and increasingly by the forging of collective identities, often through the medium of music. Historically, Oceania referred to Polynesia (“many islands”), Melanesia (“black islands”), and Micronesia (“little islands”), but the term was also applied to coastal Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesian Papua and West Papua, and maritime Southeast Asia. The terms “Polynesia,” “Melanesia,” and “Micronesia” themselves made up a tripartite division dating to late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century European contact, when European observers grouped Oceanian peoples according to phenotypical and cultural characteristics. Implicit in this categorization was always a hierarchical ordering: Polynesians were assigned the pole position among Oceanian peoples, while Melanesians and Micronesians were typically construed as subordinate and inferior. In the twenty-first century, Pacific music is still routinely thought of in tripartite terms. This tripartition is problematic both because of its prejudicial connotations and because the categories do not always correspond to cultural affinities between the respective island groups. Fiji, for example, is generally considered part of Melanesia, but it overlaps culturally with western Polynesia and thus violates forms of categorization that were originally conceived along racial and administrative lines (Smith 2009). The case of Fiji illustrates some of the problems inherent in historical definitions of Oceania. For scholars such as Douglas and Ballard, however, there is still value in the historical conception of Oceania, and they advocate the term’s continued use. Douglas and Ballard (2008) argue that a historically informed approach to the study of Oceania facilitates our understanding of how Oceanian and European cultures were [183]

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both respectively and mutually shaped by centuries of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Until the advent of radio, television, and the internet most cultural influences arrived via the sea. Such influences were introduced by other islanders in ocean-going canoes (vaka), by European sailors and officers, and by whalers, traders, beachcombers, missionaries, colonial officials, and settlers. Because of the predominantly littoral character of Oceania, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Oceanian cultural and political history has been variously construed as a story of fatal contact (Moorehead 1966), beach crossings (Dening 1980), acculturation (A. Thomas 1981), first contact (Salmond 1991), dissemination (Moulin 1996), and cross-cultural exchange (N. Thomas 1997). Scholars of colonialism, in particular, have tended to foreground encounters between indigenous peoples and Europeans, focusing their analyses on relations between metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries. More recent scholarship recognizes that encounters between indigenous peoples and Europeans were anticipated by centuries of inter-island contact and cultural exchange. This contact antedated the scientific exploration, missionization, and colonization of the Pacific that dominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before Bougainville (1766–9), Cook (1768–71; 1772–5; 1776–80), La Pérouse (1786–8), and Vancouver (1791–5) came the visits of South Asian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch voyagers, and, prior to that, the exploration of the Pacific by indigenous peoples themselves (Meleisea and Schoeffel 1997, 120). Thus, rather than emphasizing first-contact, rupture, and discontinuity, future histories of Oceania seem increasingly likely to adopt a network model, showing how cultures were affected by complex, often globalized, webs of cultural and intellectual production that served various kinds of transnational, national, local, and individual ends (Liebersohn 2006, 8–9). Indigenous exchange, Pan-Pacific commonalities, and cultural identity and regionalism will thus emerge as constitutive factors in the evolution of Oceanian music (cf. Kaeppler et al. 1998).

Encounter music Recent scholarship on Oceania’s networks of knowledge and culture obviates the need to reconstruct forgotten forms of musical practice or trace strands of musical dissemination and appropriation. Instead, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyage writing may be examined in terms of what it says about the use of music and dance within moments of cross-cultural exchange. Adopting such an approach allows music to be conceived as a form of encounter practice – a medium that, in Tia DeNora’s terms, “did things” in the world

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(DeNora 2000, 96). Within the cross-cultural context, music was not necessarily the obedient servant of its producers, nor were its effects automatically allied with the social and political interests of its respective producers. Music’s effects were often unexpected. Exchanging music fostered hospitality and trade and served strategic purposes, but on occasion it also acted disinterestedly, promoting a kind of sociability: sailors and islanders sang and danced spontaneously for one another, naturalists swopped songs with local people, and Polynesian visitors to Europe attended concerts and the opera and sang for their hosts (cf. J. R. Forster 1996, 241; G. Forster 2000, II, 534–5; Anon. 1789, 143–4). Conceiving of music as a form of encounter practice means that we are not constrained by historiographic and ethnomusicological approaches that explore the ways in which discrete musical vernaculars were tensioned by their exposure to foreign influences: European music did not confront Oceanian music on a Pacific beach, with potentially fatal consequences for the latter and enriching ones for the former. Instead, encounter music may be thought of as a form of relational practice, one that was always local, often spontaneous and provisional, and at times uncontrollable. Examining the mechanisms of encounter music enriches our cross-cultural understanding; it is also likely to tell us something about music itself. It is, after all, in these sorts of encounters that we may discover which musical effects were dependent on interpretation and context, and which remain the product of collective ways of hearing, feeling, and being. Music and dance constituted an important aspect of Oceanian voyaging: sea songs, fiddle tunes, and hornpipes provided exercise and recreation for European sailors and officers during long passages at sea. The British Admiralty did not officially condone shantying, but singing and playing are known to have facilitated work in the wooden world (Hawkins 1875, II, 22; Roger 2004, 503–5; Woodfield 1995). Sailors everywhere recognized that music and dance could be useful for managing interactions between people unfamiliar with one another’s ways and limited in their capacity for linguistic communication. Among the first Europeans to put this into practice in Oceania was Abel Tasman. In Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), his sailors heard sounds near the ship and assumed they were produced by some sort of trumpet (Brosses 1766–8, II, 360); in New Zealand, Māori were often observed playing on a shell trumpet and were quickly answered with instruments that the sailors carried on board (ibid., 361). By the late eighteenth century, the British Admiralty determined that marines should be specially trained in the fiddle and pipe and dispatched on voyages bound for discoveries; officers were duly advised on the kinds of

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music that might appeal to new sets of listeners (Agnew 2001). There were other efforts made to export European music. When Cook returned the London-visitor Mai to Polynesia, Mai was presented with a dollhouse, a suit of armor, weapons, livestock, farm implements, and seeds; he was also given a barrel organ that may have played exemplary tunes like “The King of Prussia’s March” and the Adagio from Corelli’s G minor Concerto, Op. 6 (Burney 1991, 26–8). It was hoped that Mai might ultimately use his things to model European ways and provide an improving example to his countrymen (Guest 2001). While Mai was being reinstated and Cook re-provisioned at the island, a series of feasts, concerts, plays, and firework displays were staged with the aim of promoting harmony: “The drums, trumpets, bagpipes, hautboys, flutes, violins, and in short, the whole band of music attended, took it by turns to play while dinner was getting ready; and when the company were seated, the whole band joined in full concert, to the admiration of crowds of the inhabitants, who were assembled round the house on this occasion” (Ledyard 1781, 163). In order to recommend the low-born Mai to the chiefs in a place where it was known that rank could “not be purchased” (ibid., 162), Cook “made entertainments for the young princesses and their brothers, with music and dancing according to the English fashion; and to please the public in general, Capt. Cook caused fire-works to be played off almost every other night, for their diversion” (ibid., 165). According to one of Cook’s men, John Ledyard, the music making took place against a backdrop of violence, including grisly punishments meted out for thievery (ibid., 161). It seems unlikely that the barrel organ and the band achieved their intended ends – although the possibility has been raised that Mai’s barrel organ introduced Western harmony to the Tahitians (McLean 1999, 40). Jacques Labillardière, who accompanied a voyage in the early 1790s in search of the missing Frenchman La Pérouse, was among the few late eighteenthcentury commentators to publish transcriptions of Oceanic music (Labillardière 1800); he also reported a wide range of responses to European music making. When his ship arrived at the Bismarck Archipelago to the north of New Guinea, seamen tested the effects of a ship’s bell on a group of Admiralty Islanders. The men fled but could be persuaded to return when the ship’s fiddler played some tunes. In Buka Island, music was exchanged within the context of trade. Offers of handkerchiefs, bottles, and pieces of red cloth encouraged a group of people to approach the ship. Being acquainted with the method of barter, the islanders quickly established the value of their goods and bartered a bow and arrows for some handkerchiefs. Labillardière noted that, because of the “sweetness of their language,” these islanders were good mimics and easily imitated words

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spoken to them by the sailors. They also responded enthusiastically to the sailors’ musicking: One of the gunners went for his fiddle, and played them some tunes; and we had the pleasure to see that they were not insensible to music. They offered us a number of things in exchange for the instrument, making signs for it, by imitation the motions of the fiddler upon a paddle. But they soon found that their solicitations were fruitless. It was the only fiddle by which the ship’s company danced; and we had too long a voyage before us, to think of parting with the instrument, which procured us an exercise so salutary to seamen. (ibid., I, 270–1)

The visitors noted that the Bukanese were especially fond of loud, lively tunes, listening “with very great attention.” Labillardière thought that their pleasure in the music was irrepressible – they kept time by constantly moving their arms and bodies – and to him this signified “unequivocal proofs of their sensibility” (ibid., I, 272). In Tasmania the following year, the voyagers expected fiddle music to meet with equal approbation. The violinist took his instrument ashore, “imagining that he should excite as much enthusiasm among them by some noisy tunes, as we had observed in the islanders at Bouka; but his self-love was truly mortified,” writes Labillardière, “at the indifference shown to his performance here. Savages, in general,” he concluded, “are not very sensible to the tones of stringed instruments” (ibid., II, 45). Labillardière’s remarks were in keeping with widespread perceptions about the standing of Tasmanian Aborigines relative to other Oceanic peoples. Yet his remarks also show how indigenous responses to European music (as well as indigenous music itself) became a yardstick in the appraisal of non-European peoples. James Magra, an ordinary seaman on Cook’s first voyage, assumed that there were direct links between the islanders’ physical disposition and their cultural practice. The Tahitians’ stature, erect posture, and gracefulness, he thought, exceeded that of the “most delicate European woman” and was owed to the fact that Tahitians were habituated from early childhood to the “very extravagant distortions and gesticulations” characteristic of their dances (Anon. 1771, 42–3). Commentators of Marc Joseph Marion du Fresne’s 1771 circumnavigation drew more prejudicial connections between physical appearance, moral character, and indigenous music and dance. Dispatched to return the Tahitian Aotourou after his visit to Paris, the Frenchmen arrived in New Zealand, where the captain was killed in a bloody skirmish. Here, dance was construed as a compensation for Māori bellicosity and taken as evidence of the islanders’ unrestrained libido and lumbering physicality (the men danced so heavily on the ship that the sailors were afraid the decking would break). The captain’s deputy Julien Crozet concluded that if Māori singing and dancing

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were alternately warlike and lascivious, this was only to be expected from a people who fought frequently, then ate their victims (Rochon 1891, 65). Because non-Europeans were often assumed to respond instinctually to music, positive responses to European music were sometimes taken as a sign of primitiveness. Disliking European music, however, seemed to evince a lack of discernment and this, too, was seen as a marker of primitiveness. Theorists further assumed there was a one-to-one correspondence between a people’s physical appearance, moral character, sociopolitical organization, and cultural forms – criteria were expected to move in consort up or down the ladder of civilization. Thus, commercial behavior and a high level of sociopolitical organization were supposedly accompanied by cultural sophistication and physical attractiveness, whereas unattractive people were meant to have rudimentary social structures, little grasp of commerce, and simple, ugly music. Even if encounter music was never easily reconciled to this kind of reductive thinking, commentary on the performance and reception of music does have to be factored into the racialization of indigenous peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Historical sources In reconstructing eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cross-cultural musical encounters, we rely on voyage and travel accounts, missionary and colonial documents, instrument collections, transcriptions, and, to a lesser extent, book illustrations and other visual records. This body of material was produced and compiled predominantly by Europeans and North Americans; the material was also informed, and hence intellectually constrained, by the colonial, commercial, and missionary contexts within which it was produced. Works by indigenous people have also survived. A 1769 painting by a Polynesian priest, for instance, shows members of the traveling religious sect, the arioi, sitting in a group, playing nose flutes and drums. The painting was long attributed to the “Artist of the Chief Mourner” and sometimes to James Cook’s naturalist Joseph Banks. It is now known that the artist was an arii from Raiatea in the Society Islands, a man named Tupaia who sailed with Cook and acted as his first-voyage informant in Polynesia (K. V. Smith 2005, 5) (Fig. 7.1). Tupaia’s painting provides a rare, self-reflective perspective on indigenous music making, but the painting is also significant because European artists themselves left comparatively few visual records of non-European musical performances. Why European artists generally favored subjects like dance and warfare over equally unfamiliar, but no less spectacular, music making is a matter for speculation. Perhaps artists were hampered by the inconvenience of working

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Fig. 7.1 Tupaia, [Musicians of Tahiti, June 1769] Four Tahitians: two dressed in the mare playing the nose flute; two dressed in the tiputa beating drums. “In my mornings walk today I met a company of travelling musicians; they told me where they should be at night so after supper we all repaired to the place. There was a large concourse of people round this band, which consisted of 2 flutes and three drums.” Banks, Journal I, p. 290, June 12, 1769 in the field and by the difficulties of rendering unfamiliar sounds in visual terms. Music also had a comparatively low aesthetic status in eighteenthcentury Europe, and the allegorical conventions governing its representation may not have been readily transposable to a cross-cultural context. Finally, European artists seem to have been limited by their own biases: the perceived superiority of stringed instruments over wind and percussion seems to have made it difficult to acknowledge the existence, let alone significance or sophistication, of Oceania’s ubiquitous membranophones and idiophones. James Cook’s three circumnavigations benefited from the presence of trained artists and, in the official accounts, we find isolated depictions of Polynesian musicians and musical instruments, including illustrations of islanders playing the nose flute and drums (see Fig. 7.2). Elsewhere, panpipes, drums, and nose flutes are represented alongside fishing hooks, spears, baskets, and other items of indigenous manufacture (see Fig. 7.3). This decontextualized representation

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Fig. 7.2 Engraving by F. Bartolozzi after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, A View of the Inside of a House in the Island of Ulietea [Raiatea], with the representation of a dance to the music of the country

of musical instruments reminds us that indigenous music was, by and large, not yet a discrete category of intellectual inquiry among European observers in Oceania. Music historians like Charles Burney and John Hawkins would refer to non-European instruments in their universal histories but only in passing, always in contrastive terms, and within the context of their conjectural histories. Thus, the shell trumpet heard by European travelers to New Zealand was made to serve as a model for the kind of trumpet that Burney, in his General History, supposed the Greeks might have developed subsequent to the Trojan War: the shell trumpet was, he said, a “rough and noisy signal of battle” (Burney 1789, 370). The morphological similarities between Tongan panpipes and ancient Greek ones were likewise taken as evidence of both the natural character of these instruments and proof of the rudimentary level of development of the Tongans. Burney ruled out the possibility that “there ever could have been the least intercourse or communication” between Europeans and Oceanian peoples: the incidence of similar instruments in different parts of the world must instead indicate a kind of cultural polygenesis (ibid., 271). In arriving at this conclusion,

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Fig. 7.3 Engraving by John Record after John Frederick Miller [Tools and instruments from the Society Islands]

Burney would mark a break with the kind of diffusionist thinking that came to dominate some later anthropological and ethnomusicological research on Oceania (cf. Graebner 1903). Not until the mid- to late nineteenth century, with the systematization and institutionalization of ethnomusicological inquiry, would Oceanian music and musical instruments be singled out for focused, comparative study, transcription, and visual representation. The paucity of information about eighteenth-century music makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct accurately and comprehensively indigenous musical instruments, scales, repertories, and performance practices. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century depictions of Oceanian musical instruments, nonetheless, do provide insights into European categories of perception. They show, for instance, that indigenous musical instruments were evaluated according to a European visual aesthetic that stressed form over function (cf. A. Thomas 1981): commentators attached greater significance to the intricate craftsmanship and elaborate decoration on some of the instruments than they did to the instruments’

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sound-producing capabilities. Musical instruments were also depicted in conjunction with weapons, allowing us to speculate about the ambiguous status of non-European music during the early contact period. On the one hand, indigenous music was seen as compensatory – a sign of the islanders’ potential for improvement. On the other hand, indigenous music was seen as a corollary of the very violence that was thought to mark non-Europeans as uncivilized and inferior in the first place. Such contradictions are also voiced in the textual accounts accompanying the illustrations. In New Zealand, Tonga, and parts of Melanesia, commentators had particular difficulty reconciling their theories about progress with what they actually saw and heard. Specifically, the interest and appeal of Māori, Tongan, and Vanuatan music could not be properly reconciled with the islanders’ apparently low level of social and cultural development (Agnew 2008a, 182). Such contradictions went unresolved in late Enlightenment accounts of Oceanian music. Later accounts, in contrast, tended to smooth over the conceptual anomalies. The specificity or complexity of indigenous music, along with its affecting character, was often minimized in keeping with prevailing racial and anthropological theories. In his 1854 contribution to music aesthetics, Eduard Hanslick, for instance, rendered Polynesian music the very antithesis of musical sophistication and beauty: “When the South Sea Islanders clap rhythmically with metal pieces and wooden sticks while emitting an unintelligible howl,” he writes, “then that is natural music for the very reason that it is no music” (Hanslick 1986, 86–7). Max Weber would likewise set up non-European music as a logical straw man in his sociological account of the rational underpinnings of Western music. The originality of prohibiting consecutive fifths in Western counterpoint was contrasted with the use of parallelism in other musical cultures, including Indonesia, where parallel fourths and fifths were said to be common, and the Admiralty Islands, which used parallel seconds (Weber 1958, 81; cf. Hornbostel 1909). Such later reporting stands, then, in marked contrast to some of the records dating from the late eighteenth century. These include works by the official artist on Cook’s third voyage, John Webber. Webber’s A Night Dance by Women in Hapaee and A Night Dance by Men in Hapaee (Webber 1784) depict performances staged by the Tongan chief for Cook in 1777: sailors and officers are shown attentively observing the performances, which involved elaborate displays of skill and artistic ingenuity. The illustrations are noteworthy for a number of reasons: first, they draw on eighteenth-century theatrical and artistic conventions to show scenes in which the dancers and musicians are illuminated, while the observers, shown from behind, remain in darkness (Joppien and Smith 1985–8, III, 35–6) (see Fig. 7.4). Second, these are among

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Fig. 7.4 William Sharp, A Night Dance by Men in Hapaee

the only illustrations of the period to represent both musicians and audience members, thereby providing a full context for the way encounter music was performed and received. Finally, Webber’s illustrations suggest some of the ways that encounter music served strategic purposes. The apparently peaceful and diverting entertainment gave form to a vicious power struggle, and concealed behind the performances was a plot to murder the visitors (cf. N. Thomas 2003, 317–18; Agnew 2008b, 99–103). Few transcriptions of Oceanian music date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. James Burney, son of the music historian, was the first to transcribe samples of Polynesian music and his record contributed to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates about the origins of harmony and the progress of music. Naturalists and sailors returned with instruments like the Tahitian nose flute (vivo), but this tended to attract curiosity and ridicule rather than serious interest among contemporary commentators. Other instruments like the panpipes (mimiha) were found in various parts of Oceania, including the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, Tonga, and Samoa, and a few such instruments were taken back to Europe. The fact that the panpipe was common to both Europe and Oceania prompted musicological discussion, including the publication in 1775 of two articles by Joshua Steele about possible tunings of the instrument. William Shield’s and John O’Keefe’s pantomime Omai; Or, A Trip

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Round the World (1785) brought the South Seas to yet a wider public. The musical accompaniment incorporated a large wooden slit drum (nafa), blasts of the conch-shell (pū), and the oblong paddles typically used to accompany the Tongan me’etu’ upaki (“standing dance with paddles”) (cf. Martin 1817, 317–19). Covent Garden theatergoers were treated not only to these unfamiliar percussion instruments but also to Irish tunes, minstrelsy, and the first transcription of a sea shanty (Troost n.d.). Metropolitan listeners did, then, have some exposure to Polynesian music; in contradistinction to Chinese and Ottoman musical elements, however, which early found their way into the Western musical repertory, Oceanian music did not lend itself to comparable exoticization. Oceanian music seems to have been too unfamiliar and too varied to be readily quoted to a metropolitan public – at least until the emergence of an identifiably Hawaiian, acculturated idiom in the nineteenth century. Like all scholars of the past, we might wish for a fuller, more multivocal record of the music of long ago, a record that would allow us to rehear forgotten music and understand what it meant to its practitioners. We would wish to know more about the music performed on Pacific beaches and at ceremonies upcountry; more about indigenous modes of musical transmission than what was reported, for example, by a missionary like James Montgomery when he told of Aborigines handing off songs across tribal boundaries (Montgomery 1831, 177–8). There remain too few songs of sailors, whalers, and traders, improvised responses to their arrival, himene that adapted Tahitian words to European melodies, travelers’ incantations, and chants that accompanied the launching of canoes (Henry 1985, 178–82, 276). Voyage and travel accounts are thus sometimes considered a limited and problematic corpus for this kind of reconstructive enterprise (Kaden 1994, 253). It is, however, important to recognize the significance of voyage accounts to contemporaneous readers. Eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury accounts were typically prefaced by an insistence on the veracity of the work, as well as by claims about the significance of voyage and travel literature generally. For instance, William Smith, one of the first missionaries to Tahiti, pointed out that there was no genre more popular or consumed with greater interest than navigators’ “authentic narratives.” The value of the genre lay, he said, in its capacity to combine pleasure and utility: readers could empathize with the travelers’ adventures and be entertained and morally improved in the process (Smith 1813, iii). This sort of moral dimension is particularly evident in the work of George Vason, a member of the London Missionary Society 1796 expedition to Tonga. Framing his memoir as a tale of double apostasy, Vason first renounced missionary

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work to live among the Tongans then renounced Tongan ways for a return to Christian England. The account contrasts an indolent life enlivened by beautiful dancing and melodious singing, with descriptions of cannibalism and bloody interstitial clashes. Readers could, in other words, be entertained by accounts of Tongan life even while following an example of Christian imitatio. Other missionary accounts, like William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches (Ellis 1829), were more distinctly ethnographic in character. Ellis provided lengthy, illustrated descriptions of Polynesian musical instruments, ceremonies, and song texts, together with contextual information. His account of Tahitians using song to adjudicate a dispute tells both of Captain Bligh’s interactions with Tahitians in the 1780s and about the ways in which indigenous knowledge was preserved and recalled in song (ibid., 286–7). The synthetic and comparative perspective in works such as this would form a model for later ethnographic and ethnomusicological writing. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, voyage commentators had begun to remark on changes to indigenous music making. On the one hand, the introduction of European musical idioms seemed to confirm indigenous improvability and missionary successes. On the other hand, commentators expressed a sense of nostalgia for the passing of the old ways and what they perceived to be an accompanying loss of innocence. This sort of ambivalence is evident in an account of Hawaii written in the mid-1820s. British naval officer George Anson Byron reported that the Hawaiians were not “entirely destitute of music” and possessed the “first rude indications of the imitative arts.” Their songs preserved their history, including a record of the settlement of the Pacific and of indigenous encounters with Europeans like Cook (Byron 1826, 19). Under these kinds of pressures some Hawaiian musical instruments fell into disuse and have since been forgotten. Yet even while regretting this loss of tradition, Byron was quick to praise the efforts of the American missionaries. Describing the burial of Kamehameha II (c. 1797–1824) and his wife after their fateful visit to London, Byron described how a native choir sang a hymn written by the missionaries and set to a tune by Pleyel. This affecting ceremony, observed Byron, evidenced the “marvelous and rapid change” brought about by the church: “Everything native-born and ancient in the Isles was passing away.” The dead chiefs lay arrayed before them; “naked savages” were now clad in “decent clothing” and “the savage yells of brutal orgies were now silenced.” For the first time, “[S]olemn sounds . . . [united] the instruments of Europe and the composition of a learned musician, to the simple voice of the savage.” Hearing this, he concluded, “[I]t was impossible not to feel a sensation approaching to awe” (ibid., 128–30). This combination of nostalgia, civilization critique, and commitment to progress would be taken up in later

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nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentary on Oceanic music. Pioneers of ethnomusicology like Erich von Hornbostel and Carl Stumpf, charged with a salvage mission, felt a sense of urgency about preserving old traditions before missionaries, settlers, and colonial officials eradicated them altogether. For present-day readers, voyage accounts provide an often-vivid record of the ways in which music worked relationally. From voyagers and travelers we learn about music’s capacity to frighten, amuse, bore, flatter, distract, regulate, convert, socialize, and elevate listeners. Perhaps the abiding value of European voyage accounts lies, then, not in their contribution to discrete ethnographies of Oceanian or Western musics; rather, their value lies in what they can tell us about how strangers encountered one another through organized music making. They remind us that music can be defined in more ways than one: Western assumptions about the social and public character of music are confounded by notions of ownership, restricted audience, and secrecy prevalent in parts of Oceania. Western categories of musical knowledge making are also unsettled by the kinds of difference these accounts invoke – the intimate connection between music and religious beliefs in eastern Polynesia; the absence of collective terms for “music” and “musical instruments” in Polynesian languages (B. B. Smith n.d.); by the interconnection between music and dance; and by the blurring of categories in, for instance, Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Sepik region, where instrumental music was also traditionally sometimes considered “song” (Yamada 1997, 236). Western music historiography may have been predicated on cleaving music from dance and dichotomizing serious and popular, instrumental and vocal, and sacred and secular musics; however, encounter music shows up the limitations of this conceptual apparatus and highlights the need for additional modes of analysis. As Amy K. Stillman argues, historicizing Oceanian music means examining the music along with its social context (Stillman 1995, 2) – a charge that also could be extended to the Western musicological tradition. Encounter music serves, then, as an ongoing challenge to the way we think about ethnomusicology – not only as a presentist enterprise but also as a historical one (Bohlman 1991; Tomlinson 2007, 4) – and it serves as a challenge to a discipline that emerged within the context of colonial encounters (Erlmann 1999, 8; Agnew 2005). Encounter music marked a new aural occurrence in the soundscapes of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyagers and islanders, and it impacted the social relations and power dynamics of the transacting parties. Rather than attempting to reconstruct discrete and static musical cultures from limited sets of sources, we might think in terms of cultures stretched, tested, and changed by the arrival of new listeners and by the provocation provided by strange sounds. As Kirsty Gillespie (2007) suggests, the history of encounters

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between indigenous peoples, and between indigenous peoples and other strangers, including Europeans, is preserved in music. Music is, in some sense, a reenactment of those earlier encounters, and of the peoples’ struggles and accommodations. The task of encounter music is to retain and explicate that history of entangled sounds.

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Narratives of the Disasters which Attended the First Effort of the ‘London Missionary Society’. With an Appendix; Containing Interesting Circumstances in the Life of Captain James Wilson, the Commander of the Duff, when he was Engaged in the Wars in the East Indies, and taken Prisoner by Hyder Ally’s troops, – his bold attempt to escape, and subsequent difficulties, New York: Collins Stillman, A. K. (1995) ‘Not all hula songs are created equal: Reading the historical nature of repertoire in Polynesia’, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, 27: 1–12 Thomas, A. (1981) ‘The study of acculturated music in Oceania: “Cheap and Tawdry Borrowed Tunes”?’, The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 90: 183–91 Thomas, N. (1997) In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2003) Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook, New York: Walker Tomlinson, G. (2007) The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact, Cambridge University Press Troost, L. (n.d.) ‘Shield, William’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/subscriber/ article/grove/music/25638 (accessed June 31, 2009) Vancouver, G. (1798) A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World; in which the Coast of North-West America has been Carefully Examined and Accurately Surveyed. Undertaken by His Majesty’s Command, Principally with a View to Ascertain the Existence of any Navigable Communication Between the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans; and Performed in the Years 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795, in the Discovery Sloop of War, and Armed Tender Chatham, under the command of Captain George Vancouver, 3 vols., London: G. G. and J. Robinson, and J. Edwards Vason, G. (1840) Narrative of the late George Vason, of Nottingham. One of the First Missionaries Sent out by the London Missionary Society, in the Ship Duff, Captain Wilson, 1796. Giving an Account of his Voyage Outward, Settlement in Tongataboo, Apostacy, Heathen Life, Escape from the Island, Return to England, Subsequent Life, and Death in 1836, aged 66 years, Derby: Henry Mozley and Sons Weber, M. (1958) The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. by D. Martindale, J. Riedel, and G. Neuwirth, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press Woodfield, I. (1995) English Musicians in the Age of Exploration, Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press Yamada, Y. (1997) Songs of Spirits: An Ethnography of Sounds in a Papua New Guinea Society, trans. by Jun’ichi Ohno, Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies

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Music, history, and the sacred in South Asia JAIME JONES

Walking into a record store in South Asia, one is confronted with a vast array of labels, in English, Hindi, and regional languages, marking different genres and subgenres of music, none of which incorporates the word “sacred.” Yet sacred music is far from absent; it is found in and among the labels, bleeding over into other territories, engaging freely in stylistic hybridity. Regional music, indicated by place or language, may also comprise music that is used in local rituals. Folk music may consist of performances of Hindu epics. Devotional music may comprise slickly produced remixes of regional sacred forms. Compilations by both Bollywood playback stars and Hindustani classical pandits feature bhajans (Hindu hymns) or qawwālī (Indo-Sufi ritual music). The current state of record store shelves might be attributed, optimistically, to the diversity of sacred musical practices throughout the subcontinent. A more pessimistic viewpoint would see this as evidence of the commercialization and standardization of devotional musics that only appear diverse on the surface. Both perspectives are true, at least in part. What this unmistakably reveals is the powerful tie between music and the sacred in South Asia. There is no such thing as “sacred music” in South Asia, but one might argue that all South Asian music is potentially sacred. The omnipresence of sacred musical expression complicates any attempt to isolate, let alone historicize, its multiple, diverse, and overlapping streams. “Little” musical devotional practices are pulled into mainstream – often nationalizing – projects in strategic ways, their own histories often obfuscated in the process. Different religious and sonic ideologies that have influenced and mutually informed one another historically are reconfigured in the writing of national histories. The performance of sacred music is simultaneously repetitive and creative, cyclic and linear, heightened and mundane. Sacred musical traditions in South Asia rely upon a productive tension between notions of history and timelessness, a tension that plays into both historical narratives about sacred music and sacred musical performances themselves. In this chapter, I investigate the complex interplay between music, history, and the sacred, first by examining broad historical constructions of religion and music in South Asia. In the most recent past, nationalism and communalism

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have been the agents that justify particular histories of religious music; these are the same histories that tend to stabilize Hindu practices into Hinduism and that oversimplify or ignore much of the creative ideological borrowing that has taken place between Hinduism, its relatives (Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism), and South Asian Islamic and Christian practices. Arguably this tendency toward mainstreaming has contributed to increased coherence between mainstream musical practices (including Hindustani and Karnatak art-music traditions, but also popular music) and regional, folk, or devotional practices. This process also places local devotional musics into a particular (chronological) relation with the mainstream, fixing them in the past. Yet these histories that are invented and anxiously repeated reveal a number of cracks and fissures that situate religious musics in South Asia not only as fluid and transforming but also as contested. This is particularly important to recognize in a context where these traditions are understood as unchanging and timeless. In addition to repertories and genres being drawn into histories, the performance of sacred music also addresses ideas about history (and its other, timelessness); as such, this is my second area of investigation. While the tension between timelessness and history in sacred music is not unique to South Asia, it is a frequent and critical factor in conceptualizations, codifications, and performances of religious music in the subcontinent. In part, this tension is rooted in the nature of music, in particular music’s structural reliance upon time and its potential to create altered experiences of temporality. It is used for precisely this potential, usually to do several, often contradictory, things at once. The music of ritual, for example, is used to invoke divine presence, to activate listeners’ engagement with god, and to signal a way into and out of an elevated consciousness, among other purposes. These functions suggest that ritual music allows human beings to engage with the ever-present, the infinite, the absolute. Yet at the same time, the musicians, genres, texts, and contexts of sacred musical performance in South Asia actively situate specific histories, consistently tying the concrete to the ineffable. Devotional repertories refer not only to the divine but also to real places and individuals, marking not an absolute but often an intensely local and particular way of understanding and of being in the world. This tension might be better described as an intersection between timelessness and history, and musical performance provides a way in which personal experience is not only accounted for and expressed but also felt, in relation to an unchanging same. By examining sacred music in South Asian history, and history in South Asian sacred music, I hope to reveal both how this relationship has been mobilized by large-scale narratives and how musical performance provides opportunities to revise those narratives.

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Sacred music in South Asian history The history of South Asian sacred music is complicated by the diversity of belief systems with which South Asians substantially engage. Major religions (Hinduism, Islam, Buddism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Christianity) compete with multiple religious practices. One solution to this problem has been to deal with sacred music primarily in the conceptual domain; for example, in research that explores ideologies of sound in South Asian religions (Rowell 1992; Beck 1993; Coward and Goa 2004). Ethnomusicologists who treat religious music as performance often recognize the complex dynamics that have rendered these traditions syncretic and highly variable on local levels. It has become standard, for example, to refer not to Hinduism but to “the religious complexes that make up Hinduism” (Kelting 2012), and one might just as easily refer to the existence of the “religious complexes” that have made up Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian practice in South Asia. Another solution common to ethnomusicological scholarship on South Asia has been to focus on the local and the particular in sacred music, to isolate a performance, a genre, a sect, or an individual – highlighting histories rather than history (Alter 2008; Capwell 1986; Qureshi 1995; Schultz 2002 and 2008). Successful studies of this nature frequently engage with larger trajectories and forces, using specific instantiations to highlight dialogic relationships between the multiple and the singular, and sometimes the little and the great. In this section, I use an opposite strategy, focusing instead on the treatment of sacred music in South Asian history – a history largely written during and after British rule. The large-scale historical narratives created and sustained in South Asia from the late eighteenth century do the work of maintaining the timelessness of nations in the face of nation-states’ modernity (Anderson 2006). Religion and sacred music, mapped onto newly bordered territories, signify perpetuity and become fixed as ideas even when they remain fluid in practice. The conflation of religion and the state, enacted (in part) to unify diverse communities, has resulted in religious mainstreams built upon a concept of the majority. This has inevitably resulted in the emergence of religious minorities as a “problem” to be managed, in cultural, legal, and political dimensions. The oppositions that emerge in the light of these processes are not new, but they do take on new meanings in the context of the modern nation-state. Sacred music, in turn, cannot be separated from its symbolic role. The mainstreaming of religious identity and practice that characterizes national espousal (whether explicit or implicit) of majority religions has resulted in histories that subsume, and sometimes vilify, minority voices. In

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order to examine this more thoroughly, I turn now to the modern history of the South Asian nation that dominates the region’s imaginary. India, through its cultural and aesthetic inventions, is an idea built upon, yet uncomfortable with, the conventions of what is problematically understood as modernity. This perspective is based primarily on the work that has come out of postcolonial and subaltern studies, framed in particular on Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Benedict Anderson’s well-known “imagined community” (Anderson 2006). In The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), Chatterjee suggests that Anderson’s communities cannot fully account for postcolonial nationalisms because they are predicated upon a teleology that is inescapably Western. In other words, the histories that become newly imagined as futures in Anderson’s formulation are stable and predetermined. What this fails to explain are the conditions of colonialism and their effects on the imagination of the colonized. Taking India’s history as his example, Chatterjee illustrates how nationalism in India was not always coeval with political action; rather, it surfaced in interior understandings of an essential Indian culture that could remain true to itself (Chatterjee 1993, 6). Dipesh Chakrabarty nuances this concept in Provincializing Europe (2000) by illustrating the “decisionist” strategies used by Indian nationalists as disparate as Gandhi and Ambedkar, in order to interpret and manipulate a shared pastness (Chakrabarty 2000, 247). This implies an understanding of history (or simply “the past”) as something separate from the present, a body of knowledge that is usable in the forging of the future, which is again categorically separated from the present. For both Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, the constructs of India’s modernity are negotiations between the trappings of a Westernoriented infrastructure and the quasi-spiritual interiority of a continuous and unchanging “Indian” culture. This results in a dilemma to which sacrality is intimately connected. India as a modern nation-state describes itself as the largest secular democracy in the world. Yet the style and substance of Indian cultural nationalism relies largely upon structures and ideologies derived from Hinduism. Complicating this apparent opposition is the fact that India’s secularity is not predicated upon a separation between state and religion, but upon a structural tolerance of all religions. In other words, these “trappings of a Western-oriented infrastructure” are undermined in their Indian manifestation, and the Hinduism upon which Indian cultural nationalists have based their style is a mediated, popular Hinduism that was largely invented. The history of the Indian nation became a history of Hinduism largely through the work of a group of Orientalist scholars who positioned both music and religion in specific ways. While the foremost of these, Sir William

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Jones (1746–94), had some appreciation for the complex cohabitation of Hinduism and Islam on the subcontinent (Bakhle 2005, 51), Jones’s work was also central to the formulation of India as a “great civilization” – and a Hindu one at that. The revival of Sanskrit as a scholarly language, and its subsequent spread to the West, is largely the result of his keen interest in ancient texts that evidenced the cultural and philosophical achievements of India’s past. The discovery of Indian civilization by the West resulted in a privileging of both Hinduism and Sanskrit sources as pure and the renunciation of foreign texts and influences. Characterizations of Muslim musicians as ignorant, and of the decline of Hindustani music under their influence, became commonplace in the work of Orientalist scholars, including Jones as well as Captain N. Augustus Willard (Bor 2010). These perspectives, at least to some extent, were sustained by Indian Hindu nationalists during the independence movement and would have a lasting impact on the positioning of Indian music in (Hindu) Indian history. The Bengali intellectual Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840–1914) maintained an ambiguous position with regard to Indian independence. Though remaining loyal to the British crown, he also quite consciously and conspicuously promoted Hindu ideals and Indian cultural traditions (Bor 1988). For Tagore music became a key means of projecting proof of the greatness of Indian civilization to the West. His 1887 presentation to Empress Victoria, Six Ragas and Thirty-Six Raginis of the Hindus, was a collection of rāgamālā lithographs, short tunes in praise of the empress, and Sanskrit verses with translations describing each raga. It was designed in large part with the aim of displaying a rich, systematic, and complex classical tradition. The title deliberately obfuscates the presence of Muslim musicians and Islamic musical influence (Capwell 2002, 219), presenting a purified vision of Hindustani music to the outside world, regardless of the real circumstances of music and music making in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Of course, Tagore also sought to transform musical practice at home, which he did by propagandizing Hindu music in a number of essays and treatises published in Bengali and by establishing music schools that would lend pedagogical integrity and coherence to the tradition as well as elevate the social status of musicians (Capwell 2010, 288; see also Nettl and Bohlman’s Introduction in this volume). Tagore’s intervention into the history of Indian music is one that covertly erases the influence of a vilified Muslim minority from a great Hindu tradition. In this sense it is an extension of the British Orientalist perspective, appropriated as “a tool of self-agency” (Capwell 2010, 285). This example demonstrates two important trajectories for sacred music in Indian history: music becomes symbolically important to the cause of (Hindu) nationalism,

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and Islamic influence on North Indian classical music is hidden or purged.1 These trajectories extend through the independence movement, as Janaki Bhakle’s nuanced examination of the opposing agendas of V. N. Bhatkande and V. D. Paluskar reveals (Bakhle 2005). Musicological and historical research has begun to redress the erasure of Muslim agents and influence from the history of Hindustani music (Bor 2010; Powers 1979; Qureshi 1993; Sarmadee 2003; Schofield 2010; Wade 1998; Widdess 2010), yet the Hinduization of Hindustani music continues to shape popular discourse about it. Hindustani music is not the only dominant or national musical tradition to subsume the music of subcontinental religious others, nor are South Asian Muslims the only unheard minority in the telling of Indian history. The multiple and heterodox devotional musical practices of Hindus are also subsumed into nationalist, classical, and popular musics. These borrowings coalesce in the first few decades of the twentieth century, falling in line with the consolidation of a reformed, predominantly Vaishnava, and ultimately nationalized Hinduism, based upon the sentiment of devotion emphasized in the bhaktī sects. Bhaktī is an umbrella term for the local devotional sects that began to emerge in South India in the second half of the first millennium, later spreading throughout the subcontinent, flourishing through the Medieval era, and still existing today. Bhaktī practices are centered on the idea of the path of devotion advocated by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, maintaining that any person can attain liberation from the cycle of life through the activity of devoting oneself to god. This perspective emphasizes individual experience and interaction with the divine, and can also be characterized as a reaction against orthodox Brahminical Hinduism(s) and its hierarchical structure, insofar as it allows for both the agency and the authority of the lower castes. While bhaktī traditions throughout South Asia do share a set of generalized principles, the number and variety of its local manifestations reveal the tendency of devotees to incorporate ideals and practices from a number of other sources, Indo-Sufism prominently among them. Bhaktī music, which consists of vernacular songs written by singer-saints, is as a result highly variable from region to region, in terms of formal structure, instrumentation, and poetic style. For both Hindu revivalists and Indian nationalists interested in unifying a population against their colonizers, the sentiment of devotion (which could be transferred to the nation) and the felt agency of the individual were appealing

1 It is not the only “foreign” element to be erased from Hindustani music – evidenced by All India Radio’s attempt to purge the harmonium from common use in North India by banning its use on air from 1940 to 1971. While the explicit reasoning behind this had to do with the fact that its equal temperament and build was too limited in terms of imitating the slides and nuanced intonation of the voice, its symbolic associations with Christian missionaries and colonialism were not missed.

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elements of bhaktī practices. These emotional features, however, needed to be channeled into a relatively uniform, mainstream Hinduism with a recognizable style. As a result, bhaktī’s heterodox practices, the local and diverse ways of achieving devotion (so often manifested in vernacular, regional bhaktī song genres), were relegated to the outskirts of a new and increasingly far-reaching orthodoxy. Meanwhile, popular Vaishnava Hinduism was increasingly characterized as the prakrit mat (natural religion), and the concept of “Hindus” emerged as a unified, all-inclusive, and highly valuable cultural–political category (Dalmia 2006, 14–18). Those who bought into this new Pan-Indian Hinduism were, like their nation, marching forward in history, while devotees who retained the beliefs and practices of local bhaktī sects were increasingly understood as anachronistic. In this sense, India’s little traditions were othered. The new Hinduism was disseminated, rather than enforced, through the rhetoric of religious leaders circulated in pamphlets, the creative use of Hindu symbols and concepts on the part of the charismatic leaders of the independence movement, the nationalization of regional and newly invented Hindu festivals, and, of course, through music. Music was no longer mere proof of Indian civilization; rather, it became a vehicle to reinforce a national Hindu identity. Indian music, encompassing not only Hindustani and Karnatak art musics but also anthems and popular songs, was sacralized in a series of negotiations made by key agents in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In some cases, such as the rabindrasangit of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), which borrowed heavily from the metaphoric language and musical style of the Bauls of Bengal, sacrality was more philosophical than sectarian. The devotional content of Tagore’s songs was more abstract, universal, and therefore less politicized, combining a privileged conceptualization of the sacred within a modernist framework. The adoption of his “Jana Gana Mana,” a hymn that deifies India, as the national anthem in 1950 is therefore not surprising, as its nonsectarian sacralization of India reflected both the official secularity of the nation-state and the eternal sacrality of the nation. Tagore’s songs, despite official endorsement, were more the exception than the rule, and the sacralization of classical and popular music in India was largely carried out in terms of the Hindu revivalist agenda to purge “foreign” influences and syncretic forms. One of the key negotiators of this process was V. D. Paluskar (1872–1931), the Maharashtrian musician, Hindu nationalist, and pedagogue who spread his ideas on the style, status, and above all devotional nature of music through his music school: the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, first established in Lahore in 1901. One of his primary goals was to distance Hindustani music from its association with entertainment and to invest it

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with devotional function above all other things. Music, in his view, was a “live agent” and had to be reformed in order to serve its real purpose: to activate public belief in Hinduism, “the true and only faith” of India (Bakhle 2005, 138). This agenda was underscored by his own devotional nationalism and his explicitly chauvinist anti-Muslim stance; he, like the British Orientalists, blamed Muslim musicians for the misdirection of music from its sacred function. Paluskar’s work in Lahore and later in Bombay, carried out through his schools but also through his increasingly public engagement with the independence movement, aided in the sacralization of Indian music in two significant ways. First, his emphasis on the devotional function of Hindustani music had a lasting impact on the conceptualization and performance of North Indian classical music. Devotional song genres began to feature prominently in the repertories of Hindustani artists. Musical performance, regardless of genre, began to be understood as a form of religious practice. Teachers of music became spiritual gurus, worshipped by their students with the devotional intensity characteristic of bhaktī. These principles still figure prominently in the discourse of Hindustani classical music, especially in Maharashtra. The second way that Paluskar helped effect the sacralization of Indian music was through his positioning of the bhajan at the center of the nationalist cause. In his Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, the bhajan was promoted as the most important form of musical performance (Bakhle 2005, 7). Paluskar’s own performances and settings of bhajans came to widespread public attention when he began to become more actively involved with the independence movement. At the 1921 annual session of the Indian National Congress in Ahmedabad, he gave a celebrated performance of the first few couplets of “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram,” a bhajan associated with the bhaktī saint Ramdas. His rendition apparently parted the crowds that had prevented Gandhi from entering the hall (ibid., 165); Gandhi himself was later to use Paluskar’s version of the bhajan in his own performances of civil disobedience. Through pedagogic enforcement in the schools and efficacious performance on the national stage, Paluskar strategically positioned the Hindu bhajan as Indian music, creating an affective link between religious devotion and the nation. Despite differences in ideological and political motivations, the efforts of Indian nationalists like Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, and V. D. Paluskar had the collective effect of conflating religious (especially Hindu) music with Indian music, relying upon notions of timelessness represented through musical performance to convey also the timelessness of the nation. The paradox, of course, is that the conceptualization of the nation mobilized by these figures in the context of the independence movement is a modern one, extending the imaginary suggested by Western Orientalist

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scholars. In addition to relying upon music’s capacity to stimulate felt connection to the nation (and bearing much in common with nineteenth-century European nationalisms), revivalist reformers like these crucially move the ideals and genres of sacred music into the history of the Indian nation-state. In so doing, they provide a space for an India that, rather than merely aping Western forms, has the possibility of remaining true to itself. This truth was and is a powerful assertion of South Asian values and ideals, but it is also infinitely problematic because it sacrifices so many voices and creates so many others in its wake. When the bhajan enters history, as both a national music of India and a music that stabilizes pan-Indian Hindu practice, the result is a codification of style that draws upon features of Hindustani music and North Indian devotional songs. This stylistic unification helped to enable a consolidation of meaning. Indo-Sufi religious music, which had considerable influence on some of the bhaktī texts that comprised the ideological underpinnings of pan-Indian Hindu practice, was erased from the bhajan’s history. A multitude of other Hinduisms and their songs and traditions were marginalized, as were Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and Christian musics. Perhaps most surprising is the fact that Karnatak, or South Indian classical music, which had retained its ties to ritual devotional purpose, was also marginalized in the invention of a pan-Indian Hindu sound. The stabilization of a genre through historical revision and renewal often indicates the sudden emergence of that genre as symbolic, and therefore politicized. Different histories reveal different kinds of revision. A striking example of this is qawwālī’s transformation as a Pakistani national music during the growth of a fundamentalist Islam beginning in the 1970s. This Islamization movement was fostered by the cassette boom of the 1980s, when suddenly recordings of Qur’anic recitation were widely available; this category of aural expression was privileged as orthodox and challenged the status of qawwālī, which, though highly popular, bore such strong ties to Hindustani classical music and was an undeniably musical idiom. In response, musicians began to adapt Arabized musical elements; this is particularly noticeable in recordings from the late 1970s and 1980s. Qawwālī began to be performed in Arabic maqāmat (melodic modes), imitations of the Islamic call-to-prayer made their way into the music, and inserted verses that used Arabic instead of Urdu (Qureshi 1992–3, 119; Qureshi 1999, 93; Manuel 1993, 95; see also Qureshi in this volume). This link to the larger Islamic community of the Middle East was pursued quite intentionally by the producers (patrons, record companies, government, and musicians) of a genre that had to cater to a cumulatively more orthodox Pakistani public.

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The examination of sacred music in modern history reveals the processes by which genres are shaped and manipulated in order to do the work of creating modern, nationalized sentiment. I have placed a rather pessimistic emphasis on large-scale historical narratives and the revisions that seem designed to exclude or to ignore other minority devotional cultures. These other religious practices and sacred musical traditions have far from disappeared from South Asia; indeed, they are in dialogue with classical, popular, and national musical mainstreams. I turn now to some of these practices in order to articulate the ways in which history itself is conceptualized and created through performance.

History in South Asian sacred music South Asian conceptualizations of time are represented and performed in the musical structures of sacred music. While the religious traditions of the subcontinent rely upon differently nuanced ideas regarding the nature of time, most fixate on a productive tension between what might be called historical time and divine timelessness. Historical time is characterized by structures of measurement, linear trajectories, memory, and personality. Divine timelessness is characterized by the immeasurable, by cyclical unfolding, manifestation, and the loss of personality. Timelessness is represented through the use of mimetic sonic features, but it is also stimulated, or realized, through repetitive action. Historical time is remembered through the musical entextualization of lineage and personality, and it is also mediated by processes of becoming. These ontologically separate categories of temporality are often reconciled through performance, through hearing and being heard, in what amounts to a musical negotiation of sacralized history. Before turning to a series of concepts and genres that illustrate how these negotiations take place, I want briefly to consider constructions of time in South Asian religious ideologies. In Hindu thought, which in turn influences Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist ideologies, the dual nature of time appears in some of the earliest sources, including the Vedas. Lewis Rowell, citing Hume’s translation of the Maitri Upanishad, isolates a description of Brahma (the god of creation, and also of speech and sound) that conveys the distinction between temporalities: There are, assuredly, two forms of Brahma: Time and the Timeless. That which is prior to the sun is the Timeless (a-kāla), without parts (a-kala). But that which begins with the sun is Time, which has parts. (Rowell 1992, 180)

The timeless is indivisible in this formulation and, as a result, is impervious to change or movement. Rowell also characterizes this as internal time, which

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he contrasts with the “external time of daily experience, manifested in the seasonal recurrences of daily routines, and also in the sharp discontinuities of life” (ibid., 187). Music is often the agent that brings these two streams together, through some of the representational and performative modes that I explore below. Made of measurable discrete entities (pitch, rhythmic units, utterances), music is nonetheless perceived as a continuous flow, ultimately inseparable. Moreover, it evidences the simultaneity of both temporal streams. While Buddhist and Jain philosophies reject the idea that time is indivisible, the conceptualization prevalent in both systems suggests instead that time is a “succession of discrete instants,” and that the goal of ritual practice is to reject the apparent continuity and perceive “what exists between” those instants (ibid., 187). This construction, derivative yet differing from Hindu thought, also places emphasis on confluence – in this case the confluence of what seems to be (linear movement) and what actually is (absence). At the most basic level, Islamic philosophy, as in Christianity and Judaism, understands time as finite, beginning with Creation and continuing until the Day of Judgment, which is the End of Time. In this formulation time is created by God, but God exists outside of it. Regula Qureshi has emphasized how time, as an element of a purely human domain, is characterized in terms of affective context, reflected in the Urdu language used by South Asian Muslims. She suggests that temporal concepts are defined “not durationally but connotationally, as either favorable or damaging, as the source of experience, not just the temporal basis for it” (Qureshi 1994, 501). This rejects the idea of time as measurement, privileging instead human emotion and activity. Ritual, particularly in Indo-Sufi contexts, provides a space during which individual, affective, linear experience is brought into proximity to the realm of God, which exists outside of time. Qureshi characterizes Sufi ritual as “striving in time, being with God” (ibid., 504), indicating the ultimate aim of transcendence, of being-there while being-away, which is experienced emotionally and physically as hāl (ecstasy). Hindu and Hindu-derived religious philosophies are often understood as profoundly ahistorical, promoting a kind of anti-teleological worldview that emphasizes cyclicity, repetition, and stasis. Conversely, Islamic and other Abrahamic religions appear to promote teleological narratives, both of personal experience and of history. What brings together these two seemingly opposing viewpoints, in the sacred music of Hindu, Sufi, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and other traditions, is the sounding together of time and timelessness, of history and eternity, of the human and the divine.

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Timelessness in South Asian sacred music In nearly all world religious traditions, music is used in ritual because of its capacity to suggest the ineffable, the unworldly, and indeed the timeless. These qualities are simultaneously represented in musical structures and actively stimulated and perceived through practice. Two distinctive ways of doing this are especially relevant to South Asian religious traditions: the manifestation of primordial sound (nāda) and the use of repetition as ritual. Nāda, translated variously as primordial sound, eternal sound, causal sound, or simply musical sound, is an important concept that derives from Vedic Hinduism. Nāda is primordial in the sense that the universe begins with sound, eternal in the sense that it has no beginning or end, and causal in the sense that it is the “creative vital force by which the entire universe is animated” (Rowell 1992, 36). There is no god who created sound (and hence the universe); rather, by sound the gods exist. As Rowell translates from S´ārngadeva’s Sangītaratnākara, “We worship that divine sound, the life of consciousness in all beings and the supreme bliss, manifested in the form of the universe. By the adoration of sound, the gods Brahmā, Visnu, and S´iva are truly worshipped, for they are the embodiment of sound” (ibid., 38–9). The idea that sound is manifested rather than caused has important implications for musical representations of the sacred, particularly in Hindu and other Dharmic religious practices. While later thinkers in some branches of Hinduism, and certainly in Buddhism, rejected the notion that nāda was eternal and unbreachable, the use of sound structures that reflect the idea of manifestation and/or constant flow is common to many South Asian devotional musics. This idea is perhaps most developed metaphorically, in some of the sonic structures of Hindustani and Karnatak classical musics. One of the most complex renderings of this idea, however, is evidenced in the seemingly simple musical performance of OM. Rowell characterizes OM as the “eternal syllable” (aksara, the Sanskrit word for “syllable,” also means “imperishable”), that “contains in itself the entire phenomenal universe” (ibid., 36). The correct performance of OM, which is still a dominant practice in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist ritual, unifies both historical and divine time in a four-part conceptualization. Its three phonemes, A+U+M, performed with forward breath, downward breath, and diffused breath respectively, represent threefold, or historical, time, which encompasses the past, present, and future. The fourth unit of OM is silence, which transcends time (ibid., 36–7). Although its symbolic representation of two temporal streams is evident, OM in practice is also a tool that unites the human chanter with the divine universe through the breath.

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This principle holds in Indian music even when it is removed from the realm of ritual. It is largely through the integration of musical metaphors for nāda that Hindustani and Karnatak music are invested with sacrality. The use of drone instruments, the prevalence of cyclic structures that intensify but (arguably) do not progress, and the formal convention of an unmetered, meditative introduction, which makes the rāga manifest, are all reliant upon this idea. It is likely that most of these musical features developed much later than the Vedic era, in which the idea of nāda was conceived and expanded. Martin Clayton has suggested that some of these features in fact reveal the influence of Indo-Sufi musical practice, which utilized music as representation rather than regulation, and which also strongly emphasized cyclic structures (Clayton 2000, 17).2 Still, the understanding of these features as metaphorically timeless (and therefore sacred) dominates both North and South Indian classical traditions. While many religious activities rely on repetition, many South Asian sacred rituals are constituted solely by acts of repetitive utterance. The words that are uttered, be they Vedic verses, the OM syllable, or the name(s) of god, are symbols of divinity; many Dharmic religions take this further by investing the sounds themselves with divine status. By naming, that is to say, by sounding sacred words and texts, the individual grows closer to the essence articulated by its name. The sonic, and most often musical, reiteration of holy words also underscores the continuous presence of the divine; moreover, this continuity – constructed in both Islamic and Hindu temporal frameworks as outside of time – is given a momentary temporality so that it can be experienced. The collective performance of zikr (remembrance of God) by Indo-Sufi Muslims is demonstrative of the centrality of repetition in South Asian religious ritual. Remembrance takes place through verbal invocation, often using the phrase “La Ilaha Ilallah,” or “There is no God but God.” The principle of repetition used in zikr is not a static but a dynamic one, relying on “circular motion in time” (Qureshi 1994, 505). In the Sikh faith, great importance is placed on the practice of nām japō (literally, name repetition), an oftenvocalized meditation on the name(s) of God. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, described nām as itself a “manifestation of God” (Coward and Goa 2004, 64). The repetition of his name(s) constitutes simultaneously a path toward liberation and a union with the divine. The practice of japa (repeated utterance) is found in Hindu traditions as well. An eleventh-century Shaivite text reveals that by repeating Shiva’s name, the devotee experiences the 2 It should be noted that the drone is noticeably absent from his discussion, as it is noticeably absent from Indo-Sufi musical genres, like qawwālī, that otherwise bear so much in common with Hindustani art music. Drone instruments are frequently incorporated into Hindu ritual music.

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revelation that s/he is Shiva (Coward and Goa 2004, 55). In many traditions that situate repeated incantation at the center of ritual practice, the act of repetition itself is powerful, sometimes more powerful than the degree of intentionality with which each utterance is made. In each of these cases, the balance between repetition as a representation of the eternal and repetition as a means toward personal transformation is maintained.

Histories in South Asian sacred music Histories are both recorded and acted upon through sacred musical performance in South Asia. Music’s capacity for triggering memory has made it integral to the preservation of stories and lineages that bear witness to the multiple narratives that constitute religious traditions. It is also an agent by which people become divine, allowing gods and saints to enter history. The concepts of sung memorialization and the embodiment of divinity both figure prominently in South Asian religious practice. It is not only god(s) that people remember through the ritual act of naming. The concept of lineage, in historical and human terms, is frequently articulated in Hindu, Jain, Sufi, Sikh, and Indo-Christian practice. The emphasis on the names of human saints stems largely from the widespread influence of Sufi and bhaktī traditions, which featured songs composed in vernacular languages that were designed to teach and personalize religious practice. These songs, existing across South Asia though featuring different metrical and melodic organization, do bear the common feature of the incorporation of the composer’s name in the final couplet, for example, in a song by the fifteenth-century saint Kabir: Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves, and within it is the Creator: Within this vessel are the seven oceans and the unnumbered stars. The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within; And within this vessel the Eternal soundeth, and the spring wells up. Kabir says: “Listen to me, my Friend! My beloved Lord is within.” (Kabir 1915, 53)

The entextualization of human authorship in the devotional songs of South Asian bhaktī simultaneously personalizes and historicizes the text. These are songs resolutely composed by individuals, sung from one person to another. They are also songs that constitute vernacular histories, insofar as they provide records of times and events. The concept of lineage is also articulated through the emphasis placed on chains of transmission, which incorporate both spiritual and familial genealogies. This is referred to as silsilā in Indo-Sufi traditions, a term which refers not

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only to the major Sufi orders in South Asia but also to the individuated lineages by which a person traces their connection to founding saints and ultimately to the Prophet Muhammad. The Sikh faith was founded through the teachings of the ten gurus, which constitute a spiritual chain of succession. Hinduism incorporates notions of both spiritual and familial lineage. The shrāddha ritual, usually practiced during pitru paksha (a time of remembrance) incorporates the chanting of the names of both previous and future family generations. In Hindu contexts, spiritual lineage is denoted by the term parampara, which is also translated as “tradition.” Especially significant to bhaktī practice is the ritual activation of the saintly genealogy through the chanted rendering of the saints’ names. It is often through this kind of musical activation that the saints and the gods are not only remembered as history, but also enter into history, through a process of becoming. The physical embodiment of holiness, often through the literal personification of deities and saints, is the aim of a number of religious practices in South Asia. Pilgrimage, when devotees travel individually or en masse to sacred sites, often constitutes an experience in which time is perceived as timelessness, during which people move closer to the divine. In Maharashtra, one of the largest mass pilgrimages in the world takes place every year, during June or July, when devotees of the Vārkarī sect (a bhaktī tradition) travel to Pandharpur, the home of Vitthala, their primary deity. They sing the songs of the saints that comprise their spiritual lineage as they walk, every day, for nearly one month. These songs incorporate the names of the saints and often refer specifically to the journey itself, locating the pilgrims on the same road as their religious ancestors. The musical repetition of the saints’ words, the conception of the road as a space shared with the men and women who, in the golden age of the tradition (thirteenth through sixteenth centuries), experienced god directly, and the physical work of the journey all contribute to the transformation of ordinary people into the saints themselves. This notion of divine embodiment is both overtly and covertly sustained in practice. At one end of the spectrum are Indo-Sufi Muslims, who experience the heightened state of ecstasy while listening to qawwālī, which they express by dancing. An individual who has entered the trance of hāl is revered by those around him, and the musical structure of qawwālī has the suspension of this state as one of its primary aims (Qureshi 1995). This is not understood as possession, but it is treated as holy. At the other end of the spectrum lay traditions that incorporate music and dance rituals that explicitly seek possession by the gods. The practice of teyyam in Kerala is likely the result of the syncretic blending of pre-Aryan and Hindu ideologies, reflecting especially the influence of Shaivite, Shakti, and more recently Vaishnavite branches of

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Hinduism (see Mason in this volume). Teyyam is danced by Dalits, who are accompanied by drummers and a singer who recounts the stories of the gods that will possess the dancers. In the words of one such dancer, “In the trance it is God who speaks, and all the acts are the acts of the god – feeling, thinking, speaking. The dancer is an ordinary man, but this being is divine” (Dalrymple 2011, 31). During teyyam rituals, the rigid caste hierarchy, which still imposes untouchability upon Dalits by upper-caste Hindus, is inverted. By becoming gods, the Dalits are worshiped (and touched) by Brahmins. This constitutes a temporary intervention into the histories of individuals through the musical embodiment of divinity.

Hearing and being heard In South Asian sacred musical practice, the timeless and the historical meet in the paired concepts of hearing and being heard. Music is the medium through which divine voices speak (or rather, sing); it also is a powerful tool through which individuals sustain, mediate, or transform history. These two concepts depend upon one another, and they are substantiated in a number of ways and in multiple religious contexts and ideologies. The liturgical texts of Dharmic and Indo-Muslim religious practice are invested with a power that is made manifest in sound. The authority of these texts derives from their origin in sound. The Vedas (Hindu scripture) are characterized as ´ruti, s or “that which has been heard.” They derive not from gods, but from the all-pervading sacred universe, overheard and repeated rather than written. The Qur’an constitutes words that were spoken by God, through the angel Gabriel, which were heard and recorded by the Prophet Muhammad. The Guru Granth Sahib, the core text of Sikh ritual worship comprising the works of Hindu, Sikh, and Sufi saints, is gurbani, or God’s word “as spoken by a guru” (Coward and Goa 2004, 29). When any of these texts are re-sounded in ritual, a devotee experiences that sonic authority. Sacred sounds permeate the landscape of South Asia, and it is not only the sounds themselves but also how they are engaged that defines them as sacred. While these sounds differ in quality, nature, and meaning depending on the religious context, there is a common valuation of attentive listening that dominates diverse traditions that would otherwise seem to oppose one another. Coward and Goa note the “auditive energies” involved in IndoMuslim reception of Qur’anic recitation (Coward and Goa 2004, 44), and Qureshi, commenting on the mahfil-e-samā‘ (gathering for listening), which constitutes the most important collective ritual for Indo-Sufis, states that the focus of the event is on the listener (who does not sing) “and on his spiritual

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capacity for receiving what he hears, including all the implications of an ecstatic response” (Qureshi 1995, 82). Attentiveness is also valued in Hindu and Dharmic religious practice, particularly in an individual’s capacity to see the divine in worldly images and hear the divine in worldly sounds. The idea that there might be multiple meanings of a sonic event is one that is found in the earliest writings of the Vedic period. In his discussion of form in early Indian music, Lewis Rowell speaks of listening as circumaudition, which he characterizes as “a process of gradual discovery” (Rowell 1992, 228). It is up to the performer to communicate the affective and devotional content of music, and up to the listener to perceive its truth. Such perceptions are possible even in the case of recorded music (Qureshi 1992–3, 119; Greene 1999). Coward and Goa liken sacred musical experience in South Asia to the principle of dars´an, which means both seeing and being seen by the deity. Equally important for them is the idea of hearing and being heard (Coward and Goa 2004, 6). Singing is a powerful means of tuning oneself in to the divine nāda that, when done right, is also a tool for transformation. Crucially, sound is powerful when it is accurately performed; the emphasis on right sound is evidenced in the penalties for “wrong sound” listed in early phonetic manuals for Vedic recitation (Rowell 1992, 57), in evaluations of good and bad Qur’anic recitation, and in the principle of a mantra’s efficacy when performed intently and correctly. Not all sacred sound in South Asian religious practice relies upon such orthodox ideologies, and this is where the idea of not only hearing/performing the sacred, but also being heard, comes into play. The texts of Indo-Sufi, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Indo-Christian devotional repertories illuminate personal narratives that constantly bring the linear experience of external time into contact with an absolute timelessness. The affective content of these songs tends to focus on the idea of longing, the pain of separation in the face of an idealized union. Moreover, longing is expressed not in ideological but in personal terms. In Rumi’s Masnavi, sung by Indo-Sufi musicians, devotees are “distraught supplicants of love” who “come to [God’s] threshold, to perceive God’s substance” (Qureshi 1995, 28). In the sixteenth-century songs of Mirabai, one of the most important female bhaktī saints, she describes herself as “pale with longing for my beloved” and “longing to reach the ultimate” (Tharu and Lalita 1993, 92–3). In the twenty-first century, Father S. J. Berchmans, a Tamil Christian, sings “A slave I am for you, oh God, you take control of me.”3 The language of devotion is personal, and it narrates

3 The lyrics of this contemporary hymn composer can be found on his website: www.prayergarden.org.

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above all the intensity of the desire to fulfill a forward trajectory of human longing with an eternal experience of the divine. Taken as a whole, South Asian devotional songs constitute a collection of microhistories that are sung to god(s) so that they might be heard. Of course, they are not only heard by god, but also resonate with communities and individuals who recognize within these narratives a familiar and shared experience.

Conclusion: sacred music as sustenance and intervention in South Asian history The processes that I have (somewhat artificially) isolated above do not play out in isolation. They overlap with and interfere with each other, in both disruptive and productive ways. When individuals chant OM, they voice a symbol of an eternal and divine sound, but they also come to meet that divinity through the breath. In rāga performance, timeless structures are referenced and sounded, but so is musical progression, achieved through improvisatory virtuosity. When a devotee sings of personal longing, and the deity becomes a lover, she humanizes god, longs for ultimate union or dissolution, and asserts her own history into the multiple voices of the sacred. Large-scale historical narratives tend to simplify these complex temporal negotiations, just as they obfuscate the little histories that create and sustain the performance of sacred music. The mainstreaming of devotional musical practice is perhaps most strongly evidenced in the invention of the bhajan as a commercial, popular music in India, one that underwent a codification of style and a consolidation of meaning in the twentieth century. The style and meaning of bhajans were negotiated by key figures who were invested in the ways that Hindu devotional music could assert a national identity. Today, bhajans inundate the popular culture of India, playing on screen in the cinema, blaring through the loudspeakers of temples and shops, and interspersed among the bins of record stores. These mass-mediated devotional songs sometimes replace live performance in ritual contexts (Greene 1999), they have unified the musical style of historically diverse religious musics (Slawek 1988), and they signal the widespread acceptance of a mainstream Hinduism. As they do so, they underscore a history predicated on the modern conceptualization of the timelessness of the (Hindu) Indian nation, subsuming a host of other histories in their wake. Yet those other histories continue, and there is no evidence of an unthinking acceptance of History writ large. During my field research in Pune, between 2004 and 2006, I worked with drummers who belonged to the Vārkarī tradition, a popular bhaktī sect of Maharashtra. Their traditional repertory, which they

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sang and accompanied on the pakhawāj (double-headed barrel drum), consists of the abhangas, or songs, of a lineage of saints. When they gather to sing together, they incorporate elements of both classical and popular bhajani styles, in creative and sometimes impossibly virtuosic performances all aimed at intensifying and manifesting the presence of the sacred. Singing the words of the saints, which constitute local and personal histories, Vārkarī practice does not bend to the style of a national music; rather, it is used as yet another musical path. In late September 2006, I witnessed the assertive projection of Vārkarī history as a sonic intervention into the pan-Indian Hindu history of the nation. About forty devotees were gathered to sing the songs of the saints, marking the death-anniversary of a locally revered member of their community. The ritual was being celebrated during Navratri, a nine-night festival, which only recently has become celebrated across India as a pan-Hindu holiday. For nine nights, there were dances and celebrations in the streets and immersions of effigies of Durga and Rama. Huge floats bearing these figures were driven through the streets to the rivers, blaring popular recordings of bhajans in Hindi, accompanied by throngs of people dancing in celebration. As Navratri floats drew near the Vārkarī ritual, blasting popular recordings at deafening volume, it became more and more difficult to hear the sung words of the saints, despite efforts on their part to increase the volume of the pakhawāj and the manjira (hand cymbals). After some time, and in the middle of an abhanga, which could not be heard attentively, the pakhawāj players ceased their intricate, virtuosic accompaniment. They quickly switched to the louder, traditional, and more recognizable style used to accompany the Vārkarīs during pilgrimage. All of the singers and drummers began to chant “Jnanoba Mauli Tukaram” (the names of the first and last saints, with god’s name in the middle), as loudly as possible. All of the frustration that had been evident for the past hour, as the devotees struggled to hear themselves over the roar of the festival outside, evaporated, as they joyfully, and a little mischievously, sang out their lineage and their difference. The emphasis switched from an experience centered upon hearing to an experience absolutely focused on being heard, not, in this case, by god, but by the amassed public just outside the door. A recognizably Vārkarī musical style and the power of the names of individual saints and gods were mobilized to raise a dissenting voice over and above the rest. Throughout South Asia, sacred music is used to negotiate, assert, and contest histories, both great and little. This is often accomplished through performances that highlight the productive tension between timelessness and history that characterizes sacred musical ideologies and ontologies. The musical structures and processes that permeate diverse religious traditions are what

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make these musical performances powerful, by allowing and even demanding a balance between sustenance (of the eternal, of the self, of the nation) and intervention (into personal and historical narratives). The remarkably public and popular role that sacred music continues to hold in South Asia testifies to its ability to say something important about the self, the community, and the nation, in the past and the present.

Bibliography Alter, A. (2008) Dancing with Devtās: Drums, Power, and Possession in the Music of Garhwal, North India, Aldershot: Ashgate Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities: The Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn, London: Verso Bakhle, J. (2005) Two Men and Music, New York: Oxford University Press Beck, G. L. (1993) Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press Becker, J. (2004) Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Bor, J. (1988) ‘The rise of ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian music c.1780–c.1890’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 20: 51–73 (2010) ‘Introduction’, in J. Bor, F. N. Delvoye, J. Harvey, and E. te Nijenhuis (eds.), Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, pp. 11–34 Capwell, C. (1986) The Music of the Bauls of Bengal, Kent State University Press (2002) ‘A Rāgamālā for the Empress’, Ethnomusicology, 46, 2: 197–225 (2010) ‘Representing “Hindu” music to the colonial and native elite of Calcutta’, in J. Bor, F. N. Delvoye, J. Harvey, and E. te Nijenhuis (eds.), Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, pp. 285–312 Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press Clayton, M. (2000) Time in Indian Music, Oxford University Press Coward, H. G., and D. J. Goa (2004) Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America, 2nd edn, New York: Columbia University Press Dalmia, V. (2006) ‘Introduction’, in V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron (eds.), The Oxford India Hinduism Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–26 Dalrymple, W. (2011) Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, New York: Vintage Books Fuller, C. J. (1992) The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, Princeton University Press Greene, P. D. (1999) ‘Sound engineering in a Tamil village: Playing audio cassettes as devotional performance’, Ethnomusicology, 43, 3: 459–89 Jairazbhoy, N. (2008) ‘What happened to Indian music theory? Indo-Occidentalism?’, Ethnomusicology, 52, 3: 349–77

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Kabir (1915) Songs of Kabir, trans. R. Tagore, New York: The Macmillan Company Kelting, M. W. (n. d.) ‘Religious music’, in R. Qureshi, et al., ‘India’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline. com/subscriber/article/grove/music/43272pg13#S43272.6.1 (accessed December 24, 2012) Manuel, P. (1993) Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, University of Chicago Press (2008) ‘North Indian Sufi popular music in the age of Hindu and Muslim fundamentalism’, Ethnomusicology, 52, 3: 378–400 Powers, H. (1979) ‘Classical music, cultural roots, and colonial rule: An Indic musicologist looks at the Muslim world’, Asian Music, 12, 1: 5–39 Qureshi, R. B. (1992–3) ‘“Muslim devotional”: Popular religious music and Muslim identity under British, Indian, and Pakistani hegemony’, Asian Music, 24, 1: 111–21 (1994) ‘Exploring time cross-culturally: Ideology and performance of time in the Sufi Qawwālī’, The Journal of Musicology, 12, 4: 491–528 (1995) Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwālī, University of Chicago Press (1999) ‘His Master’s Voice: Qawwali and “gramophone culture” in South Asia’, Popular Music, 18, 1: 63–98 Rowell, L. (1992) Music and Musical Thought in Early India, University of Chicago Press Sarmadee, S. (2003) Ghunyatu’l Munya: The Earliest Persian Work on Indian Classical Music, New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research Schofield, K. B. (2010) ‘Reviving the Golden Age again: “Classicization,” Hindustani music, and the Mughals’, Ethnomusicology, 54, 3: 484–517 Schultz, A. (2002) ‘Hindu nationalism, music, and embodiment in Marathi Rāshtrīya Kīrtan’, Ethnomusicology, 46, 2: 307–22 (2008) ‘The collision of genres and collusion of participants: Marathi Rastriya Kirtan and the communication of Hindu nationalism’, Ethnomusicology, 52, 1: 31–51 Slawek, S. (1988) ‘Popular Kīrtan in Benares: Some “Great” aspects of a Little Tradition’, Ethnomusicology, 32, 2: 77–92 Tharu, S., and K. Lalita (eds.) (1993) Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. 1, New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY Wade, B. C. (1998) Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India, University of Chicago Press Widdess, R. (2010) ‘The emergence of Dhrupad’, in J. Bor, F. N. Delvoye, J. Harvey, and E. te Nijenhuis (eds.), Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, pp. 117–40

. 9 .

Music, Minas, and the Golden Atlantic SUZEL A. REILY

Introduction The pursuit of great fortune has been a strong motivator of human action across the ages.1 Where there has been economic prosperity, typically cultural production and artistic endeavors have been fostered. Music and the arts stand as tangible signs of the achievements made possible by the access to wealth. But aesthetic expression also articulates the experiences of the victims of fortune and of those excluded from its benefits, whether incorporated into the masterpieces of the powerful, as Edward Said (1978) has shown in relation to Western appropriations of Eastern representations, or, as James Scott (1990) has noted, in the hidden interstices inhabited by the powerless. For the musicologist, then, contexts propelled by the pursuit of wealth provide unique settings in which to investigate the ways in which music is created and engaged to the fantasies and imaginations as well as to the concrete fortunes of those caught up in such pursuits. For Europeans no single material good has been more iconic of wealth than gold. Since medieval times access to gold, along with spices, was a prime motivator in the establishment of trading routes across Europe and beyond. They provided the very impetus for the maritime explorations that would ultimately lead to the so-called “discovery” of the “New World.” In order to gain control of the North African gold reserves, Portuguese navigators made their first incursions down the African coast in the early fifteenth century, establishing an alternative sea route to the overland routes controlled by Muslim traders (Klein 1999, 9–10). Gold and other precious metals propelled the Spanish colonial enterprises in the Americas, particularly in Mexico and Peru. The first British colonies in North America were established in the hope of replicating the Spanish experience, just as the Portuguese spent two centuries searching for the precious metal in their American territories. 1 The research for this chapter was partially funded by grants from the British Academy, the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council, and Queen’s University Belfast. I also wish to thank the Tinker Foundation and the University of Chicago, where a preliminary version of this paper was delivered.

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It was the discovery of gold in the late sixteenth century in Brazil that finally generated enthusiasm among metropolitans toward the region. Such a displacement of people and resources as occurred in the first decades of the eighteenth century in Brazil would only be seen again in the Americas during the California gold rush well over a century later. In effect, from the fifteenth century onwards, gold and the promise of great riches created a context for continuous and multiple flows across the Atlantic, generating a dynamic environment of cultural encounter, exchange, and contest. Paul Gilroy spoke of the “Black Atlantic” (1993) to highlight the continuous circulation of Africans, goods, and ideas across the Atlantic as a consequence of the slave trade. One could, however, also envisage a “Golden Atlantic,” a space of multiple transcontinental routes of cultural production and resources that derived from struggles over gold. The Golden Atlantic encompasses the Black Atlantic, intersecting it with the “White Atlantic” through a diversity of interconnected routes that extend across several centuries. Like the Black Atlantic, the Golden Atlantic is a context of encounters; here, however, the encounters have been marked by fantasy, fortune, and hopeful expectation, but also by deprivation, loss, and hopelessness. Alongside intense solidarity, cooperation, and mutual dependency, experience of the Golden Atlantic has entailed exploitation, greed, competition, complicity, violence. The sounds of the Golden Atlantic reverberate as much with fantasies and successes as they do with shattered hopes, cries of pain, and defiant shouts. Saints and ancestors, visions and realities, wealth and deprivation, endurance and terror, the glorious return to the mother country and the redemptive repatriation: these are the themes in the voices and instruments that create the dissonant sounds of the Golden Atlantic, dissonances that blur the boundaries between black and white people, winners and losers, successes and failures. This chapter focuses on one central period within the flows across the Atlantic in the pursuit of wealth: the eighteenth-century Brazilian gold rush in the region that came to be known as Minas Gerais, or “general mines.” Within just a few years of the discovery of substantial alluvial deposits of gold in the Espinhaço Mountains in the late seventeenth century, tens of thousands of people from diverse backgrounds started to converge upon this wilderness, which, until then, had been inhabited only sparsely, primarily by native peoples. The race for gold attracted large numbers of prospectors from Portugal as well as other parts of Europe; the coastal towns of the Brazilian colony, which had always struggled to sustain a population, were depopulated even further (Zemella 1990, 47); and vast numbers of slaves from various parts of Africa as well as from other parts of Brazil were transported for thousands of miles across difficult terrain to provide the labor for the mines. Drawn by the lure of

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gold, new routes for the movement of people and resources were forged, affecting a wide range of geographical locations across the Atlantic and beyond. The encounter of people of such diverse backgrounds instigated the formation of a unique mineiro musical culture, but the wealth generated by gold also had a critical impact upon musical production in the metropolis, while the ever-increasing demand for slaves in the mines constituted a major factor in the restructuring of the African slave trade, with significant consequences for the social and cultural environments of the various African regions involved in human trafficking. The complex hybrid cultural expressions forged within and through these transcontinental flows provide a unique insight into the complexities of the Golden Atlantic and the ways in which music has been deployed to engage with multiple encounters in contexts of intricate power relations.

Musical encounters Music was part of everyday life in the mines, and it articulated many of the encounters in the region. Perhaps no single event offers a clearer insight into the complexities of these encounters than the detailed account provided by Simão Ferreira Machado of the Triunfo Eucharistico,2 in which the Holy Sacrament was transferred from the black Church of Our Lady of the Rosary to the main (white) Church of Our Lady of the Pillar, an event that took place in 1733 in Vila Rica (now Ouro Preto), the heart of the mining region, following restoration work to the main temple. Alongside the endless floats representing the four winds, the planets, and a range of mythic figures, various dancers, figures dressed in special outfits, and the members of the lay brotherhoods (irmandades) and their array of litters, there were various musical contributions, including the “musicians of soft voices and various instruments” that accompanied the thirty-two soldiers representing the battle between Christians and Moors; a German on horseback playing a bugle, whose calls alternated with those of eight slaves playing shawms; a snaredrummer accompanying a fifer and a trumpeter; two more buglers; a bagpiper; and finally a slave drummer accompanying four more slaves on horseback playing long trumpets decked with banners. The procession was preceded and followed by a sung mass with music for two choirs, as were the masses on the following two days. Three theatrical pieces, furthermore, were presented and serenades of “good music” were heard every night over the three days of the festivities, and there was entertainment for a further nine days, including cavalcades (cavalhadas), bull fights (touros), and comedies (comédias). 2 A facsimile of this document was published by Affonso Ávila (1967).

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In this single monumental public event, a wide range of musical genres and social groupings paraded through the streets of Ouro Preto. While each group was clearly distinguished from the others, they were all integrated into a single setting, their places carefully defined. According to Maria Alice Volpe (1997), the main procession of the Triunfo Eucharistico, like many of the grand politico-religious events in colonial Brazil, was structured around the narrative of conversion. It opened with a representation of the encounter between Christians and Moors, a powerful theme of subjugation, conversion, and domestication in Brazilian popular culture; the dialogue between the (Christian) German rider and the (pagan) shawm players reiterated this narrative. The cortège as a whole contained two segments: The first displayed a range of secular and mythological elements, while the second featured the irmandades and their litters, each bearing a different Catholic saint. At the juncture of these two segments was a figure on a white horse carrying a banner portraying the newly reformed church. By appropriating and recontextualizing “pagan” imagery in this way, the procession displayed the civilizing power of colonial rule. As the Triunfo Eucharistico suggests, music, pageantry, and the Church constituted central forces in the mediation of colonial encounters, both within and across the various social groups that found themselves together in the mining centers. While such grand events were clearly able to encompass a wide range of social sectors in a seemingly persuasive discourse that outlined a divine order for society, the various social groups in colonial society were actively engaged in the negotiation of this order, with music and musical performance constituting a central tool in these dialogues. To understand this dynamic one must first get a sense of the social make-up of the mining populations and of the institutional structures of the Church and the State in this part of Portuguese America.

The Brazilian gold rush Unlike the situation in the Spanish territories, gold was not immediately available in the Brazils, but for two centuries persistent explorers, the socalled bandeirantes (banner bearers), ventured into the hinterlands in the hope of finding the precious metal, generally departing from São Vicente and São Paulo. It was these paulistas who ultimately located gold in Minas Gerais sometime in the early 1690s (Boxer 2000, 61).3 Further expeditions located

3 Controversy still remains regarding exactly where the first mines were discovered and by whom, given the secrecy surrounding the discoveries, particularly in the early years of the gold rush.

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gold in a number of sites across Minas Gerais, but also further inland in the territories of Goiás and Mato Grosso; diamond reserves were also located sometime in the 1720s in the region around what is now known as Diamantina. The discovery of gold prompted a rush that attracted thousands of prospectors, and new communities grew up overnight, particularly around the major mining sites of Minas Gerais, but also along the routes used for transporting the gold to the coast ports. According to Pr. Antonil (1997, 167),4 author of one of the most perceptive contemporary accounts of early eighteenth-century colonial society in Brazil, by 1709 there were already 30,000 people occupied in mining activities in Minas, but the population was to grow extremely rapidly in the following decades. This mass relocation of people meant that within just a few years of their establishment, some of the settlements around the finds had achieved the official status of towns (vilas): Vila Leal de Nossa Senhora do Carmo (now Mariana) and Vila Rica do Ouro Preto (now known simply as Ouro Preto) were declared vilas in 1711; Vila do Principe, later to become Arraial do Tejuco (now Diamantina), became a vila in 1714; and Vila Real de Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Sabará was declared a vila in 1715. The Crown was eager to bestow this status on mining communities as these political units required a senate chamber (senado da câmara), a local government body, that could oversee the extraction of gold and the payment of taxes, and control the entry and exit of people and goods to the mines. Further government measures that would have important musical consequences included the prohibition against establishing convents and monasteries in the mining regions as a means of reducing clerical influence as well as contraband, and a ban against the importation of published materials and books in the colony as a whole (other than primers and catechisms), because literature could incite revolt. According to the Portuguese historian Vitorino Godinho (1971), during the first sixty years of the gold rush around 600,000 metropolitans relocated to the mines at an average of around eight to ten thousand a year. This constituted a significant population drain on such a small country as Portugal, particularly given that the number of men to head off to the mines far outnumbered the women. The Crown was ultimately compelled to establish measures to contain the flow to Brazil, particularly from the Minho region of the country (Boxer 2000, 72). The workforce was made up of black slaves, many entering from the northeastern sugar plantations that were suffering from the rise of the sugar economy in the Caribbean. Demand for slaves was so high, nonetheless,

4 The Jesuit father who wrote under the name André João Antonil was the Italian Giovanni Antonio Andreoni.

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that the internal production was insufficient, and slaves had to be brought directly from Africa to meet the need. According to Mauricio Goulart (1975, 151), the arrival of slaves in Minas shifted from around 2,600 per year in the early period to over 7,000 per year by 1740, only tapering off to around 4,000 per year after 1760, when gold production was in a state of marked decline. Indeed, by 1735 the slave population had exceeded 100,000 people, a figure that could only be sustained through a continuous stream of new imports, because the harsh conditions of the alluvial mining techniques used in Minas substantially reduced slave life expectancy. It is also worth remembering that before they even arrived in Brazil, many Africans had already undergone the terrifying experience of capture, in which they had been torn away from their communities and from an environment that was familiar and meaningful to them, to face long treks to the slave ports, lengthy waits at the seafront, and cramped conditions in the belly of a ship. The period between capture and arrival at a mining site could last two to three years, and it was often undertaken with people who spoke different languages and followed different customs. The Africans who entered Minas were brought from two main regions of the African continent: West Africa, encompassing primarily the region of the Bight of Benin, and Central Africa, mainly from the Portuguese ports of Luanda and Benguela. In the first half of the eighteenth century, slaves from West Africa predominated, while in the second, Central Africans arrived in greater numbers. In Brazil Africans were identified according to “nations” (nações) based upon the African port from which they had set sail, such that a slave nação actually encompassed a range of ethnicities and linguistic groups. The most common “national” affiliations for West Africans were “Mina” and “Nago,” while Central Africans were most frequently identified as “Angolas,” “Benguelas,” “Congos,” and “Cabindas”; though trade in East African slaves was relatively insignificant and primarily limited to the early nineteenth century (Klein 1999, 70), the few slaves from this region who were brought to the mines were referred to as “Moçambiques.” Given the shortage of white women, many Portuguese took black mistresses, and soon a mulatto population began to emerge. While it has been estimated that the white and mulatto populations had equalized around 1740 (Lange 1966, 11), the first census to include mulattos was taken in 1776, which indicated that at the time there were 70,769 white people, 82,000 pardos (lit., greys), and 167,000 black people (L. Mello e Souza 2004 [1982], 203). Neither black nor white, mulattos constituted a hugely heterogeneous category in which distinctions based on skin color, links to slavery, and economic potential all came into play in the demarcation of social status (Leoni 2007).

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The encounter of so many people in a region, which, initially, had no infrastructure to speak of, created a social environment marked by intense tensions. Disputes arose over claims to mining sites (datas), instigating conflict between the paulistas, who originally found the gold, and the “emboabas,” or outsiders; with the assistance of royal forces, the emboabas eventually defeated the paulistas in a number of skirmishes toward the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century, after which a more stable environment was achieved. Another problem was the high cost involved in the transportation of vital necessities into the mining regions and of production again back out (Zemella 1990). With the focus directed almost exclusively on mining, little effort was put into local food production, leading to near famine conditions particularly in the first decades (Boxer 2000, 71). The requirements of the mining regions also led to shortages throughout the country, as production everywhere was diverted to supply the highly lucrative needs of the mines (Zemella 1990). There was intense dissatisfaction with the taxes levied on gold, which were initially set at 20 percent of all finds and later determined by the number of slaves involved in the mining. It has, in fact, been argued that the very taxation system employed by the Portuguese Crown greatly inhibited the formation of vast fortunes, leaving even the most prosperous prospectors in perpetual debt. Maintaining the workforce was also a problem. The appalling conditions in which slaves were kept contributed to the high levels of slave deaths and disease as well as to the numbers of runaways. Throughout the eighteenth century quilombos (runaway slave communities) appeared across Minas, some of which were able to survive for long periods before being raided and eliminated (L. Mello e Souza 2006). In effect, as Laura de Mello e Souza (1982) has argued, Brazilian gold was, for most, a “false Faustus.”

Colonial religiosity In spectacular form, the Triunfo Eucharistico highlights the Baroque sensibilities that prevailed in the religious universe of the mining regions of colonial Brazil. Indeed, the onset of the Brazilian gold era dovetailed with the height of the Portuguese Baroque period. Few artistic movements have generated as much controversy and been as difficult to define as the Baroque. The word itself refers to the Portuguese term for a malformed pearl, and it was used pejoratively in reference to artistic excess, particularly in Protestant northern Europe. Art historians typically claim that the Baroque aesthetic emerged as the artistic response of the Counter-Reformation, serving as a means of expressing the “Catholic” (i.e., universal) truths that were being challenged by Protestantism. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Council of Trent had

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concluded that humans had no direct access to God other than through their imaginations. Art, however, could bridge the divide by creating imaginative representations of the divine, allowing devotees to experience its grandeur. Ultimately, the Baroque experience aimed to promote religious persuasion through an appeal to the senses, rather than through rational argument. As Marilyn Stockstad has noted, “Counter-Reformation art was intended to be both doctrinally correct and visually and emotionally appealing so that it could influence the largest possible audience” (Stockstad 2002, 758). Even though the Baroque favored the grand and the dramatic, it was also able to draw the audience inward and elicit powerful emotional responses by promoting identification and empathy with the suffering of the saints, especially of the martyrs (Skrine 1978). In effect, Baroque art called attention to the transience and precariousness of the human condition in relation to the infinity of an almighty God (Dottori 1992, 52). Although the Baroque aesthetic may have been instigated by the CounterReformation, it soon transcended the boundaries of Catholicism and, throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it became a dominant style all across Europe in both religious and secular spheres. It was especially favored by the nobility for its ability to index wealth and power, and grand artistic projects were undertaken to call attention to the station of their sponsors, the palace of Versailles being one of the most iconic of such endeavors. Even in Protestant states religious conviction was insufficient to curtail aspirations for self-glorification and self-indulgence, and the Baroque aesthetic was able to flourish in a wide range of artistic fields (Skrine 1978, 106–7). In Latin America, where the divide between the Church and the absolutist State was extremely nebulous, a Baroque sensibility mediated the two spheres in complex processes of mutual affirmation. Baroque ideals were greatly encouraged by the Church, particularly through the activities of the Jesuits (Barbosa 1978, 10), for they were seen to be effective in curtailing the expansion of Protestantism in the Iberian colonial strongholds. The State, for its part, drew its legitimacy from its links to divine power. With the discovery of gold in Minas, there was considerable wealth, which significantly enhanced the Baroque orientation toward ostentation. Much of this wealth was invested in the construction and decoration of churches as well as in the production of grand religious festivals with magnificent processions and ceremonious sung masses, the Triunfo Eucharistico constituting a particularly powerful example of such endeavors (see Fig. 9.1). There were two main sponsors of communal festivals. The first were the câmaras, which represented the power of the state. The câmaras were responsible for the Crown’s official festivities, which included Corpus Christi, Saint

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Fig. 9.1 Church of Our Lady of the Pillar, Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais Sebastian, Angel Custodian of the Realm, and Saint Isabel, and a number of events associated with the Portuguese royal family, particularly marriages and deaths. The other included all the various lay confraternities, brotherhoods, and third orders, which in academic literature are commonly referred to collectively as the irmandades (Salles 2007; Boschi 1986). These associations promoted the annual festival in honor of their patron saint. By sponsoring the communal festivals, which constituted the focus of colonial social life, the câmaras and irmandades became the main patrons of the arts, encompassing architecture, sculpture, painting, theatrical productions, and, of course, music. Because lay people were more directly involved in the production of the festivals linked to the irmandades, they evinced particularly high levels of enthusiasm within the mining population. The irmandades were brought from the Iberian peninsula to Portuguese America, where they were instituted quite early in the colonial process, the first having been founded in the colony by the mid-sixteenth century (RussellWood 1968). Given the limited presence of the institutionalized Church in the mining regions, the irmandades became especially important in the organization of religious and social life. Indeed, they have been the focus of considerable attention among Brazilian historians precisely because, for all practical

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purposes, the social sphere in Minas was organized through them. Practically everyone belonged to at least one irmandade, regardless of social standing, because these associations were among the only institutions beyond the family to provide some form of social security, while serving also as the basis for sociality and collective action. Their primary role was that of caring for the welfare of their members in both life and death, ensuring that they received a proper funeral, burial in holy ground, and masses with intention for their souls to hasten their passage through purgatory. Through the promotion of festivals, the irmandades competed openly with one another, as this was one of the few arenas in which the wealth of the irmandade – and its members – could be publicly and ostentatiously exhibited. Throughout Minas, the irmandades were divided according to “racial” categories, with associations for white people, pardos, and black people. Typically, the first two irmandades to be founded in a parish were the Irmandade of the [Holy] Sacrament (Santíssimo Sacramento), whose membership tended to be made up of the wealthiest white men of society, often involving only reinóis (metropolitans) and an Irmandade of [Our Lady of] the Rosary (Nossa Senhora do Rosário), which was linked to black people, including slaves and freed slaves (forros), both men and women. While the Irmandade of the Sacramento sponsored Holy Week, which came to be seen as the most important festival in the colonial annual calendar, the Irmandade of the Rosary promoted the festival in honor of their patron, commonly considered the most joyful of the colonial festivals. As the mulatto population grew, irmandades were founded to cater to this social group, such as the Irmandade of Our Lady of Mercies, the Irmandade of Saint Joseph, among many others. The annual cycle in the mining towns, therefore, was punctuated by the lively festivals and processions promoted by the câmaras and irmandades, all of which were marked by continuous musical performance.

The colonial repertory Although secular music was widely performed in a number of social settings, including parlor gatherings (saraus) and street serenades (serestas), as well as at the opera and musical theaters, very little of this repertory has survived. Yet, many settings of the mass, litanies, motets, and other liturgical materials produced for events sponsored by the irmandades and the câmaras have been preserved, indicating that this music was not seen in as transient a mode as material meant primarily for secular entertainment. For the most part, however, what eighteenth-century liturgical music has survived exists in the form of nineteenth-century handwritten copies, and most of this material pertains to

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Fig. 9.2 A page from the manuscript of “Maria Mater Gratiae” by Marcos Coelho Netto, showing his signature and date the later quarter of the eighteenth century (Lange 1951). Since it was very rare for a piece to be copied as a score, most of the papers are found as independent parts. Only occasionally have manuscripts been identified that were actually written out, signed, and dated by the composer himself (they were all men), such as the hymn, “Maria Mater Gratiae,” by Marcos Coelho Netto,5 which dates from 1787 and is one of the earliest remaining manuscripts from the region of Minas Gerais (see Fig. 9.2). The fragmentary survival of early manuscripts has posed difficulties for the study of Brazilian colonial music: more often than not parts are missing; frequently copyists altered pieces in accordance with changes in musical trends; and they adapted them to the specificities of the performance contexts in which they operated, by changing the instrumentation or by simplifying parts to suit the competence levels of available musicians.

5 There were two musicians named Marcos Coelho Netto, father (1746–1806) and son (1763–1823), operating in Ouro Preto during the colonial period. It has not yet been possible to establish definitely which of the two composed “Maria Mater Gratiae,” one of the best-known pieces in the mineiro repertory. Curt Lange attributed it to the father, but Carlos Alberto Baltazar and Rogério Duprat (1997) argue that it was more likely to have been composed by the son.

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The manuscripts, nonetheless, do allow us to gain a sense of the musical tastes of the late eighteenth century, while also providing insight into the mineiro musical universe of the nineteenth century. It is, however, more difficult to assess what liturgical music might have sounded like in Minas during the first half of the eighteenth century, for once these styles had fallen out of favor, musicians stopped recopying them. Among the few surviving music manuscripts in Brazil to predate the last quarter of the century are forty pages believed to have been produced between 1730 and 1735. These manuscripts, discovered by Régis Duprat in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo, contain fragments of at least six distinct pieces. Most of them are set for a four-part choral ensemble, but Duprat (1985) claims that the presence of a violin part in the only secular piece in the collection suggests that Brazilian composers at the time were already working beyond the “a cappella” style of religious music. Although the primary sources are limited, he believes this collection attests to the links Brazilian composers maintained not only to the major urban centers of the colony, but also to wider European centers of musical production. Duprat sees this dialogue as being especially evident in the “use of harmonic vocabulary, the simple techniques of four-part polyphony and the expansion of polyphonic phrases, and the modulatory incursions used” (ibid., 16). It would appear, therefore, that the rapid changes taking place in the musical spheres of Portugal in the early eighteenth century due to the massive penetration of Italian models were also making their way to Portuguese America (Nery 2004, 385). The links between European musical trends and the music circles in the mining regions is especially marked in the existing manuscripts pertaining to the composers of the later part of the eighteenth century. Much of this music is set for one, and in some cases two, four-part choral groups to the accompaniment of a small orchestra, which could include strings, flutes, French horns, and bass. According to José Maria Neves (1997, 17–18), the colonial repertory in Minas employed Baroque, pre-Classical, and Classical elements. The continuo was still used in many pieces, but the clear orientation toward functional harmony is more reminiscent of Classical procedures than of the Baroque. Solos often point to Baroque tendencies toward virtuosity, but the typical homophonic procedures of the choral repertory suggest accompaniment roles for the parts that are common to pre-Classical works. These features are especially noticeable in the Antiphona de Nossa Senhora by José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita (Serro, 1746–1805), generally considered the greatest of the mineiro colonial composers. According to Gerard Béhague (1979, 81), the piece provides an excellent example of the composer’s “homophonic concertante style.” Silvio Augusto Crespo Filho (1989, 152–65), who analyzed it in detail, points out how the first movement begins in a vertical mode with a strong Classical flavor. The solos repeat the theme, adding

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elements associated with the “galant” style. The homophonic performance of the choir is broken from time to time by staggered entrances with hints of Baroque procedures (see Fig. 9.3). Although the importation of published material was banned and carefully controlled, handwritten manuscripts could – and did – circulate freely. And some published European music did enter the region, especially when sanctioned by church authorities. When the Diocese of Mariana was established in 1745, for instance, the first bishop, Dom Manuel da Cruz Nogueira, brought several books of Gregorian chant with him from Maranhão as well as a sizeable collection of music manuscripts, which are now housed in the Music Museum of the Archdiocese, along with other collections that reached the Diocese throughout the eighteenth century. Clerical correspondence indicates that in 1741 a collection of works by European masters, particularly Italian composers, including Frescobaldi, Monteverdi, Palestrina, Pergolesi, and Scarlatti, was sent to Brazil, and in 1750, a further collection of liturgical music ordered by the bishop arrived in Mariana; in 1788 a collection of a very different flavor, including works by Byrd, Handel, Purcell, Haydn, and Mozart, arrived at the seat of the Diocese (Neves 1997, 17). Amidst the vast collection of music manuscripts amassed by Francisco Curt Lange during his treks across Minas, the work of several other major eighteenth-century European composers can be found, but it also contains the work of a number of Portuguese composers, including João José Baldi (1770–1816), Antonio Leal Moreira (d. 1819), Marcos Antonio Fonseca Portugal (1762–1830), and José Joaquim Santos (c. 1747–c. 1801), as well as the Italian David Perez (1711–99), who, like Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), spent much of his professional life in Portugal (Duprat 1994). José Maria Neves contended that the Crown’s ban against bringing published work into the colony may have contributed to the level of technical progressiveness in the work of the mineiro composers (Neves 1997, 11), for the arrival of new material generated considerable excitement in music circles. Unhindered by the rules and trends of their European counterparts, the mineiro composers could, as Francisco Curt Lange states, “write with absolute freedom” (ibid., 45), grafting the new trends onto familiar practices. Indeed, Lange was at pains to point out that the composers in Minas did not simply copy their European counterparts (ibid., 47): rather, they developed a unique style that suited the religious contexts they serviced. As Maurício Dottori (1992) has argued, the mineiro colonial music cannot be understood purely in relation to its musical features, for even though it had transcended the stylistic procedures of European Baroque music, its use within religious

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Fig. 9.3 José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita, Antiphona de Nossa Senhora, measures 22–31. Francisco Curt Lange, ed. 1951

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ritual was “Baroque,” in that it contributed toward the dramatic impact of the occasion. We might look, for instance, at the Motets of the Stations [of the Cross] for two choirs, two flutes, two French horns, and bass, by Manoel Dias de Oliveira (São José del Rei, c. 1735–1813): while each choir is structured homophonically, the two choirs are in a polyphonic relation to one another; the instrumental parts provide harmonic accompaniment for the voices, while bolstering the bass line. These characteristics are especially marked in Motet no. 2, “Bajulans” (see Fig. 9.4). The full set of seven motets was composed to be sung during the visitation of the stations (passos), in which the faithful processed under the full moon from one station to the next, each station contained within one of the tiny chapel-like constructions scattered around most colonial towns (see Fig. 9.5). As devotees stood in the dark contemplating the episode represented at the station, the choirs sang: Bajulans sibi crucem Jesus exivit in eum, qui dicitur Calvariae locum (And bearing his own cross, he went forth to the place which is called Calvary).

Musicians and musicianship From the previous discussion it will be clear that the liturgical repertory in colonial Minas was quite demanding, and could only have been performed by the presence of a fair number of competent singers and instrumentalists. Furthermore, the competitive orientation of the irmandades called for an ever-greater number of performers and ever-higher standards of musicianship. This demand attracted more and more trained musicians to the mining centers, and eventually a class of professionals was established, many of whom had music as their primary economic activity. Lange (1966, 12) has estimated that there were at least 1,000 professional musicians active around the mines during the eighteenth century. With respect to Ouro Preto, Aldo Luiz Leoni (2007) has identified 205 active musicians between 1712 and 1817 for whom music was a major source of income. One of the earliest documents indicating payment for musical services was found in Ouro Preto, where a certain João Rodrigues dos Santos received twelve eights of gold from the câmara in 1715 for playing the viola (a stringed instrument similar to the guitar) (Neves 1997, 12); this would have allowed him to buy three or four chickens. While liturgical musical activities have been the most visible to scholars, music could, in fact, generate an income in a range of different spheres. Many of the same musicians who played for the câmaras and irmandades also performed for operas and musical theaters; many musicians took on pupils

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Fig. 9.4 Manoel Dias de Oliveira, “Bajulans,” measures 1–8. Adapted from Mauricio Dottori, ed., n.d., unpublished manuscript and apprentices; and in many cases they were also employed by the military with music-related duties, such as drumming or bugling. There was income to be made as a copyist or instrument maker, and in instrument repairs. There were also many slave musicians who, besides providing musical services

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Fig. 9.5 A “passo” in Campanha, Minas Gerais for their owners, could be hired out to the confraternities to play drums, bugles, and shawms (charamelas) during processions or to collect funds for festivities. Antonil (1997, 171) claimed that a good trumpeter slave could cost as much as 500 eights of gold, the same price as a strong young adult male, for trumpet signals were fundamental in administering the activities of the slaves at the mining sites. As the most lucrative musical activities were those sponsored by the câmaras and irmandades, the main strategies musicians employed were directed at securing these opportunities. While positions for the irmandades were established by annual contracts, which were automatically renewed if there was general satisfaction among all concerned, the positions at the câmaras were put out for tender each year, and only licensed musicians could participate in the tendering process. Licensing was administered by chapel masters, who often also charged high fees to applicants. These circumstances favored the formation of relatively small, stable groups of musicians, which came to be known as partidos de música in some places and companhias de música in others. The make-up of the partidos shifted over

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the century from primarily vocal groups to vocal and instrumental ensembles, but they were kept as small as possible in order to maximize the members’ incomes. They generally centered around a master musician (mestre de música), who undertook the responsibility to generate new music for major festivals, recruit and train the musicians to perform it, and conduct the musicians throughout the event. A document located by Francisco Curt Lange (1990, 130–1) is particularly revealing of the formation of the partidos in the mining centers in the latter part of the eighteenth century. A certain Domingos José Freitas tendered for the annual festivities of the câmara of Ouro Preto, presenting the musicians who would be involved as performers. These included: Alto: Francisco Gomes da Rocha Tenor: Gabriel de Castro Bass (baxa): Florêncio José Ferreira Soprano (tiple): João Inocêncio Coira Violins (rabecas): Francisco Gonçalvez, Domingos José Freitas, Antonio Alexo, Carlos Teixeira, Manoel Parreira Bass (rabecão): Caetano Rodrigues Oboes (boés): Antonio Gonçalvez, Lizardo José French horns (trompas): Marcos Coelho (father), Marcos Coelho (son) Leoni’s (2007) research indicates that, of these fourteen musicians, eleven were definitely pardos, whereas information is inconclusive regarding the complexion of the others. One of the three, João Inocêncio Coira, was undoubtedly a child, as tiple refers to a boy-soprano; he was probably apprenticing with one of the master musicians in the partido, of which there were at least three: Francisco Gomes da Rocha (1745–1808) and Marcos Coelho Netto, both father (1746–1806) and son (1763–1823). Because it would have been unlikely for a white boy to have been apprenticed into a mulatto family, João must have been a pardo. The widespread presence of mulattos amongst musicians in Minas is highlighted in a letter sent to the Portuguese monarch in 1780 by the colonial representative José João Teixeira Coelho. His observations do not hide what were surely widespread views about mulattos at the time: Those mulattos who do not make themselves idle, work as musicians, of which there are so many in the Captaincy of Minas that they certainly are more in number there than in the rest of the kingdom. (quoted in Lange 1966:12)

The mulatismo, or hybridity, of Brazilian music has been a central theme in Brazilian music scholarship since the late nineteenth century, and it has been generally located within nationalist discourses. The strong presence of

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mulattos in the music world has been seen as proof of the “natural” process of Brazilianization that European cultural forms supposedly took in the country since colonial times. Although Francisco Curt Lange (esp. 1990, 1966, 1979) repeatedly noted that in Minas the vast majority of musicians were mulattos, he took a stance that challenged nationalist musicological perspectives by arguing that by becoming musicians, as well as masters in other arts and crafts, the mulattos in Minas had carved out a niche for themselves within a highly stratified slave social system, which allowed them to gain social recognition. Far from being a natural process accompanying the growth of the mulatto population, Lange viewed the mulattos as agents, who had turned to European art music to demonstrate their ability to engage as equals in the cultural sphere of white society. Ultimately, he contended, they were able to create a space within the stratified system in which merit, rather than race, was the primary criterion for professional success. While Lange may have shifted the perspective upon the musical universe in Minas, his representation of professional musicianship has started to be challenged. Leoni, for instance, has undertaken a lengthy investigation of the strategies eighteenth-century mulatto musicians in Minas employed to overcome their social stigma, and many of his findings entail important correctives to Lange’s original research. For instance, although Lange contended that the clergy played a very limited role in the musical training of the mineiro musicians, Leoni’s data indicate that this was not the case; still, once a relatively large contingent of lay musicians had been formed, clerical participation in the musical arena was radically diminished. Furthermore, while mulattos undoubtedly made up the majority of the performers throughout the eighteenth century, it was not until around 1750 that they gained licenses to engage directly in tendering for the câmara and started to be given contracts in the richest white irmandades, such as the Irmandade of the Holy Sacrament and the Irmandade of Our Lady of Carmel. One of the first musicians to gain prominence in Ouro Preto was surely Antonio de Souza Lobo (d. 1782), who won the tenders of the câmara from 1724 to 1750; but he was not, as Lange has speculated, a mulatto, nor were any of the bidders before his tenure. Just as mulattos were being allowed to apply for licenses, the Crown issued an edict stating that any liturgical music would have to be approved by an authorized (white) reviewer to ensure it conformed to the norm of the Council of Trent. This was in direct response to a letter from Dom Antonio de Guadalupe, bishop of Rio de Janeiro from 1725 to 1739, who claimed that the music in the churches in Minas was marked by “profanity and indecency, both in its words, and its music, because all the musicians [were] pardos,

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a naturally depraved [race]” (quoted in Lange 1990, 115). Even after the mulattos had come to dominate the musical universe of Minas, their work continued to be scrutinized in ways their white predecessors had never been subjected to (Leoni 2007). What did, however, give the mulatto musicians an edge over other mulattos was the fact that reading and writing was an integral part of their musical training (ibid., 119–20). Thus, within the irmandades for pardos, a disproportionate number of musicians held leadership positions. In Ouro Preto, moreover, they congregated in the Irmandade of Saint Joseph, one of the earliest irmandades for pardos, founded in 1730. Even though the irmandade was not officially a guild, it provided musicians with a base from which to discuss their common experiences and defend their common interests. However, when the Irmandade of Saint Cecilia, to honor the patron saint of musicians, was founded in 1815, its statutes required prospective members to pass a music examination prior to enrolment, which excluded many practicing musicians, particularly those still in or only recently freed from slavery, because of their low literacy levels which hindered their performance on the examination (ibid., 124). As professionals, however, musicians were among the most organized of the nonwhite sectors in the mining centers in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The Irmandade of Our Lady of the Rosary Just as irmandades provided institutional support for mulattos, they also served as focal points for the black populations of Minas. Within these associations black people could engage in the complex process of re-identification and cultural reelaboration. While the members of the irmandades of Saint Benedict and of Saint Iphigenia were predominantly black, the main black irmandades were dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary,6 and by 1720 an irmandade of the rosary had been established in practically all the major mining centers. The organization of slaves into irmandades was encouraged by the colonial officials, for they were seen as contexts for instilling Christian values upon the pagans, and they could contain them within an institutional frame familiar to the masters. José Ramos Tinhorão (1975, 44) has argued that, by accepting the irmandade structure offered to them, black people were able to participate – albeit from a marginal position – in the wider colonial society. 6 Boschi (1986, 187) identified a total of sixty-two irmandades dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in colonial Minas; the second most widespread irmandades were dedicated to the Holy Sacrament, of which forty-three have been identified.

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Indeed, it was in the black Church of the Rosary that the Holy Sacrament was housed during the restoration work on the Church of the Pillar in the 1730s, just as the Irmandade of the Rosary was one of the sponsors of the Triunfo Eucharistico. A wide range of documents makes it clear that the wealth of the mines allowed even the black irmandades to participate in the Baroque displays that marked colonial life. They too built their own churches, and their religious festivals were staged with as much pomp and ostentation as they could muster. A unique feature of the Irmandades of the Rosary was that their statutes typically stipulated that, among the officers of the association, there was to be a king and a queen of the association, both of whom were to be black, and a judge for each of the saints the organization was engaged in venerating, and here too it was generally stipulated that they should be black. A few leadership positions, nonetheless, were allocated to white people, particularly those of secretary and treasurer, for their occupants needed to be literate. For this reason, considerable academic debate has focused on the degree of autonomy black people would have had within their irmandades. Julita Scarano (1976) has contended that the black courts had a fundamentally compensatory role, providing slaves with an illusion of autonomy. However, as Marina de Mello e Souza (2002, 182) has noted, the kings were often men who were respected by their fellow slaves for mediating conflicts within their own group, and in some cases these leaders were thought to have special magical powers, eliciting fear, particularly among white people. The very presence of an acknowledged leader allowed black people to gain a sense of self-determination within their own communities. Given the configuration of the slave population in Minas, the membership of the irmandades of the rosary in the first half of the eighteenth century was predominantly East African, but Africans of Central African provenance were dominant in the second half. By the second half of the century, furthermore, Brazilian-born black people became noticeably more numerous in the irmandades’ membership lists. However, from the very establishment of the organizations, they housed black people of diverse backgrounds. While in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro some black irmandades split along “national” lines, this was not common in Minas, where all the nações of a locality were represented in the membership of the black irmandades. Even so, “national kinship ties” (parentes de nação) (Reis 1991, 55) were forged, because they provided a substitute for lineage ties in the new social environment, binding the nations to a wider community. In effect, the process of re-identification within the irmandade articulated a shift from “ethnic” differences to “racial” unity (Nishida 1998). The king provided a powerful focus for the formation of this new sense of identity.

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Because of the centrality of the king, the annual coronation ceremony became the main festive occasion associated with the irmandade of the rosary. Although coronations took place in Minas in the first half of the eighteenth century, descriptions of the festivities associated with them are only available from the second half onwards. As elsewhere in Portuguese America, they involved joyful processions in which the newly crowned king and his entourage were paraded through the streets to the sound of singing and musical instruments. By the late eighteenth century, organized dance associations were commonplace in these processions, though it was not until 1818 that the term congada appeared to refer to them.7 By this time it was also common to refer to the kings being crowned within the irmandades as “King of the Congo” (Rei do Congo). In the twenty-first century, references to congadas – as well as congos, congados, moçambiques, caiapós, caboclinhos, marujos, and countless other terms – are current throughout Minas as well as in several neighboring states. Each term refers to a specific type of dance association linked to the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary and other popular Catholic celebrations, which still take place in many small towns, especially in the historic colonial towns. It would appear that such black dance associations were already participating in street festivities in Minas as early as 1748, since they were noted by a certain Francisco Ribeiro da Silva, who left an account of his impressions of the festivities surrounding the arrival of the first bishop of the Diocese of Minas Gerais in Mariana. Alongside a series of events of Baroque grandeur comparable to the Triunfo Eucharistico of 1733, there were black dance troupes who “entered the City in two lines, with banners, drums and instruments, and songs in their own style” (Lange 1990, 114). For the same event, another performance group called the carijós sang and danced in the streets dressed like native Amerindians, to the accompaniment of tambourines and flutes (ibid., 114), much like the caiapós and caboclinhos of the present. Although there are numerous references to organized music and dance associations linked to religious festivities, especially in relation to activities promoted by the black irmandades, there are no records of what they sang and played on their instruments. Although a few collectors, instigated by nationalist sentiments, began documenting the repertory of congados since the early twentieth century, most notably Mário de Andrade (1982), Artur Ramos (1954), Alceu Maynard de Araújo (1964) among others, the memory of these performances has been retained by and in the bodies of the descendants of the first African dancers. Without doubt, as an aural and embodied tradition, the repertories of

7 According to Elizabeth Kiddy (2005, 131–3), the first use of the term congada was in a description of a coronation festival by Karl van Martius in Diamantina.

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the congadas underwent continuous processes of change. The changes themselves, however, provide valuable clues about the ways in which the activities have been understood and negotiated among black people and their descendants in carving out a space for themselves within the colonial slave society. Significantly, one of the most widely diffused narratives within congado communities in Minas today presents the following story line. An image of Our Lady of the Rosary is located in a remote place. A prestigious musical ensemble is summoned to escort her to a new church, but she either refuses to follow them or returns during the night to her initial location. Another rather less prestigious ensemble attempts to persuade her to stay in the new church, but again she refuses. Finally, the congadas are allowed to see if they can get her to follow them, and they are successful. By agreeing to follow the black dancers, Our Lady legitimizes and blesses their performances. Elizabeth Kiddy (2005, 59) collected a common variant of this narrative in Jatobá, Greater Belo Horizonte, where there is a strong rosary tradition. In this version, Our Lady was found in the sea, and after the white people had tried unsuccessfully to coax her out of the water, the blacks are allowed to see if they are able to entice her to shore. Several African nations took a turn, but it was only when the three sacred drums of the candombe, said to be the mythical ancestor of the congado, were played for her that she began to react. But she only came out of the water when all the African nations joined together to play and sing for her. In many parts of Minas, a number of different dance associations turn out for the festival of the rosary, and each represents a distinct community, which is enacted through the performance of a distinct and identifiable musical genre. In Jatobá, for instance, there are congos, moçambiques, and candombes, this being the case also among their neighbors, the Arturos (Lucas 2002). Congos, which “open the way” for the street cortège, have the most varied repertory and the greatest opportunities for improvisation of the ensembles in this region. The rhythmic variations of the moçambiques are somewhat restricted, as the repertory must be regal to fulfill the ensemble’s role of accompanying the king and queen during the procession. The candombe, the most sacred of the ensembles, is only performed in an enclosed space; it is restricted to a single rhythmic sequence, played on a set of three cylindrical drums called Santana, Santaninha, and Jeremias (or Chama). Unlike the European-style drums used in the other two outdoor ensembles, the candombes are clearly African in structure (see Fig. 9.6), and their beats invoke the ancestors, bringing them closer to the living. As Glaura Lucas (2002) has demonstrated in her meticulous analysis of the congado performances in Jatobá and the Arturos, the subtle variations in

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Fig. 9.6 The candombe drums the drumming patterns embody a complex set of codes known only to the congadeiros (members of congado communities). She contends that this “drum language” is a legacy of the period of slavery, when a number of covert systems of communication were developed among black people in order to protect cherished aspects of their African heritage (Lucas 2005). Music provided a particularly useful vehicle for such secret codes, as it could be presented publicly as a harmless form of entertainment. Indeed, during their street processions, the members of the irmandades accompanied their newly elected kings with dances, songs, and drums, creating a carnivalesque atmosphere that presented them as an inoffensive group of people out to have a bit of fun, and not a band of black people to be feared (Reily 2007). But it also served as a legitimate space in which black people could publicly display their organizational potential and numerical strength (Priori 1994, 83). Vissungos, a genre of work songs performed in banguela among the slaves in the diamond mines around Diamantina, provide a further demonstration of how music was used by slaves in the colonial era as a vehicle for coded messages. During a vacation trip in 1928, Aires da Mata Machado Filho (1985) chanced upon this song tradition and collected a total of sixty-five vissungos, though he was unable to obtain translations for many of them. Some, for which translations are provided, demonstrate the enigmatic character of the texts, as in example 29, translated as follows: a black man who

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Fig. 9.7 Vissungo no. 29, collected by Aires da Mata Machado Filho was running away encountered ants carrying sticks on the road (ibid., 84) (see Fig. 9.7). Along with a means of safeguarding the memories of the experiences of the ancestors in the mines, this repertory has also allowed the descendants of slaves to preserve the language of their forefathers.

Beyond Minas By the late eighteenth century, the gold had all but disappeared in Minas, and the population had begun to disperse, many heading to the coffee regions along the Mantiqueira Mountains in the hope of, yet again, making fortunes in the new economic boom. Although the gold did not last, it transformed the profile of Portuguese America as a whole, as well as metropolitan conceptions of the territory’s potential. This was undoubtedly crucial in the decision to relocate the full Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century to escape the Napoleonic threat, a move that conclusively shifted Brazil’s cultural and economic center to the new capital. Soon the musical legacy of Minas was all but forgotten, overshadowed by such popular styles as the modinha, the choro, and samba, which claimed Rio as their birthplace. In the mining regions themselves, the decline in resources reduced the funds available to the irmandades, but even so many communities managed to sustain a festival cycle by recycling the works of the local masters. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the annual festivities in many former mining towns had been reduced to Holy Week and the Festival of Our Lady of the Rosary. During Holy Week in such places as Ouro Preto, Mariana, São João del Rei, Tiradentes, Prados, Campanha, among others, one can still hear the music of Manuel Dias de Oliveira, José Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita, Marcos Coelho Netto, João de Deus de Castro Lobo (1794–1832), Inácio Parreira Neves (1730–91), and many other eighteenth-century mineiro masters, but they are now performed by community choirs and orchestras (Gonçalves Dias 1999; Melo 2001; Neves 1987; Reily 2006). Festivals of the rosary are very

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widespread, having been instituted wherever a sufficient number of black people could come together to organize a congada. In Montes Claros, for instance, the Festival of the Rosary developed among the workers who built the railway, led by a family from the former diamond mines of Serro. In Montes Claros the procession is composed of catopês, marujos, and caboclinhos, each representing one of the “races” of Brazil. While the catopês are drum-based (African) ensembles, the (Portuguese) marujos accompany their songs with guitars and tambourines, and the caboclinhos play “bows and arrows,” an ingenious instrument in which an arrow snaps on a bow when pulled, producing a wood-on-wood sound (Mendes 2006). It could be said, therefore, that the ensembles in Montes Claros are engaged in articulating racial differences to Brazilian national unity. Just as the discovery of gold has had far-reaching consequences for the whole of Brazil, it also affected musical cultures in a number of other places, though little research has been done as yet to assess its wider musical ramifications. Some work has been conducted on the musical flows from northeastern Brazil to Benin (Lacerda 1998), but these studies have not indicated any direct links in the region deriving from the Brazilian gold mines; this is perhaps because slaves from this region entered the mines in their earliest phases of the gold rush. The Central African connections, however, have also been neglected. Yet, the high demand for slaves in Minas greatly intensified raiding in the Congo/Angola region, where this activity came to be known as the Kwata! Kwata! Wars. What repertories might these terrifying episodes have produced? Memory has surely survived of the exploits of the astute Queen Njinga (d. 1661), who succeeded, at least temporarily, in protecting her people, the Mbundu, from bondage by establishing an alliance with the Portuguese. But how has this translated into musical domains? The Portuguese, who had been in Central Africa since the late fifteenth century,8 fortified their claims there during the gold rush, and a prosperous community of metropolitans and Brazilians dominated the human trafficking in the region. Along with trade, the Portuguese brought Catholicism. One of the landmarks of Luanda is the cathedral, completed in 1628, and a sizable portion of the population of Angola is Catholic.9 As in Brazil, the encounters between Europeans and Africans created a large mulatto population, and Angolan culture, particularly in the urban settings, is typically described as hybrid. Because of the devastating civil war that ravaged the country since its 8 It is noteworthy that the Portuguese emissary of King Sebastião of Portugal, who arrived in Luanda in 1575, with a fleet of seven ships, was attracted to the region in the hope of controlling the legendary silver mines of Cambambe (Birmingham 1965). 9 Current figures are unreliable, but the Christian population probably exceeds 40 percent.

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independence from Portugal in 1975 until 2002, however, very little research of any kind has been undertaken in the country. In Portugal, Brazilian gold had a tremendous impact, as it literally drew the Crown from near bankruptcy to immense wealth. In his classic history of Portuguese music, João de Freitas Branco (1995, 194) claims that Brazilian gold even allowed Dom João V to compete with Louis XIV in the promotion of courtly artistic splendor. Indeed, the Portuguese Royal Chapel flourished in the eighteenth century. The very best musicians trained at the Vatican were recruited to Lisbon, and these included at least twelve string players and around thirty singers (Nery 2004, 387), a few castrati among them, of course. Unquestionably, the most prestigious recruit was Domenico Scarlatti, who arrived in Lisbon in 1719, where he remained until 1729, when he accompanied his most eminent pupil, the Portuguese Infanta Maria Barbara of Braganza, to her new home in Madrid, where she married the future king of Spain. Besides the musical education of the king’s children, Scarlatti was responsible for the music of the Royal Chapel. Another Italian musician who relocated to Lisbon was David Perez, whose work is seen by some as having been particularly influential in Minas (Gonçalves Dias 1999, 28). The Italianization of Portuguese music in the eighteenth century, therefore, had much to do with Brazil. Ironically, the very source of the flow of wealth that allowed the Baroque to flourish in Portugal would then model its own ostentation on the metropolis. Still, it has also been argued that much of Brazil’s gold arrived at Portuguese ports, only to be shipped off again to England to pay off Portuguese debts. Indeed, Charles Boxer (2000) has contended that it was Brazilian gold that financed the great British industrial revolution. Without doubt the eighteenth-century gold mines of Brazil instigated a surge in the movement of people, goods, and resources across a wide range of intersecting routes. In the pursuit of fortune, people of diverse backgrounds and aspirations found themselves side by side, driving them to translate their experiences into a diversity of hybrid musical forms that could articulate their achievements, hope, and pain. While the echoes of the Golden Atlantic reverberated far beyond the mines of Minas Gerais, we have only begun to assess the full musical ramifications of this intense and extraordinary episode in the music history of transatlantic flows.

Bibliography Andrade, M. de (1982) Danças dramáticas do Brasil, Belo Horizonte and Brasília: Itatiaia/ Instituto Nacional do Livro/Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória

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Antonil, A. J. (1997, orig. publ.1711) Cultura e opulência do Brasil, Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia Araújo, A. M. (1964) Folclore nacional: Festas, bailados, mitos e lendas, São Paulo: Melhoramentos Ávila, A. (1967) Reíduos seiscentistas em Minas: Textos do século do ouro e as projeções do mundo barroco, Belo Horizonte: Centro de Estudos Mineiros Baltazar, C. A., and R. Duprat (1997) Liner notes to Música do Brasil Colonial, São Paulo: Paulus/Brasilessentia Grupo Vocal e Orquestra Barbosa, E. C. (1978) O ciclo do ouro; o tempo e a música do barroco católico; catálogo de um arquivo de microfilmes; elementos para uma história da arte no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: PUC/FUNARTE/Xerox Béhague, G. (1979) Music in Latin America: An Introduction, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Birmingham, D. (1965) The Portuguese Conquest of Angola, London: Oxford University Press Boschi, C. C. (1986) Os leigos e o poder: Irmandades leigas e política colonizadora em Minas Gerais, São Paulo: Ática Boxer, C. R. (2000, orig. publ.1962) A idade de ouro do Brasil: Dores de crescimento de uma sociedade colonial, trans. N. de Lacerda, Rio de Janeiro: Fronteira Branco, J. de Freitas (1995, orig. publ. 1959) História da música portuguesa, Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América Crespo Filho, S. A. (1989) ‘Contribuição ao estudo da caracterização da música em Minas Gerais no século XVIII’, PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo Dottori, M. (1992) ‘Ensaio sobre a música colonial mineira’, MA thesis, University of São Paulo Duprat, R. (1985) Garimpo musical, São Paulo: Nova Meta (1994) Acervo de manuscritos musicias, Coleção Francisco Curt Lange: Compositores não-mineiros dos séculos XVI a XIX, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Godinho, V. M. (1971) A estrutura da antiga sociedade portuguesa, Lisbon: Arcádia Gonçalves Dias, J. L. (1999) ‘A música em Prados’, PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo Goulart, M. (1975) A escravidão africana no Brasil – Das origens à extinção do tráfico, São Paulo: Alfa-Omega Kiddy, E. W. (2005) Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press Klein, H. S. (1999) The Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press Lacerda, M. B. (1998) Liner notes to Drama e fetiche: vodum, bumba-meu-boi e samba do Benim, Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE Lange, F. C. (1951) Archivo de musica religiosa de la Capitania Geral das Minas Gerais (Brasil), Mendoza, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (1966) A organização musical durante o período colonial brasileiro, Coimbra: Colóquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros (1979) A música do período colonial em Minas Gerais: Seminário sobre a cultura mineira no período colonial, Belo Horizonte: Conselho Estadual de Cultura de Minas Gerais (1990, orig. publ. 1946) ‘A música em Minas Gerais – Um informe preliminar’, in R. Mourão (ed.), O alemão que descobriu a América, Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, pp. 99–179

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Leoni, A. L. (2007) ‘Os que vivem da arte da música, Vila Rica, século XVIII’, MA thesis, University of Campinas Lucas, G. (2002) Os sons do Rosário: O congado mineiro dos Arturos e Jatobá, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG (2005) ‘Música e tempo nos rituais do congado mineiro dos Arturos e do Jatobá’, PhD dissertation, University of Rio de Janeiro Machado Filho, A. da Mata (1985, orig. publ.1943) O negro e o garimpo em Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia Melo, E. de Lara (2001) ‘A música da Semana Santa em quatro cidades da região dos Campos das Vertentes/MG’, MA thesis, University of Rio de Janeiro Mello e Souza, L. de (1982 [orig. publ.], 2004) Desclassificados do ouro: A pobreza mineira no século XVIII, São Paulo: Graal (2006) Norma e conflito: Aspectos da história de Minas no século XVIII, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG Mello e Souza, M. de (2002) Reis negros no Brasil escravista: História da festa de coroação de rei congo, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG Mendes, J. J. F. (2006) ‘Música e religiosidade na caracterização identitária do Terno de Catopês de Nossa Senhora do Mestre João Farias em Montes Claros – MG’, MA thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia Nery, R. V. de (2004) ‘Spain, Portugal, and Latin America’, in G. J. Buelow (ed.), A History of Baroque Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 359–413 Neves, J. M. (1987) ‘A Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos e a vida musical em São João del-Rei’, Professorial thesis, University of Rio de Janeiro (1997) Música sacra mineira: Catálogo de obras, Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE Nishida, M. (1998) ‘From ethnicity to race and gender: Transformations of black sodalities in Salvador, Bahia’, Journal of Social History, 32, 2: 329–48 Priori, M. del (1994) Festas e utopias no Brasil colonial, São Paulo: Brasiliense Ramos, A. (1954, orig. publ.1935) O folclore negro do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Casa do Estudante do Brasil Reis, J. J. (1991) A morte é uma festa: Ritos fúnebres e revolta popular no Brasil do século XIX, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras Reily, S. A. (2006) ‘Remembering the Baroque era: Historical consciousness, local identity and the Holy Week celebrations in a former mining town in Brazil’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 15, 1: 39–62 (2007) ‘Folk music, art music, popular music: What do these categories mean today’? Roundtable presentation British Forum for Ethnomusicology, Annual Conference, Newcastle, www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/music-conferences/BFE2007/RoundtableSAR.pdf Russell-Wood, A. J. R. (1968) Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755, London: Macmillan Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Salles, F. T. de. (2007, orig. publ.1963) Associações religiosas no ciclo do ouro: Introdução ao estudo do comportamento social das irmandades de Minas no século XIII, São Paulo: Perspectiva Scarano, J. (1976) Devoção e escravidão: A irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos pretos no Distrito de Diamantina no século XIII, São Paulo: Nacional Scott, J. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

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Skrine, P. N. (1978) The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe, Cambridge: Methuen Stockstad, M. (2002) Art History, Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Tinhorão, J. R. (1975) Música popular de índios, negros e mestiços, Petrópolis: Vozes Volpe, M. A. (1997) ‘Irmandades e ritual em Minas Gerais durante o período colonial: O Triunfo Eucaristico de 1733’, Revista música, 1, 2: 6–55 Zemella, M. P. (1990, orig. publ.1951) O abastecimento da Capitania das Minas Gerais no século XVIII, São Paulo: Hucitec-EDUSP

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PART IV

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT

AND WORLD MUSIC’S HISTORICAL TURN

. 10 .

Johann Gottfried Herder and the global moment of world-music history PHILIP V. BOHLMAN

Folk song entered the history of world music in the 1770s, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was the primary material – sonic, literary, narrative, and political – for understanding the history of music worldwide. The remarkable rise of folk song as the paradigmatic form of world music during the late Enlightenment was due in large measure to the intellectual impact of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) not only on his own generation but also on the subsequent generations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which increasingly situated music, history, and politics within the borders of nations spreading across the world. Herder’s coining of the word Volkslied (folk song) in the 1770s described an act of ownership whereby a collective of people, the Volk (glossed variously as the folk, the people, or the nation), asserted authority for song and musical practices from the past and claimed it for the present. The materiality of folk song itself was, from the moment of its invention in the Enlightenment, historical. The transmission of folk song from individual to community, from oral to written tradition, unfolded according to the principles of history and history writing. With folk song as a body of fundamental texts it was inevitable that those principles would acquire global significance. Complex discourses of world music converged at the defining moment of folk song’s entry into history, and it is the goal of this chapter, first, to distinguish a number of historical strands from each other, and then, second, to examine the ways in which they converge to shape the historiographic whole of music in the modern world that is the larger subject of this volume. The chapter begins with an examination of the convergence of historical and anthropological practices that connected vernacular music practices to time and place. It proceeds by examining eponymous discourse about the role of the individual – Herder as a hero of the Enlightenment, epic as the literary and musical tale of the nation, the individuals whose life stories filled ballads – in giving voice to the people, shaping, as Herder would claim in the title of the first anthology of folk songs, “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” (the voices of the people in songs; Herder 1778–9; see also Herder 1990). The chapter then [255]

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establishes the ways in which the very collections of folk song yielded the possibility for history and history writing that proliferated to form the narratives of nineteenth-century Romanticism, particularly its political forms as nationalism. The chapter closes by following Herder’s influence as a translator of epic, direct and indirect, deserved and undeserved, on the synthesis and fragmentation of world-music histories that accompanied the expansion of nationalism into colonialism and the subsequent human crises of modern history in the twentieth century and beyond (see Borsche 2006). Its intersecting processes of synthesis and fragmentation notwithstanding, the expansive history of world music growing from the discovery of folk song begins with Johann Gottfried Herder.

Transforming song to history: four processes The Enlightenment transformation of folk song to history, the narrative dimensions of which shaped the global moment of world-music history, resulted from a dramatic paradigm shift during the 1770s, but it did so only first by drawing together four identifiable processes of change. The four processes coalesced during the decade in which Herder turned from the aesthetic and theological writings of his years as a pastor in Riga (1764–9) to the more musical and historical writings of his first decade in the German lands. Several biographical events mark the transition from one decade to the next, but for Herder’s encounter with a much more expansive sense of the world and the convergence of world histories in the present, none was more significant than the sea journey that took Herder from the Baltic lands of his youth to the German lands of his early career, a journey that he detailed in an ethnographic journal, which appeared only posthumously (Herder 1769). During the precise critical moment that he turned to a new “philosophy of history for the education of humankind” (Herder 1774), Herder would recognize in folk song an object of culture that gave voice to the subjectivities forming the foundations of world history. A decade later, he would gather his historiographic “ideas” again, publishing them this time in two parts as a history of world cultures (Herder 1784–5). The global moment accompanied the transformation of music as object to subject, hence to the formation of history, through the four processes that appear in Herder’s own writings on music in the late eighteenth century and then came powerfully to influence the writing of music history until the present. The four processes encompass the several shifts in the ontology of music: from oral to written tradition; from individual practice to communal tradition; from single to plural (i.e., from music to musics, origin to origins, culture to cultures;

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see Nettl in this volume); from local to global. The processes, nonetheless, unfold through distinct stages, and they are the results of individual action and agency: in Herder’s Enlightenment, music entered history as the human measure of a response to change. The four processes might be briefly identified as such: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Transforming the oral to the written The formation of genre The formalization of theory Inventing folk song globally.

In the years between 1769 and the publication of the volumes on and of folk songs in 1778–9, Herder was prolific while at the same time traveling and garnering increasingly more diverse cultural experiences, and publishing some of his most influential early writings, not least among them his study of the origins of language (Herder 1772). His activities as a folk-song collector were also proceeding systematically, and by 1773 he had already gathered enough folk songs, from oral traditions and from printed sources, that the manuscript for “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder (1778–9) already had a coherent shape. That manuscript provided the comparative basis in 1773 for his first major essay devoted to folk song, his “Extract from Correspondence about Ossian and Ancient Songs,” which appeared in Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Herder 1773). The manuscript anthology had already lent itself to the formulation of a theoretical framework for giving folk song temporal, historical dimensions and spatial, geographical dimensions. In the course of the next five years, Herder would both add and remove songs from the manuscript, refining and refocusing these dimensions before publishing the folk songs together, as an anthology whose dimensions had become distinctively global. These experiences and the writing they generated navigated the discursive space between an ethnographic moment and a global moment. The discursive space is narrated and inscribed by the transformation of the empirical evidence gathered in the field through a series of linked representational practices: from folk song or custom in oral tradition to fieldnote; from fieldnote to personal and reflexive narrative; from narrative to anthology of musical “works”; from anthology to new ontology of world music. These linked representational practices, moreover, do not derive only or entirely from a top-down perspective, but rather it is the ethnographic experience, however inchoate, that generates them.

Herder’s journey, history’s path Despite the boldness of his journey in 1769, it is not the case that Herder reinvented himself as an anthropologist from one day to the next. John

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Zammito has reexamined the birth of anthropology at the transition from German Enlightenment to German Idealist philosophy in light of the intellectual exchange and competition between Herder and his Königsberg teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This transition amounts to what Zammito calls a “critical turn” toward anthropology, whereby he means also to assign an enormous importance to the emergence of a sweeping new intellectual epistemology, one in which the “popular” was to claim a radically different place by the end of the eighteenth century. For Kant, the “critical turn” took place during a period from 1762 to 1769, during which he turned away from large systematic projects and toward what is generally called “popular philosophy” (in German, both Popularphilosophie and Schulphilosophie). For Herder, according to Zammito, the “critical turn” began in 1769, and soon thereafter became the basis for the global moment of world music. Zammito explains the turn/ moment thus: I propose what Kant turned away from around 1769–1770 was in fact the path of a popular philosopher. In the preceding seven years, deeply troubled about the direction of traditional German school metaphysics, as well as about the role of the Gelehrtenstand in the project of Enlightenment, it is not unreasonable to suspect that Kant considered an alternative identity, that of the popular philosopher – a project that in fact Herder would take up in his stead (and even, I am suggesting, in his image). (Zammito 2002, 6; emphasis and parenthesis in the original)

A shift in literary and discursive style was crucial in this critical turn of the 1760s, a shift that aimed to broaden the audience for philosophical and ethical speculation, but also to broaden – to reimagine and reinvent – the presence of subjects and subjectivity in Enlightenment epistemology. Driving the ethnographic moment was, therefore, the discourse of popular philosophy itself. The German philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, especially Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, as well as Joseph Sulzer and Thomas Abbt, were much more broadly concerned with the more international domains of Enlightenment philosophy, notably with English analytical philosophy and the concern of French philosophy with nature. At the moment of his critical turn, Kant openly embraced the German philosophers of the Enlightenment, above all their active integration of Rousseau’s writings into a new agenda program of public expression, or Öffentlichkeit (ibid., 10). As Zammito points out, it was precisely at the moment of Kant’s most intense engagement with Rousseau that Herder was Kant’s student. The teaching of that moment would not only be Kant’s greatest legacy to Herder but also plant the fundamental seeds of disagreement that would increasingly lead to the parting of their ways (ibid.). When those ways parted, it was Herder who stayed the course toward

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anthropology after Kant had put it behind him after the early 1770s. Herder would emerge, as Hans-Jürgen Schings has claimed, as the most important anthropologist of the late eighteenth century, “who as no other embodies the style of thought and the competence of an anthropologist” (Schings 1994, 5; see also Zammito 2002, 8). During the 1770s, the anthropological and the historical intersect in Herder’s writings, linking the aesthetic writings in the Kritische Wälder (Herder 1769) with the more specifically musical writings in the Volkslieder volumes. The key to that link lies in a work he published in 1774, Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity (Herder 1774), with which Herder launched an open assault on the absolutism that had characterized the Enlightenment notion of universal history. Crucial to his program for a new historiography was an insistence that the histories of past cultures were encountered only within those cultures themselves, in their own time and terms, without imposing the values purportedly immanent in a universal history. Herder openly rejected the increasingly common assertions that there was something akin to a universal human nature, and, instead, he made the case that the encounter between a culture and its environment determined the shape of its practices and the course of its history. If this sounds like an open call for cultural relativism, it both was and was not. On the one hand, Herder insisted that understanding a culture at historical and geographical distance from eighteenthcentury Europe required understanding its own conditions. On the other, he stopped short of stripping history of teleology, specifically of the process of development toward increasing progress, even Rousseau’s concept of perfectibilité (see Gaiger in Herder 2002, 21). In the years that followed Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder revisited the aesthetic materials that he had gathered in and around 1769, coupling them with the new concept of experience and sensation that was central to his anthropological program, and publishing them in his two most substantial works specifically devoted to the arts, the study of Plastik, or Sculpture, in 1776 (for an English translation, see Herder 2002), and the volumes on folk song in 1778–9. In both these works we encounter a new anthropology, which argues boldly for the embodiment of the artistic experience, particularly in the visual and musical arts. It is through embodiment, moreover, that the arts acquire their potential to express something profoundly human, which is to say, potentially bound to the development of humanity as a whole. The shift to the human body, thus, is also to a humanity that was globally, indeed, phylogenetically, conceived. On a much grander scale, Herder is making the shift from an Enlightenment universalism to a globalization palpable in the aesthetic – and musical – experience. The most complete map of that

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globalization was to become “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder (Herder 1778–9). When we begin to read Herder as an ethnographer at a later moment in world-music history, his writings on music begin to tell entirely different tales from the field. First of all, his inscriptions of song no longer fulfill only the characteristics of a history predicated on text, the dissemination of which depends on literary technologies (e.g., printing and translation). Second, Herder’s collections of and essays on music cease to represent the nationalist rhetoric that prevailed in the nineteenth century, especially in Germany. German songs, indeed, appear in relatively small numbers (a total of thirtyeight, with only fifteen folk songs, in a total of 162 in Herder 1778–9). Third, we recognize that his writings on music have polysemic dimensions; in other words, they are meant to embrace different ontologies and epistemologies of music, especially folk music. Fourth, Herder is remarkable for the ways in which he recognizes how the local realizes the global and vice versa, all the more because he recognizes the power of discourse networks, say, in a Latin Marian song that becomes a Sicilian sailor’s song on its way to entering the canon of German Christmas songs as “Oh, du fröhliche” (see Fig. 10.1). Herder’s music aesthetic also possesses many of the attributes of early Romantic notions of music’s relation to experience. Citing Friedrich Schlegel,

Fig. 10.1 “O sanctissima!” – Sicilian sailor’s song (from Herder’s Nachlaß)

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Berthold Hoeckner observes that Herder was perhaps the first writer to attempt to bring an epistemological whole into view through the parts, both individually and collectively. Schlegel noted that “it was Herder, who first knew to grasp a whole with an emphatic imagination and to express this feeling in words” (Schlegel 1958, III, 296; quoted in Hoeckner 2002, 5). Herder’s seminal epistemological focus on the relation between parts and wholes was born of his ethnomusicological epiphany, itself ineluctably connected to the global moment. We witness the epistemological refocusing in the representational forms that Herder began to employ in his aesthetic writings, beginning after 1769 and throughout the 1770s. Such forms appear in his earliest writings devoted to music and they sustain his approach to folk music, not least the use of fragments in the Ossian essay (in Herder 1773) and in the folk-song volumes. Herder also sutures aesthetic and ethnographic modes of rhetoric, notably through the ethnographic tradition of juxtaposing diachronic and synchronic representation. Indeed, the relation of the two larger parts of the folk-song publication, “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder, was one of systematically presenting synchronic evidence in the first part in order to undergird the diachronic historiography in the second part. “Stimmen der Völker” begins with a section devoted to what he calls Zeugnisse über Volkslieder (“witnesses,” or evidence, about folk songs) and then unfolds as an anthology with very sparse commentary on the songs themselves, intentionally allowing them to “speak” for themselves as “the people’s voices.” Part two, in contrast, intersperses extensive historical commentaries with the songs, and using this rhetorical ploy Herder uses folk song as a means of representing cultural and national history, that is of narrating the diachronic. The addition of fragments to whole literary works (e.g., the addition of songs and commentaries on songs to the 1773 folk-song manuscripts and after 1779 to subsequent publications of Volkslieder) allowed him quite unsystematically to evoke a systematic view of a globalized and globalizing music culture. The expansion of Volkslieder in 1807 from Herder’s literary estate (Nachlaß) adds commentary with particularly far-reaching global dimensions, and it draws attention to processes we today understand as globalization: encounter, colonialism, hybridity, change, and exchange (see Bohlman 2007). By the end of the 1770s, through folk song, Herder had arrived at the global moment of world-music history.

Herder, epic hero Folk song entered world-music history eponymously, that is, as narratives about people, the Volk. The Volk enters history in plural form, Völker, that is,

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as individuals and collectivities alike, as the everyperson and the hero of the nation. They not only sang Volkslieder – “das Volk dichtet,” “the people created their own poetry,” in Jacob Grimm’s formulation – but they also increasingly became the subjects of their own songs. In the nineteenth century, folk song would generate new forms of ownership. The global moment of folk song was that in which individuals acquired agency, thereby translating and transforming the narratives of song to those of epochs and nations. The global narrative of world music, taking shape as the Enlightenment gave way to the age of nationalism in the nineteenth century, became a narrative about heroes and histories. After Herder, world-music history unfolds as a polyphonic narrative, part epic and folk song, part opera and sacred cantata, part sacred and secular. Its spectacle is that of history itself, the history, above all, of modernity. In most ways, Herder was himself an unlikely hero, a Lutheran pastor by training and vocation. Still, it is this rather unspectacular of heroes who, in the course of a history he set in motion with his writings, transforms modernity into spectacle. The hero of the global moment of world-music history was Johann Gottfried Herder, whose work unfolded for the Enlightenment as an epic in and of itself. Numerous chapters in the present volume, whether historical overviews or geographical case studies, attest to Herder’s multiple identities, as well as the impact and evaluation of his writings about folk song, which assumed many forms in the media in which he chose to represent his own thinking and that of the age of intellectual transition in which he lived. Herder was a polymath in his own life, even in the quotidian activities that he punctuated with more radical shifts in his own life decisions. Herder reception embraced the polymath Herder, thereby allowing him to assume even grander heroic forms. These proliferated from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, when the multiplication of Herderian identities was strained to a point of breaking during the rise of fascism and the Holocaust (see Bohlman 2010b). In the twentieth century, Herder survived the reparsing of Europe between East and West, largely through appropriation by the East. Herder Prizes in East Germany, for example, went to the students who most effectively learned the Russian language. When West German and Western European scholars turned away from folk music and folk culture as anachronistic, East Germans and East European scientists revived Herder as the Nestor of the folk song of “democratic character” (Steinitz 1979; see Bohlman 2010a). Herder the polymath came to embody so many identities for those who drew upon him that, to some degree, he lost historiographic identity altogether. Particularly in the late twentieth century, he was subject to the paradox

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of invisibility growing from historical overexposure. The paradox of invisibility is further dependent on the assumption that it is possible to make attributions of all sorts to Herder without having read his writings. Scholars of folk music know of the two volumes of “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder (1778–9), rather than knowing what Herder wrote or anthologized in them. Hardly a tract on nationalism fails to claim Herder as some sort of founding figure, clearly without any knowledge of what Herder really wrote. The phenomenon of knowing-about-but-not-knowing is no less the case in writings on music and nationalism. Herder is himself not without a certain culpability for his own paradox of invisibility, what Hans Adler (2006) refers to as Herder’s Rezeptionsbarriere (reception barrier). Defending, or at least explaining, Herder against those accusing him of “soft science,” Adler writes: In a word, Herder’s ways of thinking and writing are similarly confused in the sense that they ignore the boundaries between modes of discourse and generate, instead, a hybrid discourse that is neither fish – that is, philosophy – nor fowl – that is, poesy or rhetoric. Herder plies the territories of a no-man’s land, making him a professional nobody. (Ibid., 18)

The history of world music, however, suggests that the reception barrier does not so much prevent understanding of Herder’s historiographic role as generate different processes of circumnavigating the barrier. In this chapter, therefore, we consider just how different Hans Adler’s observations about Herder’s invisibility are from the intellectual historians, ethnomusicologists unquestionably among them, who regard Herder not so much as a professional nobody but as a professional everybody; for example, as Michael Forster does in the introduction to his translation of Herder’s Philosophical Writings: Hegel’s philosophy turns out to be an elaborate systematic extension of Herderian ideas (especially concerning God, the mind, and history); so too does Schleiermacher’s (concerning God, the mind, interpretation, translation, and art); Nietzsche is strongly influenced by Herder (concerning the mind, history, and morals); so too is Dilthey (in his theory of human sciences); J. S. Mill has important debts to Herder (in political philosophy); Goethe not only received his philosophical outlook from Herder but was also transformed from being merely a clever but conventional poet into a great artist mainly through the early impact on him of Herder’s ideas. (Forster 2002, vii)

Johann Gottfried Herder the polymath does indeed have multiple identities, which form a constellation that might look like Fig. 10.2. These identities circulate on a number of different planes, which themselves intersect with other planes and other identities, which form the additional constellation in Fig. 10.3.

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Herder, the Pastor Herder, the Hero

Herder, the Subaltern

Herder, the Nationalist

Herder, the Ethnographer Herder, the Historian

Fig. 10.2 Herderian polymath identities

Herder, the Philosopher Herder, the Epic Singer

Herder, the Folk Singer

Herder, the Poet

Herder, the Fascist Herder, the Marxist

Fig. 10.3 Additional Herderian polymath identities In this chapter, I turn initially to one of the ways in which these identities cluster to form Herder’s modern persona as a polymath shaping the history of world music. I turn to Herder, the Hero of epic. As a musical and literary genre, epic depends on the belief that the multiple identities of myth accrue to the human as hero. Herder’s Der Cid, the great modern version of a medieval narrative, has in many ways become the mirror in which we come to gaze upon Herder’s eponymous role in the global moment of world-music history.

Herder’s Cid and the ownership of history El Cid is the great epic of Iberia, not only of Spain as a nation, but also of Portugal and other regions, for which the epic represents the return of southwestern Europe to Christianity, to Europe itself. The history of Cid translations is long, but it is with Herder’s translation – a project he pursued throughout

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his life and never fully completed – that the great Iberian epic entered European modernity. Several issues about Herder’s Cid become especially compelling for the historiography of world music. First of all, in a nine-century history of transmitting the Cid epic, Herder’s translation marked a sea change. Its appearance was crucial to the establishment of a canonical version, which in turn, that is, reflexively, came to signify the canon of epic for modern nationalism. When nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Europe set out in search of national epics, Herder’s Cid was their inspiration and their model. Second, the reception history of Herder’s Cid shifts the ownership of the epic from medieval Iberia to modern Central Europe, because published editions seemingly claim El Cid for and by Herder. In full and abridged versions, in editions for home, school, and mass consumption, Herder was assigned authorship of a work published either as Herders Cid (Herder’s Cid) or Der Cid von Herder (The Cid by Herder). Third, just as Herder’s publications of and on folk song established a modern genre of world music, so too did his work on epic as a narrative of folk song. Herder located epic in history, as well as in modernity. In so doing, he rendered epic modern. In the history of Cid transmission, the heroic unifier of Spain becomes an extraordinary epic figure through a process of consolidating numerous chronicles about the Cid, and these both agree and disagree in their details. Unlike many other epic heroes, we know Rodrigo Díaz was born in the village of Vivar near Burgos in c. 1043 CE and that he died in Valencia in 1099 CE. He was born in obscurity, and he died as a powerful military leader who had entered the genealogy of the Spanish aristocracy. His life is a rags-to-riches story, affording many the possibility of identifying with it. Exactly how Rodrigo Díaz entered epic song in an emerging vernacular, Latin and Arabic chronicles (e.g., by the great Andalusian chronicler, Abū l’Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Bassām aš-Šantarīnī [1084–1147–8]), and the narrative and lyrical traditions of troubadours, juglares, and jongleurs is far more difficult to pin down. For purposes of summary, I might paint the Cid’s life with the following broad strokes. Upon being drawn into the court of Ferdinand I and into a closer family alliance with one of Ferdinand’s sons, Sancho, to whom the Kingdom of Castile had fallen, Rodrigo Díaz ascended to the leadership of the Castilian armies against the other dominions in Iberia. He managed to anger several of the more powerful members of the Spanish aristocracy, whom he had defeated in battle, and hence was forced into exile, actually becoming a sort of private military leader, who offered services to both Christian and Muslim leaders. By about 1090, the Cid was again empowered by Castile for the task of consolidating Iberian power, and in 1094 he led the siege of Valencia, which was being held by North African armies (see Fig. 10.4).

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Fig. 10.4 Woodcut from the 1869 edition of Herder’s Cid translation – “El Cid in Valencia and in death” (romance 49) (Herder 1869)

The Cid of history and the Cid of myth constantly negotiate and blur the borders of medieval Iberia and al-Andalus. Narrative borders are also critical here. In particular, the Cid is moving across the borders between oral and literate traditions. In musical and literary genres, there is the constant negotiation of myth and history as well. He can, and to a certain extent must, be both Rodrigo Díaz and El Cid. Rodrigo Díaz was a historical figure quickly entering various literary traditions, but did so always with various mythological epithets, Cid/ Said from Arabic sources, Campeador from Spanish and Latin sources. The question is: why does this obscure figure from a village that even today has only a few hundred residents rise through the genealogy of various families to unify Iberia and buttress Europe against its historical and religious others? The questions about authenticity, however, shift across the narrative and historical borders, shifting thereby to questions about authority and authorship. Inside and outside of history, Rodrigo Díaz, Ruy, Count of Bivar, Said and Cid, Campeador and epic singer, the Cid of myth insistently and persistently

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becomes modern, in Herder’s age and ours no less than in Spain’s eleventh century. The history of Herder’s Cid is coeval with that of the rise of modern folk song itself, so much so, in fact, that we are compelled to examine the history as a coterminous foundational myth for what, since the birth of folk-music and folklore studies in the early nineteenth century, we understand folk music to be. The Cid epic entered this epoch-making discourse at its very inception. Herder was no less a polyglot than a polymath, and as such he was a passionate student of languages his entire life. It was in the winter of 1777, months before his folk-song volumes began to appear in print, that Herder determined to learn Spanish. We know from his literary estate that one of the ways in which he taught himself Spanish was to write out Spanish ballads, romances, from a 1568 Antwerp Cancionero (Cancionero de romances 1568). In these first autodidactic lessons are the texts of thirty-eight romances, of which a total of eleven contain narratives about the Cid. In addition to making copies, Herder also tried his hand at translating certain lines and fragments from the Cid romances. In her memoir, Herder’s wife, Karoline, writes of this period in Herder’s life: Almost every day, when his official duties permitted, my husband translated a ballad [Romanze] from Cid, from his old manuscripts; in fact, at the time he was editing his folk songs, he was writing out romances from the Cid. (cited in Gaier 1990, 1287–8; memoir dated May 23, 1803)

The next time we encounter the Cid in Herder’s biography is five years later, when, in conjunction with the planning of a second edition of the folk-song volumes, Herder seeks complete editions of the Spanish Cancionero, which quickly led him to realize the full extent of the problem of the epic’s wholeness. Herder was not, however, the only Enlightenment thinker to regard the problem of a complete epic in the full “heroic and poetic” style of the “Romantic era of the Spaniards” to be of critical importance. Long critical and polemical articles about Cid sources and historiography appeared in leading literary journals. What Herder did, thereby locating the Cid in the global moment of world-music history, was to provide a response to these debates, hence solving one of the vexing problems of the late Enlightenment, for which the Cantar de Mio Cid was emblematic. Herder determined that the only way to translate the Cid and convey its epic fullness was to use both Spanish and French sources. He took as his Spanish source the edition that was believed to be the first attempt to create a composite Cid – the volume of romances collected by Juan de Escobar and published in Lisbon in 1605 (de Escobar 1605). Chief among his French sources were romances from the Bibliothèque universelle des Romans, though he turned to numerous French

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sources. Of the seventy romances translated by Herder, over three-quarters – the first fifty-two – come from French translations (Köhler 1867). Like his folk-song works, Herder’s Cid translation was ongoing, and he pursued it throughout his life. Folk song and epic both reflect a process of creation called by Herder, but also by others, Übertragung, literally the recuperation of a musical and poetic text, of poesy, from one source and representing it in the contemporary contexts of another. This process of recuperation and representation would become crucial to musicological methods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indeed, until the present, not because it allowed ethnomusicologists and philologists alike to claim complete texts and authentic sources, but rather because it allowed them to fill in the gaps. Folk-song collections, including Herder’s foundational collections, at first had no musical notation, but new generations of scholars added musical notation when that became possible. We witness this with virtually every collection of the nineteenth century, from Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Arnim and Brentano 1806–8) to Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1886–98). The representational gap, moreover, can be understood as the space between oral and written tradition. For Herder and the generations that followed, that space, too, was of extraordinary importance, for it was a space of movement, from transmission to reception, reflexively back to variation and transmission and reception of altered form. It was the space of agency, and in epic it was the space in which the past was performed as the present. For Herder, epic was so critically important because it revoiced the long debate between the ancients and the moderns. Cid connects the two Europes of history, the premodern and the modern (Meier 2007; see also Andruchowytsch and Stasiuk 2004). The Cid in Herder’s sounding and re-sounding had the potential of being both ancient and modern. As Herder himself stated on the title page, the romances in the Cid were at once historical (historisch) and romantic (romantisch), and he is therefore explicit in giving Romanticism a literal meaning conveyed by the romance from Cid’s medieval world. The use of romances allowed Herder to return to what he regarded as the vernacular, the language of a subaltern expressing itself historically. He wrote about the romance in the fifth volume of Adrastea, which appeared in 1804 at the end of his life. Songs in the local language are called romances. Their syllables form patterns which are the most natural of all in the language, that is, in the forms of the language in which Spanish folk sayings are found . . . The romance is actually no more nor less than the mother tongue of the southern lands of Europe as expressed in the speech and songs of the folk. (Herder 2000, 796 and 800)

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Epic and the voice of the nation Herder’s turn toward Cid’s epic heroism gradually shifted from an attempt to work through issues of folk song to a confrontation with attributes of identity that he would don as his own. Herder was by no means the only scholar to translate and anthologize the Cid. His own work on the Cid, moreover, produced as many detractors as supporters. The point, then, is that it is critical to reflect upon Herder as part of a tradition that was itself becoming a stream within the history of world music. If he were not entering intellectual history in this way, his Cid would not have had the impact it did on the Enlightenment tradition and on the global moment of world music. Why, then, does Herder’s Cid play this special role? My first answer to that question has to do with timing: Herder’s Cid was the right work and the right time. The reception history of Herder’s Cid unfolded during the age of the national epic, and it therefore provides, once again, a parallel history, this time to the history of nationalism. In the fifty years following Herder’s Cid, the number of national epics to appear in print, one way or another, is staggering. In Finland, Elias Lönnrot gathered runes and fragments from the Karelian borders with Russia to publish the Kalevala in 1835 (see Lönnrot 1999). Lönnrot employs exactly the same process of translating narrative fragments that Herder used, even if he refers to the Kalevala’s internal units as cantos instead of romances. At the same historical moment, Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadžic´, having studied in Germany, transformed Croatian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, and Serbian fragments into modern epic forms, such as those employed as canonic repertory by guslars, or epic singers, today (Karadžic´ 1997; see also Bohlman and Petkovic´ 2012). In Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko began to publish modern epics, consciously producing a nationalist hybrid forged from songs for the bandura and his own poetry, songs, and paintings. The constellation of epics that assumed new forms – above all, new musical forms – with Herder’s Cid radiating new light from the sun at its Enlightenment center is remarkable. It was at the end of the eighteenth century that new efforts to recuperate the German-language Nibelungen accelerate, leading, in the musical realization best known to us, to Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. The French Chanson de Roland achieves its modern form in the first decades of the nineteenth century. There are those, not least among them Irish scholars, who lay claim to Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, which begin to appear in 1810, as the modern Irish epic (see Bohlman 2012). The critical question of reception history is, however, not whether Herder’s Cid, sounding the global moment for national dissemination of the epic, actually brought it about. There was, indeed, an awareness of Herder’s Cid,

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and it is possible to identify direct impact on the Finnish and Serbian epics, as well as later epic endeavors, such as those aiming to create a Yiddish and Jewish folk-song repertory. Of even greater importance, however, are the ways in which Herder’s Cid articulated a process of historiography through translation. Herder’s Cid revealed the ways in which a given set of materials could lend themselves to a process of cultural translation and hence to the production of the modern nation. The cultural translation took the oral and rendered it as the written. It appropriated myth and recast it as history. The multiple linguistic variants – romances in various languages, the encroachment of Russian and Swedish into Finnish, or the absence of a modern literary Slavic language in southeastern Europe – all these variants underwent a process of standardization and arrogation into the national language the moment they were sounded in the modern epic. Once the process of cultural translation was unleashed, the products of the modern epic lent themselves to further translation. Wagner translated the Nibelungen epic, Jean Sibelius the Kalevala – the production history of epic translations spread throughout the world in the nineteenth century. And, yet, I find myself returning to Herder. Though he never completed a definitive version in his own lifetime, eighty-eight editions of Herder’s Cid had appeared by 1922, all in all thirty-five in new editions, many with expanded translations or attempts to place Herder’s translation in new contexts. Dominating the editions are the volumes created for use in the schools of Austria and Germany, which is to say, for the standardization of Germanlanguage education that was spreading into Eastern Europe with the AustroHungarian and German Empires. As form and genre, Herder’s Cid became the model for ballad cycles in the poetry of the Schlegels, Eichendorff, Uhland, Grillparzer, Brentano, and many others; in other words, the literature and music of Romanticism. Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen or Schumann’s translations of Romantic poetry into song cycles lend themselves to interpretations created in the spirit of Cid translations. Such a claim may not seem so very outlandish if one also considers the extent to which art song of the nineteenth century reinstantiates and reproduces the nation at a profound level.

Translating Cid being translated As myth and history, the life of Rodrigo Díaz began to expand with epic proportions already during his own lifetime. As epic, the Cid emerges fully formed, translated, and transformed into a symbol for a Europe that would emerge itself fully formed from the parts of late Antiquity and the religious

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Que a Castiella / irán Buenos mandados, That to Castile / will go good tidings, Que mio Cid Roy Díaz / lid campal a arrancado. That My Cid Roy Díaz / a pitched battle has won.

Fig. 10.5 Lines 783 and 784 from the Poema de Mio Cid

diversity of the first millennium of the Common Era. An extensive epic version of the Cid had already entered written tradition prior to 1157; in other words, within a half-century of Rodrigo Díaz’s death (see Powell 1983). Called the “Poema de Mio Cid,” the first surviving versions already contain 3,700 lines, composed stichically (line-by-line), with consciously reproduced epic formulae, above all, line breaks that produce hemistiches (Fig 10.5). The language of the “Poema de Mio Cid,” moreover, clearly combines the oral and the literary, for it is in a hybrid style, weaving Latin and a spoken, vernacular Spanish together. Though narrative, form, and style are fully formed by the mid-twelfth century – in other words, though we can already speak of a single work appropriately called the Cid epic – it is impossible to identify a single author, or even a single type of author. It is impossible to attribute a Homer to a work that has become Homeric. There was ample space, it follows, for a Herder. Critical to my historiographic argument in this chapter is that the twelfthcentury epic achieves its symbolic potential through the synthesis of poesis, and therein lies the potential for spawning multiple identities that surely attracted Herder. The “Poema de Mio Cid” forms from a cluster of Cid texts in many languages. Writing in the twelfth century, Ibn Bassām aš-Šantarīnī already takes account of the Cid’s military exploits and political achievements, both positively and negatively. Latin and Hebrew texts, too, appear in the first half of the twelfth century. It was in the twelfth century, moreover, that individual narratives – since the eighteenth century we would call them ballads – spun off from this constellation of texts, contributing a distinctive corpus of songs to the Cid epic. The songs entered several repertories and practices: on one hand, those of the court or courts, purveyed by the professional class of singers called juglares, jongleurs, or generally minstrels today; on the other hand, Cid songs moved to the peripheries, where they survived from the twelfth century to the present, for example, in the Ladino-language romanceros of Sephardic Jews (broadsides of these appear in numerous variants throughout Armistead and Silverman 1986).

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Historiographic and discursive traditions, therefore, move Cid into other languages quickly, translating the epic into a pan-Romance-language tradition that spread quickly into France in the late Middle Ages, and then across the Mediterranean with the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Genre, too, is constantly going through processes of translation. Battle chronicles enter juglar and troubadour traditions. Stichic and strophic genres, improvised epics and standardized romances, fold themselves into intertextuality. New genres, too, emerge, further expanding the processes of cultural translation that forge new paths for the formation of early modern Europe as Spain and Portugal unleash the global spread of Christianity during the Age of Discovery. One of the first notable moments of early modern cultural translation is Guillen de Castro’s 1621 play Las Mocedades del Cid, which in turn became the prototype for Pierre Corneille’s 1637 Le Cid, which, because of the controversy it caused at the Académie française, brought about nothing short of a revolution in the French theater for the subsequent centuries (see Landis 1931). Translation begets translation, as the Cid becomes modern on the threshold of the Enlightenment. Transformation begets transformation, as the Cid becomes European. It is into this tradition of translation and transformation that Herder stepped with his Cid. In certain fundamental ways, his translation succeeds because it is so thoroughly traditional. He seemingly seeks a compromise between short and long forms. He recognizes the narrative integrity of the strophic romance, but he weaves these into what would be called a Romanzenkranz (laurel of romances), an unending garland of ballads (see Duttenhofer 1833). Having created a long work out of seventy small poems, Herder then seeks a way of evoking the qualities of the epic, which he is able to do brilliantly because he knows Homer so very well, and because he has labored over the problem of improvisation in contemporary narrative form. Herder uses his translation to find the smallest divisible units for the German translation, hemistiches, and to suture these, stich-by-stich, to the whole, in a bold gesture making it a new kind of epic. We witness such suturing in the printed version that follows centuries of translation as Herder sings – “besingt,” as he expresses the process of translation in German – the call to battle in Valencia at the end of the sixty-seventh romance (Fig. 10.6). Herder’s Cid at once realized the proliferation of multiple identities from the twelfth and the eighteenth century. Fragments combine to form wholes. The fissures between past and present are sutured in order to heal nations and continents torn asunder by history. Hemistich by hemistich, line by line, Europe becomes one. Again, however, nothing is that simple when we seek to

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Auf nun, auf! / Trommeten, Trommeln, Pfeifen, Klar / inetten tönet, Übertönet / Klag’ und Seufzen; Denn der Cid / befahl es da. Ihr gelei / tet auf die Seele Eines Hel / den, der entschlief. [Arise now! / Trumpets, also drums, Flutes with clar / inets intoning, Sounding loudly / the baleful sigh; For the Cid / orders it thus. You are led / deeply from the soul Of a he / ro, who rises up.]

Fig. 10.6 Herder’s Cid, romance 68, lines 49–54 (in Herder 1990, 682–3)

understand how the modernity of a post-Enlightenment world might accommodate multiple identities. Epic, as sweepingly as it might connect parts to the whole, does so only at the risk of reifying the very categories of fragmentation that it seeks to eliminate. In Herder’s Cid and the tradition of modern epic formation that it unleashed, no category of fragmentation assumes more power than that of the nation. The nation as fragment, the nation as whole. Their epic intertextuality remains fragmented in the epic of modern Europe. Perhaps this is because, in Herder’s Cid, the national and the nationalist are privileged before the nation. The differences so distinctive in Iberia and al-Andalus disappear as Castilian national power is centralized. As epic, Herder’s Cid relies on the language of power that divides Europe from Africa, the history of Europe from that of its other. East and West, North and South, emerge, fully glorified, as categories of power. Religion in Europe is reified as exclusive rather than as inclusive. Cid’s history becomes that of redefining Europe as Christian against Islam, ideologically laying claim to a single Christian Spain and a single Muslim North Africa. In the course of the past two centuries during the history of world music, the Cid has become relevant again and again. Herder’s notion of the epic, sounded first in his Cid and resounded by modern singers of tales throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, afforded the modern nation a complex and contested set of myths. Paradoxically but hardly unexpectedly, the resilience of the Cid also calls attention to the ways in which borders – cultural, historical, religious, and musical – become fissures in the fabric of Europe (see Schneider 1994). In his final work, the writings he gathered serially in the pages of Adrastea from 1801 until the end of his life in 1803, Herder mused about the death of

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epic heroes, or more to the point, the ways in which death accompanied the life of the hero. In the fifth piece in volume three of Adrastea, Herder reworks a section from Brooke’s Fool of Quality in German, publishing it in German as “Who was the greatest hero?” (Herder 2000, 382–7). In Socratic dialogue between the author and his “friend,” the essay turns from the celebration of heroism to its condemnation. A hero means a half-god, a being with superhuman power. How does this superhuman quality show itself? By gently attending to the welfare of fellow humans, with the gentle voice of goodness, which is never harsh or arrogant? By no means, instead with uproar and tumult, by pounding cities into dust, by the moaning of violated women, by the agony of dying nations, with all that heroes take to blow the trumpet of fame. (Ibid., 385–6)

Herder names names in this interpellation of the hero near the end of his own life; never the Cid’s name, however, only that of another unlikely Spanish hero, Sancho Pansa, who is meant ironically to invoke the virtues of a different epic life and death. Herder closes this essay from the final years of his life by failing to answer the question posed in the title. When I hear all the talk about these heroes [who destroy the work of others], I lose all patience. I don’t lose half so much of myself when I read my own works. Keep going, I plead, read farther; maybe I’ll return to a more pleasant topic. (Ibid., 387)

And so it is, Herder gives us the modern epic, which in turn enunciates the global moment of world-music history. Herder wills the modern epic into existence so that its identities will proliferate. Having located music in history, Herder then moves on, as any self-conscious polymath would upon recognizing the contradictions of his own life and age.

Bibliography Adler, H. (2006) ‘Herders Stil als Rezeptionsbarriere’, in T. Borsche (ed.), Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten: Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 15–31 Andruchowytsch, J., and A. Stasiuk (2004) Mein Europa: Zwei Essays über das sogenannte Europa, trans. by S. Onufriv and M. Pollack, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Armistead, S. G., and J. H. Silverman (1986) Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition, vol. 1, Epic Ballads, Berkeley: University of California Press Arnim, L. A. von, and C. Brentano (1806–8) Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer Bohlman, P. V. (2007) ‘Becoming ethnomusicologists: On colonialism and its aftermaths’, SEM Newsletter, 4, 1: 4–5

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(2010a) ‘600 Jahre DDR–Musikgeschichte – am Beispiel deutscher Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters’, in N. Noeske and M. Tischer (eds.), Musikwissenschaft und Kalter Krieg – Das Beispiel DDR, Cologne: Böhlau, pp. 79–95 (2010b) ‘Herder’s nineteenth century’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7, 1: 3–21 (2012) ‘Irish music at the edge of history’, in T. Smith (ed.), Ancestral Imprints: Histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance, Cork University Press, pp. 181–205 Bohlman, P. V., and N. Petkovic´ (eds.) (2012) Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Borsche, T. (ed.) (2006) Herder im Spiegel der Zeiten: Verwerfungen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und Chancen einer Relektüre, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag Cancionero de romances, en que están recopilados la mayor parte de los romances Castellanos que hasta agora se han compuesto (1568) Antwerp Child, F. J. (ed.) (1886–98) The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols., Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. Duttenhofer, F. M. (1833) Der Cid: Ein Romanzen-Kranz, Stuttgart: F. C. Löflund und Söhne de Escobar, J. (1605) Historia del muy valeroso Cavallero Don Rodrigo de Bivar, el bravo Cid Campeador, Lisbon Forster, M. N. (ed.) (2002) Herder: Philosophical Writings, Cambridge University Press Gaier, U. (1990) ‘Kommentar’, in idem (ed.) Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, vol. 3, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, pp. 839–1497 Herder, J. G. (1769) Kritische Wälder, oder Betrachtungen über die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen, vol. 1, Erstes Wäldchen, Riga: Hartknoch (1772) Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß (1773) Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Hamburg: Bode (1774) Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Riga: Hartknoch (1778–9) “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder, 2 vols., Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung (1784–5) Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Riga and Leipzig: Hartknoch (1869) Der Cid nach spanischen Romanzen besungen durch Herder, Berlin: G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung (1796) Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769, ed. by K. Mommsen, Stuttgart: Reclam (1990) ‘Der Cid – Geschichte des Don Ruy Diaz, Grafen von Bivar, nach spanischen Romanzen’, in idem, Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, vol. 3, Volkslieder, Übertragungen, Dichtungen, ed. by U. Gaier, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, pp. 545–693 (1990) Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, vol. 3, Volkslieder, Übertragungen, Dichtungen, ed. by U. Gaier, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (2000, orig. publ. 1801–4) Adrastea, vol. 10, Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed. by G. Arnold, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (2002) Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and trans. by J. Gaiger, University of Chicago Press Hoeckner, B. (2002) Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment, Princeton University Press Karadžic´, V. S. (1997) Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadžic´, trans. and ed. by M. Holton and V. D. Mihailovich, University of Pittsburgh Press. Köhler, R. (1867) Herders Cid und seine französische Quelle, Leipzig

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Landis, P. (ed.) (1931) Six Plays by Corneille and Racine, New York: The Modern Library Lönnrot, E. (1999) The Kalevala: An Epic Poem after Oral Tradition, trans. by K. Bosley, Oxford University Press Meier, M. (ed.) (2007) Sie schufen Europa: Historische Portraits von Konstantin bis Karl dem Großen, Munich: C. H. Beck Powell, B. (1983) Epic and Chronicle: The ‘Poema de mio Cid’ and the ‘Crónica de veinte reyes’, London: Modern Humanities Research Association Schings, H.-J. (ed.) (1994) Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: Metzler Schlegel, F. (1958) Kritische-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by E. Behler, J.-J. Anstett, and H. Eichner, Munich: F. Schöningh Schneider, J. (ed.) (1994) Herder im “Dritten Reich”, Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag Steinitz, W. (1979) Der große Steinitz (= Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten), Berlin: Verlag das europäische Buch für Zweitausendeins Zammito, J. H. (2002) Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, University of Chicago Press

. 11 .

Tartini the Indian: perspectives on world music in the Enlightenment SEBASTIAN KLOTZ

When Charles Fonton (b. c. 1725) compiled his Essai sur la musique orientale comparée à la musique européenne in 1751, he followed the Enlightenment model of comparison (a modern edition appears in Betzwieser 1993, 370–419). Fonton’s project, however, bears the stamp of empirical observation, made under his own authority and undertaken in situ in the culture under review. Discursive claims are balanced against observations, and insights drawn from informants. The full title of Fonton’s Essai indicates its broad scope, for it also looks into the question of taste in Asia, Eastern rules for chant, and tonal and scalar structures, with an abridged introduction into Asian musical instruments. Fonton’s project echoes Enlightenment approaches to music, to music aesthetics, and to the double nature of music as both art and science. These approaches articulate a sphere of reasoning and activity that deserves systematic study. Music theory and musical practice can thus emerge as a coherent cultural field that offers itself for comparison with other cultures, thereby lending Fonton’s discourse an objectivity that individual travelogues or isolated observations were unable to reach. Fonton, moreover, develops a framework of functional factors which help him to penetrate the culture he is examining and to enhance comparison with Western traditions. Paving the ground is Fonton’s colorful rendering of Western misconceptions of other cultures and their musics. Fonton examines these heavily biased opinions against the background of music as a universal occurrence: Music is a divine art form, which receives praise wherever it appears in a world that contains such diverse peoples. Its empire extends to everything that breathes, even to those places that are barbarous, where it still produces sweetness and charm. (Fonton 1751 in Betzweiser 1993, 372)

Fonton also anticipates several strands of cultural relativism, treating different cultures in their own right and within their respective contexts: Every nation has its music, but taste is distinctive in each, even if it is common in other ways. Music in different places is also distinctive, just as with customs and clothing. (Ibid.)

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Although Fonton explicitly avoids countering claims of Western superiority, there is evidence of such sentiment in the text: One could well imagine, and this is not simply a matter of judgment growing from familiarity, that foreign nations, especially those whose residents are unlike Europeans, are destitute of many things known to us, and are thus marked by the darkness of a great ignorance. (Ibid.)

Despite the seemingly “bizarre mélange” of accents, the “movements without grace,” and the cacophony, Fonton insists oriental music is a topic worth studying. If music is indeed truly universal and affects all living beings, European music, too, will have to be put in perspective, for it cannot embody this universality alone. The music of Lully or Tartini need not please those living in the East, for they might delight in the sounds recorded by the Moldavian Dimitrius Cantemir (1673–1723) in his musical chronicles of the Ottoman court (see Wright 2000). Criteria of taste, according to Fonton, are culture-specific, but may be grounded in an underlying and universal notion of taste. The matter gets more complicated because representatives of Western cultures, too, do not share the same taste. The specific circumstances of upbringing, the air that one breathes, the manifold impressions during a lifetime, different inclinations, and ways of thinking shape the various dispositions for taste. They are manifest in the diversity of Italian, German, English, and French views of goût (Fonton 1993, 373; see Shiloah 1990). Fonton’s manuscript shows how massive a challenge music presented, especially foreign music and its respective cultural, aesthetic, and moral legitimacy, for an Enlightenment discourse founded on stable, independent truths, and objective criteria. These principles are interrogated by the author: I should like to make a claim for a principle that can be regarded as absolutely true and independent. Could it, then, be applied to everything? The more that something is not like other things, the more it asserts independence; or is it simply beautiful, relative, and arbitrary? (Fonton 1751 in Betzweiser 1993, 373)

“Conformity to reason” is difficult to gauge if the phenomena are only superficially reviewed and not put into cultural contexts. If bizarre cacophonic musics of the Orient run counter to a Western notion of music and of taste, their justification and cultural meaning must lie in something else, that is, unless one rejects the idea of a truly universal music. Fonton elaborates the argument by drawing on another tenet of Enlightenment aspiration: learning and adaptation. Since the sensual capacities of human beings are universally equal and grounded in one human nature, why would our eyes and ears

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respond so differently to different cultural phenomena? Fonton mobilizes adaptation and learning as they prove both the universal nature of humanity and its endless capacity to adapt to specific circumstances. This conviction, however, is jeopardized by cultural norms that will prevent listening habits from fully adapting to unfamiliar sounds (ibid., 374). Fonton writes that it is not for such traditions of listening that he has geared his Essai. He cannot expect oriental music to find adequate acoustic appraisal in all Western ears (ibid.). If aural persuasion fails and prejudices cannot be easily ruled out, a reasonable strategy for representation must make up for these setbacks. In line with the Enlightenment, Fonton starts with an account of the origins and history of oriental music. This is followed by remarks on the various genres, on the taste and rules of oriental music. An account of the prodigal effects of oriental music complements Fonton’s attempt to present a true picture of the music of the East, its traditions, and musical instruments. The author avoids engaging matters of moral and aesthetic judgment; rather, he prefers to have the culture and its history speak for themselves. The potential aesthetic effect on unfamiliar Western readers and listeners is minimized in favor of a structural inquiry of differences between oriental and Western music. Fonton’s writing strategy has significant repercussions for our understanding of music. It implies that we should concede agency to music, independent from institutions, systems of belief, and other factors. Musical understanding must no longer be exclusively theologically or cosmologically legitimized, but stands for itself as a viable human cultural practice that, despite existing differences, can be explored on the basis of a framework one could also use for the study of European music. The Essai foreshadows another facet of modern anthropological surveys through its fear that traditional oriental music and the knowledge of its tonal system and musical instruments are in danger of disappearing. It would be premature to concede to Fonton a world-music consciousness avant la lettre, but the way he articulates his fear indicates an awareness that oriental music is part of a universal cultural practice that merits protection and retrieval (ibid., 380). Fonton’s documentation by way of music examples, illustrations of musical instruments and performance practices, as well as renderings of the musical system, complements his formidable effort to explore oriental music in its own right against the background of music as a truly universal mode of human communication. Music can be used as a clue and indeed as a key that can disclose vital facets of human culture and, through its sheer acoustic presence and effects, place our own customs and aesthetic ideals in perspective.

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Music’s cultural and social eloquence: the challenge of non-Western musics Fonton’s Essai is symptomatic of the new perspectives, discourses, and strategies of representation that unfolded during the Enlightenment. These were instrumental in creating social formations that no longer simply acknowledged the existence of other, exotic musics, but that reviewed such musics using a variety of analytical and representational strategies. While encounters with the other and strategies of cultural critique in early ethnomusicology have been written about cogently (e.g., Bohlman 1991), the challenge in the present chapter is to characterize if and how music came to be regarded as “world music,” which in Enlightenment thought came to mean 1) a universal cultural practice that can be potentially encountered everywhere, 2) whose specific manifestations can be placed on a matrix with a historical and a geographical axis, and 3) which is relevant for the understanding of one’s own culture and its history. Exotic and ancient musics, of course, had been the subjects of earlier scholarly consideration, most prominently and chronologically closest to the Enlightenment in the works of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (see, e.g., Kircher 1650). The differences we witness in the Enlightenment lie in the fact that the matrix of global musics is also inhabited by familiar Western music, and thereby the discourses of origin, heredity, and causality could be applied to non-Western musics. Global perspectives were hardly unfamiliar to European cultural elites: complex polyphony as cultivated in the era of FrancoFlemish music up to the time of Palestrina was accepted as the lingua franca of advanced musical expression across Europe, forging a common idiom that would stretch from Poland to Portugal. Gifted composers and singers lived through a truly cross-national career pattern, serving courts from England to the northern Italian signorie, while maintaining property or tax privileges in their home region. The polyphonic idiom, however, did not comprise nonWestern music, whose “emerging simultaneity” (Bellman 1998, xi) in the eighteenth century would be studied by a variety of scholars, and whose aesthetic appeal did not pass unnoticed among librettists and composers. The growing recognition of world music cannot be divorced from more tangible practices of global interaction in the realm of commerce, politics, and economic exchange, the international circulation of goods, individuals, and ideas (Bley and König 2006). The Jesuits boasted no fewer than 800 schools scattered around the globe by the mid-eighteenth century, securing a constant flow of ideas and data to Rome (O’Malley 1999, 28). They clearly operated on an international scale, but rarely questioned the deeply religious convictions

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steering their campaigns. The mundus combinatus they explored, in which everything in nature had its place, was replaced by a mercantilist, functional, and analytical conviction that tried to mold the newfound contingencies in nature and society into a new paradigm. This implied philosophical reorientation, the differentiation of various public spheres, and the rise of individual and collective actors who negotiated emerging Enlightenment positions. As a world based on similarities and correspondences gave way to a worldview privileging representations and historicizing the past, the study of music, too, gained new currency. It was culturally and morally eloquent and therefore relevant to Enlightenment thought. This eloquence was no longer read in theological and ontological terms that treated music as a manifestation of higher truths reflected in its proportions; rather, music was increasingly regarded as an expression of human nature, and indeed of humankind in the Enlightenment sense of this category, with its link to specific social purposes. Only against this background could authors such as Fonton claim a place for public debate and exchange about a concept of non-European music that was no longer determined by a religious order, noble ruler, or individual patron. The very expectation that composers might pick up on Fonton’s observations and study his magnificent tables of instruments and the details of nonEuropean tonal systems first appears during the Enlightenment. The case of exotic music, though, was particularly complex, for it could not be exhaustively explored and subjected to full academic, aesthetic, and formal control. The absence of notational systems and the unfamiliarity with its musical codes made access to non-European music difficult. Metaphysically, it was even harder to decide if this music was a part of natural history and instinctive cultural expression, or if it belonged to the unfolding sphere of the arts. Did it enrich European self-understanding, or was it a mere forerunner that received little interest? Did it enhance a sense of a shared and truly universal, natural history? Can its effects be objectified, rehearsed, explained? While listening to other musics, either performed by ethnic musicians or written by professional Western composers, did Western ears somatically experience something that impressed listeners through wonder, otherness, and imprecision? Is it possible that something produces distinctive effects, but still cannot be fully contained? Such questions paraphrase Enlightenment concerns. They indicate a thorough repositioning of music in the study of culture. Without written clues, students of foreign music turned to the circumstances in which the music was played and heard. These provided the hard data, while the music itself escaped detailed analysis. This approach implied a deep recognition of music’s social agency and a moral force that contrasted with the usual notion

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of music as something aurally pleasing and entertaining. The contextualization of music with social and cultural qualities, precisely because of the difficulty in describing its acoustic content, had repercussions for the approach to music in general. World music in this Enlightenment sense could therefore be read not only as a geographic indicator, but also as heightening music’s role in self- and world-making. Such views were formulated in the era of first contact (Tomlinson 2007; see also Agnew in this volume) before they were fully acknowledged in the Enlightenment as music became intricately linked to social purposes. The conceptual transformation of music had even wider consequences: if listening was not only providing aesthetic pleasure but would also lead to a kind of knowledge, then music was among the media and the cultural expressions capable of producing knowledge. The Enlightenment concept of acroamatic listening (akroamatisches Hören; see Trabant 1993), listening tied to reasoning and yielding insight, makes manifest the new musical–philosophical claims that were promoted, among others, by Leibniz and Herder (see also Bohlman on Herder in this volume). In this chapter I argue that it was axiomatic that the encounter with other musics enhanced this attitude of a deep listening, registering differences, seeking meaning in acoustic data, coupling aesthetic and cognitive capacities, and measuring the distances between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Concepts of world music in the Enlightenment were not a monolithic body of thought. They oscillated between an overwhelming sense of connectedness and commensurability nurtured by contact with other musics and, in contrast, the realization of an existing but conceptually inaccessible site of cultural expression that belied the Enlightenment obsession to classify, to define origins, and to establish causalities (see Nettl in this volume). Music and, in particular, opera came to represent a fascinating source of intersections and contradictory readings of the cultural other whose loose ends did not fit neatly into a European whole. Descriptive traditions of an emerging anthropology were confronted with the aural and visual orchestration of world music on the stage, leading to two competing yet highly unequal narratives. The vagueness and open, fragmentary character of ethnographic descriptions that incorporated more music as the century advanced collided with the musically and visually “specific” and “precise” renderings of cultural others on stage. Opera did not lean toward authenticity, rather toward a persuasive musical representation of the other, which it formally controlled and contained. The business of opera was about a conjectural history from the very beginning: the Italian camerata who invented early opera at the beginning of the seventeenth century could not rely on any precise records of Greek intonation and mousiké.

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They employed a kind of conjectural history in evoking the Orfeo myth, itself at least as exotic as the explicitly exotic subjects filling eighteenth-century opera. While conceptions of world music were as diverse as those who wrote about it and as diverse as the national cultures to which they belonged, the same can be stated about Western music theory itself. Music emerged as a rich and contradictory aesthetic formation related to many Enlightenment concerns, ranging from the question of origin and the concept of imitation to the cultivation of taste and the articulation of human autonomy and agency. Music did not represent a secure and accepted concept in eighteenthcentury debates. On the contrary, some of its core tenets had been called into question, starting with the discovery of the complex nature of musical sounds and overtones that threatened the reliance of Pythagorean theory on simple numbers. Another area of debate was musical imitation, which during the course of the century was modified from an imitation of nature to an imitation of individual affects. The reassessment of instrumental music, hitherto regarded as inferior to vocal music, and the long querelle, or dispute, over the superiority of melody over harmony, that is, Italian or French music in opera, represent further substantial issues that demonstrate just how volatile the image of music and music-theory was. The composer and theorist JeanPhilippe Rameau (1683–1764) openly exposed questions of musical instinct and the intelligibility of sounds, anticipating modern psychoacoustics and musical semiotics (Cohen 2001). Although he propagated his ideas in a remarkable number of treatises and academic responses to his adversaries, his position became isolated when he fell out of favor even with the compilers of French encyclopedias, who had sympathies for Rameau in the early seventeenth century. No less controversial was the appreciation of music either as a mathematical science safely rooted in proportions or as a seductive acoustic phenomenon that produced physical and psychological reactions for which a theory of affects could no longer account. In performance, music was regarded as a highly ambivalent terrain in which moral concerns and gender expectations were negotiated. The new preoccupation with world music took place within a lively atmosphere of discussion in which it was applied to contradict or to flesh out important arguments affecting music and aesthetics in general. Observations and assumptions about non-Western music were intensely absorbed by musical discourse, establishing a field of dense interactions and intersections from anthropology, philosophical reflection on the origin of language and music, acoustic theory that incorporated findings from non-Western tonal systems, and composition. Those engaged in these discussions cultivated specific ways of dealing with world music, forcing them to stretch their imagination, to

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adapt existing theories to the new musical systems, and to invent new musical idioms that registered the discovery of musics from other cultures, from empires long past, or from remote geographical regions termed savage at the time. The situation in France – or, to put it more precisely, the global interchange between France and the oriental world – is particularly instructive, for the study of foreign music was supported by the French court as part of a wellplanned missionary campaign, above all covering the Orient. The dense interplay of archaeological and geographical survey, linguistic study, the acquisition of antiquities for the Louvre, diplomacy, and the academy is echoed in the production of operas evoking oriental manners (Betzwieser 1993). The rise of an Enlightenment mentalité of world music in France and French opera represents key developments in a core culture of the Enlightenment.

Music as a transforming agent: the case of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes Librettists and composers of opera, particularly in France, catered for a musical orientalism that expanded the range of subjects and can be read as a performative counterpart to the histoires galantes (gallant histories) in the field of literature. The musical discoveries fabricated for the stage took account of the growing availability of information about other cultures and the norms of French classicist opera and dance. Opera à la turque, which had established itself as an operatic tradition, was a highly mediated appropriation of nonEuropean musics. It gained visibility in a far more persuasive and aestheticized manner than academic Essais and travel reports. Jean-Philippe Rameau programmatically elaborated the taste for things Indian by giving his heroic ballet Les Indes galantes four different settings: Turkey, Peru, Persia, and North America. The concept of transforming agents offers a suitable tool for the discussion of Les Indes galantes. Music acts as an agent that transforms both our imagination of these foreign musics and the practice and hearing modalities of Western music. The latter must confront new musical idioms resulting from an unfamiliar use of instrumental combinations, of foreign tunes, of unusual melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structures. The plots chosen by the librettist Louis Fuzelier (1672–1752) incorporate actual historical events, or at least those deemed as such, in order to root the exotic scenes in reality, not purely in the imagination (Betzwieser 1994, 160). By expanding the geography of ballet and opera, Fuzielier and Rameau surely catered to the taste of the Parisian crowds. The libretto and the

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music of the ballet, nonetheless, carry an underlying significance: they obey the poetic norms of the “merveilleux” (marvelous) and of “vraisemblance” (verisimilitude) (ibid., 159), thus implying full recognition of a subjectivity outside the canon of mythology that had fed European opera libretti until that time. Whereas the scenes feature geographic diversity, the prologue sets a common frame for all. They take shape as the power of Hebbé, goddess of Youth, and of l’Amour withers in the European territories. Hebbé and l’Amour decide to expand their sphere of influence to the gardens of Pasha Oman (No. 1), the Peruvian desert (No. 2), the gardens of the Persian prince Tacmas (No. 3), and a forest close to the Spanish and French colonies of North America (No. 4). Rameau’s orchestration of the exotic contains no pretense of being “authentic,” for he employs no tunes appearing in contemporary scientific travel studies. Instead, he aims at surpassing and aestheticizing them by way of imitation, an aesthetic and philosophical concept that went beyond simple replication. The issues of authenticity were never argued in favor of or against Fuzelier and Rameau precisely because the librettist and composer sublimated attempts at realistic portrayal, and because the concept of the authentic did not exist in the way in which we understand it today. The subtle adaptations of his French idiom to the new subject led to ingenious musical characterizations with the help of extraordinary intervals, asymmetric periods, and the frequent use of unison (ibid., 161). Exotic places emerge as territories populated by actors who share similar concerns and to whose cultural expressions audiences could relate, even within the court genre of the ballet-héroïque. World music came to life, transported to audiences by noble stage characters. The singer on stage provided a coherent in situ vision of an apparently unfamiliar musical practice that appears to function within the context depicted on stage. Plots acquired their dynamics from intrigue, romance, and conquests, all implicated in the encounter between the Europeans and their others, but well familiar as topoi to opera audiences from seventeenth-century tragédies-lyriques. In an empire constructed of music, those representing the roles of otherness continue to speak from a musical and affective position familiar to the European characters they encounter. Phrasing, accents, and moral economies may differ, but music is powerful enough to accommodate alternative versions of human sociality and render them familiar for the West. Contemporary criticism did not target these social formations of otherness, but Fuzelier’s weak prologue, its poor development of characters, and the music that represented them (Betzwieser 1993, 164). The prologue features allegorical figures and the allied forces of the French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish empires,

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and does not embrace any exotic protagonist on the stage. Musical evocations of the exotic in Les Indes galantes share some features that outweigh the impact of local idioms, as if Rameau wanted to complement French music with one overarching idiom of the exotic that would embrace any regional diversity. Octave leaps, the exotic turning figure (ibid., 167), unusual metrical repetitions, and bold rhythms can be encountered across the four scenes. Again, the difference from modern assumptions surrounding authenticity is obvious. Music exercises universalizing powers that blend all local exotic idioms into one, similar to the ways the figure of l’Amour connects the plot across the four scenes. The circumstances leading to Les Indes galantes can be grasped thanks to a unique case of documentation that records a performance of Native Americans in Paris in 1725, prior to the project of Les Indes galantes. The Mercure de France published an account of this event: Two natives, who would appear to have come from Louisiana and were large and well-built, about twenty-five years old, performed three different dances, together and apart, in such a way as to leave little doubt about their country of origin and that they were quite unlike anything in Paris. There could be little doubt that they were performing something from their own country, but this was not particularly difficult to understand. (quoted in Betzwieser 1993, 174)

The author of this account clearly reaches the limits of a hermeneutic reading and simultaneously admits that these dances will be meaningful in their traditional social context. The attempt to “penetrate” captured the analytical gaze of an Enlightenment author cultivated in the face of a style of performance foreign to him, which he reads as if from a pedagogical perspective. Because these performances cannot be integrated into familiar aesthetic and moral norms, what remains to be observed is something that could be still gained. Cultural distance did not collapse, but the difference it entailed was a matter of study and of rendering it meaningful to a European observer. Here was something that we could comprehend. The first dancer represented the chief of his people and was clothed more modestly than he would have been in Louisiana, but still projected a sense of bodily nudity. Upon his head was a crown, not particularly rich, but rather adorned with feathers of different colors. The other one displayed nothing more than the demeanor of a simple warrior . . . Together, the ballet corps performed a dance of peace. The second dance called to mind a war-dance as performed by a group of savages, ready to enter into combat with other people and displaying considerable horror . . . Together, they imitated a battle scene that was supposed to depict the defeat of the enemy. After that, the entire ensemble performed a dance of victory. (Fonton 1751 in Betzweiser 1993, 174)

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Poised along the delicate line between objects of study and performers of highly formalized rituals previously unknown in Paris, the account confirms the important social role of music among Native Americans. Through their mock dances of war, they have acquired the means to sublimate and to appropriate real conflict. Music and dance confirm their role as primary media for fleshing out these manifestations of cultural self-images, and creating cultural dissonance with Western audiences. Because aesthetic expression was hard to classify and to understand, European audiences scanned exotic performance for plot structures and the social contexts of music making. This structural approach, which admitted the existence of real difference and incommensurability, was turning toward other frames of inquiry. It contributed to viewing these musical cultures in their own right, assuming that the affects and social rites shown will be utterly meaningful in their setting. Rameau witnessed the presentation by the two Native Americans, and it led him to compose a keyboard piece, “Les Sauvages” (lit., the savages), for his Nouvelle Suite de Pièces de Clavecin of 1728. According to one of his letters, he had tried to “characterize” the chants and dances of the Native Americans in this composition, but characterization in this sense comprises sublimation, enhancing imitation in the philosophical sense of encompassing the substance of the actions under review. Harmony was of special concern to Rameau, the theorist, for it contained fundamental acoustic truths he had discovered in nature. It is worth remarking that the most visible and committed theorist of harmony in the eighteenth century conceded the characters in his exotic subjectivities were also governed by the laws of harmony. All four scenes in the ballet boast of a polyphonic and rhythmic splendor and finesse that runs counter to common opinion that Rameau actually masked other cultures, especially the individual characters on the stage, who, instead, retain a command of complex communication systems. Rameau’s Indians do not speak in metaphors that, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, might correspond to their semiotic capabilities. The operative musical powers the foreign protagonists receive from Rameau point toward another facet of the universality of music. “Music,” a synonym for harmony in Rameau, is deeply rooted in nature (Cohen 2001). The earth itself nurtures harmony and its manifold manifestations. The composer does not hesitate to use all four entrées as showcases for the power of this harmony, of something rising out of the world as a whole and not from a specific culture or nation (see Christensen 1993). This might explain why Rameau did not hesitate to reshuffle the order of pieces in the concert version of Les Indes galantes that employs tonality as a classifying method (Betzwieser 1993, 161 and 420–1).

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Site-specific plots in the four scenes are replaced or reduced (Les Indes galantes réduits à quatre grand concerts) by musical considerations that underlie the driving force of harmony. The fact that this reworked version was conceived and published confirms an intention of authenticity in the rendering of non-European cultures that pales in comparison with the more important apotheosis of harmony. Harmony was powerful enough to accord abstract form to individual circumstances. In contrast, the hybrid mixture of pieces from “The Generous Turk,” “The Flowers,” and “The Incas of Peru” reveals that these individual instances of musical expression can function in other contexts and can become part of various cross-fertilizations (an additional concert piece, “The Savages,” was added in its entirety to a later version of the Ballet réduits à quatre concerts [see Duc 2005]). A global hybridity enters the eighteenth-century stage to signify a world music: if the opéra-ballet and ballet-héroïque replaced the “journey into the past” offered by the tragédie-lyrique “by a temporal voyage” (ibid., VI), harmony, tonality, and l’amour are the organizing forces of this voyage across the musics of the world undertaken by Rameau in his Les Indes galantes.

Music and human universalism Transformation in Enlightenment musical thought might be described in terms of exploration and discovery that affected the nature of music and of reasoning in aesthetic and anthropological debates. Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730–92), a man of letters, amateur violinist, and friend of Rameau, explored new ground in the 1780s. He set out to engage music on its own terms rather than through its imitative or referential functions. In his De la musique considérée en elle-même et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poésie, et le théâtre (Guy de Chabanon 1969), evidence from new musical discoveries played a crucial role. Chabanon contested music’s imitative powers, calling into question a key tenet of Enlightenment aesthetic theory. The thesis deserves historical elaboration by showing that the role of imitation decreases as history progresses: If you approach the songs uttered by the first human beings, which were intended to imitate different sounds they experience and reflected the diverse sentiments that moved them, do you not arrive at an order of truth that is less palpable and less evident? Nothing that requires imitation has the potential to become one of the essential properties of music. (Ibid., 40)

Guy de Chabanon discusses musical instinct as a faculty commanded by both animals and infants before he turns to people living in the natural world of the wild:

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Transport yourself to the forests inhabited by ferocious and wild peoples, and you will encounter a music that is inseparable from the human and is reducible ultimately to the instincts of the native. This is music from the very cradle of life, from which it retains all the characteristics of natural institutions, and its originality could never become a force for falsifying. Here there is no state of an attempt to imitate. (Ibid., 44)

Guy de Chabanon moves on to the social rituals of the savage people, that is, the ceremonies Rameau had aestheticized in Les Indes galantes, which had premiered half a century before Guy de Chabanon’s text was written. He is unable, however, to detect any correspondence between the musical features and the ritual occasion under observation: Natives employ music in their festivals, whether military or funerary. Their songs, even as they issue forth, are songs expressing a joy over death. What kind of idea can make one accentuate music in such a way that ferocious beings rejoice in barbaric triumph as they prepare for an execution? Is there never a music that illustrates and expresses such circumstances? The songs of the natives, nevertheless, are susceptible to all the traits made possible by our imagination; melody is sweet and happy far more than terrible, and it is easy to recognize songs of war are no different from songs of death. (Ibid., 44–5)

While imitation may have had relevance in the genesis of language, matters appear to be substantially different in the case of music. Using a well-known trope of Enlightenment discourse, Guy de Chabanon assumes that present-day non-European cultures would lay bare the core of European culture. He implicitly argues, moreover, that even in primitive cultures music generates cultural meaning, not through imitation, but rather through the more complex semantic maneuvers he will tackle in the course of his inquiry. After staking out his theoretical position on the music of people living close to nature, he works his way toward other social groups who command, so he believes, only basic musical instincts, ranging from African Americans to French peasants: The absence of compatibility between song and words is abundantly evident in the song of Africans living in our colonies. Song is present in all events and rituals, even in those that are happy and sinister, where they have no less of the same character. (Ibid., 45)

Based on such observations, Guy de Chabanon argues that music has the capacity to afford pleasure independent of any imitation (ibid., 51), and that it is a natural and universal language in its own right: Everything that we have come to know until today leads us to consider that music is a universal language, with all the principles and effects that belie the

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sense that music obeys very particular laws only. Music, indeed, emanates directly from human organization and that is evident also among many of the animals. (Ibid., 129)

From a twenty-first-century ethnomusicological perspective, Guy de Chabanon imputes an anthropological basis to music and of its particular forms, which are anchored in the mental and physiological organization of human beings and not on conventions. In a similar vein, Rameau had followed the same path by grounding his musical creations on a universal harmony emanating from the depths of nature. Guy de Chabanon fleshes out the truly universal character of music by a variety of instances in which diverse musics can be heard, and understood without additional assistance. Again, music beyond Europe’s borders figures prominently. Guy de Chabanon provides proof of this universality by way of musical transcriptions he made of Native American songs that speak to him in a familiar idiom: Such songs absolutely resemble our own; even if the individual notes are different from those in our songs, they follow the same rules of an implicit harmony (harmonie sous-entendue). One of these songs can be very agreeable, even when the composer has conceived it for a piece in which its contexts change through modulation. The natives place such notes in different uses, more or less. Here, we ourselves witness the birth of art, or something that can be called “art,” because it assumes the form of natural language in the song. (Ibid., 133)

L’Harmonie sous-entendue (implicit harmony) is a key term from Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie (Rameau 1722; Rameau 1971; see also Christensen 1993). Rameau’s strategy of musical representation elaborates and enriches existing concepts of harmony, expanding harmony to a truly universal concept. As an opera composer and music theorist, he invited viewers and listeners not only to a lavish ballet displaying dances in non-European cultural contexts, but also to appreciate the implicit functions (sous-entendues) that operate in the harmonies, but are not represented in notes fixed in the score. In other words, nonEuropean musics transferred to the stage by Rameau absorb our senses and cognitive capacities, our intelligibility of music, to the same degree and with the same complexity as European art music. Though language assumes local forms through dialect, music, according to Guy de Chabanon, would be one and the same throughout the world because of underlying and implicit harmonic structures: Music is of one kind throughout the world. How can it be! The idea of beauty is not the same among all peoples, and then song is the same for all people! The

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Hurons sing like the workers of France! This is hard to imagine, much less extend it to all that we know! (Guy de Chabanon 1969, 133)

In his discussion of music examples, Guy de Chabanon detects familiar European music in the earliest Native American songs: The melody of the earliest song is entirely agreeable, for it expresses the dignity of a civilized people. I am not trying to be deceptive, rather to approach this matter as Tartini would. (Ibid., 394)

Other Native American songs evoke songs of the French Catholic church. Again, the transformative agency of music becomes evident in a theoretical text through which Guy de Chabanon unfolds a kind of auditory synopsis, short-circuiting distant musical cultures through the discovery of similarities. These are not based on the study of tuning systems, rather on the individual aesthetic impressions they make on Guy de Chabanon, who opens his imagination in search of such hidden connections. The aesthetic impression and a classifying impulse stimulate each other. The ease with which Guy de Chabanon couples stylistic remarks on an anonymous song, delivered secondhand, with the name of a renowned virtuoso and theorist of his day, is remarkable. One cannot help imagining the Baroque Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) disguised as a Native American – and vice versa. A worldview based on world music is consolidated when such analytical observations intermingle with an imagined, music-driven cultural genealogy. This genealogy easily embraces the natural history of animals and humans, the individual development from child to adult, the various social strata of Western society, and the many stages through which non-Western societies pass. Arising from this approach is an attack on a stronghold of early Enlightenment convictions: imitation is no longer a valid concept, because the expression of passion takes its place. This growing Enlightenment critique is inspired by evidence drawn from other cultures, underlining the impact and relevance of this universal outlook. Such evidence is not ethnographic in the modern sense of a concern for world music’s contexts, but it follows the form of eighteenth-century scientific investigation, taking world music’s texts – its harmonie sous-entendue – as evidence. Music’s universal powers, thus, can have literal meaning: the officer who was part of the entourage of Louis-Antoine Bougainville’s famous voyage in the 1760s and who reported the Native American songs transcribed by Guy de Chabanon is said to have survived capture only due to his singing skills, his projection of familiarity through musical communication (Guy de Chabanon 1969, 393).

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Listening to reciprocity The French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot (1718–93) was part of the last missionary campaign in China before the Jesuits were officially excluded from China. He devoted a full volume of his encyclopedic study of Chinese history and culture (Amiot 1776–91) to Chinese music both ancient and modern. The Mémoire sur la musique des chinois tant anciens que modernes (Amiot 1779) provided him with a more suitable format than a full-blown treatise on Chinese music, which he otherwise would have been unable to write due to his amateur background. The study of Chinese music also gave him considerable freedom to reread accounts of ancient music histories, which even in the late eighteenth century had mainly embraced Egyptian and Greek musical cultures. Amiot reconstructed the historical depth and scope of ancient Chinese music, pleading for its pioneering role as an influence on other ancient musical systems. Before turning to more scientific analysis, Amiot gave a lively account of the responses of Chinese listeners to French Baroque music by Rameau and Blavet, only to realize that “it left no impression whatsoever on the Chinese” (ibid., 2). A Chinese interlocutor politely paraphrased their experience of French music before highlighting the impact of Chinese music on local ears and souls: “The melodies of our most ancient music have a different sound, and they leave a different affect upon us” (ibid., 3). In this comparison, Western music fails to reach the soul of the Chinese, who are attuned instead to their own music. Ancient Chinese music would have produced even greater effects on them. On its surface, such a claim would seem to contradict notions of music as a universal art, but it is through the lens of history that Amiot seeks to restore the concept of a universal harmony. His study of Chinese music and its ancient history is motivated by curiosity in the face of the absence of reception of Western music by Chinese listeners. Secondarily, Amiot is motivated by a search for an early layer of a tonal system from which all ancient systems took inspiration (ibid., 6). If the Chinese learned music traditions that preceded Pythagorean and ancient Egyptian musical theories, it is in the musique chinoise ancienne that these early roots of harmony can be located and the ancient sanctuary of nature be revealed. To Amiot, this primitive “urharmony” would be the closest concept to a world music, obscured by regional manifestations of such harmony in the course of the history of mankind. Within this Enlightenment framework of a history of harmony as part of a history of mankind, Amiot surpasses mere antiquarian interests and discursive strategies. The level of precision, the detailed account of tonal systems and of previous attempts of reconstruction, and the wealth of carefully arranged materials

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produces a scientifically rigorous reading, through which Amiot credits China with having the most ancient musical system. One wonders why Amiot never reflected on the immediate effects of Chinese music on Western listeners or on himself. He does expose himself to a reciprocal hearing of Chinese music, but listening in this way is subtler, for it is directed toward “hearing” Chinese music history and the harmonies resonating in it. His findings are substantial and do not lend themselves to being incorporated in discourses of the exotic. Instead, world music appears in a completely new, historically informed light. Amiot’s Mémoire proved how dedication and commitment to cultures and languages that are unfamiliar and foreign as well as to their notation systems and musical instruments, guided by scientific method in the spirit of a balanced comparison, might yield insights that affect our own history and myths. If Pythagoras was a traveler who absorbed as much as he could from arcane traditions to build his own convictions (ibid., 173), the lore of ancient Western music theory and of music’s justification in the science of numbers and proportions shrinks to second-hand knowledge and stands apart from the real origins of true harmony. Amiot identifies music’s transformative power in ways different from Fonton and Guy de Chabanon, yet in each of these cases the encounter with musics either ancient or foreign triggered recalibrations of established truths that lie at the heart of European musical and historical self-image. Although he plunged deeply into historical materials, Amiot’s conclusions generate notions of world music both with respect to its origins and to the current relevance of non-Western musics, and of Western music’s acceptance in non-Western cultures (see Nettl in this volume). Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Western encounter with other musics is that musical communication as such never appears to be an issue. Perhaps with the exception of Amiot’s native listeners, who are unable to relate to French music, Rameau’s representations of Native Americans blend into the idiom of the ballet-héroïque just as smoothly as Guy de Chabanon detects in the songs of the Hurons similarities to European practices. The project of an Enlightenment world music can be grasped precisely in these negotiations, in the way music was capable of exposing and narrowing distances. These negotiations also accommodated views of cultural incommensurability, based on different anthropologies and listening traditions (see Agnew in this volume). They stretched from Guy de Chabanon’s musical universalism to Rameau’s carefully crafted renderings of musical global interchanges under the auspices of l’amour, of Love, on the stage of Enlightenment French ballet. Paradoxically, normative claims of a decisively disparaging nature were not voiced against exotic, but against the most familiar musical cultures:

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Rousseau’s biting invective against French music displays full command of the Enlightenment tactics of comparison and eighteenth-century debate (querelle). In the closing paragraph of his Lettre sur la musique française from 1753, he denied French music both ordered rhythm (tactus) and melody. The French had no music and never would have any (Rousseau 1753). Rousseau’s claims are the same fundamental criticism one would have expected at the time to be directed against “primitive” musics. Ignoring for a moment Rousseau’s underlying ideology of the superiority of Italian music as the “real” music, we recognize the ways in which the dynamics of the debate show how intimately music and its national manifestations were linked to central critical strategies and to what extent they were considered part of the culture and humanity of an overarching global diversity.

World music as the negotiation of distances The debates about music that raged in eighteenth-century France also signal that the Enlightenment was dealing with materials and arguments that were too complex to be “answered” or “solved” in a satisfactory manner. Rameau’s Les Indes galantes can be criticized for the failures of Fuzelier’s narrative plot, but it cannot be completely rejected as evidence for an intellectual paradigm shift. If Amiot’s report on Chinese music seemed incorrect or incomplete in the eyes of some readers, competitors and fellow missionaries found themselves able to embark on journeys of encounter of their own, thus making it possible to scrutinize and expand upon Amiot’s findings. Guy de Chabanon invites other opinions and fresh observations on the material he has discussed. No single actor or institution can claim to have ultimate authority on matters foreign, but can only steer discourses in one direction or the other. This confirms the specific texture of Enlightenment discourse on the exotic, to which a multiplicity of voices increasingly accrued. In the emergence of later discourses of Orientalism, the Enlightenment came to produce “a bewildering number of simultaneous conversations intrinsic to this cultural and geographic exchange” (Bellman 1998, xi). By examining the different ways world music took shape in French music and musical scholarship in the eighteenth century, it has been my goal in this chapter to show how the reflective horizon of Enlightenment authors and composers stretches beyond the West. Appropriations of foreign music, in whatever format or medium, were driven by many research and missionary agendas, and they functioned within different musical genres, such as on the opera stage. Fragmentary as the evidence from other cultures was, it helped implement a perspective that widened the awareness of national cultures

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within Europe to embrace an international perspective, which in turn was coupled with a historicizing impulse that extended to the world. From the success of opera à la turque one may conclude that performed vocal exotic music provided tangible readings of foreign manners and customs that a learned travel report, a Persian tale, or an artifact from the region could never achieve. Vocal music and dance, moreover, were regarded as moral lessons, for they represented a social activity, a way of passionate interaction that was socially and culturally eloquent and from which insight and knowledge could be gained. For this reason, the characteristic in music overrode the nascent notion of the authentic in music. A characteristic rendering of foreign subjects comprised a higher realism, a penetrating mimesis aiming to bring out fundamental truths underlying the actions and aspirations shown on the stage, fully acknowledging their fabricated nature. If music was termed primitive or cherished as an expression of passions in its own right, if it was believed to supplement or complement Western music, if it was reported in a documentary manner or imaginatively evoked, or if it was used to confirm cultural incommensurability or universalism, the growing understanding of an expansive world music depended on very specific circumstances, subjectivities, and discursive positions. Detailed descriptions of these circumstances would come to apply empirical research so that the specific mobility and patterns of circulation of music, of musicians both Western and ethnic, of musical instruments, of music examples in travel reports, and of music missionary campaigns in an age of global interchange could be characterized more precisely. Empirical data would come to confront music’s transformative power, a property harder to pin down as it interacted with the cultural imagination. This imagination was impregnated by the experience of expansion, embracing cultural and political expansion, but also the metaphorical expansion into newly imagined cultural geographies, opera subjects, tonal spaces, and physical movement in dance. The Enlightenment, for the first time analytically and critically, dealt with the tension between music’s universal nature and its systemic and structural mediatedness and situatedness. The constant familiarizing and defamiliarizing both of imagined exotic musics and, as a consequence, of Western music interacting with it, was paramount for defining this tension. The galoubet (little flute) and tambourin (tambourine) that Rameau used in the “Les Sauvages” scene of Les Indes galantes to portray the peace ceremony of the Native Americans (and Persians, Incas, and Turks) were popular Provençal instruments. In the eighteenth century, they had undergone a cross-cultural appropriation by the French elites to whom they evoked pastoral sentiments. The instruments thus carried a regional and a culturally imagined eloquence to which Rameau added a third, global dimension in orchestrating this scene. As

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the history of world music followed a universal turn in the course of the eighteenth century, unraveling such cross-fertilization would increasingly become vital in exploring reciprocities and for a historically informed deep listening to music’s transformative powers in the age of Enlightened global interaction.

Bibliography Amiot, J. J. M. (1776–91) Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages, &c. des Chinois, Paris: Nyon (1779) Mémoire sur la musique des chinois, tant anciens et modernes, Paris: Nyon Bellman, J. (1998) ‘Introduction’, in J. Bellman (ed.), The Exotic in Western Music, Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp. ix–xiii Betzwieser, T. (1993) Exotismus und “Türkenoper” in der französischen Musik des Ancien Régime: Studien zu einem ästhetischen Phänomen, Laaber Verlag (1994) ‘Rameau: Les Indes Galantes’, in C. Dahlhaus et al. (eds.), Pipers Lexikon des Musiktheaters, vol. 5, Munich: Piper Verlag, pp. 158–62 Bley, H., and H.-J. König (2006) ‘Globale Interaktion’, in F. Jaeger (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, vol. 4, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, columns 945–57 Bohlman, P. V. (1991) ‘Representation and cultural critique in the history of ethnomusicology’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 131–51 Christensen, T. (1993) Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press Cohen, D. E. (2001) ‘The “gift of nature”: Musical‚ “instinct”, and musical cognition in Rameau’, in S. Clark (ed.), Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–92 Duc, P. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in J.-P. Rameau, Les Indes galantes: Ballet réduit à quatre grands concerts 1735–1736, Courlay: Fuzeau, pp. v–xiii Fonton, C. (1751 [orig. ms]) Essai sur la musique orientale comparée à la musique européenne [full title of the manuscripts reads Essay sur la Musique Orientale comparée à la Musique Européene ou L’on tache de donner une idée Generale de la Musique des Peuples de l’orient, de leur gout particulier, de leur Regles dans le Chant, et la Combinaison des Tons, avec une Notion abregée de leurs Principaux Instrumens]; modern edition in Betzwieser (1993), pp. 370–419 Guy de Chabanon, M.-P. (1969, orig. publ.1785) De la musique considérée en elle-même et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poésie, et le théâtre, Geneva: Slatkine Kircher, A. (1650) Musurgia universalis, Rome: Corbelletti Neubauer, E. (1999) Der Essai sur la musique orientale von Charles Fonton, Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University O’Malley, J. W. (1999) ‘The historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where does it stand today?’, in idem et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, University of Toronto Press, pp. 3–37 Rameau, J.-P. (1722) Traité de l’harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels: Divisé en quatre livres, Paris: De l’Impr. de J. B. C. Ballard

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(1736 [?]) Les Indes galantes: Ballet réduit à quatre grands concerts, avec une nouvelle entrée complette, Paris: Boivin (1971) Treatise on Harmony, trans. P. Gossett, New York: Dover Rousseau, J.- J. (1753) Lettre sur la musique française, Paris, n.p. Shiloah, A. (1990) ‘An eighteenth-century critic of taste and good taste’, in S. Blum, P. V. Bohlman, and D. M. Neuman (eds.), Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 181–9 Tomlinson, G. (2007) The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact, Cambridge University Press Trabant, J. (1993) ‘Der akroamatische Leibniz: Hören und Konspirieren’, in Das Ohr als Erkenntnisorgan, special issue of Paragrana, 2, 1–2: 64–71 Wright, O. (2000) Demetrius Cantemir: The Collection of Notations, Aldershot: Ashgate

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The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology BENNETT ZON

Introduction According to Philip Bohlman, “national music reflects the image of the nation so that those living in the nation recognize themselves in basic but crucial ways. It is music conceived in the image of the nation that is created through efforts to represent something quintessential about the nation” (Bohlman 2004, 82–3). Like all nations, Britain conceived of music in its own image, whether indigenous or foreign, and while the British Empire expanded from the seventeenth century onward, so too did its characterization of its own, and the world’s, national music. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this characterization was premised on an early anthropological model called developmentalism, but, from that time forward, evolutionary models increasingly challenged its hegemonic position. This chapter explores the relationship between anthropological theory and the representation of non-Western music from the heyday of the British Empire to its decline after World War I. It sets the scene by tracing the often-fraught history of anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism, highlighting important developmental paradigms, such as monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, and slightly later the evolutionary models of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. It then situates these developmental and evolutionary templates with contemporary representations of world musics, providing in fine a suggested explanation for their adoption and abandonment.

Anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism Developmentalism is an immutable and universal law of cultural and human progression – a teleological paradigm, which Peter Bowler classifies as a precursor to evolutionism (2003, 48–95). One of developmentalism’s major exponents, the Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson, “looked for pattern, law, or [298]

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direction operating behind the particular events of history” (Honigmann 1976, 86) through a three-stage approach, from savagery and barbarism to civilization. Using a theory known as the comparative method, Ferguson and many of his contemporaries exploited the tautological nature of developmentalism to prove that not all living peoples had advanced to an equal developmental stage. Thus, modern “savages” remained fixed as living fossils akin to primitive man, whereas modern – often European – civilized humans had evolved from savagery more fully. George Stocking writes of developmentalism and its application in the comparative method as de rigueur, citing exponents such as Rousseau, Goguet, de Brosses, Lord Kames, Ferguson, Boulanger, de Pauw, Reynal, Millar, Demeunier, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and Condorcet (Stocking 1987, 15). Another Enlightenment thinker, William Godwin, speaks for the multitude when he claims that while savage races can become more civilized and civilized races can retain traces of primitive stages of development, all humans should be “brought into union with the great whole of humanity, and be made capable of taking part in its further progress . . . It is the vocation of our [human] race to unite itself into one single body, all parts of which shall be thoroughly known to each other, and all possessed of a similar culture” (Godwin 1793, quoted in Nisbet 1980, 275). While concepts of inalienable human similarity lay at the root of much late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and British anthropology (Wheeler 2000, 10), they failed to account for manifest difference between peoples, both ancient and modern. To that end, theories of human origins evolved alongside developmentalism to help explain diversity. The Great Chain of Being linked man and apes, and eventually apes and people of African ancestry (see Jahoda 1999, 25), and seminal theories of monogenesis (human origins in Adam and Eve) and polygenesis (diverse human origins) emerged. Cultural and physical disparity became important signifiers of difference, and in Britain, as elsewhere across Europe, anthropologies of difference and similarity coalesced into early forms of scientific racism (Bolt 1971, 9). Monogenesis was especially susceptible to racism, as it tried to account for the presence of people omitted from biblical descent, such as non-Christians, heathens, and savages. “Degeneration” arose to explain just such peoples. As George Stocking writes, “Degeneration, conceived in physical and cultural terms, provided an alternative explanation for the manifest human diversity that increasingly forced itself on anthropological thoughts, just as aggressive ethnocentrism and Christian humanitarianism coexisted in the general cultural attitude toward non-Western peoples” (Stocking 1987, 44). Where degenerationism seemed to resolve nagging questions of diversity, its racial emphasis

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often fueled prejudice. The British anthropologist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), for example, believed that “all mankind had originally been black and that differentiation was a result of civilization” (Augstein 1996, xxiv). In this regard, polygenism offered no better solution, being used at times to advocate slavery and an invidious belief in natural human difference. Polygenism simply reinforced already prevalent concepts of racial difference, arguing, “only differential descent from a different ancestor can account for the bodily differences that come to be called racial difference” (Saakwa-Mante 1999, 30). Graham Richards calls this “the subhumanity question” (1997, 7) – namely the largely polygenist attitudes that denigrate nonwhite people, and, in particular, black people. The practical application of these developmental models was abundant in British culture well into the 1850s, with perhaps no better example than the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace. Stocking describes it in the following terms: Much of the Crystal Palace encouraged speculation of a more specific sort; the overall system of classification, which forced jurors to compare the same functional object in a variety of national forms; the character of the different national exhibits, which led one along a line of progress from the Tasmanian savage through the “barbaric” civilizations of the East, northwest across the European continent toward an apex in Great Britain. (Stocking 1987, 5)

That this rigid concept of human development was underpinned by racism is unquestionable. Robert Knox, for instance, writes in The Races of Men, “Race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization depends upon it” (Knox 1850, v). At the same time, however, advances in theories of heredity began to force a reconsideration of earlier developmental models. Charles Darwin’s younger cousin, Francis Galton, who is widely known today as the father of eugenics, traveled widely in the 1840s and 1850s to develop a theory of racial heredity, based on physical attributes, linguistics, behavior, and belief (see Galton 1883, 17). As Stocking points out, despite its lack of conceptual cohesion, Galton’s travels were sufficiently influential to be included as a reference in the Crystal Palace guidebook and were subsequently cited in R. G. Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology of 1859 (Stocking 1987, 94). While Galton was busy developing racial science into eugenics, Alfred William Wallace, co-discoverer of the evolutionary principle, was traveling in the Amazon, collecting material that would ultimately be published in A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853). Wallace’s account (which contains limited reference to music) provides a putatively less racist approach, diminishing the significance of race in favor of questions of adaptation and descent.

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For all their significance in the history of anthropology, neither Galton nor Wallace would derail developmentalism in the way that their contemporary Charles Darwin would. Darwin, who “put together an argument for the evolution of species that was unprecedented in detail, accuracy, and scope” (Harris 2001, 116), simply undermined all previous systems of thought. In one fell swoop he denied progress and stripped out from anthropology any teleological purpose or goal. As Steven Jay Gould writes, “Darwin’s mechanism can only generate local adaptation to environments that change in a directionless way through time, thus imparting no goal or progressive vector to life’s history” (Gould 2002, xi–xiii). Darwin’s impact, to use Oldroyd’s term (1980), situated evolution at the vanguard of anthropological thinking and located it at the intersection of science, ideology, and worldview (Greene 1981) – thus was born the “Darwinian paradigm” (Ruse 1989), or conversely, the “non-Darwinian revolution” (Bowler 1988). Darwin’s exponent, Thomas Huxley, viewed Darwin’s theory of evolution as “reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools” (Huxley 1865; quoted in Hunt 1866, 321). Darwin’s view of evolution is bound up with natural selection and sexual selection. Natural selection is a process favoring the survival of organisms best suited to their environmental circumstances. All organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive, and all organisms within a species vary. Some of the variants are better adapted to their environment, and since offspring will inherit their parents’ favorable variations, the next generation will become better adapted to their environment. There is only a struggle for survival, no predetermined and universal laws of human progress, and no progression from savage and barbarian to civilization. Among early exponents of evolutionism is the vastly prolific and hugely contentious philosopher Herbert Spencer, who sought to unify all knowledge through evolutionism. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” and Spencer who translated evolutionism into sociological, ethical, and cultural principles. The origin of Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest” is widely disputed. As David Paul Crook points out, some consider the phrase as having originated in Spencer’s 1852 “Theory of Population” (Crook 1994, 216); James Allen Rogers reiterates this view (1972, 266). According to Diane B. Paul and John Offer, it is now accepted that it was first used in 1864 in Part 3, Chapter 12, Volume 1 of Spencer’s Principles of Biology (see Paul 1988, 412–14, and Offer 2000, 3). Writing in the 1890s, Benjamin Kidd claims that Spencer’s A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860–77) is “a stupendous attempt not only at the unification of knowledge, but at the explanation in terms of evolutionary science of the development

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which human society is undergoing” (Kidd 1894, 2). More recently, Nisbet describes him as “the supreme embodiment in the late nineteenth century of both liberal individualism and the idea of progress. No one before or since so effectively united the two philosophies of freedom and of progress, or so completely anchored the former in the latter” (Nisbet 1980, 226). Anthropologists were, as one might expect, heavily divided on Spencer. While propounding an evolutionary mechanism for human development, he also clung antithetically to unreconstructed notions of race (Kuklick 1991, 81). Hannaford ascribes this to his belief in the fixity of inheritance, and hence the immutable nature of human instinct (1996, 273), while others point to his belief in the inability of humans to influence the immutable laws of nature which act upon this (Hinsley 1981, 126–7). According to Hinsley, Spencer’s universe “was in constant change, leading at any one time in one of two directions: toward integration of matter (evolution) or disintegration of matter (dissolution). Evolution involved not only the integration of matter but, equally important, also increasing heterogeneity and differentiation of parts and functions” (ibid., 126). Like Spencer, advocates of evolution often held mutually contradictory views of human progress. While in 1865 the savage of Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times struggles to progress beyond the most rudimentary form of life, with the publication of Origin of Civilisation in 1870 he had developed previously unknown potential for human evolution. Lubbock’s change is characteristic of an intellectual landscape gradually ceding to a Darwinian model of evolution, typified by the eminent anthropologist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor’s two major works, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871) “are among those usually taken to mark the apogee of English, Darwinian and positivist influence in cultural anthropology” (Leopold 1980, 9). Here, the titles themselves illustrate the extent to which certain terminology had begun to be superseded – the term “culture” for “civilization,” and “primitive” for “early” (ibid., 13). Tylor explains some of the differences at the outset of Primitive Culture: Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of

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previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future. (Tylor 1871, 1)

According to De Waal Malefijt, the key word in the first sentence of this quotation is “acquired,” because it indicates “that culture was the product of social learning rather than of biological heredity, and that the differences in cultural development were not the result of degeneration, but of progress in cultural knowledge” (De Waal Malefijt 1974, 139). Like Spencer, however, Tylor’s brand of evolution remains conflicted over developmentalism. As he says, [I]t may be admitted that some rude tribes lead a life to be envied by some barbarous races, and even by the outcasts of higher nations. But that any known savage tribe would not be improved by judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist would dare to make; while the general tenour [sic] of the evidence goes far to justify the view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wise and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier, and that the barbarian stands between. (Tylor 1871, 31)

From 1871, nevertheless, the Tylorian concept of culture remained hegemonic for the next thirty years (Monaghan and Just 2000, 35), establishing a methodology that would not change substantively in England until well into the 1930s.

Evolutionary models: monogenism, polygenism, and the comparative method Although Tylorian anthropology would set the scene for modern British ethnomusicology, the history of ethnomusicology in Britain begins much earlier, in the eighteenth century, much of it in travel literature translated from other languages, such as Amédée Frézier’s A Voyage to the South-Sea, and along the Coasts of Chili and Peru (1717), Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese-Tartary (1738–41), and J. F. G. de la Pérouse’s A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788 (1799). These books, and many like them, continued to provide “raw” music-anthropological material well into the early part of the twentieth century. Another example is Georg Forster’s travels with Captain James Cook from 1772 to 1775, chronicled in A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution (1777). Forster’s account, while open-minded, nevertheless encapsulates the contradictions lying at the heart of Enlightenment developmentalism. While admiring the emotional depth of Tahitian music, he nonetheless describes it as being “exceedingly simple” and its words as having “extreme simplicity” – common ciphers for savage underdevelopment, alongside childishness, animality, naturalness, ignorance, innocence, helplessness, and imitativeness (Jahoda 1999, 9–10).

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Forster, like Rousseau, also suggests that traces of these characteristics remain in civilized humans, when he writes that one unappreciative native “never once expressed a desire of going with us; and when we proposed it to him, he declined it, preferring the wretched precarious life of his countrymen, to all the advantages of which he saw us possessed . . . this way of thinking is common to all savages; and I might have added, that it is not entirely obliterated among polished nations” (Forster 1777, 476). This trace of savagery often serves a musical purpose, explaining to developmentalists the origin of commensurately limited musical intervals. G. H. von Langsdorff’s study of the music of the cannibals of Washington’s Islands provides detailed descriptions of the physical characteristics of instruments, as well as some analytical appreciation: “It is very remarkable . . . that almost all the songs of uncultivated people, and even the music of European nations not very far advanced in civilization, is composed chiefly of semitones” (von Langsdorff 1813, 160). From a musical standpoint, von Langsdorff is a monogenist, claiming in the semitone of the islanders a single, original, savage interval. Other travelers echo this but place their native hosts at more advanced yet stunted, degenerated levels of development. T. Edward Bowdich’s claims that the minor third, which is a common characteristic of Ashantee music, “is the most natural interval; the addition of fifths, at the same time, is rare . . . [t]he singing is almost all recitative . . . [t]he songs of the Canoe men are peculiar to themselves, and very much resemble the chants used in cathedrals” (Bowdich 1819, 361–5). Where von Langsdorff and Bowdich imbue intervallic content with anthropological meaning, this suggests a largely monogenist attitude, but some contemporaries refute single musical origins. For the polygenist John Crawfurd, music of the Indian archipelago is too innately diverse to arise from one source: Each tribe has its distinct national airs, but it is among the Javanese alone that music assumes the semblance of an art. These people have, indeed, carried it to a state of improvement, not only beyond their own progress in other arts, but much beyond, I think, that of all other people in so rude a state of society. (Crawfurd 1820, 332–3)

In his explanation of musical instruments, Crawfurd also seeks the help of fellow polygenist and renowned composer William Crotch, who on his behalf examined Sir Stamford Raffles’s collection of Javanese instruments held at the house of the Duke of Somerset. Crotch’s response captures the essence of the polygenist predicament, inexplicably claiming common origin yet differential descent: The instruments . . . are all in the same kind of scale as that produced by the black keys of the piano-forte; in which scale so many of the Scots and Irish, all

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the Chinese, and some of the East Indian and North American airs of the greatest antiquity were composed. The result of my examination is a pretty strong conviction that all the real native music of Java, notwithstanding some difficulties which it is unnecessary to particularize, is composed in a common enharmonic scale. (quoted in ibid., 339–40)

Crotch’s description of Javanese music highlights another facet of developmentalism, namely the comparative method, which treats modern primitive peoples as living fossils. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his centrality to the ancient and modern debate, Crotch used modern primitive peoples (foreign and British) to explain historical antiquity. As Stocking writes, the “‘battle of the ancients and the moderns’ opened a new phase of speculation” on the notion of human progress (1987, 11). The comparative method continued to find advocates for some time afterwards, often in the context of degenerationism, as in James Davies’s in-depth musical appendix to Sir George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology (1855), entitled “On the Native Songs of New Zealand.” It provided a comparison of the intervals discernible in songs with the intervals stated to have been performed by the ancient Greeks in some of their divisions of the musical scale, called γένος εναρμονικόν (enharmonic genus) or αρμονία (harmony) (Davies 1855, 313). As Davies writes: “My point is, to prove that the ancients did possess and practise a modulation which contained much less [sic] intervals than ours, and that such, or an approach to such, modulation (though probably but imperfect) is still retained among some people, and that the principles on which the Greeks founded their enharmonic genus, still survive in natural song” (ibid., 322). Edward Lane’s The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) is another, albeit earlier, example of classic degenerationism, using instruments not simply for what Jann Pasler calls historically “neutral forms of analysis” (2004, 24) but as encoded signs of social degeneration. In Lane’s book, instruments of the typical Egyptian band are intended for public performing (rather than for dancing). From the praiseworthy kemengeh down to the lowly rabáb, they are effectively a male preserve, as are wind instruments and some drums. Instruments for women, however, are for private indulgence rather than performance (for the harem). Instruments for men are also voiced and even pitched, but what few instruments there are for women are unvoiced and unpitched. Not only do instruments for women fail to “speak,” but they are also, in construction, much simpler than male instruments. Male instruments are performed in more complex social contexts (weddings, religious processions, and so on), whereas women’s instruments are used within the prescriptive and, as it were, socially simplified context of the harem, where women were commonly essentialized as either erotic or indolent,

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to offer them “diversion,” using Lane’s term (1904, 73). For some time after Lane, instruments continued to signal degeneration among anthropologists who embraced the comparative method. A. Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers) places musical instruments within the category of “miscellaneous arts of modern savages” in the anthropological collection at the Bethnal Green Museum, claiming: The resemblance between the arts of modern savages and those of primeval man may be compared to that existing between recent and extinct species of animals . . . amongst the arts of existing people in all stages of civilisation, we are able to trace a succession of ideas from the simple to the complex, but not the true order of development by which those more complex arrangements have been brought about. (Fox 1875, 307–8)

Transition to evolution Theories of developmentalism were not uniformly accepted among scholars. The first to upset the developmentalist applecart was William Jones, renowned scholar of Indian languages, literature, and philosophy, Supreme Court judge in Bengal from 1783, and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. In one of the earliest treatises of its kind, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (1792), Jones equalizes development across peoples, claiming that all music, be it Hindu or Western music, should be judged in its own terms: [T]he Hindoo poets never fail to change the metre, which is their mode, according to the change of subject or sentiment in the same piece; and I could produce instances of poetical modulation (if such a phrase may be used) at least equal to the most affecting modulations of our greatest composers: now the musician must naturally have emulated the poet, as every translator endeavours to resemble his original. (Jones 1994, 157, emphasis in original)

Although Jones’s views did not inform consensus, they, along with others like them, did break the early confidence of Enlightenment developmentalism and with it the security of anthropological models promulgated by the increasingly professional world of learned societies, such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783), the Linnaean Society of London (1788), the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1799), the Geological Society of London (1807), the Royal Asiatic Society (1823), and the Royal Geographical Society (1830). From the 1840s anthropological societies emerged as independent entities, beginning with the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and the Ethnological Society of London, both in 1843, and later the Anthropological Society of London in 1865. A good example of conflicted developmentalism is the erstwhile Prichardian and comparative methodologist William Dauney,

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fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and compiler of Ancient Scottish Melodies (1838) and other works on national music. Dauney’s certainty is qualified: although the modern European system of music “may possibly be the best which can be adopted . . . this can only be known for certain by an extensive comparison with other systems” (Dauney 1841, 1). Like Prichard, who describes his work as “the investigation of the history of nations and of mankind from many other quarters” (Prichard 1848, 304, quoted in Augstein 1996, 216), Dauney also claims: [N]ational music . . . is amongst the oldest and the most lasting of their [a people’s] relics. Carried down from father to son, like an heir-loom in a family . . . It bears a pretium affectionis, and is prized more because it is our own, and associated with ties of kindred and home, than from any intrinsic excellence in the music itself. It is probable, therefore, that it was original destination, rather than choice, which assigned to this and other countries their particular style of national music. (Dauney 1841, 7–8)

In some ways Dauney’s methodology would not be out of place in modern ethnomusicology, insofar as “the minds of the persons employed [to transcribe music in the field] be divested of all such preconceived notions, and that they be instructed to take down the music with the strictest fidelity” (ibid., 3). In fact, these desiderata would soon reappear. Not long after Dauney had formulated his own brand of comparative method, the Musical Times published a set of lectures by T. H. Tomlinson on non-Western music. These typify “the crisis in Prichardian ethnology,” resulting from a shift in “the historical argument for human unity” to a biological paradigm seeking in history recurrent patterns and variations (Stocking 1987, 74–5). Where Prichard struggled to disaggregate antiquity and modernity, Tomlinson had no such difficulty. In “On the Antiquity of Indian Music” he summarizes this view: It may perhaps be said that in endeavouring to trace the state of the art of music up to a remote period, in such a country as India, it is wandering uselessly in a field of conjecture, without any clue to guide us to a competent knowledge, where so little assistance is derived from history, and where, in fact, oral tradition, mixed up with a great portion of fabulous matter, seems the only existing and most fallacious mode of tracing it. (Tomlinson 1853, 332)

With the decline of the Prichardian comparative method, anthropology came temporarily adrift, something evinced in musical representations of the time. John Hullah opines: [T]he history of modern music is altogether European. Not that the Orientals have, or have had, no music of their own; but that, as at present practised, their music has no charm, nor indeed meaning, for us. How is this? How can there

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be music acceptable to one comparatively civilized people and altogether unacceptable – unintelligible even – to another? (Hullah 1862, 6–7)

This incomprehension led to numerous efforts to reinstate, perhaps even to a certain retrenching of, the hegemonic position of developmentalism. Among the most prominent figures to do this was John Frederick Rowbotham, author of A History of Music (1885). Rowbotham divides national music into two interacting parts, the first a type of intellectual and emotional dualism, and the other a Comtean tripartition of distinct fixed stages corresponding to the drum, pipe, and lyre. From the 1860s, however, developmentalism largely gave way to evolutionism, first in its Spencerian incarnation and later in its equally powerful formulation by Darwin. The transition between the two is at times fraught with arcane ideological tensions that would continue to percolate through anthropological and early ethnomusicological literature well into the 1930s. If ethnomusicology could be said to have existed before the term was first used, then there is good reason to associate this term with one of its principal historical figures, Carl Engel (see also Netll in this volume). Unlike his contemporary, the unreconstructed developmentalist and frequently cantankerous music critic Henry Chorley, Engel sought an altogether more empirical methodology, though at times he clung to vestiges of the comparative method. Engel is mostly widely known today for some key works in the history of British ethnomusicology, including his Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (1874), The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864), An Introduction to the Study of National Music (1866), and the later compilation of Musical Times articles, The Literature of National Music (1879). Few, however, will be aware of his important role in establishing ethnomusicology at the heart of British anthropology, in his contribution on music to Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1874), the first systematized approach to field methodology to be produced in Britain. Engel begins his work on national music with a thoroughly unrepentant comparative method, but unlike his contemporaries who used the present to reconstruct the past, he uses the past to investigate the present, in a reversal of classic comparative method: For years I have taken every opportunity of ascertaining the distinctive characteristics of the music not only of civilized but also of uncivilized nations. I soon saw that the latter is capable of yielding important suggestions for the science and history of music, just as the languages of savage nations are useful in philological and ethnological inquiries. As I proceeded, I became more and more convinced that, in order to understand clearly the music of the various modern nations, it was necessary to extend my researches to the music of ancient nations. (Engel 1864, v)

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This reversal of comparative method set Engel on a largely untrodden path, questioning the presumption of universality, which previously attended anthropological investigations into national music: Although the feelings of the human heart, which music expresses, are, in the main, the same in every nation; yet they are, in individual instances, considerably modified by different influences . . . [T]he tunes are in some cases so totally different from those of our own country, that they are, on first acquaintance, almost as incomprehensible as poems in a language but slightly known to us. Indeed, the common adage that music is a universal language, is but half true. There are, at all events, many dialects in this language which require to be studied before they can be understood. (ibid., 167–8)

Engel’s reluctance to accept conventional wisdom about musical universality is not just an appreciation of difference but also a sign of diminishing anthropological certainty. In the face of advancing scientific empiricism, itself vitalized by Darwin’s evolutionary revolution, Engel abandoned much of the methodological apparatus of grass-roots developmentalism and drew toward the first generation of classic evolutionists, most notably E. B. Tylor. Despite his hegemonic position in British anthropology, Tylor was not a card-carrying Darwinian and, like Engel, retained in his methodology some anachronistic elements of developmentalism. Writing in his landmark Primitive Music (1871), he considers: [T]hat any known savage tribe would not be improved by judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist would dare to make; while the general tenour [sic] of the evidence goes far to justify the view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wise and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier, and that the barbarian stands between. (Tylor 1871, 31)

Tylor, nevertheless, went some way toward ditching his developmentalist baggage and, like Engel, arrived at a functional, if not theoretically satisfactory, compromise. New terminologies were created, especially antithetical to developmentalist vocabularies. As previously discussed, “civilization” was the first to go, as the opening of Primitive Culture makes clear. In Notes and Queries on Anthropology, published as an ideological statement of the newly formed Anthropological Institute, Engel simply translates and applies this to the study of national music, becoming the earliest figure in the history of British ethnomusicology to set out a methodological statement within a purely anthropological context. For Engel, as for the Institute, history “has confined itself chiefly to the achievements of special races; but the anthropologist regards all races as equally worthy of a place in the records of human

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development” (British Association for the Advancement of Science 1874, iv). Engel turns this into a proclamation of musical equality: The music of every nation has certain characteristics of its own. The progression of intervals, the modulations, embellishments, rhythmical effects, &c. occurring in the music of extra-European nations are not unfrequently too peculiar to be accurately indicated by means of our musical notation. Some additional explanation is therefore required with the notation. In writing down the popular tunes of foreign countries on hearing them sung or played by the natives, no attempt should be made to rectify any thing which may appear incorrect to the European ear. The more faithfully the apparent defects are preserved, the more valuable is the notation. Collections of popular tunes (with the words of the airs) are very desirable. Likewise drawings of musical instruments, with explanations respecting the constructions, dimensions, capabilities, and employment of the instruments represented. (Engel 1874, 110)

Spencerian and Darwinian evolutionism Engel’s and Tylor’s dismantling of developmentalism spoke to anthropologists with an interest in reassessing and redefining the universality of national music, in particular that early generation of evolutionists influenced by Darwin, such as the psychologist Edmund Gurney, author of the magisterial Power of Sound (1880), the musicologist Richard Wallaschek, author of Primitive Music (1893), and the critic Ernest Newman, author of numerous articles, including “Herbert Spencer and the Origin of Music” (1910; see also Spencer 1981). Yet under the influence of Darwin’s contemporary, Herbert Spencer, developmentalism continued to crowd musicological debate, particularly in the circle of the composer and historian C. Hubert H. Parry, author of The Evolution of the Art of Music (1893 and 1896) and Style in Musical Art (1924). Inevitably, although Spencer and Darwin were both evolutionists, they often found themselves at odds, and this same opposition filtered down into two relatively distinct representations of national music. Spencer’s influence in music begins with his hugely controversial article “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857) and continues into the early twentieth century with numerous related, and equally contentious, articles. In these and his nonmusical writings, Spencer was girded by the theoretical vocabulary of German morphology: from Ernst von Baer comes the idea that humans evolve from the general to the specialized (from homogeneity to heterogeneity), and from Ernst Haeckel, the ineluctable superiority and perfectibility of human beings (Bowler 2003, 221). These strands coalesce in Spencer’s grand narrative of musical evolution, in which impassioned speech gives rise to music. Thus,

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speech is to music as savagery is to civilization: “That music is a product of civilization is manifest: for though some of the lowest savages have their dancechants, these are of a kind scarcely to be signified by the title musical: at most they supply but the vaguest rudiment of music properly so called” (Spencer 1951, 68). Parry read Spencer with relish, falling uncler sway of his synthesis of morphological terminology and unreconstructed developmentalism. This is clear from the opening pages of the chapter “Folk-song” in The Art of Music (1893): The basis of all music and the very first steps in the long story of musical development are to be found in the musical utterances of the most undeveloped and unconscious types of humanity, such as unadulterated savages and inhabitants of lonely isolated districts well removed from any of the influences of education and culture. Such savages are in the same position in relation to music as the remote ancestors of the race before the story of the artistic development of music began; and through study of the ways in which they contrive their primitive fragments of tune and rhythm, and of the way they string these together, the first steps of musical development may be traced. (Parry 1893, 52)

Spencer left musicology divided. Acolytes of developmentalism persisted in increasingly unsupportable anthropological views, yet Darwinians struggled to substantiate evolutionary theory. Newman, for example, draws upon Wallaschek to prove that because music and speech are governed by different parts of the brain; music, therefore, cannot have evolved from speech: To us, there is a great psychological and aesthetic gulf fixed between excited speech and song – not only between the speech and the song of to-day, but between the ruder speech and ruder song of primitive man . . . Allowing for all the differences between our music and that of the savage who blows his reed and thumps his tam-tam, and for all the differences of general mental structure between him and us, we can still see that the same causes which incite us to music incited him. (Newman 1910, 197–8, emphasis in original)

This separation of music from speech is reiterated by Gurney, who in “the Speech Theory” deplores Spencer’s idea that “the speech of primitive man had a special relation to Music; [and] that his direct and normal expression of his intuitions and feelings contained the essential germs of Music, or was actually ‘a sort of music’” (Gurney 1880, 490). Gurney also suggests that “we cannot judge music with the savage ear till we can remake ourselves into savages” (ibid., 492), and with this viewpoint reflects a growing tendency to reformulate understandings of universalism in music. This reformulation would near fruition in the writing of Richard Wallaschek, who, perhaps disappointingly for later observers of his work, diverts historical methodologies into the realm of

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race: “The difference between people with and without harmonic music is not a historical but a racial one” (Wallaschek, 1893, 144, emphasis in original). Early Darwinists remained encumbered by developmentalism until the advent of the psychologist Charles Samuel Myers, the first Briton to record non-Western music in the field and arguably Britain’s first ethnomusicologist. Despite his significance, Myers’s career remains obscure within the annals of ethnomusicology and has only recently attracted the attention of historians of psychology. Nonetheless, his significance cannot be underestimated, because it was Myers who effectively vanquished British ethnomusicology’s long history of developmentalism (see Clayton 1996; McLean 1993; Schneider 1991; Zon 2007). Even then, Myers fought this process tooth and nail, and it was not until the eleventh hour, when his formative research was finally published, that he relinquished (perhaps begrudgingly) the Spencerian paradigm. In 1895, soon after leaving his medical studies at Cambridge, Myers accompanied the distinguished Cambridge anthropologist A. C. Haddon and others on an expedition to the Torres Strait (New Guinea) and Sarawak (Borneo). The expedition, known as the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, was conceived “as a multidisciplinary project encompassing anthropology in its broadest sense, including ethnology, physical anthropology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropogeography” (Herle and Rouse 1998, 1–2), within which Myers would be responsible for music. The expedition spent roughly seven months in Torres Strait (between Northern Australia and Papua New Guinea) from April to October 1898 and though generally concentrating its fieldwork on Mer, allowed for considerable movement to other islands in the Strait. The research that emerged from the expedition was published in a set of six volumes appearing from 1901 to 1935. Myers contributed articles mainly for volume 2, Physiology and Psychology (1901 and 1903), comprising research on the senses, including work on hearing and reaction times, and volume 4, Arts and Crafts (1912), which included his writing on music and musical instruments. In these and later publications, Myers signals a lifelong commitment to understanding the whole through an understanding of the individual, and as such locates himself within the progressive psychology of individual differences (or differential psychology), which explains how and why people are psychologically different from one another (Cooper 2002, ix). In “The Absurdity of Any Mind-Body Relation” (1932), for example, he proposes that life consists of both the “lives of its several parts [neurologically] and of the ‘life’ of the unitary ‘individual’, which is more than the sum of the life of its several parts” (quoted in Myers 1937, 202). Armed with differential psychology, Myers and other psychologists developed a theory that accepts difference

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as a function of the individual within the cultural environment. Finally, he used “cultural adaptationism” to debunk the last vestige of developmentalism, the “Spencerian hypothesis,” which promulgated the view that primitives surpassed civilized people in psychophysical performance because they retained more energy for rudimentary functions. Myers substantiates his views with copious musical references, all leading to what he calls the apprehension of “musical meaning.” These are set out as a universal, yet culturally individuated, evolutionary phenomenon in “The Beginnings of Music” (1913), a summary of findings from the Torres Strait. They include 1) discrimination between noises and tones; 2) awareness of differences in loudness, pitch, duration, character, and quality; 3) awareness of absolute pitch; 4) appreciation and use of (small) approximately equal tone-distances; 5) appreciation and use of (larger) consonant intervals and the development of small intervals in relation to them; 6) melodic phrasing; 7) rhythmic phrasing; and 8) musical meaning (summarized in Myers 1933, 196). With the achievement of musical meaning, in whichever culture one lives, all men attain parity: “We have first to disregard our well-trained feelings towards consonances and dissonances. We have next to banish to the margins of our field of consciousness certain aspects of music, which, were it our own music, would occupy the very focus of attention. Thus incomprehensibility will gradually give place to meaning, and dislike to some interesting emotion” (Myers 1907, 239).

Conclusion As Myers suggests, it is incomprehensibility, as much anthropological as musical, which precluded and stymied that kind of meaning which would give rise to a greater appreciation of foreign music. But why until his time did incomprehensibility (i.e., developmentalism) reign supreme? The answer is rather simple: developmentalism is the anthropology of empire. It is the anthropology of power, of moral and ethical superiority, of conquest, progress, triumph, and teleology, whereas evolutionism is the anthropology of political loss, postimperial contraction, chance, and unwilled environmental development. David Cannadine notes that “as with all such transoceanic realms, the British Empire was not only a geopolitical entity: it was also a culturally created and imaginatively constructed artifact” (Cannadine 2001, 3), It was developmentalism that helped nurture this artifact. Edward Said argues the point more broadly: “So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, inter-twined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites,

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dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future” (Said 1994, 72). John MacKenzie echoes these attitudes, showing how art, music, theatre, dance, and literature (both popular and academic) “both reflected and sometimes actively shaped the instruments” of empire (MacKenzie 1999, 272), while Jeffrey Richards expresses a similar opinion: “In view of the ubiquity of imperialism in fiction, painting, poetry and theatre, it would seem intrinsically likely that it has left its traces in music” (Richards 2001, 3). As Ralph Locke’s penetrating analysis of Said’s interpretation of Aida shows, the relationship of empire, music, and culture operates within “multiple agendas,” which must go beyond more limited readings of iconic compositions in the study of imperialism, exoticism, and Orientalism in Western music (Locke 2006, 70). Among these multiple agendas is the anthropological lens of developmentalism and evolutionism, both key factors in the construction of national identity, whether imperial or not. Peter Marshall argues, “Empire enforced a hierarchical view of the world, in which the British occupied a preeminent place among the colonial powers, while those subject to colonial rule were ranged below them, in varying degrees of supposed inferiority” (Marshall 1995, 385). George Stocking reiterates this view when he portrays certain Victorian developmentalists as unquestioningly “confident of their own cultural and racial superiority” (Stocking 1987, 80). Whether the colonized were inferior or the colonizers superior, it means the same thing: developmentalism fed their mindset and constructed their world, while evolutionism rationalized their loss and tore down their confidence. With the decline of the Empire after World War I, it was the Darwinian model that won out in the end. Ironically, as an anthropological model, Darwinism rather than Spencerism was the fittest survivor. Gillian Beer writes: The idea of development harboured a paternalistic assumption once it was transferred to human beings, since it was presumed that the observer was at the summit of development, looking back over a past struggling to reach the present high moment. The European was taken as the type of achieved developmental pre-eminence, and other races studied were seen as further back on the chart of growth. (Beer 2000, 111)

As we know, however, once the children began to leave home they forged identities of their own and eschewed paternal control, no matter how supposedly benign. Awareness of this same biased outlook clearly informs Philip Bohlman’s readings of national music, when he refers to Engel and Vaughan Williams, as expressing an evolutionary “view from the top” (Bohlman 2004, 92). From a musical standpoint, it is this same view that Myers overturned with

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what might be called “view from the bottom” – a view not from a developmental apogee but from a constantly changing evolutionary beginning. Indeed, it is this representation that reflected the postimperial British nation. To use Bohlman’s words, “It is music conceived in the image of the nation” (ibid., 82–3).

Bibliography Augstein, H. F. (ed.) (1996) Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850, Bristol: Thoemmes Press Beer, G. (2000) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press Bohlman, P. V. (2004) The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio Bolt, C. (1971) Victorian Attitudes to Race, University of Toronto Press Bowdich, T. E. (1819) Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, with a Statistical Account of that Kingdom, and Geographical Notices of Other Parts of the Interior of Africa, London: John Murray Bowler, P. J. (1988) The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (2003, orig. publ. 1983) Evolution: The History of an Idea, 3rd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press British Association for the Advancement of Science (1874) Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands, London: Edward Stanford Cannadine, D. (2001) Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, London: Penguin Books Clayton, M. (1996) ‘Ethnographic wax cylinders at the British Library Sound Archive: A brief history and description of the collection’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 5: 67–92 Cooper, C. (2002) Individual Differences, 2nd edn, London: Arnold, and New York: Oxford University Press Crawfurd, J. (1820) History of the Indian Archipelago Containing an Account of the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions, and Commerce of Its Inhabitants, vol. 1, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co. Crook, D. P. (1994) Darwinism, War and History, Cambridge University Press Dauney, W. (1841) ‘Observations with a view to an inquiry into the music of the East’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6: 1–10 Davies, J. A. (1855) ‘Appendix on the native songs of New Zealand’, in Sir G. Grey, Polynesian Mythology, and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by their Priests and Chiefs, London: John Murray De Waal Malefijt, A. (1974) Images of Man: A History of Anthropological Thought, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Engel, C. (1864) The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, Particularly of the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Hebrews; with Special Reference to Recent Discoveries in Western Asia and in Egypt, London: John Murray

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(1874) ‘Music’, in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands, London: Edward Stanford Forster, G. A. (1777) 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 and J. Robson Fox, A. H. L. (Pitt Rivers) (1875) ‘On the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection, now exhibited in the Bethnal Green Museum’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 4: 293–308 Galton, F. (1883) Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, London: J. M. Dent Godwin, W. (1793) Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Oxford: Woodstock Books Gould, S. J. (2002) ‘Introduction’, in C. Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, London: William Heinemann, pp. xi–xiii Greene, J. C. (1981) Science, Ideology, and World View: Essay in the History of Evolutionary Ideas, Berkeley: University of California Press Gurney, E. (1880) The Power of Sound, London: Smith, Elder, & Co. Hannaford, I. (1996) Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Harris, M. (2001, orig. publ. 1968) The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, updated edn, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press Herle, A., and S. Rouse (eds.) (1998) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, Cambridge University Press Hinsley Jr., C. M. (1981) Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846–1910, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press Honigmann, J. J. (1976) The Development of Anthropological Ideas, Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press Hullah, J. (1862) The History of Modern Music: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London: Parker, Son, and Bourn Hunt, J. (1866) ‘On the application of the principle of natural selection in anthropology’, Anthropological Review, 4: 320–40 Huxley, T. (1865) ‘On the methods and results of ethnology’, Fortnightly Review, 1: 257–77 Jahoda, G. (1999) Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture, London and New York: Routledge Jones, W. (1994, orig. publ. 1875) ‘On the musical modes of the Hindoos: Written in 1784, and since much enlarged [1792], by the President [of the Asiatic Society of Bengal]’, in S. M. Tagore (ed.), Hindu Music, Delhi: Low Price Publications Kidd, B. (1894) Social Evolution, London: Macmillan and Co. Knox, R. (1850, orig. publ. 1862) The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd edn, London: Henry Renshaw Kuklick, H. (1991) The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945, Cambridge University Press Lane, E. W. (1904, orig. publ. 1836) The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, vol. 2, 5th edn, London: John Murray

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Leopold, J. (1980) Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective: E. B. Tylor and the Making of ‘Primitive Culture’, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag Locke, R. (2006) ‘Aida and nine readings of empire’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 3, 1: 70 MacKenzie, J. (1999) ‘Empire and metropolitan cultures’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, pp. 270–93 Marshall, P. J. (1995 ) ‘Imperial Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23, 3: 379–94 McLean, M. (1993) ‘Oceania’, in H. Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 392–400 Monaghan, J., and P. Just (2000) Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press Myers, C. S. (1907) ‘The ethnological study of music’, in H. Balfour et al. (eds.), Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of His 75th Birthday Oct. 2 1907, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 235–54 (1933) ‘The beginnings of music’, in idem, A Psychologist’s Point of View: Twelve Semi-Popular Addresses on Various Subjects, London: William Heinemann (Medical Books) Ltd., pp. 177–203 (1937) ‘The absurdity of any mind-body relation’, in idem, In the Realm of Mind: Nine Chapters on the Application and Implications of Psychology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–216 Newman, E. (1910) ‘Herbert Spencer and the origin of music’, in idem, Musical Studies, London and New York: John Lane, pp. 189–220 Nisbet, R. (1980) History of the Idea of Progress, London: Heinemann Offer, J. (2000) Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, London and New York: Routledge Oldroyd, D. R. (1980) Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution, Milton Keynes: Open University Press Parry, C. H. H. (1893) The Art of Music, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd Pasler, J. (2004) ‘The utility of musical instruments in the racial and colonial agendas of late nineteenth-century France’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129, 1: 24–76 Paul, D. B. (1988) ‘The selection of the “Survival of the Fittest”’, Journal of the History of Biology, 21, 3: 412–14 Prichard, J. C. (1848) ‘On the relations of ethnology to other branches of knowledge’, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 1: 301–29 Richards, G. (1997) ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History, London and New York: Routledge Richards, J. (2001) Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953, Manchester University Press Rogers, J. A. (1972) ‘Darwin and social Darwinism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33, 2: 265–80 Ruse, M. (1989) The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on Its History, Philosophy, and Religious Implications, London and New York: Routledge Saakwa-Mante, N. (1999) ‘Western medicine and racial constitutions: Surgeon John Atkins’ theory of polygenism and sleepy distemper in the 1730s’, in W. Ernst and B. Harris (eds.), Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 29–57 Said, E. W. (1994) Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage

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Schneider, A. (1991) ‘Psychological theory and comparative musicology’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 293–317 Spencer, H. (1851) Social Statics, or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, London: John Chapman (1951, orig. publ. 1857) ‘The origin and function of music’, in idem, Literary Style and Music, London: Watts and Co., pp. 45–106 Stocking Jr, G. W. (1987) Victorian Anthropology, New York: Free Press Tomlinson, T. H. (1853) ‘On the antiquity of Indian music (From T. H. Tomlinson’s Lectures on Oriental Music)’, Musical World, 31, 3rd ser. 12, 22: 332 Tylor, E. B. (1871) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, London: John Murray Von Langsdorff, G. H. (1813) Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, During the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, and 1807, London: Henry Colburn Wallaschek, R. (1893) Primitive Music: An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances, and Pantomimes of Savage Races, London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Wheeler, R. (2000) The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Zon, B. (2007) Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, University of Rochester Press

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PART V

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MUSIC HISTORIES OF

THE FOLK AND THE NATION

. 13 .

Korean music before and after the West KEITH HOWARD

Barely a century ago, Western music was, in virtually all respects, unknown in Korea. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is the dominant Korean music culture, and Korean performers and conductors of Western music are legion throughout the world. Such is Western music’s dominance that the Sino-Korean term “u ˘ mak,” “music,”1 has been ceded by the performers and aficionados of Korean traditional music and today, at least to the average Korean, means classical and popular Western music.2 True, the term, ˘umak, can signify Korean music, but only when given a prefix, as in Han’guk ˘umak (Korean music) or cho˘nt’ong ˘umak (traditional music), much as “world music” still needs the prefix in the West. More usually, kugak (lit., national music) stands as the term for Korean traditional music, additional tautological prefixes indicating contemporary arrangements or compositions – ch’angjak kugak (creative traditional music) or shin kugak (new traditional music). As a term, kugak first appeared only in 1907; before then, there was, simply, little need to differentiate different musical soundworlds (No 1989, 13). During the twentieth century, every component of kugak was measured against Western music. Often, it was found lacking, for the foreign came to dominate. And yet, the focus of scholarly accounts about Korean music, as a cursory glance at the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Sadie 1980 and 2001), Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (Myers 1993), or the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (Provine et al. 2002) confirms, stubbornly remains kugak, at times omitting all mention of the dominant music culture. This is the context for the present chapter, in which I explore the development of Western music in Korea, and the impact it has had on music and musical discourse.

The arrival of Western music: missionaries and military bands Two basic perspectives exist that document the introduction of Western music to Korea. Although Korean writers tend to promote one over the

1 The term originally had a much broader signification. 2 In academic writings, Western music is often referred to as yangak or so˘yang ˘u mak.

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other, the two are not mutually exclusive. Both illustrate competing ideas about how the peninsula began to be modernized, instilling in the public’s mind, right at the outset, a belief that kugak, Korea’s own music, was somehow backward and had little place in the contemporary world that Korea now sought to embrace. The first and dominant perspective traces the introduction back to Protestant missionary activity (Chang Sahun 1974, 171–82; Yi Sangman 1976, 339–52, 1984, 160–3; Yi Yuso ˘n 1985; Choong-sik Ahn 2005, 5–18). The first missionaries arrived in 1885, following treaties that the Prince Regent (the Taewo ˘n’gun) signed with European and American powers. Within a decade, missionaries had opened Korea’s first modern schools, taking models from the American curriculum but adding mission hymns. We know that hymns were duplicated as early as 1888 at the Ewha School in Seoul, a school run by Methodist missionaries where Mrs. Mary Scranton taught singing. Mrs. Heber Jones taught hymns from 1892 at the Methodist Yo ˘nghwa Women’s School in Inch’o ˘n to the west of 3 Seoul, where classes began in 1890. Heber Jones worked with her husband, George, and L. C. Rothweiler to produce the first Korean hymnbook, Ch’anmiga, duplicated in 1892 with twenty-seven hymn texts, then reissued with eighty-one hymns in 1895. Ch’anyangga, published in 1894 by the Presbyterian Horace G. Underwood (whose elder brother, John, founded the ink business that grew to become the Underwood Typewriter Company), is normally considered the first hymnal published in Korea. Underwood went on to found what are today’s Yonsei University and Severance Hospital.4 Ch’anyangga included four-part notations for its 117 hymns. Both Ch’anmiga and Ch’anyangga translate as “Songs of Praise”; ten additional volumes of hymns appeared over the next decade (Yi Yuso ˘n and Yi Sangman 1984, 479–80; Yi Ko ˘nyong 1987, 147–85; Min Kyo ˘ngbae 1997, 25–43; Yi Kangsuk et al. 2001). The typical hymn style, maintained in many Korean churches, derives from nineteenth-century American revivalism, with unison melodies sung above a simple harmonic frame. Harmoniums were imported from the 1890s onwards from America and Japan to provide accompaniment. Hymns kept familiar European and American melodies, and many translated established texts. Choirs, then as now (but now encouraged by a music-school system geared to producing soloists), were concerned less with the harmonic blending than one would find in, say, a British cathedral. The court advisor Homer B. Hulbert wrote that hymns “meant nothing” to Koreans (1906, 314), yet church music proved inspiring to many who became 3 No Tongu ˘n (1995, 645) lists additional missionaries known to have taught singing. 4 For discussions of the beginnings of missionary activity, see E. N. Hunt (1980), M. Huntley (1987), Davies (1988), and Clark (2003).

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celebrated musicians. Kim Inshik (1885–1963), a performer, composer, and teacher, wrote about his early music lessons with two missionaries in Pyongyang, a Mrs. Hunt and a Mrs. Snooks, and his discovery of the harmonium (in Taehan min’guk yesulwo˘n, vol. 2, 1988, 187–8). Yi Sangjun (1884– 1948), the first Korean to notate folk songs using staff notation, recalled how he learned hymns and the accordion in Bible school (in Yi Yuso ˘n and Yi Sangman 1984, 515–16).5 A reminiscence of the pianist Kim Yonghwan (1893–1979), originally published in the daily newspaper Chungang ilbo on April 19, 1974, is equally informative: I was about six years old when I first saw the thing called an organ at the home of a missionary in Pyongyang . . . I became so enamoured of singing hymns that I would count the days before going to church and yearned for another opportunity to visit the missionary’s home. (English translation in Ahn 2005, 8)

˘ m twelve-stringed zither performer The contemporary composer and kayagu Hwang Pyo ˘nggi (b. 1936) writes that, because hymns proved so attractive, early Korean compositions were, almost without exception, vocal (1978, 203–4). Some knowledge of Western music predated the late nineteenth century, not least since Western scientific treatises had been imported two centuries earlier (Ki-baik Lee 1984, 239; Yi Yuso ˘n 1985, 17). From the late eighteenth century, Catholicism was known, surely even Catholic hymns (Han Myo ˘nghu ˘i 1985, 413), but Catholicism was viewed as an abandonment of ancestral obligations enshrined within Confucianism, and Yun Chich’ung (1759–91) became the first of many martyrs.6 Believers survived on the fringes of society (Sayers and Rinzler 1987), although the site of the first baptisms, Cho ˘mjinam So ˘ngji (Heavenly Truth Hermitage Saints Site), is today a place of pilgrimage, looped pre-recorded hymns booming out daily to maintain a sacred ambience. The scholar Pak Chiwo˘n (1737–1805) wrote in his Yo˘lha ilgi that Hong Taeyo ˘ng (1731–83) inspected an organ in Beijing in 1766, and hoped to gain the king’s support back in Korea to build a replica.7 Pak also wrote in his Literary Collection of Yo˘nam (Yo˘namjip) that Hong was the first Korean to play the yanggu ˘ m, an instrument derived from European dulcimers imported by Jesuits to East Asia. Korean musicologists tend to give an earlier date, 1725, for the instrument’s arrival (Chang Sahun 1969, 102–3; No Tongu ˘n 1995, 355; see also Provine 1984). Rather than keep the virtuosity with which it is associated in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, in Korea the dulcimer is played with a single slim beater to outline the melody of aristocratic music. 5 Yi’s seventeen notations were completed in 1913 but only published in 1929. 6 The pope, during a visit to Seoul in 1984, elevated 103 of these martyrs to sainthood. 7 A translation of the relevant passages has been published by Song Bang-song (1980, 133–8).

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A further Korean writer, Yi Kyugyo ˘ng (1788–1856), introduced Western clefs, accidentals, tempo terms and solfège rendered in Chinese in his Fragmentary Essay Collection by Oju (Oju yo˘nmun changjo˘n san’go). Allying Western music’s introduction to Christianity is fashionable partly because today’s Republic of Korea (South Korea) is strongly Christian, with some 40 percent of Koreans affirming Protestant or Catholic faith, a far greater proportion of the population than in either Japan or China. The second perspective, however, is also less fashionable because of another reason: the legacy of colonialism. Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. The story enshrined in this second perspective begins with international competition, for the late nineteenth century saw incursions by American, British, French, German, and Russian naval vessels that introduced Western military bands (No Tongu ˘n 1989, 103–4).8 Both the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 and the RussoJapanese War of 1905 were fought over Korea, and the Korean court, observing that they were shrimps caught between whales, vacillated, switching allegiance between their neighbors. Military bands attest to this. The first record of a European brass instrument in Korea dates to 1880, when Tsurumoto Koji, a Japanese soldier, was invited to teach the bugle (Nakamura 1997, 99–100). Bugles appeared at the Korean court by spring 1882 (Yi Kwangshik 1981, 30), and a court performance given in 1883 by the ˘ ndol (d. 1885), as band of a German warship, the Leipzig, is documented. Yi U part of a progressive group, tried to establish a Korean band on the Japanese model, and in 1888 a military band known as the Tuned Bugle Force (Kokhodae) was formed, instructed not by the Japanese but by three Americans (No Tongu ˘n 1989, 133–7; 1995, 396; Nakamura 1997, 101). In 1896, the diplomat Min Yo ˘nghwan (1861–1905) returned from the coronation of Nikolai II determined to establish a Russian-styled band, and state funds were made available to buy Russian-made instruments. The instructor and director appointed to what became the imperial band, Franz Eckert (1852–1916), was, however, a German who had previously spent twenty-two years in Japan, training a military band, teaching at the forerunner of today’s Tokyo Music School, and composing. He arrived in Seoul in 1901. He was offered – and took – a handsome salary to prepare the band for its first concert at the king’s birthday celebrations in September (Yi Yuso ˘n and Yi Sangman 1984, 486). In 1902, he was asked to prepare a national anthem to replace earlier settings of Korean texts sung in 1896 to, for example, the

8 See also Ki-baik Lee (1984, 262–3). For a list of ships visiting between 1850 and 1867, see Gyewon Byeon (2001, 26).

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melody of the British national anthem at Saemunan Church on the occasion of the king’s birthday and to “Auld Lang Syne” as the cornerstone to the Independence Gate (Tongnimmun) was laid. Any semblance of independence, though, was symbolic, and the music Eckert provided for the Korean anthem closely resembled his “Kimigayo,” written earlier as a national song for Japan (Chang Sahun 1974, 55; Yi Yuso ˘n 1985, 136; No Tongu ˘n 1995, 94–6). Eckert taught the first known modern Korean composers: Kim Inshik, Cho ˘ng Sain (1881–1958), and Paek Uyong (1880–1950). Cho˘ng remained close to the band as it faltered when court funding diminished. Little is known about Paek’s compositions beyond a sheet of keyboard notation (photographed in Chang Sahun 1974, 208), although he did leave 260 full-score pages transcribing the fifteenth-century court piece “Yo ˘millak” (Giving the People Joy) into staff notation (Song Hyejin 1991, 140). Kim Inshik is widely regarded as the composer of the first Korean vocal piece (Song Pangsong 1984, 573–4; Yi Kangsuk et al. 2001, 61), “Haktoga” (Student’s Song). Dated 1903, this song sets a text about the thirst for education. The eight-bar 4/4 melody, consisting of four two-bar phrases, is simplicity itself; the song was probably designed for children, and falls into the category of ch’angga – a term borrowed from Japan, where the same Chinese characters read shōka. The call to create new Korean songs was associated with the Independence Club and its associated newspaper, the Independence Newspaper (Tongnip shinmun). Formed in 1896 to promote modernization, and with the newspaper published in both vernacular Korean9 and English, the newspaper published lyrics for thirty-two songs over the next three years, eleven of which were for a national anthem (Kim Pyo˘ngso˘n 2007, 57–8). There were connections between the missionary fraternity and the newspaper, and the scholar Kim Pyo ˘ngso ˘n, as he attempts to show that ch’angga developed from hymns, cites named Christian contributors of texts and notes influential members had been educated in America (ibid., 59–62). There are, indeed, similarities in terms of metric patterns and stanza construction (ibid., 56–114), but these same similarities extend to Japanese shōka, where a missionary hymn input was lacking. And shōka had been popularized earlier, during the 1880s (Han Myo ˘nghu ˘i 1985, 417; No Tongu ˘n 1995, 590). The Japanese connection cannot be denied, then, and the melody of “Haktoga” is actually that of a 1900 Japanese song, “Tetsudo shōka” (Railroad Song) (Byeon 2001, 42). Both perspectives, in fact, are part of the story that needs to be told about how Western music arrived in Korea.

9 That is, in the Korean alphabet, han’gu˘ l. Until this time, Sino-Korean characters were used in all official documents and in most publications.

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Securing the dominance of Western music in Korea: education and musicology The twentieth century saw the development of music education and musicology in Korea, and the introduction of music training in universities and conservatoires, using Western models and, initially, focusing on Western music. Western music became a formal part of the Korean school curriculum shortly after Japan took control. Early syllabi and songs, mostly Japanese songs and German lieder, are documented (Yi Yuso ˘n and Yi Sangman 1984, 491–514). At times, the curriculum for the six-year “normal school” (pot’ong hakkyo) made a distinction between singing (ch’angga) and music (u ˘mak) (Yi Kangsuk et al. 2001, 66–73) – the latter presumably indicating basic theory training. Mission schools, monitored closely by the Japanese authorities,10 tried to maintain American models, and two of them are known to have had the best collections of instruments: So ˘ngshil for boys and Ewha for girls (Ahn 2005, 41–3). Both these schools trained many well-known musicians and musicologists of Western music. Among So ˘ngshil graduates, for instance, Kim Yonghwan (1893–1979) and Pak Kyo ˘ngho (1896–1970) studied at Ueno in Tokyo and Cincinnati respectively and became noted pianists, Hyo˘n Chaemyo ˘ng (1902–60) trained as a singer and composer in Chicago, and the violinist Keh Chung-Sik (1904–74) trained in Würzburg and obtained a doctorate in Basel. By 1927, Ewha taught music history, composition, counterpoint, choral music, and pedagogy in addition to performance (Kim Yongu ˘i 1977, 27–8; So˘ Uso˘k 1985, 29). At times during the colonial period, some Western music training was also offered at the forerunners to today’s Yonsei and Seoul National universities. Kugak was not part of the junior- or high-school curricula. Neither was it after liberation in 1945, when American education ideas became central in what became South Korea. This, it can be argued, reinforced the still-persistent idea that Korean and Western music occupied two distinct soundworlds. Only in the 1970s did kugak become a compulsory part of the curriculum, although, and still today, music teachers predominantly train in Western music, hence debates persist as to whether they can sensitively teach kugak (see Rockwell 1974, 15–20; Chang Sahun 1980, 39–45; Lee Yong-il 1990, 260–6; Yi Ko˘nyong 1990, passim; Kwon Oh-hyang 1992, 3–6; Kwo ˘n Oso˘ng 1995, Ch’oe Chongmin 1995, 33; Sung 2001). Extensive efforts have been made, for example, to introduce folk songs, one of the best documented being CD recordings and a

10 A discussion of the often-turbulent relations between Japanese administrators and missionaries is beyond the scope of this chapter (for a consideration, see Clark 2003, chapters 4, 9, 10, and 13).

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notation book of field recordings made in the 1960s and 1970s by the folklorist Yim Sukjay (Cantabile SRCD1227–SRCD1331, 1995; Ch’odu ˘ng hakkyo-e ponaegi wiwo ˘nhoe 1995; Im So˘kchae 1997), but it is clear that, much as happened in Britain where folk songs were taught in schools until the 1970s, many graduating students still dislike folk songs.11 Many Koreans continue to regard kugak as primitive, as heathen. Many churches refuse to allow kugak to be played on their premises, even though church weddings have all the trappings of Europe and America – including, almost compulsorily, music from Wagner and Mendelssohn that celebrates marriages of Norse gods and fairies. This is all the more curious since many kugak musicians and musicologists are Christian.12 Kugak was static, twodimensional, lacking in harmony and form, wrote the composer Hong Nanp’a (Hong Yonghu 1898–1941) in 1936 (cited in Chae Hyun-kyung 1996, 23). The lack of harmony was a result of its being stuck in the past, noted the composer Na Unyo˘ng (1922–94) (1965, 229). Although similar comments about traditional musics encountered by Western visitors elsewhere will be familiar,13 missionaries in Korea actually initiated some study of kugak: two short accounts of popular songs, including the earliest staff notation of the folk song “Arirang,” were published by Homer H. Hulbert and James Scarth Gale in the Korea Repository (Hulbert 1896, 45–53; Gale 1898, 443). Hulbert argued for understanding: Koreans like our music as little as we like theirs . . . Our harmonies seem to them like a veritable jargon of sounds, but they take genuine pleasure in that indescribable medley of thumps and squeaks that emanate from a Korean orchestra. (1906, 314)

And some early accounts sought more of a balance. Hence, although the British traveler Isabella Bird Bishop was no fan, she could still write: “While what may be called concerted music is torture to a Western ear, solos on the flute [taegu ˘ m] oftentimes combine a singular sweetness with their mournfulness” (1898, 164).

11 This was discussed in some of the reviews, among others: Professor’s News (Kyosu shinmun) 1 March 1995, 12; Han’gyo˘re shinmun 4 March 1995, 11; Korean Daily News (Choso˘n ilbo) 10 March 1995, 17; Auditorium (Kaekso˘k) March 1995, 222; Shisa Journal (Shisa Cho˘no˘l) 16 March 1995, 98–9; Weekly Chosun (Chugan Choso˘n) ˘ mak tonga) April 1995, 164; Korea Daily News (Han’guk ilbo) 25 May 16 March 1995, 4; East Asia Music (U 1995, 17, 28 May 1995; Korean Daily News (Choso˘n ilbo), 28 May 1995; Dance Arts July 1995, 32–8; News & People 6 August 1995, 76–7; Shisa Journal 6 August 1995, 85; Korea Daily News 6 September 1995; Weekly Hankook (Chugan Han’guk) 11 September 1995, 98–9. I thank Dawnhee Yim for providing me with copies of these reviews. 12 Notwithstanding this, the Christian Praise Society (Yegahoe), a small group of kugak musicians and composers, today sponsors the development of Christian music using Korean traditional instruments (see Howard 2006b, 179–80). 13 See, for example, Baker (1882), Harrison (1973), and Miller and Chonpairot (1995).

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Officially until social reforms in 1894, kugak musicians were virtual outcastes within the ch’o˘nmin caste, and this negative low status has remained into recent times. Hence, the American-based composer and ko˘mun’go six-stringed zither player Jin-Hi Kim (b. 1957) remembers: I was not proud of carrying my zither on the bus. Many people looked down on me for not playing a Western instrument . . . It looked like Korean music was not worthy [in Korea], even among the musicians and the academic people in the university. (Kim 1998, 1)

Only in the 1980s were salaries for kugak musicians raised to match those of Western musicians. Indeed, Han Manyo˘ng (1936–2007), when he was director of the National Gugak Center in the early 1980s, made equal pay his primary goal. Music training for budding Western musicians was initiated at the Choyang Club (Choso ˘n Kurakpu), set up by Paek Tongjin and others in 1909. The Club was renamed as the Korean Court Music Study Institute by June 1911 when, for the first time, the royal purse began to sponsor lessons in Korean instrumental music – it still charged twice the price for Western music lessons, and teachers of Western music, including Kim Inshik (who moved from his natal Pyongyang in 1905) and, later, Kim’s student Hong Nanp’a, were paid much higher rates than teachers of Korean music (Yi Sangman 1995, 11).14 Teaching was cut back after 1915, as the colonial grip tightened, although fifty-three Western music and thirty-four Korean music students graduated by 1916 (Song Pangsong 1984, 542–3). Thereafter, it became little more than a meeting place for musicians until it closed in 1944. In 1941, it had been formally replaced by the Korean Music ˘ mak Hyo Society (Choso ˘n U ˘phoe), authorized by the Japanese governor-general to teach Japanese, Korean, and Western music. Decline at the Court Music Bureau (Aakpu),15 charged with maintaining court music and with forerunners stretching back some 1,400 years (see Cho ˘n Yo ˘ngjo 1982; Song Pangsong 1984, 1985, 1989; Kungnip kugagwo ˘n 1991; Yun Miyong 2001, 82–3), was countered by introducing a student scholarship scheme in 1919. Students entered a four- or five-year program in 1919, 1922, 1926, 1931, 1936, 1940, and 1945, each receiving a monthly stipend of 15 wo ˘n, and many graduates became influential in the musical politics of postliberation South Korea (Howard 2006a, 51–60). Attempts by nationalists were made beyond 14 Ahn states that the monthly wage for a professor of Western music was 100 wo˘n, while a Korean music professor averaged just 4 wo˘n (2005, 32, citing Yi Yuso ˘n 1976). The latter, in light of the student stipends at the Court Music Bureau (see below), seems too little. 15 Also known as the Yiwangjik Aakpu, the Yi (Choso ˘n) King’s Court Music Bureau. In 1951, the bureau reopened as the National Classical Music Institute (Kungnip kugagwo ˘n), the English name of which in 1995 became the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts and in 2010 the National Gugak Center.

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the bureau to canonize traditional music (Robinson 1988, 372), hence Ham Hwajin (1884–1949), who in 1912 graduated from the Korean Court Music Study Institute, wrote the first modern books on court and aristocratic music (Japanese and Korean folklorists also documented folk songs).16 Gradually, musicology grew, largely inspired by the importation of Japanese-language texts, some of which translated European scholarship. Foreign and local musicologists began to publish staff notations of traditional repertory (e.g., Yi Sangjun 1929; Keh Chung Sik 1935; Boots 1940; Cho Wangsan 1947; Chang Sahun 1948; Chang Sahun, and So ˘ng Kyo ˘ngnin 1949), establishing a primacy of staff notation over Korean notation systems that continues to this day. In 1947, Lee Hye-Ku (1908–2009) was invited to teach Western music at Seoul National University. Twelve years later he opened the first Korean Traditional Music Department (Kugakkwa). The law required university lecturers to be graduates, so nobody trained at the Court Music Bureau was deemed to be qualified. Lee, however, had graduated in English literature in 1933 and then spent fifteen years working as a broadcaster, while one of the first instrumental instructors was Hwang Pyo ˘nggi, then a recent Seoul National University law graduate. The Kugakkwa adapted the Americanmodeled Western music curriculum, dividing performers from theory students, and began to train many of today’s musicologists of kugak. In 1948, Lee had also founded the Korean Musicological Society (Han’guk Kugak Hakhoe), hence his musicology became key to Korean and foreign understandings of kugak. His is a distinct and persistent musicology, retained by many of his students, that champions a notion of objectivity through foregrounding transcription, translation, annotation, and the description of old scores and performances in a manner that chimes with Western rationalism. Within the musicology of kugak, staff notation continues to be given primacy, despite the considerable wealth of extant Korean (and Chinese) notation systems. To give one example, Kim Kisu (1917–86), a graduate from the Court Music Bureau who rose to become director of both the National Center and the National Traditional Music High School (Kungnip Kugak Hakkyo), established two book series notating kugak repertories. The first, published annually from 1968, was Anthology of Korean Traditional Music (Han’guk ˘umak), and used staff notation exclusively.17 This was supplemented from 1973 onwards by Collections of Traditional Music (Kugak cho˘njip), which initially transnotated Anthology scores back into an indigenous notation system modeled on court annals, cho˘ngganbo, but adding codified ornamentation symbols. True, the last two decades have ˘nghak et al. 1994, 192–7, and Howard 2006a, 81–6. 16 See Im Tonggwo˘n 1964, 234–64, Kang Tu 17 The anthology published Kim’s compositions following his death (vols. 23–5) and continued into the new millennium with six volumes of shaman ritual notations (vols. 28–34).

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witnessed attempts to develop indigenous systems (chief among these are notation books by samullori percussion groups – for example, Korean Conservatorium of Performing Arts 1990, 1992, 1995; Ch’oe Pyo ˘ngsam and Ch’oe Ho ˘n 1992; Kim Dong-Won 1999; Ch’oe Pyo ˘ngsam 2000) – but most kugak continues to be transcribed in staff notation, including, perhaps most tellingly, performance teaching manuals, such as those for the instrumental genre of sanjo (e.g., Yi Chaesuk 1971, 1979, 1982, 1987; Han Po ˘msu 1975; Kim Taeso ˘k 1984; Pak Po ˘mhun 1985; Ch’oe T’aehyo ˘n 1988; Mun Chaesuk 1989; Kim Injae 1990). There is, however, a second aspect to Lee’s musicology. This nods to Confucian tradition, respecting senior scholars and acknowledging the considerable and pertinent literary heritage – a heritage consisting of scorebooks dating back to at least the sixteenth century, court manuals (u ˘ igwe), the annals (shillok) of celebrated kings, and the landmark 1492 treatise, Akhak kwebo˘m (Guide to the Study of Music). Lee’s fusion of West and East ensured success, and by 1981 Song Pangsong could list 1,278 entries in a bibliography of kugak scholarship (Song 1981), while the Journal of the Korean Musicological Society (Han’guk ˘u mak yo˘n’gu) could list 199 MA dissertations on kugak submitted by 1984 (‘Han’guk u ˘mak yo˘n’gu’ 1985, 215–28). The rise of musicology, tied to kugak training in universities, has come at a price. Musicians today contrast the music of premodern times with music since 1960, lamenting loss.18 It is widely held that folk music, including sanjo and p’ansori, was formerly fluid, characterized by elements of improvisation, but that repertories are today standardized. Court-music ornamentation has been standardized where, previously, rote transmission ensured some variability. The primary reason why this has happened is that repertories have been notated. A second reason, though, is also pertinent. This relates to the emergence of “schools” (ryu) of performance that have become fixed by the state preservation system of Intangible Cultural Properties: musicology, in seeking to establish these authentic and archetypal forms, has provided the documentation, thereby strengthening the iconicity of the kugak canon.

Concerts: Western music culture? Musicology catapulted kugak into the public arena, encouraging government agencies to promote it. It has, however, remained a minority interest. In 1988, just 6.4 percent of the total concert audience attended 282 kugak concerts; there were 2,160 Western music concerts. Since then, matched by increases in sponsorship, the percentage of kugak concerts within the total has grown. By 18 See Byong Won Lee 1997, 1999, 2000.

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1995, there were 1,146 kugak and 3,047 Western music concerts, and by 2001, 2,076 kugak and 4,957 Western concerts (Han’guk Munhwa Yesul Chinhu ˘ngwo˘n 1992, 346 and 436; 2002, 480–1 and 632–3). Korean scholars consider the first concerts in Korea to be those devoted to Western music. In September 1907, a recital by a foreign pianist and accordionist working with anonymous Korean artists was held at the East House hotel; in 1910, Kim Inshik was a featured composer and violinist in a concert at the YMCA. The YMCA, built in 1908, was the venue for a homecoming concert for the nationalist leader Syngman Rhee in 1911, with American and Korean artists performing, and thereafter was the primary concert venue in Seoul until the opening of City Hall in 1922 (Yi Yuso ˘n 1985, 155–94; Ahn 2005, 49–62). Seoul gained its first commercial band, organized by Paek Uyong and featuring former members of the imperial band, in 1919. The band gave its first concert that November (Min Kyo ˘ngch’an 1986, 194–7; the program is reproduced in Yi Yuso ˘n 1985, 159). Eleven concerts are documented from 1920, including one in December to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. European and American artists began to stopover in Seoul as businessmen – Japanese and others – with sufficient income to spend on leisure activities flourished: Kreisler, Giulio Ronconi, and Jascha Heifetz played in Seoul in 1923.19 Discussions have tended to ignore occasions when kugak was performed.20 It is true that court rituals and banquets were not usually open to the public, so the closest most men-on-the-street came to hearing any of this repertory was the royal processional music known as Taech’wit’a. However, within folk music21 there are many examples of musicians earning a living from performing in public or for wealthy patrons. Traveling itinerant troupes mixing music, dance, drama, and acrobatics known as sadang, or as namsadang p’ae and ko˘sa p’ae when male and yo˘sadang p’ae and su ˘ ptang when female, have a long history (Shim Uso ˘ng 1974a, 1974b, 1985). Female courtesans (kisaeng), as court and aristocracy entertainers, have long been closely associated with instrumental and vocal genres (Pilzer 2006), and an eighteenth-century painting by Shin Yunbok (1758–?) survives that depicts a courtesan playing the kayagu ˘m zither for male clients. Itinerant male entertainers specializing in music, kwangdae, are well documented from the eighteenth century onwards, particularly as 19 Most artists came to Seoul before or after recitals in Tokyo. By the mid-1920s, advertisements for the Trans-Siberian railway show it running through Korea from Beijing to the southeastern port of Pusan, from which it is a short connection to Japan. 20 Killick points out that much the same applies to theater, where Korean scholars follow early Western accounts (by Griffis in 1882, Bishop in 1898, and Hulbert in 1906) to say wrongly that “our country originally had no theatre and no stage” (Yi Chinsun 1971, cited in Killick 2010). 21 Here I use the East Asian concept of “folk” as the Little Tradition in contrast to the court, aristocratic, and literati-sponsored Great Tradition (for which, see, for example, Bauman 1992, xiii–xxi), in Korea encompassing both local folk styles and professional “folk-art” or “art” genres.

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performers of p’ansori (epic storytelling through song).22 Some were also male shamans (Murayama 1932, 19–25), while many courtesans were born into shaman families (Akamatsu and Akiba 1938, 258–60; Kim Woo-ok 1980, 51–3). Surviving records of a seventeenth-century musicians’ association from the center of the peninsula, a chaein ch’o˘ng, closely match those of more recent shinch’o˘ng, southwestern shaman fraternities (Kim Tonguk 1961, 301–3; Pihl 1977, 36–9). Into recent times, professional musicians regularly joined amateur literati groups, taking major instrumental parts in the genre known as hyangje chul p’ungnyu for appropriate payment (Yi Pohyo ˘ng et al. 1985). And the emergence of an urban mercantile class, known as the chungin, is linked to performance culture in Seoul from the eighteenth century onwards through a group of aficionados and musical creators, the yo˘hyangin (Hahn Man-young 1990, 61–72; Lee So˘ngmu 1991, 107–16, and passim).23 The blueprint for public concerts using Western stages emerged with theaters. A Chinese theater, serving the sizeable Chinese community in Seoul, is widely reputed to have existed by the 1890s (see, e.g., Pihl 1994, 45, citing Pak Hwang 1976), although no contemporaneous documentation exists prior to 1904, at which time both the Hyo ˘mnyulsa and what was later known as the Kwangmudae – the former a round theater set up within the court as the Hu ˘idae, and the latter using a room at the East Gate terminal of the new Seoul Electric Company’s tram system – offered theater for a paying public (Killick 2010). From these emerged staged versions of p’ansori and its derivatives (Killick 1997), and staged dances backed by instrumental ensembles. One of the most famous dancers to take to the public stage was Ch’oe Su ˘nghu ˘i (1911–68), a dancer known during the colonial period by her Japanese name, Sai Shōki (Van Zile 2001, 17–18 and 193–6; Cho ˘ng Pyo ˘ngho 1995). She was a muse of Picasso, and in one photograph in the New York Public Library she performs “Korean Vagabond” wearing a mask and long white sleeves modeled on the traditional mask dance drama Pongsan t’al ch’um, although she is best remembered for staging the shamanistic salp’uri dance and the Buddhist drum dance, su˘ ngmu.24 Dance accompaniments required new styles of folk music for the stage. Shinawi, originally shaman ritual music, became a favored form. In its staged

22 Their activities are foregrounded in Chan E. Park’s volume on p’ansori (Park 2003) and, in early accounts, by Griffis (1882, 291–2) and Hulbert (1906, 312). See also Song Bang-song (1976, 12–19) and Kim Myo˘nggon (1993). 23 This is the subject of a doctoral dissertation by Sunghee Park (2011) at the University of London. 24 Ch’oe settled in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), where her husband fell out of favor with the regime; she was, presumably, shot alongside him. South Korean dance scholars still identify her choreography in much contemporary North Korean dance.

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version, shinawi adopts rhythmic cycles from Korean rituals but changes the musical structure: whereas shaman musicians play together while simultaneously offering free interpretations of melodic motifs, staged shinawi employs a set sequence of melodic strands, soloists and ensemble alternating. Staged shinawi is associated particularly with the now deceased haegu ˘ m fiddle player Chi Yo ˘nghu ˘i (1908–79) and was briefly, between 1973 and 1975, nominated as an Intangible Cultural Property. It remains a regular concert item, often being used on foreign tours to end concerts. In contrast to the relative abundance of public folk-music presentations, the first documented public concerts promoted by the Court Music Bureau were held in 1932, arranging and adding stage settings to standard repertory, and in one event even incorporating a piano (Chang Sahun 1984, 594–613). Prior to that time, the Bureau had organized concerts for invited guests such as, in 1920, for the visiting Japanese scholar Tanabe Hasao (Yi Sangman 1995, 11). The transition whereby kugak moved onto public stages was assisted by recording and broadcast technologies. A March 1899 newspaper, the Hwangso˘ng shinmun (Capital Daily News), offers a glimpse of probably the first imported gramophone: an advertisement tells people to come and listen to it. Shortly after the twentieth century began, shellac discs began to be produced to stimulate sales of gramophones, although gramophones, at 15 wo˘n, cost several times an average person’s monthly wage. One p’ansori singer, Cho Sanghyo˘n, in August 1992 recalled his first encounter to me: Only the richest people in our village were able to afford gramophones. Everybody would gather in the evenings to hear the sound such a machine produced. We were very curious, and when I was really young, I thought there must be people inside the machine itself. (Interview, 1992)

As elsewhere, local recordings were produced to attract local consumers. Here, then, kugak had an edge on Western music. The first kugak recordings were made by Victor in 1908, five years before the first-known recordings of hymns were distributed. A number of recordings of popular folk songs and p’ansori excerpts were soon available (Yi Sangman 1976, 329–52; Yi Sangman 1984), from 1925 onwards supplemented by popular songs. Staged versions of p’ansori were particularly popular, and since unlike the solo singer of tradition they featured many artists, multi-album recordings were released of the best. Occasional instrumental recordings were also produced, largely in Seoul (for a complete listing of sound recordings during the colonial period, see Kim Cho ˘mdo 2000). Many popular songs were recorded in Japan, often requiring singers to travel from Korea and quite possibly recruiting Japanese supporting musicians. One celebrated song sung by Yun Shimdo˘k in 1926 to her sister’s

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piano accompaniment, “Sau ˘i ch’anmi” (Adoration of Death), was recorded at the Osaka studio of Nitto. It actually uses a Russian melody rather than anything Korean, and its fame rests on tragedy: Yun, a graduate of a mission school in Pyongyang, met and fell in love with a married Korean in Tokyo; when she was cast as Carmen in a play in 1925, the illicit relationship became public, and the couple committed suicide by jumping overboard as they returned to Korea from the recording session (Yi Yuso ˘n 1985, 132–3, 186–90; Pak Ch’anho 1987, 170–5; Yi Yo ˘ngmi 1998, 50). Popular songs soon became the major sellers, with Yi Aerisu’s 1932 rendition of Cho ˘n Surin and Wang Pyo˘ng’s “Hwangso˘ng u ˘i cho˘k” (Enemy of the Yellow Castle) setting a record when it sold more than 50,000 copies (Pak Ch’anho 1987, 190–3). Radio broadcasts began in Seoul in 1927, with transmitters gradually opening during the 1930s in other Korean towns and cities. Radio ownership grew, reaching 112,000 sets in 1937. Considerable local talent was used, featuring many of the same performers as those on gramophone recordings. An inaugural concert featured the Seoul Band and a local chamber orchestra, and, illustrating how fast Western music was increasing in popularity, the radio formed its own chamber orchestra in 1928, directed by Hong Nanp’a. This had sufficiently developed by 1936 to tackle a Schubert symphony. From 1938 onwards, a regular weekly broadcast featured imported recordings of orchestras and artists. Importing talent for live broadcasts was, however, expensive, so Koreans returning from training as Western musicians in Japan and elsewhere were featured, while the mainstay for broadcasts was kugak musicians and popular singers. Indeed, one celebrated taegu ˘ m flute player, Pak Chonggi, gave 209 separate documented broadcasts before his death in 1941 (Yi Chinwo˘n 2007, 255–71).25 Post-liberation at the end of the Pacific War, Western music dominated the media in South Korea. Today, kugak is confined to one regular program on the state-controlled KBS TV, supplemented by occasional events on the rival MBC TV. On radio, it featured for many years primarily on just one channel, KBS FM1, and even there it was a poor relation to Western music. In 1989, KBS FM1 devoted 78.6 percent of its airtime to Western music, 2.4 percent to lyric songs, and 14.2 percent to kugak, but it programmed kugak at inconvenient times – at 5:00 am, 5:00 pm, and midnight.26 KBS FM2, incidentally, was by then a pop-music station. From 2001, GugakFM has provided a twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week radio station devoted to kugak, but it has 25 Pak was born into a shaman family on the southwestern island of Chindo and is credited with the development of the folk song “Chindo arirang” as well as sanjo for the bamboo flute. In some texts, he is said to have died in 1939, but note that his final broadcast was on July 13, 1941. 26 Figures provided by Pak Ch’anghan at KBS, August 1990.

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low market penetration, and its inauguration, arguably, was used as an excuse for mainstream broadcasters not to program kugak.27 In the twenty-first century, the National Center is the primary venue for kugak concerts. Tentative steps toward domestic concerts began in Pusan, where the center began its operations during the Korean War. Back in Seoul, a number of venues were used before the center moved to a site next to the Seoul Arts Center in 1988. The first foreign concert by the center orchestra was given in Tokyo in 1964 (Hahn Man-young 1990, 39–43; Yi Sangman 1995, 12–15). Today, a weekly potpourri is offered for students and foreigners on Saturdays, and regular recitals of celebrated musicians are presented every Tuesday and Thursday. Other concerts fill out the schedule so that, for instance, during September 2007 the center hosted an impressive thirty-five concerts. The center has branches in Chindo and Namwo˘n, and during the first decade of the twenty-first century built new facilities in Pusan and Cheju. It holds events in each of these places. This may at first glance seem impressive, but whereas Western music concerts are funded by ticket sales and corporations, the very concentration of kugak concerts at the center stand testament to the fact that kugak concerts continue to rely on government sponsorship.

Is “composition” a Western concept? Until the 1960s, with the sole exception of Kim Kisu, composers in Korea wrote Western music, at least in terms of instrumentation, harmony, and form. During the colonial period they favored pastiche, rather as in Japan, creating music with textbook diatonic harmony for local consumption. Their main source of knowledge was Japan, where many who could afford to do so trained. Hong Nanp’a, for example, studied in Tokyo, returning to escape persecution in 1919 as turbulence followed the Korean declaration of independence. Kim Sunnam (1913–83), who after Korea’s liberation settled in North Korea (No Tongu ˘n 1992), Pak T’aejun (1900–86), Eaktay Ahn (1905–65), Yi Hu ˘ngyro ˘l (1909–80), and Korea’s best-known composer to date, Isang Yun (1917–95), all studied in Japan. Eaktay Ahn later traveled to America, studying in Cincinnati and Philadelphia before graduating from Temple University in 1937. By then, he had also toured Europe, working with Ernst von Dohnanyi. Ahn always claimed to be a student of Richard Strauss more than Dohnanyi (Cho˘n Cho ˘ngim 1998), and influence is apparent in the rich and luxuriant harmonies of his “Tonghae mulga,” since 1948 South Korea’s national anthem, composed

27 Interviews with Yun Miyong, the director general, and other GugakFM presenters, April 2007 (for further information on GugakFM, see Yoonhee Chang 2004).

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in Europe in 1936 and then incorporated into the finale of his 1938 work, “Symphonic Fantasia, Korea”. Some composers did travel westwards. Hyo ˘n Chemyo ˘ng (1902–60) graduated from Chicago in 1929, Hong Nanp’a spent a year at Sherwood College in Chicago in 1930 and Ch’ae Tongso ˘n (1901–53) went to Germany, returning in 1932.28 While Chinese composers favored Europe, fewer Koreans did. The reason was because Europe was seen in terms of its past, as the contemporary mantra preached modernization. To Isang Yun: “European music” meant old music, the works of Mozart, Bach, Brahms and Schumann. When I heard this music in my youth, it made me think that Europe was like a fairytale world. I had seen pictures of the wigs [people used to wear], pictures of Old Masters, old clothes, splendid castles, and music salons. These images were influential. (Yun, in Rinser and Yun 1977, 290–1)

Yun did travel to Europe, but only in 1955, after reading a Japanese translation of Josef Rufer’s 1952 Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen (Twelve-Tone Composition). He had been born in Tongyo ˘ng, away from the capital to the west of the port of Pusan, Korea’s second city, and studied Western music theory, composition, and the cello, first in Seoul, then at the Osaka Music Institute from 1934 to 1936 and with Tomojirō Ikenouchi in Tokyo from 1938 to 1941. In Europe, he sought out Olivier Messiaen but found lessons with him too expensive, so moved on to Berlin, where he settled. To many Koreans, “composition” remains a Western concept. Within kugak, this presented a peculiar challenge, since its creative process was considered to require transmission by rote learning, allowing gradual transformation over time and thereby downplaying any sense of an individual composer. To Han Manyo ˘ng, a former director of the National Center: We had no conception of composer, because new music always stemmed from absorbing old music . . . Only in the twentieth century were Koreans faced with the need to make new music, as an inevitable result of westernization. (Interview, August 1990)

Legends do describe the creators of some traditional music, but they also support a concept of “formation” (hyo˘ngso˘ng) over time – a concept used by a further former director of the National Center, the composer and musicologist Yi So˘ngch’o˘n (1936–2003). To give one example, in the sixth century, according to the twelfth-century History of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk sagi, kwo˘n 32), Uru ˘k, a musician in the Kaya tribal federation, invented the most evocative of 28 Biographies of composers and many other Koreans specializing in Western music are given in Han’guk ˘ mak p’yo˘n 3 and 4 (Seoul: Taehan min’guk yesulwo˘n, 1998 and 2004). yesul ch’ongjip: U

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Korea’s instruments, the kayagu ˘m twelve-stringed zither. He wrote twelve pieces for the zither, several with titles evoking localities that suggest arrangements of local songs. When Kaya was overrun by its eastern neighbor, Shilla, Uru ˘k joined the Shilla court, where his pieces were reworked as five new pieces. While Uru ˘k’s pieces have been lost, one surviving court piece, “Sujech’o˘n,” has a particularly long history: “Sujech’o˘n” probably originated from “Cho˘ngu˘ psa,” a simple [southwestern] Paekche Kingdom [18 BCE – 660 CE] folk song. It was refined as court music during the Koryo˘ dynasty [918–1392]. It was then successively modified and further refined through the Choso˘n dynasty [1392–1910] . . . So, traditional pieces that survive have undergone long maturation. (Hwang Pyo˘nggi 1978, 235)

Isang Yun had a different take on this same piece, used as inspiration in his “Loyang” (1962). “Loyang,” taking its name from a Chinese outpost (Nagyang in Korean) in the northwest of the Korean peninsula that existed until the fourth century, showcased his personal mature style, a style that was neither Korean nor Western yet both. The instrumental forces and citations are from “Sujech’o˘n,” but Yun confusingly gave his inspiration as a separate, Chinese piece that survives in the Korean court repertory, “Nagyangch’un” (Spring in Loyang): I found a piece that had originally been recovered some 900 years ago at the site of Loyang. It was not an original, but a reconstruction based on the old piece which, it is said, goes back to the ancient time of Chinese cultural influence. (Yun, in Rinser and Yun 1977, 84)

Copious scorebooks, largely memory aids for literati, document musical devel˘ m hapchabo onwards. We know, for example, how the opment from the 1572 Ku suite Yo˘ngsan hoesang expanded over time, and how the kagok lyric-song repertory developed out of three related melodic pieces, the slow “Mandaeyo ˘p,” medium-paced “Chungdaeyo ˘p,” and fast “Saktaeyo ˘p.” Scorebooks, and the fact that itinerant musicians were largely illiterate, are used to support the concept of “formation”: It was rather like a stream which, flowing, slowly becomes a large watercourse and eventually a river; hence, music, passing through many people’s hands, gradually became embellished and refined. (Cho˘n Inp’yo ˘ng 1987, C013–026, 182)

Add this to the historical consciousness of Korean musicology, and the reason why scholars track back surviving repertories to putative archetypes (wo˘nhyo˘ng) becomes clear. The same happens with folk genres. Hence, p’ansori is

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considered to have evolved with named great singers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see, e.g., Cho˘ng Noshik 1940; Rutt and Kim 1974; Um 1992; Walraven 1994; Pihl 1994; Chan E. Park 2003). Sanjo, similarly, is held to have evolved from Kim Ch’angjo (1865–1918) as the founder, through a second generation who established schools of performance, to a third generation active after World War II implicated in the musicological documentation and notation of sanjo and its preservation as Intangible Cultural Properties. Once creativity through transmission is recognized, “formation” needs supplementation by two half-way houses: chakch’ang, “weaving together” or “stitching together,” experienced in staged versions of p’ansori (Killick 1998, 403–4), and chaeguso˘ng, recomposition or reorganization, characteristic of the contemporary percussion quartet, samullori, who utilize material from the percussion bands of old Korea (Hesselink 2004, 413–14; see also Hesselink 2012). Transmission also connects to identity. So, when in 1990 I asked in a questionnaire what Koreans liked in kugak, typical responses were: “kugak leads us to examine our inner feelings”; “kugak explores the emotions and lives of the people”; “kugak . . . is music owned by all Koreans”; “kugak captures the essence of Korea.” In 1990, this internalized identity was not so strong in the public’s perception in respect to Western music: “my major was Western music, so I understand it and find it interesting”; “Western classical music has the highest watermark”; “the strength of Western music is its structure and order.”29 Nationalist discourse, though, was by this time pushing for Western music to become part of Koreanness. Yi Kangsuk, later president of the Korean National University of the Arts, redefined local production after returning from graduate studies in America, distinguishing “Korean music” (Han’guk ˘u mak) from “quasiKorean music” (chun Han’guk ˘u mak), but not Western from Korean soundworlds (Lee Kang Sook 1977, 1980; Yi Yuso ˘n 1985; see also No Tongu ˘n and Yi Ko ˘nyong 1991, 21–30). The composer and critic Yi Ko ˘nyong (1987, 1988), later also president of the University of the Arts, broadened the argument, stating that Korean audiences needed a national music that fused Korean and Western. In the inaugural edition of The People’s Music (Minjok ˘u mak), he wrote: We musicians should create a national music that overcomes foreign influence, pursues our desire for unification and is relevant to daily life . . . We will, then, overcome conservatism and exclusivity, pursuing musical democracy by bringing together and unifying all music . . . as our national music.30 (Yi Ko ˘nyong 1990, 10)

29 Reported in Howard (2006a, 45–6). 30 For a critical survey of “people’s music,” see Yi Soyo ˘ng (1993, 55–90).

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And so, all music in Korea has in the last few decades come to be considered Korean, identified using the appellation “uri” for “our” or “us” – “our music” (uri u˘ mak). Indeed, Koreanness has become a normal way of expressing that something is local through studies of Korean culture (Han’guk munhwaron) and Korean race (Han’guginnon) that promote a shared value system claimed as unique and unitary, based on a single ethnicity, but ignoring the origins of cultural components such as Western music. Koreanness promotes “ways of thinking which dominate and determine every behavior and feature of Koreans who are different from foreigners” (Yi Kyut’ae 1983, as translated and cited in Kweon Sug-In 2003, 46).31 One striking example of Koreanness is that fusion, when applied to music, is not – unlike its application in world music elsewhere – a mix of Korean and foreign, but a mix of Korean and Korean. Composers who employ Western soundworlds therefore now anchor themselves to Korea. The pointillist Byung-dong Paik (b. 1936), for example, told me during an interview in 1990: “I live in Korea. I drink Korean water. I breathe Korean air. I think, then, that my music is entirely Korean.” He later wrote: My style comes from Western music . . . but my upbringing and consciousness is Korean. Thus, my national identity is stamped on my music. In my music . . . all instruments sing with melodies that approach the patriotic. (Paik, in Morton and Collins 1992, 719)

A particularly striking indication of Koreanness is given by the German-trained Sukhi Kang (b. 1934): One day I was visiting Haein Temple. While walking beside a stream in a nearby valley, I heard something totally new. It was not the sound of flowing and shimmering water, but came glistening from the streambed. It was the sound of variously shaped large and small pebbles . . . It was one with my heartbeat. Beside the path was red cherry blossom. The blossom shone in a rainbow of colours as it reflected the sun. Stones in the blossom’s shade resonated dark and gloomy deep in the earth. Stones lit in the patches of sunlight filtered through the blossom gave metallic clangs. (Kang, in Morton and Collins 1992, 466)

Paik and Kang are but two of the many fine composers in Korea today – 834 are listed in one three-volume compendium (Han’guk yesul yo˘n’guso 1995–7). Leaving their earlier pastiches well behind, Korean composers joined the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1956; in 1958, Seoul

31 See also Ch’oe Chunshik (1997, 2000) and, in respect to music, Chae Hyun-kyung (1998).

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National University alumni formed a Contemporary Music Society. By 1987, 1,539 of the 16,792 Western music students at Korean universities were composition majors (Economic Planning Board 1987).32 The first compositions for orchestras of Korean instruments were written by Kim Kisu. His first piece, Hwanghwa mannyo˘n chigok (Eternal Imperialism) (1939), set a text by the erstwhile nationalist Yi Nu ˘nghwa within the frame of an aristocratic lyric song. The subject matter supported colonialism, hence the piece is no longer performed. Kim’s approach reflects the inroads made by Western music. In his orchestral pieces, a conductor leads and instrumentalists are arranged in the Western fashion. Western tempo indications and time signatures are given on the scores. There is some continuation of past practices, for block textures of wind and string groups, reflecting court practice, are favored,33 and Kim uses little harmony. Today, orchestras of traditional instruments continue to divide their forces as if imitating their Western equivalents: Haegu ˘ m two-string fiddles to the left like violins, kayagu˘ m and ko˘mun’go long zithers filling an arc to the right, as violas and cellos, with a small ajaeng bowedzither section taking double bass roles, wind and percussion instruments lined up in rows behind. Musicians sit on seats, whereas they used to sit on the floor, and this requires zithers to be placed on newly created stands, whereas they used to rest on the floor. In North Korea, the haegu ˘m has evolved into four distinct instruments tuned identically to the four Western strings, and all traditional instruments have been modified – kaeryang, “improved,” is the North Korean term – to allow them, like their Chinese counterparts, to play Western diatonic scales. When Seoul National University opened its College of Traditional Music, solo and ensemble compositions were needed, because the curriculum stipulated performance majors must play three repertories in their graduation recitals (court, folk, and contemporary music). As the Korean economy grew, and as the successes of kugak musicology were felt, more traditional music orchestras were formed. Commissions for compositions within the ch’angjak kugak or shin kugak categories increased rapidly: Yi Sanggyu lists 2,239 pieces performed by 1995 (Yi Sanggyu 1995, 109–60) and researchers at the National Center list 2,821 works in their archive by 351 composers (Song Hyejin et al. 1996).

32 In the same year, and demonstrating the disparity between kugak and Western music at Korea’s universities, the total number of students studying kugak (divided into theory, performance, and composition majors) was just 1,711. 33 Much as in the orchestral compositions of Isang Yun (Howard 1999, 81–4).

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In 1961, when the composer and musicologist Yi So˘ngch’o˘n switched majors at Seoul National from medicine to music, composition training was still exclusively in Western music: There was no way to study composition for Korean instruments. Lee Hye-Ku had begun to teach the theory of traditional music at Seoul National University [but] for three years, and like everybody else who wanted to write Korean music, I was only able to study Western composition . . . For many years, Koreans had learnt only Western music. So, composers [had to] transfer techniques to creative traditional music, and this was one way we could ensure a contemporary spirit in our works. (Interview, July 1990)

The last sentence in this quote underestimates the iconicity of kugak, promoted so successfully by musicology and by the state’s cultural preservation system. Iconicity challenged composers who wanted to create works for Korean instruments, as Yi confirmed to me in July 1991: Scholars said my compositions would damage traditional music. I was young and found composing easy, but I was too weak in expressing my views. Others felt I was playing with the tradition. Traditional music was raised on a pedestal that was so high I felt I could never touch it . . . In the 1960s, my music was not considered Korean, yet my acceptance as a composer depended on how much I retained the tradition. (Interview, July 1991)

A second composer, Young Dong Kim (b. 1951), faced the same challenge: By the 1970s, [composing] traditional music had begun to be taught at universities. What was considered the “appropriate” style was based on one or two composers and was promoted by musicologists rather than performers. I was taught to respect traditional music and place all its pieces on tall pedestals to be admired, but I believed that if I wanted many people to listen to my music, I needed to develop a personal style. (Interview, June 1990)

He did so, but by moving out of the kugak world and writing music for film, dance, and television, thereby avoiding criticism from kugak musicologists as he coupled iconic Korean instruments such as the taegu ˘m flute with harmonic fills on Western synthesizers and guitars.

Fusing East and West Although rumblings still occasionally surface, the merging of Korean and Western soundworlds has today become everyday. Before mentioning examples, I need to return to the beginnings of the twentieth century. Three genres emerged from the ch’angga mold: yesul kagok, a form of lyric song that combined patriotic or sentimental texts with diatonic harmony, tongyo children’s

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songs, and yuhaengga popular songs (lit., songs in fashion). All three are claimed in much Korean scholarship to be local in origin, although similar repertories existed in Japan. Hong Nanp’a’s “Pongsunga” (Balsam Flower),34 written in 1919, is commonly regarded as the first truly original yesul kagok. Written first for violin solo in Japan as “Aesu” (Sadness) and suggesting homesickness, the song sets a nationalist text to a lilting 6/8 meter. Either “Pandal” (Half Moon), composed by Yun Kugyo ˘ng in 1924, or the earlier “Sarang u ˘i so ˘nmul” (Present of Love) from 1921, is claimed as the first children’s song (Yi Yuso ˘n 1985, 189–90). The first popular song normally identified is “Hu ˘imangga” (Song of Aspiration), written probably in 1923 by an unknown composer, and recorded as “I p’ungjin sewo˘l” (These Troubled Times) by two courtesans in 1925. The origins of yuhaengga remain contentious. The term itself is the Korean pronunciation of Japanese ryūkōka, well known within the broader repertory of enka (Yano 2002, 28–44). The mode is the common menarijo of Korea’s eastern seaboard, identical to the Japanese yonanuki minor, a mode lacking the fourth and seventh. One distinction is that early Korean songs are in triple time whereas Japanese ryūkōka are in duple time, but by the early 1930s, as the recording industry mushroomed and as more yuhaengga were recorded in Japanese studios, Korean songs switched to duple time (Fumitaka 2000, 118–21; Yi Yo˘ngmi 1991, 1998, 78–87, 2006, 3–5; Gloria Lee Pak 2006, 65). Tempting us toward Korean origins, the characteristic ryūkōka style is associated with Koga Masao (1904–78), a Japanese composer who grew up in the Korean port of Inch’o˘n. Yuhaengga, though, have suffered because of their supposed “Japanese color” (waesaek) (see Gloria Lee Pak 2006). One song was banned in 1965 when the Korean government prohibited all Japanese imports; this was “Tongbaek Agassi” (White Winter Flower Lady) (1963) a song by the young singer Lee Mija that for the first time ever sold 100,000 LPs after its release.35 Yuhaengga still today form staples for cheap cassettes, parties, and background music in restaurants and on highway buses in South Korea, and in North Korea they remain core to the style of popular song permitted by the state, albeit with suitably revolutionary titles.36 After 1945, music influences shifted from Japan to America in South Korea and China and the Soviet Union in North Korea. In 1951, the American Forces Korean Network began operations in the South, broadcasting pre-recorded discs of American billboard hits prepared in Los Angeles. In 1956, the

34 As spelled by Hong on the score; normally given as ‘Pongso˘nhwa.’ 35 Due partly to the cost of tooling and the relatively small size of the domestic market, Korea has never developed a significant market for singles over albums. 36 In English, titles include “Tankers and Girls,” “We Shall Hold Bayonets More Firmly.” “The Joy Of Bumper Harvest Overflows,” and so on.

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American United Service Organization (USO) took control of shows at military camps on Korean territory, recruiting cheap local singers and artists to replace expensive visiting American stars. Korean musicians thereby learned contemporary pop and jazz styles that they then introduced to local audiences. The first domestic pop-music broadcasts were the weekly Ku˘ mju ˘u i hu˘ imang ˘u mak (This Week’s Music Requests), aired by KBS on radio from the late 1950s (So ˘n So ˘ngwo ˘n 1996, 31); American films had by then found their way to Korea, and Korean album jackets began to indicate suitable dances for the songs they contained: tango, rumba, blues, chachacha, and more (Maliangkay 2006, 24). American protest songs became Korean ttong kit’a, sung by solo singers with acoustic guitars, with lyrics changed to comply with censorship rules. As students protested against the military dictatorship, these became core to an underground song movement lasting into the 1980s (Hwang 2006, 37–9). Public pop music retained eponymous pan-Asian balladry, based in Korea on yuhaengga, until democracy and music videos arrived in the early 1990s, the pop-music scene then exploding with rap, reggae, jungle, and punk (Howard 2006c, 82–98; see also Epstein 2006). It would be a foolhardy critic who argued that Korean pop is not Korean, although to foreign ears it is difficult to appreciate the local within the appropriations. Kugak remained separate from popular music until the 1980s. Composers, quickly learning from Young Dong Kim and still trained in universities to master the harmonic and structural features of Western music, made crossovers inevitable. Again, almost all compositions for Korean instruments have continued to be written in staff notation. The boundaries of East and West began to be blurred. Children’s songs, tongyo, were promoted from the 1980s onwards by the Society for Korean Music Educators (Han’guk kugak kyoyuk hakhoe) and the National Center in annual contests. Diatonic melodies suitable for children to sing were coupled to Korean instrumental accompaniments. Seven volumes of songs were published by the National Center between 1989 and 1997, and recordings were then promoted as commercial CDs (Jigu KTCD-006, 1996, KTCD-007, 1996, Samsung SCO-148MUN, 1997, Seoul Records SRCD-1425, 1998, SRCD-1431, 1999). Taking their lead from yesul kagok, the group Seulgidoong, founded by Hojoong Kang (b. 1965) in 1985, developed kugak kayo, which inverted the melody/accompaniment formula, using, like Young Dong Kim, Korean melodic instruments but harmonic accompaniments played on a mix of Western and Korean instruments. Kang in 1999 told me how when I was in my second year of university, I took a simple pentatonic folk song from North Cho˘lla Province and sang it for the University Song Festival

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on MBC TV. I accompanied myself on guitar and added a tanso flute much as folk singers in the central provinces would do. This was how I created my first “hit,” how I started to adapt Korean music to popular-song styles. In those days, if you wore a Korean costume on TV, viewers would switch to another channel . . . I established Seulgidoong with some alumni friends and colleagues. We wanted to make music that would be easier to listen to, and decided the way forward was to generate a style of songs based on traditional melodies. We called this style kugak kayo. We added guitars and synthesizers to Korean instruments. By using traditional songs but developing new arrangements we allowed people to understand Korean music and began to accumulate lots of fans. (Interview, 1999)

At the beginning of the new millennium, a genre known as kugak p’yusyo˘n (fusion) emerged. This was designed to be popular, to increase the audience for music based on kugak. In part, it is a marketing strategy to counter the decline in the domestic music industry as it struggles to counter the rise of music downloads. Equally, however, it reflects the interests and expertise of twenty-first-century kugak graduates, who have grown up surrounded by Western music and are at home in both Eastern and Western soundworlds. They play modified traditional instruments, such as kayagu ˘m zithers that have grown from the old twelve-stringed pentatonic silk-stringed version to contemporary twenty-five-stringed diatonic nylon-stringed instruments. Kayagu ˘m zither orchestras, most famously at Sookmyung Women’s University, popularized the genre, recording arrangements of The Beatles’ classics on “Let It Be” (SRCD-1524, 2003) and “For You” (SRCD-1627, 2006), while kayagu ˘m trios and quartets such as Sagye (Polymedia, 2001), Yeoul (EMI CNLR-62402, 2006), and Lee Rang (Synnara NSC-172, 2006) are marketed as virtual pop stars (Lee Rang is actually a mother, the sanjo specialist Mun Chaesuk, and her two daughters; the trio got a promotional boost as one daughter was crowned Miss Korea in 2006). In kugak p’yusyo˘n, audiences are treated to Vivaldi, Piazzolla, The Beatles, samba, and jazz, all played on Korean instruments, often with harmonic keyboard or guitar fills. And so, although kugak p’yusyo˘n is designed for local consumption and has not had much impact beyond Korea, it is with this genre that traditional music has become one with Western music.

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Im Tonggwo˘n (1964) Han’guk minyosa, Seoul: Chimmundang Kang Tu ˘nghak, Ryu Chongmok, Kim Yo˘ngdon, Na Su ˘ngman, O Yongnok, and Yi Pohyo˘ng (1994) Minyowa minjung ˘u i sam, Seoul: Toso˘ ch’ulp’ansa Keh Chung Sik (1935) Die koreanische Musik, Leipzig, Strasbourg, and Zurich: Heitz Killick, A. (1997) ‘Putting p’ansori on the stage: A re-study in honor of Marshall R. Pihl’, Korea Journal, 37, 1: 108–30 (1998) ‘The invention of traditional Korean opera and the problem of the traditionesque’, PhD dissertation, University of Washington (2010) In Search of Traditional Opera: Discourses of Ch’anggu ˘ k, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press Kim Cho˘mdo (2000) Yuso˘nggi ˘u mban ch’ongnam charyojip 1907-nyo˘n put’o˘ 1943-nyôn kkaji/The Complete Listings of SP Phonorecords Released during the Years 1907 up to 1943, Seoul: Synnara Kim Dong-Won (1999) SamulNori Textbook (Learning Korean Culture Series), Seoul: Overseas Koreans Foundation/Korean National University of Arts ˘ nha ch’ulp’ansa Kim Injae (1990) Kayagu˘ m sanjo, Seoul: U Kim, Jin Hi (1998) ‘Independent composer profile 8: Jin Hi Kim’, SCI Newsletter 18, 3: 1–6 Kim Myo˘nggon (1993) Han: Kim Myo˘nggon ˘u i kwangdae kihaeng, Seoul: Toso˘ ch’ulp’ansa Kim Pyo ˘ngso˘n (2007) Ch’anggawa shinshi ˘u i hyo˘ngso˘ng yo˘n’gu, Seoul: Somyo˘ng ch’ulp’an Kim Taeso˘k (1984) Ko˘mun’go sanjo, Seoul: Kwanil munhwasa ˘ ryu munhwasa Kim Tonguk (1961) Han’guk kayo ˘u i yo˘n’gu, Seoul: U Kim Woo-ok (1980) ‘P’ansori: An indigenous theatre of Korea’, PhD dissertation, New York University Kim Yongu ˘i (1977) Ihwaru˘ l pinnu ˘ n ˘u magindu˘ l, Seoul: Taegwang munhwasa Korean Conservatorium of Performing Arts/Han’guk cho ˘nt’ong yesul yo ˘nju pojonhoe (1990) SamulNori: Kim To˘ksu p’ae SamulNoriga yo˘nju hanu ˘ n changgo karak haksu ˘ p p’yo˘n1, Seoul: Samho ch’ulp’ansa; English version, SamulNori: Korean Traditional Percussion SamulNori Rhythm Workbook 1: Basic Changgo, Seoul: Sam-ho Music Publishing, 1992a (1992b) SamulNori: Korean Traditional Percussion SamulNori Rhythm Workbook 2: Samdo sul changgo karak/Kim To˘ksu p’ae SamulNoriga yo˘nju hanu˘ n samdo so˘lchanggo karak haksu˘ p p’yo˘n 2, Seoul: Samho ch’ulp’ansa (1995) SamulNori: Korean Traditional Percussion SamulNori Rhythm Workbook 3: Samdo sul changgo karak/Kim To˘ksu p’ae SamulNoriga yo˘nju hanu˘ n samdo so˘lchanggo karak yo˘nju p’yo˘n 3, Seoul: Samho ch’ulp’ansa Kungnip kugagwo˘n (1991) Yi wangjik aakpuwa ˘u magindu˘ l, Seoul: Kungnip kugagwo˘n Kweon, Sug-In (2003) ‘Popular discourses on Korean culture: From the late (1980)s to the present’, Korea Journal, 43, 1: 32–57 Kwon Oh-hyang (1992) ‘Cultural identity through music: A socio-aesthetic analysis of contemporary music in South Korea’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles Kwo ˘n Oso ˘ng (1995) ‘Kugak cho˘ngch’aek chedo u ˘i pyo˘nch’o ˘n’gwa mirae u ˘i cho˘nmang’, in Kwangbok 50-junyo˘n kinyo˘m haksul taehoe/Proceedings of the Conference for the Fiftieth Celebration from Japanese Colonization, 27–28 September 1995, Seoul: Kungnip kugagwo˘n/National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, pp. 161–81

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Lee, Byong Won (1997) Styles and Esthetics in Korean Traditional Music, Seoul: National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (1999) ‘The ornaments in traditional Korean music: Structure, function and semantics’, Ssi-ol Almanach 1998/99, Berlin: Internationale Isang Yun Gesellschaft, pp. 59–66 (2000) ‘Western staff notation and its impact on Korean musical practice’, In Search of New Creativity: The Changing Values of Music, Seoul: Asian Music Research Institute, Seoul National University, pp. 79–90 Lee Kang Sook [Yi Kangsuk] (1977) ‘Korean music culture: Genuine and quasi-Korean music’, Korea Journal, 20, 11: 4–10 (1980) ‘Today’s Korean music’, Korean Journal, 20, 11: 70–7 Lee, Ki-baik (1984) A New History of Korea, trans. by E. W. Wagner and E. J. Shultz, Seoul: Ilchogak Lee So ˘ngmu (1991) ‘The rise of chungin and their characteristics’, Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies, 1: 107–16 Lee Yong-il (1990) ‘A study of Korean music education and its improvement’, in Jack Dobbs (ed.), Music Education: Facing the Future, Helsinki: International Society for Music Education, pp. 260–6 Maliangkay, R. (2006) ‘Supporting our boys: American military entertainment and Korean pop music in the (1950)s and early-(1960)s’, in K. Howard (ed.), Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, Folkestone: Global Oriental, pp. 21–33 Miller, T. E., and J. Chonpairot (1995) Crossroads: A History of Siamese Music Reconstructed from Western Documents, (1505)–(1932), DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies Min Kyo˘ngbae (1997) Han’guk kyohoe ch’anso˘nggasa, Seoul: Yo˘nse taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu ˘ mak tonga, Min Kyo˘ngch’an (1986) ‘So ˘yang u ˘mak cho˘nnaeru ˘l ponu ˘n segye u ˘i nu ˘n’, in U 194–7 Morton, J., and P. Collins (eds.) (1992) Dictionary of Contemporary Composers, London and Chicago: St James’ Press Mun Chaesuk (1989) Chukp’a: Kayagu˘ m kokchip, Seoul: Segwang u ˘mak ch’ulp’ansa Murayama, Chijun (1932) Chōsen no fugeki, Keijō [Seoul]: Chōsen sōtokufu Myers, H. (ed.) (1993) Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies, London and New York: Macmillan and W.W. Norton Nakamura, Rihei (1997) ‘Han’guk u ˘i Yiwangjo kungjung u ˘mak kyosa Ek’eru ˘t’u ˘’, trans. into Korean by Min Kyo˘ngch’an, in Nangman ˘u mak, 10: 99–120 No Tongu ˘n (1989) Han’guk minjok ˘u mak hyo˘ndan’gye, Seoul: Segwang u ˘mak ch’ulp’ansa (1992) Kim Sunnam, ku˘ salmgwa yesul, Seoul: Han’gilsa (1995) Han’guk ku ˘ ndae ˘u maksa 1, Seoul: Han’gilsa No Tongu ˘n and Yi Ko˘nyong (1991) Minjok ˘u mangnon, Seoul: Han’gilsa Pak Ch’anho (1992) Han’guk kayosa [History of Korean Popular Music] (1987), trans. from Japanese by An Tongnim, Seoul: Hyo˘nam Pak, Gloria Lee (2006) ‘On the mimetic faculty: A critical study of the 1984 ppongtchak debate and post-colonial mimesis’, in K. Howard (ed.), Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, Folkestone: Global Oriental, pp. 62–71 Pak Hwang (1976) Ch’anggu˘ ksa yo˘n’gu, Seoul: Paengnok ch’ulp’ansa Pak Po ˘mhun (1985) P’iri sanjo yo˘n’gu, Seoul: Segwang u ˘mak ch’ulp’ansa

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Park, Chan E. (2003) Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press Park, Sung Hee (2011) ‘Patronage and creativity in Seoul: The late 18th to late 19th century urban middle class and its vocal music’, PhD dissertation, SOAS, University of London Pihl, M. R. (1977) ‘Korea in the bardic tradition: P’ansori as an oral art’, in Korea Studies Forum, vol. 2, Seoul: The Korean-American Education Commission, pp. 1–106 (1994) The Korean Singer of Tales, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Pilzer, J. D. (2006) ‘The 20th-century “disappearance” of Korean professional female entertainers during the rise of Korea’s modern sex-and-entertainment industry’, in M. Feldman and B. Gordon (eds.), The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 295–311 Provine, R. C. (1984) ‘Yanggu ˘m’, in S. Sadie (ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, vol. 3, London: Macmillan, p. 882 Provine, R. C., Y. Tokumaru, and J. L. Witzleben (eds.) (2002) East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea. Vol. 7: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, New York: Routledge Rinser, L., and Isang Yun (1977) Der verwundete Drache: Dialog über Leben und Werk des Komponisten, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Robinson, M. E. (1988) Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–1925, Seattle: University of Washington Rockwell, C. (1974) ‘Trends and developments in Korean traditional music today’, Korea Journal, 14, 3: 15–20 Rutt, R., and Kim Chong-un (trans.) (1974) Virtuous Women: Three Masterpieces of Traditional Korean Fiction, Seoul: Korean National Commission for UNESCO Sayers, R., with R. Rinzler (1987) The Korean Onggi Potter, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press Shim Uso˘ng (1974a) ‘Namsadang’, in Survey of Traditional Arts: Folk Arts, Seoul: National Academy of Arts, pp. 455–72 (1974b) Namsadang p’ae yo˘n’gu, Seoul: Tonghwa ch’ulp’ansa (1985) ‘Han’guk u ˘i yurang yein chiptan: Namsadangp’aeru ˘l chungshimu ˘ro’, in Cho˘n’tong munhw, 140–9 So ˘ Uso˘k (1985) Cho˘nt’ong munhwa wa so˘yang munhwa, Seoul: Sungmyo˘ng taehakkyo ch’ulp’ansa So ˘n So˘ngwo˘n (1996) Taejung ˘u magu ˘ i ppuri, Seoul: Toso˘ ch’ulp’an Kkun Song, Bang-song [Song Pangsong] (1976) ‘Korean kwangdae musicians and their musical traditions’, Korea Journal, 14, 9: 12–19 (1980) Source Readings in Korean Music, Seoul: Korean National Commission for UNESCO Song Hyejin (1981) ‘Yiwangjin aakpuwa inyo ˘ru ˘l maejo˘tto˘n pakkat saramdu ˘l’, in Yiwangjik aakpuwa ˘u magindu˘ l, Seoul: Kungnip kugagwo˘n, pp. 137–48 ˘ n’gyo˘ng (eds.) (1996) Han’guk ˘u mak: Song Hyejin, Kim Myo˘ngso˘k, and So˘ U Ch’angjakkok chakp’um mongnokchip, Seoul: Kungnip kugagwo˘n Song Pangsong (1981) Han’guk ˘u makhak nonmun haeje, So˘ngnam: Han’guk cho˘ngshin munhwa yo ˘n’guwo˘n (1984) Han’guk ˘u mak t’ongsa, Seoul: Ilchogak (1985) ‘Choso˘n hugi u ˘i u ˘mak’, in Yi Haerang (ed.), Han’guk ˘u maksa, Seoul: Taehan min’guk yesulwo˘n, pp. 279–408

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(1989) Han’guk ˘u makhak so˘so˘l, Seoul: Segwang u ˘mak ch’ulp’ansa Sung, Sang Yeon (2001) ‘An ethnography of public school music education in South Korea: Issues in the reintroduction of Korean music’, MA thesis, Indiana University Taehan min’guk yesulwo˘n, (1988, 1998, and 2004) Han’guk yesul ch’ongjip, vols. 2–4, Seoul: Taehan min’guk yesulwo˘n, Um, Hae-kyung (1992) ‘Making p’ansori: Korean musical drama’, PhD dissertation, Queen’s University of Belfast Van Zile, J. (2001) Perspectives on Korean Dance, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Walraven, B. (1994) Songs of the Shaman: The Ritual Chants of the Korean Mudang London: KPI Yano, C. (2002) Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press Yi Chaesuk (1971) Kayagu˘ m sanjo, Seoul: Han’guk kugak hakhoe (1979) Kugak panjubo˘p, Seoul: Sumundang ˘ nha ch’ulp’ansa (1982) Kayagu˘ m sanjo Kim Chukp’a ryu, Seoul: U ˘ nha ch’ulp’ansa (1987) Kayagu˘ m sanjo So˘ng Ku ˘ myo˘n ryu, Seoul: U Yi Chinwo˘n (2007) Taegu˘ m sanjo ch’angshija Pak Chonggi p’yo˘ngjo˘n, Seoul: Minsogwo˘n ˘ mak ˘u i ihae, Seoul: Minu Yi Kangsuk (1985) U ˘msa Yi Kangsuk and Kim Ch’unmi and Min Kyo˘ngch’an (2001) Uri yangak 100-nyo˘n, Seoul: Hyo˘namsa Yi Ko˘nyong (1987) Han’guk ˘u mak ˘u i nolliwa yulli, Seoul: Segwang u ˘mak ch’ulp’ansa (1988) Minjok ˘u mak ˘u i chip’yo˘ng, Seoul: Han’gilsa (1990) ‘Ch’aeku ˘l naemyo˘nso˘’, Minjok ˘u mak, 1: 10–11 Yi Kwangshik (1981) Han’guk kaehwasa yo˘n’gu, Seoul: Ilchogak Yi Kyut’ae (1983) Han’gugin ˘u i ˘u ishik kujo, Seoul: Shinwo ˘n ch’ulp’ansa Yi Pohyo ˘ng, Yi Chuyo ˘ng, Yi Tongyo ˘ng, and Cho ˘ng Ch’unja (1985) Hyangje p’ungnyu: Muhyo˘ng munhwajae (u ˘ mak) chosa pogoso˘ 6, Seoul: Munhwajae kwalliguk/Munhwajae yo ˘n’guso Yi Sanggyu (1995) ‘Ch’angjak hwaltong mit kugakki kaeryang u ˘i so ˘nggwawa munjejo˘m’, in Kwangbok 50-junyo˘n kinyo˘m haksul taehoe/Proceedings of the Conference for the Fiftieth Celebration from Japanese Colonization, Seoul: National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, pp. 109–60 Yi Sangjun (1929) Choso˘n sokkok chip, Seoul: Samso˘ngsa ˘ mak kyegwan’, in Munye ch’onggam, Seoul: Han’guk munhwa yesul Yi Sangman (1976) ‘U chinhu ˘ngwo˘n, pp. 329–52 (1984) ‘Han’guk u ˘i so ˘yang u ˘mak paengnyo˘n’, Kaekso˘k, 1: 160–3 (1995) ‘Cho˘nt’ong u ˘mak kongyo˘n u ˘i saeroun cho˘ngnibu ˘l wihan cheo˘n’, in Kwangbok 50-junyo˘n kinyo˘m haksul taehoe/Proceedings of the Conference for the Fiftieth Celebration from Japanese Colonization, Seoul: National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, pp. 9–18 Yi So˘ngch’o ˘n (1992) ‘Han’guk cho˘nt’ong u ˘mak u ˘i ch’angjak pangbo˘be kwanhan yo˘n’gu’, in Yo˘nse nonmunjip, Seoul: Yo˘nse taehakkyo, pp. 119–81 (1997) Han’guk, han’gugin, han’guk ˘u mak, Seoul: P’ungnam ˘mak undong u ˘i iron’gwa shilch’o ˘n’, in Kim Ch’angnam (ed.), Yi Soyo˘ng (1993) ‘Minjok u Norae, vol. 4, Seoul: Shilch’o ˘n munhaksa, pp. 55–90

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Yi Yo ˘ngmi (1991) Minjok yesul undong ˘u i yo˘ksawa iron [History and Theory of the National Art Movement], Seoul: Han’gilsa (1998) Han’guk taejung kayosa [A History of Korean Popular Song], Seoul: Hanguk yesul yo˘n’guso ch’ongso˘; Seoul: Shigongsa, 2000 (2006) ‘The beginnings of Korean pop: Popular music during the Japanese occupation era (1910–45)’, in K. Howard (ed.), Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, Folkestone: Global Oriental, pp. 1–9 Yi Yuso˘n (1985) Han’guk yangak paengnyo˘nsa, Seoul: Chungang taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu Yi Yuso˘n and Yi Sangman (1984) ‘Hyo ˘ndae yangak’, in Yi Haerang (ed.), Han’guk ˘u maksa, Seoul: Taehan min’guk yesulwo˘n, pp. 477–608 Yun Miyo˘ng (ed.) (2001) Ko˘nwo˘n (1400)-nyo˘n, kaewo˘n 50-nyo˘n Kungnip kugagwo˘n, Seoul: Kungnip kugagwo ˘n

. 14 .

Folk music in Eastern Europe TIMOTHY J. COOLEY

The concept of folk music is a European invention. The history of the concept is covered well in Philip Bohlman’s chapter on Johann Gottfried Herder and post-Enlightenment history in this volume, and here I focus on how the concept played out more specifically in Eastern Europe. “Eastern Europe” is as much a political concept as a geographic one. It is a remnant of the Cold War and retains negative connotations for many who associate Eastern Europe with the former Soviet Union and in opposition to the similarly politically constructed European “West.” The view of Eastern Europe employed here is expansive (including parts of southeastern Europe), sociolinguistic, and historical, or historiographic in the spirit of this volume. Geographically, Eastern Europe includes the countries east of Germany, usually excluding Austria to the southeast, Sweden and Finland to the north and east, but including Slovenia and the successor states of Yugoslavia. The United Nations generally does not include the former Yugoslavia, but limits Eastern Europe to those nations that were part of the Warsaw Pact. This points to the most common political definition: the former “Eastern Bloc” countries, meaning the post-World War II nationstates that were to a greater or lesser degree under the influence of the former Soviet Union, and were politically socialist or communist. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, many nations formerly considered Eastern European had come to be viewed as Central European. Also a political term including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, Central Europe includes states that have historically been aligned politically with Western Europe, and that are predominantly Roman Catholic rather than Orthodox (Porter 2009). Throughout this chapter, many of the examples come from this area since it is here that I have conducted my most extensive research over many years. Considering the close ties between the concept of folk music and language, shaped by Herder’s foundational work in the eighteenth century and the subsequent formation of nineteenth-century theory generated by linguists and philologists, a sociolinguistic view of Eastern Europe may be particularly

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useful. Many, but not all, countries in Eastern Europe have Slavic-language majorities (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, Macedonian). Other language groups include Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian), Romanian, Albanian, and several others. The predominance of Slavic languages is one of the reasons I extend my consideration of the problematic term “Eastern Europe” south as far as Macedonia, though culturally this region of Europe shares as much with Greece and Turkey as it does with northern Slavic regions. Likewise, while much music in Poland shares form and aesthetics with musics from Germanic countries to the west, in the southern regions of Poland arguments can be made for closer associations with Hungarian and Romanian musics – all unrelated language groups. As important as the concept of Eastern Europe was to music scholarship in, especially, the twentieth century, the greatest contribution of this chapter may be its critical dismantling of the concept of Eastern Europe itself, hence its challenge to redirect future scholarship toward a post-area-studies paradigm that favors transnational and transregional flows of musical meaning over the nation concept that was so formative in the folk-music concept itself.

The concept of folk music As a European invention, the concept of folk music reflects ways of organizing thought about European cultural practices primarily by Europeans themselves. Most studies of European musics posit (and now usually problematize) three basic categories of music: folk, popular, and classical. Timothy Rice’s introductory chapter in the “Europe” volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music is an example (Rice 2000, 2). Coined by Johann Gottfried Herder in the eighteenth century, Volkslied (folk song) was considered not only the production of the common people (usually defined as the economic group “peasant”), but also contained keys to the soul or essence of the people. The concept of folk song was tied to language studies and the collection of song texts, and the inclusion of melodic information was secondary (Gelbart 2009). The musical sounds of folk music were always of interest, however, and the ethnographic study of this music was greatly enhanced by the invention of sound-recording technologies in the 1880s (Porter 2000). The ability to record sound facilitated the collection of ostensibly objective data for comparison, and contributed to the institutionalization of comparative musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft) as a field of study. In the service of this new field, archives of musical sound recordings were established first in 1899 at the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austro-Hungarian Akademie der

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Wissenschaften in Vienna; and then during the following year the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv was founded by Carl Stumpf (cf. the chapters by LarsChristian Koch and Travis A. Jackson in this volume). These were soon followed by numerous national sound archives developed during the first decades of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, many of these archives were damaged or destroyed during the two world wars. From the 1950s to at least the 1980s, great effort was expended rebuilding sound archives by many Central and Eastern European nation-states, projects that went hand-in-hand with the post-1945 re-creation of those nations. Though the legacy of these collecting and archival projects may be criticized for an objectivist, positivist approach to the subject of folk music, which at times ignored the social realities of musicians themselves, they provide the foundation of many contemporary ideas about folk music today. In many Eastern European regions folk-music collections had special significance. Through much of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, many Eastern European regions were governed by foreign imperial powers. Poland is a striking example: the former Kingdom and then Republic of Poland did not exist as a political entity during this period but was partitioned three ways between Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Therefore, links between the concept of folk musics and nations tended toward the abstract since there was no Polish nation-state. One result was that connections with the assumed progenitors of folk music, the peasant class, played out differently in Eastern Europe than it did in Western centers of imperial power. Since they were viewed as possessing the essences for a hoped-for national state, Eastern European peasants were sometimes idolized as the hope for the future rather than as relics of the past. In similar ways, the qualities assigned to folk music projected forward rather than backward in time. This took symbolic expression in the Young Poland Movement as seen in Stanisław Wyspian´ski’s play Wesele (The Wedding, 1901) wherein an intellectual from Kraków marries a peasant woman. Marrying a peasant woman was seen as progressive by some in the Young Poland Movement. The notion that the folk may contain keys to a progressive future would return several times throughout the twentieth century. Poland and other Eastern European entities reemerged as political nations after World War I and set about the tasks of rebuilding their material infrastructure and building new national identities. In Poland this took the form of gathering together sometimes-disparate regional identities into a new national sense. After World War II, the process began again with particular emphasis on a muzyka ludowa (music of the people or folk music) now more broadly applied to the emerging concept of the working man and woman

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in a communist state. This had implications for music performance and scholarship that are addressed below.

Collection and codification of folk music Early folk-music scholarship in Eastern Europe, as elsewhere, focused on collection and classification. Many song collectors contributed to our understanding of what constitutes folk music in Eastern Europe, and I mention only a few here by way of example. In Poland, Oskar Kolberg (1814–90) is an interesting nineteenth-century example. Working during a period when Poland was partitioned among three empires, Kolberg devoted his mature years to collecting folk songs in and around the historical lands of Poland. He published many volumes during his lifetime under the title Lud (The Folk), and annotated volumes of his work were published beginning in 1961 under the title Dzieła Wszystkie (Complete Works), reaching some sixty-nine volumes by the 1990s with more planned (Kolberg 1865– ; Kolberg 1961– ). The sheer mass of his collection makes it a useful resource of data about what sorts of musical practices and sounds were current in the second half of the nineteenth century. Others followed in his footsteps, including the Czech writer Ludvik Kuba (1863–1956) who helped shape the concept of a Czechoslovak music in the early twentieth century. Other regions and nations have comparable individuals who initiated collections of folk music that became part of national identities. Inspired and initially trained by his fellow-countryman Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967), the Hungarian musical folklorist Béla Bartók (1881–1945) was influential not only in Eastern Europe but also in the balance of Europe and the United States, and beyond, for example in Turkey (Bartók 1976b). His early interests were linked to his desire to develop an “international” style of composition that was simultaneously “Hungarian.” These views were drawn from a maturing Romantic nationalism, and the swelling interest in cultural Darwinism, which viewed folk music as a production of a peasant class, imbued with purity and something of the Hungarian essence. He contained within his work seemingly contradictory desires to document “pure” (premodern, traditional, not tainted by external influence) Hungarian folk music and to create a distinctly modern and international Hungarian music (Trumpener 2001; Brown 2000). These views were prevalent from the end of the nineteenth century and through at least the first half of the twentieth century, though the implications of this approach to folk music played out differently depending on the political and economic context of the collector/scholar. This became clear to Bartók himself after he too suffered displacement during World War II

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when quests for racial purity fueled the Holocaust (Bartók 1976a). As a composer with a rising profile in Europe and America, nonetheless, Bartók’s views were very influential internationally and he was instrumental in strengthening the institutional position of comparative musicology. It is this inward focus of Bartók’s work that characterizes it as musical folklore, a complementary paradigm to early twentieth-century comparative musicology. Whereas comparative musicology strove to be global in scope, comparing all known musics from around the world to draw universal conclusions about “the origin and growth of music and the nature of the musically beautiful” (Hornbostel 1975, 249), musical folklore focused on the researcher’s home region or nation, and their work often, though not always, contributed to nationalist projects. Bartók considered his work to be science, as did his contemporaries among the comparative musicologists. He used a recording machine and made transcriptions with as much accuracy as he could manage (see Fig. 14.1). These were codified in an ingenious classification system that he and Kodály devised. This system facilitated the comparison of tunes and the grouping of tune families. Even when he conducted studies outside of Hungary, he tended to compare and seek links with the folk music of Hungary (see, e.g., his Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor [1976b]). Bartók’s interests were similar to the cultural mapping of the comparativists, but the cultural relations were

Fig. 14.1 Béla Bartók (fourth from left) recording songs in Zobordarázs (Dražovce), Slovakia, with a wax-cylinder recorder, 1907

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directed inward toward Hungarian music. Within the area of Eastern Europe more generally, Bartók and Kodály’s legacy rests in their proposals for techniques of collecting, analyzing, and codifying folk poetry and tunes. The two world wars of the twentieth century not only interrupted the work of musical folklorists and comparative musicologists in Central Europe, but in some cases collections of recordings and manuscripts were also destroyed or lost. Consequently, post-World War II scholarship in many places was devoted to reestablishing lost archives. Perhaps especially in Eastern Europe, this effort was highly politicized as newly formed or reconstituted nation-states worked toward self-definition, generally paired with the reconstruction of their basic infrastructure. In the communist states, many scholars were employed directly by state agencies with overtly politicized agendas. For example, religious songs became problematic in Poland, and scholars pragmatically were reluctant to publish them, just as in some situations singers were reluctant to sing them publicly. In states with extremely nationalist communist systems, musics representing identities other than the sanctioned official identity were unacceptable and, as in the case of Romania and Bulgaria, there was official legislation against them (Slobin 1996, 3; Rice 1994, 16–19). This was particularly true of Jewish, Turkish, and Rom musics that were officially discouraged and even outlawed in some instances. As might be expected, however, musicians resisted state control, and scholars subverted restrictions on their activity as well. Despite ideological agendas that drove many collection projects, we are fortunate, nonetheless, that most postwar Eastern European nations supported the documentation of folk music, resulting in large archives of sound recordings from especially the 1950s onwards, and in many cases containing some recorded music from earlier periods. These collections contain records of human musicking that cannot be bound by any political agenda or national myth. The collection and codification of folk music in Eastern Europe has yet to be interpreted as a document of the impact of wars and political restructuring on people’s musical practices. Musical reactions to war have only recently begun to be considered by scholars, and this has been work focused on more recent wars, such as the Balkan wars of the 1990s (see Pettan 1998). The more immediate impact on music scholarship was the destruction of the collections of folk music, both in audio-recording form and transcribed, followed by an urgent effort to reestablish audio-recording archives following the wars.

The sounds of folk music Ethnomusicological and musical-folklore literatures offer many overviews of folk-music sound in Eastern Europe (Rice 2000, 127–8; Ling 1997;

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Nettl 1997). In an attempt to avoid reifying existing codifications of folk music in Eastern Europe, I here sketch organizing structures rather than statements of ethnographic fact.

Religion The influence of religious institutions in both creating and spreading musical ideas, texts, and sounds is pervasive. The three predominant religions in all of Europe are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. All three religions, often glossed as the Abrahamic faiths, have roots in the Middle East, and all share primary texts (the Torah, or Pentateuch, and the Old Testament. Yet, despite these similarities, the differences between the religions and how they are practiced tends to be emphasized in both scholarly and popular literature. Musically, at least some branches of each major religion employ types of heightened presentation of text that some might call music, though it may not be considered music by the practitioners. The call-to-prayer (adhān) in Islam is an example of a sound-art that, while musical, is not classified as music by Muslims. Concepts of sound-art from Islamic perspectives are most influential historically in the Balkan Peninsula, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Albania, and some parts of southwestern Russia – generally on the periphery of what is commonly constructed as Eastern Europe. The most widespread major religion in Eastern Europe is Christianity, subdivided into three branches: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. As institutional bodies that introduce musical sounds and ideas, and in some cases through discouraging other musical behaviors, the Christian church has had a profound impact in unifying some aspects of music in Europe. These include the widespread use of harmony, a preference for duple meter, and a high degree of musical literacy. The general concept of music as emotionally uplifting, but potentially morally dangerous, may also be contributed to the influence of the Christian church. In Eastern Europe, as in many parts of the world where the Christian churches have great influence, Christian and pre-Christian folk-music traditions meet in calendric rituals, most prominently around winter solstice and Christmas. Folk-caroling traditions (called, for example, colinde in Romania, koleda in Bulgaria, and kole˛da [plur. kole˛dy] in Poland; see Alexandru 1980, 11–15; Rice 1994, 24, 128–32; Czekanowska 1990) are the loci of lively musical practices that appear to be very old and relatively stable through time. In some cases they are gender-specific. The tradition is often considered appropriate for boys and young men, but I have documented girls and young women taking part in kole˛dy performances in Poland. While considered the purview of the young, carol traditions often refer to deep-seated social tensions; for example, among the representations of Jews and Roma in Poland.

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Lifeways The development of agriculture, shepherding, and the control of land use around these practices contributed to predominant lifeways in Eastern Europe. Often derived from pre-Christian rituals to ensure successful crops and herds, performance practices related to agriculture are widely shared throughout the region. These include song-types and dances for calendric harvest and solstice rituals. Many people engaged in the creation of craft, using hand labor, also create songs to accompany repetitive labor or to create sociability among workers (see, e.g., Rice 1994, 127–68; Alexandru 1980, 19ff). Studies of music in Europe typically make distinctions between class (peasants, lords, nobility, and so forth) intersecting with ethnic groups (Jews and Roma throughout Europe, but many additional groups considered ethnicities as well, such as the Rusyns or Łemkos in the Carpathian border regions of Poland, Ukraine, and Slovakia). Class-based social distinctions were altered by industrialization and increasing urbanization, though these same forces exacerbated ethnic divisions in some cases. Many of the contexts for ritual music were lost or transformed into new rituals with these fundamental lifeway changes. For example, life-cycle and calendric rituals found new saliency in tourist festivals during the second half of the twentieth century (Cooley 2006). Tourist festivals and income generated from visitors and travelers are as important in many villages, towns, and cities today as income generated from crops and livestock in the past. Music performed for tourists, therefore, is of similar significance to music in earlier calendric rituals related to traditional lifeways (Suppan 1991; Wrazen 1988, 49–54; Wrazen 1991; Wrobel 1983, 105).

Musical instruments Some instrumental traditions are closely linked to lifeways. Bagpipes (and there are many distinct varieties throughout Eastern Europe and the world) are common among groups who tend sheep or keep goats, not least because the instruments themselves are traditionally made from the hides of these animals. Flutes and alpine horns are also associated with shepherding cultures (Trærup 1970, 20; Alexandru 1980, 44). According to my conversations with players in or from Poland and Slovakia, their origins may lie in signal functions. Bowed lutes, especially violins, are widely used in the folk musics of Eastern Europe. Regional variations in the instruments themselves were reduced by the increased availability in the late nineteenth century of factory- or large shop-made standard violins. Some areas, however, retain distinctive bowed lutes. The gadulka (three-string, short-neck bowed lute, held vertically) in Bulgaria is a prime example. Other examples include the many variants of a three-stringed cello-sized bass and viola-sized counter-violin (sometimes called

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altówka or kontra) in Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. By the late twentieth century, most of the violinists with whom I worked in Poland were very interested in and knowledgeable about violin traditions throughout Central Europe. The same is true with bagpipe players and flutists. While the codifying efforts of folk-music scholars suggested – and some communist governments legislated – appropriate musical styles and repertories for any given musician, recorded broadcast music, relative ease of travel, and the force of curiosity and human creativity produced village musicians with wide-ranging musical skills.

Song forms The most studied aspect of regional musical practice throughout Europe is song. The reason for the focus on song is both practical and ideological. Practically, the collection of song texts requires little specialized training beyond knowledge of the language. Ideologically, since at least Herder’s coinage of Volkslied, emphasis in folklore studies has focused on language as carrying essential information about the folk (Gelbart 2009). The musical context of language requires specialist training in musical notation and analysis. Those studies that do engage in musical analysis often begin with musical form and function. The most common song form is strophic – lyrics sung to a repeating melody or melodic/harmonic pattern. The patterned repetition of the strophic form lends itself to dance-music forms, sung and instrumental. Perusing just about any collection of songs from Europe – whether presented as folk, popular, or classical – is likely to produce many examples of strophic songs. There are, of course, other song forms, and many variations within the strophic context. In the Polish Tatras (the Carpathian Mountain region along Poland’s southern border with Slovakia), for example, songs are used to call for a dance called góralski, a dance by a single male/ female couple. The songs are called by the man, who sings a single couplet (though occasionally he may sing more than one couplet), usually with the second line repeated, forming an ABB poetic and melodic structure as in Fig. 14.2 below.

Fig. 14.2 “Ozwodna” (c. circle dance), sung by Krzysztof Trebunia-Tutka, Zakopane, Poland, 2003

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Fig. 14.3 “Ganga,” sung by Azra Bandic´, Mevla Luckin, and Emsija Tatarovic´. Field recording by Mirjana Lausševicc´, Umoljani village, Bosnia 1990 (see Cooley 2009, 227–8)

Though the song proper ends with this couplet, the ensemble (usually a lead violin, one or more accompanying violins, and a three-string basy) picks up the tune and repeats it, with variations, for as long as the dancers dance. Thus, the song has a single strophe, while the instrumental version continues. Another way to look at it is that it is not a song first and foremost, but a dance tune, introduced by the dancer with a few lines of poetry, ideally improvised to comment on the present social situation (Cooley 2005, 42–4; Wrazen 1988, 161–76). Therefore in the góralski context, the dance and all that goes with this (display of the body, physical skill paired with musical knowledge, publicly performed courtship between a man and a woman) is the focus, not the poetic text. Indeed, the dance/music nexus overshadows poetic concerns to the extent that some dancers do not sing at all, but simply call to the band a dance/tune type. Ganga, a song form sung primarily by girls and young women in Bosnia and Herzegovina, similarly uses single strophes. In Fig. 14.3, I represent a song text as sung in three lines, though a poetic transcription would divide the lines where I have placed commas. Musically, this ganga, as is the practice, does not repeat melodic material per se, but is based on an introduced textual idea, sung by a lead singer (the first line), who is then accompanied at an interval of a major second by two other singers (lines 2 and 3) (Cooley 2009, 228). These examples offering exceptions to the strophic tendencies in song form illustrate a tendency in the scholarship in more recent years to recognize and probably seek out diversity of cultural practices. Therein lies a tension in our understanding of musics in Eastern Europe: the study of at least folk music is used to show or construct links between large groups of people (the nationstate, for example), and it is also used to illustrate distinctions (within modern nation-states and internationally). Though an intellectual history of music scholarship will reveal institutional and political reasons for this tension, it can also be found among musicians themselves who perform representations of circumscribed regional groups, and alternatively internationally connected cosmopolitan representations depending on their own goals and contexts.

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Rethinking folk music Discomfort with the term “folk” emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, symbolically marked by the dropping of the term in the renaming of the International Folk Music Council in 1981 as the International Council for Traditional Music (see Bohlman 1988, xiii). This renaming of a leading international academic society surely had many reasons, perhaps first because the concept was not as applicable beyond Europe as within, but also because of concerns that “folk music” had become a divisive commodity in the many national projects of the twentieth century. This was particularly problematic in Eastern Europe where communist parties had adopted muzyka ludowa, lidová hudba, folklorna glazba, народной музыке (Polish, Czech, Croatian, and Russian terms respectively for “peoples’ music” or “folk music”) as an icon of their political ascendancy. Even though the use of folk music for political purposes was not new in the twentieth century, its appropriation by communist national groups and other institutions presented contradictions within the concept itself that generally emphasized rural origins, peasantry, isolation, ritual function within limited contexts, and autonomy. The concept of folk music, of course, was created by or immediately appropriated for creating national identities. Thus, the folk-music question is teleological, producing the nationstate and produced by the nation-state. Folk music generated different meanings and served different ideologies in Eastern Europe from other parts of Europe. This may have been particularly true among the Slavic peoples, according to Ernest Gellner (1998, 115), and this distinction helps us understand how the concept changed and was employed throughout the twentieth century. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, most Slavic peoples did not have their own states, but were subjugated and colonized by empires. The elite of these stateless peoples tended to see peasant culture as possessing something of the vital national qualities required for a future state that they hoped would come to pass. This future-looking position of peasantry and folk culture was different from that of colonial/imperial powers with established nation-states, which tended to view folk culture historically, and in extreme cases, as providing evolutionary information about a nationally construed race to justify the hegemony they enjoyed. In Slavic Eastern Europe, folk cultural practices became symbolic for nationalist movements, and as Slavic peoples gained states after World War I and then World War II, folk music and other manifestations of peasantry were employed to construct a sense of national identity. The symbolic use of folk culture among pre-nation-state Slavic regions was probably more unified than the various ways that folk culture was used by

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Slavic nation-states post-World War II. In postwar Poland, for example, regional variation was encouraged, including the establishment of festivals that celebrated regional folklore, including music, dance, costumes, architecture, and foods. Although a pan-Polish identity was also projected as the future of the state, groups or cultural practices that did not fit into that ideal were discouraged relatively subtly. In contrast, the push for a unified identity in Bulgaria was much stronger, and ethnic difference was treated as a threat, leading to legislation against some music forms interpreted as Jewish, Roma, or Turkish. How the concept of folk music was constructed, reconstructed, and employed in various regions of Eastern Europe is the key question of later twentieth-century scholarship and music making. The most fundamental shift in conceptions of folk music was from a quantifiable approach to an approach that emphasized context. Early attempts to adapt this approach by Eastern European scholars are notable. For example, building on the collection and codification system of Kodály and Bartók, Constantin Bra˘iloiu (1893–1958), a Romanian folk-music scholar, researching in both Romania and Switzerland, moved decidedly toward a culture-concept approach to folk music that demanded rigorous contextualization. He went so far as to proclaim that thorough knowledge of musical form is inadequate, and that we need to understand how forms function and change in society (Bra˘iloiu 1984, 60). This shift from an interest in the product (the folk song) to the processes used to create music and how those processes engage other aspects of individuals and societies requires a very different concept of folk music. This reformation of the concept of folk music is ongoing and manifested in many later twentieth-century studies. Philip Bohlman took a global view in The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988) by suggesting dialectic rather than definitional approaches to the question of folk music. In a survey I conducted with members of the European Special Interest Group of the Society for Ethnomusicology, asking them to list up to five most influential works on folk music in Eastern Europe, the vast majority of works mentioned by this twenty-first-century generation of ethnomusicologists addressed questions of cultural change during the communist era and then again after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The listed works also tended to treat musical practice as contextualized social process, usually related to identity construction in response to social and political change, but not as a human essence. Cited examples included Jane Sugarman’s study of gendered subjectivity as manifest in musical practices at Presba Albanian weddings (1997), Timothy Rice’s phenomenological approach to music in Bulgaria (Rice 1994), and Mark Slobin’s influential collection of essays on musical changes in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe (Slobin 1996).

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Folk music and identity in the twenty-first century: two case studies Efforts to reconcile universalizing theories (folk song containing essences of the nation) with the intensive studies of individuals and small groups are another important trend continued in the twenty-first century. Whether these efforts are intended to ground and contextualize universal theories, or counteract them, they continue to be effective means of advancing the interpretation and understanding of folk musical practices in Eastern Europe. Two case studies from the Carpathian Mountains in Central Europe will illustrate the point. These case studies consider the Górale (mountaineers) of the Polish Tatras and the Łemoko or Rusyns in Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. I hope to show that the very issue of Rusyn identity – the entire ontological quest for ethnic existence even – is both very similar to and yet very different from the question of Górale ethnicity. The stories of Górale and Rusyns are stories of Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism. Many Górale of the Tatra Mountain region of Poland, a border region with Slovakia, today consider themselves to be an ethnic group within Poland. They present a distinct cultural identity, most notably in their musical practices that differ markedly from most other Polish folk traditions, but share much with other Carpathian Mountain music traditions. Used both as a symbol of Polish sovereignty (see, e.g., Karol Szymanowski’s ballet Harnasie) and as an icon of distinction, Górale cultural identity was solidified only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cooley 2005, 77–8). In 1947 at the very moment when Górale identity in Poland was poised to help move the Polish Tatra region into a socialist version of modernity with some success, not far to the east Rusyns (there called Łemkos) were being forcibly removed from the lands they occupied in the lower Beskid Mountains, in what is now southeastern Poland (Metil 2002; Magocsi 2005). Their very identity as a people – as a nation – was denied, as was in many cases their property and right to worship as they wished. In the twenty-first century, the Rusyn question remains a sensitive one, some denying their status as an ethnicity, others disagreeing about the implications of such a status. In contrast, Górale of the high Tatras still struggle with the perennial issues of a border region, but they have, at least for the time being, created for themselves an identity as a minority group with some claim to territories and even national identity within the larger nation-state of Poland. Interestingly, however, Rusyns contribute to that identity. For this reason I return to the greater Carpathian borderlands between Poland and Slovakia and to theories of imagining identity that come into play there.

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My own work with the Polish Górale of the Tatra Mountains focuses on the idea that people make the social realities and fictions that they then inhabit (Cooley 2005, 59). The emphasis on making social realities draws on the now established theories of human imagination, as developed by Benedict Anderson, and invention as promoted by Hobsbawm and Ranger (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Recent scholars of cultural studies maintain that most human cultural practices are constructions or inventions; they are made up, in that sense, including the work of folk-music scholars who effectively make, that is, “imagine” or “invent,” the musics that they document. Rusyns who found themselves in the Polish nation-state at the end of World War II were individually influenced by a policy intended to unify Poland and make it more homogeneous. Yet the history and geography of Podhale and other Carpathian borderlands make them distinctive cases. The alpine ridges of the Tatras do provide a natural border between Poland and Slovakia; and they also generated very complex migrations and settlements. The most persistent ethnographic trope about Górale cultural practices is that they are a result of mountain isolation (Czekanowska 1990, 84). Similar tropes of isolation find their way into the literature on Łemko Rusyns (Strech 2007). Yet almost from the beginning of the ethnographic study of Podhale as with the Low Beskids, a more complex theory that challenges the notion of isolation emerges. When seeking to understand the cultural practices of small groups of people, it is becoming more common to seek explanations in cultural connections rather than in states of isolation. Recent studies of Eastern European ethnic groups emphasize cultural exchange. The Carpathian Mountains, for example, may have offered some individuals isolation, but as a whole they acted as a conduit of people and cultural practices between the Balkans and the Tatras. Due to the relatively poor soil for growing crops and grazing animals, the northern side of the Tatras, known as Skalne Podhale and called home by Polish Górale, was one of the last parts of Europe to be settled. The southern sides of the Carpathians around the Tatras do seem to have been settled first. From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries the upper Spisz area was first settled by Rusyns from the Carpathians in Ukraine. Rusyns were very possibly some of the earliest settlers of the southeastern Tatras, in Spisz. Poles from the north, Wallachians from what is now Romania, and Saxons also settled there. It was probably these later three groups that eventually settled on the cold north side of the Polish Tatras rather than Łemko Rusyns, but they still play an important role in discourses of Górale ethnicity.

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Discourses on ethnicity I turn now to three different discourses on Górale ethnicity: the first and most common is a “melting-pot” discourse. This discourse accounts for the clear cultural links with Carpathian regions, extending to the south into the Balkans, by concluding that Poles, Rusyns, Wallachians, Hungarians, Germans, and Slovaks moved into Podhale itself, where they eventually intermingled, and thus created a separate ethnic group. The second interpretive discourse of Skalne Podhale interprets it as an ethnically pure enclave, but does not deny the cultural influences of heterogeneous people on the folklore of Górale. Nor do the scholars who support this view dispute the presence of diverse groups in the broader Tatra regions. At issue is the genetic heritage of those who settled Podhale itself and who now call themselves Górale of Podhale (Radwan´ska-Paryska and Paryski 1995, 410–11, 679; Gutt-Mostowy 1998, 2–27). This discourse maintains that Podhale was settled almost exclusively by Slavic Poles from the north. The third interpretive discourse charts cultural connections between Górale of Podhale and the different societies and people along the Carpathian Mountains, and downplays the role of race or genetic heritage. Perhaps the most active mid-century musicological scholar of the region before World War II was Adolf Chybin ´ski. His publications treat the region as a borderland with shared cultural practices, including music, between Wallachians, Rusyn Łemkos, Saxons, Slovakians, Hungarians, and Roma (Chybin ´ski 1961, 97). The third discourse differs from the first two in that it takes a decidedly cultural approach to ethnicity and it distinguishes ethnicity from race or genetic heritage, key concerns in discourses one and two. The third discourse lends itself to recent theories of identities as cultural inventions and acts of imagination that are ultimately human-made. Ethnicities are one of the ways we imagine social groups and boundaries that are contextually dynamic. Conceiving of ethnicity in this way, I have shown elsewhere how Górale ethnicity was musically made from the nineteenth century to the interwar period (Cooley 2005). Most Górale I interviewed considered themselves related in real ways to diverse groups east and south through the Carpathians, including Rusyns, who form a key element in the imagination of a very real Górale ethnicity.

Musically imagining Rusyns Working with Rusyns primarily in Slovakia, Robert Metil takes an approach similar to the third discourse on ethnicity, and contrary to some historians of Rusyns (Metil 2002, 101–2). Metil claims that songs among Rusyns in Slovakia are stronger markers of identity than is Eastern Rite Christianity. The

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influence of songs from Slovakia, Metil claims, need not be a sign of the degradation of Rusyn culture due to assimilation into Slovakian society, but it may be that the relative mutability of cultural practice (song in this case) serves as a superior basis for identity formation. Metil espouses a radically different view of folk song from the one that was common a century earlier. Instead of seeing folk song as a treasure-trove of information about the core essences of a people, it is seen as malleable cultural practice, meaningful in its function and use. Rusyn and Górale are relatively small ethnic groups, but their stories tell us much about music scholarship in Eastern Europe. Entering the twenty-first century, Górale ethnicity is relatively fixed, though still in need of constant reinvention, while Rusyn ethnicity is less stable. Two centuries ago, nonetheless, there was no fixity in the imagination of Górale identity, and this is revealed in how music associated with Górale has been represented over the two centuries. A century ago, Górale ethnicity was a recognized entity with a coalescing musical expression. Górale were an embraced ethnic other, useful in the Polish national project, but kept at arm’s length. In the 1990s, Górale were fully part of the nation-state of Poland, though with a comfortable sense of ethnicity that characterized their own distinct music, generally described as “folk music.” That music, however, was actively placed in international and global contexts using mass media, freely fused with distinct ethnic and multinational popular musics – contexts anathema to concepts of folk music a century ago. Rusyns may have had a fairly stable sense of ethnic identity a century ago, but it would have been a fractured, transnational identity facing, in a few decades, forced assimilation into Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Górale, in contrast, were able to employ a multicultural discourse to create a new ethnicity. It is at once fractured – drawing from a transnational, transnationstate, and from the migration history of the greater region to form what I theorize as a modern identity that was unified, codified, encircled and differentiated from all that is around it and musically articulated. Rusyns may be at a similar moment in the twenty-first century, looking to the ever-renewable medium of song as they reimagine a renewed ethnicity for a new century.

Folk music in Eastern Europe in the twenty-first century The concept of folk music began as an identity question, and it remains an identity question. Yet approaches to that question have changed. The theory that human cultures and societies are imagined, made, invented, is behind a

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dramatic shift from an era of discovery (collecting and codifying), which drove ethnographic work in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, toward a new era of interpretation. The task, as taken up by recent studies in Eastern Europe, is not so much to discover and document human behavior as a botanist might look for new species of plant life, but rather to interpret human behavior as inventive, meaningful, expressions of human creativity. Folk music is less about the essences of people and more about human potential. Folk music will still be of interest to those who seek to define national distinctiveness, but as we have seen in the cases of Rusyns and Górale, it can also be a means for people to perform transnational identities. This requires a view of folk music as human performance, and therein lies our challenge as folk-music scholars in the twenty-first century. Addressing this challenge is taking folk-music studies to places where they dared not go a century ago as the walls erected between folk, popular, and art music are crumbling. Or it may be that we are in a very similar place. “Folk music” remains a powerful idea that takes on symbolic meanings, though the meanings are rarely stable. The trace of folk music emerges in expected and unexpected places, such as the Russian entry into the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 of six grandmothers singing a folk song celebrating domestic chores to a techno-beat and light show. What is “folk” about this performance? The singers? Their ostensibly authentic costumes? The poetry? The melody? Or does it matter? For about three minutes six women represented a very large and diverse nation before a global audience. Their performance was read as “folk” uncritically by most viewers who did not understand the text (though many may have understood the incongruous chorus sung in English, “everybody dance”), did not hear the tune within a Russian tune-family or type, nor recognize the costumes as pointing to a particular region (the Malopurginsky District of the Udmurt Republic, central Russia) and a specific village (Buranovo). But a few viewers did, those from Buranov, and now more people have heard a representation of their village music in one night than would have experienced it in a century of village evenings. Again I ask, does this matter? Yes, it does matter, and for reasons beyond (though not necessarily in contrast to) those that motivated musical folklorists a century ago. We need not be bothered by the authenticity of folk music on the global stage, and it is not necessary for all who experience a performance to read it intertextually within the traditions of a particular nation, region, and village, though such knowledge can multiply one’s appreciation and understanding of any given performance. The six grandmothers of Buranov negotiated cultures of new media and sang their way onto a global stage, reminding the world that they are people, they are folk, and they have songs to sing. The taxonomic work of a

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century ago continues and remains significant, but today we need to understand the cultures of exchange that have always been a part of musical identity (Bohlman 2002; see also Stokes 2004, 48). Now more than ever, folk music in Eastern Europe is world music.

Bibliography Alexandru, T. (1980) Romanian Folk Music, trans. Constantin Stihi-Boos, rev. A. L. Lloyd, Bucharest: Musical Publishing House Anderson, B. (1991, orig. publ. 1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn, London: Verso Bartók, B. (1976a) Béla Bartók: Essays, selected and ed. by B. Suchoff, New York: St. Martin’s Press (1976b) Turkish Folk Music of Asia Minor, ed. by B. Suchoff, Princeton University Press Bohlman, P. V. (1988) The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2002) ‘World music at the end of history’, Ethnomusicology, 46, 1: 1–32 Bra˘iloiu, C. (1984) ‘Outline of a method of musical folklore’, in A. L. Lloyd (ed. and trans.), Problems of Ethnomusicology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–85 Brown, J. (2000) ‘Bartok, the Gypsies, and hybridity in music’, in G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 119–42 Chybin´ski, A. (1961) O polskiej muzyce ludowej: Wybór prac etnograficznych, ed. by L. Bielawski, Cracow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne Cooley, T. (2005) Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2006) ‘Folk festival as modern ritual in the Polish Tatra Mountains’, in J. C Post (ed.), Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 67–84 (2009) ‘Europe/central and southeastern regions’, in J. T. Titon (ed.), Worlds of Music, Belmont, CA: Schirmer, pp. 204–63 Czekanowska, A. (1990) Polish Folk Music: Slavonic Heritage, Polish Tradition, Contemporary Trends, Cambridge University Press Gelbart, M. (2009) ‘“The language of nature”: Music as historical crucible for the methodology of folkloristics’, Ethnomusicology, 53, 3: 363–95 Gellner, E. (1998) Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge University Press Gutt-Mostowy, J. (1998) Podhale: A Companion Guide to the Polish Highlands, New York: Hippocrene Books Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press Hornbostel, E. M. von (1975, orig. publ. 1905) ‘The problems of comparative musicology’, trans. R. Campbell, in K. P. Wachsmann, D. Christensen, and H.-P. Reinecke (eds.), Hornbostel Opera Omnia, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 247–70; Kolberg, O. (1865) Lud: Jego zwyczaje, sposób z˙ ycia, mowa, podania, przysłowia, obrze˛ dy, gusła, zabawy, pies´ni, muzyka i tan´ce, Warsaw: W. Drukarni Jana Jaworskiego (1961) Dzieła Wszystkie, Wrocław: Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze

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Ling, J. (1997) A History of European Folk Music, University of Rochester Press Magocsi, P. R. (2005) Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America, 4th, rev. edn, Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers Metil, R. C. (2002) ‘Rusnak song, tattoos on concrete, the lethal function of narrative, and the metaphor of skin for identity in Eastern Slovakia’, in U. Hemetek, G. Lechleitner, I. Naroditskaya, and A. Czekanowska (eds.), Manifold Identities: Studies on Music and Minorities, London: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 99–116 Nettl, B. (1997) Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents, 2nd edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Pettan, S. (1998) Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia, Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research Porter, J. (2000) ‘Song genres’, in T. Rice, J. Porter and C. Goertzen (eds.), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8, Europe, New York: Garland, pp. 127–38 (n. d.) ‘Europe’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/(4068)4 (accessed September 9, 2009) Radwan´ska-Paryska, Z., and W. H. Paryski (1995) Wielka encyklopedia Tatrzan´ska, Poronin: Wydawnictwo Górskie Rice, T. (1994) May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music, University of Chicago Press (2000) ‘The music of Europe: Unity and diversity’, in T. Rice, J. Porter, and C. Goertzen (eds.), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8: Europe, New York: Garland, pp. 2–15 Slobin, M. (ed.) (1996) Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Stokes, M. (2004) ‘Music and the global order’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 47–72 Strech, M. R. (n. d.) ‘Ukrainian highlanders: Hutsuls, Boikow, and Lemkos’, www. unian.net/eng/news/news-(2107)86.html (accessed 10 November 2007) Sugarman, J. C. (1997) Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Presba Albanian Weddings, University of Chicago Press Suppan, W. (ed.) (1991) Schladminger Gespräche zum Thema Musik und Tourismus, Tutzing: Hans Schneider Trærup, B. (1970) East Macedonian Folk Songs: Contemporary Traditional Material from Malesevo, Pijanec and the Razlog District, Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag Trumpener, K. (2001) ‘Béla Bartók and the rise of comparative ethnomusicology: Nationalism, race purity, and the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’, in R. Radano and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Music and the Racial Imagination, University of Chicago Press, pp. 403–34 Wrazen, L. J. (1988) ‘The Goralski of the Polish highlanders: Old world musical tradition from a new world perspective’, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto (1991) ‘Traditional music performance among Górale in Canada’, Ethnomusicology, 35, 2: 173–93 Wrobel, K. (1983) ‘Traditional Polish dance music since 1890: An analysis of stylistic change’, MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles

. 15 .

A story with(out) Gauchos: folk music in the building of the Argentine nation BERNARDO ILLARI

Latin America seems ready-made for world music – or so people think. Society is taken as a synonym of ethnic mixture, while music and other symbolic systems enshrine hybrids and crossovers. All of the above, however, is a modern construct, fueled on the one hand by market conditions that assign a permanently subaltern place to the continent and its peoples and on the other by nationalist strategies of harmless difference – the development of a differential image that did not endanger the traditional predominance of Argentines with European ancestry. Before 1900, Others rarely enjoyed prestige of any kind. It is impossible to document the expressive practices that symbolically substantiated them, because, following Spivak’s catchphrase, the subaltern very seldom spoke, especially in music, and hegemonic forces were not interested in representing them. Music failed to be collected in written format, descriptions of practices are scanty, and very little source material remains that is useful for creating a history of music making, styles, or genres. If narrating the stories of ethnic music is impossible, retelling the evolution of musical speech, or discourse on music, is perfectly feasible, and could indeed help to fill in the blanks, however far-fetched that substitution might be. The individual bits of popular-music evidence, very fragmented and dispersed over space and time, converge on three counts: they all represent music, they substantiate some kind of agenda on the part of the authors, and they enter into dialogue with epochal trends of thought and feeling. Scores, pictures, poems, and prose representations all refer to music in interesting ways, be they as a set of texts, as an ensemble of practices, or, as often occurs, simultaneously as both. They also stand in complex relationships with shared philosophies and sensibilities. This twice-rewritten text – due to unfortunate losses of equipment in the course of a lengthy Argentine sojourn – would not have been written if not for Phil Bohlman’s repeated insistence and infinite patience. I thank also Melanie Plesch, for her willingness to share her text on Cordero with me, Jorge Horst, Héctor Goyena, Graciela Restelli, Silvina and Cecilia Argüello, and Gabriel Ávalos for letting me access important bibliographic items used here; my students of the seminar Música y construcción de la Nación, taught at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in October-December 2009; and, not least, my family, whose unyielding support eased my way through a most complicated writing process.

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In this chapter, I explore the discourse on folk songs and dance – the so-called folklore musical – that appears in well-known texts.1 Because it supposedly belongs to rural culture, previous scholars often set folklore musical in opposition to música folklórica or to its urban, commercially produced offspring. My choice to focus on it here is guided by two interrelated factors: the centrality of this folklore to twentieth-century and, to some extent, current nationalist discourses; and the availability of a large body of past scholarship that studied, categorized, and described this music, establishing an orthodoxy that formed yet another crystalized ritual of the nation. Amerindian and AfroLatinamerican musical practices may appear significant to modern and foreign gazes, not least because of their colorful contribution to a richer tourist experience. Latin American nations, however, tended to shun them from self-images until recently (Terán 2008, 172–3), preferring instead mixed folk practices that subtly emphasized their belonging both to the West and to concurrent neocolonial economic orders.2

Argentina and the Gauchos Argentine folk music has come to be regarded as largely coterminous with Gaucho music. Gauchos live at the center of Argentina’s imagination of itself. A Gaucho is the hero of the Martín Fierro, considered to be the national epic. When celebrating the fatherland, Gauchos take the title roles and many of the supporting cast positions. Argentine music is often associated with the Gaucho singers and dancers of the plains, obliterating other significant Indian- or African-influenced repertories and traditions, both urban and rural; African traditions in particular have largely been ignored (Solomianski 2003). Gaucho ethos permeates the fabric of contemporary society, serving as a model for generous and disinterested behavior but also promoting a certain sense of carelessness. Yet the Gaucho may never have existed outside of people’s minds as a single, unified type. From the outset, the discourse, which was firmly under the control of descendants from Europe, de-personalizes Gauchos. They seldom were presented as individuals, but rather appeared as members of a category comparable to “Indians,” “black people,” or even “el pueblo,” which oscillates between “people” and “populace.” For a long time, Gauchos were not allowed into the Argentine Self, but were one among several excluded Others. In fact, when they started to be incorporated into an idea of national society, following 1 Stevenson 1968 and Suárez Urtubey 2007 have provided crucial pointers for the selection of my source material. 2 On the “neocolonial order” in Latin American history, see Halperin Donghi 2007, 215–368.

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an economic reevaluation of the potentialities of the countryside, the groups of rural laborers that accept the Gaucho label better than others were quickly losing their independence of action and becoming part of a subaltern low-wage working force: paper Gauchos thrived as personal ones vanished. A discursive history of Argentine musical folklore necessarily includes an account of the dialectics of exclusion and inclusion that the Gaucho social type suffered over time, within texts controlled from the outside. This narrative, however, is but one factor in a much larger struggle, which traverses most of Latin American history and which pits the city against the countryside; the barring of the Gaucho goes hand-in-hand with the exclusion of the rural areas with which they are identified.3 My tale starts with the negative segregation of the country under a Baroque penchant for social divisions, in which discourses on popular music represent group interests and identities. Three more stages chart different historical variants of the same problem before Argentina achieved legal constitution as a nation-state (1853). They all intersect with wider systems of thought and feeling: Enlightenment, Independentism, and Romanticism, respectively. An epilogue summarizes the city’s economically motivated absorption and the subalternization of the country after the constitution.

Divisive colonialism During most of the colonial period, the Argentine territory lacked mining riches and held little interest for Spanish officers. Primacy was accorded to Charcas (present-day Bolivia), thanks to the silver extracted from Potosí. The three provinces that eventually composed Argentina – Cuyo, Tucumán, and the River Plate – were barely populated and lacked autonomy, belonging to the Viceroyalty of Peru, as well as a strong set of symbolic practices and representations. In 1776, with the creation of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate with Buenos Aires as its capital, the whole regional outlook changed in terms of both politics and economy, displacing mining in favor of overseas trade. Two periods are thus defined: one that roughly corresponds to Maravall’s “culture of the Baroque” (1986), and a second one infused with Enlightenment ideas. Baroque musical practices do not appear prominently in writings from either of the early colonial provinces. Yet the territory participated in trends that ran through the wider Peruvian space, and that set the stage for later developments. From the consolidation of the Spanish continental hegemony until around 1750, society was by and large the result of the colonial transplantation of Iberian lifestyles and traditions. As is well known, domination 3 José Luis Romero has systematically elaborated upon the confrontation between city and countryside in terms of two “ideologies” (i.e., systems of ideas) in his “Campo y ciudad” (1982). Similar ideas inform his 2004 analysis of historical urban types in Latin America.

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was exerted chiefly through newly founded cities, from which hinterlands were ruled as extensively as possible. In the countryside, however, Amerindian populations both predominated and knew the terrain better than any European descendant, which enabled them to claim a higher degree of autonomy than is typical in a colonial situation. An opposition was thus created between hegemonic, Western cities – regarded as bright enclaves of a Catholic-centered idea of civilization – and subaltern, Indianized rural areas that were always suspected of a dark, devilish Otherness that was ill known and barely controlled. City and countryside became legitimate historical actors that sported logics of their own (Romero 1982, 96–103). The rift between city and country both resulted in and fueled the overall conception of Spanish Baroque society as a composite of static, blood-based estate groups, or estamentos, that operated as units – such as clergymen, the military, or the aristocracy. Solidarity usually brought together representatives from the lower, middle, and high sectors of each group but tended not to occur across groups – for example, among people of similar income levels or group situation. Elsewhere, I have proposed the musical metaphor of a polychoral culture to represent these kinds of societies, imagined as the harmonious result of the action of relatively autonomous groups in ways that can be likened to the choral interaction of a polychoral piece (see Illari 2001). Peruvian Baroque discourses about folk music emphasize both the rift between city and countryside and the divided nature of colonial societies. Running against any perennialist presupposition, folk music rarely surfaces in texts. When it does, furthermore, it more often than not serves the private interests of a particular group. Guamán Poma de Ayala’s famous discussion of Westernized Natives – whom he calls indios criollos – uses a courting song to signify what the author sees as their morally depraved behavior. His one-of-akind discourse, which involves a text centered around a picture, refers to the heavily Amerindian countryside around Wamanga in ways that are not characteristic of colonial urban milieus. His argument is quite simple: Christianized natives, himself above all, were essentially moral and tended to behave better than any Spaniard or Spanish-influenced person. Song was invoked to help make this point part of the “new chronicle” that served as proof and for the “good government” plan that proposed sweeping reforms to the system of colonial rule (Poma de Ayala 1615). At the other end of the century, and closer to the former Inca city of Cuzco, the Franciscan friar Gregorio de Zuola (d. 1709) left another extraordinary testimony about rural music, in the form of twelve monodic songs that he wrote down into his commonplace book. Once again, his discourse – not verbal or pictorial, but musical – represents the interest and preferences of his group,

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namely locally born European descendants, known as Criollos (lit., Creoles). Through concordances, his pieces turn out to be not collected popular songs but internal voices of Spanish polyphonic compositions, modified so that they no longer fitted their original contrapuntal context. The operation yielded a repertory, most probably Zuola’s own, that resembles nothing else on Earth but was created from a typical Criollo standpoint, keeping in touch with Peninsular Spanish song roots but modifying them in unforeseen ways (Illari 2000). Through the creation of a musical “atmosphere” that “remains always as rarified as the mountain air over 2-mile-high Cuzco” (Stevenson 1968, 313), Zuola voiced his group’s idiosyncrasy to the exclusion of everyone else, in what seems an act of self-affirmation. While there is no evidence that Guamán Poma’s Westernized Indian music or Zuola’s Criollo songs were cultivated at the time in the three colonial provinces whose territories later belonged to Argentina, they document processes of musical representation that seem typical of Baroque polychoral society. They provide a concrete idea of the kinds of complex, mixed estate musics that were current everywhere within the Spanish dominions, allowing us somehow to fill in the blanks left by the scanty Argentine documentation.

The Enlightenment and music The philosophies of the Enlightenment left a major imprint upon South American – and Argentine – history, musical or otherwise (see, for example, Chiaramonte 2007 and Terán 2008, 13–24). Under the inspiration of newer, Enlightenment-influenced political ideas, the three older provinces were reunited into a new territorial entity: the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, ruled from Buenos Aires.4 Largely thanks to the legalization of Atlantic trade and the need for a more developed colonial bureaucracy, the new capital grew exponentially over the last decades of the eighteenth century, as did the local intellectual milieu.5 Colonial society underwent major internal changes as well. Hegemonic groups were now bourgeois, with trade as their main supporting activity. Many, if not most, were local-born and felt a collective attachment to the land to a degree hitherto unknown. In the cities, lower groups mixed – blurring traditional ethnicities, stimulating communication between the ranks, and giving way to the mixed population that is held to be characteristic of 4 The Viceroyalty should not be confused with Argentina. It included the present-day territories of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Bolivian land later taken over by Chile, and portions of the Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul and Parana; most of Patagonia fell outside of colonial control. 5 City growth and population changes are discussed in Socolow 1978 and 1987.

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Latin America. They, too, cherished a new sense of local identity. The economic mobility of bourgeois trade came together with society’s shifting outlook, producing a new, dynamic sense of life that broke down much of the older seigniorial framework, even though, in a somewhat contradictory way, certain aspects of Baroque lifestyles – including public preeminence as symbolized in city rituals and a strong religious attachment – remained central until the independence period and beyond (Romero 2004, 123–37, 159–72). Certain Enlightenment ideas motivated the breakdown of the opposition between city and hinterland and stimulated a rush of interest, both practical and intellectual, in the countryside. The valuation of rural areas changed substantially under the influence of physiocracy, a doctrine officially adopted by the Spanish King Carlos III that privileged agriculture as the main source for national wealth, and Rousseau’s sentimental idealization of nature as essentially good (Terán 2008, 22–4). Many written descriptions and studies appeared that were issued by administrators, who wished to advance their careers by providing countryside information and viable development projects, and by locally born authors interested in acquiring the kind of instruction favored at the times. These authors raised knowledge of rural areas under a patriotic banner, though not devoid of possible profits. Still, the good countryside and the noble wild man, as they were perceived, left much to be desired. A demonized Other was necessary for the sake of self-definition, and, as hegemony belonged to Westernized and lettered urban groups, the rural areas and their populations were quickly singled out. The latter were often seen as falling outside of civilization, based upon Europeanstyle reasonability and restraint, and as remaining barbaric; at best, they could be subjected to improvement projects. Discourse about the countryside moved between the imagined virtues and perceived evils of the subject, within a dialectical process constantly fueled by strategic interests. These descriptions of the countryside also took music into account. The most impressive is perhaps the encyclopedia of Trujillo (northern Peru), which local bishop Baltasar Martínez Compañón (1737–97) set out to write in the course of his trip to inspect the diocese (1782–5) and probably meant to enhance the colonial control of the region. Even if he never finished the text, the 1,300 illustrations he gathered provide a multimedia representation of the region, complete with twenty musical scores and thirty-seven images of dances (Stevenson 1968, 313–21; Claro 1980; Vega 1978).6 The collection is regarded 6 These illustrations are available on the internet through the page “Manuscritos de América en las colecciones reales,” www.cervantesvirtual.com/portal/patrimonio/index.htm (accessed November 8, 2009). Two different lots of illustrations related to the Martínez Compañón collection were recently auctioned in New York.

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as the earliest substantial document on folk music in the region, yet its value as a stylistic document depends upon understanding the decisions that notators made while transcribing pieces from oral sources – a task that scholars have yet to undertake. In the meantime, the illustrations have generated their own distinct set of performative representations in the hands of early music groups, more or less informed by current folk traditions (see Appendix). The 1791 debate on the yaraví, a local genre of sentimental song considered Amerindian, discloses an emerging debate on sociomusical identity that would occupy South Americans over the next two centuries. The yaraví, originally written in Quechua, is related in imprecise ways to the Incan haraui, a genre of celebration, love, and mourning that was sung with flute accompaniment. It soon accepted Western influences – an early Romantic sentimental tone, Castilian lyrics, and, later, Classicist leanings (Porras Barrenechea 1946). The imaginary Indian-ness and sorrowful character of the genre, together with its emergence during the 1780s, may have something to do with Túpac Amaru’s failed uprising, as suggested by Tupamaro songs in the Martínez Compañón collection that have been identified as tristes, a related, yaraví-like Spanish genre (Vega 1979, 36, 39). The sadness of the songs may prolong and project in urban milieux, and through love lyrics, the desolation of defeat. Be that as it may, salons and theaters did adopt yaravís and turned them into a token of a still-vague feeling of local identity that was fully up to date, as if sentimental songs were pronounced with a local accent. The Lima newspaper, Mercurio peruano, a bastion of local criollismo, hosted two articles that discussed the genre from different standpoints. Sicramio (1791), who has been identified with the Italian-born founder of the newspaper, José Rossi y Rubí (Solís 2007, 85–6), took a patriotic Criollo stance by arguing that the music of the yaraví was “inimitable,” on account of its sad and tearful affect. The composer, flutist and organ builder Toribio del Campo, who signed with his initials, responded to him as a professional, pointing out that the technique of yaravís was so simple that there was nothing that could not be imitated. For unparalleled emotions, Campo preferred Pergolesi’s music and that of his learned local colleagues (Campo y Pando 1792). It is fitting that the late eighteenth-century consolidation of Criollo selfconsciousness, which stayed fluent and ill-defined during the Baroque (Palmié 2007),7 also included the appearance of distinctive genres of popular song and a debate over their identity value: new hegemony, new music, fresh discourse. The yaraví discussion is far more than salon quibbling. It reveals

7 By overlooking evidence and studies on colonial Criollo identities, Palmié takes his argument against its existence too far.

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the willingness of a portion of the bourgeoisie to employ the local as difference, most typically through the appropriation of imagined Amerindian symbolic goods (Illari 2007, 553–82). The articles also document the clash of such a position against other groups’ attachments to a cosmopolitan sense of distinction, a position voiced not by any aristocrat but by a man-of-the-trade who, as such, belonged to the intermediate sectors. The discussion inaugurates, furthermore, the endless debate on whether Latin American musical identities should look inward, to the local or national (in the ethnic sense of the word), or rather seek inspiration overseas; this imagined opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism morphed into different shapes but continued to take center stage in many musical arguments until the 1970s and beyond.8 Within this very context, the earliest descriptions of the rural human type of the Gaucho also surface: ethnically mixed wanderers of Indian, African, and European background who esteemed individual freedom above everything else, lived at the fringe of the unlawful, and yet held a strict code of honor. They were extremely skilled at horse riding, performed only temporary jobs when they needed, mated with stolen women, and, not least of all, often sang to their own guitar accompaniment (see Slatta 1983; Schwarz-Kates 1997, 14–160). A rosary of texts charts their emergence, first as Gauderios (1746), later (1771) as Gauchos, with a noticeable increase of references from 1790 onward; if it makes sense to consider the large plains of Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul as the region that first nurtured such a type – on account of the earlier development of cattle raising in the area – it soon spread to the Argentine Mesopotamia, Buenos Aires, and beyond (Ayestarán 1950, 8–13; Rodríguez Molas 1968, 508–25).9 Gauchos were generally despised as barbarians in this literature, precluding any positive identification. Yet their distinctive ways of speech soon came to be employed either for political purposes or as theatrical characters, particularly in comedies. A 1777 romance by the cathedral canon-to-be Juan Baltasar Maciel (1727–88) sings the military deeds of Viceroy Pedro de Ceballos in a Gaucho estilo campestre (rural style; Barcia 2001). The sainete (intermezzo farce) El amor de la estanciera (Love of the hacienda girl), apparently written in the 1780s (Barcia 1999; El amor de la estanciera 1999), derides Gauchos by turning them into laughable objects. Chroniclers and travelers also recognized – and frequently scorned – the Gauchos’ musical skills early in history. They seldom fail to refer to their guitar-accompanied singing of songs such as the sad and mournful triste, 8 For further discussion of the yaraví polemic, see Illari 2007, 433–6. 9 The belief that Gauchos existed already in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century is no more than a hypothesis that rests upon the identification of rural dwellers with more recent types.

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which seem like Castilian-only versions of the Quechua or bilingual yaravís.10 “In each countryside store [pulpería] there is a guitar,” writes colonial officer Félix de Azara (1742–1821) within a lengthy description of the Gauchos, disclosing a combination of professional zeal, Enlightenment curiosity, and European dislike for uncivilized Others. He continues, “They sing yaravís or tristes, which are songs invented in Peru, the most monotonous and always sad, for they deal with ingratitude of love, and with people who cry their pangs in the deserts” (Azara 1847, I:309). Both Azara’s belittling attitude and the genres he singled out for comment inaugurated historical lines of their own. His Eurocentric mind-set is a common one among nineteenth-century travelers, and some local writers, while the songs lengthened their lives when they were introduced in salons. The resulting prestige renewed their countryside currency.

Exclusive independence Gaucho outlaws soon underwent a legalization of sorts, when independence wars required their services as soldiers, be it on account of simple quantitative need or for the upper echelon’s convenience. Whether they were drafted forcibly, as was once thought, or followed their leaders into war, as historians tend to emphasize today, is of little concern: rural areas gained a new value as a source of military men. The Gauchos’ collective action is well represented in a discourse that seems unable to treat them like individuals, fueling their myth even before they had become true historical subjects. Gauchos from Buenos Aires and elsewhere fought against the attempted British invasions in 1806 and 1807. They picked up arms again to defend the revolution against royalist armies in the 1810s and 1820s, to the observers’ unanimous approval – even Theodorick Bland, President Monroe’s envoy to Buenos Aires of the late 1810s, discussed their military value, thus ushering the Gaucho into the United States Congress (Bland 1818, 47, 49, 57). The 1810 revolution against the Spanish kingdom in Buenos Aires did end external domination and dismantled the colonial establishment (Halperin Donghi 1972), but it failed to replace the kingdom with a new country. The steps toward building a national state were small and tentative: in 1813, an Assembly failed to write a constitution, but it wrote many basic laws and established national symbols; in 1816, independence from Spain was officially declared. A failed constitution of 1819 resulted in provisional centralized governments, with each province reclaiming sovereignty and assuming

10 Vega’s attempts to separate both genres fail to establish a clear difference (see 1966, 264–70 [yaraví], 271–80 [triste]; see also Pagaza Galdo 1960–1961).

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autonomy. Buenos Aires once again attempted to have a centralized constitution approved in 1826, and a national state briefly existed between 1825 and 1827. The provinces, however, did not accept either of these and continued to manage their own affairs. Independence did not have a strong musical impact. Trends and practices of the last quarter of the eighteenth century continued until around 1830, including the quantitative prevalence of simpler salon songs and dances together with more complex theatrical music, an increased attention to religious music, and a complicated relationship with rural musics. Enlightenment ideas and concomitant Classicist aesthetics, which provided the intellectual and symbolic background for the 1810 revolution, were cultivated with particular resolve and intensity in the 1813 Assembly and at the time of creating the first, failed, centralist Argentina in the 1820s. The preference for the secular over the sacred that informed the philosophes’ thought, and which was shunned during the Spanish reception of their ideas, was then introduced, complete with state appropriation of ecclesiastical lands and taxes and the conversion of priests into provincial employees in Buenos Aires (1823). Bentham’s utilitarianism and Destutt de Tracy’s ideology served as philosophical inspiration for top rulers such as Martín Rodríguez (1771–1845) and, particularly, Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), Argentina’s first president – on paper at least (Shumway 1993, 81–111). Independence did produce important changes that affected popular music. Patriotic song, which first flourished after the local victory against two attempted British invasions in 1806 and 1807, emerged as a genre needed to promote the revolutionary cause, commemorate its deeds, and gain adhesions among the different social ranks. Following both the French revolutionary model and the 1806–7 precedent, most of the pieces were cast in high-brow, classicist language that seems somewhat artificial today.11 The “patriotic march,” commissioned in 1813 to serve as a musical symbol of the nation-to-be and later becoming the national anthem, is but the most famous example of this repertory and one that became popular throughout South America by way of circulation and reception (Vega 1962, 30–41). Some compositions were meant for countryside circulation and resorted to folk genres, idioms, and typical expressions. Most famously, the danced song called the cielito, which seems to have existed in rural areas before 1810, was turned into the preferred vehicle for vernacular patriotic propaganda. Bartolomé Hidalgo (1788–1822), a poet from Montevideo who may have been of African ancestry, is generally credited as the main contributor to a 11 Many were collected by Rivadavia’s indication (see Barcia 1982).

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process that reinforced official action from within, reaching to popular strata from mid-society. His poetry was clearly meant to teach Gauchos the principles of citizenship, on the basis of his uncompromising respect of them – a literary praxis that much helped to create an inclusive sense of a “we” (see Demarchi 2007, 2008). Some cielitos that Hidalgo apparently composed were sung in front of the city’s walls during the patriots’ sieges of 1810–12. His subsequent poems resorted to Gaucho speech, just like canon Maciel a few decades earlier, and multiplied the stanzas: eighteen in the Oriental Cielito (1816) and thirtysix in the one that celebrated the patriotic victory of Maipú (1818). Hidalgo had them printed as broadsides, so as to insure the widest possible circulation, including to rural areas whose dwellers would have sung a selection of his verses. These developments were full of consequences. By addressing political topics in folk language, the cielitos not only accorded the Gauchos a literary voice but also set the roots of the gauchesco literary genre, which eventually became canonic and national. The popular appeal of the cielitos furthermore turned them into prime political instruments that did not necessarily depend upon official viewpoints. Hidalgo’s patriotic aims were soon replaced by criticism of Rivadavia’s cosmopolitan rule – as part of a centralist idea of the nation, labeled as unitaria or unitarist – and later by overt political propaganda for the federalist party that supported a confederate, if vague, model of state. Starting in the late 1820s, a whole roster of Buenos Aires federalist newspapers used gauchesco poems to support their cause – a typical populist gesture. Yet as the confrontation between the two parties matured, certain unitarist poets, most notably Hilario Ascasubi (1807–75), responded with Gauchesco cielitos and refalosas from Montevideo (see Rama 1982; Shumway 1993, 47–80). Only in the 1850s and 1860s, after the downfall of federal governor Juan Manuel de Rosas’s tyranny, did the gauchesco reprise a less partisan and more humorous kind of writing, which was yet also more blatantly abusive of the subaltern. Most notable was Estanislao del Campo’s (1834–80) Fausto Criollo (1866), a comic retelling of Gounod’s opera by an imaginary gaucho.12 In the meanwhile, local folk music assumed a distinctive shape.13 Fandangoderived “picaresque” dances, such as the zamacueca, the gato, and other related genres,14 customarily appear in documents and travelers’ descriptions of the 1820s and subsequent decades: the gato in Uruguay in 1823 (Vega 1986, II:153), 12 To musicians, the poem is mainly known through Alberto Ginastera’s (1916–83) orchestral Obertura para el Fausto Criollo, op. 9 (1943). 13 Vega’s argument backdating the genres and styles to 1800 and before rests on purely speculative grounds (see Vega 1956, 153). 14 For descriptions and examples, see Aretz 1952. For partial English overviews of Argentine folk music, see Garmendia Paesky 1982, 34–93, and Schwartz-Kates 1997, 189–274.

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the zamacueca in Peru and Chile in 1824 (ibid., 70–1, 115), and the mariquita in 1825 (ibid., 179). Some pieces can be dated to the same years, thanks to historical references in their lyrics or titles. The dance of the triunfo (triumph), for example, points to the victories of Junín and Ayacucho in 1824 (ibid., 259–60) and to later events as well; the oldest datable texts of the hueya (footprint, or perhaps track) also refer to the 1824 battles and to events in 1835 and 1840–1 (ibid., 273–4).15 Dances that were to become staples of national folklore can be recognized here. The process of independence developed simultaneously with the creation of new genres that emerged at the time of the last patriotic victories – and some of them seem to have been created for the purpose of celebrating the victories and keeping their memory alive, building up a sense of identity from the lower echelons of society. Both the cielito and, in particular, the triste became commonplace in the urban salons, which travelers regularly employed to create a sense of difference that would implicitly support their superiority. For José María Cabrer (1801), who devoted an inordinate amount of writing space to the triste, the combination of sweetness, pathos, and suavity in the music with the tragic or dramatic love texts moved “the hardest heart even when the listeners are not interested in the matter at all” (González 1882–86, III:481).16 In 1819, Alexander Caldcleugh imagined the Mendoza triste as the “mournful strains sung by the subjects of the last Inca after his death” – he had obviously encountered quite an imaginative informant – yet qualified the melodies as “excessively wild and irregular” (Caldcleugh 1825, I:288). Some ten years later, Arsène Isabelle looked down upon the favorite salon genres of Buenos Aires – tristes, cielitos, and the Spanish bolero – as “not devoid of charm,” and elaborated the idea into a sexual fantasy: “There is nothing more seducing than a porteña telling another one, in confidence: este triste me lleva el alma” (this triste carries my soul away; Isabelle 1835, 257). The travelers’ difference was the natives’ identity: the salons adopted the countryside tristes and cielitos as a token of local identity and after independence came to prefer them as a sign of belonging to the “political system of America,” as the new entity was known – no longer a colonial possession but not yet an organized state. So strong was their salon cultivation that it stimulated the genres’ folk life and produced subsequent musical representations – for example, as instrumental variations on the cielito – or revivals; the very term “cielito” came to refer to the whole dancing party (Sarmiento 2003, 63). Neither the emergence of musical folklore outside of the cities nor the salon 15 For a comprehensive historical examination of orally transmitted poems see Fernández Latour 1960. 16 Most of Cabrer’s work is plagiarized, yet his description of Buenos Aires is considered original (see Torre Revello 1943, 299–305).

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genres’ country connections, however, imply an overtly positive valuation of the rural. Rural music remained just as separate from the cities as both the people who made it and the symbolic system to which it belonged. According to the surviving musical documents, moreover, salon genres did not keep recognizable Argentine folk traits but rather employed indistinct Western idioms. Musical novelties from the independence period are far from the radicalism that assumed the political break with Spain and the scrapping of colonial structures and hierarchies. However useful Gauchos became, the city continued to hold a complex relationship with their hinterlands and did not yet appropriate them as an identity source. The musical politics of criollo identity, of constructing a sense of self through the manipulation of Western styles and idioms – rather than doing it on the basis of distinctive local materials – remained current after the revolution. Folk music continued to occupy a marginal position: tristes and cielitos adopted in the salons kept their names, characters, and ability to uphold a subjective sense of difference, but they lost any idiosyncratic traits they might have borne. The creation of a new South American political entity separate from the Spanish kingdom does not carry together the instant symbolic inclusion of every involved group, nor a complete break with deeply entrenched modes of representation, as popular music visibly – or perhaps audibly – implies.

Paradoxical Romanticism At first sight, one might assume that the willing reception of Romantic philosophies and sensibilities would help in solving the Argentine rift between city and hinterland – Herderian idealizations of both rural areas and their songs could heal urban suspicions and project the “natural” countryside, complete with their mythical Gaucho dwellers, as the ultimate cradle of nationality. None of this occurred. Romanticism indeed took Buenos Aires by storm in the early 1830s, immediately spreading to provincial cities. It remained hegemonic until mid-century, not least because of its power to emphasize the urbanites’ civility and create distinction, but the countryside did not lend itself well to idealizations of any kind. The novelties became all the more visible since, for the first time, they were accompanied by the appearance of a concise group of local-born intellectuals, known as the “Generation of 1837,” which appropriated the ideas and endorsed the sensibilities. If action, both political and military, was the hallmark of the independence period, reflection became the seal of the succeeding decades (Katra 1996, 112–67). In Buenos Aires in 1832, poet and ideologue Esteban Echeverría published a booklet with a poem, Elvira o la novia del Plata, considered to be the inaugural work of

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Romanticism in the Spanish language and soon followed this with a book of poems, Los consuelos (1834); this sparked a lively debate on the use of Classical verse forms and conventions (Mercado 1996, 38–49; Weinberg 2006, 33–57). Four years later, he published an article acknowledging Herder’s Wirkung and the national character of folk songs. The countryside, however, became an actual threat for the urban bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia was unable or unwilling to see it under a different light. A long-term process was already under way, which took city dwellers to the country for its economic advantages – urbanizing rural areas and also ruralizing city life. This process would eventually accelerate after 1850, providing the sources for the stupendous Argentine end-of-century boom and a basis for national gentry. Yet in the 1820s, and on the basis of their contribution to the war of independence, rural groups felt entitled to higher consideration and a larger share of power. After the struggle ended, federal caudillos convoked idle soldiers in their support and voiced their claims in the clearest possible way. Their pressure ended Rivadavia’s unitarist government in 1827 and installed federalist rulers in most of the provinces, with hegemonic Buenos Aires tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas on top. Their very physical presence scared urban elites to death, for they saw country dwellers as ragtag armies riding through their beautiful streets in uncontrolled ways: savages, they seemed, but completely lacking in any nobility that could enable them to become the carriers of the deepest national sense. Building a nation-state ceased to be a central concern until mid-century. Through a most astute combination of iron-handed authority, populism, terror, and high-class alliances, Rosas defeated his learned, centralist enemies – many of whom went into exile – and stayed in power for more than two decades. At first, the organization of a confederate country seemed possible; an 1831 pact set the foundations for such a state and delegated external relationships to the Buenos Aires governor. Rosas, however, did not allow the process to progress any further. It was only after he was defeated and fled the country in 1852 that a new constitution finally created the Argentine Confederation (1853). As a byproduct of this complex process, the Rosas era produced intellectual images of the local countryside that adopted tones oscillating between criticism, realism, and disenchantment.17 In his extended poem La cautiva (The captive woman), Echeverría produces enticing descriptions of what 17 Caveat lector! These remarks apply to the intellectual production of the 1830s and 1840s as currently constructed in the literature; for music, Suárez Urtubey 2007 serves as a good guide. One imagines that there was an alternative, pro-countryside, federalist discourse that opposed the overtly negative views of the 1837 intelligentsia, and more extensive source research than I have been able to perform for this chapter – in media such as newspapers, popular pamphlets and broadsides – may end up providing a clear counter-construction of the countryside.

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people saw as endless, deserted, incommensurable stretches of land, good only for colonization. Intellectual, writer, and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, another prominent member of the 1837 Generation, went even farther when he famously analyzed a country that did not yet exist through the blunt use of the Enlightened antinomy between Westernized civilization – represented by the unitarist bourgeoisie of the cities – and local barbarism – embodied in federalism, the country caudillos, and gauchos. His immensely influential, greatly vital essay, presented as a literary biography of the provincial caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788–1835), is a classic of Argentine nationality and comes close to being “the most important book written by a Latin American in any discipline or genre” (González Echeverría 2003, 1).

Rural music in Romantic cities By 1835, the countryside of the confederation had constructed a characteristic folklore of its own. Still, urban constructions of rural music did not draw on the potential for difference and identification that it offered. On the contrary, they rarely transcended the hegemonic writers’ negative approaches. Musicologist Melanie Plesch, for example, has examined the representation of the ur-gaucho instrument – the guitar – in paintings and literary descriptions around the time of Rosas that are sometimes taken at face value as evidence for performance practices. The musicians, she argues, are presented in disapproving ways through multiple strategies: the denigration of their ways and persons; a homogenization of multiple individuals under a single type (already a feature of the “paper gaucho” since the eighteenth century); their reduction to immobility and atemporality that denies them a history, as if they have been and will always be only equal to themselves; and their disqualification like Bedouins, Moors, and other Oriental people considered barbaric (Plesch 1999). Sarmiento himself turned Gaucho music into proof of the country’s lack of civilization in Facundo (Sarmiento 2003). His lengthy second chapter explores diverse kinds of Gaucho, in what is generally regarded as a prime sociological contribution, as if analyzing the type into its components: the tracer, the rural guide, the “bad Gaucho,” and of course the singer, an indispensable Gaucho trade. A man of letters is often pleased by his colleagues’ skills: the author cannot hide his admiration for rural troubadours’ poetic abilities, which for lack of schooling seemed to stem from nowhere. “In the midst of the rudeness of national customs,” he argues, music and poetry, “that embellish civilized life . . . are honored and favored by the masses themselves” (ibid., 53). Yet he managed to turn his approval into criticism by pointing out that the Gauchos’

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“original poetry” was “heavy, monotone, irregular . . . more narrative than sentimental, full of images taken from countryside life, the horse and scenes from the desert, which make them metaphoric and pompous” (ibid., 65). The fact that the author admitted not having visited the region before writing his essay – he based it on written sources – clearly exposes the ideological roots of his disapproval. His ethnography is both negative and imaginary, tailored to support his anti-Rosas political stance of the time as well as his cosmopolitan agenda for the times to come. Sarmiento did not spare even the mellifluous and mournful triste from his trenchant criticism. In an exercise of willful misconstruction, he describes it as a “Phrygian chant, weeping, natural to man in the primitive state of barbarism, according to Rousseau” (ibid., 53). The author does not seem to have heard a triste, or, if he did, he did not pay it any serious attention. His reference to Rousseau is furthermore puzzling. In Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, the Swiss philosopher deals with the Phrygian mode through the traditional ethos: belligerent but not primitive. At best, he assigns to that mode the dithyramb, a Bacchic song in Phrygian, which transmitted “the fire and the gaiety that the god to which it is consecrated inspires” (Rousseau 1768, 166). An inebriated man, however, is not the same as a wild one; Sarmiento adopted very liberal interpretations for the sake of his argument.18 The fear of the countryside that informed Sarmiento’s writing explains puzzling idiosyncrasies of the earliest project for the development of Argentine song. In 1836, Echeverría joined Buenos Aires composer Juan Pedro Esnaola (1808–78) in an effort to create a collection of so-called Argentine melodies or national songs. Soon the attempt was aborted, on account of the social and political unrest that occurred toward the central period of Rosas’s tenure. The two artists, nonetheless, produced a respectable number of pieces together – probably nine, to which three more were added later19 – plus a posthumous introductory prospect by Echeverría (1874b) and a published article that clarifies his approach to song writing (1874a) – enough materials to assess the nature and outreach of the project. Perhaps because of their fear, the authors left out of their proposal what modern folklorists cherish, namely rural song. Nothing in the project or its companion article refers to a Gaucho, or otherwise rural, presence within this collective self-image. The “national” character of the project referred

18 Similar concerns have been raised about the author’s imaginary reckoning of the vidala, a folk-song genre, as being Indian (see Suárez Urtubey 2007, 171–2; Vega 1966, 207). 19 See Illari 2005 for a list of these pieces, which must be completed with Un adios of 1841 (Echeverría’s authorship was first reported in García Muñoz and Stamponi 2002, 131) and El prisionero (c. 1840 or later). All scores are available in Esnaola forthcoming.

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not to the nation-state that did not yet exist, but to the population of a given territory to which they both felt themselves to belong: a sense of a “we.” The songs should be “the simple fruit of our musical sense,” further defined as “our aptitude to express in harmonious cadences the emotions of the soul and the intimate affects of the heart,” as Echeverría puts it (1874b, 130–1). The Romanticism of the quotations – the “simplicity” assigned to collective musical creation, the emphasis on music as the intimate expression of feelings – echoes European ideas, albeit with all references to the countryside carefully edited out. By so doing, the author exclusively stresses Occidental notions of civilization as an ideal to attain and develop, to the detriment of any connection with rural areas or their symbolic production, people, and landscapes. Esnaola’s sophisticated settings, clearly based upon opera arias and chamber song, are original – hence national – products, but they also lack folk references (Illari 2005). At a time when the eruption of rural masses had produced the urban dwellers’ energetic rejection, Echeverría and Esnaola’s exclusion of the countryside was not a coincidence or a mistake but a decision: the poet and musician implicitly subscribed to ideas no different from the ones developed in Facundo nine years later.20 Even texts that apparently support countryside music disclose a negative approach when subject to a deeper scrutiny. For example, Fernando Cruz Cordero, a lawyer and amateur guitarist-composer, wrote on “our music” in general, and the cielito in particular, in positive, even enthusiastic terms. When pitted against his appraisals of other musical traditions, however, the surface of his discourse reveals a few cracks. The second part of his Discourse about Music, geared toward defending and legitimizing his instrument (Plesch 2006, 37–40), lands upon the topic of the music of nations, which he probably based upon Rousseau (Cordero 2006, 58–9).21 He argues that music assumes different national characters. After describing the characteristics of English, French, Italian, and German music, he judges that “our music” is comparable to the first two traditions but cannot compete with the last two, for they enjoy their maturity and virility (his term), while “ours” is an infant, and, as such, it is impotent (again, Cordero’s terms). Cordero’s rescue arguments follow: he validates “our music,” which he apparently locates in the Buenos Aires province, through sentiment, and he writes passionately about the cielito. “Our music” has something peculiar of “ours,” a soft and delightful character that could not leave anyone untouched. Furthermore, Italian violin virtuoso Giacomo (aka Santiago) Massoni wrote

20 On Echeverría’s nation-building efforts in general, see Mercado 1996. 21 In the original text (1844), see 25–7.

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variations on “our provincial airs” that “complemented his celebrity in Europe.” Finally he lands upon the cielito, “two chords that belong to us, and that, alone by themselves, make hearts beat,” on account of its “divine” energy, expression, and charm that speak equally well to all social ranks. Yet he also adds that the dance is “as tasteless to the palate of art as it is tasty to that of nature.” It is not civilization but barbarism, namely authenticity and the closeness to a primeval state, which validates “our music” and the cielito. Sarmiento’s antinomy also informs Cordero’s text – the savage is still there, albeit converted into a noble one. For all of its stated enthusiasm, Cordero’s strategy looks more like a smoke screen than a promotion of rural music. His curious feminizing of “our music” applies gender ideas to the subject in a derogatory way (Plesch 2006, 37). He excludes from his text everything specifically rural. Of all possible genres, he singled out the one that was regularly cultivated in the salons, which failed to produce a concrete set of musical signs that could evoke identity.22 Moreover, he legitimized popular genres, not in and of themselves, but rather through their use by an Italian composer. His text does manage to project a favorable image of the subject matter, while at the same time it falls short of a truly positive presentation. There may have been a political motivation behind this move. Cordero, the son of a prominent doctor who served as doctor for the Buenos Aires police during the Rosas regime (Plesch 2006, 14),23 profited as a lawyer from his father’s apparent allegiance to the regime and certainly wanted to put forward an image of a “good federal.” For this reason, and given the countryside basis of Rosas’s party, a promotion of rural music was in place. Later in his life, however, the author became a prominent member of Argentine Masonry, which stands at odds with the strong pro-Catholic basis of Rosas and the federals in general. The carefully controlled ambivalence on the subject of “our music” in Cordero’s Discourse on Music implies that he already nourished anti-Rosas feelings when he wrote it, but that he disguised them to avoid any trouble for both his father and himself.24

22 Cordero’s description is itself telling of the lack of a specific set of cielito gestures: the tonic and dominant chords performed in “triplet air” (probably meaning 3/8 meter), which indeed is the basis for the cielito caprices and variations by Esnaola, Alais, and Hargreaves. So nondistinct is the cielito that even Carlos Vega failed to produce an exemplary tune to illustrate his monograph on the genre, something he did with almost every other dance (see Vega 1986, I:149–210). 23 Many of Dr. Cordero’s notes survive in the police archive, now deposited at the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires. 24 Cordero’s refined ways and his opposition to the countryside are featured in memoirs by José Antonio Wilde and Santiago Calzadilla. Particularly telling is the story about a Gaucho guitarist who declared that it was easy to imitate Cordero’s learned (probably plucked) style of playing but was ultimately unable to do it, for his technique may have principally involved strumming. See Plesch 1999 and 2006, 19–20.

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Paradoxically, local Romanticism eschewed both the countryside and its music. As control of discourse remained in the hands of learned urbanites, a consistently negative trend runs throughout the texts, including Sarmiento’s blunt analysis, Echeverría and Esnaola’s song project, and even Cordero’s seemingly positive enthusiasm for the cielito. At this time, rural populations had already created identities of their own, complete with a set of distinctive musical genres and practices. Legitimacy, however, was absent from the mix. Those constructs were not generally promoted. Hegemonic identities were negotiated on the basis of salon music, and their Western-style practices were held to be models of civility for the future, as if the nation under construction were the affair of a single social class – and the countryside remained excluded.

Epilogue: nationalizing the Gaucho It was only during the so-called process of national organization that the countryside was reevaluated in positive terms and eventually construed as the site for an Argentine (musical) myth of origins. The construction of the Argentine state was not closed in 1853 but continued until 1880, when Buenos Aires was declared a federal territory and the brand-new capital of La Plata was founded for the province of Buenos Aires (1880–1). The reassessment of the countryside responded to several causes. Starting in the early 1860s, the introduction of steamships, railways, engines, wired fences, and a rationalist approach to economic exploitation made the Argentine countryside much more profitable. The region as a whole gained a new status, as did rural peoples and cultures. Immigration, nonetheless, was officially promoted, attracting several hundred thousand Europeans to populate and “civilize” the “Argentine desert.” Development and immigration triggered intense fears of change, which in turn fueled the nostalgia for the past and the imagination of older rural ways as essentially good and desirable. This rescue operation of the countryside experienced a quantum leap with the publication of José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, a lengthy epic about a persecuted Gaucho written in such a powerful way that it gained instant popularity.25 The poem continued the century-old gauchesco tradition in that it denounced a political situation – namely the forced draft of rural dwellers to fight Indians in the south of the country – and that it resorted to purportedly authentic Gaucho speech. Yet it was also quite new in its positive take on Gaucho behavior and customs and in its recourse to realistic elements: a lowly hero, a social theme, “ugly” language, and crude imagery. The 25 For Hernández’s power connections see Demarchi 2008–9.

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publication hit the spot: thousands of copies were sold over the following years, particularly in a countryside that identified with the hero, the aesthetics, and the poem. A second part that provided closure to the narrative from a more generally human and less overtly political perspective followed in 1879, meeting similar success. A true flurry of novels, circus performances, plays, and poems picked up the topic of the Gaucho and exploited it ad nauseam over the following decades, prompting the movement that Prieto (2006) called “criollismo,” while Vega considered it the “first wave” of the Argentine traditionalist movement (Vega 1981, 34–72). Gaucho music also underwent a large boost. Within the Martín Fierro, music was no less than the precondition for the poem, for Gauchos (as the stereotype goes) do not speak much but sing their stories willingly. The two main nineteenth-century ethnographies of Gaucho music, Arturo Berutti’s “Aires nacionales” (1882) and Ventura Lynch’s La provincia de Buenos Aires (1883) came in the wake of the poem’s astonishing success; several lesser pieces of writing accompanied them (Suárez Urtubey 2007, 176–93). Music accompanied circus and theater plays, which produced a revival of vanishing countryside traditions, some of which were accepted into the salons. Still, this movement mainly targeted popular audiences. Few intellectuals joined, or even approved of it, for it was regarded as vulgar and unworthy of educated people’s attention. By 1900, it was quickly fading away, for the aristocratic elite that ruled the country until 1916 was more concerned with cosmopolitanism than with anything national. The decisive canonization of the Gaucho as part of an Argentine national origin myth came around the 1910 centennial, after (both après and d’après) lofty writers such as Ricardo Rojas or Leopoldo Lugones, who moved from provincial origins that inspired their work to the capital that hosted and promoted their action. Music was extremely important for their ideas – Rojas discussed it again and again and promoted the work of musicologists Vicente Forte and Carlos Vega in the 1920s, while Lugones made the payador (a gaucho singer of payadas, or improvised poetical duels) central to lectures that definitively rescued Martín Fierro in 1913 (see Dalmaroni 2006, 79–140; Degiovanni 2007, 97–214; Terán 2008, 171–82). As the result of such efforts, another story about the national invention of an Argentine folk music was about to take shape.

Appendix: the most important recordings of Martínez Compañón’s music Al uso de nuestra tierra: Chants et danses du Baroque Péruvien. Performed by Musica Temprana, directed by Adrián Rodríguez van der Spoel. Publisher no. VOL BL 702. Rognes (France): Voice of Lyrics, 2001.

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Camino a América. Performed by Musica Ficta [Buenos Aires], directed by Rubén Soifer. Buenos Aires: IRCO, n.d. Codex Martínez Compañón. Performed by Tiziana Palmiero and the Capilla de Indias. Publisher no. K617179. Metz: K617, 2005. El congo: Trujillo del Perú in the 18th Century: A Peruvian Musical Manuscript. Performed by Anthonello and Adrián [Rodríguez] van der Spoel. Publisher no. AMOE 10011. Tokyo: Anthonello Mode, 2009. Martínez Compañón y Bujanda, Baltasar Jaime. Peru: El diamante. Publisher no. OPS 30–265. Performed by Albalonga, directed by Annibale Cetrangolo. Paris: Opus 111, 1999.

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Degiovanni, F. (2007) Los textos de la patria: Nacionalismo, políticas culturales y canon en Argentina, Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Demarchi, R. (2007) ‘Popular y revolucionaria: La gauchesca en su origen’, Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios, 37, www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero37/revogauc. html (accessed October 21, 2009) (2008) ‘El ideologema de la revolución: Los cielitos de Hidalgo’, Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios 38, www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero38/cielitos.html (accessed October 28, 2009) (2008–09) ‘Para leer el Martín Fierro: Literatura y política, economía y saber’, Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios, 40, www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero40/mfierro.html Echeverría, E. (1874a) ‘La canción’, in J. M. Gutiérrez (ed.), Obras completas, vol. 5, Buenos Aires: Carlos Casavalle, pp. 132–7; orig. publ. as ‘Canciones’, El iniciador: Periódico de todos y para todos, 7 (1838): 137–8; facsimile reprint, 221–2 (1874b) ‘Proyecto y prospecto de una colección de canciones nacionales’, in J. M. Gutiérrez (ed.), Obras completas, vol. 5, Buenos Aires: Carlos Casavalle, 130–2 El amor de la estanciera (1999) Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, www.cervantesvir tual.com/FichaObra.html?portal=0&Ref=(1273) (accessed 1 November 2009) Esnaola, J. P. (forthcoming) Colección de canciones con acompañamiento de piano / Collection of Songs with Piano Accompaniment, ed. B. Illari, Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical Fernández Latour [de Botas], O. (1960) Cantares históricos de la tradición argentina, Buenos Aires: Dirección Nacional de Cultura, Instituto de Investigaciones Folklóricas García Muñoz, C., and G. Stamponi (2002) Juan Pedro Esnaola: Su obra musical: Catálogo analítico-temático, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Universidad Católica Argentina Garmendia Paesky, E. (1982) ‘The use of the milonga, vidalita, and huella in the piano music of Alberto Williams 1862–1952’, PhD dissertation, Catholic University of America González, M. [aka Parellada, P.] (1882–6) El limite oriental del territorio de Misiones (República Argentina), 3 vols., Montevideo: El Siglo González Echevarría, R. (2003) ‘Facundo: An introduction’, in D. F. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, the First Complete English Translation, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–15 Halperin Donghi, T. (1972) Revolución y guerra: Formación de una élite dirigente en la Argentina criolla, Mexico City: Siglo XXI (2007) Historia contemporánea de América Latina, 6th edn, Buenos Aires: Alianza Halperin Donghi, T. et al. (eds.) (1994) Sarmiento, Author of a Nation, Berkeley: University of California Press Illari, B. (2000) ‘Zuola, criollismo, nacionalismo y musicología’, Resonancias, 7: 59–95 (2001) ‘Polychoral culture: Cathedral music in Chuquisaca (Bolivia), 1680–1730’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago (2005) ‘Ética, estética, nación: Las canciones de Juan Pedro Esnaola’, Cuadernos de Música Hispanoamericana, 10: 137–223 (2007) ‘The popular, the sacred, the colonial and the local: Villancicos and the performance of identities in Chuquisaca (Bolivia)’, in T. Knighton and A. Torrente (eds.), Devotional Music in the Iberian World, 1450–1800: The Villancico and Related Genres, London: Ashgate, pp. 409–40 Isabelle, A. (1835) Voyage à Buénos-Ayres et à Porto-Alègre par la Banda-Oriental, les Missions d’Uruguay et la Province de Rio-Grande-do-Sul de 1830–1834, Le Havre: J. Morlent

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Katra, W. H. (1996) The Argentine Generation of 1837: Echeverría, Alberdi, Sarmiento, Mitre, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Lynch, V. R. (1953) Folklore bonaerense, Buenos Aires: Lajouane; orig. publ. as La provincia de Buenos Aires hasta la definición de la cuestión capital de la republica, vol. 2 [sole published]: Costumbres del indio y del gaucho, Buenos Aires: La Patria Argentina, 1883 Maravall, J. A. (1986) The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. T. Cochran, Manchester University Press Mercado, J. C. (1996) Building a Nation: The Case of Echeverría, Lanham, MD: University Press of America Pagaza Galdo, C. (1960–1) ‘El yaraví del Cuzco’, Folklore Americano 8–9: 75–141 Palmié, S. (2007) ‘On the c-word, again: From colonial to postcolonial semantics’, in C. Stewart (ed.), Creolization and Diaspora: Historical, Ethnographic, and Theoretical Perspectives, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Shore Press, pp. 63–88 Plesch, M. (1999) ‘La silenciosa guitarra de la barbarie: Aspectos de la representación del Otro en la cultura argentina del siglo XIX’, Música e investigación, 3–4: 57–80; orig. publ. in English in ‘The guitar in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires: Towards a cultural history of an Argentine musical emblem’, PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 1998, pp. 50–87 (2006) ‘El Discurso sobre música de Fernando Cruz Cordero’, in F. C. Cordero, Discurso sobre música, Buenos Aires: Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación, pp. 9–44 Poma de Ayala, G. (1615 [orig. publ.]) Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, Guamán Poma Website, A Digital Research Center of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, www.kb.dk/permalink/(2006)/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm (accessed October 30, 2009) Porras Barrenechea, R. (1946) ‘Notas para una biografía del yaraví’, El Comercio, July 28, http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/Bibvirtual/libros/linguistica/legado_quechua/notas_para. htm (accessed November 24, 2009) Prieto, A. (2006) El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna, 2nd edn, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Rama, Á. (1982) Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina Rodríguez Molas, R. (1968) Historia social del gaucho, Buenos Aires: Maru Romero, J. L. (1982) ‘Campo y ciudad: Las tensiones entre dos ideologías’, in Las ideologías de la cultura nacional y otros ensayos, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, pp. 86–114 (2004) Latinoamérica, las ciudades y las ideas / Latin America: Its Cities and Ideas, 2nd edn, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, www.educoas.org/Portal/bdigital/contenido/interamer/ interamer_59/index.aspx (accessed September 13, 2009) Rousseau, J.-J. (1768) Dictionnaire de musique, Paris: Duchesne Sarmiento, D. F. (2003, orig. publ. 1921) Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism: The First Complete English Translation, trans. K. Ross, Berkeley: University of California Press, Schwartz-Kates, D. (1997) ‘The gauchesco tradition as a source of national identity in Argentine art music (ca. 1890–1955)’, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin Shumway, N. (1993) The Invention of Argentina, Berkeley: University of California Press Sicramio [Rossi y Rubí, José] (1791) ‘Rasgo remitido por la Sociedad Poética sobre la música en general, y particularmente de los Yaravíes’, Mercurio Peruano, 101

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Slatta, R. W. (1983) Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Socolow, S. M. (1978) The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce, Cambridge University Press (1987) The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Solís, M. d. R. (2007) ‘La obra de José Rossi y Rubí en el Mercurio Peruano: Búsqueda y creación del lector criollo ilustrado’, Tinkuy: Boletín de investigación y debate, 6: 1–101, www.littlm.umontreal.ca/recherche/publications/Tinkuy6FINAL.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009) Solomianski, A. (2003) Identidades secretas: La negritud argentina, Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Sorensen Goodrich, D. (1996) Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture, Austin: University of Texas Press Stevenson, R. (1968) Music in Aztec and Inca Territories, Berkeley: University of California Press Suárez Urtubey, P. (2007) Antecedentes de la musicología en la Argentina: Documentación y Exégesis, Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad Católica Argentina Terán, O. (2008) Historia de las ideas en la Argentina: Diez lecciones iniciales, 1810–1980, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Torre Revello, J. (1943) Crónicas del Buenos Aires colonial, Buenos Aires: Bajel Vega, C. (1956) El origen de las danzas folklóricas, 3rd edn, Buenos Aires: Ricordi (1962) El himno nacional argentine, Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires (1966) Las canciones folklóricas de la Argentina, Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación, Subsecretaría de Cultura, Instituto Nacional de Musicología (1978) ‘La obra del Obispo Martínez Compañón’, Revista del Instituto de Investigación Musicológica ‘Carlos Vega’, 2: 7–17 (1979) ‘Colección de música popular peruana’, Revista del Instituto de Investigación Musicológica ‘Carlos Vega’, 3: 17–43 (1981) Apuntes para la historia del movimiento tradicionalista argentino, Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Musicología ‘Carlos Vega’ (1986) Las danzas populares argentinas, 2nd edn, 2 vols., Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Musicología ‘Carlos Vega’ Weinberg, F. (2006) Esteban Echeverría, ideólogo de la segunda revolución, Buenos Aires: Taurus

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PART VI

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ASIAN MUSIC HISTORIES

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Four recurring themes in histories of Chinese music JONATHAN P. J. STOCK

Introduction The writing of history has long standing in Chinese civilization. Since almost the earliest dynasties, it was normative for the new rulers to order their officials to record detailed information on those whom they had supplanted. Musical data were among the information preserved in the resulting dynastic histories. Palace musicians not only provided entertainment, but were essential functionaries in the rites of government, and so an integral part in the basic operating system of Chinese imperial bureaucracy. Moreover, throughout history Chinese authorities have regarded music as able to shape the well-being of society as a whole. Accordingly, it was a force to be reflected upon in works on the ideologies of rulership. The first Chinese music history still extant today is part of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü (Lüshi chunqiu), a large-scale reference work named for Lü Buwei (d. 235 BCE), prime minister of the kingdom of Qin (source of the Western term “China”). Lü assembled a team of scholars to produce this work at a moment when Qin was poised to conquer rival states and establish a much larger empire. Completed c. 239 BCE, the work finally comprised twelve almanacs (one per month), eight examinations, and six discourses. It narrates how to run a state, including advice on the holding of rites, sustaining the institutions of government, and properly conducting military affairs, among other topics. Musical content appears particularly in Almanac 5, that dedicated to the second month of summer. Here, we read that the Son of Heaven (i.e., the ruler) should at this time mandate the music master to place the instruments of music and the accoutrements of dance in good repair so that the sacrifices can be performed in a seemly way. Numerous instruments are identified, from zithers (qin and se) to bells and stone chimes (zhong and qing) (Knoblock and Many thanks to Qian Lijuan, Wu Xiaorui, and Yang Hon-Lun for their generous assistance in locating materials and providing feedback on drafts. I am grateful also to staff at the Library of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, where this writing first took shape and whose personal research grant made possible the library time in Shanghai.

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Riegel 2000, 134). Contemporaneous practice may have suggested these particular instruments, but the record was historically oriented: it offered an account of music’s origins and a discussion on the relation between music making and the health of the nation that referred to earlier states. Historical writings are not only long-established, but are also richly diverse. There have been very significant shifts in the contexts surrounding and impelling the writing of fresh histories of music over the long period of Chinese cultural identity, and historians at any single time have taken multiple and divergent approaches to their subject. These characteristics mean that the compiler of a history of histories faces a wide-ranging set of source materials that resist compression into the apparent certainty of a single, developmental pathway. To capture better the existing multiplicity of sources, I compare how selected histories present four key themes, each of which is present (or conspicuously absent) in work from every historical era. While this choice leaves the reader to infer a chronological survey of Chinese music, it allows ready access to the kinds of argument building over data and interpretation that have been ongoing in China for well over two millennia. Excepting contemporary published sources that are cited in this chapter’s bibliography, historical sources used in this comparison are summarized in Table 16.1; these represent only a tiny fragment of the materials available. 1) The opening theme is that of music’s origins, which Chinese historians, recent and long-since departed, have elaborated upon in a number of Table 16.1 Summary of historical primary sources compared in this chapter Source Oracle bone inscriptions

Author/Comments

Date of completion

Court officials; divinatory tools sixteenth to eleventh that recorded many musical centuries BCE (Shang details period) Book of Odes / Shijing Court officials; completion tenth to sixth centuries BCE ascribed to Confucius (Zhou Dynasty) (551–479 BCE); lyrics of 305 songs Classic of History / Team of scholars; early work on eleventh to fourth Shujing court history centuries BCE (Shang and Zhou periods) Spring and Autumn Qin kingdom scholars; written c. 239 BCE (shortly preceding Annals of Master guide to governance Qin Dynasty) Lü / Lüshi chunqiu

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Table 16.1 (cont.) Source

Author/Comments

“Record of Music” / Confucian scholars following “Yueji” the Qin government’s destruction of earlier sources; one chapter of the Record of Rites / Liji “History of Tuning” / Sima Biao (c. 240–306); later “Lü li zhi” added to the Later Han History / Hou-Han shu, the dynastic record of the Later Han (25–220) “Song of the Pipa” / Bai Juyi (772–846); poem with “Pipa xing” lengthy description of music for four-stringed lute Book of Music / Chen Yang (fl. late eleventh to Yueshu early twelfth centuries); music encyclopedia The Green-Bower Xia Tingzhi (mid-fourteenth Collection / century); collection of Qinglou ji biographies of Yuan Dynasty performers, mostly actresses A Revised Zhu Zaiyu (1536–1611); treatise Interpretation of the on musical temperament Semitones / Lülü jing yi Mountain Songs / Feng Menglong (1574–1646); Shan’ge collection of folksong lyrics from East China Music of the Oriental Wang Guangqi (1892–1936); Nations / treatise on comparative Dongfang minzu musicology zhi yinyue

Date of completion second century BCE; but intended to replicate sources several centuries older (Qin Dynasty) fifth century (incorporates detailed materials from Jing Fang, 78–37 BCE)

816 (Tang Dynasty)

1101, published 1195 (Song Dynasty) 1341–55, preface added in 1368 (Yuan and Ming Dynasties) c. 1595, published c. 1606 (Ming Dynasty)

c. 1619 (Ming Dynasty)

1929, Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju (Republic)

thought-provoking ways. 2) A second theme emerges from further observations on some of the earliest known musical practices from China, namely the assumption that there is an intimate connection between a nation’s musical pitchscape and its political health. 3) Writers from the middle centuries of China’s lengthy imperial period very regularly paid attention to the contributions of specialist musicians, and that forms the next theme in this account. 4) The final

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Fig. 16.1 Yang Yinliu’s A Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music theme is particularly prominent in the musical here-and-now of the early twenty-first century, but turns out to have strong precedent in historical accounts: China’s music history as an account of culture contact, within and across China’s national boundaries.

Original ideas “Labour created man himself, and so created music too,” wrote historian Yang Yinliu (1899–1984) extending a pithy phrase from Friedrich Engels to form a single-sentence paragraph opening his two-volume A Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music (Yang Y. 1981, 1; see Fig. 16.1).1 Yang was preparing his work at a time when explicit inclusion of Marxist ideology was required, but the claim is an interesting one, and stands out from Western scholars’ ascriptions of music’s origins to its role in sexual selection or the forging of communal spirit. There are several further points of interest in Yang’s 1 Engels’s statement occurs at the start of an unfinished work of 1876 entitled ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’, in which he argues that the human hand was not only the “organ” of labor, but also the “product” of it; see also www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-playedlabour/index.htm (accessed June 12, 2012). For a biography of Yang that contextualizes his work on this history over several decades of writing and revision, see Micic 2009.

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account. First, he notes that the earliest music must have been communally participated in by all, since it predated the division of physical and intellectual labor in society (ibid., 2). Second, Yang comments that music was inseparably connected to religion and witchcraft, where it was endowed with imaginative and optimistic potential. Third, labor itself provided much of the material of musical art, not simply its patterns of movement and sound, which afforded rhythm and tune, but also the impetus for artistic creativity that emerged as part of the ongoing struggles in the production of society. Fourth, Yang described the earliest performances as involving the unified combination of poetry, music, and dance (ibid., 3). The compiler of the account of the origins of music in the Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü was similarly confident 2,200 years earlier, although the source to which he ascribed music’s primogenesis was a rather different one. Instead of the reshaping of the human body sparked by bipedalism and materialized through the rise of manual labor, the author records that: The origin of music is in the very remote past. It was born of equal measurement and rooted in the Grand Unity. The Grand Unity gave birth to the Counterparts [heaven and earth]. The Counterparts gave birth to yin and yang. The yin and yang transformed and stratified into higher and lower levels. These came together and formed regular patterns. Rolling over and about, they would separate, then come together, come together, then separate. This is called the constancy of heaven; the turning wheel of heaven and earth coming to an end begins again, reaching its ultimate source. All things are part of this process . . . The emergence of the myriad things is the creation of the Grand Unity, transformed by yin and yang. Like the sprouts of a bean, they begin with a burst of movement and then crystallize into solid form. Their physical forms are varied, and they all produce sound. The sounds issue in harmony, and that creates accord. From this harmonious accord was born music, set down by the sage-rulers. (Almanac 5, section 2; cited in DeWoskin 1982, 56)

In this account, music exists in the world quite independently of any human presence. It is, moreover, a force in itself, and the ruler was reminded to seek and achieve a sound balance so as to make a positive impact on the external world more generally. This sound balance, with its patterned flows of yin and yang and cyclic changes of form, took its primary inspiration not from labor but from the natural world. These two examples could be interpreted to suggest a move from metaphysical to sociological explanations of music’s origins, but provision of a further early account of music’s origins shows that Chinese experts have been actively debating the origins of music since the beginning of their recorded histories. The passage below opens the “Record of Music” (“Yueji”, chapter 27 of the Record of Rites [Liji], probably written in

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the second century BCE but widely believed to be based on considerably earlier sources and practices): In all cases, the arising of music (yin) is born in the hearts of men. The movement of men’s hearts is made so by [external] things. They are touched off by things and move, thus they take shape in [human] sound (sheng). Sounds respond to each other, and thus give birth to change. Change forms a pattern, and this is called music (yin). The music is brought close and found enjoyable, and reaches the point of shields and axes, feathers and pennants, and this is called Music (yue). (Cook 1995, 24–5)

By contrast, here we find a view of music beginning within the individual as he or she forms an emotional response to external ideas and experiences. Given initial expression in sound, there is then a process of sharing and developing these emotionally driven sounds into patterns, from which finally emerge fully planned and pleasurable performances of music and dance. (The shields, axes, feathers, and pennants are devices held by dancers in early Chinese rites.) In its language, this view shares little with Yang Yinliu’s observations above, although it too points to a unified expressive form involving music and dance, and presumably the sung word as well; in fact, it may be unsafe to use sources describing early court rites as evidence of the origins of music itself which presumably would have occurred long before the rise of courts in human evolution. Additionally, the writer of the “Record of Music” and Yang both point to the existence of an aesthetic role for music: the author of the “Record of Music” identifies the ability to enjoy as a key requirement in moving from patterned sounds to performance, while Yang refers to the human imagination that must be exercised to create music.

Tuning the nation Predating all the sources cited so far is another set of written descriptions of music in China, those of the Shang period (sixteenth to eleventh centuries BCE), the height of the Chinese Bronze Age, a time that saw the rise of writing in China more generally. These sources were not produced with the intention to record music history systematically, but later historians can find among them tantalizing glimpses of then-contemporaneous musical ensembles and of music’s role in the royal rites. Music-related information is found among inscriptions on segments of bone, which were employed as divinatory tools.2 Each oracle bone, as they became known, was inscribed 2 Researchers believe that the Shang Chinese wrote on bamboo and silk as well as bone, turtle shell, and, toward the end of the Dynasty, on bronze. Bamboo and silk remains have not survived in burial sites, and so

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with a question or proposal and heated; specialists then interpreted the resulting pattern of cracks and splits to determine whether or not Shangdi (lit., the Ruler Above, i.e., God) approved of the course of action proposed. Tong Kin-Woon (1983a, 1983b, 1984) has studied the surviving inscriptions in detail; his analysis reveals that music was believed to be able to propitiate the forces of nature, the ancestors, and Shangdi himself, and contribute to the earning of good fortune, bountiful harvests, and national prosperity. The Classic of History (Shujing) is an assemblage of records compiled between the eleventh and fourth centuries BCE. It details the Shang period, its predecessors – the Yu and Xia periods – and the ensuing Zhou period. Among its several musical references are a number that attest further to the role of the ruler in maintaining the soundly tuned nation: Let me hear the six pitch-pipes and the five musical tones produced by them. (Let me hear) the eight categories of musical instruments [i.e., metal, stone, clay, leather, silk, wood, gourd, and bamboo] tuned according to the pitchpipes. They (the sovereign said) will serve as (the basis of) an examination of the merits and faults of my government. (Let me hear) the odes which are created by the nobles and the poems created by the people (and examine them as to their) using the (correct) five notes. (New Text, “Book of Yu” [“Yu shu”], part 2; cited in Kaufmann 1976, 23, endnote references omitted)

Later dynasties added two further elements to this portrait of correct, and correcting, performance.3 The first of these was the proposal that the five notes of a pentatonic scale (known as gong, shang, jue, zhi, and yu) embodied the nation. Here, the compiler of the “Record of Music” explains this notion: Gong is the ruler, shang is the minister, jue is the people, zhi is the affairs, and yu is the things [of production]. If these five are not chaotic, then there will be no discordant music (yin). If the gong [tone] is chaotic, then [the music] is disorganized, [indicating that] the ruler is arrogant. If the shang [tone] is chaotic, then [the music] is slanted, [indicating that] the ministers are corrupt. (Cook 1995, 30)

The second addition was the idea that absolute pitch was crucial to the efficacy of the rites, and that finding and retaining that pitch would sustain the dynasty. This impelled an amount of musicological inquiry, as officials sought out historical sources in order to identify the earliest tunings, which they then our view of Shang civilization today is one that emphasizes the richness of their court rites and religious practices, recorded on the more expensive and more durable materials, more than the Shang themselves might recognize. 3 The notion that musical performance made a genuine contribution was, however, disputed by the philosopher Mozi (c. 470–c. 391 BCE), who criticized taxing the ordinary people in order to support legions of court entertainers.

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applied in reconstructed ancient music ensembles, a historically informed performance movement long before that of the West.4 Many early Chinese writers attribute the origin of pitch-pipes – and the regulation of musical pitch more generally – to a court music master named Ling Lun. Acting on orders from the Yellow Emperor (claimed to have been active c. 2,700 BCE), Ling traveled West until he located perfectly regular bamboo, from which he cut pitch-pipes, one for each semitone, each based on the sound of a different phoenix. These pipes were then employed to tune the bell sets and other instruments used in the court ceremonies intended to harmonize heaven and earth.5 The ordering of these semitones into a series is also ascribed to Ling Lun. The series comprises alternate movements up a fifth and down a fourth, with adjustments in direction as required to keep the whole series of twelve pitches within the space of a single octave. Whether this method dates back as far as the sources claim is unknown – its earliest documentation occurs in The Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü – but excavated bells attest to the system being in actual use already in the fifth century BCE (see also von Falkenhausen 1993, 302–3). Discussions over numerous centuries focused on the refinement of the mathematical means through which pitch-related calculations were made. None of the early sources explicitly identifies a notion of equal temperament, but Chinese writers quickly observed that when one continued through the cycle of fifths for twelve steps, the end-note was noticeably out of tune with that which started the cycle, even though each individual step sounded perfectly in tune. This acoustical problem (known in the West as the Pythagorean comma) demanded a solution insofar as the court bell and chime sets that played for ritual music had to offer each of the twelve semitones (lü). As fixed-pitch instruments, these could not be retuned for performances in different modes, unlike stringed instruments, and the expense of constructing them, their size, and wide register discouraged the making of multiple sets, each suited to a contrasting mode, as occurs with bamboo flutes, for instance. One of the most successful solutions was that put forward by Jing Fang (c. 78–37 BCE); it appears in the “History of Tuning” (“Lü li zhi”) of the Later Han History (Hou-Han shu). Using a purpose-built monochord alongside advanced mathematical calculations, Jing continued the generation of pitches through a cycle of fifths up to the sixtieth step. He then selected the twelve that sounded best, resulting in a set that is in all

4 For a case study of instances from the Ming Dynasty, see Lam 1996. 5 As numerous sources observe, bamboo pitch-pipes are actually not very reliable for generating a stable pitch, and it is likely that Chinese instrument builders used some other device in tuning their bell sets.

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practical senses audibly indistinguishable from one produced through equal temperament (McClain 1979). Such concerns are evident in later sources as well. Zhu Zaiyu (1536–1611) followed predecessors like Jing by refining the calculation and definition of musical temperament in several treatises, including the A Revised Interpretation of the Semitones (Lülü jing yi), completed around 1595 and published c. 1606. Earlier researchers had generated a cycle of fifths and fourths by subtracting or adding to the length of a musical string using the proportions 2:3 or 4:3, a process which generated fifths that were a little too wide and fourths that were a little too narrow, the comma mentioned above. These proportions can also be written as 500:750 and 1000:750 – Zhu’s innovation was to replace the value 750 with 749, a step that both compresses the fifth and stretches the fourth, essentially overcoming the problem of the comma (Kuttner 1975, 180). Zhu ascribes his use of 749 as a divisor back to far earlier historical sources where, in fact, it is little seen. Kuttner (ibid., 181–2) describes this as an expedient gesture in the wider context of a scholarly tradition that venerated past sources. It also resonates, of course, with the broader ethos driving inquiries such as Zhu’s, that is, the reconstituting of the practice of remote antiquity, although Zhu himself did not take steps toward the practical application of his tuning system. Notwithstanding the development of tuning systems over a period of well over two thousand years, the earlier emphasis on music as a barometer for the nation as a whole has not been set aside. Indeed, in modern China, under both the Nationalists (1912–49) and Communists (1949 to the present), governments have regularly acted to prescribe the nation’s favored sonic environments. The most striking instance of this occurred during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when only a very small number of (large-scale) pieces were approved for performance. This phase remains to be treated critically in music histories written by mainland Chinese authors, but one important element of such an account would likely be the multimodal systemization observed in the so-called “model works” (yangbanxi), where manipulation of costuming and make-up, lighting, props, movement, stage positioning, and instrumentation is given as much attention as absolute pitch-level (see also Mittler 2003).

Historical approaches to musicians Chinese music history features many further accounts of individuals who bring or once brought Chinese music to life in performance, some more fanciful (as in the case of Ling Lun above), others strictly matter-of-fact.

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An extended, impressionistic example is offered by Tang Dynasty (618–907) poet Bai Juyi (772–846) in his composition “Song of the Pipa” (“Pipa xing”) written in 816.6 In the poem, Bai records that he is recently banished from the capital, and he and his companions seek a musician to add to their enjoyment while drinking together on a boat. Encountering an unnamed female entertainer, they invite her to play and her evocative performance on the four-stringed, pear-shaped lute pipa takes them all into a mood of poignant reflection. In response to Bai’s enquiries, she then recounts her past as a popular court entertainer whose upper-class audience withers away as her youthful beauty declines. Her subsequent marriage to a merchant has brought her little companionship, since he regularly leaves her alone when traveling to trade. Her account leads Bai to recognize his own forlorn emotions for the first time. Bai compares her elevated music to the rustic folk songs and tunes of this site of mutual abandonment. Offering to dedicate a poem to her, he encourages her to play once again. She finally does so, moving all to the deepest tears. The biographical accounts of actress-singers preserved in The Green Bower Collection (Qinglou ji, 1341–55, preface added in 1368) by Xia Tingzhi (fl. mid-fourteenth century) are typically rather more prosaic in nature than Bai’s poetic account, but this does not mean they are any less carefully composed. Here is Xia’s short entry on Zhu Jinxiu: The wife of Hou Shujiao. She had mastered both the male and the female roles in Comedy [zaju, a genre of operatic performance] and her singing voice made the dust fall from the rafters. Though her figure was no more than mediocre, her outstanding art quite surpassed her colleagues. (cited in Idema and West 1982, 166, romanizations adjusted)

Xia Tingzhi was well aware that the writer of a history of sing-song girls would be assumed to be of dubious moral stance. He asserts in his preface that zaju dramas were able to deepen human relationships and share a sense of beauty, and indeed that this contribution, in the hands even of female performers, reveals the last days of the Southern Song to be a time of richness, not of moral decline (cited in ibid., 157–78). As this suggests, Xia was not writing history from the perspectives of actresses, but selecting anecdotes and reminiscences about performers whose situations exemplified the Confucian values espoused by those who shared Xia’s own class 6 In setting a poem alongside the formal court records and musicological writings already introduced, I am recognizing poetry as a further means by which an author preserves music-related immediacies for future audiences, albeit one with its own specificities in terms of the mechanics of memorializing. The large number of surviving poems in Chinese has led to the publication in recent decades of musicologically oriented collections of poems with commentaries, such as Lu 1993.

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background. For instance, he described with approval singers who became concubines of prominent men and then, after the man’s demise, lived out their years chastely. It is clear that he valued women performers first and foremost for their beauty, although physical shortcomings could be compensated for by possession of exceptional skills in singing and acting, as in the case of Zhu Jinxiu. Despite their ability to move audiences, many Chinese musicians had low social standing. They often married other musicians, although the families of those who lost in political intrigues were regularly drafted into the musical profession as a form of punishment and so provided a further source of new blood. Xiang Yang has studied such music makers in Shanxi Province in depth, comparing historical sources with information from contemporary field study (Xiang 2001). Although names are recorded in some of the historical sources Xiang uses, it is evident that certain historians were more inclined to document numbers and categories of musicians than to record the details of their lives as individual human beings. Chen Yang (fl. late eleventh to early twelfth centuries) offers one such example in his Book of Music (Yueshu, 1101), a detailed examination of the music ensembles found in the court, which includes descriptions of the tuning, instruments, and dances: In the fifth year of the Taiping xingguo era [980], an edict ordered that those in the army who performed music well should be gathered together, and were called the yin long team. In the third year of the Chunhua era [992], this was altered to the junrong team. They were placed under the management of court functionaries. The troupe was lined up in two ranks around forty musicians and a leader who was responsible for the song lyrics. It was a performance of the zaju type, with these musical instruments: mouth organ (sheng), bamboo flute (di), bamboo reed pipe (bili), lute (pipa), cymbals (fangxiang), clapper drum (paigu [wood clapper, paiban?]), stick drum (zhanggu), drum of the Jie people (Jiegu), and large drum (dagu). Originally, there were 136 performers, later increasing to over 200. When the emperor inspects different provinces, they play music on horseback ahead of the imperial chariot. (cited in Xiang 2001, 14; his editorial additions in square brackets)

The treatment given to the Beijing opera actor and singer Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) contrasts with each of the examples presented so far. Accounts of Mei are numerous indeed, and his career has formed the focal point in discussions in topics as varied as aesthetics, melodic analysis, stage design, political history, intercultural theatre, and gendered performance. Nevertheless, the apparently remarkable illuminative ability of Mei’s life across such diverse subject areas still does not make it an essential component in every history of

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Chinese music in the twentieth century. Liang Maochun and Chen Bingyi (2005), for example, embrace a wide range of genres in their account, but give no space at all to Mei’s achievements. An element of authorial choice remains in Chinese musicology as to which major figures are included and how they are represented, but, more significantly, we see in the larger-scale pattern of choices made hints of the contrasting priorities of several distinct strands of music scholarship. Shen Qia (1999) summarizes these strands, drawing attention to the emphases of approaches as diverse as: Chinese musicology / Zhongguo yinyuexue Chinese traditional musicology / Zhongguo chuantong yinyuexue ethnomusicology / minzu yinyuexue folk-music research / minjian yinyue yanjiu traditional music theory / minzu yinyue lilun

There are further disciplinary affiliations associated with Chinese scholars who work on Western music.7 In some of these strands, study on even the most outstanding music makers within indigenous traditions receives less attention than the research of those involved in imported musical styles; the implication of such histories is that these latter styles have supplanted the former in the musical life of the nation, an implication which does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. Here, we can see the impact of composer-centric accounts, as widely found in Western musicology. In these, performers typically fare less well than the creators of new compositional utterances, an approach that is very much the opposite of that found up until around one century ago, where the figures discussed in Chinese histories were almost exclusively performers, on the one hand, or theorists, on the other.

Centers, peripheries, and the musical history of intercultural contact Writing in the 1950s, Shen Zhibai (1982, 3–6; see Fig. 16.2) identifies four key desiderata in a history of Chinese music, one of which is that China was from the earliest days multicultural as well as being involved in cultural exchange with neighboring peoples. That the minority peoples and the areas where they customarily lived were an inalienable part of the new People’s Republic was a key emphasis of state policy at that time, but Shen pays more than lip service to this idea of culture contact, building this principle into each chapter of his

7 For an extended account of numerous subfields within Chinese music history, see the account by Wang and Qiao 2005, 160–80.

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Fig. 16.2 Musicologist Shen Zhibai chronologically ordered book. For instance, at the appropriate historical moment in chapter 2, he provides a lengthy case study of the pipa, emphasizing its foreign origin and tracing related, lute-form instruments throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe (ibid., 39–45). Many historians have documented the importing of foreign sounds throughout the long history of Chinese music, most notably the entertainment orchestras brought to the court from numerous other states during (and before) the Tang Dynasty. For example, Yang Yinliu (1981, 215) offers a comparative table to show the growth in number of these ensembles over the years 581–642. And Yang Hon-Lun (2007) looks at the partially similar situation in China from 1949 to 1960, where a series of statesponsored commemorations of Western musical figures (including Glinka, Handel, and Paul Robeson) acted to project representations of the new state as cosmopolitan and culturally interlinked with carefully selected global partners. Glinka represented the Soviet Union, of course; Handel was presented as a model East German; and Robeson was championed as an African American socialist oppressed in his homeland.

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But the presence of non-Han musicians and musical styles in China has not been welcomed by all. In his Book of Music, for instance, Chen Yang appears, at best, amused by the fact that Han civilization was taking on influence from those whom he believed to be cultural inferiors: The xiqin was originally a foreign (that is, Turco-Mongol) instrument. It arose from a strung rattle-drum, and its shape also resembled the same. It was an instrument beloved of the Xi tribe. Now concerning its structure: the two strings are made to creak (ya) by a slip of bamboo between them. Up to the present (that is, 1195 [1101; 1195 was the date the Book of Music was published]) it is in use among the common people. This is not in accordance with the principle of “transforming the barbarians by the practices of the Chinese.” (entry on “The Xiqin” [“Xiqin”]; cited in Picken 1965, 85, romanizations adjusted) It is permissible to use Chinese music to alter Barbarian customs, but for Barbarian music to muddle up the Chinese – how can that be permitted? (“Introduction to the Barbarian Section” [“Xu Hu bu”]; cited in Wang 1984, 73)

If attitudes toward the importing of music have varied so widely from approval to documentation and amused disapproval, Chinese music historians collectively say rather less about flows in the opposite direction. Even today, and notwithstanding specific studies of the export and transmission of music outside China’s borders, few of the general texts mention music making in the sizeable Chinese diaspora or explore the substantial contribution that Chinese traditions have made over the ages to musical life elsewhere. Wu Zhao and Liu Dongsheng are an exception, explicitly incorporating a section on “Musical Contact between China and the Nations of Europe and Asia” that examines not only the flow of Western music into China but also that of Chinese music into Japan and Southeast Asia during the modern period (1993, 305–9). Although their passage is relatively brief, it serves to counterbalance a portrait of China as only an importer of music during this time, not a center for cultural innovation and exportation. Wang Guangqi (1892–1936) offers a second example in his Music of the Oriental Nations (Dongfang minzu zhi yinyue, 1929). One of the first generation of comparative musicologists, Wang identified three global cultural centers (Greece, Persia, and China) and drew up a map of pathways of dissemination and interaction from each (reproduced in Shen 1999, 11). Other Chinese writers have paid attention to the crossing of important internal boundaries of social class and the urban–rural divide. Feng Menglong (1574–1646) offers an excellent example of this. Feng believed the folk songs of the rural population carried content of value to those in urban

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society. In this, he followed a long tradition, dating back to the first imperial courts, where music masters were regularly set the task of collecting folk songs so that the emperor could assess the state of the health of the nation. Feng’s work stands out, however, in that he focused on the erotic lyrics that comprise a high proportion of the songs he gathered in the Wu-dialect area (Southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Eastern Anhui Provinces).8 In his preface to a volume entitled Mountain Songs (Shan’ge, pre-1619), Feng argues that the songs he found showed authentic emotion and avoided the falseness of cultivated expression in the cities. That he needed to put forward such a justification for assembling these materials suggests that little had changed in terms of public ideologies since Xia Tingzhi’s volume on sing-song girls, and this remained the case three centuries later when early twentieth-century Chinese folklorists accused Feng of having a taste only for the exotic and salacious. After 1949, and despite many claims by the communist government to valorize the values of the ordinary citizen, love songs were almost entirely eclipsed in a series of movements that sought out, and if necessary, provided “healthier” songs for the population at large (Schimmelpenninck 1997, 144).

Conclusions, limitations, next steps Certain long-term continuities come to the fore in an approach such as this: that music emerges from feeling; that its use has consequences for all within earshot; that histories of Chinese music are accounts, too, of the people who sing or play instruments; and that Chinese music has been part of international cultural flows for almost two thousand years already. In choosing to emphasize such continuities, and in bringing attention to their varying treatment over time, I have said much less about significant historical changes, such as the rise of significant genres, the emergence of regional styles, and the development of particular instruments, ensembles, and performance aesthetics. These are documented in many existing accounts, which the present chapter seeks to reflect upon, not replace. The set of themes I have selected for this chapter also brings out the vibrancy of musicological debate in China over a very long period. The source studies reveal Chinese musical discourse as an accumulation of knowledge over time, but primarily as a locus for argument, with contrasting interpretations of evidence being put forward at the earliest times just as much as in the present day. Jeff

8 Antoinet Schimmelpenninck notes that there are many love songs even in the earliest such collection, the Book of Odes (Shijing, thought to have been compiled between 1000 and 600 BCE). She proposes that the argument that songs (and presumably their singers) were collected for political reasons may be a polite cover for a movement that was always more concerned with providing fresh court entertainment (Schimmelpenninck 1997, 2–3).

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Todd Titon defines ethnomusicology as “the study of people making music” (Titon 2009, xvii) and points to the efforts we undertake to construct the “idea” of music, as well as its sounds: this chapter shows some of the work the Chinese have undertaken over centuries making and remaking the idea of music. It would be difficult to study Chinese music as a monocultural entity, if only because insistence on cultural homogeneity so often occurs in a wider context of contact and contestation, but each of the first three themes listed could readily be turned around to produce a more extended analysis of the making of music history in China. For example, we might look at how Chinese authors have written on musical change, rather than its origins, or even at its disappearance. Our analysis could consider music created in China as a means for disengaging with the wider social world. We might complement the section on Historical Approaches to Musicians with a section on Music as Historiography. Chinese artists and poets have regularly utilized the resource of musical performance to make new sense of the history of their nation. This occurs most obviously in operatic traditions and storytelling with musical accompaniment, but it can be found also in film, in contemporary art-music compositions that include deliberately archaic components, and in the so-called northwest wind-style of 1980s Chinese rock (xibeifeng), songs known for their nostalgia-laden lyrics and rough vocal timbres that point from urban centers toward an (imagined) rural “back-home.” The themes identified intersect in revealing ways. The writing of musicologist Shen Zhibai offers examples that illustrate what is at stake in the writing of music history. Shen (1982, 97) opens his chapter on the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing Dynasties (1644–1911) with an account of Zhu Zaiyu’s work on the calculation of equal tempered semitones, proudly describing him as “ahead of Werckmeister by one-hundred years,” an observation that rather ignores the succession of European musicians working on problems of musical temperament in the century before Andreas Werckmeister himself. Shen’s history was published posthumously; he actually prepared much of the writing around the time of the Korean War (1950–3), when the communist government in China was preparing the nation for conflict with the United States. As such, an overtly nationalistic stance would very likely have been required in order for the book to secure publication by the state, not least given that Zhu Zaiyu was a member of the aristocracy, and so in that sense a less than ideal example of a people’s historical hero for the population of the newly formed nation. In fact, similar claims have been made by scholars outside China: Kenneth Robinson (Robinson and Needham 1962, 212–18) even suggests that Zhu’s calculations may have been quickly brought to Europe and stimulated the development there of equal temperament, a claim for very significant impact upon the history of Western music; he was contributing to a major scholarly

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project that sought to correct Western assumptions of complete primacy in the history of science. A subsequent generation, with also new disciplinary expectations, has disputed these claims, both outside and within China. Fritz Kuttner (1975) offers detailed reference to source materials from each location, and Chen Yingshi (1988–89) reminds us that while Zhu worked out how to

Fig. 16.3 Section of a score for the nanyin chamber-music genre (Quanzhou 2003, 193) Explanatory note: the score is read in columns, from right to left across the page. Large symbols in each column are the song lyrics. Smaller symbols form three columns beneath each lyric: (left) the main pitches for the instrumental accompaniment; (center) performance symbols for the pipa (the lute which leads the ensemble); and (right) the metrical pattern of eight beats per measure is marked by the symbol ㄙ, three diagonal black dots ､, and a white circle 0, and then three more black dots. The music is played by an instrumental ensemble (notwithstanding the lyrics, there is often no vocalist) and normally performed from memory; the working out of the several individual instrumental parts and of details of rhythm, ornamentation, and interplay are left to the performers and their knowledge of the tradition. A composer’s name is not given on the score.

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calculate equal temperament, he crucially did not ever see this theoretical insight into practical musical application in China. Finally, my discussion of themes in historical writing about music has left aside one crucial difference between Chinese and Western musical traditions. This concerns the role of composers and specifically the preservation of their work in notation. Obviously, there have been creative and innovative musicians in China throughout history, just as elsewhere in the world, but until the last hundred years or so, recording the identity of the creator of a musical work was generally not considered to be of importance. Meanwhile, music notation, though employed in China for hundreds of years, was used in ways quite distinct from its Western classical and church music roles as both a compositional tool and a means of coordinating distinct parts in group performance. While there are some genres of Chinese music that might be likened to the classical traditions of the West – music for the seven-stringed zither qin and jingju (Beijing opera), perhaps – the Chinese musicologist has many fewer scores to consult than his or her Western counterpart, and the notations that are available are likely to serve as outline representations of their creators’ intentions (more like a jazz lead sheet than a symphonic score; see Fig. 16.3). The characteristics of scores available to Chinese musicologists may not be a factor that needs discussion in the bulk of Chinese-language sources studied here but in the context of the present volume it is a characteristic that continues to mark out Chinese musicology as notably distinct from its Western counterpart.

Bibliography Chen Y. (1988–89) ‘Temperamentology in ancient Chinese written records’, Musicology Australia, 11–12: 44–64 Cook, S. (1995) ‘Yue Ji 樂記 – Record of music: Introduction, translation, notes, and commentary’, Asian Music, 26, 2: 1–96 DeWoskin, K. (1983) A Song for One or Two: Music and the Concept of Art in Early China, Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan Idema, W., and S. H. West (1982) Chinese Theater 1100–1450: A Source Book, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag Kaufmann, W. (1976) Musical References in the Chinese Classics, Detroit, MI: Information Coordinators Knoblock, J., and J. Riegel (eds.) (2000) The Annals of Lü Buwei, trans., annotated, and with an introduction by J. Knoblock and J. Riegel, Stanford University Press Kuttner, F. A. (1975) ‘Prince Chu Tsai-Yü’s life and work: A re-evaluation of his contribution to equal temperament theory’, Ethnomusicology, 19: 163–206 Lam, J. S. C. (1996) ‘Ritual and musical politics in Ming Shizong’s Court’, in B. Yung, E. S. Rawski, and R. S. Watson (eds.), Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, Stanford University Press, pp. 35–53

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Liang M., and Chen B. (2005) Zhongguo yinyue tong shu [A General History of Chinese Music], Beijing: Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan chubanshe Lu W. (ed.) (1993) Zhongguo gudai yinyue shi 200 shou [200 Poems on Music in Ancient China], Shanghai yinyue chubanshe McClain, E. G., with translations by Ming Shui Hung (1979) ‘Chinese cyclic tunings in Late Antiquity’, Ethnomusicology, 23: 205–24 Micic, P. (2009) ‘Gathering a nation’s music: A life of Yang Yinliu’, in Helen Rees (ed.), Lives in Chinese Music, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 91–116 Mittler, B. (2003) ‘Cultural Revolution model works and the politics of modernization in China: An analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’, The World of Music, 45, 2: 53–81 Picken, L. E. R. (1965) ‘Early Chinese friction-chordophones’, The Galpin Society Journal, 18: 82–9 Quanzhou Local Opera Research Association (eds.) (2003) Qing keben Wenhuan tang zhipu [The Qing Dynasty Wenhuan Tang Notation], Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe Robinson, K. G., and J. Needham (1962) ‘Sound’, in ‘Physics and physical technology’, in J. Needham (ed.), Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, Cambridge University Press, pp. 126–228 Schimmelpenninck, A. (1997) Chinese Folk Songs and Folk Singers: Shan’ge Traditions in Southern Jiangsu, Leiden: CHIME Foundation Shen Q. (1999) ‘Ethnomusicology in China’, trans. and with response by J. P. J. Stock, Music in China, 1, 1: 7–38. Previously published as ‘Minzuyinyuexu zai Zhongguo’, Zhongguo yinyuexue, 3 (1996): 5–22 Shen Z. (1982) Zhongguo yinyue shi gangyao [A Draft History of Chinese Music]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe Titon, J. T. (2009) “Preface” in J. T. Titon (chief ed.), Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World’s People, Belmont, CA: Schirmer, pp. xvi–xxiii Tong K. (1983a) ‘Shang musical instruments: Part one’, Asian Music, 14, 2: 17–182 (1983b) ‘Shang musical instruments: Part two’, Asian Music, 15, 1: 102–84 (1984) ‘Shang musical instruments: Part three’, Asian Music, 15, 2: 67–143 van Falkenausen, L. (1993) Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China, Berkeley: University of California Press Wang S. (1984) ‘Song Chen Yang “Yueshu”: Wo guo di yi bu yinyue baikequanshu’ [Chen Yang’s Book of Music: China’s First Music Encyclopedia], Yinyuexue congkan 3: 67–74 Wang Y. and Qiao J. (chief eds.) (2005) Yinyuexue gailun [On Musicology], Beijing: Guoji jiaoyu chubanshe Wu Z. and Liu D. (1993) Zhongguo yinyue shilu˝e [An Outline History of Chinese Music], Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe Xiang Y. (2001) Shanxi yuehu yanjiu [A Study of the Shanxi Music Households], Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe Yang H. (2007) ‘Power, politics, and musical commemoration: Western musical figures in the People’s Republic of China (1949)–(1964)’, Music & Politics, 2, www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/(2007)-2/yang.html (accessed June 15, 2009) Yang Y. (1981) Zhongguo gudai yinyue shi gao [A Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music], Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe

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On the history of the musical arts in Southeast Asia MARGARET KARTOMI

The concept of Southeast Asia as a geographical and cultural unit was widely accepted only after World War II, from which time “insular Southeast Asia” comprised the nation-states of Indonesia, East Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and the Philippines, and “mainland Southeast Asia” comprised Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and West Malaysia. These states contain a great diversity of ethno-linguistic groups, each with its own self-contained music culture and history, ranging from upland hunter-gatherer minorities to coastal plain-dwelling majorities. The region is divided into the predominantly Buddhist mainland and the mainly Muslim islands, with the Philippines being the only predominantly Christian nation. A few general histories, based on a large body of interdisciplinary research, have been published on Southeast Asia as a whole (Hall 1961; Fisher 1967; Cady 1964; Tarling 1999), but a history of its music – as opposed to individual histories of its many ethnic groups and genres – has not yet been written. This is due to the gap between modern situations and historical knowledge, the unevenness and inadequacy of the sources, and the hesitation of many scholars to view the region as a whole. Although the collective historical and archival research into the court musical arts of Thailand, Central Java, and Bali is substantial, the many music cultures of the thousands of ethno-linguistic groups in the region have not yet been researched. A succession of music ethnographies has been published, especially since the 1980s, that relate a previously unstudied music culture, genre, or instrumentarium to the general history of its area or people, while others have combined scattered archaeological, iconographic, and epistolary evidence with colonial-era writings and field research into people’s cultural memory, thus producing brief historical accounts. In this chapter, cultural memory means not only “memory culture” of individuals, which allows a society to objectify its past activities and preserve its traditions, but also “references to the past” made by later generations, who reconstruct and reinterpret their art forms and singular cultural identity in a particular time and space. It includes myths and legends and the memories of elderly artists’ teachers and mentors. [416]

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A few biographies of select recent performers, composers, and scholars have been produced, based on data that belongs to living memory. Some scholars have argued that history can be read “in the notes,” for example, by analyzing Malay and European elements in dondang sayang (love song) music, which may have developed as a result of Malay–Portuguese contact in the Portuguese colony of Malacca between 1511 and 1641. No authors, however, have been in a position to write a history of Southeast Asian music as a whole. This chapter aims to provide an overview of Southeast Asia’s music history and to examine critically some of the main themes in the historical discourse, including historical aspects of publications on the music cultures of the region. It will be somewhat speculative by necessity and has space enough only to refer to a few of the sources, focusing mainly on the most-studied music cultures in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

The prehistoric era The available sources allow only tentative conclusions about musical life in prehistoric times, including the ancient migrations. Archaeological discoveries of sets of lithophones in Hoa Binh and Bac Son (Vietnam), dating from the third to the first millennium BCE, indicate that they may have been precursors of the xylophones that spread throughout Southeast Asia in the first millennium or earlier, such as the bamboo Vietnamese t’rung and the Sundanese calung, which are also mentioned in royal annals and traditional oral narratives. The earliest bossed gongs may have been made in the first two centuries BCE, initially perhaps in Java, whence they would have spread to many parts of the region. Archaeological sources indicate that bronze and iron objects were widely distributed in Southeast Asia from 500 to 400 BCE, probably transplanted into the Philippines from Sa Huynh and into Indonesia from Dông Son in the Red River valley of northern Vietnam from c. 700 to 100 BCE. This indicates a sophisticated metal-working music culture and widespread culture contact in that era. Fragments of waisted bronze Dông-son kettle drums, as detailed by Heidhues (2000), have been unearthed in southern and southwest China and throughout Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The musical significance of the kettle drums requires considerable speculation. The central pattern carved on some upper surfaces, depicting the sun, snails, frogs, and geometrical designs of heavenly bodies, suggests that they may once have been played during magical rain-making ceremonies or sunworshiping rituals. Dông-son drums continued to be made in more recent

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centuries: for example, at Gresik in East Java but with a long hourglass shape instead of the ancient waisted form. One such drum is housed under its own roof to this day in a temple at Pejeng in the Bangli district of Bali, where it is forbidden to be touched, let alone played, though Dông-son instruments have long since ceased to be part of living musical culture. The wide distribution of some instruments, including conch shells and other signaling instruments (such as split drums of Bali and west Sumatra), suggests they are of ancient origin. Many instruments made of bamboo, which grows profusely in many varieties and provides a major basis for the material culture, include flutes, single-reed pipes, shawms with wound coconut leaf or sugar palm horns, shaken idiophones (e.g., the angklung in Java, Malaysia, and Thailand), tube zithers (e.g., the Karo Batak keteng-keteng), bamboo buzzers, and jews’ harps. Drums made of wild animal skins (e.g., from lizards or snakes) and bowed strings with a stretched fish skin membrane (as in mainland Riau) are found in more isolated areas and are also probably very old, while instruments made from the skins of domesticated goats and buffaloes may date from the first millennium CE. Wooden blocks for stamping husks off rice grain developed centuries ago into a musical instrument, with players beating out different pitches on them in interlocking rhythms and colotomic patterns (as in Javanese gamelan music), but their shapes vary in different parts of the region; for example, there are hollow wooden trough shapes in Java, troughs with gouged holes in the Simalungun Batak area (Sumatra), and egg-cup shaped troughs in Aceh (Sumatra) and Thailand.

From c. the first to c. the fifteenth century CE A number of sources show that between the first and the tenth centuries CE, many parts of Southeast Asia experienced commercial, artistic, architectural, and religious contact with India and China, which substantially influenced the musical arts. Chinese sources clearly refer to well established trade links between south China, parts of Southeast Asia, India, and the Red Sea and mention that tribute missions were frequently sent from the region to China, even from faraway Java. In Vietnam, Chinese sources report that a succession of commercial kingdoms was established, including Langkasuka, near Patani on the Thai-Malayan isthmus, around 100 CE. A Buddhist kingdom known as Funan, in which the local people were converted to Hinduism, was established in the third century and was conquered by a Khmer prince of Cambodia in the sixth century. Saivite Hinduism and Hinayana or Theravada Buddhism were superimposed on local animist systems of nature and ancestral spirit veneration, with indigenous deities appearing alongside Hindu deities and Buddhas.

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From the fifth century, Chinese diplomats and Buddhist pilgrims described sophisticated courts in which Indian Brahman priests officiated. Indian traders, priests, artists, and craftsmen reportedly brought forms of Hinduism and Buddhism to most of the region, along with the associated rituals, liturgical songs, instrumental music, and dancing; local people absorbed and transformed them in their new environments. Meanwhile, in many parts of mainland and insular Southeast Asia, a rich array of indigenous music, dance, and theater forms developed from Hindu and Buddhist ideas and episodes from the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. Vietnam was politically dominated by China from the seventh to the tenth century CE. Given the dearth of evidence, however, the extent to which Vietnam’s indigenous arts were influenced by China in this period is a matter of debate, as is the whole issue of Chinese and Indian influence in Southeast Asia. The Netherlands East Indies (NEI) ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst was convinced of the Indian origin of most archaeological, iconographical, and epistolary sources, as discussed in his Hindu-Javanese Musical Instruments (1968). Kunst and later scholars, such as Andra Varsanyi (2000), bring together evidence of a wealth of Hindu and Buddhist music culture in parts of Indonesia from around 700 BCE to 1600 CE, focusing on the historical and organological study of the great gongs in Indonesia and adopting a similar historical approach. J. C. van Leur (1955), however, asserts that colonial-era writers overrated the extent of foreign influence vis-à-vis indigenous genius in this and later eras. The spirit of India in the commercial Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms on the mainland and the islands is strongly apparent in the archaeological, iconographical, and epigraphic evidence that they left behind. They include: the Taruma kingdom in West Java from around the fourth century CE; Srivijaya (seventh to fourteenth century CE), initially located near Palembang, Sumatra; Pagan (now Bagan) in Burma (from 849 CE); and Majapahit in East Java (thirteenth to sixteenth century CE). Chinese, Arab, and Old Malay records and iconographical evidence indicate that Tantric Saivite and Tantric Mahayana-Buddhist cults were centered at Malayu, Srivijaya, and Padang Lawas, and later Jambi, Muara Takus, and Pagaruyung in Sumatra, where they built temple complexes ranging from the monumental to the small shrine. Archaeological, iconographical, and epistolary evidence of a wealth of metal, wooden, and bamboo instruments, including various types of flutes, drums, lutes, xylophones, and zithers, are depicted in stone bas-reliefs on the Buddhist stupa Barabudhur built by the Buddhist Sailendras in Central Java during the eighth to ninth centuries CE; similar depictions are also found in the tenthcentury Saivite Lara Jonggrang temple complex at Prambanan and Cambodia’s

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great complex of temples at Angkor from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Tantrism entered Java as an integrated element of Saivism (worship of Shiva in Hinduism) and Buddhism. In medieval Java, Saivite priests and Buddhist monks taught the scriptures and presided over rituals in temples, monasteries, and independent hermitages; they were also resident in the courts. A problem for historians is that the sources cannot clarify how those peculiar blends of Hinduism and Buddhism in medieval Southeast Asia came to be. Religious communities and their Tantric aesthetic were almost certainly wellsprings for the worldview that came to permeate music and dance at the courts of Central Java. Reliefs of most instruments on Barabudhur are arguably of indigenous origin, despite the colonial-era view that they were Indian transplants. They include waisted, hourglass, pot and barrel-shaped drums, a slit drum, two-stringed lutes, harps, transverse flutes, mouth organs, reed pipes, shell trumpets, a single small gong (kethuk), a keyed metallophone (not dissimilar to a modern Javanese saron), a xylophone, bells, tinkling cups, and large and small cymbals. On Prambanan a truncated conical drum and a three-stringed lute are found, and on Candhi Sari a bar zither and a range of similar and dissimilar instruments, as well as dance postures, appear in the murals of Angkor in Cambodia. Reliefs of a male drummer and female dancers are chiseled in murals on a Wajrayanistic temple at Portibi, North Sumatra. Archaeological evidence of instruments includes bells, cluster bells, and stone chimes, while engravings have been found of mouth organs, drums, and clappers on some bronze drums. An annotated translation of the fourteenth-century Javanese epic Nagarakrtagama by Theodore Pigeaud (1962) also drew attention to many instruments and small gamelan-like ensembles used in the fourteenth-century East Javanese Hindu kingdom of Majapahit. The spread of Indian artistic practices resulted in artists throughout Southeast Asia creating local musical, dance, and theatrical adaptations of the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata epics and the Buddhist Jataka stories (of the life of Buddha). Historians still cannot establish, however, whether and to what extent the collective evidence of early local performing arts mainly represents local artistic life or Indian models. On the Hindu island of Bali, direct Indian influence began in the eighth century or earlier, while Balinese contact with Hindu-Buddhist Java began in the ninth century. In the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, Hindu-Javanese artisans, priests, and nobles fled from the East Javanese kingdom of Majapahit to Bali, where Hindu- and Buddhist-Javanese and Balinese culture continued to develop, with the courts setting the standards for the rituals, gamelan playing, dance, and theater. In the late thirteenth century, the rise of Kublai Khan in China resulted in a Mongol raid that destroyed the Burmese kingdom in Pagan, along with

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Indianized realms in Cambodia and East Java. Migrations of Thais from the north into Thailand and Burma resulted in the establishment of their capital in northern Thailand in 1350. From then until c. 1750, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam received immigrants from Mongol conquests in southern China, who introduced forms of Chinese theater that were adapted in each country to suit local conditions. In the centuries that followed, Burmese, Thais, Laotians, and Cambodians borrowed from and adapted each other’s theater, music, and dance forms, either as the spoils of war or the fruits of peaceful contact, and their bronze ensembles, song, dance, and theater came to bear many stylistic and material similarities as well as important differences. David Morton has briefly described the historical influences of Mon, Cambodian, and Chinese music cultures on Thai instrumental ensembles, musical styles, and repertories in The Traditional Music of Thailand (1976). From the early second millennium, populations in parts of Indonesia, Malaya, southern Philippines, Sulu Islands, Borneo/Kalimantan, and others began to convert to Islam. Many prosperous foreign traders practiced Islam, and Indian and Middle Eastern Muslim missionaries proselytized in the Tantric monasteries located in the countryside. Judith Becker (1993) has drawn together sources to show that Tantric-Buddhist and Tantric-Hindu practices and religio-artistic ideas merged together in fourteenth-century Java and persist in part to this day. The pluralistic, tolerant form of Islam that they received incorporated animist, Tantric, and Savaite-Buddhist facets with new Sufi elements in their rituals and associated performing arts. Converted Muslim teachers gradually replaced the Tantric teachers in the courts. Being mainly Sufi-oriented, their kind of mysticism did not greatly differ from that of their Tantric predecessors, though their form of worship and idea of God differed. The Javanese court arts reinterpreted the pre-Muslim genres and incorporated them into Javanese Muslim forms (e.g., gamelan sekati and wayang menak shadow plays). Southeast Asia’s first Muslim kingdoms at Pasai and Peurulak, in present-day Aceh, date from the late thirteenth century. From around 1300, Muslim conversion in Mindanao, Sulu Islands, and Borneo was also attributed to the activities of Sufi missionaries and Muslim traders. By the early fifteenth century, the sultanate of Melaka (Malacca) was established as a major trade emporium and center of Muslim knowledge. Legend has it that Sufi saint-missionaries, who were attached to existing troupes of artists, converted rural populations in Malaya, the southern Philippines, Java, Aceh, West Sumatra, and beyond to Islam. Thus, the wali sanga (nine Muslim saints) are believed to have spread Islam throughout Java via itinerant shadow-play artists and their troupes of musicians who could attract substantial audiences to hear their sermons and stories and be taught

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how to pray. A rich array of Muslim devotional songs, with dance or movement based on Sufi mysticism and related secular forms, spread throughout insular Southeast Asia and Malaya. One such form was the solo and group vocal kompang with frame-drum accompaniment, which thrives in Malaysia and parts of Sumatra to this day. Despite the Muslim conversions, the Hindu/Buddhist-Javanese tradition of gamelan and vocal music, dance, and theater continued to thrive in Java’s villages and royal courts, providing special patronage and developing “refined” (Indonesian, halus) styles and repertories. Artists in Bali apparently absorbed Hindu/Buddhist-Javanese culture through the immigrants from Majapahit and continued to develop their own gamelan, dance, and theater styles based on Balinese legends and Balinese adaptations of the sacred Hindu Ramayana epic. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese managed to throw off nine centuries of Chinese domination in 938. Vietnam’s subsequent golden age of music and culture, in the Ly and Tran dynasties (eleventh to fourteenth centuries), featured elaborate choreographed dances, water puppet and other theater performances, Buddhist liturgical songs, and court music composed for various orchestras and ensembles, with outdoor festivals and Buddhist ceremonies becoming broadly popular. From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, however, Vietnamese monarchies began to adopt Chinese, especially Confucian, ideals as the principal guidelines for social, cultural, and political activities. As a result, elegant court music was distinguished from that of commoners.

The early colonial period Sources from the colonial era are much more abundant than in earlier times, including the extensive writings of European observers held in the colonial archives of the six former colonizing nations. Being written by representatives of invader powers, however, they present their own problems of historical interpretation and perspective. Enticed by east Indonesia’s spices and other resources, the colonial era began when the first Europeans arrived there in the sixteenth century and began proselytizing Christianity. Portugal conquered the commercial sultanate of Malacca (Melaka) in 1511, the Spanish began colonizing the Muslim southern Philippines from the 1570s, and the Dutch began to send trade missions in the seventeenth century. Indigenous Filipino culture thrived before the arrival of the Spanish. Reports from the early sixteenth century by friars, civil servants, and travelers describe a wealth of wooden, bamboo, and bronze instruments and songs for agriculture, fishing, courting, epic story telling, as well as music and dance for

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life events. Except in the Muslim south, Hispanization was closely linked to the people’s conversion to Catholicism. Missionaries induced the Filipinos to build churches, with the friars teaching Gregorian chant, organ playing, and polyphony and presiding over elaborate masses, festivals, and fiestas. Besides liturgical and paraliturgical genres, hybrid genres with a Hispanic – and later Hispanic-Cuban – tinge took root. Spain also tried to halt the Islamicization process in Mindanao, the Sulu Islands, and Palawan, where a tolerant form of Islam among the Moros (so named because they shared the same religion as the Moors of Spain) provided the religious–political base for and commercial relations between the many sultanates. In Malacca and elsewhere in Portugal’s seaborne empire, Portuguese colonial households employed Filipino and other Southeast Asian musicians who doubled as servants, giving them European bowed and plucked stringed and other instruments to play. The roots of the Malay-Portuguese branyo social dance and dondang sayang (love song) music in Malacca, with vocalist, violin, plucked strings, harmonium, and drums, may lie in this colonial PortugueseMalay household environment. Transplanted forms of Malay-European music, such as kapri and gamat music-dance in west-coastal Sumatra, may also derive from early Portuguese-Malay contact. Portugal, however, lost its empire to the Dutch in 1641, and by the early eighteenth century the Netherlands East India Company controlled much of modern Indonesia, with the British following suit in Malaysia and Singapore. The Dutch presided over Christian proselytization in parts of Indonesia and also supplied local musicians with instruments and repertory, which spread in the form of brass instruments (e.g., hand-made trumpets and trombones) and drums in the tanjidor bands in Java and Sumatra. Popular Malay bands combined violins and Western harmony with Malay-style vocal duels, cyclic drum playing, and couples dancing, thus creating syncretic music-dance genres such as kroncong in Indonesia and Malaya. By the nineteenth century, virtually the whole region was fragmented between the European powers. The British ruled over much of present-day Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Burma, while the French took over Vietnam and Cambodia, leaving Laos sandwiched in the middle. Only Siam (Thailand) stood outside the formal empires of the external colonial powers. Early colonial literature, written by gentlemen scholars and travelers in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, dealt mainly with political, military, commercial, and missionary matters, making only occasional reference to the performing arts. For example, Valentijn (1724–26), a Dutch army clergyman in Ambon, mentions the existence of gong-chime and drum ensembles (tifa-totobuang) that are still extant in the Maluku provinces of eastern Indonesia. The colonial British

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administrators William Marsden (2012) and Thomas Stamford Raffles (1817– 30) briefly describe aspects of the performing arts in their general histories of Sumatra and Java respectively, as did their Dutch equivalents in the East Indies and the French in Indochina. Raffles went on to found Singapore, after heading the British colony in Java and Bengkulu (Sumatra), when the British swapped their Sumatran territory for Singapore and the Malay peninsula in the early decades of the nineteenth century and the colonial plantation cultures practiced various forms of Chinese and local music and theater. Terry Miller (1984) attempted to reconstruct Siamese music history based on sources from 1548 to 1932; similar attempts have been made for Lao music in northeast Thailand, also by Miller (1985), and Siamese music history by Panya Roongruang (2003). Muslim proselytization, partly through the musical arts, continued to spread in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Malaysia, and the southern Philippines. The Dutch colonial power tried to control NEI’s Muslim communities by bringing in European law and favoring local marriage and other non-Muslim traditions over sharī’ah law and Muslim customs. As Muslim conviction deepened in some areas, Islam became a rallying call for resistance to colonial rule. The Javanese Prince Diponegoro led an unsuccessful resistance war against the Dutch in the early nineteenth century. As contact with the holy land increased, the Muslim art forms diversified and grew popular, especially various forms of frame-drum accompanying group singing of liturgical texts, as well as their secular offshoots such as ratoh duek (lit., sitting chattering) in Aceh. In Java the Muslim-associated arts coexisted with the ancestral, animist-Hindu-Buddhist gamelan tradition, the practice of which continued in its diversity of rural styles, and with each of the royal courts preserving or developing different ensembles and repertories. From around the 1780s, increased contact with Sunni Muslim orthodoxy on the Arabian Peninsula led to a diminishing prestige of the old pluralistic mysticism in insular Southeast Asia. Gradually, it was replaced by a combination of fiqh (jurisprudence), philosophy, and Sunni Islam – though still with Sufi overtones – which sought devotees’ union with Allah. This ideology lies at the base of the many local forms of devotional singing called zikir (Arabic, remembrance of Allah), with or without frame-drum or – in Aceh – body percussive accompaniment. Examples are insular Southeast Asia’s dabus genre, in which devotees seek divine union and physical invulnerability, and Malaya’s/Sumatra’s hadrah genre, with its devotional and secular song lyrics. From 1869, however, a new stream of reformist Islam came into vogue when the Suez canal was opened, enabling a burgeoning number of Southeast Asian pilgrims to visit the holy land. Pilgrims who returned home from the h ạ jj

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taught groups in their home villages the rituals and musical genres that they had witnessed in the holy land. Growing reformism emphasized the gaining of knowledge by reading the Qur’an rather than gaining Sufi-style mystical union through group singing, movement, and frame-drum playing, but both streams of thought and associated artistic practices continued.

The high colonial period The high colonial period, from around 1850 to World War I, was an era of colonial military expansion. Many migrants worked in the colonists’ mines and in cash crop (sugar, pepper, etc.) plantations for export. Southeast Asia had received Chinese and Indian migrants for millennia, but now large groups of male Hakka and Hokkien laborers were brought in from China to man the mines and plantations in British Malaya and the NEI, and many married local women. In Malaya, Java, Bangka, Belitung, and elsewhere, Chinese immigrant workers practiced Confucian temple arts, such as wayang gantung (hanging puppets) and wayang potehi (marionette theater), local Malay music and dance, and European brass-band music; itinerant Chinese theater troupes also performed on occasion. Around Java, Sumatra, Malaya, and beyond, itinerant ketoprak, bangsawan, Dul Muluk, and other theater troupes traveled widely with their bands of mixed European and Malay instruments, performing local legends, Chinese, and even Shakespearean stories for enthusiastic audiences in this pre-film era. A local theater form, randai, became popular throughout West Sumatra. The Christianization of some regions, for example on Nias and in the Batak areas of North Sumatra, proceeded apace in the nineteenth century. Kunst (1940) notes critically that the local traditions in Nias were severely weakened, indeed almost expunged, by the churches’ intolerance. Considerable musical and functional change to the Toba-Batak gondang sabangunan ensemble music tradition resulted from Lutheran missionization in Protestant areas of north Sumatra from the 1860s to the 1990s. Meanwhile, the rapidly industrializing United States was acquiring colonial aspirations like the Europeans. It took over from the Spanish in the Philippines after winning the Spanish-American war in 1899. Under the Americans, Hispanic-Filipino church music continued to develop and American music education was introduced. The syncretic animist/Muslim-associated kulintang (bronze gongchime ensemble) genres in Mindanao continued to be practiced, as was the vocal/instrumental ensemble music of upland groups, such as the T’boli in Mindanao and the Hispanic-Filipino genres – for example, the local pandanngo dance (based on Spain’s fandango), the plucked instrumental ensemble rondalla, and kundiman love songs with Western harmonies.

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From the early twentieth century, the expansionary Dutch colony faced resistance from fiery local communities as they fought more bloody wars. The Acehnese war (from 1873) and the Balinese war resulted in Dutch victory in those areas around 1910 and 1908 respectively. In Aceh, the Sultan was deposed, but the traditional non-Muslim and Muslim music and dances described by Dutch colonial administrator and scholar C. Snouck Hurgronje continued among the rebellious population, with orthodox Muslim leaders promoting the developing Muslim devotional genres and the aristocratic chieftains patronizing non-Muslim as well as Muslim forms. Meanwhile, the Dutch banned dabus, holy-war epic story-singing and other genres judged dangerous to Dutch power. In colonized Bali, however, the spiritual power of the courts declined and their revenues were severely limited, resulting in a serious reduction of patronage of the arts as gamelan and other artistic properties were sold, pawned, or given to the villages. This transfer resulted in increased artistic activity in many villages and led to significant stylistic and artistic change, the most important of which was the development of the new, vigorous gamelan kebyar ensemble and style, along with newly choreographed dances in north Bali from 1915, whence it spread to the south and eventually throughout the whole island. It was destined to play an important role in the development of the tourist industry, developed by the Dutch regime from the 1920s. In Java, the Dutch continued their established strategy of working with the princes and transforming their royal power structures to their own economic and political advantage, assisting the courts in their patronage of the traditional gamelan, dance, and theater. Denying Indonesians the right to a modern education, they encouraged their own scholars to research the Javanese performing arts and belletristic literature, including the long Javanese court poem Centhini (completed in the nineteenth century), which gave intimate descriptions of many musical, dance, and dramatic forms at the main nineteenthcentury court and earlier. In addition, a Dutch learned society (Java Instituut) sponsored competitions to encourage the very small number of educated Javanese to write theoretical treatises on music, the earliest being written in 1870 by Raden Harya Tondhakusuma of the Mangkunegaran court in Surakarta, followed by a collaborative Javanese-Dutch work on Javanese children’s songs in 1913 by K. P. H. Koesoemadiningrat and D. van Hinloopen Labberton. The comparative study of Southeast Asian and other musics of the world began in Europe in the late 1800s, when German music scholars such as Curt Sachs and Erich M. von Hornbostel used Southeast Asian and other data in the development of their comparative study of musics and instruments from around the world (see Koch in this volume). However, they took a largely

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synchronic rather than a historical approach, initially basing their work on phonogram recordings of music performed by Javanese, Siamese, and other troupes appearing at European trade fairs, such as the Paris Exposition of 1889. Likewise, Alexander Ellis, Carl Stumpf, and others presented postulations about Southeast Asian scales and tone systems, while Jacobsen and van Hasselt described the ergology of instruments in a 1907 book on Javanese gong making. In tune with current critiques of other classification systems by botanists, biologists, and naturalists, Hornbostel and Sachs also described and classified Southeast Asian and other musical instruments from a European perspective. In several Southeast Asian countries, the colonial territorial expansion and desire for more effective rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought a new class of colonial administrators whose governments required them to study the societies in which they worked. Some officials, such as Winstedt, Swettenham, and Wilkinson in Malaya and Furnivall in Burma, were trained in philology, Sanskrit, or Indology and pioneered the historical, linguistic, and archaeological studies of the region. The abovementioned Snouck Hurgronje was appointed adviser on Islamic affairs to the Dutch government and contributed major ethnographies on the Acehnese and Gayo ethnic groups in Aceh. Learned societies were established that published journals on the region, such as Holland’s Konigliche Institut voor Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde (founded in 1851), the Straits Asiatic Society (1877), and the Burma Research Society (1911). Publications on cultural topics neglected Muslim topics and focused on the “high arts” of the Indic-Javanese courts, paying little attention to the “low” or “popular” arts; the cultures of NEI’s outer islands were almost totally neglected.

The late colonial period (1): World War I to World War II From the 1910s, anti-colonial movements grew in the countries of Southeast Asia, instigating not only political change but also changes in the performing arts. Cities were expanding, but there was no call for substantial industry in the colonies, the people remained poor and uneducated, and artists working in the courts, villages, and colonial service received a pittance for their services. In Indonesia, for example, the banners of nationalism, communism, and Islam became rallying calls for resistance to colonialism, including among artists. In Java, a court musician named Pontjopangrawit was involved in anti-colonial civil disobedience activity and was one of thousands of accused communists to be arrested in 1926 and exiled in Digu in West Irian, where he made a gamelan with

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the materials at hand; he eventually returned to work in the palace in 1930. In 1912, Muslim reformists created the Muhammadiyah movement, which was active in the anti-colonial struggle and also aimed to purify Indonesian Muslims from indigenous and Sufi practices, favoring only the devotional Muslim artistic expressions and disapproving of art forms such as the above-mentioned Sufi dabus genre. Both, however, continued to develop. By the late 1920s, when the long period of world economic expansion from the 1870s had ended, the dependent nature of the colonial economy became apparent to many. Nationalists, communists, and Muslim parties led the challenge against the statecraft of the imperial period, with insurgencies and rebellions leading to a modern nationalist movement that challenged colonial control, worked toward an independent Indonesia, and transformed the condition of the musical arts. In Bali, colonial policy included the development of tourism for the benefit of Western visitors, which also led to profound consequences for the musical arts. Western musicians such as Walter Spies and Colin McPhee lived in Bali and researched the musical arts. By the time the Dutch-Bali war ended in 1908, Bali’s courts had been destroyed and royal spiritual power and patronage of the arts declined, with the princes pawning or giving away their ancestral gamelan orchestras to the villages. Some village artists responded by developing a new, vigorous style of gamelan playing called kebyar, which started in the north and expanded to the south and then to the whole island. The Balinese kept practicing the traditional Hindu rituals and arts in the villages but saw fit to shorten and develop their sacred music, dance, and theater forms in a secular environment for the growing tourist industry. Tourist patronage declined with the 1929 economic crash, then revived in the 1930s before it finally stopped in World War II. The Dutch were forced to leave their colony when the Japanese invaded in 1942. Colonial scholarship on music of Indonesia began in the 1890s when NEI colonial policy was geared to educating select Dutch colonial servants in philology, Indology, and Islamic studies before sending them to work in the Indies as well as to encouraging them to research and publish on the area where they worked. The leading musicologist among scholars who lived in the NEI was Jaap Kunst. Though focusing on Java and Bali, he also traveled to some outer islands, such as Sumatra and Sulawesi, and tried to describe their music and reconstruct their music history, as did A. Brandts Buys on Madura (1928) and Claire Holt on the dance of south Sulawesi (1939) and some other areas. Kunst attempted to reconstruct history by drawing on archaeological, iconographical, and literary evidence, drawing attention to the dance and music scenes depicted in reliefs on temples built in the first and second millennia CE. Likewise, Prince Damrong in Thailand

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tried to document the music history of the Thai royal court in the 1920s and 1930s, after collecting the titles of many Thai melodies – half of which, however, were subsequently lost. He and Kunst shared a speculative, cyclic view of history, with Kunst writing in 1934 that Javanese music had reached the zenith of its development in 1800 and showed signs of decline thereafter, and Prince Damrong also expressing his fear for the survival of Thai classical music. The writings of both, as was typical among colonial and royal indigenous writers of their time, were based on a view of the superiority of the high art of the courts versus the low art of the rural majority and indigenous forest and sea-boat dwellers. A similar court-centered, technical perspective was adopted by Thai scholars such as V. Vichitr-Vadakarn (1937), who, however, described the performing arts from a Thai nationalist, rather than a theoretical or universalist, perspective. During this same period, only a few European scholars who published in colonial-era journals researched the performing arts of Malaya and Thailand. Led by Mubin Sheppard, the articles on Malayan arts were published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Thai articles in the Journal of the Siam Society (from 1904). A similar role was assumed in the Straits Settlements, when the Straits Asiatic Society was founded in 1877. The Burma Research Society and its journal began in 1911, the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1917. Their French equivalents were the Société Asiatique in Paris and École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Indochina, along with their respective journals. Researchers ignored the Chinese arts practiced in the region, even in areas of Chinese predominance, as in parts of Malaya and Indonesia. In Indonesia, the reformist wing of the Muslim movement increased its power after the Indonesian Revolution in 1945, though many nominal Muslims continued to adhere to their ancestral faith (a mix of spirit and ancestor veneration, Tantrism, and Islam) and enjoyment of the associated musical forms, especially gamelan-type ensembles in Java, Bali, Sumatra, and Malaysia. Likewise, the Tantric-Buddhist artists, devotees, and audiences in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam continued to practice their genres of bronze ensemble music, dance, and theater. In comparison to the amount of research on Hindu and Buddhist court arts in Southeast Asia, research into the Islamic arts remained minimal.

The late colonial period (2): after World War II, 1945–1975 The war dealt a fatal blow to British, Dutch, French, and American colonialism in Southeast Asia (e.g., in China, India, and Pakistan), despite Western efforts to reestablish their colonies afterwards. The first countries to attain independence

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were the Philippines, Burma, and Indonesia (in 1945–6), then Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, and finally the French dependencies in Indochina: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Vietnam threw off the French yoke in 1955 only to be invaded again, this time by the United States and its allies. As newly independent countries took control of their own lives, including their music and musical scholarship, new perceptions of the region’s past and its now more global context evolved. A major development for the region’s indigenous music education, practice, and research was the establishment of conservatories and university music departments, such as at the Ateneo in Manila, Chulalongkorn and Thammasat in Bangkok, University of Malaya and University Kebangsaan in Malaysia, and the University of Singapore. In Indonesia, a series of conservatories was established, first in Central Java (in Surakarta, from 1950), followed by West Java, Bali, West Sumatra, and South Sulawesi, and the Ethnomusicology Department in Medan’s University of North Sumatra (from 1979). Distinguished Southeast Asian-born artist-scholars were employed to teach and write treatises on the theory and practice of traditional music for their students. Among the most noted of the writers in Java who began writing in the 1950s were Sindoesawarno and Martopangrawit. Contemporary Western ethnomusicologists worked mainly on the court arts rather than on rural village or Muslim-associated genres, studying the historical sources only in passing. Meanwhile, the scene was changing as a growing number of Southeast Asians began to receive postgraduate education in ethnomusicology in Western countries. An important external influence on the practice of the performing arts after the war was the reopening of the tourist market in the 1950s. In Bali this market expanded greatly after its international airport opened in 1969. Governments and corporations in the rest of the region, apart from the continuing conflict areas of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma, also saw the potential economic rewards from tourism and geared troupes of artists to shorten their traditional rituals and dances and prepare appropriate musical and theatrical episodes to entertain tourists, grace state occasions, perform on election campaigns, and represent their country on international tours. Both indigenous and foreign scholars intensified their efforts to document and record the traditional music cultures, given the growing awareness of the loss of and creative change in the traditional arts in this era of rapid social change.

From 1975 to the Asian monetary crisis in 1997 In 1975 the colonial era came to a close when Vietnam became fully independent of foreign powers. Classical and popular Vietnamese musical arts were free

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to develop again in peace, though continuing conflict in neighboring Cambodia, Laos, and Burma delayed the return to normalcy in those countries. Southeast Asian-born ethnomusicologists were becoming more openly and constructively critical of their own and foreign, colonial/postcolonial scholars’ ideas and works, especially in relation to issues such as historical change, gender relations, mass communications, social justice, heritage, and environment. In the next two decades, foreign-educated Indonesian scholars Umar Kayam, Hardja Susilo, and I Made Bandem and the Malaysian scholar Mohd Taib Osman were influenced by theoretical approaches of social theorists such as Clifford Geertz and Benedict Anderson and historians such as Merle Ricklefs. With the defeat of the United States and its allies in Vietnam, moreover, came a crisis in Western confidence in its own superiority and a questioning of the colonial era’s modernist ideology, based as it had been on the extensive economic exploitation of the colonies. The number of Western scholars researching Southeast Asian topics expanded enormously, and gradually the number of ethnomusicologists increased among them. The critique of modernism that emerged between both locally born and foreign ethnomusicologists resulted in a cross-fertilization of ideas. Some tried to erode colonial-era approaches in favor of a postmodern approach that aimed to decolonize scholarship, resulting in a few critical studies of the history of colonial-era musical thought and activity. Such scholars included Javanese-born Sumarsam, whose book on eighteenth- to twentieth-century Javanese music history and theory raised critical dialogue on various themes (Sumarsam 1992). Sudchaya wrote a rare study of Thai folk music outside of the classical tradition (Sudchaya 2000). Over the decades, local and foreign scholars adopted a partly historical approach in their publications, for example, on bangsawan theater in Malaysia from the late nineteenth century (Tan Sooi Beng 1993), zapin music and dance in Malaysia and its Hadhramaut roots (Mohd Anis Md Nor 1993), Thai nang yai large-puppet theater as it enters the world of television (Nashijaya 1986), Indonesia’s komedie stamboel (Cohen 2006), West Java’s post-nineteenthcentury wayang golek puppet theater (Weintraub 2004), and classical Javanese dance’s animist and Hindu-Buddhist themes within Java’s Muslim environment (Brakel-Papenhuysen 1995–6). The history of gender relations in music began to be studied critically in a thesis on female composers in Vietnam (Lê Thi Kim 1991) and classical female versus new male metallophone playing style in nineteenth- to twentieth-century century Java (Weiss 2006). From the 1980s, scholars were criticized for their almost exclusive focus on the court traditions of Java, Bali, and Thailand and neglect of music of rural and outer areas. These critiques began to be met by the publication of partly historical studies of various ethnic groups; for example, northeast Thai

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(Miller 1985), Mon (Flora and Bauer 1987), Lao (Catlin 1987; Chapman 2002), Kenyah, Banjarmasin Malay (Kartomi 2012), Sumatran Rotinese (Basile 2006), Lombok (Harnish 2006), ethnic Chinese minorities in Malaysia (Tan Sooi Beng 1980), studies of rural gamelan traditions (Sutton 1991), and the history of Thai Buddhist performance (Wong 2001). Other music-historical themes included the changing social and musical role of Vietnam’s dan tran (board zither) music in twentieth-century history (Le Tuan Hung 1998). Others were Vietnamese water puppet theater (Tran van Khe); nationalism and regionalism, for example, as they affected the various urban and rural Javanese gamelan and music and dance in South Sulawesi (Sutton 2002); music of minorities, for example, Chinese minorities in Malaysia (Tan Sooi Beng 1980) and Indonesia (Kartomi 2000), the aristocratic Sundanese cultural memory of vocal–zither–flute ensemble music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Williams 2001), the destruction of the traditional arts and the environment in the name of economic development and tourism (Sarkissian 2000), and “new classical music” composed in the twentieth century; for example, Western-style music and works by twentiethcentury composers in North Vietnam (Tu Ngoc 2000; Nguyen Thi Nhung 2001) and the Philippines (Baes 2002). To this day, historical studies are still rare in Southeast Asian ethnomusicology, although a few biographies in publications on larger topics have appeared. Among the first was on the life stories of two twentieth-century Javanese musician-composers, Wasitodipuro and Narto Sabdho, by Judith Becker (1980). Other examples are the life histories of: past Thai classical musicians (Suphalaksana 1998), the 1894-born Javanese court musician Pontjopangrawit, who became a founding staff member in Indonesia’s first conservatory in 1950 (Kartomi 2002), the Balinese musician Wayan Gandera (c. 1910–65), who played a role in the “hidden history” of the gamelan gong kebyar throughout the twentieth century, the Filipino composer, musician, and ethnomusicologist José Maceda (1917–2006), seen in the context of modern composition in Southeast Asia (Tenzer 2007), and the Balinese musician Madé Lebah (Warren 2007). After the various local, Western-Malay popular-music and theater forms had developed in the region from the 1890s, Western popular and rock music became prominent, and a youth culture and market emerged after the war. Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, banned rock music in the early 1960s, but this was reversed when President Suharto’s repressive regime swept into power in 1965, from which time Western commercial music began to swamp the market. Studies of Southeast Asia’s popular commercial music of the region began in the 1970s, first on Javanese kroncong music and orkes/pop Melayu (Malay ensemble/pop; Becker 1975; Ernst Heins 1975; Kornhauser 1978),

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then on Malaysia’s Malay-European dondang sayang crossover (Thomas 1986) and Indonesia’s Arabic, Indian-film, and pop Melayu crossover dangdut (Frederick 1982). Created by Indonesia’s first music superstar (Rhoma Irama) in the 1970s, this home-grown popular-music genre became internationally known, especially in Malaysia, Britain, and Japan from the 1990s, and dominates the music industry to the time of writing. Cassette sales and new pop bands proliferated from the 1970s (Yampolsky 1989), while a traditional Sundanese music/dance style, jaipongan, became popular (Williams 2001), as did campur sari (lit., a “nice mix” of gamelan and kroncong styles). The Suharto regime controlled the outputs of traditional and popular artists by stringent censorship and exploited the artists for government use, especially in doctored election campaigns. The lyrics of many top hit dangdut, pop, and rock songs sung by the idol of Indonesian youth, Iwan Fals, and other originally workingclass artists began to express stringent social criticism in the decades leading up to Suharto’s fall in 1998, but they were always curbed and some of Fals’s national performance tours were banned. Some artists felt they were benefiting from the growth of the cultural tourist industry, but they found it to be a double-edged sword. It offered them some financial benefits but also exploited them in their poor employment conditions and inadequate payment. Moreover the quality of performances suffered, as they had to be adapted to meet the short attention span of audiences for the tourist market, the media, and overseas cultural missions. Most musicians’ livelihoods became increasingly precarious as cassette piracy dominated the market and recorded music replaced live performance in many celebrations in the cities and villages. The private sector was allowed to control the lucrative popular-music market and to create niche markets for select traditional musical genres (mainly Balinese, Sundanese, Javanese, Minangkabau, and Sulawesi court music), while the state provided some funding for traditional and new experimental music. In postwar Malaysia, popular bangsawan theater music, which combined internationally distributed popular music and various ethnic-music styles in the early twentieth century, lost its syncretic vitality when government controls of its Chinese elements tightened and racist attitudes were expressed. In spite of this, artists involved in intercultural creativity continued to develop new forms of popular music (Tan Sooi Beng 1993). Popular music played a role in the development of Malaysian national culture and media (Chopyak 1986), and since 1950 many popular songs have reflected social change in their sociopolitical commentary and criticism. In Thailand, which intensified its efforts to modernize its society and culture from 1945, artists developed a variety of classical Thai-Western fusion genres

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(for example, dontri Thai prayuk from the 1950s; Ware 2006). Thai popularmusic forms, such as phleng sakorn (Western-style songs in English), phleng luuk krung (city music), phleng luuk thung (country music, a Thai rural-Western crossover), and phleng phua chiiwit (songs for life, expressing social protest), gained a mass following from the 1970s (Myers-Moro 1993). Some were popularized by touring Thai groups noted for their advocacy of the poor and oppressed (e.g., Kharawaan and Kharabauw). In the Philippines, some viewed Filipino and Western popular crossovers as a creative synthesis; others viewed them as cultural hegemony and the subject of protest (Baes and Baes 1998). In the intensely globalizing world of the 1980s, not only were the lives of artists throughout Southeast Asia increasingly dominated by multinational takeovers of production and distribution companies and by technological changes, but the artists came to play an important, albeit economically marginal, role in the developing cultural tourist market – that is, until the market crashed in 1997.

1997 to the present Most Southeast Asian countries were adversely affected by the Asian monetary crisis in 1997, which wiped out the effects of the high economic growth from the 1970s. Some countries felt the effects of government censorship less than others, but international distributors now had a free hand to control public taste and used market research to decide what music to promote and in what quantities. As the music industry expanded and new technologies developed, there was an explosion of pirated recordings, to the great disadvantage of artists. From 1999 there was also a serious decline in the cultural tourism market, resulting in the sudden reduction in the livelihood of many artists and a loss of business to the global market for many small music schools and performance groups. In the less prosperous and ordered societies after the monetary crisis, the purchasing power of the poor, both rural and urban, was greatly reduced. As such, they were less able to employ artists at their weddings and other rituals, often substituting cassette recordings instead. Meanwhile, thousands of undocumented, unstudied ethnic music cultures entered the “endangered” category. Suharto’s fall in 1998 resulted in major political and artistic change. In reformasi (reform-)era Indonesia, government played a much less repressive role than before and gave recognition to cultural plurality. Its abolition of censorship resulted, for example, in the return of previously banned performances of Indonesian-Chinese arts. This decentralization of the region abolished central control of style and content and gave people greater freedom of expression and autonomy over their outputs. Regional pop-music sales increased, but they were accompanied by the commercial proliferation of

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foreign popular styles and the exploitation of pop Indonesia, pop Melayu (Malay pop), regional pop, dangdut, Muslim rock, jaipongan, and campur sari music. In the late 1990s, international pop music accounted for more than half the sales of recorded music, with home-grown crossovers such as dangdut, Muslim pop, and campur sari attracting around one-third and traditional ethnic music about 15 percent of sales. Currently, Indonesia’s music industry sector is the largest in Southeast Asia but small by world standards.

Conclusion Despite its ethnic diversity and the incompleteness of the music-historical data, Southeast Asia coheres as a music-historical as well as a geographic and cultural unit. Over the past half millennium, its musical expressions have been closely related to its economic and political history, experience of colonialism, achievement of independence, grappling with modernization, and gradual entry into the global market economy. Southeast Asia’s early music history is closely tied to the history of its people’s adherence to dominant world religions. In the first millennium, Hinduism and Buddhism prevailed on the mainland; in the second millennium, Islam grew in Indonesia and Malaysia, as did Christianity in the Philippines. All four religions played a role in every Southeast Asian country, past and present. Animist belief systems, based on the veneration of the spirits of nature and of ancestors, persisted everywhere from prehistoric times, as exemplified by the scattered remains of prehistoric bronze Dông-son drums found throughout the region and extant musical rituals for a variety of magic purposes, such as to capture dangerous animals. Southeast Asia’s minimal traditional ensemble type, born of its environment, geography, and history, comprises a melodic instrument (e.g., the singing voice or flute), drums, and an optional gong component, to which other instruments may be added. All of the countries also possess medium to large ensembles of bronze or brass instruments, the prototypes of which go back to the animist-Hindu-Buddhist era from the early first millennium CE, and may include string, wind, and other percussion instruments. The diverse Muslimassociated styles in Muslim areas mostly feature solo and group singing with frame drum playing or body percussion with dance and possess historical Middle Eastern and Muslim-Indian links via traders and missionaries. The Christian-associated and European secular styles in the predominantly Christian regions are marked by the use of European harmony, transplanted instruments such as violin, organ, and brass ensembles, and fusions of European, Malay, and other indigenous Southeast Asian music and dance

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styles. Most of the direct musical influences from India, China, the Middle East, Europe, and beyond on Southeast Asia’s traditional musical styles and content were lost long ago, having been absorbed and constantly transformed as conditions changed in their new environments. The most recent force for change in the region’s music is its incorporation into the global economy and communications network, with international private sector interests controlling the region’s lucrative popular music and media products and governments attempting to maintain what they can of the traditional musical genres and the new, experimental music, which are likely to remain commercially unviable. Meanwhile, the music cultures of Southeast Asia remain as richly diverse as ever, as they creatively adapt and readapt to ever-changing conditions.

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. 18 .

Musicians and the politics of dignity in South India KALEY MASON

No matter how bewildering the times, no matter how dissembling the official language, those we call ordinary are aware of a sense of personal worth – or more often a lack of it – in the work they do. Studs Terkel, Working (1972) When we dance, our fluids work overtime and sometimes escape to the surface, becoming visible. The unruly spectator makes due note of this and asks us to reconsider how fluids expose the labor of the dancer onstage and therefore the dancer as laborer. Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris (2012)

Engaging world music materially People who make music for a living often hone their knowledge and skill sets with modest means at the vulnerable edges of social orders. In spite of the vagaries of local art worlds, they work to tell our stories evocatively, to nourish individual and collective creativity, to give voice to those with and without voices, and to sustain their lives and the lives of significant others; this is the art, community, identity, and life-work musicians, including dancers, perform. Rarely, however, do listening publics recognize the craft of musical production as intrinsic to the values performers produce – the evanescent moments of pleasure and/or significance they realize at sociomusical events. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it, the “lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training” (Sennett 2008, 37). Accordingly, musicians seldom manage to convince patrons and publics that their art is more than inherent exceptionality or hereditary tradition (Becker 1982, 14), that it is in fact the culmination of years of training, sacrifice, devotion, competition, and self-management; in a word, labor, from the Latin root meaning pain and great difficulty (Williams 1975, 177). Why should we concern ourselves with the challenges laboring musicians face in the histories of world music that animate the present volume? Drawing [441]

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on ethnographic fieldwork in India, media sources, and secondary literature, this chapter invites thinking cross-culturally beyond sublime qualities of sound to reach for more compelling accounts of musical dignity – or how performers cultivate and defend their sense of self-worth between the work of art and the art of work. Such a perspective on “art” as “work” would emphasize the interplay of creative agency and contextual constraints, thus revealing the power dynamics that shape repertories across differences of gender, sexual orientation, faith, class, generation, nationality, race, and ethnicity, among other standpoints. Music specialists are rarely free to fashion sound materials under conditions they choose. Those extraordinary performers who successfully navigate global cultural networks, nation-building projects, and worldmusic stardom are exceptions to the rules by which most musicians live. Even as more artists in more corners of the world gain access to digital technologies and new possibilities for self-promotion, most ordinary musicians – and those from historically marginalized communities in particular – still struggle to receive fair compensation and due recognition. Their stories of hardship and hope, humiliation and resilience, are increasingly being heard, as the ordinary art of musical work gains more traction in socially engaged music studies (Finnegan 1989; MacLeod 1993; Tanenbaum 1995; Stokes 2002; Perrenoud 2007; Szeman 2009). Because there are no extraordinary works of musical art without ordinary musicians, and because the latter are ordinarily undervalued, world-music histories should also be told through the prism of labor and dignity, two modern categories that help avoid what literary critic Terry Eagleton presciently describes as a “peculiarly modern alienation of the social from the economic, meaning from material life” (Eagleton 2000, 31). Indeed, to weave ordinary South Indian musicians into the fabric of worldmusic history is to braid stories of pride in musical craftsmanship with tales of material needs and desire for occupational respect. The following excerpt from my fieldnotes describes Hindu ritual musicians at work, summoning and guiding the presence of the divine at a teyyam1 spirit-medium ceremony in the southwestern state of Kerala. Like the dancer in the epigraph whose perspiration belies any pretense of innately inspired musicality and gestural grace, their stories of the practical acquisition of skills, trade lineages, corporeal sacrifice, and subalternity offer persuasive reasons why authors of world-music pasts should embrace thinking about music as labor in search of dignity.

1 In Malayalam, the language of Kerala, the word teyyam is derived from the Sanskrit term for God, daivam. The teyyam described in this scene, Ucit ̣t ̣a Bhagavati, is a fertility goddess worshiped annually in the Malabar region of northern Kerala (Vishnu Namboodiri 1998).

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January 28, 2004, 4:30 am. Kannur District. The early morning air is cool. Shapely brass lamps exude soft patches of scented light in the sacred grove of an ancestral aristocratic home near the Arabian Sea. In the shadows of coconut and areca palms, drummers punctuate the final solemn verses of a praise hymn (tōtˍˍtampāt ̣t˘̣u),2 invoking the Goddess Ucit ṭ ạ Bhagavati. With curved slender sticks, they play high-pitched trills on cylindrical wooden drums called cen ṭ ̣as in a march-like manner. A teyyam spirit-medium – elaborately adorned with red body paint and a round flat headdress overflowing with yellowish strips of tender coconut fronds – sits on a wooden sacred seat (pīt ̣ham) and sways languidly from side to side in preparation to receive the Goddess, the Sakti, the feminine power in Hindu worldviews. Suddenly, the Goddess enters the body, stands abruptly, and blesses her ritual attendants, who bow deferentially with hands clasped. Drum rolls swell; she spins, sending the thin strips of fronds dangling from her waist and headdress into a swirl. Her presence acknowledged, she settles into a graceful dance to the accompaniment of a seven-beat rhythmic cycle: One-two-three, One-two, One-two . . . One-twothree, One-two, One-two . . .

By birth, these hereditary performers are members of the Malayan caste of ritual specialists, bonded by marriage alliances, descent, and a shared body of specialized knowledge and skill sets passed down from one generation to the next.3 A common identity category recognized throughout the geographical expanse of South Asia and its diasporas, hereditary performers can be traced to historical patterns of occupational social divisions called jatis, a flexible indigenous concept that colonial authorities conflated with ritual status under the rubric of caste, from the Portuguese casta, literally meaning blood lineage. Given the importance of hereditary musical traditions in contemporary art worlds of South Asia, these performers are in many ways more accurately understood as modern bearers of a preindustrial meaning of art as trade or craft lineage (Neuman 1990). For musicians as different as the late Qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the late Tamil film songstress M. S. Subbulakshmi, contemporary sitarist Shujaat Khan, and the Malayan performers above, hereditary musicianship is creative know-how that precedes the modern semantic baggage associated with labor in the global expansion of capitalism. Being a hereditary performer of South Asian descent, then, involves 2 All Malayalam words follow the transliteration system of the Library of Congress, except in the case of Indian words that are commonly used in the English lexicon, which retain their usual spelling as listed in the Oxford English Dictionary; for example raga, Sakti, and Siva. 3 The Malayan who perform in the context of teyyam spirit-medium rituals are mostly men. Although women once sang during the performance of praise hymns and continue to be the bearers of a repertory of traditional songs associated with midwifery, they rarely participate musically in contemporary teyyam festival occasions today. Instead, women are encouraged to develop their hereditary musicality and musicianship in classical music (Karnatak music) and dance (Bharatanatyam), avenues that reflect the community’s mobility aspirations.

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more than inheriting the means for a livelihood. It concerns making music with dignity in material worlds according to a complex set of ethics, values, and social obligations that guide the transmission and aesthetic choices of a performance lineage trade. Labor is therefore not only a useful category for describing how musicians earn a living or part of a living, but rather a way of thinking about musical experience as a describable form of action and interaction aimed at altering material life, including through divine encounters like the one above. A more flexible understanding of labor thus brings intersections of creative processes, bodily exertion, social and economic relations, self-crafting, identity politics, spirituality, and sensory experiences together in one frame of reference. The value of labor in this paradigm emerges from “how people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves,” as well as how others recognize that importance (Graeber 2001, 45). When considered in tandem with dignity, labor thus serves as a nexus for relating ideas, ethics, politics, and memories that influence world-music debates and the status of working musicians. In this way, it has the potential to support a critical historiography that questions rather than affirms received ideas about musical work worlds, recognizing that history “needs to go beyond memory” (Megill 2007, 40). Like a heuristic “detour on the way to something more important” (Hall 1991, 42), labor and dignity bring the hard surfaces of musical life into focus – “the political, economic, and stratificatory realities” within which musicians pursue individual and collective goals (Geertz 1973, 30).

Dignifying expressive labor This chapter is less about affirming the dignity of musical labor in all places and at all times, and more about developing a framework via India and other case studies for thinking historically about musical pasts and human inequalities, including those that privilege the very act of historicizing itself (Chakrabarty 2000). To this end, I lean heavily on the modern Enlightenment categories of labor and dignity while remaining aware of their limitations, an approach rooted in an earlier call for tactical humanism, or the use of a shared political language to find a place to stand vis-à-vis “cultural” difference and global disparities (Abu-Lughod 1991, 159; Asch 2001). Five interrelated themes in particular figure prominently in the discourse on musical pasts represented in the present volume: mobilities, values, bodies, technologies, and rights. Drawing on examples of how these categories intersect with labor, I discuss ways that history writing might account for these mutually contingent domains of world musical experience, beginning with mobilities.

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Since at least the early 1990s, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and popularmusic scholars have questioned the emphasis in music histories and ethnographies on conditions of stasis and rootedness in the lives of those who depend on a musical craft to meet material needs (Guilbault 1993). Despite the fact that musicians in cross-cultural contemporary and historical contexts have often lived displacement and travel rather than settlement as a norm (Strohm 2001; Kapchan 2007), music studies followed a nineteenth-century European predisposition toward mapping musical cultures of modern nation-states, even as unprecedented mobility and flux intensified in the wake of accelerated urbanization, industrialization, and colonialism.4 Until relatively recently, many scholars privileged the stable cultural histories of geographically contiguous “musical areas” over the corporeal border-crossings and migrations that contested the idea of settled living. This began to change in the 1990s when music studies responded to two paradigm shifts: the transnational music industry’s invention of the commercial category of “world music” and the move toward describing and theorizing the relation between music history and globalization (Erlmann 1998; Monson 1999; Feld 2000; Bohlman 2002). Hence, some music scholars joined other disciplines in taking the critical mobilities turn, a shift that opened new possibilities for thinking about musical labor. The mobilities turn “refers to a broad project of establishing a ‘movementdriven’ social science in which movement, potential movement and blocked movement are all conceptualized as constitutive of economic, social and political relations” (Urry 2007, 43). In the context of world-music labor, writing through mobilities encourages asking what it means to be musically mobile and why some musicians are more mobile than others in the junctures, disjunctures, and heightened global flows of people, goods, finances, information, and ideas (Appadurai 1996). How have mobility systems – from pathways, to railways, to auto and aero-mobility – enabled or constrained musicians’ creative work? Migration, diaspora, hybridity, travel and tourism, pilgrimage, public culture, displacement and exile, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, and global cities – these are some of the forces, conditions, and ideas that shifted the focus away from static frameworks toward movement-driven categories in music scholarship of the Roaring Nineties and New Millennium (Stokes 2004; Levi and Scheding 2010).

4 Scholars from Central European academic lineages in particular adopted the “musical area” concept developed by comparative musicologists with intellectual ties to the Kulturkreislehre (culture circle) school of German anthropology of the early twentieth century (Schneider 1976; Nettl 2010, 176–8). While diffusionism – the idea that the influence of cultural innovations can be tracked based on the distribution of traits – implicitly acknowledged the role of human movement in cultural history, the emphasis was always on stability and stasis in order to facilitate systematic comparison.

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Fig. 18.1 M. T. Manoharan performs on the oboe-like kurum kuḻal for a local Hindu teyyam at a sacred grove in Kannur District, Northern Kerala, March, 2004 Take the case of M. T. Manoharan (Fig 18.1), a double-reed aerophone player who managed to navigate between local patronage of teyyam spiritmediumship and the world of international artistry. I recall our first meeting at a teyyam festival in a coastal village in rural Northern Kerala: March 8, 2004. Kannur District. I stand next to a thatched green room of dried coconut fronds at the edge of a sacred grove near the town of Payyanur. The Malayan kurum kuḻal (little oboe) player, M. T. Manoharan, hands me a cassette featuring devotional songs that he composed for the main goddess of a local temple. We chat about his craft, about the performers we both know, about my life in Canada, and about his travels with a performing arts troupe in France. His smile widens when he remembers how French audiences expressed appreciation for his playing; how they would clap; how they would congratulate him after the performance. He discreetly accepts the 50-rupee note I hand him for the cassette and invites me to visit his home before he leaves again: this time to Switzerland, Italy, and the United States. A month later I’m speeding down a dusty main road in an autorickshaw under the shade of a coconut-palm canopy in the small coastal village of Mattul.

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Straining to project my voice over the hum of the engine, I ask the driver if he knows where I can find M. T. Manoharan, but not until I mention that Manoharan had been to France does he recognize the name. He stops and asks two men in front of a teashop if they know where “the fellow who went to France” lives. “Paris Manoharan,” they confidently confirm, indicating a narrow lane on the left side of the road ahead.

These scenes evoke the highly mobile world of a professional musician from a disadvantaged background who earns a living and respect through participation in cultural tourism’s global ecumene (Hannerz 1992). They bear witness to the expanding sense of what it means to be a member of the Malayan performing caste and on the move while remaining committed to ritual responsibilities at home. Together, these vignettes also underscore how the places to which one travels become important identity markers, particularly in South India where it is common to add a place-name associated with an ancestral home or one’s lived experience before a given name. Thinking about musicians like “Paris” Manoharan as creative agents with more or less access to mobility sharpens our understanding of the symbolic and material values at stake for professional performers. From discursive judgments of taste and aesthetic sensibilities, to ritual efficacy and political economy, the reasons why musical mobilities matter to an individual or a group vary widely. In economics, musical value is often linked to the basic utility of a practice or object. Karl Marx, writing about the history of capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century, theorized this form as “use value” in contrast with the “exchange value” of a commodity, a form of wealth specific to capitalism that is generated at the expense of laborers who produce more than they need for their own reproduction. Marx meticulously detailed how owners of the means of production appropriate surpluses that result from extra labor by 1) converting objects or services into commodityforms that can be sold for more than the cost of production, and 2) treating labor itself as a commodity that can be exchanged for wages in a marketplace. Marx’s historically and geographically specific theory of value, labor, and history established the basis for a penetrating critique of capitalism (Marx 1867). It also provided music studies with critical tools for thinking about the material struggles performers encounter in art worlds. For example, building on Marxist anthropology of the 1970s and early 1980s, some scholars deployed mode of production theory to interpret musical encounters between capitalist and preexisting systems of exchange, and analyze the links between control over the musical means of production and the distribution of creative agency (Attali 1977; Manuel 1993; Qureshi 2000). More important, however, Marx’s theory of value has challenged music scholarship to interrogate sources

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and forms of material musical wealth, to consider how musical objects and services acquire worth in specific cross-cultural and historical contexts, and at whose expense. The question of what kind of material value music specialists produce, however, is only one way of thinking about the relationship between music and labor. Bringing dignity to the fore invites more questions, including how value systems produce musicians. In what ways do moral principles inform a larger set of guidelines to live and work by musically? Some scholars have shown how a general ethic of creative action provides an important frame of reference for performers’ self-understanding, as in the case of the late legendary uilleann bagpiper and pipe-maker Chris Langon. Ethnomusicologist Patrick Hutchinson cogently summarizes Langon’s view of the creative process of setting tunes in Irish traditional music as analogous with craftsmanship: “The setting makes audible, as the finished products of the manual trades make visible or tactile, the individuality, the personality of the tradesman or musician” (Hutchinson 1994, 598). Other scholars have considered how discrepant senses of value and moral convictions limit the creative choices musicians make. For example, research on genre formation in Anglo-American popular-music scenes has explored how consumer, producer, and industry expectations influence the coalescence of musical practices into a set of rules aimed at shoring up the boundaries of conventional idioms (Frith 1996; Holt 2007). Furthermore, a recent study on Trinidadian gospel music reveals how individual ethics and public moral discourses influence the stylistic choices musicians make in the discursive spaces between self and society (Rommen 2007, 44–5). Where music as a vehicle for ethical world-making meets music as a source of wealth and prestige, value has also been understood as varieties of human capital, a concept grounded in the assumption that appropriators of surplusvalue (capitalists) are not the only actors with resources, that anyone can invest resources in social relations with expectations for material or symbolic returns (Bourdieu 1979). Responding to the wide currency that Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital gained in the late 1980s and early 1990s, music scholars pursued this idea of value by coining several types of capital, each concerned with explaining different ways in which musicians reinforce or contest dominant value systems that maintain social hierarchies (Thornton 1996; Scruggs 1998; Taylor 2000; Cottrell 2002). More recently, theories of value that combine symbolic and material dimensions have borrowed from ecological discourses to extend concepts of musical capital in a burgeoning literature on music and sustainability. From this perspective, performers produce and conserve musical values in the role of successful stewards of expressive public resources (McCann 2001; Titon 2010). Beyond a few exceptions,

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however, there have been relatively few serious attempts to problematize value – economic, social, cultural, ethical, and ecological – as mutually constitutive with moving musical bodies. Preceding the mobilities turn, nonetheless, was a bodily turn, a shift toward a critical musicological perspective that drew from feminist theory to confront gendered mind–body assumptions in historically specific contexts, and in the process, implicitly or explicitly suggested thinking about creative musical action as labor (McClary 1991; Le Guin 2006). Scholars working in this stream developed political–economy approaches that focused on embodiments of symbolic, use, and exchange values across time and space, from courtesans in early modern Venice (Gordon 2006), to Hindustani court musicians in pre- and postcolonial North India (Qureshi 2002), to eighteenth-century castrati in Europe (Feldman 2008), twentieth-century agents of tango in Argentina (Savigliano 1995), and Indian dance in North America (Srinivasan 2012). These studies and others demonstrated that corporeal conceptions of value implicitly encourage an understanding of labor as gendered public and private activity that involves great physical difficulty, a meaning that precedes understanding labor as a component in the production of commodities. The meaning of labor as a physically arduous activity is preserved in contemporary English and French vernacular uses of the term to refer to the bodily act and experience of child birthing: to be in labor, or le travail de l’accouchement. The gendered association of strenuous physical activity with women’s bodies and life-cycle events is illustrated cross-culturally by song repertories performed by women for the health of individuals, families, and wider communities. These range from songs that guard against the evil eye, such as those sung following childbirth (kan ṇ ẹ̄ ˍrˇupāt ̣tˇ̣u ) by South Indian midwives from the same Malayan caste of ritual specialists introduced above, to laments for ritual mourning in the Euro-Mediterranean region that form part of a larger gendered division of public musical labor associated with birth and death – a pattern that one prominent world-music historian theorized as women’s “work of pain” (Magrini 1998). Hannah Arendt traced the idea of labor embodying physical difficulty to ancient Greece, where action engaged in providing human biological necessities was considered undignified and deeply constraining: “To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the conditions of human life” (Arendt 1958, 83–4). Interestingly, the contrast between acts that are vital for human sustenance on the one hand, and Greek veneration for contemplation that transcends material constraints on the other, found expression in the sonic metaphor of ascholia, unquiet, in contrast with scholia, quiet (ibid., 15). Arendt considered unquiet actions to be part of what she

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described as the vita activa (in contrast with the vita contemplativa), life activities that involve labor, work, and action (ibid., 7).5 Labor referred to the biological process of life itself; work encompassed acts on and within the material world; and action recognized the fundamentally social and political condition of human existence. From the perspective of ancient Greek and subsequent modern thinkers, then, unquiet expressive uses of sound were vital for the human condition. The concept of musical labor that this chapter develops includes to some extent all of these components in Arendt’s vita activa, but her contrast between labor and work is especially important because it gives more weight to the claim that the category of labor implicitly evokes embodiment. Indeed, as Arendt pointed out, most European languages have evolved separate terms for labor and work, thereby amplifying the distinction between the materiality of the body and the matter bodies transform,6 the difference between the labor of our body and the work of our hands (ibid., 79).7 To consider musical labor in relation to the work of our hands, we add another critical lens: technologies. Technology in the art of musical work encompasses knowledge of how to use one’s body to act sonically on and in the material world as well as the tangible tools one acts with, not to mention the craft involved in making and maintaining tools in the first place as in the case of instrument makers or piano tuners. Between practical knowledge and material culture, research on technology and work in world-music discourses has centered on the question of how sound production and reproduction technologies influence creative musical processes and products (Greene and Porcello 2005; Katz 2004). Some studies have traced the history of instrument-making technologies and how they shaped the range of stylistic choices musicians make. For example, Paul Théberge has showed how digital recording technology and keyboards revolutionized the music industry by expanding the spectrum of available sounds, which had the effect of encouraging musicians to become consumers as well as producers in order to keep pace with the evolution of distinctive sound-crafting capabilities (Théberge 1997). Others have more explicitly examined the impact of mechanical reproduction technologies on musicians’ livelihoods in the United States, including how recording innovations

5 Robert Kendrick has pointed out that Gregorian chant and some early polyphony were profoundly influenced by the prominence given to the vita contemplativa in medieval Christendom, a condition that may have established an early precedent for scholarly resistance to the study of music as labor (personal communication). 6 Some European examples Arendt cites include laborare and facere in Latin, arbeiten and werken in German, and travailler and ouvrer in French. 7 Arendt quotes John Locke, section 26 of Chapter V (On Property) in the second essay, “Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government,” from Two Treatises of Government (1689).

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(Kraft 1996; Anderson 2006; Suisman 2009) and player pianos (Taylor 2007) encouraged new listening practices at different moments in the twentieth century. These commercial and cultural transformations ultimately led to the demise of live-music markets. Offering an alternative perspective on the nexus of technology and labor, recent ethnographic work in recording studios in Turkey has shown that sophisticated digital recording software and audio work stations do not necessarily result in cost-effective displacement of musicians, as new aesthetic goals continue to require highly skilled performers and labor-intensive sessions (Bates 2010, 97). Along a similar vein, first-hand accounts of the growth of public concerts in North India have shown how gramophone culture created new expectations for “live” performances, a shift toward concertizing that opened up another source of income for musicians in the wake of declining elite musical patronage at intimate gatherings (Neuman 2009). The Turkish and Indian cases underscore the need to interpret the influence of soundproduction technologies on creative use as mutually constitutive as opposed to unidirectional and deterministic. Moreover, these studies are also noteworthy because they emphasize social relations of musical production, revealing that even after digital technology made it more common for musicians to work together outside of co-presence and real time, recordings continued to be produced through interaction across divisions of musical labor from playing an instrument to sound engineering. The imperative to take creative agents and agentive relations seriously in discourses on technologies of music making brings the fifth theme of rights into productive tension with mobilities, values, and bodies. The labor of music, its agency, and constraints “almost always, and indeed necessarily, involves internal relationships of power” (Ortner 2006, 148), which is why inequalities in creative workplaces are a key area of inquiry in the emergent discourse of cultural rights in ethnographies and histories of world music (Weintraub and Yung 2009; David 2010; Guillebaud et al. 2010). According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, individuals have the right “to practice a certain religion, prepare certain kinds of food, wear certain clothing, sing certain songs, and play certain musical instruments – all in order to define and assert one’s cultural identity and heritage” (Weintraub and Yung 2009, 3). While the language of human rights has historically specific roots in the European Enlightenment, rights discourses are both indispensable and inadequate for representing world (music) histories in the aftermath of European colonial encounters (Chakrabarty 2000, 16). As more governments participate in legal frameworks and international debates on intangible cultural heritage and intellectual property, rights discourses are

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increasingly complicating our understanding of musical labor and dignity in working arenas of musical production and exchange, confronting power relations, stakes, and stakeholders in the process. A focus on rights illuminates where, when, and how performers stand to benefit or lose materially when acts of musical ingenuity are acknowledged or go unrecognized in a larger world of cultural property studies. First, from a juridical point of view, material recognition has mostly depended on how well individual musicians meet profit-driven criteria established by Western copyright law – a legislative framework that has privileged single-authored creative work and tangible products at the expense of alternative ways of conceptualizing relations between musical practices and material stakes. For instance, Western legal criteria designed to maximize capital accumulation have not served the economic and ethical interests of groups that: 1) consider musical knowledge to be a shared tradition, 2) attribute creative origins to spiritual agents, or 3) maintain that musical forms must remain intangible out of respect for sacred worldviews (Seeger 1996; Palmer 2007). Second, many working musicians are bearers of culturally distinct musical practices that play a vital role in their social group’s economic empowerment, as in the case of Indigenous Peoples’ investment in cultural tourism and independent record companies to advance rights to self-determination (Mason 2004; Diamond 2005). Third, all music makers, and especially those that depend on their art to make a living, have a particular stake in gaining cultural rights as part of a wider organization of professional solidarity. For example, case studies of musicians’ guilds and associations in medieval and early modern Europe describe how performers organized to support their occupational material and social interests through negotiations with patrons (Glixon 1983; Slocum 1995). These early European accounts of labor solidarity and exclusivity based on shared musical craft status resonate cross-culturally with the hereditary stylistic schools or gharanas that continue to protect trade secrets in North Indian art-music worlds today (Neuman 1990). Furthermore, the history of modern musicians’ unions also underlines how a collective consciousness of labor rights helped organize performers in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and New York, where the first American musician associations advocated for higher wages, better working conditions, and fixed hours in the second half of the nineteenth century (Leiter 1953; Kraft 1996). These early unions served to exclude as much as include, however, as women and anyone perceived to be outside contemporary boundaries of whiteness were either ineligible to join or forced to become members of racially segregated local chapters with less access to lucrative employment opportunities (Halker 1988; Tucker 2000). Founded in 1896, the American Federation of Musicians pursued a policy

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of union segregation that effectively denied African American musicians the same rights to venues, equal wages, and working conditions as their white counterparts well into the 1960s (Monson 2007, 53). Finally, beyond rights discourses aimed at dignifying musical labor in histories of professional associations are rights discourses that equip scholaradvocates with critical tools for writing about cases where music makers are the target of unspeakable indignities. These are the hard realities of individuals and groups who were and continue to be coerced into laboring musically, from Italian child street musicians sold into bonded servitude in New York during the second half of the nineteenth century (Zucchi 1992), to hereditary women performers recruited and forced into sex work in twentieth-century India and Korea (Maciszewski 2006; Pilzer 2006), to survivors and victims of concentration camps compelled to perform for genocidal authorities (Eckhard 2001; Jackson and Shapiro-Phim 2008). By examining the intersection of rights, dignity, and musical labor, we interrogate acts of human violence and degradation while also ensuring that some of the darkest moments in the annals of world-music history are not forgotten.

Honor and hereditary musicianship January 28, 2004. Kannur District. The Goddess continues her graceful dance. One-two-three, One-two, One-two . . . One-two-three, One-two, One-two . . . One-two-three, One-two, One-two . . . With every stylized step she comes closer to a clearing where a mound of glowing embers smolders. When she arrives the tempo doubles. Women in bright colored saris with blurry-eyed children huddle together between massive teak pillars on a veranda nearby, while men form a circle around the burning mound. Some musicians begin playing a driving succession of pounding low-pitched strokes, as the ensemble switches from a seven-beat to an eight-beat cycle; others ornament in and around the main pulses with high-pitched rolling patterns. The intensity provokes the Goddess into a frenzy at which point she throws the body of the medium repeatedly on the glowing embers. Devotees jostle for a better view as she pierces the dawn with her screams. Visibly focused, disciplined, attentive, and devoted to her every gesture – the drummers invigorate the Goddess as anticipated by the community of worship gathered to witness her magnificent splendor and divine power.

Central to the ethical foundation of hereditary musicianship for the Malayan performers above is an indigenous concept of honor, both in the sense of living up to the collective expectations for conduct held by a group and in the sense of gaining public distinction. When asked about the jobs family members do for a living, many Malayan musicians will point to a range of trades and

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professions; yet when asked about pursuing a career as spirit-medium specialists and traditional healers, the same musicians will unfold a more complicated relationship with their hereditary occupational lineage, one that transcends meeting material needs. For example, when I questioned one young percussionist’s intention to join the flow of Indian migrant laborers to the Middle East despite having a job playing for local communities of worship, he responded that this activity was avakās´am, not a job. Although musicians rely to some extent on ritual performances to supplement income, they perform at sacred groves primarily because they have a responsibility and traditional right to do so, a double orientation that in Malayalam finds expression in the term avakās´am, meaning hereditary right and duty. Through patrilineal descent, performers inherit an avakās´am for a specific sacred network of shrines within a continuous geographical area. According to oral tradition in the community and records that were preserved in writing on palm-leaf manuscripts, service-providing families entered into this system of mutual rights and obligations with local rulers in a premodern era, yet ties with landowning families continue to be symbolically recognized through transactions that include gifts of rice and curry from festival organizers to the performers, before or after a spirit-medium ritual. Moreover, this sense of responsibility extends beyond modern patron–client relations to include relations with ancestors from whom the avakās´am was inherited. Since it is considered a duty to provide ritual services for devotees in the sacred geography of hereditary rights, performers feel morally and spiritually responsible for ensuring the transmission of trade secrets to the next generation. As a result, even if musicians do not live by performances at spiritmedium ceremonies, they nonetheless continue to cultivate the ritual craft to honor ancestors and uphold the cultural dignity of their community – a collective sense of pride in the creative and spiritual dimensions of their hereditary responsibilities (Fig 18.2). The honorable labor embedded in the Malayalam word avakās´am, moreover, is equally communicated through nonverbal means. After a substantial period of training and an extraordinary public demonstration of devotion to the art of embodying local deities, male performers acquire the right to add the prestigious title of Panikkar to their names. This is granted by committees that include representatives from the families whose sacred groves the performers have served for generations.8 What the

8 The honorific Panikkar is awarded to a Malayan teyyam performer by prestigious temples located within the geographical boundaries of the family’s avakās´am. The performer’s new status is usually publicly recognized following a spirit-medium ceremony for Ottakkalam Teyyam, a deity whose mediation involves leaping into a fire multiple times during the ritual. The title is an important distinction marking a key lifecycle event for some Malayan men.

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Fig. 18.2 Religious festival organizers serve Malayan musicians at the home of a high-caste family in Kannur District, Northern Kerala, January, 2004 honorific does nominally for a ritual performer’s status, the presentation of a gold bangle (vaḷa) does visually, serving as a corporeal symbol of the sacrifice, physical pain, and devotion their craft demands. The honor associated with Malayan hereditary rights and responsibilities is also marked musically by the ritual presence of the oboe-like kurum kuḻal, which Malayan musicians play to please deities once they have been awakened in the body of a spirit-medium. Mastering this instrument takes many years of training under the careful guidance of a guru from the community. In addition to developing the muscular capacity to form and maintain the correct embouchure and control the diaphragm, both of which are essential for channeling and sustaining airflow, one must also learn how to play several melodic types (modes) called rāga. While the term rāga comes from the South Indian Karnatak classical tradition, Malayan performers have adapted the concept to describe how they classify and organize the horizontal organization of pitch in spirit-medium ceremonies. Every rāga has a set of rules for use in the context of ritual performance, including which notes, intervals, and phrases are appropriate as well as where and where not to embellish within the structure of the rāga. At specific moments in the ritual, these melodic conventions work

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to establish a mood associated with an aspect of a teyyam’s (god or goddess) character, emotional state, or event from their past. For instance, when playing for Pottan Teyyam, a popular deity considered by many to be a local incarnation of the pan-Hindu god Siva, the kurum kuḻal player performs in rāga nīlambāri,9 thereby calmly evoking Pottan’s story – a tale of how an “untouchable” fool10 humbled the great Brahmin philosopher and spiritual leader Adi Shankaracarya by exposing the hypocrisy of caste discrimination and by demonstrating the essential unity and equality of humankind. Performers are trained to play the rāga in such a way as to convey the seriousness and courage of Pottan’s actions; they must also soothe him with melodic phrases in rāga nīlambāri while he lies on a mound of burning embers at a culminating moment in the ritual. The efficacy of the ritual depends on the kurum kuḻal player’s ability to invite and amplify Pottan Teyyam’s presence, but just as Pottan acts as a powerful spiritual agent of human dignity for communities like the Malayan – whose ancestors suffered the indignities of physical and epistemic caste violence – the kurum kuḻal player acts as an agent of musical pride for the Malayan and their hereditary ritual craft lineage. In the context of teyyam worship, the instrument is inextricably associated with the rights, responsibilities, musicianship, and honor of the performers. From sacred groves to more recent appearances on world-music stages, the kurum kuḻal’s presence evokes Malayan musicality and cultural dignity, ritualizing space, time, and actors at the same time it embodies a visual and audible sign of exceptionality and ritual efficacy. Guided by a spiritual and aesthetic value system that invests skillful musical performance with the agency to awaken the presence of powerful local deities, the instrument is vital for a successful spirit-medium ceremony, and by extension the prosperity and well-being of the wider community of worship. These are, however, not the only values Malayan performers encounter through their hereditary craft in contemporary times. With the historical transformation of labor into a commodity through interactions with British colonial legal infrastructure and market capitalism (Birla 2009), as well as democratic socialism, came new understandings of the value of labor, which eventually influenced how musicians conceptualize their creative action and self-worth.

9 Nīlambāri rāga is typically associated with the “stillness of the late evening or night hours” (Pesch 1999, 127) and thus it is commonly used for lullabies in South India (Sambamoorthy 1971, 142–3). Musicologists classify nīlambāri as a dēs´ya rāga, meaning it is understood to have originated in local vernacular (folk) musical traditions (Pesch 1999, 121), but the rāga is also used in the classical Kathakali dance-drama tradition of Kerala (Zarrilli 2000, 110). 10 The Malayalam word pot ̣t ̣an is commonly translated as fool.

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Wages and artistry October, 2004. Switzerland. I travel to meet “Paris” Manoharan again later that year. Seated cross-legged on carpets backstage at the Théâtre du Loup in Geneva, he opens a velvet indigo pouch and carefully removes the brass bell of his kurum kuḻal. Despite the cool autumn weather, the crimson spotlights warm the stage enough for him to be comfortable, dressed in an ankle-length rectangular orange loincloth wrapped around the waist (lungi or dhoti), and a thin navy sweater. In a few hours he and nine other performers will present two teyyam spirit-medium ceremonies for the final act concluding a ten-day cultural festival sponsored by Les ateliers d’ethnomusicologie. I watch as he swiftly and meticulously polishes the brass with a piece of cotton cloth until he raises the bell proudly, admires the lustrous shine, and passes it to me for a closer look.

In my fieldnotes above we see how “Paris” Manoharan – the South Indian musician we encountered in Northern Kerala earlier – succeeded in making an important personal and physical connection with the prosperity, power, and prestige associated with a European global city. Yet this scene in Geneva also points to how he transcended local relations of ritual servitude by reaching for wider identity possibilities in new productive arrangements abroad. Between looking after the needs of deities and devotees at home and entertaining cosmopolitan audiences at public concerts in Europe, North America, and Japan, Paris Manoharan expanded his sense of self-worth. He did this by accessing networks of global artistry, by meeting cultural entrepreneurs and administrators, other artists, world-music enthusiasts, and ethnomusicologists. How can musical labor and dignity account for the coexistence of hereditary values with modern categories of work? To grasp the complexity of identities like these, we must first recall how capitalism changed the way people conceptualize value in relation to the art of work in general, and more specifically, how Kerala’s political modernity – as a region governed intermittently by local communist parties in global capitalist India since 1957 – has influenced performers’ actions on and in material worlds. To produce capital – surplus wealth used to generate more wealth – a musician, like any worker, must produce exchange value (Marx 1861–64, 448), in this case by performing in an event that gains autonomous status independent of individual players (Attali 1977, 77–8). Recording technology made this possible on a mass scale by enabling the production of a tangible record of congealed creative labor, but even before the invention of the gramophone and its effects on livelihoods, musicians produced exchange value at live musical occasions. An event promoter, manager, or impresario simply paid musicians a salary or wage in exchange for performances at a venue where access is regulated

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by a fee (ibid.; Olmsted 2002). Pointing to a note in Marx’s Grundrisse that uses the example of the productive labor of an instrument maker in contrast with the unproductive labor of the musician who plays the instrument (Marx 1857–58, 305, fn. 6), many scholars have argued that Marx did not recognize intangible services as productive labor. However, in a subsequent economic manuscript, Marx described conditions under which musical labor is productive using the example of a singer who makes money for someone else by singing: A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. (Marx 1861–64, 448)

Autonomy implies that musicians no longer sell their embodied musical value, but rather sell their time, albeit not just any time: abstract time. The difference is one between “labor as a measure of time and time measuring labor” (Postone 1993, 216). Under capitalism, musicians sell abstract labor determined by abstract time rather than concrete labor in the form of their embodied productive and creative potential. To generate exchange value, musicians thus produce musical time for wages, and the moment when a musician begins selling abstract labor time, the modern concept of the artist is born (Attali 1977, 95). Musicians like Paris Manoharan, then, navigate between abstract labor, exchange value, and the role of the artist on the one hand, and embodied labor, use value, and the hereditary role of the neofeudal service provider on the other. The evidence pointing to these separate, yet mutually conditioning, exchange worlds can be found in the categories used to talk about how musicians get paid. At the local shrines where Paris Manoharan holds the customary hereditary right and duty (avakās´am) to provide music for teyyam, the payment he receives from patrons is referred to as daks ̣inạ . The term more accurately translates as a gift or token of recognition, a material object defined more by the reciprocal act of giving and receiving in the process of renewing bonds between musicians and patrons than by the object itself. As an enduring symbol of hereditary authority and responsibility, this form of remuneration contrasts markedly with the word used to describe musical work outside these obligations. When playing at weddings or teyyam ceremonies in the hereditary territory of other Malayan families, Paris Manoharan refers to the payment as a form of kūli, which is the equivalent of a small wage given for a one-time job determined on the basis of duration and job completion rather than hereditary obligations. Finally, when offered a chance to perform teyyam in other states of India or abroad with a traveling troupe, he describes the remuneration as either kūli or ´ambaḷam, s which is the equivalent of the English word “salary” in Malayalam and thus

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refers to a longer period of work involving a written contract. The use of these terms suggests that Paris Manoharan shapes his complex identity as a professional musician between hereditary/feudal service and modern capitalist concepts of artistic labor. While these two domains of labor might be viewed as contradictory, his artistry in fact depends on maintaining close linkages with the ritual context, sacred worldview, and caste relations in which he cultivated his skills in the first place – in much the same way as Franz Joseph Haydn relied on his “feudal” job for the Esterházy court while using the mercantilist traderoutes of eighteenth-century music publishing to make his European fame. Given that Paris Manoharan’s trade secrets have now captured the imagination of a world-music marketplace, the reverse is also true: his reputation as an artist who traveled and labored musically abroad has further dignified his role as a hereditary performer at sacred shrines. Physical mobility and global artistry, then, improved his local sense of cultural self-worth without undermining relationships with ancestors, communities of worship, and teyyam deities. This expanding horizon of complementary identity possibilities available to music specialists, however, is only one possible outcome of the interaction between modern artistry and preexisting hereditary values in South India. For some teyyam performers, modern concepts of labor have strained relations with patrons of spirit-medium ceremonies in the wake of widespread unionization and labor legislation under Kerala’s successive (and democratically elected) communist governments (Heller 2001). Though mainly associated with manual trades, and agricultural and factory work, the Malayalam word for labor, toḻil, is now also used to refer to musical labor. Musicians will point to visible scars, calluses, bruises, and swollen parts on their bodies to prove that hereditary ritual arts involve great physical difficulty and pain, corporeal evidence that speaks to an individual’s credibility as a musician. Looking for the bodily imprints of disciplined practice is common among musicians throughout India (Neuman 1990, 31–2), but what is relatively new is the turn among performers toward understanding this evidence as labor. It is not surprising, then, that musicians working in different settings and relations of patronage in South Asia have increasingly developed a consciousness of remunerated performances as a form of work or wage labor. This was especially true in Kerala where a robust socialist movement encouraged musicians to reinterpret their musical production as labor in the decades following Indian independence in 1947. It was thus only a matter of time before performers began organizing themselves into unions around a concept of labor rights, and indeed the Malabar Association of Teyyam Artists was formed in the early 1990s to advance and protect the interests of hereditary ritual musicians; for example, by striking

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during the festival season to increase remuneration, improve working conditions, and protest against temple committees that refuse to recognize avakās´am rights. The role of labor movements takes us to the final South Indian scene I explore in this chapter, one in which global–local interactions, musical entrepreneurship, and the politics of dignity provide yet another perspective on music and labor from the Indian subcontinent.

Musical entrepreneurship and the digital divide On March 1, 2009, the South Indian Cine Musicians’ Union organized a highly publicized event to congratulate A. R. Rahman for his Oscar-winning work on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack (2008).11 At a crowded auditorium in the Vadapalani suburb of Chennai, the union praised the international accomplishments of the composer known in Indian media as the “Mozart of Madras.” South Indian classical-music legend M. Balamuralikrishna presented Rahman with a glass-encased pair of hands hoisting a silver globe inscribed with the insignia of the Cine Musicians’ Union and Trust: a ring of film stock framing the silhouette of a tambura, a long-necked lute continuously plucked in the background to establish the tonal center in South Asian classical-music traditions. The choice of iconography was significant for the way it celebrated Rahman’s global reach while symbolically claiming credit for nurturing his craft in the Chennai-based community of cinema musicians. The gift anchored Rahman in a local world of sociomusical work, and yet it also expressed the aspirations of ordinary musicians for recognition in world-music markets. However one chooses to nuance interpretations of this gift transaction, clearly the leadership of a fraternity of musicians was keen to honor an exceptional colleague whom they considered one of their own. Still, one might ask, nonetheless, why the union celebrated the achievements of an instrumental figure in popularizing a highly computerized mode of production that threatened the interests of organized musical labor. After all, Rahman pioneered the use of synthesizers and digital audio workstations, technologies that eventually transformed relations of musical production in the Tamil commercial film industry by reducing the demand for session musicians. What are the implications of the digital revolution for the average Indian musician? Why would a musicians’ union venerate a star composer who, despite

11 The opening scene of this section is based on my reading of an audio-visual recording of the cine musicians’ ceremony in honor of Rahman in Chennai, which at the time of writing is widely available for viewing on the internet (youtube.com/watch?v=U5dnV-BGksQ, last accessed August 9, 2012). A. R. Rahman won Academy Awards for best original soundtrack and best original song (“Jai Ho”) for the film Slumdog Millionaire (2008), directed by Danny Boyle.

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a reputation for treating musicians he employs with deep respect, is nonetheless associated with production values and technologies that eliminated jobs? For ordinary members of the Cine Musicians’ Union, Rahman must seem like a musician of the imagination with both real and imaginary personae, simultaneously a local celebrity presence as well as “a psychological projection” that fans and fellow musicians perceive in relation to larger transformations in India’s cultural economy and listening publics (Leppert 2004, 26). After all, his mastery of digital technologies (sequencers, samplers, and synthesizers) to create a distinctive sound characterized by catchy vocal and instrumental hooks, unconventional textural layers of prefabricated and acoustic sounds, and novel timbral effects is often credited with revolutionizing film-song aesthetics at a time in the early 1990s when the industry faced heightened competition from satellite television and global popular culture in the wake of India’s liberalization policies (Booth 2008; Getter and Balasubrahmaniyan 2008). Not surprisingly, portrayals of Rahman often evoke modern Romantic tropes of extraordinary individual artistry, yet union members know that musical exceptionality is only one factor that contributed to his real and imaginary international stardom. In contrast with narratives of genius that single out talent and devotion as the twin catalysts for his success, musicians point to Rahman’s musical entrepreneurship – his work ethic, flexible musicianship, media expertise, social networking, and commercial acumen (Mathai 2009). To live by their art, musicians often learn how to manage their craft entrepreneurially, how to negotiate between promising enterprises, potential patrons, and publics, how to hone flexible skill sets, and especially how to assess and take risks (Weber 2004). For freelance musicians working in capitalist relations of production, risk-taking is a condition that both limits and opens new identity possibilities, often with devastating or empowering consequences for one’s sense of self-worth as an artist. For Rahman, the risks paid off abundantly. Aided by the Indian economy’s neoliberal turn toward free-market policies, heightened capital flows, and flexible labor in the early 1990s, he worked with other musicians to compose music for Indian publics that were developing increasingly eclectic cosmopolitan sensibilities. His success at the Academy Awards further enhanced his status as the personification of Indian musical dignity in an age of digital reproduction. And yet Rahman and others of his generation also participated in the restructuring of musical relations of production with new technologies – a transformation that reduced employment opportunities for ordinary musicians and multiplied their risks. The following ethnographic scene in Kerala shows how freelance musicians are adapting to these changes in the political economy of film music production.

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October 10, 2011, 5:30 pm. Thiruvananthapuram. The lighting is dim and the temperature is cool in the tight quarters of the air-conditioned control room of S. S. Digital Studio in Kerala’s capital city. A sound recordist and six violinists (all men) are layering acoustic tracks on top of pre-recorded keyboard parts composed by the music director and composer Jassie Gift. They’re in the final stages of work on a new film called Shyloo (2011) for Sandalwood, the South Indian Kannada-language industry based in Bangalore, Karnataka. The background music accompanies a tragic melodramatic scene pictured on a monitor hanging above the acrylic glass panel that separates the live room from the mixing console. The recordist replays each section of the scene several times on the computer while one of the violinists plucks the dirge-like melody with pizzicato technique and the others sing using Indian sargam syllables (solfège). Two middle-aged, bespectacled men with dark, neatly trimmed moustaches, write down the melody on staff paper in Western notation. Later that evening they record the scene together three times, phrase by phrase, creating a layered texture of eighteen violins for the cost of six. Following the session, the mood lightens with laughter and banter about food while we wait for the beef chilli, chicken curry, and chapattis to arrive. I learn they are Christians from Central Kerala, highly trained in Western and Indian art music, and all members of the Malayalam Cine Technicians’ Association (MACTA), the union for creative workers in the Malayalam-language commercial film industry known as Malluwood. Before leaving the studio for the three-hour drive back to Kochi, they reminisce about a time when entire fourteen-minute scenes were recorded in just one take (the length of a reel). Back then there was no stopping and they would fill a large theater in Bangalore with forty violins led by a conductor. That was more than ten years ago when it was still possible to make a living as a recording artist, before the advent of digital audio workstations in the industry.

A 2010 article in The Hindu (English-language Indian daily newspaper) supports this contemporary account from Kerala, as Chennai-based instrumentalists share similar stories of losses and risks they face as a result of structural adjustments in the industry that favor maximizing capital accumulation through the devaluation of labor. They speak nostalgically about a time when they could count on regular employment at the workshops of music directors and large recording studios (Aiswarya 2010). Under the social and economic productive system scholars describe as Old Bollywood, musicians were paid directly by the producer for arranging, rehearsing, and recording (Booth 2008, 207). Around the mid-1990s, this system changed when the responsibility for paying musicians was shifted to music directors, who were given lump sums by producers to cover the entire cost of production. Consequently, the orchestras and studios began to shrink as computers and keyboards replaced skilled performers. The collaborative and creative relationships that music directors cultivated with preferred session musicians in cottage-industrial workshops were radically

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altered by a system in which music directors competed with musicians for limited resources. Faced with serious budget reductions, music directors naturally chose restraint, opting to cut costs by both reducing the size of ensembles and using new technologies. In an interview with ethnomusicologist Gregory Booth, cellist Sanjay Chakravarty explained how the “lump sum” system in Mumbai encouraged music directors to save money by doing as much as possible on a computer, using fewer musicians, and recording in bathroom-sized studios (Booth 2008, 217). In contrast with the social process of making music as an ensemble of professionals, the practice of recording musicians separately on different tracks in smaller studio spaces was a cost-cutting measure that favored the rise of mediasavvy composers like Rahman in the industry. As Getter and Balasubrahmaniyan explain, Rahman is known to work alone, very late at night, and often records single performances rather than capture the sound of an entire ensemble at once. After performing and recording basic rhythm and harmony tracks from his keyboards, he will call in a soloist. Guitarist R. Visweswaran described being allowed to play freely as Rahman recorded sounds that would later be cut and pasted on his Apple computer digital recording workstation. (Getter and Balasubrahmaniyan 2008, 125)

Since the early 1990s, studio musicians like Chakravarty, Visweswaran, and the violinists from Kerala have grown accustomed to working with music directors who rely increasingly on computers and recording software such as Pro Tools.12 In addition to reducing the number of musicians required for any given session, the new technology altered the division of labor, as the jobs of arranging, recording, and composing lost their distinctive roles. For example, composers could avoid labor-intensive arrangements for ensembles by plugging keyboards into a computer and playing individual parts directly into a software program, which is exactly what the violinists were working with in the scene described above. In response to these changes, musicians have either adapted to the new system by supplementing income through other entrepreneurial activities like public concerts, tours, reality TV talent contests, and teaching, or they have found new professions. Their stories echo the challenges musicians faced in similar historical moments of rapid technological, economic, and political change in the capitalization of music. From the rise of musicpublishing businesses in modern Europe (Weber 2004), to the commercial 12 Pro Tools is a computer software product that serves as a tapeless digital audio workstation platform for recording, mixing, and editing sound. Developed in the early 1990s by Digidesign, an American digital audio technology company later acquired by Avid Technology in 1995, the software has become an industry standard for professionals worldwide.

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uses of sound recordings in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century (Kraft 1996), to the shift from private to public patronage in India over the first half of the twentieth century (Peterson and Soneji 2008), musicians have confronted new material realities by becoming more mobile, accessing technology, developing flexible entrepreneurship, expanding creative skill sets, as well as embodying new values in local–global musical worlds. How, nonetheless, are ordinary and extraordinary musicians equipped differently to navigate shifting hierarchies of value in moments of accelerated economic, technological, and social change? Since Indian independence in 1947, the honor and pedigree associated with hereditary musicianship has gradually merged with modern work ethics, rights discourses, and professional solidarity. In 1952, the first Indian Cine Musicians’ Association was founded in Mumbai to negotiate with producers for better wages and working conditions.13 The union was formed at the same time as freelancing became an important option, both for hereditary musicians who could no longer depend on the stability of aristocratic patronage or salaried staff work at the All India Radio and film studios, and for nonhereditary artists for whom it suddenly became possible to pursue a career in music. Just as preexisting values associated with elite music culture became entangled with modern concepts of labor rights during film music’s Golden Age in the 1950s and 1960s, organized musical labor now faces new modes of production driven by ideologies of individual freedom and free-market economics, and labor flexibility at the expense of solidarity – a transformation that has widened the gap separating contemporary musicians who have access to mobility and digital sound technologies and those who do not. The imaginary musician Rahman personifies may represent India’s most celebrated success story in the early twenty-first century, but the stories of ordinary musicians provide a more sobering picture of musical stakes and what it takes to make ends meet in a world economy where “flexibility is the slogan of the day” and “working life is saturated with uncertainty” (Bauman 2000, 147).

World musicians in a global hierarchy of value In his ethnography of Greek artisans struggling for dignity in the shadows of the modern nation-state, the European Union, and neoliberal economic policies, Michael Herzfeld confronts what he calls a global hierarchy of value, a world economy that ennobles some creative workers at the expense of others

13 A South Indian cine musicians’ association was founded a few years later as a distinct craft association under the umbrella of the Film Employees Federation of South India.

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(Herzfeld 2004). He describes how a nexus of business and political interests continues to make historically and culturally specific European visions of civilization appear universal and compulsory while artisans increasingly live and embody labor at the margins. By studying everyday experiences of selfcrafting, Herzfeld shows how contested values intersect in public views that both venerate and repudiate marginal artisans: veneration for the modern markets they supply with cultural heritage; repudiation for the modern lives they fail to live by virtue of existing outside the rational organization of global mass production and consumer ideologies. Like Greek artisans, many musicians in India work within the constraints of a global hierarchy of value, for they “know that their engagement with tradition is a double-edged sword. It exalts them, to be sure; but it also serves to marginalize them from some of the most desirable fruits of modernity” (ibid., 5). For the average card-carrying cinema musician, A. R. Rahman’s awards and world-music stardom represent musical fruits of modernity, signs of success and progress that instill a vicarious sense of aspirational dignity even as they draw attention to the gap separating ordinary and extraordinary musical lives. Uncomfortably positioned between a world that dignifies labor’s indispensability in creative workplaces on the one hand, and one that exalts labor’s flexibility in the global marketplace on the other, cinema musicians work and reminisce, their memories offering a glimpse of the values that guided professional music making before neoliberal restructuring intervened with new productive arrangements at the end of the twentieth century. They remember the pleasure of collective professional music making, the respect accorded embodied sounds of acoustic instrumentation, the recognition of distinct areas of musical expertise in the division of labor, fewer business incursions into the creative process, and the rights of musicians to earn decent wages under fair working conditions (Booth 2008, 282). In a conversation I recently had with Kanhangat Ramachandran, a music director and Karnatak classical singer from Kerala, he expressed this sense of loss when I asked him about how musical production values have changed. Despite the fact that he himself recently opened a brand-new recording studio equipped with professional Korg synthesizers, computers, and Pro Tools digital recording software, he spoke disparagingly of the impact new digital technologies have had on the craft of songwriting. At one point he exclaimed: “There is no life in the music people make today, no jīvan. It’s all cut and paste.”14 His bleak outlook on the nexus of computer dependency and profit-driven expediency in commercial film industries could be read as a clash of values – local preexisting 14 Interview with Kanhangat Ramachandran in Cherukunnu, Kannur District, Kerala, September 11, 2010.

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ethics of embodied musical production grappling with the pressure to conform to millennial capital accumulation. Yet his words and actions also capture the complexity of musical work worlds in which performers do have choices despite uneven distribution of creative agency and heightened insecurity. A focus on labor and dignity encourages us to create compelling accounts of these choices and their constraints, thereby widening the space for the vita activa and laboring musician in historiographies of world music. To this end, ethnography offers an interpretive strategy that is inherently personcentered or people-centered, one that begins with the musical laborer rather than a product or service. To listen compassionately to histories of musical labor and dignity is to alter the way we conceptualize world-music encounters by keeping creative agents and agentive relations at the center of our representations, analyses, and politics. Musician-centered approaches also militate against assumptions of stasis that encourage mapping static musical practices onto stable social groups, preferring instead to emphasize cultural mobility over ways of hearing and seeing that “remain focused on fixity” (Greenblatt 2010, 3). When confronted with the versatility of professional performers in everyday life, it becomes increasingly untenable to translate world-music pasts without accounting for the mobilities, values, bodies, technologies, and rights that enable and limit productive sonic activity. Whether in the context of Zouk artists recording between Paris and the French Antilles (Guilbault 1993), dance musicians touring towns of the Congo Basin (White 2008), or Andean entertainers performing at seasonal markets abroad in European and North American cities (Meisch 2002), music specialists will use whatever tools are available to mobilize, valorize, embody, mediate, and dignify the art of their musical work.

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(1861–4 [orig. publ.], 1944) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 34, New York: International Publishers (1867 [orig. publ.], 1977) Capital Volume One, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books Mason, K. (2004) ‘Sound and meaning in aboriginal tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research, 31, 4: 837–54 Mathai, K. (2009) A. R. Rahman: The Musical Storm, New Delhi: Penguin Viking McCann, A. (2001) ‘All that is not given is lost: Irish traditional music, copyright, and common property’, Ethnomusicology, 45, 1: 89–106 McClary, S. (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Megill, A. (2007) Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice, University of Chicago Press Meisch, L. A. (2002) Andean Entrepreneurs: Otavalo Merchants and Musicians in the Global Arena, Austin: University of Texas Press Monson, I. (1999) ‘Riffs, repetition, and theories of globalization’, Ethnomusicology, 43, 1: 31–65 (2007) Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa, New York: Oxford University Press Nettl, B. (2010) Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Neuman, D. M. (1990, orig. publ. 1980) The Life of Music in North India: The Organization of an Artistic Tradition, University of Chicago Press Neuman, D. (2009) ‘The production of aura in the gramophone age of the “live” performance’, Asian Music, 40, 2: 100–23 Olmsted, A. (2002) ‘The capitalization of musical production: The conceptual and spatial development of London’s public concerts, 1660–1750’, in R. Qureshi (ed.), Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 106–38 Ortner, S. (2006) Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Palmer, A. D. (2007) ‘Approaching a sacred song: Towards a respectful presentation of the discourse we study’, Studies in North American Indian Literature, 19, 2: 52–61 Perrenoud, M. (2007) Les Musicos: Enquête sur des musiciens ordinaires, Paris: Éditions La découverte Pesch, L. (1999) The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Music, Oxford University Press Peterson, I. V., and D. Soneji (eds.) (2008) Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press Pilzer, J. (2006) ‘The twentieth-century “disappearance” of the Gisaeng during the rise of Korea’s modern sex-and-entertainment industry’, in M. Feldman and B. Gordon (eds.), The Courtesan’s Arts, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 295–311 Postone, M. (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge University Press Qureshi, R. (2000) ‘Confronting the social: Mode of production and the sublime for (Indian) art music’, Ethnomusicology, 44, 1: 15–38 (2002) ‘Mode of production and musical production: Is Hindustani music feudal?’, in idem (ed.), Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 81–105

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Rommen, T. (2007) Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad, Berkeley: University of California Press Sambamoorthy, P. (1971) A Dictionary of South Indian Music and Musicians, vol. 3, Madras: Indian Music Publishing House Savigliano, M. (1995) Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, Boulder, CO: Westview Press Schneider, A. (1976) Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: Zur Methodik und Geschichte der Vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft, Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft Scruggs, T. M. (1998) ‘Cultural capital, appropriate transformations, and transfer by appropriation in Western Nicaragua: El baile de la marimba’, Latin American Music Review, 19, 1: 1–30 Seeger, A. (1996) ‘Ethnomusicologists, archives, professional organizations and the shifting ethics of intellectual property’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 28: 87–105 Sennett, R., (2008) The Craftsman, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Slocum, K. B. (1995) ‘Confrérie, Bruderschaft and guild: The formation of musicians’ fraternal organisations in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe’, Early Music, 14: 257–74 Srinivasan, P. (2012) Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Stokes, M. (2002) ‘Money and musicians’, in R. Qureshi (ed.), Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 139–66 (2004) ‘Music and the global order’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 47–72 Strohm, R. (2001) ‘Italian Operisti north of the Alps’, in idem (ed.), The 18th-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 1–59 Suisman, D. (2009) Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Szeman, I. (2009) ‘“Gypsy Music” and deejays: Orientalism, balkanism, and Romani musicians’, The Drama Review, 53, 3: 98–116 Tanenbaum, S. (1995) Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Taylor, T. (2000) ‘World music in television ads’, American Music, 18, 2: 162–92 (2007) ‘The commodification of music at the dawn of the era of “mechanical music”’, Ethnomusicology, 51, 2: 281–305 Terkel, S. (1972) Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do, New York: The New Press Théberge, P. (1997) Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press Thornton, S. (1996) Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Titon, J. T. (2010) ‘Economy, ecology, and music: An introduction’, World of Music, 51, 1: 5–15 Tucker, S. (2000) Swing Shift: ‘All-Girl’ Bands of the 1940s, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity Press Vishnu Namboodiri, M. V. (1998) Teyyam, Trivandrum: State Institute of Languages

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Weber, W. (2004) ‘The musician as entrepreneur and opportunist, 1700–1914’, in W. Weber (ed.), The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 3–24 Weintraub, A., and B. Yung (eds.) (2009) Music and Cultural Rights, Urbana: University of Illinois Press White, B. W. (2008) Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Williams, R. (1975 [orig. publ.], 1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford University Press Zarrilli, P. B. (2000) Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come To Play, New York and London: Routledge Zucchi, J. E. (1992) The Little Slaves of the Harp, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press

. PART VII . INSTITUTIONS AND POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

. 19 .

Images of sound: Erich M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive LARS-CHRISTIAN KOCH

Carl Stumpf – polymath founder of the Berlin Phonogram Archive In the Berlin intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century, scholars focused intensively on the increased significance of the natural sciences, the core of a new approach to the materials of scientific inquiry. They concerned themselves with a science of life that would encompass human beings and their societies, and would do so by adhering to the strict rules of the natural sciences. The first professor for ethnology in Berlin, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905; see Köpping 2005), as well as Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), one of the founders of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, were among those scholars who turned to the natural sciences in order to combine approaches with the classical ideals of the humanities. The term Ethnologie (ethnology/anthropology) appeared in Bastian’s writings as early as 1867, after a period of travel and the completion of his second doctorate, the German Habilitation, in geography and history at the University of Berlin. Ethnology replaced psychology as the central focus of Bastian’s research. For Bastian, ethnology provided a way of studying the “psychic half” (psychische Hälfte) of human beings (Bastian 1888, 122–3), whereas anthropology (Anthropologie) took the human body as its subject. In similar ways, Carl Stumpf called for a scientific psychology and rejected the nineteenth-century approach to the mind based on idealism. Stumpf’s disciplinary framework, however, was different from that of Bastian. These late nineteenth-century disciplinary distinctions were historically important, for they explain, among other reasons, why ethnology and musicology were not combined in the early history of ethnomusicology, as they would be later in German Musikethnologie (music-ethnology, the name of the field still in the twenty-first century). The first term applied by German scholars, instead, was vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (comparative musicology), and it is under this name that we find the developments that form the foundational years of the new discipline.

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Fig. 19.1 Carl Stumpf (1848–1936)

Carl Friedrich Stumpf Carl Stumpf (Fig. 19.1) was born in Berlin in 1848 and grew up in a musical family. During his school years, he studied several musical instruments, as well as harmony and counterpoint. As a university student, he focused his studies on philosophy and the natural sciences, culminating with a doctorate in philosophy and concentrating in that field also for a second German doctorate, or Habilitation. He held professorships in philosophy at universities in Würzburg, Prague, Halle, and Munich before returning to Berlin to found the Psychological Institute at the Friedrichs-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (now the Humboldt University, but hereafter simply the University of Berlin) in 1893. His tenure as director of that institute lasted until 1928. In 1900, Stumpf founded the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv (henceforth, Berlin Phonogram Archive), with an inaugural wax-cylinder recording of a Siamese court orchestra. The official date for founding the Phonogram Archive is, in fact, 1904, though today it is common to use the first recording as the official establishment (see Simon 2006). Together with his assistant at the turn of the century, Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877–1935), Stumpf proceeded to establish the archive in such a

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way that he came to be regarded as one of the founders of comparative musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft), the forerunner of modern ethnomusicology. Already before establishing the archive, Stumpf recognized a theoretical and methodological distinction between psychology and physics, publishing these in the introduction to Tonpsychologie, his first major work, published in two volumes in 1883 and 1890 (for a modern version of the introduction see Stumpf 1965a, 1965b). In Stumpf’s approach, tone psychology was directed toward individual and experimental research (Stumpf 1997b, 145), and it played an important role in comparative psychology, one of Stumpf’s primary interests (Sprung 1997). In this way, he distanced himself from scholars primarily concerned with the aesthetics of music. Stumpf became a strong advocate of studying music unfamiliar to the ear, writing in 1908: The greater the initial wonder, the stronger the drive toward research, the greater the expansion of the perspectives and the depth of insight into the essence of this and all art, when gradually the explanations are found, and when we learn to comprehend our own level of art as one of the flowers of a tree with outstretched branches. This does not diminish the immediate pleasure of the magnificent creations of our classicists by any means; instead, our perception increases, and to a certain degree we make the artworks of the whole world our own. If exotic works of art seem repelling at first, the perception of the theoretical comprehension and the internal structures serve to moderate, (Stumpf 1908, 234) producing a positive aesthetic satisfaction.1

As the head of the Psychological Institute, Stumpf was primarily interested in questions about the perception of sound. In Tonpsychologie he had tried to prove that a listener’s perception of sound and the evaluation of it took place simultaneously. Subsequently, he proposed his theory of sound fusion (Verschmelzungstheorie), whereby he argued that consonance was not based on the similarity of overtones, the explanation advanced by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94). Stumpf believed, instead, that two tones sounded as one when played simultaneously. He believed, furthermore, that the way to prove such theories was to show them to be universal sound phenomena, hence present also in non-Western music. It was the phonograph that afforded him the possibility of experimentation (e.g., in his studies of the Native Americans in Stumpf 1922). When he was appointed as head of the Psychology Department at the University of Berlin in 1900, Stumpf began to apply the phonograph experimentally, indeed, with the initial studies of the visiting Thai musicians that signal the founding of the Berlin Phonogram Archive. The archive, thus, was established through Stumpf’s experimental initiative as an 1 Translated by Emily Schalk, with Philip V. Bohlman.

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extension of the Institute of Psychology, with the goal of collecting and analyzing recordings made in different regions of the world. With the Berlin Phonogram Archive established, Stumpf specified three goals for comparative musicology: 1 The analysis of sound using musical criteria. 2 Examination of the psychological role of music for human beings. 3 The study of musical instruments.2 (Stumpf and Hornbostel 1911, 105) Carl Stumpf had taken the first steps to establish comparative musicology at the University of Berlin, and he now turned to his assistant, Erich M. von Hornbostel, to take an even more decisive role.

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel Born in 1877, Erich M. von Hornbostel (Fig 19.2) was raised in a Viennese family much involved in the musical life of the capital of the Habsburg

Fig. 19.2 Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877–1935) 2 Elsewhere, Stumpf includes the history of music and culture (Stumpf 1922, 89). He was particularly interested in the comparison of different musics in order to understand how music changed through time.

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monarchy. Though he studied harmony and counterpoint as a student and had become an excellent pianist and composer in his teens, Hornbostel chose not to pursue music as a career, studying philosophy and the natural sciences in Heidelberg and Vienna before completing his studies in the latter with a chemistry degree in 1900. In the same year, he assumed a post at the Physical Chemistry Institute in Berlin, where he began pursuing his interests in experimental psychology and musicology, adding to these Stumpf’s work in Tonpsychologie. In 1905, he became Stumpf’s assistant, and a year later he took over the management of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, still part of the Psychology Institute of the University of Berlin. The archive quickly became the primary focus of his professional activities, and he assumed its directorship until 1933, stewarding the archive during a period of enormous growth and international influence. Hornbostel also began to shape his research interests, making his first trip under the auspices of the Chicago Field Museum in 1906, during which he undertook a series of organological measurements with different collections and music-psychological experiments among the Pawnee in North America. During his North American research trip, furthermore, he visited schools to conduct comparative study of memory among African American and Native American students. In 1917, Hornbostel was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, where he taught in the new fields of systematic and comparative musicology. As a soldier during World War I, he also engaged primarily in comparative psychological studies through experiments on the directions in which sound traveled, conducted together with Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), the founder of Gestalt psychology (Klotz 1998, 30). Throughout its early years, the Phonogram Archive was financed primarily by Stumpf and Hornbostel themselves. In 1923, the archive fell under the auspices of the Berlin Music Conservatory, which then appointed Hornbostel as lecturer in 1923 and professor in 1925. By the mid-1920s, therefore, Hornbostel had established himself as an international figure in the development of comparative musicology, acknowledged by invitations such as his role at the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arabic Music, a milestone in the history of world music (see Congress of Cairo 1934; Racy 1990; Bohlman 2002, 47–63). When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, Hornbostel, whose mother was Jewish, made the decision to leave Germany, staying at first in Switzerland with his family. In the same year, the German government revoked Hornbostel’s professorship and his position at the University of Berlin. Later in the year, he moved to New York City, where he and his son, a physician, both accepted positions at the New School for Social Research, increasingly a home for political exiles, especially Jews. In the United States, Hornbostel’s

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health began to decline, and he departed for England to receive special medical attention. He was able to begin research at the University of Cambridge, with a fellowship from the Academic Research Council. He died on 28 November 1935. Together with Carl Stumpf and Otto Abraham, Hornbostel made contributions that are recognized in the history of world music as instrumental in the establishment of comparative musicology (see Christensen 1991). Historians often underestimate the role of Otto Abraham. With a degree in medicine from the University of Berlin, Abraham joined Stumpf at the Psychology Institute from 1896 to 1905, during which time he collaborated on the foundational recordings of the Siamese court orchestra. Abraham, Stumpf, and Hornbostel collaborated on a series of important publications, both on non-Western music and on the techniques of recording and transcription of music in the Berlin Phonogram Archive, that would produce empirical materials for similar studies in comparative linguistics (see, e.g., Stumpf 1901; Hornbostel and Abraham 1906). It was also during these early years that Hornbostel began his collaborative work with Curt Sachs.

Curt Sachs Curt Sachs studied music history at the University of Berlin, but earned his doctorate in art history. In 1920, he received an appointment as director of the Prussian Collection of Music Instruments (Staatliche Instrumentensammlung), which at that time was part of the Prussian Conservatory of Music (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik) in Berlin. A series of positions at the University of Berlin also began, culminating in a professorship in 1928. It was in all of these positions that he cultivated his collaboration with Erich M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive. Because he was Jewish, Sachs was stripped of all academic positions in 1933, leading him to emigrate, first assuming positions at the Musée de l’Homme and the Sorbonne in Paris, but soon thereafter in 1937 to the United States, where he would serve as professor of music at New York University from 1937 until 1953. Sachs and Hornbostel collaborated on a music-instrument classification system that would become paradigmatic in the history of world music (for its earliest theoretical underpinnings see Hornbostel and Sachs 1914). Hornbostel and Sachs understood the role of the classification system in quite different ways. For Hornbostel it was crucial that the system had ethnographic applications, that fieldworkers could use it easily and effectively; Sachs maintained the importance of classification for comparison across the

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material objects that filled instrument collections worldwide (Sachs 1929). The basis for classification was the physical production of sound itself, leading the two comparative musicologists to establish the four well-known categories: idiophones (the sound is produced by the solid object of the instrument), membranophone (sound comes from a membrane), chordophones (stringed instruments), and aerophones (wind instruments). The Sachs-Hornbostel classification system was based, characteristically for the two comparativists, on non-Western musical sources, especially the Indian Sanskrit system from the Nāt ̣yas´āstra (c. first half of the first millennium CE), used also in the musicinstrument museum of Brussels for the collection of Indian instruments gathered from Sourindro Mohun Tagore at the end of the nineteenth century.

Comparative musicology and the history of world music Comparison had become the primary concern in the early years of the Berlin Phonogram Archive. Hornbostel and Stumpf were interested in the comparison of acoustics and music; Sachs and Hornbostel turned to the comparison of instrument types. Experimentally, comparison was possible because of the ways in which phonograph recordings from the field could be examined next to the sound production of collections that were filling the archive in Berlin. Fieldwork, too, was comparative from the start. Before going into the field, fieldworkers were provided with wax-cylinder recording machines and instructed not only on the ways to use these, but also on what sort of information should be gathered and documented, so that it could be brought back to Berlin and subjected to comparison. Fieldworkers returned to Berlin with the wax cylinder and a field journal of observations and scientific data. In Berlin, the wax cylinders were copied on to Galvanos, metal negatives of the wax cylinders, to make copies for the collector and the archive. During this process most of the wax cylinders were destroyed (Fig 19.3). The permanence of the galvano allowed for repeated transcription and comparison. No less significant for the history of world music, the galvanos were copied and distributed for comparison by scholars throughout the world, first with the Demonstration Collection in 1913 (Hornbostel 1963) and then as commercial discs of Music of the Orient in 1934 (Hornbostel 1979). These two collections constitute the first anthologies of world music, and they were intended for scholars no less than popular audiences (Bohlman 2002, 26–7). They expanded the meanings of comparison, giving it scientific dimensions as well as social and cultural differentiation. Already in 1905,

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Fig. 19.3 Three galvanos and copies made from them Hornbostel would write about this role of comparison in the understanding of world music: Comparison is the principal means whereby the quest for knowledge is pursued. Comparison makes possible the analysis and the exact description of an individual phenomenon by comparing it to other phenomena and by emphasizing its distinctive qualities. Comparison, moreover, also characterizes individual phenomena as special cases in which the similarities are defined and formulated as “laws.” Systemization and theory depend on comparison. In this sense, all learning is comparative, and comparison is a general not a special method. (Hornbostel 1905, 249–50)

The invention of the phonograph was critical for the development of comparative musicology in Berlin. Hornbostel understood the name of the technology – phonograph, “sound writer” – quite literally, for the galvanization of the wax cylinders produced writing on two levels: first the inscription on the galvano, and then through transcription on paper. The researcher, therefore, worked with images of sound, and these images became the basis for comparison (see, e.g., Figs. 19.4 and 19.5). The technique of recording and writing sound with the phonograph is as simple as most great inventions are. A metal stylus connected to a membrane is forced to follow the grooves of a recording, conveying sound waves to a horn that magnifies the sound wave. The stylus has contact with the surface of a rotating wax cylinder. During the recording process, the needle creates a groove in the wax with hills and valleys. In playback, the stylus reverses this process. This movement of the needle again transmits energy to the membrane, which results in production of sound waves once again, which the listener perceives through a horn with a different shape. It is important to stress that the phonograph was the first device for

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Fig. 19.4 Transcription by Carl Stumpf – “Siamese Nationalhymne”

Fig. 19.5 Transcription by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel recording and replaying sound. Initially, Edison used waxed paper, but already by the 1880s pure wax cylinders (relatively soft wax) were mass marketed. The sound recordings were inscribed as grooves on the outside of hollow cylinders. The earliest cylinders usually wore out each time they were played. When this happened, the surface could be shaved smooth so new recordings could be made on them. By the early twentieth century, a harder wax was developed along with the possibility to make copies of the unique recordings.

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Fig. 19.6 Edison phonograph for the home (c. 1905)

Hornbostel and the methods and techniques of early comparative musicology In 1910, Hornbostel published an article on comparative acoustic and musicpsychological studies, in which he specifies the methods to be used in the comparative study of world music (Hornbostel 1910): 1 Experiments with non-European subjects (Versuchspersonen). 2 Pitch-measurements on musical instruments. 3 Studies that employ phonographs. Hornbostel himself worked most extensively with the last two methods, and little is known about his ideas on the first method; in other words, the ethnographic techniques for comparative musicology. What we know about his approach to ethnography comes from the guidelines he prepared for field recorders, among them the recommendations for using the phonograph from materials in the Berlin Phonogram Archive. The following guidelines, for example, come from Hornbostel’s “Instructions for the Operation of the Phonograph for Field Researchers” from 1904.3 After a short list of necessary equipment, the section on recording follows, and the instructions end with the brief description of what was for Hornbostel necessary for every recording:

3 These guidelines are consolidated from various sources, published and unpublished, in Berlin.

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B. Recording 1 Wind the mechanism completely before every recording. 2 Normally, one should set the mechanism to run at a medium speed; with very high-pitched, very soft, or very fast music, running at high speed. 3 Situate the machine firmly in place, and do not move it while recording. 4 Begin every recording by sounding the pitch a1 on the pitch pipe for the phonograph and then announcing the log number and title of the recording. 5 Bring the resonator of the musical instrument, or the speaker’s or singer’s mouth, as close as possible to the megaphone without touching it. The player (singer) may, if practical, mark the beat by handclapping, as closely as possible to the bell of the megaphone. 6 After recording songs, record the lowest and highest note in the singer’s vocal range. Instrumental musicians should be allowed to play into the phonograph the complete scale of their instrument using the succession of pitches to which they are accustomed; in the case of stringed instruments, record the open strings separately. 7 Test every recording immediately by playing it back in its entirety. 8 Enter the log number, location, and title of the recording on the cylinder container. 9 Fill out the log as carefully as possible. 10 Occasionally, it is advisable to make two recordings of the same piece of music (also by different musicians). C. Log (The log should contain): 1 The number from the order in which the recording was made. 2 Date and location of the recording. 3 Particulars of the speaker or musician: a Tribe; b Name; c Age; d Sex; e Profession. 4 The type of recording being made: a Speech (conversation, declamation); b Singing (solo, duet, chorus, instrumental accompaniment); c Instrumental music (name, description, drawing or photograph of the instrument); d Title of the piece; e Category of the piece (dancing song, religious song, folk song, etc.); f Indigenous name of the mode in which the piece is played. 5 Text of the song or speech sample in as careful a transcription as possible, perhaps with translation (to be written on the right-hand side):

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6 Does an indigenous musical notation of the recorded piece exist? If possible, write down on the right-hand side. 7 Noteworthy circumstances (bearing or expression of those being recorded; gestures, dance, ceremonies). Optional 8 Indigenous theory? Scales (five-tone, seven-tone? How do the locals arrive at the number of scale steps?) Multipart texture in singing and instrumental music? 9 a Professional musicians (organization, social standing, etc.)? b Amateur music (prevalence, instruction, etc.)? 10 Attitude of the indigenous musician to European music? 11 Indigenous myths of origin and history of music?

Pitch, scale, and tone measurements were obviously important to Hornbostel, as well as data concerning the cultural setting of the recorded music. Though he recognized the value of these data and instructed field collectors to include it, such data were not his primary research field. Musical instruments, however, were. Apart from the classification system he developed with Curt Sachs, he developed a number of critical ideas about the research into musical instruments. He was keenly aware of the difficulties connected to measurements of musical instruments, and therefore included them in the contexts used to analyze phonograph recordings. Since music’s earliest beginnings, music theorists have been concerned with the determination of the size of intervals, and this is also one of the most important tasks of comparative musicology. Modern methods of acoustical measurement permit a very exact determination of pitch, not only for instruments with constant pitch, but also in music recorded with a phonograph. Hornbostel recognized that measurement on musical instruments harbored sources for errors of all kinds and should therefore never be used by itself for determining a musical system. The analyst must also remember that instrumental scales are not always identical with the scales used in performance, what the comparativists called Gebrauchsleiter. For the early comparativists flutes and pipes largely proved to be useless for acoustical study, for primitive instrument makers were generally guided by nonmusical principles – the finger holes for wind instruments were spaced equidistantly, in symmetrical groupings, or approximately halfway between the natural modes of a bamboo tube. The irregular scales of such wind instruments, moreover, were corrected by the player when playing music itself. The most reliable instruments were the tuned percussion instruments – xylophones, chimes, the idiophone orchestras of Southeast Asia – though the comparativists recognized that even these instruments must be measured with some caution.

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Fig. 19.7 The “Hornbostel Black Box” Such difficulties notwithstanding, Hornbostel collected musical instruments and measured them whenever possible. Even if he did not publish his measurements extensively, we now know that he must have had plans to do so. When I first heard that his collection of instrument measurements had been taken over by George Herzog, one of his close students, who later took them to Indiana University, where he taught for several years and founded the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, I determined to find out the extent to which Hornbostel used instruments in the early decades of comparative musicology. Scholars were aware of the tests carried out on musical instruments, approximately 200 in number, in the Mathers Museum in Bloomington, but I had also heard rumors that there was a “Hornbostel Black Box” with his original notes, a sort of missing link in this early history of ethnomusicology (Fig 19.7). During a short visit to Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music in 2005, I visited the Mathers Museum and spoke with Ellen Sieber, who showed me the instruments themselves, but did not know of the whereabouts of a “Hornbostel Black Box.” Fortunately, the next morning I received an e-mail from Ellen Sieber, with the brief remark: “Black Box found.” I went immediately to the museum where Sieber was already waiting, expecting the Black Box to be a medium-sized black file-card box with notes on musical instruments Hornbostel made as well as photos and correspondence concerning musical instruments, but I was quite unprepared for the degree to which the files contained materials that throw new light on the history of world music (Fig 19.8).4 In order to place the “Hornbostel Black Box” into context, it is necessary to look at some of his earlier methods from the first years of the Berlin 4 My thanks go to Ellen Sieber, who has subsequently scanned the documents for preservation and further comparative research on the “Hornbostel Black Box” and the Berlin Phonogram Archive.

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Fig. 19.8 Measurements from a xylophone from Burma by Hornbostel Phonogram Archive. In 1913, he prepared a manuscript with the title, “Tonsinn und Musik” (Sense of tone and music), in which he detailed the examination of tone psychological phenomena in the form of elaborated questionnaires (the article was never published and survives only in typescript). With this insight into the methods and techniques of early comparative musicology we recognize just how important psychological experimentation in music was at this time. The unpublished manuscript contains 138 positions or, perhaps better stated, questions. These were intended to provide guidelines for psychological research of what were at the time called primitive people (Naturvölker). In 1906, Carl Stumpf and his colleagues at the psychological institute of the Berlin University had already provided detailed guidelines to Richard Thurnwald, a German anthropologist, before he left for his Melanesia expedition. Because such guidelines had proved to be very helpful in his fieldwork, he recommended the use of guidelines for ethno-psychological research (Klotz 2004, 407). The preparation of such guidelines led to an unparalleled effort in collecting interdisciplinary data from non-Western cultures. Amateur researchers became professional once they received equipment and a

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standardized research guideline. Missionaries, colonial administrators, and scientists from different disciplines were asked to collect ethnological and ethno-psychological data. The material collections, their documentation, and the data produced by the guidelines were collected in universities, museums, and specialized research institutes. Accordingly, a method was developed that would comparatively examine all ethnological, psychological, and experimental dimensions of culture. To achieve this end it would be necessary to gather a huge amount of research material. In 1912, the Institute for Applied Psychology and Psychological Research Collection in Potsdam, founded by Otto Lipmann, published a “Guideline for the Psychological Research of Primitive People” (Vorschläge zur psychologischen Untersuchung primitiver Menschen), which had chapters on, among other things, color-sense, optical-perception, and the sense of time. The only chapter missing was one that dealt with the perception of sound and music. It is this function that Hornbostel’s 1913 typescript, in effect, fulfills. Hornbostel’s manuscript contains ten chapters and an appendix (Fig 19.9). The chapters

Fig. 19.9 Typescript of Hornbostel’s unpublished manuscript on experiments with music psychology: table of contents

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are clearly divided into several research areas, which comfortably reflect specific field-research situations. Hornbostel starts with the basics, but becomes more complex with virtually every chapter. Reading his guidelines, one can clearly make out that he had already done some fieldwork, which obviously had a deep impact on him. It is also amazing how dense and extensive his guideline is. We can only imagine what it was like to do fieldwork while working through a guideline of more than 40 pages or 138 positions, with detailed questions, communicating with the people of the culture at the same time, sharing the experiments with them, and knowing that this is only the part on tone-psychology; the other questionnaires concerning color-sense, optical-perception, and the sense of time still required the researcher’s attention. If it was virtually impossible to carry out such rigorous fieldwork, it is undeniable that it was organized to be highly systematic. In order to provide insight into Hornbostel’s ideas on fieldwork in music psychology at this critical moment in the history of world music, I summarize the chapters here. *

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A. I. Notes during language recordings: points 1–17 contain questions about linguistic matters, such as behavior during language recording sessions, the opinion of the test subjects about the experiments, and a long list of terms on sound, instruments, music making, aesthetics, and, of course, speech and language matters relating to song lyrics. A. II. Explorations (questions addressed to the informants) after language recordings: points 18–43 concern sound-generating instruments (Schallwerkzeuge); Hornbostel goes into considerable detail here. Questions about names and terms are followed by tuning systems, the making of instruments, and playing situations, even about how one learns to play the instrument one is observing. Points 44–82 deal with vocal music in almost the same way, but in even greater detail. Questions about rhythmic accompaniment, sound quality, aesthetics, occasions, content of the lyrics, melodies, their ownership (copyright), improvisation, and the like. B. III. Occasional Observations: points 83–98 concern occasions when the researcher realizes that the informant is able to hear a sound or noise earlier and better than the researcher, that he more easily hears the direction and origin of the sound. C. IV. Experiments without the recording apparatus: after acquiring an idea about sound and noise perception in the culture under study, Hornbostel proposes experiments without apparatus to prove this. He starts with the statement that every experiment has to be done in the form of games and contests. These are the subjects of points 99–113. Most of the experiments

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deal with the perception of sound. To take one example proposed by Hornbostel: the researcher clips his fingernails or holds a pocket watch behind the blindfolded test-subject, who should describe the direction from which the sound is coming. Or in point 113 he tries to find out if a tempo during a work process is so much fixed that a test-subject can reproduce it by beating with a stick while the researcher measures it with a pendulum behind the test-subject. C. V. Experiments with indigenous musical instruments: points 114–25 deal with native musical instruments and their relation to sound perception. For example (114) Hornbostel recommends giving the subject an indigenous instrument and asking him to make a copy. The researcher should bring both instruments home to measure their differences; if this is not possible, he should at least record both instruments. He also recommends playing indigenous instruments with different techniques – beating a drum in the middle or on the rim – and then asking the subjects how the sound was made. Hornbostel, furthermore, asks the researcher to play intervals on different instruments, asking the subjects if both notes are the same, different, or very different. C. VI. Recordings with the phonograph: Hornbostel includes a standard guideline about how to use a phonograph, the full equipment the researcher needs in the field, and how to make good documentations. Here, we do not find single points about the technical aspects. Only with points 126–9 are there questions about the reaction of the informants to the phonograph: are they afraid, amused, astonished, etc.? C. VII. Experiments with the phonograph: I treat this chapter in detail because it is critically important for the fieldwork situation and the ideas the researcher brings to it. Unfortunately, the final chapters, which could have provided an even deeper insight into this matter, are lost, or Hornbostel failed to finish them. After explaining in the previous chapter how recordings with the phonograph have to be made to get proper results, he starts directly with the first experiment: 5 * Point 130: demonstration of foreign recordings from surrounding areas, and after these, melodies from elsewhere are presented. What impressions and judgments do these produce, especially aesthetic judgment (beautiful, ugly, good, better, worse, etc.), and do the melodies seem familiar or strange? * 131: demonstration of the subjects’ own recordings with slightly altered speeds. Is there a difference they notice, and how is it characterized?

5 Hornbostel observes in a footnote that these are available to the researcher at the Phonogram Archive.

492 *

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132: the same as 131, but with extremely increased or decreased speed. One starts – on a different day from the day the recording was made – with an extreme speed and slows it down (or speeds it up) until the subject recognizes the melody. This has to be calculated according to the number of revolutions (Tourenzahlen) – he describes here how to do it technically – or if there is enough space on the cylinder by recording again the a1 with a pitch pipe. Hornbostel suggests using a short recording again and again while recording the pitch pipe after every experiment. 133: ask the subject to repeat pitches sung, whistled, and produced by the pitch pipe. Record both with the phonograph. 134: demonstration of recorded intervals and motives. Record the tone repetitions with a second phonograph. Hornbostel mentions here that these experimental cylinders were made in the Phonogram Archive and can be ordered from there. 135: demonstration of an unknown, but indigenous, melody to the informant. Ask that individual to repeat the melody immediately. Record the repeated tone with a second phonograph. 136: pronounce a short phrase such as “good morning” using a heavily articulated language-melody. Record the repeated sentence. 137: test subject should sing an indigenous melody that is normally not sung. Record this with the phonograph. 138: like 125, in other words, the subject should beat on a drum the rhythm of a vocal melody normally not accompanied by a drum. Record this with the phonograph. A second subject should be asked to guess the melody after listening to the drum rhythm.

The final sections in the typescript for “Tonsinn und Musik:” * * * *

C. VIII. Experiments with the tonometer. C. IX. Physiological examination of the sense of hearing. C. X. Experiments for musically talented experimentalists. Appendix: Problems in music psychology and ethnomusicology.

It was Hornbostel’s goal to guide his traveling amateur researchers toward objective experimentation to obtain valid data on musical talent, auditory perception levels, and the sense of tone. He is very precise in suggesting experiments, revealing that he does not trust the researcher, which, furthermore, is why he asks that all experiments be done twice. He uses various kinds of recordings, with sound production, human and instrumental, of many different kinds. Some of these include documents from his own fieldwork, about which we know relatively little, and thus throw light on the application

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of experimentation to the ethnographic practices of early comparative musicology. Hornbostel’s 1913 “Tonsinn und Musik” contributes significantly to the early history of ethnomusicology because of the ways it reveals the connections the comparativists of the Berlin School hoped to establish between the collection of world music, the analysis of it, and the experimentation to which it contributed new data and methods. These connections emerge from the recordings to which the essay refers the researcher; for example, in point 138, which directs the researcher to a recording Hornbostel himself made in Oklahoma during his 1906 trip to the United States. This wax cylinder is called “Rhythmic Studies,” but it is in fact an interview with a Pawnee to whom Hornbostel referred as “Scout” (Ziegler 2002,166; the recording is available on Berlin and Simon 2002). The recording makes it clear that Hornbostel was highly interested in this kind of experimental study years before he wrote his guideline, and it becomes even clearer in the letters he wrote to Carl Stumpf during his 1906 research in the United States. In the recorded experiment he describes, different rhythms (2/4, 3/4, 4/4) were beaten on a drum, first by Hornbostel himself and then by Scout. It clearly demonstrates the differences in the perception of rhythmical concepts and musical thought. Only a part of the Hornbostel Pawnee collection was galvanized, depending on the quality of the recording as well as the content; cylinder 31 – “Rhythmic Studies” – was among those not preserved as “copies,” and survives only as an original. Hornbostel’s description of the procedures applied to the copied cylinders, nevertheless, provides great insight into Hornbostel’s experimental methods, for his voice and announcements can easily be identified. Apart from his North American research and ethnographic work, we know that Hornbostel did not work extensively in the field and that “Tonsinn und Musik,” including its experimental questionnaire, was never published. We can therefore speculate that he himself did not collect enough data for his experimental work, making it necessary to turn to other researchers. Looking closer at his fieldwork in the United States, however, it becomes evident that he was very interested in music psychology from a comparative perspective, leading him to elaborate a research plan for his own fieldwork and his fellow comparative musicologists in Berlin. In his first letter from the United States (October 12, 1906), Hornbostel writes from Chicago about his plan to make recordings with some Pawnee Indians in Oklahoma and his eagerness to test the methods – without, however, describing these methods – on a Pawnee chief, whom he expected to meet in the coming week when he traveled to Oklahoma. He had already developed contacts with a psychological institute in Chicago, evidently at the Field Museum, where he wanted to record

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drum acoustics. In his next letter to Stumpf (November 9, 1906), written from Oklahoma, he notes that experiments with adults are particularly difficult to carry out, limiting him to experiments with only three adults, whom he tested for their sense of color and visual acuity. Experiments with children, he notes, were much easier. At a local school he found thirty-three Pawnee children whom he could test for color-sense and visual acuity (“Not a single anomaly!”, he added in brackets), as well as applying further tests for visual reaction time, optical illusions, and memory experiments (ten figures in successive presentation). Only a few days later, on November 15, 1906, he again wrote to Carl Stumpf informing him that he witnessed a “real mescal ceremony,” thus affording him the opportunity to listen to an entire evening of medicine songs. His primary attention, then, turned to children at the local Indian School, examining them with memory tests, and then comparing these with tests conducted on students at a school without Native American pupils. When he attempted musical experiments with Pawnee children concerning repeating tones and aesthetic estimations on triads, he did so by asking the children to repeat music in four different ways: 1 2 3 4

Sung tones. Whistled tones. Single tones blown on the tonometer. Ascending and descending intervals, mainly octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds.

Hornbostel makes a point of recognizing how important experiments with informants who were not musical specialists were for his methods. In his correspondence with Stumpf he observes that it is obvious that some informants sing primarily in the upper or lower parts of their ranges, and they do not depart from that range even when asked to sing at the octave. Nonspecialist musicians, therefore, sing primarily what they are accustomed to singing, rarely repeating for comparison anything outside the realm of musical experience. He said that he realized again how important mass experiments with unmusical people are. He says in this letter that it is obvious that some test subjects stick to the highest or lowest note their voice can reproduce as soon as the experiment leaves their own comfortable voice range instead of singing an octave. For him it seems as if unmusical people have a tendency to persist on the sung note. The degree to which he was willing to take experimentation is evident in his description of an attempt to procure mescal and to use it for the recordings of medicine songs. Experimentation with drug-induced musical

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performance, he argues, could have very important implications for comparative musicology. Although Hornbostel claims to have witnessed a real “mescal ceremony,” it seems that he failed to obtain the drug and subject it to musical experiments. As a chemist by training, he would have realized what the drug did and did not produce, as well as his fallacy in ascribing musical alterations to its psychological effects. From this ethnographic episode we recognize Hornbostel’s eagerness to examine everything related to psychology and questions of human perception. Strongly influenced by his teacher, Carl Stumpf, he regarded psychological experimentation, shaped by the natural sciences, as crucial to the formation of method in comparative musicology (see also Fox in this volume).

The Berlin Phonogram Archive and shifting paradigms in the history of world music Together with Stumpf, Hornbostel was strongly involved in the creation of the subjectivities necessary for comparative music psychology and, in a wider sense, for ethno-psychology. After his first field experiments in the United States, Hornbostel continued experiments in music psychology. Even during World War I, Hornbostel and Wertheimer undertook experiments with soldiers in the German army, examining the auditory perception of direction, so that the results of these experiments could be applied to battle situations (Müller 1998, 172). Music psychology continued to influence Hornbostel, Stumpf, and the comparativists associated with the Berlin Phonogram Archive through the years immediately following World War I, but it began to disappear from comparative musicology in the 1920s. A paradigm shift was underway, from the experiments that Hornbostel and Stumpf had designed as extensions of the natural sciences into musicology to an era of collection and analysis that was more indebted to the social sciences – anthropology, ethnology, and sociology – and the comparison of world music in the cultures of displaced populations in Europe and in the situations of encounter that were transforming music cultures abroad. The wax cylinders collected, stored, and analyzed in Berlin would continue to be important, above all to history, but the scientific methods with which they were applied would change. Increasingly, they became a record of world music in the most literal and figurative sense, representing difference and change, and lending themselves to historical interpretation and the historiographic approaches that would transform comparative musicology to ethnomusicology. By the mid-twentieth century, further transformed by the devastation of World War II, the

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experimental foundations of the Berlin Phonogram Archive were to open new chapters in the history of world music.

Bibliography Bastian, A. (1869) ‘Das natürliche System der Ethnologie’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1: 1–45 (1888) Allerlei aus Volks- und Menschenkunde, Berlin: E. S. Mittler Berlin, G., and A. Simon (eds.) (2002) Music Archiving in the World: Papers Presented at the Conference on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, Berlin: VWB – Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung Bohlman, P. V. (2002) World Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press Bunte Bilder für die Spielstunden des Denkens auf zwanzig Tafeln (1888) Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn Königliche Hofbuchhandlung Christensen, D. (1991) ‘Erich M. von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the institutionalization of comparative musicology’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and the Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 201–9 Congress of Cairo (1934) Recueil des travaux du Congrès de Musique Arabe, Cairo: Imprimerie nationale, Boulac Hornbostel, E. M. von (1905) ‘Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft’, Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 7, 3: 85–97; reprinted as ‘Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft’, in C. Kaden and E. Stockmann (eds.), Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze, Leipzig: Reclam, (1986), pp. 40–58 (1910) ‘Über vergleichende akustische und musikpsychologische Untersuchungen’, Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychology, 3 (1963, orig. publ. 1913) (comp.) The Demonstration Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, 2 LPs and accompanying booklet, Ethnic Folkways FE (4175) (1979, orig. publ. 1934) (comp.) Music of the Orient, 2 LPs and accompanying booklet, Ethnic Folkways FE (4157) (1986) Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze, Leipzig: Reclam Hornbostel, E. M. von, and O. Abraham (1906) ‘Phonographierte Indianermelodien aus British-Columbia’, in Boas Anniversary Volume, New York: J. J. Augustin, pp. 447–74 (1986) ‘Vorschläge zur Transkription exotischer Melodien’, in C. Kaden and E. Stockmann (eds.), Tonart und Ethos: Aufsätze, Leipzig: Reclam, pp. 112–50 Hornbostel, E. M. von, and C. Sachs (1914) ‘Systematik der Musikinstrumente: Ein Versuch’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 46: 553–98 Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung (ed.) (1912) Vorschläge zur psychologischen Untersuchung primitiver Menschen, Leipzig: J. A. Barth Klotz, S. (ed.) (1998) Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler, Berlin: Schibri (2004) ‘Musikforschung als Kulturvergleich’, in A. Honold and K. R. Scherpe (eds.), Mit Deutschland um die Welt: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, pp. 407–14 Köpping, K.-P. (1983) Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind: The Foundations of Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Germany, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press

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(2005) Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind: The Foundations of Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Germany, Münster: LIT Verlag Morton, D. (2000) Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press Müller, M. (1998) ‘Erich M. von Hornbostel: Gestaltpsychologie und kulturvergleichende Forschung’, in S. Klotz (ed.), Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler, Berlin: Schibri, pp. 167–83 Racy, A. J. (1990) ‘Historical worldviews of early ethnomusicologists’, in S. Blum, P. V. Bohlman, and D. M. Neuman (eds.), Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 68–91 Sachs, C. (1923) Die Musik Indiens und Indonesiens, Berlin and Leipzig: Vereinigung Wissenschaftlicher Verleger (1929) Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente, Berlin: D. Reimer Simon, A. (ed.) (2000) Das Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv (1900)–(2000): Sammlungen der traditionellen Musik der Welt, Berlin: VWB – Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung Sprung, H. (ed.) (1997) Carl Stumpf – Schriften zur Psychologie. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Stumpf, C. (1901) ‘Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen’, Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, 2: 405–26 (1908) ‘Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv’, Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, 22: 225–46 (1922) ‘Lieder der Bellakula Indianer’, Sammelbände für Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, 1: 87–105; orig. publ. 1886, Abhandlungen zur Vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (1965a, orig. publ. 1883) Tonpsychologie, vol. 1, Hilversum and Amsterdam: Knuf and Bonset (1965b; orig. publ. 1890) Tonpsychologie, vol. 2, Hilversum and Amsterdam: Knuf and Bonset (1997) ‘Richtungen und Gegensätze in der heutigen Psychologie’, in H. Sprung (ed.), Carl Stumpf: Schriften zur Psychologie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (2012, orig. publ. 1911) The Origins of Music, Oxford University Press Stumpf, C. and E. M. von Hornbostel (1911) ‘Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst’, Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft, 6: 102–15 Ziegler, S. (2002) ‘The Berlin wax cylinder project: Recent achievements and aims’, in G. Berlin and A. Simon (eds.), Music Archiving in the World: Papers Presented at the Conference on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, Berlin: VWB – Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, pp. 163–72 (2006) Die Wachswalzen des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs, Berlin: Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

. 20 .

Music in the mirror of multiple nationalisms: sound archives and ideology in Israel and Palestine RUTH F. DAVIS

In 1994, the year after the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that marked the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, the Popular Art Centre, a nongovernmental organization in Ramallah West Bank, launched the Traditional Music and Song research project aimed at creating a national sound archive for Palestine.1 Between 1994 and 1998, supported by foundations in Switzerland and Germany, the project produced some 220 hours of digital music recordings, photographs, and film footage in towns and villages across the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.2 The documentation is stored in a purpose-built audio-visual archive in the Popular Art Centre, providing a public repository of authentic national folklore. In 1997, in an attempt to showcase its work to an international audience, the Centre produced the CD Traditional Music and Songs from Palestine.3 The liner notes highlight the urgency of the project which “collects, documents and keeps this substantial part of the Palestinian folklore, before it is lost by the natural passing of the older generation or before it is distorted, forgotten or expropriated as a consequence of the Occupation.” The notes emphasize the Arab identity of the music and its intimate connection to other popular art forms: Palestinian popular music purely rests on oral tradition. This has the effect that most – if not all songs and melodies – are somehow performed differently from one area to another including the neighbouring Arab countries. These

1 This was the first encounter between the two leaders, and their iconic gesture, caught within the widearmed embrace of a beaming Bill Clinton on the White House lawn, came to symbolize the peace process itself. The Oslo Accords were the fruits of the first, public face-to-face discussions between representatives of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in which the latter acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinians were granted interim self-government in a five-year plan that was supposed to provide a framework for final status negotiations between Israel and the anticipated Palestinian state. 2 The Welfare Association in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Buntstift Foundation in Göttingen, Germany. 3 Traditional Music and Songs from Palestine (1997). Thirteen tracks recorded in the field.

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countries share with Palestine also a common musical and cultural heritage, therefore Palestinian popular music can only be understood as a part of the Arabic tradition of popular music in the near East. On the other hand, popular music is deeply related to various kinds of popular arts, especially poetry and dance, with which it builds a harmonious structure, and so it should also be understood as a part of this supplementary structure. (Traditional Music and Songs from Palestine 1997)

More than eight decades earlier, in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, a young Jewish cantor from Latvia, made the first recordings of Arab music in Palestine on wax discs, using the Archiv-Phonograph of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv. In 1906, having spent several restless years wandering among and between Jewish communities of Germany, Russia, and South Africa, becoming increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as the relentless Germanization of Jewish life and music, Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem, convinced that only there, in the historical homeland of the Jewish people, would he discover the authentic biblical sources of Jewish song. Idelsohn’s informants belonged for the most part to the waves of so-called mizrakhi (Hebrew, eastern) Jews who had immigrated to Palestine from the surrounding Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; driven by poverty, persecution, and messianic aspirations, their exodus had occurred in parallel with, but independently of, the Zionist settlement programs emanating from Europe. It was among those Eastern Jewish communities, for centuries isolated (so Idelsohn believed) not only from one another, but crucially also from European diasporic influences, that Idelsohn honed his understanding of Jewish music as essentially oriental and semitic in character and identity, sharing fundamental principles of structure, aesthetics, and social function with Arab music. Jewish music derived its distinctive qualities, Idelsohn claimed, from its unique power to reflect the collective emotional and spiritual experience of the Jewish people: Jewish music – coming to life in the Near East – is, generally speaking, of one piece with the music of the Orient. It takes its trend of development through the Semitic race, and retains its Semitic-Oriental characteristics in spite of non-Semitic – Altaic and European – influence . . . Notwithstanding its general qualities – Jewish song achieves its unique qualities through the sentiments and the life of the Jewish people. Its distinguishing characteristics are the result of the spiritual life and struggle of that people. (Idelsohn 1992, 24)

Between 1911 and 1913, Idelsohn recorded 109 phonograms for the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv supported by a grant from the Imperial Academy of Sciences; in 1913, he recorded seventy-one cylinders for the Berlin PhonogrammArchiv. The Vienna collection, published in a complete CD edition by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, includes eight examples of Arab music

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(Lechleitner 2004). The four instrumental pieces, representing different maqāmāt (melodic modes) of Arab urban music, are performed on the cud (Arab lute) by Jewish musicians of Syrian and Moroccan descent. Only the vocal pieces are performed by Arabs: two religious songs and one secular song by a Yemenite tax official, who had settled in Jericho after making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the call-to-prayer by a muezzin of unspecified origin. Idelsohn’s conviction that Jewish song took its unique qualities from the collective life and spirit of the Jewish people had its ideological roots in European folk-music scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Propelled by ideologies of nationalism, the idea that popular song traditions embody the collective spirit, or soul, of the particular communities from which they emanate became all the more poignant as industrialization, urbanization, and migration to the cities appeared to threaten the continuing existence of those very song traditions, and the lifestyles that had once sustained them. Collecting activities were perceived as rescue operations, intended to conserve and revive the dying folk cultures. It was against this intellectual backdrop that the concept of a “Jewish folk song” took root, at first in Central Europe (Germany and Austria) and, from the 1890s, in Russia, where traditional Jewish village life was further threatened by persecution, emigration, and assimilation. Various small-scale collecting projects culminated in 1898 with the announcement by two Jewish historians, Saul Ginsburg and Pesach Marek, calling for contributions to their definitive collection of Jewish folk songs in Russia (Ginsburg and Marek 1901). The resulting work, published in 1901, is cited by Idelsohn as the first of the “most noteworthy” collections of Eastern European Jewish song; it contains 376 song texts, without music, in various regional dialects of Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and German (sometimes combined in the same song) written in Hebrew characters with Latin transliteration, preceded by a substantial scholarly introduction. Headed by a quotation from Rabbi Adolf Jellinek (d. 1893) – ‘Die innere Geschichte eines Volkes ist in seinen Liedern enthalten’ (the inner history of a people is contained in its songs) – the essay begins with an attribution to the eighteenth-century poet, philosopher, and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (see the chapter by Bohlman in the present volume): At the present time it is not really necessary to delve into the immense importance of folk songs for the study of the spiritual life, manners and customs, and history of every people. We owe much to Herder who, with his Stimmen der Völker [in Liedern], singled out national poetry as the most important source for the understanding of the folk psyche. In that it reflects in a simple way ideas, opinions, reminiscences, and expectations of this or that people, their everyday life, and relationship to the surrounding imaginary, folk song leads us into the

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intimate world of folklife and serves as precious material for history as well as ethnography.4

The invention of the phonograph toward the end of the nineteenth century brought music to the forefront of folk-song scholarship, hitherto focused almost entirely on lyrics. Transformed into sound objects, the oral musical traditions, formerly as intangible and ephemeral as the performances in which they were generated, could henceforth be collected, stored, and subjected to sustained scholarly scrutiny. Recording technology provided an objective, “scientific” method of documentation, replacing previous methods of transcribing from live performance, whose results were at best subjective, imperfect, and incomplete. As Jaap Kunst famously observed: Ethno-musicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented. Only then was it possible to record the musical expressions of foreign races and peoples objectively; it was no longer necessary to make do with notations made by ear on the spot, which notations, however well-intended, usually fell short in every respect. (Kunst 1955, 64)

With the founding of public sound archives at the turn of the twentieth century, recordings containing fragments of musical performances assumed the status of ethnographic artifacts; the recordings, referred to in the literature as “specimens” or “samples”, were treated as raw data, equivalent to the performances themselves. Institutions such as the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna (founded 1899) and the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin (founded 1900) supported recording projects in regions throughout world; the resulting repositories of highly diversified material provided sources both for wideranging comparative studies, as scholars from various disciplines addressed fundamental questions on the nature of musical systems and their historical development, and for projects national in scope, in which recordings representing the musical heritage of individual peoples and places were invested with unique symbolic value and meaning, providing authentic raw material for scholars and composers of national music. Nowhere has music been more intensively, diversely, and controversially collected, both for comparative purposes and in the name of competing ideologies of nationalism, than in that small strip of land of indeterminate borders in the southeastern Mediterranean, west of the Jordan River, known variously as Eretz Yisrael, Israel, Palestine, and the Holy Land. The very multiplicity of the names and their varying meanings, reflecting different perceptions of

4 Taken from the German translation of the original Russian in Bohlman 2005, 61.

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national, ethnic, religious, and historical identity, are in turn reflected in the multiplicity and diversity of projects that claim to represent the region’s traditional music. In the following pages I reflect on the different ways in which collectors of this music have negotiated specific artistic and scholarly interests and agendas with competing ideologies of nationalism in four largescale music recording and archiving projects based in and around Jerusalem, from Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s pioneering initiative at the end of the Ottoman Empire, through Robert Lachmann’s “Oriental Music Archive” in mandatory Palestine, the recording initiatives leading to the creation of the National Sound Archive of Israel, to the Popular Arts Centre project in Ramallah at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire: A. Z. Idelsohn and “the song of Zion” Ye musicians of Israel and its singers, and lovers of your people’s music, that are dispersed through all the corners of the earth! . . .Who amongst you feels and believes that the people’s music is an echo of our people’s soul? Who amongst you believes to hear in the singing of the Jews today the echo of the song of Moses the Man of God, the psalms of David the King of Israel, and the chant of the Levites in the Temple? . . . For prophecy is lost from amongst us, and no vision comes to Israel, because its spirit has been polluted and sunk low . . . but one consolation has remained to redeem us – the Song of Zion! . . . Heirs of the singer-Levites, know that it is in your power to save the spirit of the people from complete assimilation . . . Put off your “shell,” the “shell” of the diaspora and the evil and impure spirit . . . and address your heart to the Song of Israel, whose spirit hath not ceased from Zion and which still resounds in the air of the mountains that crown Jerusalem all around . . . Witness the folk-tunes of the Jews in all corners of the world, which resemble each other in everything . . . [T]hey all derive from a single source and all have a common fundament. It is only the rust of the galut that has encrusted them, and impressed an alien form upon them, and made them as strangers to each other . . . But similarly the Jews have become strangers to one another through the heavy hand of the galut . . . However, if we desire the unity of the people in mind and soul, we must unify the most potent means, which acts upon the mind and the soul, namely – song! To unify and to renew the original song and music of Israel, to develop and to perfect it and to raise its reputation so that it may again become one of the most beloved possessions of our people . . . [W]e, the undersigned . . . have bestirred ourselves and founded an INSTITUTE FOR THE MUSIC OF ISRAEL, a centre for the assembling of Hebrew song and music . . . and from Zion shall go forth Hebrew song, the national song for all Jews that are in tribulation and in exile, to revive their soul and to renew the love of Zion in their hearts. (Idelsohn and Rivlion 1986)

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Thus Abraham Zvi Idelsohn announced the opening of his Makon sirat yisra’el (Institute of the Song of Israel) in Jerusalem, in April 1910 (Passover 5670). His plan was to gather together in one place singers representing all the diverse Jewish communities in Jerusalem “like an Ingathering of the Exiles in little.” Reunited in one big choir, the differences between each community’s style would, he believed, instantly become evident; comparison between them would, he predicted, reveal the common “fundament”; gradually, through proximity and mutual influence, the common style would prevail until “ultimately the people of Israel will have a new-old song – the Song of Israel that goeth forth from Jerusalem.” In reality, there is no evidence that Idelsohn’s Institute ever existed. Thwarted by lack of material resources and opposed by religious leaders, the project floundered at the outset. Instead, Idelsohn realized his vision metaphorically in the form of his ten-volume Thesaurus of Oriental Jewish Melodies (Hebraisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz; Idelsohn 1914–32), a systematic assembling of thousands of melodic transcriptions arranged according to origin (Idelsohn 1973). The first five volumes, documenting the oral traditions of Yemenite, Babylonian, Persian, Oriental Sephardic, and Moroccan Jews, derive from Idelsohn’s collecting activities in Jerusalem. The remaining volumes, representing German, Polish, Lithuanian, Hassidic, Judeo-German folk, and European Sephardic traditions, were compiled from written sources after Idelsohn’s immigration to America in 1922. Each volume is preceded by a substantial introduction, including historical and ethnographic information and detailed comparative studies that highlighted the unique and common elements of the various melodic traditions. The comparisons even extend to the pronunciation of texts, with tables charting differences between the various Hebrew dialects.5 Unprecedented in scale and scope, unparalleled in influence, Idelsohn’s work is revolutionary in several different respects. Not only does it provide the first systematic documentation of the oral musical traditions of the Eastern Jewish communities; more fundamentally, it is the first to represent Jewish music in its entirety as essentially semitic-oriental in origin and identity. Thus, at a time when comparative musical studies were in their infancy, Idelsohn was able to locate his work in Jewish music within the wider fields of Eastern (and ultimately Western) Christian chant scholarship while also making pioneering contributions to the Western musicological understanding of Arab melodic practice, or maqām and, by extension, modal practice generally. 5 Idelsohn’s deep knowledge of the Hebrew liturgy as both text and melody, acquired through his training and extensive experience as a cantor, was combined with grounding in Western music theory and composition gained from studies in universities and music conservatories in Berlin and Leipzig.

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The key to Idelsohn’s portrayal of Jewish music as semitic-oriental lies in his novel understanding of the concept of mode. Opening his discussion of “the basic elements of Semitic-Oriental music” in the second chapter of his classic work Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (1929) he writes: “Oriental music . . . is based on the modal form: A MODE . . . is composed of a number of MOTIVES (i.e., short music figures or groups of tones) within a certain scale” (Idelsohn 1992, 24). Idelsohn’s definition of mode is essentially a compression of his 1913 definition of the Arabic term maqām “as he had come to understand it from his vantage point in Jerusalem in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire.” It was this earlier definition that Harold Powers, in his own path-breaking cross-cultural study, cites as a principal source of the modern musicological understanding of mode: In the wider sense maqām in music signifies in effect Musikweise, that is, a musical type [Musikart] which makes use of its own proper degrees of the scale [Tonstufen] and motivic groups [Motivgruppen]. In no way may the concept maqām be identified with “church mode” [Kirchenmodus] or even “tonality” [Tonart]. For while these latter merely denote the scale in which tunes [Weisen] can be sung as desired, in maqām both scale type and melody type [Tonleiter und Tonweise] are comprised, and pre-eminently the latter. (Idelsohn 1913–14; cited in Powers 1980, 423)

Idelsohn’s undestanding of mode as Musikweise, which treats the motive as opposed to the interval as the fundamental structural unit, provided the model for his comparative analytical study of the Jewish traditions in the Thesaurus. Paradoxically, it was this very analytical model, derived from his observations of the melodic principles underlying the surrounding Arab music, that provided Idelsohn with the means to demonstrate the fundamental unity, thus the distinctiveness of Jewish song. His insistence on the preeminence of “melody type” or “motive” over and above intervallic criteria enabled him to overlook differences between the Western semitone and Oriental quartertone intervals in his comparative analyses, and thus to conclude, as “an incontrovertible fact,” that “despite the resultant variance, Synagogue remains identical the world over, because these differences in tonality are of sufficiently minor importance not to change the character of the music” (Idelsohn 1992, 26). In addition to its modal attributes, Idelsohn observes that “Oriental music has retained the FOLK CHARACTER. Therefore, unlike the art music of Europe, which can be understood by the few only, the song of the Orient is understood by all” (ibid., 29). It was his understanding of Jewish music as essentially folk in character that enabled Idelsohn to represent synagogue song (which he considered the oldest and therefore the purest form of Jewish song), both in his 1910 Manifesto and elsewhere in his writings, within the terms of

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contemporary folk-music scholarship. As for the biblical modes, the raw material of synagogue song, they are, he concluded, “of ancient usage, probably preceding the expulsion of the Jewish people from Palestine . . . [T]hey are the remainder of the Jewish-Palestinian folk tunes, representing the Jewish branch of the Semitic-Oriental song” (ibid., 71). Anonymous, timeless and fundamentally unchanging, replicating itself faithfully in oral tradition since biblical times, Jewish music was, for Idelsohn, not only a source of national cultural history and ethnography but also a metaphor for the Jewish people itself. In his own words, it was “the tonal expression of Jewish life and development over a period of more than two thousand years” (ibid., 24). If, despite his vast effort, Idelsohn failed to achieve the renaissance of synagogue style – “the new-old song” – he envisaged in his 1910 Manifesto, his Thesaurus had a unifying effect nonetheless, ironically perhaps, within the secular musical worlds of composition and scholarship in pre- and post-state Israel, where the volumes served both as a model and ideal for subsequent generations of scholars of Jewish music and as a primary source of authentic Jewish melodies for composers of Israeli art music. Interviewing composers in Israel in the 1980s, Philip Bohlman discovered that each one of them, in seeking to compose “Israeli” music, had turned to Idelsohn’s Thesaurus of Oriental-Jewish Melodies as their common source (Bohlman 2008, 7).

Idelsohn and the phonographic revolution At a time when scholars were more often than not content to let others do their collecting for them, regarding the collection and subsequent interpretation of data as unrelated activities, Idelsohn’s extensive, first-hand engagement with the sources of his melodies and their environment was unprecedented, prefiguring the participant–observation methods of modern ethnomusicology. He gives a glimpse into his method of working in his introduction to the first volume of the Thesaurus: The present work . . . is the result of years of effort and constant communication with the Yemenite Jews who emigrated to Palestine, whose number already amounts to several thousands. For many years I visited their public prayers and their private festivities. My authorities in my noting down of the melodies were the precentors of the Yemenite synagogues. These melodies I repeatedly compared with the melodies of new arrivals from the various provinces of Yemen. (Idelsohn 1914, I:x)

Yet the factor that did most to bestow authenticity on Idelsohn’s transcriptions was his use of recording technology. The 109 wax discs Idelsohn made for the

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Vienna Phonogramm-Archiv are accompanied by extensive field notes providing essential details of each recording; these in turn are accompanied by only fortythree musical transcriptions, of which more than two-thirds are of Yemenite traditions. The transcriptions based on recordings are identified according to their Archive numbers in the Thesaurus, where they constitute only a very small fraction of the total number of transcriptions. As Edwin Seroussi observes in his essay accompanying the complete edition of Idelsohn’s recordings: Somehow there was a widespread impression that the Thesaurus was a piece of modern ethnomusicological research in which field recordings played a crucial role . . . Now that the surviving recordings have become available, it is clear that they played only a minor role in Idelsohn’s investigations. The majority of transcriptions in the Thesaurus were therefore made by listening to repeated live performances and not from recordings. The release of the recordings also teaches us how tangential to the whole enterprise his recording activities actually were . . . [T]he recording efforts of Idelsohn consisted of short sessions and . . . most of his time spent in Palestine was dedicated to other types of scholarly and educational activities. (Seroussi 2004, 53, 57)

Idelsohn himself provides evidence of the scope and intended function of his recordings, and assesses their historical significance, in his introduction to the Yemenite transcriptions in Volume 1 of the Thesaurus, which contains the highest proportion of transcriptions based on recordings: Of the [227] melodies and tunes incorporated in this collection I made thirty phonogram impressions. The purpose of these impressions was in the first place to furnish proof for my notations, so that everybody who wished could submit them to an examination, and secondly to make it possible to investigate the tunes with reference to their tone degrees and number of vibrations . . . To phonograph exotic music and judge it only on the basis of phonographic impressions is a scientific achievement of our most modern time . . . The founder of musical science, according to C. Stumpf, is Alexander J. Ellis, who in his treatise on the Musical Scales of Various Nations, published for the first time measurements and analyses of exotic music. (Idelsohn 1914, I:3)6

If, as his own account indicates, Idelsohn intended his recordings merely to supplement rather than replace his use of live performances as sources, they performed a vital role nonetheless, both real and symbolic: his use of the phonograph bestowed a new scientific authority and status on the study of oral musical traditions, transforming this work into an “investigation” 6 The fruits of Idelsohn’s “tonal investigations . . . effected with the aid of the tonometer of Dr v. Hornbostel” (ibid., 4) may be found in the measurements of intervals and tone degrees given in the various introductory studies to the different volumes of the Thesaurus.

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belonging to “our most modern times.” Moreover, by providing his recording activities with a lineage that could be traced back to the seminal work of the British physician Alexander J. Ellis, published in 1885, Idelsohn locates his work securely within the narrative shaped by his Berlin contemporaries, Carl Stumpf and E. M. von Hornbostel, that would subsequently come to represent, via Jaap Kunst, John Blacking, and others, the commonly accepted account of the origins and early development of modern ethnomusicology (Ellis 1885). For Israeli musicologists such as Edith Gerson-Kiwi and Amnon Shiloah, writing some seven decades later, Idelsohn’s use of the phonograph amounted to a revolution in musicological research, which gave the melodic sources a true quality of authenticity. In a way it served as a prime model for the young and rising discipline of ethnomusicology, providing a means of research based on strictly controllable source material. In fact, the first recordings of Jewish and oriental traditions paved the way for the earliest centres of ethnomusicology in Israel’s universities. (Shiloah and Gerson-Kiwi 1981, 201)

Cultural Zionism and the “Song of Israel” In his autobiographical writings, Idelsohn identified himself as a disciple of Achad Ha’am (lit. “One of the Nation”), the pseudonym of the Ukrainian Jewish philosopher and founder of the strand of Zionist ideology known as cultural Zionism, Asher Zvi Ginzberg (Idelsohn 1935). A secular Jew, steeped in orthodox hassidic culture, Achad Ha’am sought to translate the ethical values of Judaism as embodied in the Torah and, above all, in the prophetic writings, into the terms of a modern, secular society. For Achad Ha’am and his fellow cultural Zionists, the message of the Hebrew prophets constituted the ultimate expression of the Jewish spirit; and the perceived spiritual alienation, disintegration, and decay of modern diasporic Jewish society, brought about by assimilation and emancipation, were even greater threats to Judaism than the age-old problems of persecution and anti-Semitism. In their utopian vision, spiritual renewal, attained through the creation of a society based on Jewish cultural and ethical values, was the primary goal of Zionism, and a prerequisite for political emancipation: Israel was to become “a Light unto the nations” as prophesied by Isaiah. Translated into the language of cultural Zionism, Idelsohn’s vision for Jewish song, outlined in his 1910 Manifesto, was a metaphor for his vision for the Jewish people. To unify their song and redeem it from “the rust of the galut” was to unify the Jewish people and redeem them from their diasporic condition; and to restore and renew the Song of Israel, the “echo of our people’s soul,” was to create the spiritual foundations for the renewal of Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael.

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Cultural Zionism, the Hebrew University, and Robert Lachmann’s Oriental Music Archive Achad Ha’am was also the mentor of Judah L. Magnes, a California-born Reform Rabbi and community leader who, in November 1925, was appointed the first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Magnes had been awakened to Zionism at the turn of the century, as a graduate student in Berlin and Heidelberg. Having pursued a distinguished career in New York as the Rabbi of Temple Emmanu-El, the main synagogue of Reform Judaism, and as the founding chairman of the Jewish communal organization, the Kehillah, Magnes lost his standing in the Jewish community because of his pacifist stance during World War I. At the end of 1922, Magnes immigrated to Palestine with his family and dedicated himself to the cause of the Hebrew University. For Magnes and his cofounders this was to be no ordinary university, distinguished only by its use of the Hebrew language. Rather the Hebrew University would embody the highest ethical values of Judaism, providing the spiritual foundations for the Zionist project itself. Reacting to the news of the laying of the foundation stone of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in July 1918 to the sound of Ottoman and British gunfire in the north, Achad Ha’am wrote from London: We do not know what the future has in store for us, but this we do know: that the brighter the prospects for the reestablishment of our National home in Palestine, the more urgent is the need for laying the spiritual foundations of that home on a corresponding scale which can only be conceived in the form of a Hebrew University . . . which, from the very beginning, will endeavor to become the true embodiment of the Hebrew spirit of old and to shake off the mental and moral servitude to which our people has been so long subjected in the Diaspora. Only so can we be justified in our ambitious hopes to the future universal influence of the “Teaching” that “will go forth out of Zion.” (Magnes 1961)

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Great Britain was assigned the mandate for Palestine, whose terms, as laid down by the League of Nations, incorporated the declaration made in 1917 by the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, that “His Britannic Majesty’s Government viewed with favour the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”7 As Jewish immigration increased through the 1920s, Arab nationalists mounted acts of violent resistance. For Magnes and his fellow cultural 7 Mandatory Palestine originally included the regions west and east of the Jordan River, historically known as Cisjordan and Transjordan. The latter region soon became a separate administrative unit and in 1946 achieved full independence as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

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Zionists, their reaction to the Arab demands, and by extension, their relations with the Arab population as a whole, constituted the ultimate test of their Jewish ethical values. Writing to the American Reform Rabbi and Zionist leader Stephen S. Wise in the aftermath of the Arab riots in August 1929, Magnes declared: For me this is not so much the Arab question as it is the Jewish question. What is the nature and essence of Jewish nationalism? Is it like the nationalism of all the nations? The answer is given by our attitude towards the Arabs, so that the Arab question is not only of the utmost practical importance; it is also the touchstone and test of our Judaism. (Magnes 1982)

So uncompromising was Magnes in this belief that, ultimately, it took precedence over his commitment to the Zionist project itself. In a letter to Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, Magnes spelled out the practical implications of his pacifistic stance: The question is, do we want to conquer Palestine now as Joshua did in his day – with fire and sword? Or do we want to take cognizance of Jewish religious development since Joshua – our Prophets, Psalmists and Rabbis, and repeat the words: “Not by might, and not by violence, but by my spirit, saith the Lord?” The question is, can any country be entered, colonized, and built up pacifistically, and can we Jews do that in the Holy Land? . . . If we can not even attempt this, I should much rather see this eternal people without such a “National Home,” with the wanderer’s staff in hand and forming new ghettos among the peoples of the world. (Magnes 1961)

Magnes’s preoccupation with the Arab question determined his priorities for the Hebrew University, both before and during the ten years of his chancellorship until 1935. Having secured a generous endowment from the American Jewish philanthropist Felix Warburg to ensure the establishment of an Institute of Jewish Studies, the University’s first institute, he immediately sought support for an institute dedicated to Arab and Oriental Studies to be integrated with it. As a result, when the university was inaugurated on April 1, 1925, it comprised three founding institutes: the Institutes of Jewish and Oriental Studies, Chemistry, and Microbiology.8 Similarly, it was his preoccupation with the Arab question that inspired Magnes, a decade later, to invite the Jewish comparative musicologist and specialist in Arab music, Robert Lachmann, to found an Archive of Oriental Music in the fledgling university. Lachmann, who had been dismissed by the Nazi authorities from his post as music librarian at the Prussian State Library in September 1933, entered into correspondence with 8 The same occasion saw the laying of the foundation stone for the Einstein Institute for Physics and Mathematics.

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Magnes in early 1934. A letter dated February 4, 1934 from Lachmann’s former mentor and senior colleague Johannes Wolf, director of music in the State Library, recommending Lachmann to Magnes, reveals that Magnes was actively seeking to employ a comparative musicologist at the university at the time (Wolf 2003). In a letter to the Russian Jewish émigré composer Lazare Saminsky in New York, moreover, Magnes indicated that he considered Lachmann, with his specific expertise in Oriental and Arab music, a more desirable prospect than Lachmann’s senior and internationally better-known colleague Curt Sachs (Magnes 2003). In April 1935, just six months before Magnes’s tenure as chancellor of the university was to expire, Lachmann arrived in Palestine accompanied by his non-Jewish technician, Walter Schur, his state-of-the-art recording equipment, his personal library of books and commercial records, copies of some 500 of his own cylinder recordings, and copies of the cylinder recordings Idelsohn made for the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv in 1913.9 As a comparative musicologist, Lachmann was knowledgeable across a wide range of Asian and European traditions, ancient and modern: his publications as music librarian include articles on Haydn and Schubert manuscripts in the State Library, his classic monograph Musik des Orients, published in 1929, compares musical systems of various Asian traditions. In the same year he carried out his only substantial study of Jewish music prior to his arrival in Palestine, on the Tunisian island of Djerba.10 Lachmann, however, was above all a scholar of Arab music. His doctoral dissertation for the University of Berlin focused on the music of Tunisian prisoners of war at Wunsdorf (Brandenburg), where he had served as an interpreter during World War I. During the 1920s he had carried out extensive fieldwork across North Africa, translated and edited a treatise on music by the ninth-century Arab scholar al-Kindī and, in 1932, was elected chair of the Committee on Musical Recordings at the Congress on Arab Music in Cairo.11 Between June 1935 and May 1938, Lachmann made 959 metal disc recordings in Palestine, documenting sacred and secular traditions of “Oriental” communities in and around Jerusalem; among those represented were Bedouin, village and city-dwelling Arabs; Armenian, Coptic, Greek Orthodox, and Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox) Christians; Jews of Yemenite, Kurdish, North African, and Babylonian descent; the B’nei Yisrael from India, and Samaritans. Unlike Idelsohn, who recorded only male performers, Lachmann recorded songs of Yemenite Jewish, Bedouin, and Arab village 9 The Archive was set up with the aid of a private donation made by Leonie Guinzburg of New York, arranged by Magnes and supplemented by Lachmann’s private funds and his pension from Berlin. This initial donation was a one-off grant, paid over three years. 10 See Lachmann 1974 for a summary of Lachmann’s published and unpublished works. 11 For a critical overview of Lachmann’s work, see Gerson-Kiwi 1974. For his approach to the study of Jewish music, as recorded on the island of Djerba, see Davis 1985 and 2002.

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women.12 Whereas Idelsohn confined his work for over fifteen years to Jerusalem and the surrounding Eretz Israel, the physical and spiritual home of the Jewish people, for Lachmann, Jerusalem was only a beginning. In his numerous reports of the archive’s activities, he consistently emphasizes the need to extend his work beyond Jerusalem into other parts of Palestine and neighboring regions. In his report of April 1937, he proposes to record “in the near future . . . Mandean Religious Songs (Mesopotamia)” and “Bedouin forms of song in the Syrian Hauran and in Nejd.” He predicts, furthermore, that “this institute – because of its ideal situation and the infinite scope of its work – could become the unique centre for the study of the music of the Near East” (quoted in ibid., 182, 184). Above all, Lachmann was motivated by a sense of urgency. He insisted repeatedly that “all this material should be collected as quickly as possible so as to secure this invaluable musical tradition before it comes to be transformed or altogether destroyed by the growing European influence” (quoted in ibid., 184). Such was Lachmann’s perception of this danger that, outlining the full scope of his methodology in his first annual report, he cautions that “it should . . . be borne in mind that, given the rapidly progressing decay of local music, collecting activities proper must have precedence over the literary evaluation of the collected items” (quoted in ibid., 142). Lachmann’s professional correspondence and diaries from his Palestine years describe an unrelenting stream of obstacles relating to inadequate and insecure finances and lack of institutional support. Claiming his income was insufficient to support his work there throughout the year, he established an annual pattern of spending only the winter months in Jerusalem and the summer in Europe (Berlin and London) where he received a pension from his former employment in Berlin until 1937. His initial one-year year appointment as chaver mechkar (research associate) of the School of Oriental Studies was extended for a further two years; however, in May 1938, when Magnes was no longer its chancellor, the university rejected his proposal to secure Lachmann a permanent position and, instead, agreed to support his work for only three more years “without further obligation” (ibid., 202). That summer, on a visit to 12 According to the summary inventory Lachmann prepared for the Hebrew University on April 25, 1937 (Katz 2003, 187–9), his 769 recordings to date comprised: Jewish cantillation and song Samaritan cantillation and song Arabic (Bedouin and village; Qu’ranic recitation) Oriental (Arab) urban Christian chant and hymns Gypsy Miscellaneous

197 233 190 92 42 6 9

The remaining 190 items listed in his recording diaries mainly comprise Christian, especially Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox), Persian classical, and Bedouin Arab traditions.

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London, Lachmann tried unsuccessfully to enlist the support of the BBC’s Overseas Service: with World War II on the horizon and pressures on Jewish immigration from Nazi Europe fueling Jewish nationalist aspirations and Arabs staging a general strike and revolt, the times were hardly auspicious for convincing potential sponsors, whether in Palestine or abroad, of the value and urgency of his unique and eclectic project. On his return to Jerusalem he contracted acute vascular disease, from which he never recovered: he died in May 1939, aged 46.13

Cultural Zionism and Lachmann’s comparative method In The Lachmann Problem, Ruth Katz (2003) describes Lachmann’s career in Palestine in quasi-dramatic terms, portraying him as “a heroic anti-hero,” betrayed by the society to which he belonged, failed by that which received him. Structuring her book in dramatic form – a two-part prologue and a two-part epilogue framing a docudrama in three acts – she concludes that Lachmann’s “case may be read as a personal tragedy, or as the pangs of the uprooted, or even as religious drama”: Fortified by new insights into the group whose fate he shared, Lachmann hurled himself towards a “Liebestod” – towards transmutation into a new spirituality with self-destruction as its highest rapture. The newly “Converted,” thus, departed from this world in true Germanic fashion. Even Wagner might have been proud of him. Most of us ordinary human beings only sense the aura emanating from Lachmann’s departure. The atmosphere surrounding his death has a quasi religious character; it is permeated by Lachmann’s devotion to what he firmly believed and unreservedly trusted . . . In retrospect, Lachmann’s behaviour . . . reminds us of those who are generally portrayed as impregnated and guided by something greater than themselves, such as religious heroes, saints or true prophets. (Ibid., 277)

Yet, as Katz herself acknowledges, Lachmann’s “case” was hardly unique. Introducing his story, she concedes that “having chosen to go to Palestine, Lachmann’s predicament there adds a chapter to the predicament of many [Jewish] professionals who were betrayed by their native cultures but failed to be absorbed adequately by the culture to which they turned” (ibid., 14). At a time when departments of musicology, let alone music archives, were rarities in the established universities of Europe and North America, the very fact that 13 Lachmann was admitted to the General Bicur Cholim Hospital, Jerusalem, on September 19, 1938 and transferred to a sanatorium on October 4 (unpublished documents, Lachmann Archive). Despite temporary remissions, he was unable to resume his recording activities before his death on May 9, 1939.

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the fledgling Hebrew University, cash-strapped and struggling for survival in a climate of social, political, and economic turmoil, in a land moreover where disease was rife and basic material resources scarce, should even consider prioritizing the establishment of a music-recording archive was surely in itself remarkable. That it should do so precisely at the moment when the entire community of Jewish scholars in Nazi Germany suddenly found themselves without jobs, and when the university found itself under increasing pressure, but with insufficient means to absorb even a fraction of these and other Jewish scholars seeking refuge from fascist Europe, was all the more so. If, as Katz suggests, the university’s reluctance fully to commit itself to Lachmann’s project should be read as a personal tragedy, then the very fact that the university was willing to support it at all must surely be recognized as an extraordinarily bold leap of faith, testifying to the ideological integrity, vision, and imagination of its founding chancellor. That Lachmann acknowledged and sympathized with the ideological motives underlying Magnes’s support is evident from remarks scattered through his scholarly writings and correspondence.14 In a letter to Magnes dated November 14, 1937, in response to the news that the Hebrew University had turned down Magnes’s proposal to offer him a permanent position, Lachmann defends the inclusiveness of his work, an approach which, he felt, met with little sympathy from the university community as a whole. Yet it was this very inclusiveness, Lachmann assures Magnes, that lay at the heart of the potentially wider contribution his work could make to the strife-ridden and ethnically polarized society of late 1930s Palestine. I have been at pains, on many occasions, to explain that the investigation of traditional Jewish music cannot be carried out satisfactorily unless neighbouring subjects, the music of the Oriental Christian Churches, as well as Arab music, are studied along with it. I cannot help feeling that, outside, of course, the School of Oriental Studies at the University, this point is not generally accepted and that the reasons why it is not accepted are irreconcilable with a disinterested attitude towards research work like my own, or, as a matter of fact, research of any kind. My work necessitates free intercourse with all the different ethnical groups in this country and the Near East generally; it may therefore be made to contribute, however modestly, towards aims beyond its immediate scope, towards a better understanding between Jews and Arabs.15

It was the same ideological impulse that led Lachmann, in the same letter, to make the radical proposal, at the height of the Arab general strike and revolt, to

14 For further examples, particularly in relation to music broadcasting, see Davis 2005 and Davis 2013. 15 Lachmann’s letter is reproduced in full in Katz 2003, 197–8.

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dissociate his archive from the Hebrew University and share its direction with an Arab: This contribution [toward a better understanding between Jews and Arabs] could be made or, at least, tried to be made with some hope of success in a neutral atmosphere rather than in my present surroundings. When I consider a change in my relations to the University this point rather than my personal interest would carry most weight in favour of a dissociation . . . To secure Arab co-operation I should be willing to share the direction of the Archives with an Arab provided that we can be sure of his fully understanding our intentions as regards both research work and cultural contacts. (quoted in Katz 2003, 198)

In mandatory Palestine, the ideology of cultural Zionism translated into the politics of binationalism, according to which Palestine would be neither a Jewish nor an Arab state, nor a divided one, but would belong equally to Jews and Arabs. In common with other leading lights of the university, such as Achad Ha’am, the philosopher Martin Buber, and the founding president of Hadassah (the women’s Zionist organization) Henrietta Szold, Magnes opposed the Mandatory plans for Partition and, more controversially, in the interests of democracy, favored conceding to Arab demands to restrict Jewish immigration. However, as pressure to facilitate Jewish emigration from Europe mounted through the 1930s and in the absence of reciprocal support on the part of any Arab leadership, the case of the cultural Zionists seemed to many both hopeless and morally unsustainable. In autumn 1935, his fundraising efforts thwarted by the global economic depression and in the face of mounting criticism from the university’s board of governors, Magnes resigned his position as chancellor and accepted instead the honorary position of president. Thereafter, Magnes was no longer in a position to exert direct influence on Lachmann’s fortunes in the university.

Toward a Jewish national sound archive in Israel After Lachmann’s death in 1939, his archive was transferred from his rented accommodation in downtown Jerusalem, housing his recording laboratory and study, to university accommodation on Mount Scopus. This became inaccessible when, with the partition of Palestine in 1948, East Jerusalem passed to Jordan. The collection was retrieved, piecemeal, by military convoy, and in 1964 it was incorporated into the newly founded National Sound Archive of the National and University Library on the new Hebrew University campus in West Jerusalem. In the absence of appropriate playback equipment, the fragile cylinders and rusty discs languished in a cupboard in the offices of the Jewish Music Research Centre until, in the early 1990s, the entire collection was

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transferred onto digital media in a project funded by the Austrian Friends of the Hebrew University, with technical equipment and expertise provided by the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv.16 Yet, even as his recordings lay mute, Lachmann’s vision continued to inspire the work of his former students, particularly Edith Gerson-Kiwi and, through her, that of subsequent generations of Israeli ethnomusicologists. A pianist and a scholar of Italian Renaissance music, with a doctorate in musicology from the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, Gerson-Kiwi arrived in Jerusalem in 1935, the same year as Lachmann. In a report written in early 1937, Lachmann lists her as one of the “three female students” who had joined the archive in the previous year, and the only one researching a topic in Western music.17 Even within his lifetime, Gerson-Kiwi’s representation of her mentor’s project differed subtly but crucially from his own. While Lachmann insisted, as a matter of principle, on collecting the traditional music of all “Oriental” communities, without prioritizing any one of them on grounds of ethnicity or religion, for Gerson-Kiwi “Oriental music” meant, above all, “Oriental Jewish music.” In her account of Lachmann’s Archive in Musica Hebraica, the journal of the World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, in the year before his death, she accords the non-Jewish traditions a secondary status, essential only “for comparison,” and as part of a wider concept of Jewish music. The main purpose of the institute lies in the collection and scholarly study of the traditional melodies of the Near East. Above all, it is oriental Jewish music which is collected for the institute in its most authentic and complete forms . . . Such scientific knowledge is based essentially on a wealth of comparison, and thus it is necessary to broaden the entire notion of Jewish musical traditions. At the very least, one must include for comparison the music of neighbouring peoples, for example the Christian Jacobites, Copts, Abyssinians, or the Islamic peoples of North Africa and Asia Minor, that is, the Arab and Turkish peoples. (Gerson-Kiwi 1938)18

A similar bias toward a Jewish characterization of Lachmann’s archive, now explicitly equating Jewish with “national music,” colors the description of Sofia Lentschner, another of Lachmann’s “three female students,” in her Memorandum to the Hebrew University, written from New York two months

16 I give a more detailed account of the Jewish Music Research Centre’s initiative in Davis 2013. 17 The report is given in full, translated from the Hebrew, in Katz 2003, 166–8. Gerson-Kiwi’s subject is listed as “Western liturgical songs and instrumental music.” The other two students are Kitt Flaxman (“Yemenite Biblical recitation”) and Sofia Lentschner (“Oriental urban instrumental music”; see below). 18 Reproduced in full in Bohlman 1992, 197–8. Extracts are given in Bohlman and Davis 2007, 123.

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after Lachmann’s death.19 Even taking into account the collections Lachmann brought from Berlin, Lentschner greatly magnifies the total number of Lachmann’s recordings; while her assertion that the majority were Jewish contradicts the very principles that were the hallmark of his research: The institute in Jerusalem is singular in that it combines both the national and the comparative, culture-historical interest . . . When Dr. Robert Lachmann was invited by the Hebrew University to transfer his collections and apparatus to Jerusalem in 1935, he visualized the unusual advantages of an institute of Jewish and Oriental music in Jerusalem, and there gradually developed an institution of international reputation. About 3,000 recordings of Semitic music have been assembled, in the majority Jewish. (quoted in Katz 2003, 225–6)

In the late 1940s, a gift of a tape recorder made by “American friends” to the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem catalyzed Gerson-Kiwi into resuming the archive’s activities, at first under the auspices of the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Education and, from 1953, as part of the Hebrew University’s School of Oriental Studies (Shiloah and Gerson-Kiwi 1981, 202–3). By this time, however, the scope of Lachmann’s vision was constrained by the ideological imperatives and the new political and material realities of Israeli statehood. As the neighboring Arab and other Islamic countries closed their borders to Israel, refusing to recognize the new Jewish state, the oral music traditions of the new Jewish immigrants from those same countries became the principal focus of Gerson-Kiwi’s recording and research. Reflecting on her early initiatives three decades later she writes: In 1950, Israel was at the peak of the mass immigration of refugees. A major goal was to undertake an investigation of this unbelievable assembly of Jewish communities from the four corners of the world . . . The early collection and analysis projects of the Archive, located since 1953 at the Hebrew University, were of an even greater importance because the variety of Oriental traditions of the “Ingathering of Exiles” was likely to disappear as the exiles became integrated as Israeli citizens. The work of the Archive was and remains today a modest attempt at musical documentation of one of the great historical events in Jewish history. (Ibid., 203)

Echoing Idelsohn in its rhetoric and sense of historical import, Gerson-Kiwi’s account of her vision and purpose is, however, starkly different. In late Ottoman Jerusalem, Idelsohn envisaged the Oriental musical traditions he 19 See Katz 2003, 230. Lentschner was continuing her research into Arab urban music at Columbia University. In the same letter she requests that records of Arab music played on the ‘ud by the Jewish Iraqi musician Ezra Aharon, belonging to herself, be returned as soon as possible, “since my present work at Columbia University is greatly hampered by their absence.”

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collected as stable and continuing, providing an authentic link between the Jewish biblical past and an idealized Jewish future in Eretz Israel: their destiny was to provide the basis for cultural and spiritual renewal out of which a new national song would emerge. For Gerson-Kiwi, in contrast, picking up the threads of Lachmann’s project in post-state Israel, the interest of the “Oriental traditions” she retrieved from the “Ingathering of Exiles” was already consigned to the historical. In her mind, the very uncertainty of their future at this critical historical juncture – likely as they were to become submerged by the new occidentalized Israeli culture – magnified the importance of her work. Gerson-Kiwi’s prioritization of Jewish music is reflected in her account of the collecting work of other scholars in Israel in the 1950s.20 This trend was consolidated with the founding in 1964 of the National Sound Archive, or Phonotheque, and its research organ the Jewish Music Research Centre in the National and University Library in West Jerusalem. Focusing on oral music traditions, both oriental and occidental, the National Sound Archive was conceived primarily as “a laboratory for research of Jewish music.” However, the comparative principle, established by Idelsohn, exploited to its fullest degree by Lachmann and reaffirmed by Gerson-Kiwi, which insists, at the very least, that the study of Jewish music must also include the music of co-territorial non-Jewish communities, was by then embedded in the national ethnomusicology, and it remains a central tenet of both institutions, even if only to affirm the foundational role of Jewish music. Introducing “the central Phonotheque of recorded music, specifically Jewish,” Edith Gerson-Kiwi and Amnon Shiloah explain: No other archive is as well-equipped as the Phonotheque with regard to both the quantity and the quality of recorded examples of music of Jewish origin; nor does it ignore the surrounding traditions of Arabic music and Oriental-Christian liturgies, both of which manifest a strong attachment to ancient Hebrew music. As long as all of them, the Jewish, Arab and Christian liturgies, are preserved as oral and regional traditions, these collections in the Phonotheque are a lasting monument of the major musical contributions of ancient Israel to the evolving sacred chant of early Christianity, with all its multiple patterns of dissemination throughout the old Occident. (Shiloah and Gerson-Kiwi 1981, 203)

And, echoing Gerson-Kiwi’s characterization of Lachmann’s Oriental Music Archive in the 1930s, the official statement of the Jewish Music Research 20 See Gerson-Kiwi 1958, 24, where she lists the work of Johanna Spector and Leo Levi on musical folklore of Yemenite and Italian Jews respectively, that of Joachim Stutschewsky and M. Sh. Geshuri on East European Hasidic traditions, and that of Leon Algazi, Alberto Hemsi, and Paul Benichou on Sephardic traditions.

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Centre claims as its fundamental tenet “the understanding that a full appreciation of the Jewish musical traditions is impossible without reference to the musical cultures of the non-Jewish societies with whom the Jews were in close contact for the past two millennia.”

Toward an Arab National Sound Archive in Palestine The attempt by the Popular Art Centre in Ramallah to create a National Sound Archive for Palestine did not emerge in a vacuum. The Traditional Music and Song research project was conceived in the wake of scattered small-scale collecting activities associated with firaq al-dabke (s. firqa al-dabka) – groups specializing in modern staged representations of traditional Palestinian folk dance and music named for the debke – a circle dance traditionally performed spontaneously at weddings.21 In her study of firaq al-dabke in the Palestinian refugee experience, Jennifer Ladkani attributes the rise of these folkloric groups to social centers (jama’yyat) set up by international nongovernmental organizations in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in the years around 1948. The Popular Art Centre itself was created in 1987, during the onset of the first Intifada, initially as a forum for the artists themselves, by the socially progressive dance group “Firqa al-Funun al-Sha’biyya al-Filastiniyya” (Palestinian popular arts troupe), otherwise known as El-Funoun. Founded in 1979, El-Funoun claims to be the first Palestinian dance group in which men and women danced together, hand in hand, and in which women played leading organizational roles. Eschewing both the overtly political agendas and the literal folkloric reproductions of other firaq al-dabke, El-Funoun aspires to revive Palestinian folklore as the basis for cultural renewal by reinterpreting it according to contemporary artistic norms; it describes its vision as “an artistic articulation of the Palestinian Arab cultural heritage in its present and future ambitions.” Ladkani characterizes El-Funoun’s approach as a type of resistance through denial, “as a way to re-place Palestinian folklore in an imagined state of being; to ‘create,’ through dance, music, and drama, an ideally historicized Palestinian nation; one nation which never experienced occupation, dissolution, or colonization” (Ladkani 2001, 169). In February 1999, El-Funoun produced its first CD, Zaghareed (ululations), on the Sounds True label (Boulder, Colorado). In this modern representation of a traditional Palestinian wedding, arrangements of songs and instrumental pieces 21 Typically the staged versions in Palestine substitute politicized lyrics for the traditional love songs and incorporate electronic and other nontraditional instruments (see Ladkani 2001). For a study of dabke in Syria, see Silverstein 2012.

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collected for the Traditional Music and Song research project are transformed into a concert sequence and dance-narrative in which, contrary to traditional practice, where marriages are arranged by the couple’s parents, the bride chooses her own husband with her parents’ blessing (Firqa al-Funun al-Sha’biyya al-Filastiniyya 1999). Zaghareed was produced five months after the fifth anniversary of the Oslo Peace Accords, the date by which, if the agreements had been fully carried out, Palestine should have been an independent state. In September 2000, the Second Intifada erupted. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the National Sound Archive of Palestine remains intact and open to the public. However, since the initiatives of the 1990s, its collecting and research projects have ceased. Separated by the controversial “security barrier” dividing West Bank territories from Israel, accessible only through military checkpoints, the collection in Ramallah is mirrored, some ten miles away in Jerusalem, by the recordings of Arab songs and instrumental pieces collected by Robert Lachmann, often from the same towns and villages, some sixty years before. In contrast to the Popular Art Centre’s nation-bounded concept (providing a Palestinian Arab music counterpart to the Israeli National Sound Archive), Lachmann’s Arab music recordings were conceived as part of a wider, comparative vision of Oriental music, embracing equally all ethnicities, religions, and social groups, whose boundaries stretched beyond Palestine into the wider Middle East. Each inspired by its own peculiar urgency, reflecting political ideologies and agendas as yet unrealized, the two collections mirror each other in protracted limbo, their projects frozen in time.

Bibliography Bentwich, N. (1961) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1918–60, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Bohlman, P. V. (1992) The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, 1936–1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II, Oxford: Clarendon Press (2005) Jüdische Volksmusik – Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte, Vienna: Böhlau (2008) Jewish Music and Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press Bohlman, P. V., and R. Davis (2007) ‘Mizrakh, Jewish music and the journey to the East’, in M. Clayton and B. Zon (eds.), Portrayal of the East: Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 95–125 Davis, R. F. (1985) ‘Songs of the Jews on the island of Djerba: A comparison between two surveys’, Musica Judaica, 7: 23–33 (2002) ‘Music of the Jews of Djerba, Tunisia’, in V. Danielson, S. Marcus and D. Reynolds (eds.), The Middle East, vol. 6, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, New York: Routledge, pp. 523–31

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(2005) ‘Robert Lachmann’s Oriental Music: A broadcasting initiative in 1930s Palestine’, in D. Cooper and K. Dawe (eds.), Music of the Mediterranean: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 79–96 (2010) ‘Ethnomusicology and political ideology in mandatory Palestine: Robert Lachmann’s “Oriental Music” Projects’, Music and Politics, 4, 2; http://dx.doi. org.10.3998/mp.9460447.0004.205 (2013) Robert Lachmann’s Oriental Music Broadcasts, 1936–1937: A Musical Ethnography of Mandatory Palestine, Middleton, WI: A-R Editions Ellis, A. (1885) ‘On the musical scales of the various nations’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 33: 485–527 Firqa al-Funun al-Sha’biyya al-Filastiniyya [Palestinian Popular Arts Group] (1999) Zaghareed [Ululations], Boulder, CO: Sounds True Gerson-Kiwi, E. (1938) ‘Jerusalem Archive for Oriental Music’, Musica Hebraica, 40–2 (1958) ‘Musicology in Israel’, Acta Musicologica, 30, 1 and 2: 17–26 (1974) ‘Robert Lachmann: His achievement and his legacy’, Yuval, 3: 100–8 Ginsburg, S. M., and P. S. Marek (1901) Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii [Jewish Folksongs in Russia], St. Petersburg: Voshkod; reprint ed. by Dov Noy, Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University Press, 1991 Goren, A. (ed.) (1982) Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Idelsohn, A. Z. (1913–14) ‘Die Maqamen der arabischen Musik’, Studien der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 15: 1–63 (1935) ‘My life’, Jewish Music Journal, 2, 2: 8–11 (1973) Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies / Hebraisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz, 10 vols., Berlin: Benjamin Harz et al.; New York: Ktav Publishing House; reprinted from the English edn (Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies) vols. 1–2, 6–7, 9–10; Berlin: B. Harz, (1923–33) or the German edn (Hebraisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz) vols. 3–5, 8; Jerusalem: B. Harz (1922–32) (1986) ‘My life’, in I. Adler, B. Bayer, and E. Schleifer (eds.), The Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume, Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, pp. 18–23 (1992, orig. publ. 1929) Jewish Music in Its Historical Development, New York: Dover Publications Idelsohn, A. Z., and S. Z. Rivlion (1986) ‘The announcement of the opening of the “Institute of Jewish Music” in Jerusalem by A. Z. Idelsohn and S. Z. Rivlion in (1910)’, trans. by B. Bayer, in I. Adler, B. Bayer, and E. Schleifer (eds.), The Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume (Sefer Avraham Tsevi Idelson), special issue of Yuval, 5, Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 24–35 Katz, R. (2003) The Lachmann Problem: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press Kunst, J. (1955) Ethno-musicology, 2nd enlarged edn of Musicologica, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Lachmann, R. (1974 and 1978) Posthumous Works, E. Gerson-Kiwi (ed.), 2 vols., Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University Ladkani, J. (2001) ‘Debke music and dance and the Palestinian refugee experience: On the outside looking in’, PhD dissertation, Florida State University Lechleitner, G. (ed.) (2004) Tondokumente aus dem Phonogrammarchiv der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Gesamtausgabe der historischen Bestände 1899–1950,

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Series 9: The Collection of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn 1911–1913, VÖAW, OEAW PHA CD 23 2005, 3 CDs with booklet and CD-Rom Magnes, J. L. (1961) Letter to C. Weizmann, August 12, 1918, reproduced in Bentwich, N., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1918–60, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, plate 4–5 (1982) Letter to S. S. Wise, Jerusalem, February 6, 1930; reproduced in A. Goren (ed.), Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 286 (2003) Letter to L. Saminsky, New York, February 21, 1934; reproduced in R. Katz, The Lachmann Problem: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, p. 73 Powers, H. (1980) ‘Mode’, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 12, London: Macmillan Publishers, p. 423 ff. Seroussi, E. (2004) ‘The content and scope of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s recordings’, in CD booklet, The Collection of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn 1911–1913, Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, pp. 53, 57 Shiloah, A., and Gerson-Kiwi, E. (1981) ‘Musicology in Israel, 1960–1980’, Acta Musicologica, 53, 2: 200–16 Silverstein, S. (2012) ‘Mobilizing bodies: Popular culture and the politics of belonging in Syria’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago Traditional Music and Songs from Palestine (1997) recordings by B. Shammout and G. Boss in cooperation with Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, Popular Art Center PAC– 1001 CD with notes in English and Arabic (13 tracks recorded in the field) Wolf, J. (2003) Letter to R. Lachmann, February 4, 1934; reproduced in R. Katz, The Lachmann Problem: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology, Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, p. 65

. 21 .

Repatriation as reanimation through reciprocity AARON A. FOX

Introduction: An accidental archivist In January 2004, I received an e-mail request from Chie Sakakibara, then a doctoral candidate in Cultural Geography at the University of Oklahoma. Less than a year earlier, I had been appointed as the director of Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology. The circumstances under which this had happened were melodramatic, resulting in the abrupt retirement of the Center’s prior director of over thirty years. I was at the time an assistant professor in Columbia’s Department of Music, despite the fact that I identified (as I still do) as an anthropologist for whom “music” is an important, but not singular, focus. If the fact that I barely considered myself an ethnomusicologist was problematic, I was even less qualified as an archivist, a key part of the job description for the director of the center. In July 2003, nonetheless, I became the curator and administrator – the archivist – of the center’s foundational asset: the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music. The Boulton Collection (as it is widely known, and as I shall call it here) is an assemblage of sound recordings made or acquired by the mid-twentiethcentury music collector Laura Boulton (1899–1980) in a series of expeditions to dozens of countries on five continents over a period of nearly forty years beginning in the late 1920s. It now consists of around 1,500 hours of recorded sound, and several thousand pages of related documentation prepared by Boulton. In a tortuously complex process I describe in some detail below, the Boulton Collection was purchased by Columbia from Boulton in a transaction that began in 1962, although the current disposition of ownership rights would not be settled until after Boulton’s death, twenty years later. The Boulton Collection’s history includes disputes between the collector and various institutions, and among and within those institutions as well, about the extent and nature of its contents. Describing those contents in a systematic way, let alone evaluating them or using them as a serious research collection, entails confronting the outright opacity (and sometimes duplicity) of

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Boulton’s amateurish and self-interested approaches to her work as a fieldworker and as an archivist. But seeing her work as a particularly vivid example of the ironies inherent in ethnomusicology’s broader racist and colonialist legacy, a legacy embedded in the structure of the broader archive-building (and hoarding, and exploiting) mindset upon which the discipline was constructed, is my deeper goal in this chapter. Doing so allows us to think critically about that legacy and about how to address it and heal its lingering and still caustic effects on our discipline and its relations with its publics and constituents. Recovering, through repatriation, the cultural and scholarly value of archives like Boulton’s, I propose in turn, suggests ways to move ethnomusicology forward as an ethical as well as scholarly enterprise, by confronting the moral obligations the discipline has incurred, but not always honored, in the past.

The Laura Boulton Collection as a useless mess The Boulton Collection includes important recordings made by other collectors (though in this sense it overlaps, sometimes confusingly, with the center’s broader collection), as well as commercial materials and broadcast materials recorded in the field, alongside its core of Boulton’s own field recordings of live performances (but not nearly all of those). It technically excludes, even as they physically include, field materials Boulton released commercially on eleven LP records for the Folkways label in the 1950s. Some of the materials are junk: duplicates of recordings curated in other, better collections, poorly documented performances (with very few that are well documented, as I will elaborate), or banal examples of state-sponsored folklore. Some of the recordings are beautifully made, while others are awful. Some of the recorded performances feature important tradition-bearers or examples of otherwise undocumented communities, artists, repertories, and genres, while others feature highly amateur or lackluster renditions or poor samples of betterdocumented traditions. The diversity of Boulton’s sources, representing hundreds of different performers, cultural traditions, communities, and languages, of which Boulton’s knowledge was uniformly superficial at best, further hinders assessment of the collection as a scholarly or public resource. Fortunately, given my lack of archival experience, I inherited a relatively sleepy situation as the center’s new director in 2003. Relatively little scholarly (or other) use had actually ever been made of the Boulton Collection by anyone other than Boulton herself and a limited number of Columbia and Indiana University faculty and students, over the years since its aggregation in the 1960s. Several projects during the 1990s, and the availability of catalogues of

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the collection online by the early 2000s, had begun to expose the collection’s qualities and very existence to a larger world.1 Public access to the collection has not been particularly difficult; the materials have been available for listening at two other major and public institutions (Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music and the Library of Congress) over the course of several decades, where they were also independently catalogued. The legal arrangements developed in 1982, however, have hindered use of the collection. Because Columbia University “owns” the publication rights to the Boulton Collection, researchers working with the catalogues of Indiana University or the Library of Congress, or accessing the collection itself at any of its locations, must seek permission from the Columbia University Center director in order to duplicate or even transcribe them for any purpose. By the early 2000s, in part because the internet had exposed the Indiana University and Library of Congress catalogues to public searchability, requests for research access to the Boulton Collection were increasing.2 So, too, were requests from two other categories of access-seekers who had never been considered as potential stakeholders in the Boulton Collection before: commercial music and film producers, both nonprofit and for-profit; and individuals and families seeking to ascertain whether they could claim a heritage- or descent-based stake in some portion of the archive. Almost as soon as I took over the directorship in the summer of 2003, I began fielding (and mostly deferring) a surprising number of requests for access to, and/or publication of, portions of the archive. Sakakibara’s 2004 request, seeking research access for scholarly purposes, fell squarely within the center’s long-standing access policy. The center operates as a branch of the Columbia University Library in this respect, supporting scholarly research as a primary mission. Even scholarly requests made me anxious in the early years of my directorship (2003–8, after which Ana Maria Ochoa assumed the center’s directorship, although I have continued to curate the archive), as I was also fielding inquiries from a film-production company, seeking to license several of Boulton’s African recordings, and from the descendants of a famous Navajo medicine man – Pablo Wellito – and his five sons, recorded by Boulton in Chicago in 1933, a story to which I shall return. I had little knowledge of the materials in the collection, let alone the current standards or best practices for handling such things as access and rights 1 This includes especially the center’s licensing of Navajo recordings from the Boulton Collection for the Smithsonian/Folkways CD Navajo Songs in 1992. 2 Columbia had never published its catalogue of the Boulton Collection until I made a tape-reel-level inventory available as a spreadsheet on our website in 2003. The center has since compiled a detailed, but not public, database of the collection that contains both Boulton’s metadata and a variety of extended metadata we have developed, currently consisting of around 12,000 records.

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requests or digitizing tape recordings. I had determined, nonetheless, initially stimulated by my dialogue with the descendants of Pablo Wellito, that the Boulton Collection contained substantial amounts of music “collected” (there are other verbs that could be used) from Native American, Alaska Native, Canadian First Nations, or other indigenous artists and communities in the 1930s and 1940s. I was aware that there were emergent issues in anthropology, ethnomusicology, Native American studies, library science, and museum studies concerning the ethical management of (especially indigenous) cultural heritage resources. I had some sense, in other words, of how much I did not know, and how easily serious mistakes could be made in such circumstances that could lead to serious ethical challenges or even litigation. My first impulse was to restrict access, but it had also occurred to me that engaging with serious requests for access could introduce me to people invested in figuring out the value of Boulton’s recordings, and perhaps invested in helping me untangle basic questions about the value of the collection. By the time Sakakibara’s request arrived, I had begun to read into the emerging literature on the subject of indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights (e.g., Brown 2004; Coombe 1998), and to study contemporary archival practice more generally. Still, the poor state of the Boulton Collection’s documentation, despite numerous attempts over decades to describe the collection systematically, and its tangled legal and institutional history were obstacles to applying my developing knowledge in the form of actual practices and policies. It seemed to me that the Boulton Collection, in its current state, was essentially useless as an asset for scholarly research, let alone a public cultural asset or an asset for the communities whose cultures it documented. Curating it properly seemed a daunting and possibly pointless task given the time that had elapsed since most of the recordings were made, the poor state of their documentation, the uneven quality of the collection, and Boulton’s own scattered and often self-servingly inaccurate accounting of her work, especially in her 1969 autobiography, but also in the large collection of correspondence and administrative records and photographs she bequeathed to Indiana University, themselves once considered part of the collection itself, but duplicitously alienated from the sale by Boulton. As I probed the collection’s recordings, catalogues, and documents, I came to understand why so little scholarly use had ever been made of Boulton’s materials. Detailing the history of the Boulton Collection and devising ways to untangle and describe its contents entailed a lengthy study of legal documentation, correspondence, and prior attempts to impose uniform metadata frameworks on the collection. The audio resources presented challenges of their own. They often did not correspond to associated catalogue metadata, for

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example. Worse still, I did not have access to Boulton’s original (or master) materials from which to start over. Columbia possessed only two copies of the archive on reel-to-reel tapes, dubbed at the Library of Congress from the masters in 1973, and a partial digital copy made from these second-generation tapes. The process of transferring the master recordings to tape had introduced many new inconsistencies in the correspondence between the recordings and the metadata and problems with the audio. Subsequent efforts to reorganize the catalogue metadata only made things worse. Dieter Christensen, my predecessor, had partially digitized the collection from the tape dubs between 1999 and 2002. Unfortunately, this had resulted in still further breaks in correspondence between the digital and analog versions, the catalogue records, and, ultimately, the masters. The tapes themselves, like the masters before them, had been crudely stored and labeled, and often moved and handled, over decades at Columbia. The archive suffered from a general lack of coherence and hundreds of specific and often intractable obstacles to figuring out what exactly was in it, and how it could be made useful after all this time. Christensen, who had effectively succeeded Boulton in 1971, himself left Columbia in 2003, as Boulton had thirty years earlier, under conflicted circumstances, causing a second disastrous break in continuity of curatorship. He declined to assist my efforts to make sense of the work he had done over thirty years with the collection, which he had been hired as a faculty member by Columbia in 1972 specifically to administer. His role is as important to this history as Boulton’s. He was exactly what Boulton patently was not: a professional field researcher and archivist, in Christensen’s case impeccably trained at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. In spite of this, he never managed to render the Boulton Collection useful, or even envision a useful future for it. Ultimately, he shared Boulton’s perspective on the archive as a repository of inert data, and her privileging of the archive’s research value over other kinds of utility, despite his far more professional conception of the archive’s management. To be clear, Dieter Christensen tried to make the Boulton Collection usable during his three decades at Columbia, to very little effect and often in spite of his more privately expressed doubts about its value. This was especially sobering as I contemplated the possibility of wasting the rest of my own career chasing the same impossible goal of restoring scholarly value to the inconsistent legacy of a manic but careless collector. I often wondered why my predecessor had even bothered to keep trying. The main reason seemed simply to be that Columbia’s acquisition of the collection had provided the primary initial impetus, funding, and rationalization for the significant investment the university made in ethnomusicology (including creating the center and hiring

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Christensen as a faculty member in 1971) beginning in the mid-1960s. Despite Christensen’s efforts over decades, from my perspective the archive’s records remained incoherent; its contents poorly described and poorly cared for not only as physical materials but also as intellectual property; and its protocols and goals unclear and unengaged with contemporary standards of practice. I was unsure how to proceed, an accidental archivist responsible for a chaotic archive.

Laura Boulton’s 1946 Iñupiat recordings Let me return for a moment to the winter of 2004. Ms. (now Dr.) Sakakibara, the PhD candidate in Cultural Geography whose inquiry I mentioned in opening this chapter, had written me to ask for listening access, for her own research purposes, to a relatively small set of 124 recorded items “collected” by Boulton during a week-long visit to the Iñupiat (“Eskimo”) community of Barrow, Alaska in October 1946. Of these dance songs, stories, and miscellany (e.g., dog whistles, children’s songs), only six items had ever been published, on a 1955 Folkways LP recording that is still available through iTunes and Smithsonian Global Sound (Boulton 1955). The notes accompanying the set of recordings were orderly, but minimal (and as it turns out wrong in many details). She had, however, also devoted a short chapter of her 1969 autobiography to her visit to Barrow, providing some supplementary, if likely unreliable, information about the recordings she made, and adding two tantalizing photographs to the Iñupiat collection’s documentation, one of which also appeared in an alternative cropping on the 1955 Folkways LP. Ms. Sakakibara’s research as she briefly described it (and as I discovered more vividly after asking for her dissertation proposal) was fascinating to me as an anthropologist: an ethnographic exploration of the dynamic interplay of cultural systems of kinship, emotion, personhood, and ritual characteristic of indigenous Arctic subsistence hunting communities with the effects of rapidly advancing climate change on the Arctic environment with which Inuit cultures have co-evolved for thousands of years, focused specifically on the Iñupiat tradition of hunting the Bowhead whale. Her faculty advisers were prominent figures in geography and Native American studies, and she had received National Science Foundation funding for the project. As reluctant as I had become to facilitate access to indigenous materials in the Boulton Collection, Sakakibara’s request was impeccably credentialed in scholarly terms, sensitive to issues of rights and cultural appropriateness, and made in the context of a

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research project that could be beneficial for the community in which the recordings had been made. Her interest in the recordings as documents of the community’s expressive culture from the mid-1940s, a tumultuous and poorly documented prior era of rapid change on Alaska’s North Slope, was compelling to me. I wanted to help, and I realized she might be able to help me. After securing Sakakibara’s written agreement to strict terms of use, I sent her four CDs containing all the songs, and a printout of a scan of Boulton’s catalogue notes. Knowing that Sakakibara was headed to the Iñupiat communities of the North Slope for a year of fieldwork, I also asked her to carry copies of a letter with her. In that letter, I described the recordings briefly and listed the names of the six adult men and one child whom Boulton identified in her notes as performers on the recordings. I invited “descendants” of these performers to contact me if they wished to receive copies of the recordings and related notes, along with a copy of the aforementioned chapter from Boulton’s autobiography, in which she described her visit to Barrow in romanticized and opaque terms, but in some detail. I also described my broad but still sketchy ambitions to “repatriate” these recordings. Sakakibara and I had no idea what would happen, or if the letter would evoke any response at all. I simply asked her to offer it to whomever she wished in the community, especially if they shared a last name with one of the identified singers (an incredibly naïve understanding of Iñupiat kinship on my part. I had confirmed with specialist colleagues that the Iñupiat recordings in the Boulton Collection were social dance songs, not likely to be regarded as inappropriate to circulate to those who expressed a kinshipbased interest in them. I also ascertained that the recordings represented a musical tradition about which very few contemporary ethnomusicologists have written serious work, and which was barely documented in the era of Boulton’s visit to Barrow. Small as it was, this was potentially one of the more important portions of the Boulton Collection as a scholarly resource, if only it could be contextualized somehow. My specific initial outreach, in the letter, to descendants of the identified performers was meant to appeal to what I understood about indigenous sensibilities concerning the ownership rights inherent in such materials (as well as consideration for American intellectual property law). I also wanted, at least symbolically, to “repatriate” the recordings quickly in an initial gesture. I thus placed a reference set of the recordings and notes for public access in the archives of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where the materials could be accessed publicly. ANLC is the nearest university-based audio archive to the North Slope. I was at the time unaware of

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the audio holdings in the Iñupiat Cultural Heritage Center and the Tuzzy Consortium Library in Barrow, which also now hold copies of Boulton’s Barrow recordings and associated materials.3 As summer 2004 arrived, Sakakibara headed off to Alaska to do her dissertation research, and I turned to other things. I had no idea how successful our outreach strategy would be. Ironically, and luckily, my ignorance worked to my ultimate advantage. I had failed to consider initially (and now know intimately) that “descendant” status was a very crude filter to apply to the kinship system at the core of Iñupiat society. For the Iñupiat, as for many other indigenous societies, kinship relations provide the framework for all other forms of social relation within the community. Nor did I have any idea at the time of the complex importance of adoption as a means of conferring kinship status in Iñupiat society. Put simply, nearly every Iñupiat interlocutor with whom I have subsequently discussed these recordings over the past six years (a number surely in the hundreds, out of a population of around 9,500 spread across an area the size of Michigan, with about 3,000 living in the city of Barrow, and the rest in much smaller remote villages) has been able to assert a lineal or adoptive relationship to one of the six identified adult singers on the Boulton recordings. Consequently, nearly every member of the community can assert a familial stake in these recordings (or in a related set of photos, discovered later) as well as a more broadly shared “tribal” claim. In reality, the two levels of investment in cultural patrimony are inseparable: kinship defines the boundaries of Iñupiat identity as much as the equally important and intertwined subsistence-hunting relationship to the land, sky, and seas of northern Alaska or the distribution of the Iñupiat language. To be Iñupiat is, more than anything, to be consciously related and thus morally obligated, by ancient and still vital codes of complex reciprocity that have fascinated nearly every ethnographer who has ever worked in the Arctic, to other Iñupiat people. What did in fact happen once my letter began to circulate among the families in Barrow and other North Slope villages was surprising, and transformational for my own thinking on many levels. It has since led to nearly six years of ongoing research and community-based applied work in Alaska by myself and 3 I did not, at that point, reach out to any specific tribal or village institutions on the North Slope, in part because I could not figure out whom to contact. The structure of governance for Alaska Native communities, embedded within the state’s borough system and made up of a network of “village corporations” as well as state-chartered institutions of government, is quite different from that of most Indian reservations in the United Sates, which are sovereign nations with (typically) specific bureaucratic procedures for dealing with relations with outside institutions over issues of cultural patrimony. While such a structure did exist on the North Slope, I did not understand how to engage with it until I first visited in 2007.

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Sakakibara, working with many collaborators and supported by the National Science Foundation. Before I continue with this story of the recent past, however, I must return to my parallel account of the longer history of the Boulton Collection.

For love and/or money: courting Laura Boulton Boulton’s field recordings were aggregated into a defined research collection at Columbia University under her unpaid (or rather, indirectly paid) curatorship (1963–72, though her role was at times ambiguous). During that period she also acquired other audio materials, sometimes from other units of the Columbia library system, hoping to expand the archive’s value for a projected (and then realized, in 1967) center for the study of ethnomusicology at Columbia. The center was to be conjoined with a new PhD program in ethnomusicology, which was inaugurated in 1966–7 as well. The entire enterprise was to be associated with her self-asserted legacy as a pioneering ethnomusicologist, a term she began using regularly to describe herself only after coming to Columbia (Boulton 1962). The desire for recognition reflected deep insecurity about her own standing as a contributor to the discipline’s development, a not unreasonable anxiety given that Boulton never published scholarly work and had a very poor understanding of the musical cultures she documented or the increasingly anthropological theoretical project of ethnomusicology in its postwar American form. Her ignorance was rooted, ultimately, in her embrace of a still-pervasive racist, romantic, and evolutionist discourse in which the word “primitive” played a key role, more characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology and musicology. She was, as she most famously styled herself, a “music hunter,” and called her collecting trips “expeditions” (Boulton 1969). Boulton was rarely taken seriously by the (mostly male) scholars who were building American ethnomusicology into a successful academic discipline in the Cold War, during which government investment in foreign area studies at universities was exploding. Compared even to many other well-known music collectors of the last century, Boulton had no reputation or training as a scholar, or deep knowledge of any particular culture or region. The recordings and films Boulton had made were her only claim to significance as “an ethnomusicologist.” She was widely regarded among her contemporaries as, at best, a lightweight, and at worst, a bumbling pretender.4 Despite the grandiosity of

4 Nicholas England, a member of Columbia’s Music Department faculty, characterized her work as “musical travelogue through exotica” in a scathing internal memo written around 1970.

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her ambitions for legitimation, Boulton was disingenuously encouraged to pursue them at Columbia by several faculty members in Columbia’s Music Department during the 1960s, especially the department’s politically astute chairman, music historian Jack Beeson, whom I interviewed on this subject in 2003. Boulton was also encouraged by Willard Rhodes and Nicholas England, despite his misgivings. Rhodes and England, the department’s ethnomusicologists, had ambitions to reinvigorate the discipline’s presence at Columbia, building on the legacy of George Herzog, who had left Columbia for Indiana University in the early 1950s, taking his magnificent personal music archive with him as the core of what would become the Archives of Traditional Music.5 In addition to the professional ambitions of Boulton herself, and the institutional ambitions of certain members of the faculty, much more primal desires shaped the Boulton Collection’s early years as a scholarly archive: the romantic obsession of an elderly, wealthy man with an attractive younger woman, and the financially motivated fears of university administrators that they would lose out on a major legacy gift. During the early1960s, Boulton had become romantically involved with Julian Clarence Levi (1874–1971), a prosperous octogenarian architect, painter, and recent widower, and at the time the oldest living alumnus of Columbia College, with several million dollars to his name. Levi was already a focus of the university’s fundraising interest given his wealth, advanced age, and long association with Columbia College. Columbia’s initial acquisition of Boulton’s Collection in 1962 was funded by Levi directly (amounting to around $150,000, given as cash and then invested by the university into a $5,000 per year lifetime annuity for Boulton, though she was never paid a formal salary or given a faculty appointment during her entire decade of affiliation with Columbia). Levi’s effective, if indirect, gift of Boulton’s archive was an undiguised romantic gesture to his paramour, all but explicitly acknowledged in the related correspondence, from his perspective. Indeed, he wrote Boulton a love note from Paris on a newspaper clipping announcing the acquisition in 1963. Levi’s gift came with strings attached for Columbia: Boulton was to have office space, equipment, and administration support for the center she was developing. The university’s administrative enabling of the acquisition on these terms, involving a relatively small portion of Levi’s fortune, was a solicitous gesture to Levi from the administration’s perspective. They were interested in a much bigger gift they hoped would come with Levi’s death, and if acceding to this unusual arrangement on his behalf helped achieve that goal,

5 The ownership of Herzog’s archive was in fact disputed by Columbia, and it was considered an asset of the center on loan to Indiana by Columbia, well into the 1970s.

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it had the administration’s eager support, as well as Beeson’s support, as he correctly read the administration’s desire for the Department of Music to be a team player and assumed, correctly, that it would be rewarded. In other words, Columbia’s purchase of the Boulton Collection was meant to flatter a rich man in the throes of infatuation, not to acquire an asset that was important or valuable in its own right or because of the reputation of its collector. The contents of the collection were irrelevant. In fact, the scholars involved in the acquisition, at least, knew the collection was not what Boulton represented it to be, knew Boulton was an amateur, and internally argued over their support for the new center. But money talked. The Executive Committee of the Music Department, whose approval was required, initially rejected the founding of the proposed center and graduate program within the department in 1966; an extra $60,000 gift from Levi to fund its operations for three years, however, greased the wheels and led to wary acceptance after Beeson’s and Rhodes’s strong lobbying effort on behalf of the administration. Levi was one of few who remained fond of Boulton during this period, during which she jealously guarded her control over and identification with the developing archive and successively alienated every ally she found at Columbia, while withholding promised further gifts (for which she had previously carefully calculated the maximum income tax advantage to herself) of her instruments, papers, photographs, and library to complete the terms of sale. As part of the arrangement, which Levi also funded through continuing small gifts of cash and equities through the 1960s, Boulton was offered office space and audio equipment, and more important, the appearance of institutional affiliation: formal letterhead, a grandiose name for her various small tape-cluttered offices as the “Center for Studies in Ethnomusicology” (also “The Project in World Music” and several other iterations), plus technical support from the library for her work with various forms of analog audio materials. She, however, had no evident reciprocal concern for the university’s interests. She saw even those who sought to help her as a means to an end, and mistrusted their efforts. Boulton had long craved the professional legitimation her Columbia affiliation provided. It can be inferred from her correspondence and publications of the period (1962, 1969) that she believed that her contributions to the development of the discipline of ethnomusicology had not been recognized (or were being jealously ignored) by the then rapidly institutionalizing field, which was increasingly separating itself from a long history of amateur music-collecting, much of it by women, that had fed its need for data (in the form of decontextualized sound archives) in earlier decades, in favor of a professionalized standard of fieldworkbased research by trained ethnographers (mostly male at that time). By the 1960s, Boulton was an anachronism in ethnomusicology, only she didn’t know it.

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Her publication of an autobiography, which is singularly self-congratulatory, and riddled with egregious factual errors and casually racist language, was her main project during this period, done in conjunction with a sprawling effort to convert her chaotic notes and materials into a systematic catalogue with uniform metadata. She knew virtually nothing about archival science or the musics she collected, but she was unwilling to turn over the work to academic colleagues or to professional librarians in part because her original descriptive materials were so incoherent that only she could make sense of them and associate them accurately with the audio materials on the recordings, and because she wanted the center to be permanently associated with her own name. Under the terms of the 1962 sale, Columbia believed it had acquired not only all of Boulton’s recordings themselves (other than those published by Folkways Records and a separate set of Orthodox liturgical music recordings made for Dumbarton Oaks and belonging to Harvard University, once also included in the sale),6 but also the collection of musical instruments acquired on Boulton’s recording expeditions (now at Indiana University), all of Boulton’s notes, correspondence, books, photos, films, and documentation related to the collection (most of which is included in her personal papers, also now at Indiana University), and, finally, a commitment from Boulton to produce an accurate inventory and catalogue of the collection. She was also expected to facilitate research access by her colleagues and their students to the collection, which she did as minimally as possible. Numerous disputes would soon arise concerning the exact boundaries of the transaction. Included in all parties’ understanding of the transfer, however, was that Laura Boulton initially possessed, and was thus able to sell, not only the physical recordings, but also a bundle of defined rights (the right of publication, in particular, in both audio format and in transcription) customarily enjoyed throughout the twentieth century by all manner of “collectors” of cultural materials embedded previously within oral traditions. Such oral traditional materials (e.g., songs, stories, myths, or rituals) are not subject to protection under United States copyright law (or any other form of legal protection during the era during which Boulton recorded), since they do not “exist” in materially inscribed (and thus “authored”) forms prior to transcription or audio publication. Therefore, the right to publish and/or transcribe oral traditional materials has typically amounted, over the course of more than a century of field recording in the United States and globally, to a grant of derivative

6 In addition, the National Film Board of Canada owned, and still owns, most of Boulton’s films, made in the 1940s under contract to the Canadian government, although the audio recordings from those expeditions (1940–3) are aggregated under Columbia’s ownership in the Boulton Collection (see McMillan 1991).

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intellectual property rights to the collector who takes possession of oral tradition in the very act of recording. This patently unfair structure has typically been used by collectors, scholars, and producers, often under conditions of colonial, racial, or class domination, to convert traditional cultural resources, as if they were raw minerals dug from unclaimed ground, into commercial and scholarly finished products. The pattern recurs across the history of recorded music, and it is a structure that is in many ways still in place globally today, albeit in the context of new modes of circulation, publication, and collection. The commercial version of this form of cultural exploitation is well understood and documented. A vast body of field recordings made during the twentieth century, however, ostensibly collected for the purposes of research and other purportedly noncommercial pursuits (preserving “vanishing” cultures as national cultural patrimony chief among them), have nonetheless provided financial and other benefits to collectors and owners of these materials, over long periods of time, by virtue of their transformation into inscribed and published intellectual property (or collective heritage). Indeed, countless field recordings initially harvested for research have also moved between noncommercial and commercial contexts throughout the last century, often precisely because they are from oral traditional sources and thus unprotected by prior copyright. Put more bluntly: Laura Boulton enjoyed an annuity of roughly five thousand dollars (and significant tax benefits) every year for nearly twenty years from income earned through the sale of her recordings and her various gifts to Columbia, in addition to royalty and public-appearance income derived from her legal ability to publish these materials. Not one artist she ever recorded, nor any of their descendants, nor any community in which she worked, has ever seen any income from these recordings, or had any subsequent control over their publication or contexts of presentation. Boulton’s (and then Columbia’s) persistent ownership of the collection reflects a history of financial exploitation disguised as being in the service of disinterested scientific research.7 In 1968, this exploitative structure struck no one – scholars, librarians, lawyers, administrators, or the donor and his beloved collector – involved in a routine transaction to complete the sale of an archive of field recordings by a collector to a university archive as problematic or unethical. Columbia simply acquired Boulton’s intellectual property rights when it acquired her archive. The ethics of such ownership never arose as an issue, and would not arise until I became director in 2003, more than forty years later. As far as anyone

7 Boulton’s take, of course, pales compared to Columbia’s leveraging of the acquisition of her archive to secure a multi-million dollar donation.

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concerned with the deal was concerned, the “primitive” people on those recordings had no rights. The exact terms and contents of the 1962 transaction were not fully clarified until a 1982 agreement between Columbia University, the Library of Congress, and the Boulton Foundation (an entity created to disburse Boulton’s estate after her death, and managed by her longtime personal assistant Shirley Porter, whom I have also interviewed for this research); it was dissolved in a bequest to Indiana University, which as a result still earns royalties from her Folkways records, even though Folkways has since been acquired by the nonprofit Smithsonian Institution. By 1982, Columbia retained neither the original master recordings, nor significant other portions of materials originally understood by all parties as part of the sale (e.g., the instruments, which wound up at Indiana as well after a sojourn at the University of Arizona). As the 1982 agreement clarified, however, throughout this period Columbia continued to own all publication rights to the recordings themselves and their associated primary documentation (a typescript catalogue on roughly a thousand pages of large-format onionskin, extensively edited in pencil, that I digitized in 2004–5 and that will soon be available for online public access). This agreement remains in force today. Levi finally died in 1971, leaving Columbia the sought-after bequest of 4.5 million dollars, at a time when Columbia was suffering financially from a downturn in the national and New York City economies and the lingering aftermath of the 1968 riots. While it had been discussed (between Beeson and the Columbia administration, and by implication Levi himself) before Levi’s death that a portion of his final bequest would be sequestered as an endowment to support the continued development of the center and the PhD program in ethnomusicology, Columbia’s administrators decided against doing this, since it was curiously not specified in Levi’s will, to Beeson’s anger and disappointment. Also in 1971, the university hired Dieter Christensen, a visiting faculty member at Wesleyan University at the time, initially on a visiting appointment as an expert consultant, qualified to appraise and inventory the Boulton archive. By the time of Levi’s death, both faculty and administrators at Columbia had begun to suspect Boulton not only of incompetence, but of a positive intention to alienate portions of her archive from the terms of the sale. Their patience was wearing thin by 1972. Beeson continued to humor Boulton’s self-regard in hopes of seeing more funds from Levi’s estate in the ethnomusicology graduate program. Once Levi had died, however, Columbia lost any incentive to tolerate Boulton any longer. Hiring Christensen to appraise the archive, it can be inferred from correspondence, was intended as a signal to Boulton from the university that her involvement with the archive was expected to end. Columbia had lost trust in her skills as an archivist, her

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expertise concerning the musics she had collected, and her honesty as a business partner. The tone of the correspondence of the period is openly hostile. The university hoped to drive her away, and they found the right man for the job in Christensen, who had credentials to back up his positions. Christensen’s work resulted in a detailed inventory of the collection and serious accusations against Boulton. Her departure followed immediately as she was effectively evicted from Dodge Hall. In order to salvage their investment and honor part of the implied commitment it had made to Beeson, the administration almost immediately created a targeted full-time faculty line, with a half-time teaching load, to be filled by Christensen. The position was to be divided evenly between the task of managing the center and its archives (under the now-formal title of Director) and developing the PhD program in ethnomusicology to leverage the value of the archive as a scholarly resource. At last, as Boulton had always planned, the center and the graduate program were to be intertwined, but this would now be under one faculty member’s jurisdiction, with no role for Boulton herself. The center was given a modest budget (rather than income from the scuttled endowment plan) under Christensen’s control. Boulton was being sent packing, still in possession of many assets initially understood to be part of the collection, and remained enraged at Columbia for the remainder of her days. Dieter Christensen disdained Boulton’s lack of professionalism and what he believed (on good evidence) was her dishonesty. The brief period during which they overlapped at Columbia (1971–2) was characterized by intense conflict. Christensen had already determined that Columbia had no proper facilities for storing, handling, or preserving Boulton’s master recordings, most on ten-inch aluminum or acetate disks. Christensen arranged the permanent loan of her masters to the Library of Congress, where folklorist Alan Jabbour oversaw their transfer to several reel-to-reel tape copies, on seven-inch reels dubbed at 7.5 ips. Two of these (the so-called “red” and “green” labeled sets) were sent back to Columbia, one (red) intended as an archival copy, the other (green) as a listening copy, which was then housed for the next thirty years (where it remains today) in the unsuitable environment of Columbia’s Dodge Hall. The red label set was stored in better conditions in Columbia’s Butler Library (where it remained until I arranged for that set to be moved to an offsite climate-controlled storage facility in 2003). A third set was sent, as per the transfer agreement, to Laura Boulton at her retirement home in Arizona, for her personal collection. Upon her death, that set was given to Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music, where it has since been kept under excellent conditions. Finally, the Library of Congress kept a listening copy, while storing the already damaged masters under superb conditions.

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The situation with the collection remained basically stable, if not stagnant, from the 1982 final agreement until Dieter Christensen’s retirement in 2003. As curator, and working with an inadequate budget, he added several new audio and video collections to the archives. He made serious efforts to recatalogue the collection properly, none entirely successful. He developed the center itself into an institution with a broader agenda to support scholarly research and the PhD program he also directed. He undertook the aforementioned digitization process as an in-house project, staffed by graduate students, to convert the green-label tapes (the second-generation listening copy) to 16-bit/44KHz (“CD quality”) audio, initially stored on optical disks.8 Finally, Christensen approved occasional research uses of the collection, and licensed several nonprofit publications of Boulton Collection materials. Upon taking over the directorship in 2003, I focused quickly on the indigenous holdings in the collection. In 2002, Christensen had received and responded to the inquiry from the Navajo family (with a daughter studying at Columbia, Pablo Wellito’s great granddaughter) I mentioned earlier, but there had been only minimal follow-up. I reached out to this family as soon as I read the correspondence. The story of the project that emerged is beyond the scope of this chapter, but within a year of my appointment, I was planning a larger-scale effort to repatriate the center’s entire inventory of Native American recordings, inspired by my reading, but more so by my initial engagements with the Navajo descendants of Pablo Wellito. By the time Sakakibara wrote me in 2004, I had already seen a granddaughter’s tears of recognition upon hearing her deceased grandfather’s voice for the first time in decades on a recording; I had stood in front of a room full of descendants of Pablo Wellito explaining why the center “owned” his medicine songs, and felt ashamed of the center’s failure, common among many institutions that hold Native American materials not bound by legal obligations to repatriate, to reach out proactively to the communities whose legacies we were charged with curating; I had seen film clips of the atrocious conditions under which Pablo Wellito and his sons had been effectively compelled to perform and record for tourists and collectors like Boulton (at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago in 1935); and I had read correspondence and documentation that made it clear that Boulton’s recordings reflected a casual and fundamentally racist disdain for the interests or equality of the people she recorded, even when she engaged in paternalistic and self-serving representations of her subjects and consultants as charming but simple interlocutors with whom she inevitably had great rapport. 8 This project was about two-thirds complete when I took over in 2003; I oversaw the completion of it, using the 24-bit/96KHz standard, along with an audit of the digital copies against the tape copies and the creation of the collection’s first comprehensive digital catalogue.

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She believed, with her generation, that “primitive” and “ancient” cultures were fated to disappear. She saw this as an inevitable effect of modernity, and again like many of her contemporaries, as more of a problem for science than for people whose cultures were supposedly vanishing. In 2003, one of my doctoral advisees with expertise in indigenous studies, Amanda Minks, produced a detailed inventory of all the items in the collection that could be considered indigenous in origin, collating the often confusing metadata we had for those recordings into a single document. Armed with this excellent new metadata, and the first fruits of my work with the descendants of Pablo Wellito, I applied to a university-wide grant competition that distributed funds from the Provost’s office for innovative development of educational resources, with a goal of making sense of the Boulton archive and beginning a process of systematic repatriation. The Academic Quality Fund grant the center won in late 2003 represented more than five years’ worth of our current budget. I was making plans to spend these funds completing the digitizing process, designing another attempt systematically to describe the collection, and identifying prospective repatriation projects, when Sakakibara’s initial request arrived.

“We are reviving these songs” In January 2007, three years after that initial inquiry from Sakakibara, I received an e-mail from a young Iñupiaq named Joseph R. (“Riley”) Sikvayugak: Hello Aaron,

My name is Joseph R. Sikvayugak from Barrow, Alaska. I have received the 4 CD’s that were sent to my uncle Sherman Sikvayugak. Joe Sikvayugak is my grandfather, and we are . . . reviving these songs to sing at Kivgiq, our Messenger Feast that will happen Feb 14–17 . . . Now, some of the elders have heard that these songs will be out and finally will be heard again after 60 years. My oldest brother Vernon J. Elavgak and I have formed a new group that will sing only these songs that you have sent to Joe’s son Sherman. Reading this was thrilling. I had sent the set of four CDs and related materials to Riley’s uncle Sherman in response to his mailed request in mid-2006, responding to one of several dozen requests I received during 2005 and 2006 in response to the letter Sakakibara had delivered to her interlocutors in Barrow. These requests steadily increased as relatives in far-flung villages

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heard from each other that the recordings were available. As I had assembled these packages and sent them off in the mail, I had often wondered about what was happening in the homes where those packages were being opened, and those CDs listened to. I had no way of knowing. Now, however, I did know what had happened to at least one of those packages. Joseph Riley Sikvayugak, who wrote me the e-mail above, was the grandson of another Joseph Sikvayugak (spelled Sikvayunak by Boulton, a common alternative English orthography of the same Iñupiat name). Riley’s grandfather Joseph was a prominent hunter and community leader, as well as the caretaker of the government school in Barrow, and a father of six by 1946. He was also a passionate musician who regularly organized drummers and dancers for performances and jam sessions (in the tiny kitchen of his quonset hut house in Barrow, to the annoyance of his beloved wife Nellie, whose cast iron stove had to be moved outside whenever her husband decided to invite his fellow drummers over to play). This was an era when missionization and other brutally abrupt modernizing forces had led to an accelerating decline in the robustness of Iñupiat cultural traditions, including music and dance, associated wholesale by missionaries with shamanism and ritual contexts they saw as primitive, promiscuous, and satanic (an impression they tried hard to convey to Iñupiat converts, so that many families stopped dancing out of fear for their salvation). This tradition was also tied closely to the annual hunting cycle that had been frequently disrupted in the first half of the twentieth century by disease, starvation, and misguided efforts to convert Iñupiat from subsistence hunters to herders. Finally, the need to send village teenagers off to faraway boarding schools (the local school only went through the eighth grade) was singularly disruptive of cultural continuity in many ways, including removing young people from communities at an age when they would develop crucial skills as dancers and musicians (and hunters), as well as shaming those students for speaking their languages or singing their community’s songs, experiences still remembered today by elders as deeply traumatic. Boulton, who probably knew nothing of missionary cruelty or boarding schools, believed that what she called “Eskimo” music (the term has a complicated history, but is considered an acceptable ethnonym in Alaska today if used respectfully) was fated to disappear. From the perspective of 1946, that seemed a reasonable fear even to Iñupiat people; my oral historical research with Iñupiat elders has convinced me that it was a fear shared specifically by Joseph Sikvayugak and his contemporary community leaders, many of whom appear as his fellow drummers and singers on Boulton’s recordings, as they faced outsiders associated with the construction of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL), begun at Barrow in 1946, and in general confronted

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increasing pressures to assimilate and abandon Iñupiat language and cultural traditions. Boulton’s arrival in Barrow in 1946 (she landed on the new airstrip at NARL) was not coincidental or particularly intrepid; she was part of a deluge of outsiders and outside interests that descended on the Alaskan Arctic in the immediate wake of World War II. The Cold War brought massive militarization to the North Slope, due to its proximity to the Soviet Union, and the booming economy of the United States made territorial Alaska’s hitherto inaccessible oil reserves newly valuable. While the coastal Iñupiat had long been in regular contact with the broader world through the global whaling industry and through missionization in the late nineteenth century, the postwar years marked a transformation for Iñupiat communities, and at least for several decades a decline in local control of the community’s interests that would end with the vigorous and hugely successful struggle for Native sovereignty and civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Joseph Sikvayugak (hereafter “Joe,” as he was commonly known) was there for all of that as a community leader. One wishes Joe could have foreseen his grandchildren’s reaction to receiving recordings of his 1946 performances for this “crazy taniq lady” (as my Iñupiat collaborators sometimes affectionately call Boulton). Almost certainly he would have been pleased to know the music he loved was alive and thriving along with the community he served. Then again, perhaps he did foresee what might happen. Boulton must have relied on Joe Sikvayugak completely during her visit to Barrow, although she credits him relatively modestly in her book. Because Joe was one of few bilingual men in the community and a leading musician, it seems certain that all of her musical metadata came from him. As the caretaker of the school, Sikvayugak had access to one of few buildings in town with electricity (from a diesel generator), which she needed to make her recordings. These appear to have been made with an audience present and perhaps dancing. Sikvayugak is the primary singer on the recordings, appearing on more than three-quarters of the recorded tracks. As is the case with many of her portraits of her collaborators in her autobiography, however, Boulton seemed to regard Sikvayugak more as a charmingly simple native assistant than a collaborator or intellectual equal. He is mentioned only in passing in the chapter on her Barrow visit in her autobiography, while the information Boulton surely learned from him is presented in her voice alone, as if she had inferred it from observation.9 9 Amusingly, her actual inferences from observation are wildly inaccurate, as for example her casual assigning of titles to the dance songs in her notes, which gets a laugh today from Iñupiat musicians, who take it as a point of distinction that their songs do not typically have formal titles, and are generally known by their opening melodies, often sung in vocables, more than for their minimalistic and often improvised and altered poetic texts, or known by a general characterization, such as “the Obama song” performed by Barrow’s Suurimanichuat Dancers at the Presidential Inaugural in 2008.

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Boulton often presented her stories from the field in a patronizing tone, with herself as the lone intrepid hero overcoming every manner of obstacle including willing but simple (and sometimes duplicitous) natives. I contend here, nonetheless, based on several years of conducting oral historical interviews with Iñupiat elders, that Joe Sikvayugak did anticipate, or at least imagine, the stunning development that would be reported sixty years later in the e-mail from his grandson. Having reconstructed some aspects of Sikvayugak’s intentionality in assisting Boulton with her project, and something of his good-natured but serious personality and sense of mission, which drove his leadership in the community for years following Boulton’s visit, I believe that Sikvayugak would have seen Boulton’s visit as a chance to develop a useful alliance with a possibly powerful outsider and thereby enhance the outside world’s respect for his musical culture and community. What she thought was disappearing, in other words, was what he hoped she would help him document and save, not for science but for his people. Boulton’s project, furthermore, would not have been as inexplicable to Sikvayugak as she likely presumed. Traditional Iñupiat expressive cultural forms (e.g., carving, dance, or oral narrative) are often of a documentary character. The documentary impulse had definitively emerged in characteristically modern form in Barrow by 1946; for example, in the person of Marvin Peter, a handicapped Iñupiat photographer whose subsequently famous work vividly recorded life in Barrow in the 1940s. We know Boulton met Peter and strongly suspect he gave her some of his photographs. Surely she could have perceived that she was among fellow documentarians had she paid closer attention. Ten years after Boulton’s visit, Sikvayugak himself was one of the first men in the community to acquire an expensive reel-to-reel tape recorder for the express purpose of documenting the community’s musical traditions, which he pursued with diligence. Indeed, this is clear evidence for my claim that he saw Boulton from the perspective of a fellow collector, again an impulse that runs strongly through Iñupiat traditional culture, attested to by the cabinets full of carefully labeled videotapes of years’ worth of community dances one finds today in many Iñupiat homes or the fantastically valuable collections of beachcombed ivory carefully curated by Iñupiat women. It is entirely reasonable to infer that Sikvayugak saw Boulton as a colleague, not a boss or a superior being from another world, and that he had his own positive agenda in agreeing to help her. The expectation that his generosity in sharing his time, expertise, and musicality with this outsider would eventually result in reciprocal benefits for his community would have been the

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characteristically traditional Iñupiat way of understanding such an encounter between moral and intellectual equals then, as indeed it remains now. Joe Sikvayugak was not the primitive natural man of Laura Boulton’s imagination. He was a thoughtful leader with an agenda for his people and their music that differed in purpose from, but was not necessarily incompatible with, Boulton’s scientific agenda. Boulton, sadly, was blind to the fact that she was dealing with a fellow intellectual and documentarian who sought to form a collegial relation that would be mutually beneficial, which kept her from recognizing that his generosity was guided by cultural values of which she was profoundly ignorant despite professing her deep interest. Riley Sikvayugak’s e-mail, reporting his work with his brother Vernon Elavgak, and Vernon’s wife Isabell (and, I later learned, a number of other Iñupiat young people) to create a new dance group to perform the repatriated songs of his grandfather showed me that I was caught in my own version of Boulton’s error of condescension. In my efforts to theorize my developing approach to repatriating the Boulton Collection, I had increasingly projected the idea of supporting community-based uses for these recordings that would serve the interests of the communities from which they were “collected,” theorized in terms of obligatory reciprocity for the availability of the recordings to scholars as a research resource over many decades. In my early thinking, I saw these applications as projects I would have to imagine, initiate, and try to find funding to sustain. I only fantasized about a longer-term horizon beyond which the materials would inspire and sustain community-initiated projects without my involvement, but did not at all see that as an imminent possibility. I had presumptuously failed, with such thinking, to honor the power of the past, the agency of people like Joe Sikvayugak and other ancestors and elders, or the determination of today’s Iñupiat leaders. I found myself reading a confident description of how a group of young Iñupiat dancers had confidently taken possession of their family and community legacy from Boulton’s archive and were already developing it, on their own, into the repertory for a new dance group, an audacious undertaking. This development was emblematic of just how wrong Boulton was in her fears about the disappearance of Iñupiat traditions, or perhaps how prescient Joe Sikvayugak the elder was at foreseeing the renaissance in Iñupiat musical culture as it became intertwined with the Alaska Native sovereignty movement as an organized and outward-facing political expression of Iñupiat identity. Little did Laura Boulton realize that her work would support this renaissance in amazing ways long after her death. I contend that Joe Sikvayugak, at least, was confident that his gift would be returned in time.

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Tagiugmiut, the people of the sea The new dance group was called “Tagiugmiut,” from the Iñupiat words for “salt” and “people.” The name metonymically refers to living by the sea, the source of most of the food that has sustained coastal Iñupiat communities for countless generations. The group’s formation in 2006 made it the fifth dance group in Barrow, but an exceptional one in that it was not led by an elder or based on kinship bonds between the descendants of a historical settlement. It was, as Vernon Elavgak later proudly told me, more like “starting a band to jam with your friends, and it just takes off.” That Tagiugmiut had been created by young people acting on their own initiative was both exciting and problematic from the point of view of Barrow’s elders and leaders, given the value of the traditions maintained within the more established dance groups to the Iñupiat the importance of elders as adjudicators in Iñupiat society. To some extent, the formation of Tagiugmiut was a presumptuous act, eased only somewhat by the group’s founders’ familial claim on the newly reintroduced repertory from Boulton’s recordings, a claim that was hardly exclusive given the dense network of kinship that connected nearly all members of the community to at least one performer on the recordings. Starting a new dance group entailed an assumption of responsibility for the proper care of this repertory by Riley, Vernon, Isabell, and their growing circle, something young people might not be expected to take as seriously as many elders would prefer. Their claim was legitimate, however, and these young people had a history of serious commitment to dance and music. Their initial efforts were at least tolerated by the community, if a bit warily by some. In order to understand why the group’s innovative approach was provisionally welcomed, and why it has become so much more successful since, it is necessary to rehearse some difficult facts about life in Native communities in Alaska. Virtually anyone involved in the community life of the North Slope would agree that the greatest problem faced in the present is the social, emotional, mental, and physical health of the community’s young people, and thus its future. Addiction, suicide, depression, violence, illness, poor access to medical care, and motivational issues are serious problems in Arctic communities (which have some of the highest rates of suicide and addiction in the world), and disproportionately affect the young. Advocates for the maintenance and strengthening of Iñupiat traditional culture, including both Iñupiat community leaders and outside observers, believe strongly that the best antidote to this situation is for the community to maintain vigorous commitments to sustaining cultural traditions – especially

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hunting, religious worship, language, domestic arts, and music/dance. At the most basic level, these activities give young people something to do, but it goes beyond that, with these traditions providing a vital traditional context for education, social integration, and moral development. Put simply, young people who dance are less likely to die. Because so many do, dancing really matters for community health. Dancing saves lives. The young founders of Tagiugmiut were motivated by this understanding, and by grief over the friends they had lost. Vernon, Riley, and Isabell saw their new dance group as, in many ways, a youth-oriented intervention in their own generation’s cycle of loss and trauma, and as a form of public service. They quickly added many new young people to the group, some from families that had detached from the community’s tradition-maintaining efforts. They taught young men to make their own drums, and young women to sew their own, beautiful custom regalia, sky-blue windbreakers embroidered with lively images of the major animals hunted by Iñupiat people, designed by Isabell and another early member, Doreen Ahgeak. They painstakingly transcribed songs from the Boulton Collection CDs, transcriptions that now form part of the collection’s metadata. They rehearsed for hours on end, and they performed for the community for the first time at the enormous Kivgiq dance festival, held every two years in Barrow, in February 2007, to wide acclaim.

Dancing makes you human: what Boulton did not see Such acclaim was hardly assured from the outset. Crucially, the founders of Tagiugmiut also had to develop new “motions” (the naturalistic but highly stylized mimetic choreographic vocabulary of Iñupiat dance) to accompany the songs they were learning from the CDs I had sent. This was because Laura Boulton had made no documentation of the dances associated with the songs. Ever the amateur fieldworker, she had failed to record or even acknowledge in writing the most important part of the performances she had witnessed: the dances associated with many of the songs. In Iñupiat tradition, songs and dances are intimately interlinked and to some extent inseparable as “music.” Both are equally the products of precompositional/choreographic agency and intentionality, if not always by the same person, blended with creative improvisation in performance. Iñupiat “motion dances” can “belong” to, as well as be authored by, individuals, families, dance groups, or whole communities. The privilege to perform or modify others’ dances and songs is earned through respect for tradition, and through seniority and experience. It is never mere imitation to perform

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another person’s or community’s dance; it is a citation, a commentary, and a tribute, and in some cases requires at least implied permission. Appropriation (or modification) of any significant sort is frequently accompanied by an obligation explicitly to cite (or at least be able to cite) one’s source and authority to use particular song/dance forms. This tradition is flexible and open to innovation that respects the past; one is free to create by borrowing, but never to appropriate the value of someone else’s creativity without reciprocal actions and commitments. Borrowing of songs and dances (and other forms of intellectual patrimony) is encouraged and usually not prohibited in advance, surely within kinship networks that ultimately include almost all individuals. For Iñupiat traditionalists, with the right to use elements of cultural and family patrimony comes the responsibility for respectful representation, appropriate citation, a sharing of any added value, and a commitment to the integrity and communal ownership of the borrowed knowledge. “Innovation” within this tradition is greatly valued and efficiently resourced from a cultural commons to which it will contribute if successful. In this sense, expressive culture is a community resource, no less than the Western Arctic caribou herd or the Bowhead whale, which must be used respectfully so that it can be maintained and renewed for the future. Making up new dances was a bold move for Tagiugmiut, but it was necessary. Laura Boulton did not, as far as I know, produce any film during her visit to Barrow in 1946, but there is visual documentation of her visit. Tantalizingly, she did return (to Seattle at the time) with a set of several dozen beautiful black-andwhite photographs taken by a young, unpaid assistant who accompanied her to Barrow. John Klebe was a remarkable photographer, and the photos he produced, which reside with Boulton’s papers at Indiana University, have become an important asset for the repatriation project the center has conducted in Barrow since I discovered them in fall 2007.10 Very few of his photographs, however, document any aspect of dance or musical performance.11 Inexplicably, Boulton did not attempt to produce a filmed record of her recording sessions in Barrow, as she had by this time made a number of documentary films for the National Film Board of Canada, including three 1943 films documenting Canadian Inuit communities (McMillan 1991). She 10 The collection also includes at least a dozen photos of Barrow residents obviously taken in the spring, not during Boulton’s October visit, and obviously shot on different film stock; we have tentatively identified these as, in fact, the work of the brilliant Iñupiat photographer Marvin Peter, whom we know Boulton encountered, and who had fairly recently set up the first darkroom in Barrow; again, it would have been a typically Iñupiat gesture for him to have given this visiting collector a handful of his photos, and a typically Boulton-esque gesture not to notate the source of these gifts. 11 Klebe took one truly extraordinary photo of Joe Sikvayugak seated drumming while Otis Akhivgak, wearing a loon headdress, poses in one of the motions associated with the central portion of the Messenger Feast ceremony, the same ceremonial now revived as the core of the Kivgiq dance festival.

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knew how to make film, and she knew from experience how vital a visual record of Inuit cultural practices would be to representing those practices. Nonetheless, in the absence of such visual record, her 1946 Barrow recordings are in fact, despite her pretensions, a fundamentally incomplete document of Iñupiat music, given the centrality of a rich formal tradition of mimetic dance to the very ideas of music and musical creativity in Iñupiat tradition. Iñupiat dance is much more than a source of entertaining sociable fun, although it is often and surely that. In the modern era, it has become a key idiom for the public performance of both Iñupiat and more broadly indigenous identity, and its renaissance in that capacity has been intertwined with the Iñupiat people’s successful struggles for sovereignty and control of their traditional lands, which contain enormous mineral wealth. Traditionally, dance was and remains, in a more outward-facing sense, a medium of exchange and communication both between people and between people and the spirits of the natural world, integrated into the structures of material and emotional reciprocity necessary for subsistence in the Arctic. Dance is also fundamental to social individuation within a network of communal obligations. A person’s unique and individual way of dancing is his or her social signature as much as his or her sense of humor or physical strength. One’s dancing is remembered long after one’s death. Old dance videos, watched intently, are a key idiom for memorializing the dead, as children are carefully taught to observe and imitate the distinctive way their relatives danced. Experienced dancers can quickly identify a figure whose face is invisible simply from the style in which s/he is dancing. One’s dancing style is as distinctive as one’s face or voice. Both specific dances and particular styles of dancing are also patrimony for families, villages, and dance groups. Not to possess any such patrimony and its symbolic capital (not to mention its associated material capital, such as one’s grandparent’s beautifully crafted dancing boots) would be considered tragic by many. Accumulation, display, and sharing of such patrimony partially motivate participation in dance groups and events. Dance is also a key contemporary idiom for the expression of traditional spirituality. The spiritual work accomplished through music and dance is a crucial phase of the hunting cycle (Sakakibara 2009). For Iñupiat traditionalists, dancing makes you human. Musical sound is, in some respects, merely a necessary platform for the visual and embodied communication of dance. The founders of Tagiugmiut were accomplished dancers who had apprenticed as children and teenagers in elder-led and well-established dance groups. They commanded the vocabulary of movements and rhythms they needed, and the honed balance of physical strength and granular choreographic grace that

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defines skilled dancing. They had relationships with elders who would help them create new sequences and, in so doing, authorize this bold creative work, and they worked very hard in rehearsals. Their preference for driving tempos, forceful drumming and singing, and dramatic, strong dancing, their spectacularly designed regalia, and the simple fact of their youthfulness combined to make them a compelling new force in Iñupiat music. Their membership, in turn, gradually increased: today the group claims over seventy-two members in its largest incarnation, which made it by far the largest dance group at Kivgiq 2011. They have successfully recovered, through disciplined recreation, the heart of the music Boulton recorded with her eyes closed, by reconnecting it forcefully to the moral and aesthetic history of Iñupiat dance. In so doing, they have also restored the archive itself.

Chasing Laura Boulton: from hunting to sharing During the summer after I received Riley Sikvayugak’s e-mail, more exciting news came from Barrow. Tagiugmiut had won first place in the dance competition at the World Eskimo and Indian Olympics (WEIO), a fifty-year-old pan-Native sporting and cultural event that brings together both Inuit and Indian contestants from across Alaska for an annual competition in Fairbanks. Winning WEIO is among the highest honors in contemporary Alaska Native dancing culture. The same few well-established groups tend to win in most years, yet this time victory had gone to a new and young group from Barrow, performing their ancestor’s songs, acquired from an old university archive. The story circulated in Arctic media and Iñupiat social networks, leading to a wave of new requests for copies of the recordings. Pride in, and acceptance of, the group by Barrow’s leaders increased commensurately. By winning at WEIO, the group had met a traditional standard for validating innovation with disciplined success, adherence to which had kept Iñupiat music and dance alive through the mid-twentieth century so that it flourished at the turn of the twenty-first. Tagiugmiut had added value to the tradition, and shared it with the world. As I digested this latest development, I realized it was time for me to go to Barrow and meet the members of Tagiugmiut. Simply identifying a descendant of someone recorded by Boulton (Joe Sikvayugak’s son Sherman) and sending him a set of CDs had resulted, in the space of a couple of years, in the breakout success of a new dance group that was functioning not only as a popular new presence in Iñupiat musical culture, but also as a positive social force in the Barrow community. I began to imagine what could be built on top of this success if I engaged in a more ambitious effort to develop collaborative

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relationships in the Iñupiat community. Finally, I realized that following Boulton’s music-hunting trail to Barrow, this time as a music-sharer, would help me understand and develop her archive itself, shedding light on her methods and possibly allowing some of her methodological mistakes to be ameliorated as her ethical carelessness was addressed. In other words, I came to see the development of the archive as a community resource for the people whose patrimony it contained as inseparable from developing it into the scholarly resource it had never been before. I asked Chie Sakakibara, who had just finished her dissertation, if she would come with me to Barrow over Thanksgiving break, if I covered our costs. She agreed even though we had never met in person. She came to New York to give a talk at the center early that fall, where we at last met and planned our approach. Finally, in late November 2007 we joined up in Barrow. We were there later in the year than Boulton had been. The long Arctic darkness had already set in. The ambient temperature was well below zero. We spent our first days meeting with community leaders, winding up for dinner each night back at the house of Roy and Flossie Nageak, the captain and matriarch of the PK13 whaling crew, and a family that had been extremely generous to Chie during her earlier research. In a routine that has probably happened hundreds of time in the Nageak home on Herman Street over many years, they introduced yet another taniq first-timer to Iñupiat food, hospitality, language, values, and, above all, kinship. In our first day or two, we visited community leaders and officials responsible for cultural heritage management and research permitting. Everyone said to us: “Go talk to Warren Matumeak.” The implicit message was also clear: “If Warren Matumeak says your project is okay, come back and talk to us.” Warren Matumeak, an elder in his seventies and still quite vigorous at the time (he has since passed away), was reputed to be more knowledgeable about Iñupiat song and dance traditions than anyone else with the exception of the equally formidable intellectual Martha Aiken, now also passed on. Matumeak was, as I later came to understand, the senior musicologist of the community. He was also much more, with a long history of leadership, extensive experience traveling the world as a representative of his community, a record as an activist for Iñupiat subsistence hunting rights, and exceptional stature in the accomplishments that defined Iñupiat manhood for his generation: hunting, dancing, politics, and theology. A commanding intellectual, musician, and man of deep faith (with an intimate knowledge of scripture), Matumeak spent much of his time in retirement leading the Presbyterian church choir, composing gospel songs, translating English hymns into Iñupiat, and leading his own dance group (Suurimanichuat, who were invited to perform in President Obama’s inaugural parade in January 2008).

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With help from Matumeak’s daughter Darlene Kagak, we were introduced to Matumeak. He consented to giving us some time, and we arranged to come back later that afternoon thinking we would be lucky to have an hour of this important man’s day. When we did, we sat at his kitchen table and talked briefly. Then Matumeak impatiently asked us to play the music for him. He put the earbuds in his ears (so that I could record his commentary separately, to which he consented). And he listened. He sang along. He tapped out rhythms on the table, smiled, and uttered an occasional arriga! (an Iñupiat expression of satisfaction). At the end of the first song, he simply said “Again!” – not as a request, but a command. Translation and detailed exegesis flowed, along with hints of deeper histories behind each song, as his hands and upper body sometimes acted out specific dance motions (and I quickly asked permission to start a video camera), and as he had me pause, replay, and slow down the tracks on my computer. Some songs had long passed out of circulation, or were unknown to him. Others were still commonplace in the contemporary repertory. By dinner, we had made it only to the end of the first of four CDs, about thirty items, in over three hours of painstaking work during which my own focus had often wavered, while Matumeak’s hunting-honed patience never did. I was disappointed. We had nearly ninety items to go, and I thought we had lost the chance to go through them all. As we left, however, Matumeak instructed us to return, slightly earlier, the next day. Again, we didn’t finish, so we returned for a third day. In all, Matumeak gave us over ten hours of his time in the three days leading up to the holiday, and already I realized our new recordings contained a level of information and metadata about the old recordings that far exceeded anything Laura Boulton had ever bothered to document. Other Iñupiat friends and consultants reacted with surprise that Matumeak had given us so much time; it was surely a promising sign we were on the right path. By the end of three days, Sakakibara and I had apparently passed Matumeak’s implicit test of our own commitment and seriousness of purpose, another reason for those long hours in his kitchen. As we sat down to a dinner of raw whale and caribou together on the third evening, Matumeak asked me to lead a prayer, which I did nervously for the first time of many to follow. We had worked, prayed, and eaten together. The obligations of reciprocity had been activated between us, in what I would later come to understand as the Iñupiat way. On Thanksgiving Day, I served for my first time as a member of the PK13 crew in the traditional day-long ceremony of community meat distribution in the Presbyterian church before sharing a holiday dinner with the Nageak clan. A community dance had been planned for the evening, as is customary as an expression of gratitude and solidarity on the several days of the year when meat is distributed to the entire community by successful hunting crews. Iñupiat

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communities, however, observe a solemn rule that no dance may be held if someone in the community dies tragically or unexpectedly and has not yet been buried by the day of the dance. My first Thanksgiving in town was only the first during many Barrow visits when that rule had to be invoked. Despite not being able to see an actual performance by Tagiugmiut, who were slated to perform that night (a high honor for them), Sakakibara and I had fortunately been able to attend their rehearsal earlier in the week and meet the group’s members and founders, as well as to see some of the repatriated songs being performed and danced. By the time Alaska Airlines flight 52 took off for Fairbanks at 8:00 pm on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the first stage of a long trip home I have now made a dozen times, I was certain I would be returning. Watching the aurora borealis out the 737’s window as my inspiring collaborator and friend, whose e-mail request had started this all, slept in the next seat, I wondered what Laura Boulton was thinking as she left Barrow sixty years before with John Klebe in the next seat, never to return. As for me, I had fallen in love with the people I was now leaving, and I could not wait to come back to a place that now feels like another home. For the first time since I had become the caretaker of Laura Boulton’s music collection, I felt like I now knew how to be an archivist on my own terms.

Community-based repatriation Shortly after Sakakibara and I returned, we started planning our next steps. We made a subsequent visit in the spring, and another in the summer, during which we negotiated the terms of the project in a research agreement approved by the Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture Commission, and conducted further interviews with other elders during which we systematically reviewed the audio materials as we had with Matumeak. We also began sharing the newly unearthed photographs, identifying the people in them, eliciting oral historical accounts of their lives and the relationships between them. We made numerous outreach presentations to the community and in all of Barrow’s schools, and continued to deepen our friendships with several families and with a growing number of advisers and collaborators. My own social integration into Iñupiat life, following on Sakakibara’s earlier induction, became a crucial context for understanding the meaning of music and dance, and the value of Boulton’s recordings to the Iñupiat, and has since drawn me into further ethnographic research that now extends well beyond the initial boundaries of the repatriation project to encompass hunting, spirituality, and kinship. With the inception of such projects, the history of a world-music archive was actually beginning anew.

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We now had formal permission and a rich trove of oral historical and interview data that had begun to illuminate the 1946 recordings and photographs at last. Sakakibara (a postdoctoral fellow in the Columbia Earth Institute and the Center for Ethnomusicology during 2008–10) and I applied for a grant from the Arctic Social Sciences division of the National Science Foundation, and in 2009 we were awarded three years of comprehensive funding (since extended) that has allowed us to continue developing metadata through interviews with elders, documenting the contemporary musical life of the community, tracking the development of Tagiugmiut, planning a full digital publication of the archive, associated materials, new metadata, and all of our research products, and negotiating the transfer of intellectual property rights from Columbia’s control to local control by Iñupiat institutions. Tagiugmiut has performed widely, including in both subsequent Kivgiq events, which we attended (in 2009 and 2011), growing in size, power, and skill with each performance; they are slated to appear again in Kivgiq 2013. At Kivgiq 2009, on statewide television, Isabell Elavgak graciously thanked Columbia University from the stage, for returning Joe Sikvayaguk’s songs, the basis of their repertory. In 2011, the group formally presented a copy of the set of Columbia-produced CDs of Boulton’s Barrow recordings to a visiting Inuvialuit dance group from Aklavik, Canada, in a ritualized (and danced) gift exchange in a packed high-school gymnasium. The gift granted formal permission for the Aklavik dancers to use the songs (and the dances Tagiugmiut had developed to go with them) as they saw fit as long as they maintained them respectfully and added value to them over time, permission Tagiugmiut had now earned the right to grant, having taken possession of the songs in a successful and responsible way. That moment marked, perhaps, the highlight of my now nearly ten years as an archivist, and something of a turning point as well. It had been only a few years since those CDs, or copies of them, sat on a barely disturbed shelf at Columbia. The recordings on them had barely been played for the sixty years since Boulton had received those songs as a gift to her from Joseph Sikvayugak and his fellow singers, drummers, and dancers (Leo Kaleak, Alfred Kanayurok, Otis Akhivigak, Willie Sielak, Guy Amayurok, and Jonas Okakok). That gift had been given freely, but with the expectation of reciprocity on Boulton’s part. For nearly four decades, Boulton extracted value from those recordings for herself and her ambitions, while adding little, and returning nothing to her colleagues in Alaska. For the next three decades, the recordings were virtually forgotten, their cultural and scholarly value having never been actualized by the one person who knew anything about what was

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in them – Boulton herself. Life in the Alaskan Arctic moved on and was in many ways transformed. Music and dance changed, exploding in a renaissance of cultural pride and sovereignty, and turning to face the outside world as a statement of identity. The children and teenagers of 1946 were the elders of today. No one on the North Slope even knew the recordings existed. No one remembered the crazy taniq lady. An e-mail from a young graduate student to a newly installed archivist in 2004 had led to all this energy being released, and to seventy-two young people dancing joyously in bright blue regalia on a frigid Friday in February 2011, and then pausing long enough to fulfill their own obligation to pass the gift of song and dance forward in a formal way, inserting the songs back into traditional pan-Inuit networks of exchange and reciprocity in which songs and dances had always circulated, changed, and returned to their makers for many centuries, if not millennia, before Laura Boulton had ever shown up.

Conclusion: reciprocity and the archive As it turned out, the value of the Boulton Collection as a scholarly and educational asset could only be discovered and actualized for the future – for any of its stakeholders – if we (and here I include all of my collaborators in this work, far too numerous to name here) approached its reconstruction by engaging with the descendants of those who had given Boulton their songs, and if we in turn gave it away again with humility and generosity and a sense of responsibility to tradition. This is in fact a very traditionally Iñupiat way of thinking about what it means to own something – be it a harpoon, a cellar full of meat, or a song/dance. It is not yours unless you share it without reservation, and doing so will always bring you back more than you could ever hope to get by yourself. I emphasize in conclusion how much my encounters with Iñupiat and other Native American collaborators and colleagues have shaped this perspective: musical archives are only meaningful, only valuable for any purpose at all, when they are embedded in (and actualize) networks of forward-looking reciprocity. Their value in a history of world music is inseparable, morally and ethically, from such reciprocity. From many of my Native interlocutors on these repatriation projects, I have learned to see coincidences – the great-granddaughter of a Navajo healer winding up as a student in the same building where her ancestor’s recordings are housed, seventy years after the recordings were made, or an e-mail from the right graduate student asking for access to the archive at the right moment – as anything but sheer dumb luck.

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It was perhaps the luckiest such coincidence of the many that have shaped my repatriation work over the past decade that the first community in which I have been able to develop fully the ideas that now animate my approach to curating the entire Boulton Collection was one whose very identity is rooted specifically in the acts of welcoming and feeding strangers and converting them into kin, sharing everything one has accumulated without reservation in order to increase one’s own prosperity and power through alliance, and innovating relentlessly but with respect for time-tested cultural values and models of appropriate conduct that stress mutual obligation and long-term sustainability. These values now inform my work, and that of my many collaborators on other such projects I have not even mentioned here, with the Boulton Collection. In the end, Laura Boulton is my ancestor, too, and deserves to be honored for what she did accomplish. While I have harshly criticized her ethics and her professionalism in this chapter, I must add that I have made a habit over the last decade of asking my indigenous interlocutors if they feel Boulton “stole” their music for her own benefit. To a person, out of dozens I have posed that question to, they have refused that characterization vigorously. When I am feeling particularly frustrated with Boulton’s documentation or her ethical lapses, I try to remember the late, revered Iñupiat elder and intellectual Martha Aiken, who told me: “Thank God for that Laura lady, because without her we wouldn’t have these songs back.” Martha Aiken, one of the wisest members of her generation on the North Slope, could always cut to the truth that way.

Acknowledgments Quyanaqpak from the heart to the communities of Barrow and Anaktuvak Pass, Alaska, to every person named in this chapter, to the Nageak, Kagak, and Kaleak families and crews, to Fannie Akpik, and to the many others who have helped this project who are not. The research reported in this chapter has been supported by Columbia University and the National Science Foundation, and was approved by the Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture Commission. In loving memory of Warren Matumeak and Martha Aiken.

Bibliography Boulton, L. (1955) The Eskimos of Hudsons Bay and Alaska, New York: Folkways Records (1962) ‘I search for ancient music’, Columbia Library Columns, 12, 2: 13–22 (1969) The Music Hunter: The Autobiography of a Career, New York: Doubleday

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Brown, M. (2004) Who Owns Native Culture?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Coombe, R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, Durham, NC: Duke University Press McMillan, R. (1991) ‘Ethnology and the N. F. B.: The Laura Boulton mysteries’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 1, 2: 1–10 Sakakibara, C. (2009) ‘No whale, no music: Iñupiat drumming and global warming’, Polar Record, 45, 235: 289–303

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PART VIII

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THE GLOBALIZATION

OF WORLD MUSIC IN HISTORY

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Landfall It took only a matter of a few hours to introduce diaspora to the Caribbean. After making landfall in the Bahamas on Friday, October 12, 1492, exchanging some gifts, and inquiring as to where he and his companions might find gold, Christopher Columbus detained seven Lucayans, compelled them to board his ship, and proceeded to sail onward into the Caribbean, his captives serving as guides (Craton and Saunders 1992). That act of violence, that forced and tragic separation of Lucayans from their families and land, offered a concrete example in one place – and at the very moment of first encounter – of things to come. Having thus initiated what Silvio Torres-Saillant has called the “colonial transaction” (2006), it did not take long to translate an isolated incident into a region-wide reality. A mere twenty years after Columbus’s arrival, for instance, the Bahamas themselves had been effectively depopulated. Lacking the natural resource so valuable to the Spanish Crown (gold), the Bahamas had, as early as 1513, been thoroughly exploited for the one thing that they were able to provide – labor. Loaded on ships and transported to Hispaniola or to the pearling grounds off Cubagua, Bahamian Lucayans were destined to live out the remainder of their lives in slavery and to wrestle with the violence of diaspora. Roughly a century after Columbus’s fateful arrival in the Bahamas, Theodore de Bry imagined what this initial encounter must have been like for Columbus and the Lucayans (see Fig. 22.1). And imagination was necessary, for by this time the Amerindian population in the Caribbean had been all but completely destroyed by disease, warfare, and slavery (Conniff and Davis 1994). His engraving, completed in 1594, skillfully encapsulates the power relations that were instantiated in that first encounter between Europe and the Caribbean. Power is inscribed quite starkly in the composition of this scene, in which fully two-thirds of the space is occupied by Europeans, while the remaining third is devoted to the Lucayans. Columbus, foregrounded against the military-industrial and religious complex of fifteenth-century Spain, meets the Lucayans in what

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Fig. 22.1 First Landing of Columbus, Theodore de Bry, 1596. Copper engraving, tinted amounts to a 2:1 ratio of power and space. In de Bry’s conceptualization of the ethnographic present, Columbus, flanked by armed guards, is greeting a contingent of Lucayans, who are presenting him with gifts and offerings. Meanwhile, other Lucayans, seeing the size and proximity of Columbus’s ships and the power they clearly represent, attempt to flee. All of this activity, however, seems of little concern to the three individuals intent on planting the cross on Caribbean soil. A few aspects of this engraving intrigue us today. On the one hand, the scene radiates de Bry’s supreme confidence in European power. In addition to the obvious technological advantage of the Europeans over the Lucayans, the tip of Columbus’s lance blends into the forward mast of the closest ship, forming a cross at the very top of which flies the Spanish flag. Theology is here symbolically conflated with military and political might, simultaneously reinforcing and legitimizing Columbus’s actions.1 A straight line, traced from left to

1 This is a striking illustration of the move from potestas to auctoritas, or from power to authority.

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right through each of the ships and on to the edge of the engraving, effectively separates the fleeing Lucayans from the more compliant members of their community. Resistance, it would seem, is likely to result in isolation, not only from Europeans (and this only temporarily), but also from their families and friends. On the other hand, de Bry’s scene includes elements that threaten to erode the viewer’s confidence in European power. This is the case not least because, on the margins, at the peripheries of the frame, and away from the main action, the viewer is introduced to the practical limits of Columbus’s control. First of all, although Caribbean soil is forced to yield to the cross, the Lucayans themselves seem to remain unmoved by its presence. Not a single Lucayan eye is trained on the cross and the fleeing Lucayans are actually putting distance between themselves and the cross. The foundational rationale for European power, then, is not actively being accepted in the New World; rather, Europe is imposing it – quite literally implanting it. Of the total number of Lucayans depicted here, fully one-third are attempting to make their escape (though they are still held captive by the frame). Clearly, not everything is going perfectly to plan. What remains fascinating about this engraving is the iconic representation of power and the concomitant, if more subtle, suggestion of its tenuous hold. One consequence of this juxtaposition is that a sense of overwhelming force comes to serve as the unifying constant within the frame. And in this regard, de Bry’s imaginative recreation of the moment of initial encounter contains at its very core the conditions of possibility for the violence that Columbus actualized when he compelled the first of many Lucayans to enter into diaspora. It contains at its core the ethico-religious and sociocultural rationale for the broad application of European power throughout the region and for its control over Amerindian and African bodies. It also contains within its construction, however, the paradoxical seeds of its own dissolution, recognizing if only obliquely the potential for Lucayan resistance – in a word, recognizing their humanity. The margins, the peripheries, the areas just beyond the reach of colonial power; these are the physical and noetic spaces that constitute one of the landscapes within which many individuals and communities faced the violence of diaspora and worked to craft new lives throughout the Caribbean. This chapter explores some of the routes that music has traveled through this peripheral geography, focusing especially on the sounds of the sacred – on what it means to sing one’s self in diaspora. Columbus may have personally introduced diaspora to the Caribbean, but it was really due to the demands of what Antonio Benítez-Rojo has called “Columbus’s machine” (the plantation, that is) that the Caribbean was rapidly

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turned into a destination for millions of people (Benítez-Rojo 1996). Questions of travel and, therefore, of diaspora are thus embedded at the very heart of the Caribbean, by which I mean simply that during the centuries following that first encounter, Amerindians, Africans, South and East Asians, along with smaller numbers of people from the Levant and Europe, have found themselves making (new) homes in the Caribbean and struggling – each in their own ways and in the face of very different challenges – to come to terms with diasporic conditions. The first shipment of African slaves arrived on Hispaniola a brief ten years after Columbus’s first visit to the Caribbean (1502) and, thus initiated, slavery in the region would continue until 1886, when the last Cuban slaves were freed.2 During this span of almost four centuries, between four and five million Africans found themselves in slavery somewhere in the circum-Caribbean. In some instances, slaves were able successfully to make their escape, and maroon communities became a permanent fixture in the colonial landscape, beginning in earnest during the seventeenth century (Price 2002; Bilby 2005b). Starting in the nineteenth century, moreover, some 420,000 East Indians were transported to the region as indentured laborers, making their lives anew in the Caribbean (approximately 250,000 to Guyana, 144,000 to Trinidad, and 37,000 to Suriname) in large part due to the need for post-emancipation plantation labor – an institutionally sanctioned abuse of people that Hugh Tinker has called “a new system of slavery” and which lasted from 1838 to 1917 (Tinker 1974; Myers 1998; Manuel 2000). Another major influx of people to the region during this period included the some 140,000 Chinese émigrés who relocated to Cuba (120,000) and to the British West Indies (18,000) (Look Lai 2000). All of these movements into the Caribbean were enacted in the vacuum created by the virtual disappearance of the Amerindian population and against the background of concomitant intraregional migrations. By way of illustration, and naming only three among many possible examples, Haitian elites headed for Cuba in order to escape the revolution (1790s), West Indians worked to build the Costa Rican and Panamanian railroads (1850s–70s), and police officers recruited from Barbados upheld the law in the Bahamas (1890s) (Moore 1997; Sublette 2004; Craton and Saunders 1992). Many of those who moved by choice, moreover, chose to make out of potentially temporary places permanent homes. Added to these migrations and relocations was the strategic, intercolonial transfer of slaves, a practice that was especially prevalent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Higman, 1984).

2 Slavery in the Americas, though, lasted until 1888 when Brazil’s Lei Áurea – or Golden Law – went into effect.

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One of the defining conditions of Caribbeanness, whether lived out in Cubagua in the 1510s, in Martinique during the 1750s, or in Trinidad during the 1990s, is the fact of diaspora – the reality of negotiating what Martin Sökefeld calls “not being there” (2004). Stuart Hall puts this archetypal idea as follows: “Everybody in the Caribbean comes from somewhere else. That is to say, their true cultures, the places they really come from, the traditions that really formed them, are somewhere else. The Caribbean is the first, the original, and the purest diaspora” (Hall 2001, 27–8). World music, too, has been profoundly shaped by and has itself shaped the experiences of diasporic, Caribbean communities, and this was the case for many even before they arrived in the region. Accounts of musical performances and of the creation of body art on board ship during the middle passage, for instance, illustrate the power of the expressive arts to shape experiences and to combat psychic and physical violence (Mintz and Price 1976). Subsequent to arrival in the region, the blending of musical inheritances accomplished throughout the Caribbean – the gradual and power-soaked interaction between the many “musics of the world” that found expression there (Bohlman 2002) – has provided the world with many instances of creole musical style, and this not only through recourse to sounds that were regionally available, but also through an active engagement with the sounds that continued to travel back and forth through what Paul Gilroy has called the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993; see also Reily in this volume). Highlife and jùjú, for example, are two West African genres that have been profoundly affected by musical styles emanating from the Caribbean (Waterman 1990). Champeta, the Afro-Colombian style of sound-system music, has, for its part, been deeply impacted by the sounds and rhythmic ideas that musicians gathered from the predominantly West African-based merchant marine during the middle years of the twentieth century (Cunin 2000). These musics – these world musics – are all dependent on travel and global patterns of consumption for their current shapes, and a great deal of their power lies in the diasporic connections that they make explicit through their sonic footprints. These centripetal and centrifugal movements of people and sounds map out the second landscape of diaspora explored in this chapter.3 Growing Caribbean communities in major metropolitan centers, such as London, Toronto, Paris, and New York City, are forging new lives in what can be described as twice-diasporized contexts. In the words of Orlando Patterson, “the former colonies now become the mother country; the imperial metropolis

3 The growth of tourism and the emergence of the United States as the region’s largest and most powerful neighbor must also be factored into this landscape (Sheller 2003; Pattullo 2005).

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becomes the frontier of infinite resources” (Patterson 2000, 468). Caribbean musicians continue to engender particularly interesting examples of musics that are at once locally significant and part of global networks of consumption. One need think only of genres such as merengue, soca, dance hall, zouk, reggaeton, and salsa to realize that the Caribbean has become a major source of globally significant popular musics. These genres have all grown out of contexts of innovation that were fed from the wells of diasporic life and all of these genres increasingly rely on the dynamics created in the process of moving between national and diasporic spaces; that is, they rely for their current sound and popularity on the dynamics that obtain in what Paul Austerlitz, in an exploration of merengue, calls the “transnational circuit” (1998). Juan Flores, reflecting on this dynamic, observes that, Caribbean societies, cultures, and musics cannot be understood today in isolation from the diasporic pole of their translocal realities, or strictly from the vantage point of the diaspora alone. Rather, it is the relation between and among the poles of national and regional history and diasporic recreation . . . that provides the key to present-day analysis of Caribbean expressive possibilities. (Flores 2005, 127)

In 1992, for instance, five hundred years after that first act of violence was committed against the inhabitants of the region, the Baha Men released an album that included a pop song sonically marked as particularly Bahamian (principally through recourse to sounds and rhythms from the junkanoo festival).4 The song, entitled “Island Boy,” appeals to Bahamians living abroad to return to the Bahamas, doing so by tapping into their nostalgia for “home” – by offering a sonic and lyrical instantiation of what W. E. B. Du Bois would have called their sense of double-consciousness – and echoing, albeit under vastly different sociocultural and political conditions, the cries that undoubtedly trailed after the Lucayan captives as they sailed away from their loved ones in 1492. The lyrics cannot be understood apart from the experiences of Bahamians abroad. They become fully meaningful, moreover, only when holding in mind the effects at “home” of these Bahamians’ absence. The song’s pop aesthetic, thoroughly shot through with Bahamian sonic markers, musically reinforces this doubleness. A brief excerpt from the chorus reads as follows: Come back home, To the land of the palmy beaches. Where your heart has always been, Since the very first day. 4 The song includes the characteristic rhythms of the goatskin drums and the cowbells along with the whistles so ubiquitous during junkanoo parades.

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This dynamic push–pull relation between the Caribbean and its various diasporas comprises the final landscape explored in this chapter. The pages that follow illustrate these geographies of place and identity – some of the complexities attendant to locating home and away – tracing landscapes of diaspora that today serve as reminders of the colonial past and as the ground upon which individuals and communities alike continue to build musical narratives of diaspora, both at home and abroad.

Landscapes of diaspora 1 Sounding the sacred It is difficult to overstate the importance of sacred music and ritual in the process of coming to terms with diasporic life in the Caribbean. This is the case not least because the sacred provided and continues to provide a source of grounding in an environment that, at the outset of the colonial transaction, was generally devoid of meaningful signposts of community (both spiritually and physically). The sacred functioned as a major touchstone for reshaping cultural and social heritages from the fragments of memory and practice salvageable in new Caribbean contexts.5 As de Bry’s engraving reminds us, this process was occurring in the face of a religious context that was part and parcel of the colonial system and which could not be completely ignored. Although Catholicism and (later) Protestantism represented for a great many slaves mostly another register of colonial control, they nevertheless recognized in Christianity certain elements that could be adapted to their own cosmologies. Religious syncretism – or religious symbiosis, as it has more recently been called – thus emerged as one of the main results of the complex encounter between Christianity and the beliefs and practices of Caribbean slaves (Taylor 2001; Desmangles 1992). Michel de Certeau offered an excellent summary of this process when he pointed out that, [Colonized people have] often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it. (de Certeau 1984, xiii)

5 See Mintz and Price 1992 for a classic statement of these issues.

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In the course of escaping without leaving, Africans throughout the Caribbean began to explore syncretic/symbiotic possibilities. Santería, Vodoun, Shango, and Espiritismo are only a few of the most obvious examples of these waves of active, lived experimentation with religious belief. Spiritual Baptists, Convince, and Rastafarianism provided another range of responses to the spiritual challenges of diaspora. Teacher Hazel Ann Gibbs-DePeza, speaking about the history of Spiritual Baptist faith and practice in particular, but in a manner that is generalizable here, has remarked that, “The Spiritual Baptist Faith . . . can justly be described as the attempt of the Negro to establish bench marks for freedom, to fashion out of the religious elements in the community something more fitting to the needs of the people, a worship more realistic.”6 This is another way of making the same case as does de Certeau and it brings productively into view the central role of community in the pursuit of religious practice throughout the Caribbean. The communal aspects of religious practice embedded in teacher GibbsDePeza’s explanation afford an opportunity to explore what amounts to a musical recreation of social bonds – of communion – in diasporic contexts. Upon disembarking in the Caribbean, the idea of kinship and of belonging within a larger network of inter-personal relationships came to be grounded more urgently in religious practice, in part because it could no longer be grounded in any unproblematic way in a historical, genetic understanding of family. Aspects of religious practice that afforded communities a means toward pursuing healing (both spiritual and physical) also found a great deal of resonance in the Caribbean. According to Karen McCarthy Brown, “it is not an overstatement to say that spirituality and healing are synonymous in the Afro-Caribbean” (McCarthy Brown 2006, 2). The religious life of the Caribbean, moreover, also offers regular examples of the power relationships at play throughout the long history of the region, and this not least because the worship growing out of these “more realistic” modes of religious expression often challenged church and state, and this both sonically and politically.7

Drumming for life Karen McCarthy Brown offers the following observation regarding the significance of Vodou in Haitian life: “Moun fèt pou mouri,” people are born to die – the saying reveals the Haitian’s sense that life is both short and painful. This verdict cannot change; it can only 6 Cited in Murray 1998, 217–18. 7 Consider here the many legal injunctions that were put in place to limit the assembly, the music and drumming (even the possession of instruments), and the religious practices of slaves throughout the region. For details concerning these issues, see, for example, Cowley 1996, Moore 1997, and Averill 1997.

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be accepted. Yet in the midst of the struggle that is life it is possible to enhance one’s chans (luck) and minimize the mizé (suffering). This is accomplished in two ways: first, by respectful attention to the web of sustaining human relationships that defines family, and second, through conscientious service to the spirits who are after all members of one’s own extended family, even – from one perspective, at least – parts of oneself. (McCarthy Brown 2006, 25)

The importance of relationships both physical and spiritual (of family and community through time) and the cycles of healing and thanksgiving that surround their maintenance, thus, form the core of Vodou ritual practice. The diverse range of African beliefs assembled in Hispaniola during the colonial period (derived primarily from Fon, Yoruba, and Kongo traditions) served as a spiritual foundation for Vodou, which, by the time of the Haitian revolution (1791), was firmly established in rural Haiti. Numerous regional rites developed and two of these in particular gradually became highly influential – the Rada and Kongo-Petwo rites. Vodou has consistently provided a context within which to interpret political and social realities, offering an important counter-discourse to power (Averill 1997). Its symbolic language, along with the drumming, singing, and dancing at the heart of ritual life, has permeated Haitian expressive arts. Gerdes Fleurant has observed that, it is no exaggeration to say that the music of Vodun constitutes the foundation of Haiti’s musical life, secular or sacred . . . The folk and popular music of the past two centuries have emerged from the beat of Kongo-Petwo rhythms. In the past fifty years, one of Haiti’s major dance bands, the Jazz de Jeunes, which was founded in 1943, has extensively and successfully used both Rada and Kongo-Petwo beats in their compositions. (Fleurant 2006, 56)

The musical dimensions of Vodou have also been explored – albeit toward very different ends – in the context of art music by Haitian composers such as Werner Jaegerhuber, Ludovic Lamothe, and Justin Elie and, more recently, by self-consciously roots-oriented, mizik rasin bands such as Boukan Ginen and Boukman Eksperyans (Largey 2006; Averill 1997). The presence of Rara bands throughout Haiti and its diaspora illustrates, perhaps better than any of these other musics, the extent to which Vodou has become integrated into the everyday lives of lower-class Haitians. According to Elizabeth McAlister, “Rara is about play, religion, and politics and also about remembering a bloody history and persevering in its face. But at its most bare philosophical level, Rara is a ritual enactment of life itself and an affirmation of life’s difficulties” (McAlister 2002, 23). Rara bands are, moreover, multivalent in that, when performing, they accomplish multiple tasks in several registers of Haitian life. “They are musical bands, carnivalesque

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crowds, religious rituals, armies on maneuvers, mass political demonstrations, and performances of national pride” (ibid., 14). Combining the rituals and symbols of Afro-Haitian religion with the Christian festal calendar (Rara season coincides with Lent), the roots of Rara run deep, both in terms of its spiritual heritage but also in terms of its familial and communal dimensions. Rara bands are generally composed of extended family and local community members, and the music played by the bands is performed on drums from the Kongo-Petwo rite, bamboo trumpets (called vaksin), and other percussion instruments, all of which accompany songs with lyrics that are by turns bawdy, politically charged, ritually meaningful, and obscene. The music is drawn from various sources, including carnival rhythms, musical salutes (called ochan), and ritual songs drawn from the Kongo-Petwo and Bizango rites, and illustrates well the ways that the sacred has become part of popular culture in Haiti. Rara has also found expression in Haitian diaspora communities, where it serves both as a means of marking identity and as a form of remembrance. Perhaps equally important, Rara performance in places like New York City offers a means of negotiating transmigrant experiences no matter where “home” happens to be located at the moment. As McAlister notes, “a song created in Léogâne could be sung in Brooklyn a week later, creating a deterritorialized popular Haitian discourse that allowed traditional knowledge rooted in peasant culture, now inflected with the diaspora experience, to circulate internationally throughout many Haitian social spheres” (McAlister 2002, 185). Vodou rituals and the various performing traditions that rely on its rich symbolic and musical language for inspiration are about drumming for life in the face of power, and this imperative remains operative through conditions of slavery, economic disenfranchisement, and new forms of diaspora.

Drumming in memory of Muharram During the nineteenth century, Trinidad witnessed a steady influx of South Asian indentured laborers, a movement of people that significantly transformed its social and religious landscape. South Asians of both Muslim and Hindu faiths found themselves working in relatively isolated areas of Trinidad (like the Caroni region, for example) and began to forge new lives together. Both Shi’ah and Sunni were represented among the Muslims who arrived in Trinidad, and their ritual and musical lives are deeply connected to religious networks quite separate from those that trace along the routes of European and African religious travels. A case in point is the tassa drumming that accompanies the Hosay festival in Trinidad.

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Hosay is a Shi’ah Muslim festival commemorating and celebrating the martyrdom of Muharram (the Prophet Muhạ mmad’s grandson). Ensembles include two primary kinds of drums – lead and second drums – and hand cymbals, but the number of players can vary greatly. Significantly, and not least because of the intensity generated by the tassa drumming, the Hosay festival has, in Trinidad, become a site of potential inter-ethnic and inter-religious participation – an opportunity for many Afro-Trinidadians along with a great many Indo-Trinidadians to participate together in the festivities. As Hamdoo Emamali put it in an interview with Frank Korom: “In Trinidad, especially, people will get frenzied the moment you start beating tassa drumming. And so they start dancing right away and whatnot. And so you really cannot contain them, you cannot prevent them” (Korom 2003, 195). As such, Hosay in Trinidad is celebrated in idiosyncratic fashion, outwardly emphasizing revelry over reverence and celebration over remembrance, a fact that has made it the target of both local Sunni ire and foreign Shi’i missionary concern. And yet, as Frank Korom points out, “[b]y allowing the participation of the Afro-Trinidadian majority and by externally appearing to creolize, thereby minimizing criticism from the latter for being too Indian, the Indo-Trinidadian Shi’ah are also able to stave off Sunni criticisms of their religious practices by rallying the support of their Afro-Trinidadian fellow participants” (ibid., 231). The cultural politics involved in negotiating East Indian religious practice in Trinidad during the twentieth century offers some sense of the continuing need for sacred music as a means of working through what “not being there” means in the present. It also illustrates the careful allegiances that determine why being “here” is significant and important. The Trinidadian observance of the Hosay festival, along with the tassa drumming that enlivens it, is not primarily about nostalgia or about identification with global Islam. It is, rather, about coming to terms with life in diaspora and about doing so in and through the process of translating religious ritual and musical performance into a “worship more realistic.”

Landscapes of diaspora 2 Traveling sounds: routes, roots Martin Stokes, writing about the relations of power in world music, cautions that the patterns of movement and processes of musical change addressed by creolization and hybridity theory are not new, per se: There is little “new” about “World Music.” Music has always traveled along the grain of political and economic power, establishing lasting dialogues

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between communities so linked. These dialogues have persisted, in the case of the movement of music between Africa and the New World, for example, for centuries. The problem that “World Music” poses as discourse is in some respects related to that posed by globalization as discourse. It is almost entirely ignorant of its own past, blind to the material conditions of its own existence, and oblivious to the history of power differentials among the various partners in cultural exchange in world history. (Stokes 2003, 307)

Important in his formulation is the dialogic, centrifugal, and centripetal nature of music’s travels. As the following pages illustrate, the power differentials so evident in the transnational sphere are also dramatically present at the local level.

Rumba: from Havana to the world and back again Developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, rumba moved from the streets – where it was performed by Afro-Cuban musicians and dancers – to the cabarets of Havana, where it was cleaned up for local consumption and caricatured in order to exploit the racial tensions attendant to fin de siècle Cuba. Musically, the basic rumba ensemble includes three main percussion parts (conga, clave, and palitos), a vocal soloist, and a chorus. It is dance music, and although several varieties of rumba developed (including the columbia, and the yambú), it was the guaguancó that became widely popular. The couples’ dance associated with the rumba guaguancó, however, was considered too sexualized and too “African” for mobilization within Cuban national culture, leading to efforts on the part of the elite to limit severely its popularity. This was achieved through recourse to legal proscriptions, and this to such an extent that merely owning a drum (let alone playing it) was, for a time, criminalized. It should come as no surprise that one of the harshest years with regard to the official suppression of Afro-Cuban music came in 1888, just after emancipation (1886) and with the prospect of independence in the air.8 Meanwhile, the rumba was extracted from the streets, cleaned up and caricatured, and then put on stage in the cabarets. It was this version of the rumba that managed to find its way into a floorshow performed by a Cuban dance troupe in Paris during 1927 – a show that became an almost instant success (Moore 1997). By the early 1930s, rumba dance manuals were being printed in places like Germany’s Wintergarten magazine and danceband leaders across Europe and the United States were soon being inundated with requests for rumbas. One of the musics of the world, already modified for export, is thus transformed into a 8 Two wars had already been fought over Cuba’s political future (the Ten Years’ War, 1868–78, and the La Guerra Chiquita in 1880) and independence was won in 1898, after another three-year war. By this time, moreover, the United States was heavily involved in Cuban affairs.

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world music in the process of going abroad. The effects of this dance craze were widespread and ultimately returned home, changing the terms upon which rumba was evaluated and understood in Cuba. Indeed, one of the pervasive patterns of musical movement within the Caribbean consists of a movement outward, where musical style finds international acceptance, and a subsequent centripetal journey whereby that style gains a measure of legitimacy at home.

Reggae outernational The global presence of reggae serves as one of the most obvious illustrations of the centrifugal and centripetal flows of Caribbean popular music. The global presence of roots reggae and of the various genres that have emerged in its wake are, by now, quite well documented. Reggae is, moreover, also an excellent context within which to explore the centripetal flows of musical ideas, as evidenced, for example by the early Jamaican interactions with African American musical projects such as rhythm and blues and by the more recent negotiation of hip-hop aesthetics by Jamaican dancehall artists (Stolzoff 2000; Marshall 2006). The connections between reggae as soundtrack and the ideological and theological messages of Rastafarian beliefs are also significant, for these two streams were coupled together in powerful fashion beginning in the late 1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s. Turning inward – and exploring the sacred dimensions of life in diaspora – Jamaican artists began to shape a new sound from the available means, offering a music to the world that did, in the space of a few short decades, become world music writ large, but which was considered subversive and suspect within Jamaica. Reggae continues in important ways to inform world music today. The aesthetic and musical idea of versioning, for example, offers a great deal of insight into current forms of music making around the world. I-Roy has offered this short proverb about the vitality of the version: “It’s easier for camel to pass through needle’s eye than for version to die” (quoted in Davis 1976). I-Roy’s fantastic quip, through its richly layered metaphorical allusions, offers a perfect point of departure for exploring the local instantiations of reggae produced through the constantly shifting and endlessly complex processes of globalization. I-Roy’s words simultaneously open onto questions of travel (globalization), religion (Christian/Rastafari), and the unique shapes of newly localized reggae musics (versions). Versions of the order invoked in I-Roy’s statement explicitly acknowledge the past while illustrating through their very performance/airplay in the present creative possibilities for (and perhaps even the inevitability of ) future instantiations of that musical material. They continue the dialogue, as it were. If we change the register of address, however, the idea of the version can be directed toward explaining the

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mechanisms through which Korean and Brazilian reggae, to name just two examples – even the Christian Reggae band, Christafari – reflect in centripetal fashion upon the roots and sources of their sounds while simultaneously refracting in ever more complex centrifugal patterns new versions and new articulations of what reggae can/might mean (Rommen 2006). More important, these “refractive” versions also afford us an opportunity to consider how reggae might come to be understood apart from specifically Jamaican contexts. Michael Veal, writing about dub, points out the following: When we blend the parallel significance of dub’s role within and outside of Jamaica, it becomes clear that the central artistic revolutions of the late twentieth century were not accomplished solely in the intellectual and cultural centers of Europe and America. They were also accomplished on the margins of Europe and America, where Western cultural forms mixed, mingled, or collided with a variety of non-Western forms in the creation of new aesthetic, cultural, and technological centers. (Veal 2007, 257)

Read in this way, reggae, as one of the musics of the world, is quickly transformed into a world music, in terms of both its commercial reach and its aesthetic and technological contributions to global patterns of production. And the centripetal and centrifugal patterns that are driving these contributions play out in musical terms. The consistent dialogue that has found hip-hop aesthetics challenging the ways that Jamaican musicians hear and what they are producing locally; the importance of reggae and dub aesthetics to the early development of hip hop (Flores 2000); the role of rhythm and blues in shaping the sounds of early reggae; the much more recent influence of dub aesthetics in electronic dance music – all of these flows, stretching backward and forward in time, are powerful reminders of the kinds of cultural negotiations that continue to inform the musical languages of the Caribbean.

Landscapes of diaspora 3 Twice diasporized, or the metropole as frontier The city of Philadelphia maintains a public space, called Penn’s Landing, that hosts a variety of community celebrations each summer. One of these celebrations, which enters its twenty-second year in 2008, is the Caribbean Festival (see Fig. 22.2). Fairmount Park offers another space for public festivals in Philadelphia, and it currently hosts the much younger Philly Carnival. Philly Carnival is sponsored by the Philadelphia Multi-Cultural Carnival Association, which was founded in 1999 (see Fig. 22.3). Although Philadelphia is not home to a West Indian population even approaching those of London, New

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Fig. 22.2 Flyer for Caribbean Festival ’07 (Philadelphia) York City, or Toronto in terms of its size, it is nevertheless participating in the continuing expansion of Trinidad-style carnivals into major urban spaces; more than forty cities in the United States currently mount annual carnival celebrations.

Carnival and the Caribbean transnation The Caribbean has, indeed, transplanted its inhabitants across the globe and, in so doing, has also transplanted its musics and its festivals to new locations, implanting them in new contexts where ethnicity, nationality, and identity necessarily take on new meanings. In their groundbreaking collection entitled Island Sounds in the Global City, Ray Allen and Lois Wilcken trace some of the ways that music helps the Caribbean community in New York City negotiate not only issues of diaspora (the reality of “not being there”) but also the new challenges related to forging new – and necessarily broader – understandings of community. “Diasporas may transcend boundaries, but space, place and locality remain important points of reference, on a symbolic as well as on a physical level” (Kokut et al. 2004, 5). The collapse of what, in the Caribbean,

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Fig. 22.3 Poster for Philly Carnival ’07 are considered distinct national spaces and sounds into a single space during carnival celebrations such as the Labor Day Carnival in New York or Notting Hill Carnival in London offers a window onto these ongoing negotiations. In fact, the Philadelphia Multi-Cultural Carnival Association’s statement of purpose places this concern at the center of its mission in the city. “The Philadelphia Multi-Cultural Carnival Association . . . is dedicated to promoting the Caribbean Culture through artistic expression of music, dance and art form. It was formed to bridge the gap and foster an atmosphere of cooperation and cultural understanding between the diverse Caribbean ethnic groups that reside in the Greater Philadelphia area and the Delaware Valley” (posted to www.phillycarnival.com). Questions of identity, in other words, force different answers in places like Philadelphia or New York City than they do in Grenada or in St. Vincent, demanding a simultaneous recognition of regional community and of particular heritage. Bajan flags, Jamaican flags, Trinidadian flags – these are all understood as representative symbols of the individual heritage of particular members of Caribbean communities outside of the Caribbean. But they also combine to form

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the broad-based, regional identity of Caribbean communities abroad, a collective identity represented well in the festival poster created for the Philadelphia Caribbean Festival, in which the costume of the dancer incorporates regional flags in quilted fashion (see Fig. 22.2). Although West Indians had found their way to New York in large numbers even during the 1920s, the Labor Day parade in Harlem was first turned into a major street festival in 1947 and the calypsonian Lord Invader recorded a song in commemoration of that event in 1948. The lyrics of the second verse are particularly pertinent in this context: From A-Hundred-and-Ten to One-Forty-Second, / We had bands of all description, / I am not only speaking of West Indians, / Ninety percent was Americans, / They love the Carnival, / And that is why they join the bacchanal. (liner notes to Lord Invader: Calypso in New York, Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40454)

The lyrics of this song narrate the literal take-over of the streets of New York. They illustrate the broad appeal of the carnival among “Americans” and also consolidate the Caribbean participants into a group called West Indians. Given the fact that “Americans . . . love the Carnival,” the economic aspects of the festivities cannot be overlooked. The revenues that Notting Hill Carnival and Caribana bring to their respective cities are considerable and this is, of course, also the case for carnival in Port of Spain. In fact, some of the revenues generated by visitors to carnival in Port of Spain come from Trinidadians who are returning from abroad to play mas or simply to be “home” during the festival. Jocelyne Guilbault has noted that “West Indians in diaspora now actively participate as consumers in many musical activities held in Trinidad. With today’s access to mass communication and modern technology, the traditional meaning of ‘home’ defined by a specific place or locality has become ever more blurred and indeterminate” (Guilbault 2007, 198). Philip Scher, exploring the identity politics that accompany these journeys from home to “home,” has noted that, The growth of a thriving Carnival industry between Trinidad and the United States today relies not only on the presence of Trinidadians in the foreign metropole but also on the persistent desire on the part of dislocated nationals to want to cultivate and perpetuate a cultural heritage . . . The creation of a Trinidadian identity by that county’s transmigrants abroad must negotiate the fragmented and dislocated nature of the transmigrant experience. To that end, Trinidadians in New York frequently draw upon essentialized cultural forms from which to imagine a concrete social identity. (Green and Scher 2007, 99–100)

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The idea of “home” thus becomes more difficult to imagine, for it requires either a reduction of its rich complexity through essentialization or an acknowledgment of its partial indeterminacy in the present circumstance. Neither position can be adopted without consequence in the context of the larger West Indian community in Philadelphia.

A “Caribbean Medley”: live in London In the summer of 2000, Donnie McClurkin, the Detroit-based gospel singer, released a live album recorded in London’s Fairfield Halls. It includes a track entitled “Caribbean Medley” – a medley of traditional gospel songs that have been circulating for such a long time that they are intimately familiar to West Indian Protestants.9 McClurkin emphasizes this familiarity by foregrounding the audience’s roaring approval as well as their singing throughout the mix and by letting the crowd finish lines for him. The musical texture, for its part, is arranged around a roots reggae feel. His opening interaction with the crowd, which includes a substantial West Indian contingent, finds him exhorting the audience as follows: “Well then, we going to sing us some Jamaican songs. But if we sing ’em you gotta get outta those seats and you gotta dance like you really from Jamaica, or your parents were from Jamaica, parents’ parents were from Jamaica. But I want you to be true to who you are.” Interesting here is the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the Caribbean, for McClurkin evokes a Caribbean physically large enough to encompass London, but culturally reduced to Jamaica. And this in spite of the fact that the songs in this medley are as familiar to Trinidadian or Barbadian believers as they are to Jamaican Protestants. Musically, the performance offers a good example of the ways that music moves around the Caribbean and, for that matter, around the globe. The reggae sound, so powerfully evoked in this medley, for example, would not have been an appropriate vehicle for these songs within Protestant Jamaica even as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, and this not least because reggae has only recently been freed from its explicit associations with Rastafarianism (Rommen 2006). Although the steel pan (incorporated here as a sampled sound on a keyboard) is now a pan-regional sound, it is still a sound most closely associated with Trinidad. The musical arrangement, thus, carves out genre and stylistic spaces in which it could not possibly have worked in the 1970s or 1980s, pointing to the continued change within the Protestant community, both within the 9 The medley includes the following songs: 1. “I’ve Got My Mind Made Up (I Want to See My Jesus Someday)”; 2. “Goodbye World, I Stay No Longer With You”; 3. “Thank God I’m Born Again”; 4. “I Am Under the Rock”; 5. “Jesus Name So Sweet”; 6. “Fire Fall on Me.”

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Caribbean and abroad, and to the ways that musical sounds (like steel pan and reggae) have come to be symbolically associated with the entire region, and this especially outside of the region itself. This recording is an example of the dynamics at play between the Caribbean and its diaspora, between internal and external perceptions of Caribbeanness, musically and theologically, and between the music industry (McClurkin’s album) and the expressive culture of the region. This live recording, however, also symbolically points to one of the ways that spirituality has found expression in the Caribbean – that is, through community. The concert was, after all, experienced by a group of individuals, many of whom recognized in the “Caribbean Medley” a marker for self-identification, a means of sharing both history and present with others, and perhaps even a measure of common ground with what had, until that moment, been strangers. McClurkin’s “Caribbean Medley” afforded the West Indians in attendance an opportunity actively to engage with what Caribbeanness means in a place like London and to do so by means of musical material that is deeply rooted in West Indian Protestant worship.

Interlude – merging landscapes of diaspora? Bahamian junkanoo is a celebration – including masquerade, dance, music, and art – rooted in West African spirituality and sharing at least some connection to similar traditions in Jamaica, Belize, North Carolina, and St. Kitts and Nevis and Bermuda. Unlike pre-Lenten carnival celebrations in places like Trinidad, New Orleans, and Brazil, junkanoo is a Yuletide festival, celebrated on Boxing Day (December 26), and on New Year’s Day. In the contemporary moment, junkanoo is the primary marker of Bahamian national identity, is sponsored by the state, touted as a space within which all Bahamians can come together in equality, and is, as such, a civic – that is to say, a “secular” – festival (Rommen 1999). It is not uncommon to find junkanoo troupes incorporating Christian ideas into their parade themes, nor is it rare to hear spirituals or hymns/ anthems as part of the musical accompaniment to the parade. Christianity has, it would seem, found a place in junkanoo.10 Although most scholars suspect that junkanoo was, at least initially, full of religious meaning for its participants, this claim has, until recently, been difficult to substantiate for lack of documentation and because current practice bears relatively few overt signs of African religious meaning. Recent fieldwork by Ken Bilby, however, 10 This fact was acknowledged explicitly in a symposium held in March of 2002 at the College of the Bahamas and entitled, “Junkanoo and Religion: Christianity and Cultural Identity in the Bahamas.” The papers were published under the same title by Media Enterprises, Nassau in 2003.

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seems to indicate that junkanoo did in fact carry significant religious meaning in the years prior to its modernization and mobilization as a national symbol (Bilby 2005a). The earliest references to junkanoo come not from the Bahamas but from Jamaica where elite observers like Sir Hans Sloane (1707) and Edward Long (1774) attempted to describe the scenes playing out before them, capturing well the communal aspects of the festival but failing to register the spiritual dimensions embedded in these festivities (another example of religious practice hiding in plain sight). Consider, for instance, this passage from Long’s History of Jamaica: In the towns during Christmas holidays, they have several tall robust fellows dressed up in grotesque habits, and a pair of ox-horns on their head sprouting from the top of a horrid sort of visor or mask, about which the mouth is rendered very terrific with large boar tusks. The masquerader, carrying a wooden sword in his hand, is followed by a numerous crowd of drunken women, who dance at every door, bellowing out “John Connu!” with great vehemence. (Long 1774, 424–5)

Although it took a bit longer for junkanoo to make it into written documents in the Bahamas, the results were generally similar (Townsend 1823; Powles 1888). The following passage from planter Charles Farquharson’s diary of 1832 offers a rare glimpse at the social dimensions of slave life in the Bahamas: “Wed. 26. Some of our people gon [sic] abroad to see some of their friends and some at home amusing themselves in their own way threw [sic] the day, but all of them at home in the evening and had a grand dance and keep it up until near daylight” (Farquharson 1957, n.p.). This passage, like the one penned by Edward Long, illustrates well the communal character of junkanoo, but not the deeply religious roots of this communal celebration. Ken Bilby, researching junkanoo in rural St. Elizabeth parish, Jamaica, has noted that the celebrations there are still quite heavily invested with religious meaning and ritual power. These celebrations serve as a component of a larger community religion that is practiced year-round. Throughout the year, as the need arises, local ancestors are called by the gumbay drum and the old myal (spirit) songs to come and help the living tackle the problems of daily life. At Christmas time, the focus shifts from healing to feasting, celebration, and Jonkonnu dancing, and the ancestors are very much a part of these holiday observances as well. (Bilby 2005a, 4)

The ritual power of junkanoo, then, is centered primarily around healing from spiritual ailments (themes we have seen elsewhere in the region) and in the celebration of such healing, and this in direct contradistinction to the

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predominantly “secular” shape that junkanoo has taken in Jamaican and Bahamian national spaces during the twentieth century. Bilby’s research resonates with the intuitive claims of earlier researchers on junkanoo such as Ira De A. Reid who, based on fieldwork in North Carolina, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, postulated that the spiritual inspiration for junkanoo likely derived from a range of West African religious practices (Reid 1942). In this connection, and speaking of both junkanoo and Buru festivities, Bilby suggests that, These last holdouts in the present are uniquely positioned to help us understand what complex Afro-creole performances such as Jonkonnu and Buru really were – which is to say, what they meant – to those who practiced and cherished them in earlier times. And they offer resounding confirmation of what many in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean have intuitively grasped: both Jonkonnu and Buru, despite their “secular” appearance in the present, spring from deep spiritual roots. (Bilby 2005a, 5, 9)

In the early stages of its history, junkanoo provided a context within which community could be reconstituted and fostered and within which healing could take place – a context that provided a means of rethinking African cosmology, reworking it to suit the current situation. In Jamaica as in the Bahamas, this imperative gradually lessened as junkanoo continued to be adapted to its Caribbean context. In the case of Bahamian junkanoo, this included a shift in instrumentation and a move toward incorporating Christian ideas, both of which were encouraged and accelerated through the increasing institutionalization of the festival during the twentieth century.11 The sounds of junkanoo, as performed on Bay Street in Nassau today, include goatskin drums, bells, whistles, and brass instruments, effectively combining African and European instruments and sound worlds into a quintessentially Bahamian sound. One of the most revealing aspects of the power of junkanoo as a marker of identity is that the festival has, since at least the 1950s, served as inspiration for Bahamian popular musicians. The rhythms and instruments of junkanoo have, in fact, formed the foundation for much of the music that has been recorded in the Bahamas since the late 1970s, and it is in this popular junkanoo music that the centripetal and centrifugal flows of sounds and people are most visible. Perhaps the most famous exponent of this popular junkanoo is the band called the Baha Men. Over the course of their recording career (1992–present), they have carefully worked junkanoo rhythms and sonic markers (including cowbells, whistles, and

11 Jamaica also institutionalized and standardized Jonkonnu such that, by 1962 “official representation had crystallized into an image of Jonkonnu as a ‘secular’ festival embodying the nation’s identity” (Bilby 2005a, 3).

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goatskin drums) into their arrangements and have done so while constantly reaching outward to connect with other styles such as rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and soca.12 This litany of styles, performed in arrangements that foreground junkanoo, illustrates the intersections and multiple crossings of national, regional, and transnational spaces typical of the ways that Bahamian artists have addressed their own place within the region and their interactions with the broader networks of popular music. The Baha Men are only one particularly visible example of the centripetal and centrifugal forces that combine to make Nassau a space of encounter (Clifford 1997), a place where the musics of the world and world musics intersect with and inform each other, a location from which new sounds and stylistic ideas emerge, crashing into football stadiums in Cleveland, Ohio and generating legions of fans in places like Japan. And yet, success notwithstanding, outside of Nassau the Baha Men are not generally considered purveyors of popular music; rather, they are understood as world musicians. A quick check on any internet music outlet will illustrate this point: iTunes, for example, lists the Baha Men under world music and Amazon.com and Tower.com both categorize the band under “international/ Caribbean.” This illustrates the degree to which Caribbean music (with the notable exception of reggae) and the region as a whole continues to exist as a provincial space within which travel and play are possible and where food, beaches, and entertainment can be consumed. The growth of tourism and the emergence of the United States as the region’s largest and most powerful neighbor have profoundly impacted the economies and politics of the Caribbean and must be factored into any account that attempts to understand world music in the Caribbean or Caribbean music in world perspective (Sheller 2003; Pattullo 2005). Finally, just as Trinidad carnival has become a fixture in cities across the world, so too has junkanoo increasingly become a powerful symbol of Bahamian identity abroad. Miami, for example, has played host to a formal junkanoo troupe since 1957, when the Sunshine Junkanoo Band was formed in Overton. Since then, other groups have formed, including the Bahamas Junkanoo Revue, which came into being in 1993. There is a great deal of back-and-forth between

12 The Baha Men have recorded a wide range of material, including covers of songs written by local Bahamian artists (such as their 1992 recording of The Beginning of the End’s “Funky Nassau” [1972]); covers of songs composed by regional artists (like their 2000 arrangement of Trinidadian Anselm Douglas’s soca tune entitled “Who Let the Dogs Out?” [1998]); covers of songs performed by industry stars (like their 1998 recording of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” or a medley combining K. C. and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way I Like It” and “Get Down Tonight” in 1997); arrangements of regional traditional songs (like their 1992 version of “Gin and Coconut Water”); collaborations with industry icons (such as their 1994 work with Lenny Kravitz on “Just a Sunny Day”); and, of course, their original material.

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the junkanooers in these bands and the members of Nassauvian bands, leading to an interesting exchange that finds Miami-based groups attending Boxing Day and New Year’s Day parades in Nassau and a reciprocal gesture by Nassauvian bands which finds them attending the annual Goombay Festival in Coconut Grove, the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday celebration in West Perrine, as well as the Rose Bowl parade (Wood 2007). Key West, historically linked by migratory patterns to Nassau, has also fostered a junkanoo tradition that, in the middle of the twentieth century, was active enough to attract both the interest and the resources of Folkways Records (Folkways FL 4492).13 Cities such as New Orleans and Toronto also regularly include junkanoo rushes in their festival programs and, although the international profile of junkanoo is relatively small by comparison to carnival, it is interesting to note that junkanoo is finding its way into the cities where Bahamians are now living abroad. Keith Nurse, discussing the growth of what he calls “overseas Caribbean carnivals,” has noted that like “its parent, the overseas carnival is hybrid in form and influence. The Jonkonnu masks of Jamaica and the Bahamas, not reflected in the Trinidad carnival, are clearly evident in many of these carnivals, thereby making them pan-Caribbean in scope” (Nurse 1999).

Landfall revisited “Discovery of the New World: They Came! They Saw! They Conquered!” This was the theme around which the Roots junkanoo group designed their entry for the 2004 Boxing Day Parade. The music, the choreography, the set pieces, the narrative itself, revolved around the same questions that Theodore de Bry was attempting to address some four hundred years earlier. The artistic vision that the Roots brought to Bay Street, however, is radically different from that of de Bry; for example, in the set piece that Roots called “The Beauty of Guanahani: Landfall of Columbus” (see Fig. 22.4). It is worth noticing that the humanity of the Lucayans is on full display in the Roots’ set piece, countering the ambivalence with which the Amerindians are depicted in de Bry’s engraving. For Bahamians, the Lucayans are the protagonists in this scene. Perhaps most importantly, contemporary Bahamians are finding in these originating myths a means of addressing their present and possible futures, tying their own heritage (their Roots) as Bahamians to the

13 The resulting album, recorded by Marshall W. Stearns in 1964 and entitled Junkanoo Band-Key West, is still available through Smithsonian Global Sounds at www.smithsonianglobalsound.org.

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Fig. 22.4 “Landfall of Columbus,” Roots junkanoo group on parade, Nassau 2004

experiences of the Lucayans – in short, identifying with them through a shared understanding of diasporic life. Bahamians – and Caribbean communities in general – continue to find avenues for (re)membering the past in order to address the needs of the contemporary moment, locating these strategies variously in the realm of the sacred, in the centripetal and centrifugal flows of music and people, and in the process of coming to terms with the role of new diasporas in local life, both at home and abroad. These landscapes of diaspora continue to inform life in the Caribbean and the traces of these landscapes will continue to be audible in the region’s musical life.

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Bohlman, P. V. (2002) World Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Conniff, M. L., and T. J. Davis (2002, orig. publ. 1994) Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora, Caldwell, NJ: Blackburn Press Cowley, J. (1996) Carnival, Canboulay, and Calypso: Traditions in the Making, Cambridge University Press Craton, M., and G. Saunders (1992) Islands in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, vol. 1: From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery, Athens: University of Georgia Press Cunin, E. (2000) ‘La champeta: Musique noire, métissage et espace urbain à Cartagena (Colombie)’, in Musiques et sociétés en Amérique Latine, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 283–93 Davis, S. (1976) ‘Peter Tosh, album review’, Rolling Stone Magazine, August 26 Desmangles, L. (1992) The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Edmondson, B. (1999) Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press Farquharson, C. (1957, orig. publ. 1831–2) A Relic of Slavery, ed. by O. J. McDonald, Nassau: The Deans Peggs Research Fund Fernández Olmos, M., and L. Paravisini-Gebert (2003) Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo, New York University Press Fernandez, R. A. (2006) From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz, Berkeley: University of California Press Fleurant, G. (2006) ‘Vodun, music, and society in Haiti: Affirmation and identity’, in P. Bellegarde-Smith and C. Michel (eds.), Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 46–57 Flores, J. (2000) From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, New York: Columbia University Press (2005) ‘Créolité in the hood: Diaspora as source and challenge’, in F. W. Knight and T. Martínez-Vergne (eds.), Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 117–31 Garcia, D. F. (2006) Arsenio Rodriguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Green, G. L., and P. W. Scher (2007) Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Guilbault, J. (2007) Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics, University of Chicago Press Hall, S. (2001) ‘Negotiating Caribbean identities’, in B. Meeks and F. Lindhal (eds.), New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 24–39 Herskovits, M. J. (1938) Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact, New York: J. J. Augustin

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Higman, B. W. (1992, orig. publ. 1984) Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press Howard, R. (2004) ‘Yoruba in the British Caribbean: A comparative perspective on Trinidad and the Bahamas’, in T. Falola and M. D. Childs (eds.), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 157–76 Kokut, W., K. Tölölyan, and C. Alfonso (eds.) (2004) Diaspora, Identity, and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, New York and London: Routledge Korom, F. J. (2003) Hosay Trinidad: Muh ạ rram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Largey, M. (2006) Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism, University of Chicago Press Long, E. (1774) History of Jamaica, vol 2., London: Printed for T. Lowndes Look Lai, W. (2000) The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806–1995: A Documentary History, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press Manuel, P. (2000) East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Marshall, W. (2006) ‘Bling-bling for Rastafari: How Jamaicans deal with hip-hop’, Social and Economic Studies, 55, 1 and 2: 49–74 McAlister, E. (2002) Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, Berkeley: University of California Press McCarthy Brown, K. (2006) ‘Afro-Caribbean spirituality: A Haitian case study’, in C. Michel and P. Bellegarde-Smith (eds.), Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Mintz, S., and R. Price (1992, orig. publ. 1976) The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective, Boston: Beacon Press Moore, R. (1997) Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and the Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940, University of Pittsburgh Press Murray, E. J. (ed.) (1998) Religions of Trinidad and Tobago: A Guide to the History, Beliefs, and Polity of 23 Religious Faiths, Port of Spain: Murray Publications Myers, H. (1998) Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the India Diaspora, University of Chicago Press Nurse, K. (1999) ‘Globalization and Trinidad Carnival: Diaspora, hybridity, and identity in global culture’, Cultural Studies, 13, 4: 661–90 Ortiz, F. (1947) Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. H. de Onis, New York: A. A. Knopf Patterson, O. (2000) ‘Ecumenical America: Global culture and the American cosmos’, in P. Kivisto and G. Rundblat (eds.), Multiculturalism in the United States, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, pp. 465–80 Pattullo, P. (2005) Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, London: Latin American Bureau Ping, N. (1980) ‘Black musical activities in Antebellum Wilmington, North Carolina’, Black Perspective in Music, 8, 2: 139–60 Powles, L. D. (1888) The Land of the Pink Pearl: Or Recollections of Life in the Bahamas, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, Ltd. Price, R. (2002, orig. publ. 1983) First-Time: The Historical Vision of an African American People, University of Chicago Press

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Reid, I. D. A. (1942) ‘The John Canoe Festival: A New World Africanism’, Phylon, 3, 4: 349–70 Rommen, T. (1999) ‘Home sweet home: Junkanoo as national discourse in the Bahamas’, Black Music Research Journal, 19, 1: 71–91 (2006) ‘Protestant vibrations? Reggae, Rastafari, and conscious evangelicals’, Popular Music, 25, 2: 235–63 (2007) Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad, Berkeley: University of California Press Sands, K. C. (2003) ‘Junkanoo in historical perspective’, in Junkanoo and Religion: Christianity and Cultural Identity in The Bahamas: Papers Presented at The Junkanoo Symposium, March 2002, Nassau: Media Enterprises, pp. 10–19 Sheller, M. (2003) Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, New York and London: Routledge Sloane, H. (1707) A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, London: Printed by B. M. for the author Stokes, M. (2003) ‘Globalization and the politics of world music’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, New York and London: Routlege, pp. 297–308 Stolzoff, N. (2000) Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Sublette, N. (2004) Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago Review Press Taylor, P. (ed.) (2001) Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Tinker, H. (1974) A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920, New York: Oxford University Press Torres-Saillant, S. (2006) An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Townsend, P. S. (1823 [orig. publ.], 1980) Nassau, Bahamas, Bahamas Historical Society, Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press Veal, M. E. (2007) Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Waterman, C. (1990) Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music, University of Chicago Press Wood, V. N. M. (2007) ‘Bahamas junkanoo revue: Junkanoo costumes’, posted to the website of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida at www.historical-museum.org/ folklife/flafolk/junkanoo.htm.

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Sufism and the globalization of sacred music REGULA BURCKHARDT QURESHI

Prologue – is there a Sufi world music before European hegemony? Since the establishment of Sufi institutions in the twelfth century CE, Sufism and its musical practice have become part of a “world system” spanning the Muslim world from Morocco to China. Sufis and religious leaders traveled across these lands, sharing and exchanging their spiritual knowledge, participating in the life of Sufi hospices and their spiritual practices, including the ubiquitous samā‘ ritual – musical assemblies for listening to spiritual poetry. A rich literature of erudite travel accounts attests to both individual and collective dimensions of Sufism across the global Muslim community (úmmā) and its economic, scholarly, and trade networks. Connected by the common node of Mecca and facilitated by a dual lingua franca of Arabic and Persian, these exchanges validated and inspired locally rooted Sufi communities (Abu Lughod 1989; Cooke and Lawrence 2005). Historians identify the transregional and multiethnic polities as their world system. Even after European imperial expansion from the sixteenth century onward created a subaltern orientation vis-à-vis the colonizers, effectively cutting off the free flow of access across the Muslim ecumene, the sense of belonging to a transnational community remained, along with strong local and regional roots. In South Asia, Muslim rule had consolidated a feudal-imperial order that gave priority to a hierarchical and historicizing model for maintaining indigeneity in the colonial era. In the postcolonial era, globalization is the last step along a transnational path that has been inherent to South Asian Sufi ideation and practice as expressed in Iqbal’s universally known verse: “We are Muslims, we are compatriots to the whole world.”1 In the twenty-first century, Sufism and Sufi music appear to be predisposed for an accelerated and universalized globalization that includes and, indeed, privileges music as the most ubiquitous and instantly transmitted sonic

1 Muslim hain, hamwatan hain, sārā jahān hamārā.

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medium. Could Sufism and its music adapt to the globalized realm of Sufi world music ontologically?

A classical blueprint for samā‘ Sufism is a relationship with the Divine, a human search for God that is both ancient and living. Musical sound is integral and central to this search. It carries the message of spiritual poetry, and infuses verbal meaning with a deeply embodied ontology of sound that transcends the discursive. Listening to these spiritual words set to music (hymns, inshād, qawwālī) is known as samā‘ (Arabic: audition, listening) and constitutes the core of Sufi practice across the Islamic world. Perhaps the Sufi samā‘ that is most intact in its ritual continuity can be heard in South Asia, where numerous Sufi communities, lineages, and shrines have offered the samā‘ experience of qawwālī to all comers since at least the thirteenth century. The vitality of qawwālī is directly linked to its broad local as well as imperial roots, reaching out across boundaries of language, class, and creed. The focus, however, has always been on inner spiritual development (bātin); its core is poetry with music, a powerful, flexible sound medium that speaks to all kinds of listeners both verbally and musically. Qawwālī has a remarkable plurality of musical settings, bearing resemblance to both classical and folk music. It also serves as entertainment and is part of the global musical landscape today. Who is a Sufi? This term was until recently not used except in recognition of genuine spiritual attainment and never as a self-designation. Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam, today a world movement that complements Islamic orthodoxy and extends its spiritual reach to all comers. Sufis are mystics who follow an intuitive, aestheticized, even emotional path rather than a set of theological rules. In this they resemble mystical movements of other religions, but Islamic mystics are unique in identifying an explicit alternative to cognitive reasoning that can be traced to the all-pervasive oral practice of Qur’ān recitation or chant. They strive toward nearness to God through love. Above all, Sufis include the sound of music and songs in their religious practice with the aim of experiencing that nearness or even union with the Divine. The core of Sufi practice is a twofold ritual: one is dhikr, remembering God by speaking and repeating His name, alone or collectively; the other is samā‘, a gathering for listening to the singing of spiritual verses, usually speaking of love and longing, suffering of separation, and of the hope and joy of even a glimpse of the Divine Beloved. Love is the central quest and samā‘, for Sufis, becomes the vehicle for the journey of the soul to God.

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Is samā‘ music? Music (Arabic: mūsīqī ) is a loan word from Greek denoting secular music; it is not a concept relevant to Sufism. The Sufi term samā‘ is not a different word for musical sound, but it points to an entirely different conceptual priority: the priority of listening (samā‘), not the making of music – hence hearing or listening – implies a shift of focus from the phenomenon music to its human effect, or from the “what” to the “who” of music.2 Furthermore, Sufi samā‘ is considered as sound that has words embedded in it, of words transformed into music. Sufi performance occurs, thus, on a separate track from music. For Sufi listening, the right context is paramount and must comprise a right place, a right time, and right participants when holding a samā‘ ritual. On a theoretical level, the term samā‘ also denotes comprehension and acceptance of revelation, as first described in a mid-ninth-century treatise from Baghdad (Knysh 2000, 322–3). Historically, the development of samā‘ arises in the first instance apart from devotional practices of public recitation of Qur’ān verses, plus secular tarab (concerts), plus artistic declamation of secular poetry. At the same time, numerous writings on samā‘ from the mid-tenth century onward have both contested the religious legitimacy of musical recitation and defended the practice – a debate that continues until today.

Sufi performance: the samā‘ ritual in the eleventh and twentieth centuries In its fully developed form, the samā‘ experience has been a collective form of listening, but the music was performed by specialists, not Sufis. As early as the eleventh century, Hujvīrī in his Kashf-al Mahjūb tells of calling in a singer (qawwāl) for a visiting Sufi who wished to hear spiritual poetry (Hujvīrī 1911). Above all, samā‘ became a collective practice, as observed by the thirteenthcentury Ibn Jubair: “Their (Sufi) custom of assembling for impassioned musical recitals (samā‘) is delightful. Sometimes, so enraptured do some of these absorbed ecstatics become when under the influence of a state that they can hardly be regarded as belonging to this world at all” (Karamustafa 2007, 139, fn. 52). Collective samā‘ required guidance and control by sheikhs or spiritual leaders who also wrote training manuals on samā‘ from the same period. This constellation of the samā‘ event as collective listening continues to be observed in the twenty-first century. Miniature paintings illustrate vivid samā‘ recitation and ecstatic dance.

2 “Music” is used here as a generic term except when referring to a particular kind of music.

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Experiencing samā‘ in 1975 It was the auspicious first qawwālī assembly of the saint’s death anniversary, with the lead singer intoning Qaul, the foundational Arabic hymn that has since that time introduced every qawwālī at the Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. A great stirring began among the audience seated in a circle. One by one, most stood up and sought the assembly leader, bowing low with extended hands, to present him with an offering of money. Some Sufi disciples knelt before him or even put their head to the ground; others enlisted a senior person to make their offering jointly. The leader himself accepted each offering by raising it to his forehead in deep respect. The money was then placed on the ground until one of the singers picked it up at suitable moments in the music. Indeed, this collection would have constituted the musicians’ monetary reward. Throughout this intense offering activity, the performers sang the opening line of the song, over and over. Later, the singers moved on to a devotional Hindi song, full of longing, with a melody in the well-known classical raga kafi: Torī sūrat ke balhārī. The words and the music of Khusrau, the saint’s greatest disciple, is every devotee’s call from the heart. Several Sufis were quick to rise and prostrate themselves before their sheikh, as if unable to contain their emotion. With this, the focus shifted to another, orange-draped sheikh, whose ecstatic expression and gestures demanded a restatement of the entire recitative. The lead singer responded, skillfully returning to the salient phrase, which he embellished with variations. Soon thereafter, he ended the song in answer to the assembly leader’s signal. (Qureshi 1975)

The singer’s aim is always to move, to arouse, and to draw the listener toward his sheikh, the saint, God, and into the ecstasy of mystical union. While one singer lifts one Sufi’s spirit with a stately classical tune in forceful rhythm, another one melts his heart with a lilting melody, or captivates his mind with a new composition. Some songs easily touch the uninitiated whereas others demand the spiritual knowledge of an adept. Offerings from the devotees to the sheikh leading the assembly constitute the musicians’ remuneration. For the Sufi listener, qawwālī means, above all, hearing music – a neverceasing sequence of different songs, performed many times but never the same way twice. It also means observing a ritual built around this music, where the mystical quest is pursued with proper form and under the guidance of a Sufi leader, who controls both audience and musicians. In pursuing his personal spiritual quest, each listener responds to the music in his own way, according to his or her inner needs, and the mood of the moment. Finally, experiencing qawwālī means charting a process of interaction between musicians and listeners, between musical sound and audience responses. Sufi listeners and qawwāls recognize two complementary modes of expressing mystical emotion. One is more intuitive, reflecting the listener’s spiritual state, which finds expression

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in gestures, weeping, vocalization and ultimately, the dance of ecstasy (raqs). A more formal response is the nazrānā or nazar: an offering, usually of money, made to a spiritual superior who is generally the sheikh in charge of the gathering. The nazrānā is a deferential gesture of the devotee’s submission to the saint, and a confirmation of his attachment to, and the flow of blessings from, his spiritual guide (Qureshi 1994). Samā‘ is a deeply moving experience of partaking in the expression of emotions, intense longing or even ecstatic transcendence that results from jointly hearing the meaningful spiritual verses sung with great intensity by the qawwālī performers. Samā‘ is an act of listening that connects the Sufi to the very covenant between God and human, and to the revealed Word of God through his Prophet. Both are enshrined in the Islamic ontology of musical– verbal sound and linked to its temporal concomitant: time.3

Islamic ontologies of music and time Ontologies of music For Muslims the ontology of music is ontology of sound. The primordial experience of sound is hearing a voice: the revelation of the Qur’ān to the Prophet Muhammad. The sacred voice from the Infinite, sounding the command from God to Muhammad: “Read” (recite) the revelation of the Qur’ān (96/1). This revelation is central to the faith. Sound carrying the revealed words of God was sent to the Prophet by the Archangel Gabriel as verbal sound, and literally carried the divine message. The foundation of Muslim piety is reciting and, above all, hearing the sacred words of divine command, so that recitation is shaped sonically to articulate every sound particle of the message. Sounding the sacred word associates the sound itself with the sacred message and its divine force is embodied in the sonic articulation of the divine messenger. Listening is thus the primary act of devotion, primacy of the sounded/recited Qur’ān over its written form. The words are recited, even with a minimal sound volume, with or without the book. Retention of the Qur’ānic text in memory was primary, preceding its written form over a century after the Prophet’s death. The result is an affective and intersubjective dynamic of listening. The primacy for human beings of hearing the sound of a voice from God has been made manifest in three instances as transmitted in the Qur’ān and the Hadīth (Sayings of the Prophet). The first instance is the divine fiat of creation itself, sounded in the single word “kun” (be! – a creative decree) from God 3 An accurate term introduced by Michael Frishkopf is “language performance” (Frishkopf 1999).

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(Qur’ān 1/72). The second is the primordial covenant (mithāq) between God and human beings, established by God and embracing all of human creation with the divine call to all of human creation “alastū bin rabbī kun” (am I not your Lord) and the human response “balā” (yes, we witness it, Qur’ān 19/36, Ernst 2011).The third instance of divine sounds is a hadīth that tells of the moment of creation when the soul refused to enter the body of Adam, until the angels were asked to call the soul into the body, and it complied, enchanted by the divine voice. Sound, therefore, is beautiful, and hearing it is the most profound interaction between God and humanity, compelling beyond cognition, but always linked to words. These “origin myths” are ever-present, recalled in the call-toprayer, which chants the words of the creed, permeating the Muslim soundscape across the Islamic world. Sound, however, cannot be without words. The words themselves are inseparable from their sound, hence even silent recitation is carried out with the lips forming their sounds. The chanted sound creates the aesthetic embeddedness of the words (During 1997).The Sufi samā‘ is rooted in this ontology and enacts it in the recitation of spiritual poetry, the voice of the mystic who is seeking God. A marvelous repertory of poetry by Sufi poets articulates this quest, the separation of the soul from God (second myth), the longing and striving of the mystic toward union with God as is expressed most universally by the most superb lover of God, Jalāluddīn Rūmī, in the opening verse of his Mathnavī: the reed flute longs forever to return to its reed bed: Listen to the reed flute, its song of separation: Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has made men and women weep.4

Hearing samā‘ is experiencing how ontologies embedded in Sufism become manifest to the listener. Hearing is also being reciprocal. Sufi music is always a conversation with the listener, the performance is guided by feedback from the listener. It takes at least two participants, a performer and a listener: Samā‘ is a relationship. Samā‘ is constructed on the foundation of this ontology and in clear distinction from secular music, that is, music not connected with the spiritual message of its words.

Ontologies of time Related to the ontology of sound and music is a web of ontologies of time and its complex intersections. They are anchored in the ideational norms of Sufism

4 bishno az nay chun hikāyat mī kunad az judā’ī bā shikāyat mī kunad kaz nayistān tā marā babrīdah’and dar nafīrām mard u zan nālīdah’and (Jalal al-Din Rumi 1925).

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and Islam: the conceptual frame of temporality linking life from creation to the end of time. Time, however, is a part of creation and ultimately relative, for God alone; temporal sequence itself is not causal. The Sufi worldview partakes of temporal lineality with its dynamic of divine causation, looking back and up, to founding saints, the Prophet and thereby to God. Cutting across this dual lineal structure, one of the foundational documents of Sufism and samā‘5 places divine ecstasty (hāl) in direct juxtaposition with time (Hujvīrī 1911) thus creating “a ‘state’ of direct knowledge of the eternal,” in which past and future are subsumed within the eternal Present of God (Burckhardt 1995, 15). Outside of language, this state is accessible through the ontology of samā‘. The performance of qawwālī, thus, takes place in a frame of linear time, but its flow can at any moment be overlaid by the more powerful experience of the eternal “now” of a state of ecstasy and of an ecstatic state that needs to be sustained by multiple repetition of song phrase and intense drum pattern. The sacred effect of the music, however, comes not from the musician’s skill; the voice of the Friend (God) comes “from Beyond,” until the return to linear time, as expressed in much Sufi poetry, like Rumi’s famous verse about samā‘: Not from strings, not from wood, nor from skin, of Itself comes this voice of the Friend (God).6

Approaching world music through its sacred counterpart Approaching sacred versus world music, Philip Bohlman posits that music history in the Islamic world embodies narratives that profoundly depend on the different ontologies of music that are central to Islamic thought. Islamic musics, nonetheless, have undergone extensive processes of globalization, and some repertories, such as the Sufi qawwālī, are inseparable from world music today (Bohlman 2002). This chapter explores the relations between qawwālī as sacred7 music and as world music. The question being raised is whether globalization, operating transnationally and across historical time, has the potential to transform sacred music into world music. Does it eliminate traditional forms of belief or enhance them? Often performed by the same musicians, how have performers translated their spiritual Sufi repertory into world music? What are 5 The Persian treatise Kashf-al-Mahjub by Ali-al-Hujwiri (d. c. 1072), one of Sufism’s earliest authorities and a major saint in Pakistan. 6 Nai ze tār o nai ze chōb o nai ze pōst, Khud bakhud mī āyad īn āwāz-e-dōst 7 For want of a better term, the word “sacred” is here used in reference to the Sufi dynamic of encompassing both religion and spirituality.

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the continuities as well as disjuncture between them? How new is Sufi world music; or is this a music without history?8 I interrogate the notion of the categorical newness of musical globalization by relating both disjuncture and continuity to the ontological foundations of Sufism, both historical and musical. Can Sufi world music be considered as an extension of Sufi history/ies? Can it be linked to the ontological foundation of music in Islamic thought through both sound and time, as is the live tradition of Sufi music? In other words, can Sufi world music be seen as a possibly integral part of the orbit which traditional Sufi music inhabits? The crucial question is whether the sacred function and foundation of Sufi music is or should be assimilated to its world-music version. Or does the sound of the music by its very nature embody that function, thereby leaving open a re-sacralization of the music in a way compatible with the production and consumption of world music? Or does Sufi world music simply operate as a version of (secular) popular music? Given the fact that Sufi world music is derived directly from its traditional counterpart, I address this question by exploring the relations between Sufi music as sacred music, on the one hand, and Sufi music as world music on the other. To address these questions calls, first of all, for de-naturalizing the edifice of marketing categories that are inevitably inserted into the discourse, starting from the industry-generated term of “world music” to marketing categories of Sufi music from folk and tribal to religious music. This enables linking Sufi world music to its own antecedents of mediated Sufi music in their home lands of South Asia for qawwālī so as to include subaltern history into the project. If this implies a move to historicize world music, it also suggests a complementary move to contextualize the historicist perspective on traditional Sufism that has dominated Western scholarship, along with the conventional Western treatment of both Islam and music in general.

Sufi chronology and ontologies of Sufi history The long recorded history9 of Sufism begins with pious individuals practicing introspection and asceticism, followed from the ninth century by circles of devotees around leading thinkers in Arab centers. This led to the establishment of Sufi orders (tarīqā) and lodges (zāwiya, khānqāh, tekke) for spiritual

8 The pivotal diagnostic is history. History permeates Sufism and Sufi music, and therefore its scholarly treatment. Considering the deeply historicized identity of Sufism, the first response is to uncover these layers. 9 The lunar Islamic time era is of course the foundation for Sufi chronology, but both lived experience and time reckoning also reference the solar Christian era.

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communities by the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, in which sheikhs provided training for their disciples, prominently including samā‘. These communities extended northwards, connecting Iran, India, Turkey, and Central Asia by spiritual lineages (silsila) and spawning local styles of ritual. Local patronage also resulted in numerous saintly tombs that continue to serve as shrines until the present. Centered in Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE), the Sufi orders (tarīqā) expanded eastward to India, where the Chishti order became dominant and generally supported the veneration of saints and the practice of samā‘. These developments matched an imperial and feudal model of lords and followers, among them professional service providers, which included musicians. The experiential core of the social institutions of Sufism lies in the master– disciple relationship, its ongoing link with early Sufism and its model as embodied in the figure of the sheikh. Hence, timeframes are complex, entwined with the needs of the present and of creating a “history of the present.” There is a remarkable wealth of writings by Sufis, especially during the most important era from the early centuries (eighth and ninth centuries CE) and culminating in the thirteenth century along with the establishment of orders, or simply groupings under a sheikh. This required organization, with major emphasis on training disciples. Writings in prose comprise philosophical works about Sufi thought and mystical experience, as well as biographies. Central to Sufi practice, even today, are malfūzāt (oral teachings) by Sufi masters, particularly from India and widely employed in India and Pakistan. In contrast, Western historiography is based on nineteenth-century foundations in Arabic and Persian philology and in foundational translations of Sufi treatises and poetry; foundational also in Orientalist terms of reference like “oriental spirituality” and a perceived detachment of Sufism from Islam. Historical writing is mostly discursive and descriptive, situating Sufism and its attributes in the context of social, economic, and cultural developments and what Karamustafa terms “conditioning webs of history and culture” (Karamustafa 2007, vii). In the twenty-first century, postmodernity is discovering the ontological significance of the Sufi-centered priority of listening, of oral practice that privileges memorized scripture and oral transmission (Ernst 2011; Frischkopf 2001; Hirschkind 2006).

History from within/prescriptive history/ historicizing practice A historical orientation is built into Indic Sufism, for it is hierarchical and based on seniority and spiritual ancestry. This implies a historical dynamic as a

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structuring principle for both Sufi ideology and its social organization: the spiritual lineages linking the devotee to saints, the Prophet, God, and the principle of buzurgī, the spiritual seniority acquired by the Sufi over time. A historiographic frame of reference is, in fact, recognized by every Sufi sheikh, but it does not inform the Sufi tradition consistently. A sheikh may quote a thirteenth-century account to prove a point, but Sufism truly lives through a body of traditions that are oral, covering all aspects of Sufi thought and practice. It emanates from those in spiritual authority, the sheikhs, but circulates among all participants in Sufism, including lay devotees and service professionals, such as the qawwāls. These secondary carriers depend on the primary carriers for information and authentication. The Sufi oral tradition provides a kind of spiritual currency articulating both ideology and the social structure of the Sufi communities. This currency is to articulate and pass on what someone in spiritual authority has said. The sheikh’s prime function is to uphold and disseminate this oral tradition. His spiritual status authenticates what he says. At the same time, his command of the Sufi tradition reinforces, if not legitimizes, his authority. In this dynamic interplay, the body of tradition can become a malleable tool, especially where it serves to enhance the individual status of a sheikh or saint. There is, thus, sometimes little consistency in hagiographical or genealogical sources, be they oral or written. It is in the area of ritual, however, in which the oral tradition of South Asian Sufism articulates norms that are remarkably consistent and congruent with what is known from the classical Sufi writings. This includes the standard conception of the samā‘ ritual; indeed, the principles laid down between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries do serve as a charter for the present-day samā‘ practice (Ghazzali 1979; Macdonald 1901 and 1902; Hujvīrī 1911). Conventionally accepted variations in the execution of samā‘ performance are historically linked to the early Sufi contact with Hinduism and the commitment of Indic Sufism to extend its scope to a non-Muslim population. An intellectual and spiritual symbiosis has existed for centuries between Muslim and Hindu metaphors on an aesthetic level and finds overt expression in samā‘ poetry.10

Political economies: feudal and imperial to capitalism Feudal samā‘ is based on process, social relations, reciprocity, all enacted by spiritual authorities, disciples, and musical experts. Roles are strictly defined,

10 Historically, qawwāls were agents of art music, a further link to Sufi identification with nonspiritual music.

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described, and controlled, with meanings transmitted and history. Samā‘ is an auditory and visual and embodied experience. In its primary consumption it is collective (live), and its conditions are fixed (Qureshi 2004). Capitalist samā‘, in contrast, is based on product, resulting from capitalist relations of production between record company and musical experts. Production is controlled by the investor. Auditory experience is enhanced by live enactment on stage and virtualized by live video. Primary consumption remains individual (e.g., through use of earphones) and requires conditions that are optional. Traditional Sufi music is generated by feudal relations, much as is Hindustani art music generally. Both are rooted in the classical Indian jajmānī, or patron– client or feudal service arrangement, in which hereditary musicians provide professional service to patrons who in turn enable them to produce and practice their art. Traditional Sufi samā‘ can therefore be seen as a symbolic replication of feudal social relations, while Sufi world music can be seen as a replication of capitalist social relations. Does this imply a mutually exclusive musical identity? The twentieth century reveals the degree to which qawwālī has increasingly adapted to coexistence within both these inevitably very different socioeconomic structures. The agent of this adaptation is the hereditary professional performer of qawwālī: the qawwāl.

The qawwālī performer: Sufi or musician? The Sufi musician, or qawwāl, has knowledge of secular music ranging from North Indian art music to regional folk songs. This specialized musical knowledge, however, has always been seen in reference to a larger body of Sufi tradition that is authenticated and controlled by the sheikh. Professionally, his identity is articulated in terms of descent and heredity, and socially, in terms of a patron–client dependency with the sheikhs. Both serve to define the qawwāl as a functionary attached by hereditary right to a saint’s shrine and providing local Sufis with the required musical service. The fact that music as such is “bracketed out” of the standard Sufi tradition suggests rather an open field for the Sufi musician. Indeed, the domain of music is considered his preserve as long as he adheres to the requirements of the samā‘ ritual. Separated from spiritual involvement, the qawwāl is likened by Sufis to a mere bearer of gifts from above: a medium, not an agent (Idris Khan 1973, Introduction). Qawwālī musicians are until today attached to a sacred venue, usually a Sufi shrine. Their performance can also serve to render an unmarked space spiritual, if legitimized by a spiritual patron. The musicians act as agents of

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this transformation through their performance. Thus, the sacred is invested in the music, but the music is also detachable from the ritual for nonsacred signification, so that a poem that extols spiritual love in the samā‘ assembly can be heard as a secular love poem in a secular context or made attractive by switching a slow asymmetrical meter of 7/8 to a lively 8/8 pattern. Historically, good qawwālī singers were also trained in classical rāgas, reflecting the symbiosis of patronage from both Sufi and sultan (worldly and spiritual authorities) characterizing feudal and imperial social formations (Rothstein 1993).

Encounters between two kinds of qawwālī An encounter of traditional Sufi music and Sufi world music has yet to be identified as coming from two distinct musical spheres. Perhaps the most obvious distinction would be between the deeply historicized milieu of traditional Sufi music and the recent appearance of the very notion of world music. History has been a dominant trope for the Western study of both music and Islam, Sufism included. How might one include world music into such a history, given its incipient development from widely dispersed historical roots and routes? Philip Bohlman has shown productively how pioneering authors have integrated their encounters with an ever-expanding horizon of musical ideas and practices under the singular denominator of globality (2002). The approach must be built on a frankly ethnomusicological premise that prioritizes musical agents and participants, implying that music is the result of interaction among social actors who together make music happen across space and time, even including dispersed actors who may play greatly diverse roles that are not directly participatory in the process. Such interaction may lead to depersonalized sonic production, resulting in a “product” that is entirely separated from the music-making “ensemble” of the original participants in the musical “piece” – the very term designates the alienation of the musical product from its producers through commodification. Where they reunite is in the stage performances that provide a live enactment of the recordings as both an aesthetic experience and a marketing tool. The globalization of music is thus inseparable from the global marketplace. Regardless of how unique, profound, beautiful, or shocking the live performance was that the recording represents and adds to the global reach of dissemination, the commodification of live music is what has resulted in labels and categorizations chosen by the recording industry to promote sales worldwide. At the same time, world music is more than an undifferentiated and everincreasing mass of commodified sounds. To access differences and meanings embedded in those sounds calls for situating Sufi world music in the context of

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its economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, as a tool to identify the role of performers, listeners, and those providing a target for exercising spiritual and social control. At the center is the mediascape in which world music lives and circulates.

A world-music genre is born Sufi music, along with other musical expressions emanating from the Muslim world, is today a prominent component of the globalized sound-world named world music by a music industry consortium in 1987 (FRoots 1987; see Cook and Stokes in this volume). The very title designates a wellestablished category of recorded music with distinct sonic identities that are both evocative and exotic. The association with Sufism, furthermore, conveys a “new age” spirituality to the music, which the term “Sufi music” has acquired with the spread of Sufi movements in the West. Sufi world music originates in Sufi rituals from across the Muslim world. Some most widely known are the qawwālī from Pakistan and India, the Mevlevi from Turkey, the Jajouka from Morocco, and the Inshād Dīnī from Egypt. Among these, qawwālī has perhaps the longest history as a genre undergoing constant mediation in India since 1901, in Pakistan since 1953, and in the West since the mid-1970s. Qawwālī has today a global presence based on worldwide dissemination, from the Sabri Brothers in 1975 to the journalistic coverage in 1993 at Abida Parveen’s New York debut that associated qawwālī with classical concerts.11 The fact is that these Pakistani artists were not new to either the recording media or to stage performances, but the truly global star of Sufi world music was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Their rise happened in tandem with successive technological changes in sound media, culminating in the digital age and the instant dissemination enabling the virtually live visual and auditory replication of a traditional Sufi performance. If Sufi world music has a history, media must be embedded in it.

Sufi music: from India’s gramophone to global Youtube Unlike the centuries of Western development of written notation as a well-established representation of the musical sound event – albeit separated from its context of production – the recent and increasing sonic representation

11 This is another instance of the need for “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000), but the forces are far too scattered and conflicted to make the analogy with Chakrabarty’s decolonizing move workable.

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in the form of audiovisual media is only beginning to be explored in its own right. Indeed, world-music study is possible due to these very media, and ethnomusicologists are only beginning to acknowledge their complex role in our encounters with other musics and their makers. What further complicates the scenario is the presence of indigenous world-music developments through regional media, which have often been unacknowledged or negatively valued by Western researchers. In South Asia, colonial rule resulted in indigenous recording and broadcasting institutions under monopolistic control and with an enormous impact on the development and repertoires of the South Asian mediascape, starting a century ago and continuing in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging this media history puts into question the exclusively global status assumed by the Western world-music industry, considering the global participation coming from indigenous recording industries in South Asia, Egypt, and elsewhere, former British colonies in particular. Their recordings have been treated as a subordinate variety until a Western label or star includes their “local” musicians but invariably does so on its own terms, effectively leaving South Asian musicians in a subordinate position (Dhondy 1994). In contrast, the recent option for non-Western artists of entering the Western star system enables them to separate not only their music but themselves from the social confines of their South Asian milieu and to impersonate their music and their role for greater musical and economic success by feeding the Western globalization trend. Qawwālī was the sacred music first appropriated in South Asia for mass production and dissemination, leading to the genesis of a vital genre of popular religious music. “Muslim Devotional” developed out of the ritually embedded music of Sufism and acquired an iconicity embodying a uniquely South Asian constellation of religious and national–cultural identification. South Asia’s long history of recorded sound is characterized by the global hegemony and dissemination of the recording company EMI, whose monopoly lasted essentially until the late 1970s (Kinnear 1985; Qureshi 1992–3), followed quickly by the spread of cassette technology with its “democratization” of recording technology. By the economic opening of the 1990s, the state monopolies had given way to an open market of audio-visual dissemination, with the internet increasingly dominant, though only among a limited, economically Westernized population (see Manuel in this volume). The first set of Indian recordings from 1902 included three qawwāls (Gronow 1981; Joshi 1977), and by the 1930s, sound recording was well established, with a major local production facility and wider dissemination through locally assembled Japanese phonographs and through the newly

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established All India Radio (Joshi 1977). The Gramophone Company (EMI) pursued markets on the basis of identifiable communities and the musical idiom through which a group recognizes itself. In the early years, qawwālī was the most widely recorded religious category with Urdu as the predominant language, given its primary status under the British (Joshi 1977). Still, the Gramophone Company also took care to maintain its own hegemony through style: a solo voice accompanied by harmonium and tabla became the standardized ensemble for all recorded songs, including qawwālī. With the development of autonomous music for the silent cinema, this basic instrumentarium expanded to include clarinet and the bulbultarang, or teshokoto, a Japanese board zither with typewriter, which became a favorite accompaniment for popular qawwālī in the hands of early Western producers. The long years of exclusive dissemination, and the glamor of its studio identity, gave this instrumentarium great staying power up to the present. The prime market for recorded qawwālī were urban business communities, especially in Bombay; it was considered morally wholesome for women and easy to understand, yet entertaining at the same time. Most qawwālī were hymns to the Prophet Muhammad, in simple Urdu verses, clearly pitched to a popular market, unlike the standard religious qawwālī This popularity was used in secular India after Independence to promote nonsectarian Sufi ideals of communal harmony (Qureshi 1999).

Pakistan: the Sabri Brothers and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan It is in Pakistan that EMI developed a market for the music of Sufism through serious Sufi recordings of qawwāls whose music was honed in shrines and samā‘ assemblies. Beginning in the 1950s, Sufi ritual music increasingly became an icon of Muslim identity for the new Muslim state. Many LPs of superb quality were issued, sung by qawwāls who had migrated from India along with a substantial number of Sufi sheikhs and patrons who established Sufi communities and regular samā‘ assemblies, especially on saint’s days. Long-play and, later, cassette technology enabled the performance of a complete samā‘ hymn and its registers of intensification, expanded meanings, repetitions, and improvisations, interfacing with increasingly ecstatic listeners. Leading these developments was Ghulam Farid Sabri (1948–74), later joined by his brother Maqbool Sabri. Among their many recordings, the most outstanding were, and remain, “Tajdar-e-haram” and “Balagal-ula ba kamalehi”, both addressing the Prophet. These and numerous other

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recordings circulated increasingly among South Asian diasporas across the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, East and South Africa, Britain and North America. They were also performed in samā‘ assemblies all over South Asia, thus retaining their ritual identity. Beginning in the 1960s, state TV (PTV) joined radio in featuring qawwālī as serious entertainment. All this amounted to what could be termed an incipient globalization that extended across the Muslim world and particularly to Muslim audiences in Britain, who constituted a growing market not only for touring performers from South Asia but also for recordings of their music. Live stage performances by qawwālī “parties” had already been established among Pakistani elites, replacing India-dominated secular classical music with a religiously acceptable, and distinctly Pakistani, substitute. Qawwālī thus was accorded quasi-state patronage that provided for the recording industry not only advertisement but also something close to market control, while Pakistani listeners at home and abroad were guided by this official patronage, consuming qawwālī as an approved package of Muslim entertainment-cum-devotion. The Sabri Brothers were the first qawwāls to perform concerts widely in Britain. They had their first concert in North America, in New York in 1975, the promoters of which intersected with the growing world-music industry, particularly Peter Gabriel. Their major success was with South Asian expatriate audiences who supported and understood the language and meaning of their Sufi performances. “They set a pattern and began to build an audience for what has now come to be known as ‘World Music’.” What remained was the development of a “qawwālī star” image, even in Pakistan until television performances bestowed a visual identity on Ghulam Farid Sabri “with his long hair,” Aziz Mian “with his golden sherwānī and wild gestures,” and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan “with his rotund face and body.” It was their entry into the Western world-music circuit, with concerts reinforced by recordings, that gradually invested Ghulam Farid Sabri and especially Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with stardom.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948–94) came from a famous classically trained qawwālī lineage. He made an immediate impact at home and abroad with his superb voice and astonishing virtuosity, and his intense and moving delivery; and his widely accessible folk-like poetry in Punjabi endeared him to Punjabi expatriates, including Sikhs from India (Ruby 1992). Remarkably, he maintained the textual as well as the musical integrity of his songs, regardless of

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audience, and his vocal delivery was uncompromisingly linked to the traditional melodies and rhythms of his repertory. He was also a master of classical rāga improvisation, rapid passage work, with masterful syllabic recitation, and complex rhythmic patterns with forceful arrival points. The sophistication and above all the “other-worldly” sound print of Nusrat’s voice attracted many solo recordings and numerous collaborations with major Western performers and composers and their labels, also of film scores. Throughout his career, however, Nusrat Fateh Ali also continued to record and perform traditional qawwālī. Early in his career, he was signed up by Oriental Star Agencies in Birmingham to their Star Cassette Label, following the Sabri Brothers. From the early 1980s onward, the label sponsored regular concert tours by Nusrat in the United Kingdom and released much of this live performance on cassette, CD, videotape, and DVD. The video collection is particularly meaningful for adding the visual dimension to these archival recordings. Subsequently, Peter Gabriel’s Real World label released five albums of OSA’s traditional qawwālī recordings. The year 1982 marked Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s brief cut on Peter Gabriel’s Rhythm and Music compilation, the first of his recordings to be globally disseminated as spiritual but more broadly aesthetic objects. Nusrat Fateh Ali’s rhythmic improvisational style has gained his music entrance in the “world-beat” circuit and a trendy cosmopolitan world-music culture, whose audiences respond strongly, pulling the music away from its textual base. What was being transformed here, however, is not primarily the music; rather, the distinct acoustic features of qawwālī now acquired a new emphasis to distinguish this genre within an international repertory that is dominated by Western taste preferences. To some extent, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan responded to this trend, particularly in his collaborations, but he also retained his traditional repertory and performance style. A contributing factor here is the considerable patronage by greatly expanded expatriate audiences who today form a significant link that hooks South Asia into cosmopolitan World Public Culture (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1990). The increasing identification of Sufi qawwālī with art music in Pakistan is a consequence of the gradual association of world-music recordings with art music, particularly of a spiritual sort (Taylor 2007). Clearly, diasporic communities were instrumental in producing and patronizing the first “authentically spiritual Sufi” world music. In the end, it took collaborations with figures in Western popular culture (e.g., Vedder in the film Dead Man Walking) for Nusrat to become part of “the mainstream of American Pop culture” so that a window could open for more devotional singers (Strauss 1996). Similarly, the powerful Pakistani singer Abida Parveen performs the ecstatic and passionate Sufi songs of the

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Sindh region, where she was discovered singing at a rural shrine. Promoted as a woman Sufi singer, she has made a big impact especially in the West, communicating “divine unity-seeking Sufi poems” with worshipful iconic gestures regardless of language.

Qawwālī virtualization, on and off stage In stage performances without a sheikh controlling the performer, the qawwāl sings as well as projects the effect that the song has on him as he sings it, with expressive face and gestures. All three top-star serious qawwālī performers have the ability to express what they sing and connect with listeners. What is missing is the spiritual environment of a Sufi gathering and the presence of a sheikh who offers spiritual links to the Sufi ancestry and to the hierarchy rising from the sheikh up to the founding saints and the Prophet himself, leading to the ultimate nearness to God himself. In its place is the immediate, complete, multisensory experience of samā‘ offered by the performer, enacting the model of samā‘ in the form of a staged performance. With YouTube, films and videos of performances, the close-up visual reinforcement of the sonic message has led to increasing interest in experiencing Sufi and other performances of spiritual world music, thanks to ease of accessing and consuming spiritual music from across the globe. This has been strongly reinforced by the growing number of “festivals of spiritual music”; for example, in Fez, Morocco, and others in tourism-friendly locations. How spirituality is drawn from the musical experience, or invested into it, varies individually according to deportment modeled by elders, by fans toward a star on stage, or by introspection oriented to self-development, and according to many other options. Without mapping the antecedents of traditional Sufism on Sufi world music there is a surprising absence of spiritual reference made to the music being performed. What remains to a Sufi world-music performance is a normative context of stage performance, with a goal to communicate effectively to the listeners. The ontologies of historical Sufism have been collapsed into what amounts to a first generation of Sufi music transformed into a religious world music. Ties to its live antecedents severed, the music has joined the category of a commodity, subject to production and consumption. For the first time, the music of Sufism is marketed through live performances as an audio-visual representation in the virtual universe. Central to this process is mobility and networks. The performers or their sponsors make concert performances a priority promoting their recordings. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is the supreme example of international stardom as a touring artist giving constant live concert presentations of his recorded music (Sakata 1994).

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Abida Parveen follows closely. What both have cultivated is acoustic and declamatory intensity, with strong rhythmic accompaniment. Both have created a visual intensification of their music in three directions: projecting energy through vocal intensity and explicit devotion to God; raising the pitch level of the music; and raising the arms upward, pointing to the Almighty above. This process can be seen as commodified experience, with the performer visually represented on film. Detached from ritual or place, the sounds become forged into a new aesthetic: transforming the sacred into the beautiful.12 Can ontologies of sound and time be extended beyond the ritual meaning of their origin myths? Sufi examples of such a process exist in the twentiethcentury Sufism of European scholars of art and religion,13 but their aestheticism is contemplative and visually oriented. Yet sound does have a place in the process of striving to create “uninterrupted awareness of Divine Presence” (Burckhardt 1995, 83, 92). Music, being sound in time, a sequence of moments (moment time), is a concept of duration per se, not constrained by meaning. Through dhikr, however, sound can be endowed with ideational meaning, its utterance creating an aesthetic of continuity by recited repetition (reiteration, also takrār, the multiple repetition of God’s names) (Qureshi 1994).

Dhikr and reciprocity Collective dhikr is precisely what Sufi groups in the West practice, in the absence of qawwāls or samā‘. This practice of Sufi music was not known by this name until the twentieth-century world-music phenomenon, at which time qawwālī became an addition to the sacred, or religious music, category of world music, and evolved into a genre. The Sufi-music designation came to serve as a generic marketing designation, even while qawwālī records were also assigned sales labels, such as tribal, folk, and popular. These crass commercial beginnings did not prevent the Sufi-music genre from attaining success with listeners and becoming invested with meaning, even spiritual meaning. This process took place in an encounter that had to be live, for listeners to experience the music live on stage – the universal venue for musical performance in the West. Above all, liveness meant a human agent, a model, an embodiment of the music and its meaning. On the concert stage the performer embodies not only the music, but also what it may mean. There is virtually no room for a spiritual guide on the stage, because the concert is the live 12 Perhaps this arises from necessity, to make up for what has been called the “crisis (loss) of use value” (Taylor 2007, 99–102). 13 Titus Burckhardt, Fritjof Schuon, and other members of the René Guénon circle.

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representation of a recording, a sonic commodity. It is to be noted, nonetheless, that the live sonic performance event on stage is deeply entrenched in centuries of Western musical cultivation based on the elevation of music to the highest human level of striving toward the divine, sundered from visual distractions. Similarly, South Asia is a land of the cultural performance, with specialists surrounded by listeners who are nonmusicians. Live performance is a culturally valued activity that brings good fortune. Globalization, regardless of the extent and sophistication of the media, will feature the performers live, because Sufi practice is reciprocal. The need for reciprocity in the state of ecstasy means repeating over and over the phrase that inspired the ecstatic state until it subsides. How, then, do we deal with ecstasy arising from an audio-visual source? Two Sufis recalled instances of reaching trance listening to music as it brought about mediation and then the need for repeated and increasingly intense singing of the words that created the trance effect. One was a Sufi and a qawwāl in the cinema where a love song put the Sufi into trance and he had to be taken outside, so that the qawwāl sang the phrase all the way on their ride home to his house. The other, a sheikh from the shrine of Ajmer, was entranced by a hymn on the radio, and when it stopped he was so disturbed that he smashed the radio on the ground.

Conclusion: a qawwālī concert in Seattle by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan A qawwālī performance by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the University of Washington. The darkened hall is full, with bright stage lighting on the qawwālī “party” singing in chorus, accompanied by brilliant drumming from tablas and the powerful beat of the traditional dholak. Nusrat totally dominates the music with voice and gestures, As the song proceeds, individual, mostly South Asian-audience members walk up on the stage and bow to offer him money, while more and more others go to the front of the stage and dance, to the pounding beat, raising their arms. The event informally enacts a Sufi ritual while also remaining a star performance for music fans. (Nusratonline.com 1993)

The fact is that video recordings have long been capable of delivering music events visually as well as sonically in popular culture. The music video, however, has not massively embraced Sufi and other spiritual events until very recently, until, that is, YouTube broke through the barrier of formal staging to project the immediacy and spontaneity of live encounters with the creator(s) of the music as it is being heard. The performer, then, becomes a mediated icon of his or her recorded music’s unlimited repeatability and ubiquitous presence that rivals the

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sonic power of a live event. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and now Abida Parveen became such icons, who maintained the spiritual content of their music, even when their audiences did not understand the sacred content of their songs, or their musical significance. Live mediation in these performances, however, comes from the South Asian members among Western audiences of qawwālī. They provide for the mainstream Western audience an experience of participation in the ritual, if only in a schematic and temporary way. This experience is, remarkably, a gift – not a promotion, in the spirit of South Asian sociality based on reciprocity and sheer enjoyment of hearing qawwālī together with others who share this spirit. It is an invitation to take the music of Sufism forward – in history and as history – in a spirit that connects the pre-Western practice of forming communities. It is also an invitation to choose individual paths that accept as well as transcend the strictures of both feudal and capitalist conditions, thereby creating solid historical connections for those who seek spiritual meaning in the Sufi music of qawwālī today.

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Idris Khan (1973) Hakim Muhammad, Risala-e-sama’ aur naghmat-e-sama’, Bareilly: Maktaba Ala Hazrat Saudagaran (in Urdu) Jalal al-Din Rumi (1925) The Mathnawi-I Ma’nawi, Book I. ii. 1–4, ed. and trans. R. A. Nicholson, London Joshi, G. N. (1977) ‘The phonograph in India’, NCPA Journal 6, 3: 5–27 Karamustafa, A. T. (2007) Sufism: The Formative Period, Edinburgh University Press Kinnear, M. S. (1985) A Discography of Hindustani and Karnatic Music, Discographies, No. 17, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Knysh, A. (2000) Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, Leiden: Brill Macdonald, D. B. (1901 and 1902) ‘Emotional religion in Islam as affected by music and singing: Being a translation of a book of the Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din of ‘Abu Hamid alGhazzali, with analysis, annotation and appendices’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 195–252, 705–48; 1–28 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Live At Meany (1993) University of Washington, http:// nusratonline.com Qureshi, R. B. (1975) Fieldnotes (1992–3) ‘“Muslim Devotional”: Popular religious music and Muslim identity under British, Indian and Pakistani hegemony’, Asian Music, 24, 1: 111–21 (1994, orig. publ. 1987) Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in Qawwali, University of Chicago Press (1999) ‘His Master’s Voice: Qawwali and “gramophone culture” in South Asia’, Popular Music, 18 1: 63–98. (2004) ‘Lineage, shrine, qawwali, and study circle: Spiritual kinship in transnational Sufism’, Religious Studies and Theology, 64–84 Rothstein, E. (1993) ‘Classical view: In the East as in the West, frenzy feeds finance’, The New York Times, October 17 Ruby, A. A. (1992) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: A Living Legend, trans. S. H. Malik. Lahore: Words of Wisdom Sakata, H. L. (1994) ‘The sacred and the profane: Qawwali represented in the performances of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’, The World of Music, 36 3: 86–99 Strauss, N. (1996) ‘Ecstasy in songs of the Sufi’, The New York Times, October 15 Taylor, T. D. (2007) Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

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Global exoticism and modernity W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD

The uses of Orientalism and globalization, West and East The usefulness of Orientalism to the West – both in its manifestations as scholarship and as artistic representation – was most prominently propounded by Edward Said in 1978. Scholars in numerous fields have been engaged in detailing the history of Orientalist utility ever since. One feature central to Orientalist perception is the belief that exotic others remain stuck in an eternal past and are thus not part of historical evolution and modernity. This convenient fiction has reinforced the West’s notion of its own superiority and modern status in an enduring dynamic, and the exotic Oriental or primitive other serves as a stable benchmark against which the West may measure its own progress. As Veit Erlmann writes, “[T]he strange career of the modern in the West was possible precisely because so much of it existed only at the level of ideology, as a result of a perceived antithesis between an enlightened West and a recalcitrant, backward Rest” (Erlmann 1999, 175). Appropriating elements of an ancient, exotic, and preferably obscure culture has repeatedly offered a direct avenue to modern status for Western agents. At certain historical moments, however, this entire construct seemed threatened, as the timeless exotic other engaged in undeniable change and appeared to make a bid to join history – to modernize and thus destabilize fundamental notions of difference. Since the “modern” was proclaimed to be and widely accepted as a desirable state and was consistently equated with the West, this modernization could only be achieved through rapid westernization. The reliance of Orientalism on such simplistic, Spencerian notions of cultural evolution can lead to a Preliminary versions of this chapter were delivered at the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Williams College in October 2007, at the Eastman School of Music’s “Music and Globalization” International Symposium in September 2008, at the 2008 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, at the Williams College Asian Studies faculty colloquium in November 2009, at the University of Pennsylvania in January 2010, at the “In the Mix: Asian Popular Music” conference at Princeton University, March 2011 and at Cornell University in April 2013. I am very grateful for comments made by participants at each of these events, for the thoughtful suggestions of Christian Thorne, and for the research assistance of Augusta C. Caso.

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particularly disconcerting situation, in which the exotic other lays claim to both the categories of the ancient and the westernized ultra-modern simultaneously. The usefulness of Said’s theories of Orientalism for critiques of Western imperialism has until recently somewhat obscured the fact that exoticism is a universal phenomenon. Discourse on exoticism has focused almost entirely on how the West imagines, represents, and appropriates its others. Yet exoticism is global and has operated throughout history. Said was surely correct (if we ignore his qualifier) when he stated, “[h]uman societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with ‘other’ cultures” (Said 1978, 204).1 Likewise, the notion of being modern – whether viewed as a cause for celebration or lament for a lost ideal past – is not the prerogative of the West, although exoticism and modernity were, of course, particularly rampant in Western global constructs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Musical westernization has been central to state-sponsored modernization projects at least since the replacement of the Janissary mehter band with a European-style ensemble in the early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and since the musical education programs of the American Luther Whiting Mason in Meiji-era Japan. European appropriations of exotic and “primitive” musical cultures for the development of musical modernism were paralleled by Occidentalist appropriations of Western music globally. The rise of mass-mediated popular musics and developments in recording technology over the past century served as cardinal signs of modernity in both the West and the East. What is more surprising is the role of Orientalism and self-Orientalism in non-Western modernization programs. This includes examples of intra-Asian Orientalism, as when Japan represented China as an exotic other in films and music in the early twentieth century and, in turn, when Chinese popular musicians framed music of China’s ethnic minorities as exotic late in the century. It also includes recent examples in which Asian and Asian American musicians appear to take on Western Orientalist clichés for purposes of parody – although parodic intent in musical representation is notoriously difficult to prove, as is its communicability.2 Less optimistically, one might 1 Said’s statement here would be more accurate if phrased as “imperialism and/or racism and/or ethnocentrism.” 2 On the question of parodying Orientalism in popular music, see for example Hisama 1993. For an example of a skeptical perspective on Asian American works that claim to engage in Orientalist representation for the purposes of parody, see Moy 1993 and Shimakawa 2002, both of which focus particularly on the plays of David Henry Hwang. In reference to the ambiguous participation in postmodernism by migrant and subaltern communities, Peter Manuel has stated: “The syncretic popular musics cultivated

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hear instances of such self-Orientalism as signs of capitulation to a Westerndefined global culture – a move somewhat similar to the participation of minority performers and composers in the ethnic and racial comic representations of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley in the United States. This auto-exoticism is even more literal than what Said had in mind when he claimed that “the modern Orient . . . participates in its own Orientalizing” (Said 1978, 325).3 Thus, patterns of cultural mimesis, particularly of the East attempting to achieve modern status through westernization, have occasionally been taken to an apparent limit at which the East imitates the West imitating, imagining, and representing the East.4 Whether or not Orientalist cultural stereotypes can be successfully undermined through parody by those peoples historically deemed exotic in the Western imagination, the mechanisms of Orientalist representation and cross-cultural appropriation have clearly been employed globally for a variety of purposes and often with little concern for whether the West is listening. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, cross-cultural interpenetrations proceeded at such a rapid pace that many argued a new phenomenon, dubbed “globalization,” was occurring.5 In musical studies, globalization is primarily considered to be something that is imposed upon non-Western music cultures by the West, as a keyword search of the term in Grove Music Online reveals.6 Until recently, debates on the impact of musical globalization have focused on what this flow from the West has produced: has globalization resulted in ever-greater musical homogeneity, or has the stimulus of Western music engendered myriad new styles? In surveying the increased interconnectedness of the musical world in the early 1980s, Roger Wallis and Krister Malm lay out four possible forms of cross-cultural musical interaction: exchange, dominance, imperialism, and transculturation/creolization (Wallis and Malm 1984, 297–302; see also Goodwin and Gore 1990). The strongest advocates of the homogenization interpretation of musical globalization have been Steven Feld and Veit Erlmann. Feld offered a penetrating critique of world beat in 1988, and in 1995 declared: “[T]he postmodern world music commodification scene is dominated by by such communities often exhibit such contradictions with particular clarity, combining pre-modern folk elements with the latest mainstream pop styles in a self-conscious and often deliberately ironic sort of eclecticism” (Manuel 1995, 235). 3 With specific reference to Chinese participation in Orientalism, see Dirlik 2008. 4 For a similar interpretation of cross-cultural Orientalist circularity, focusing on the Chinese experimental composer Tan Dun’s “neo-Orientalism,” see John Corbett 2000. Barbara Mittler (1996) has made a similar point; see also Sheppard 2010. 5 Some theorists have acknowledged the fact that globalization has long been a factor in human history (see Robertson 1992, 9–10). 6 For an important early survey of the effects of musical globalization on traditional musics, see Nettl 1985.

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surfaces, neon signs of musical heterogeneity that glow in the ever-present shadows of an expanding musical homogeneity” (Feld 1995, 96). Erlmann has repeatedly argued that trends in transnational music have pointed toward synthesis rather than diversity in musical styles (see Erlmann 1993, 1996, 1998). These positions on musical globalization were echoed as recently as 2007 by Timothy D. Taylor: “Globalization is the term most commonly used to refer to the recent regime under which nonwestern peoples are dominated and represented by the West” (Taylor 2007, 113). Running nearly alongside this diagnosis of cultural grey-out induced by globalization has been the argument that burgeoning transnational cultural movements have resulted in astonishing cultural diversity. Some major theorists of globalization have stated unequivocally that “there is no good reason . . . to define globalization largely in terms of homogenization” (Robertson 1995, 34)7 and that “globalization is not the story of cultural homogenization” (Appadurai 1996, 11).8 Such positive views of the effects of world-music globalization on musical diversity have also included a denial of cultural imperialism in terms of global economics and Western political power. As Reebee Garofalo wrote in 1993, “[T]he transnational flow of music is often envisioned as a vertical flow from more powerful nations to less powerful ones, or as a center-periphery model with music moving from dominant cultures to marginal cultures . . . with accompanying images of overpowering, displacing, and/or destroying local cultures” (Garofalo 1993, 17). He countered this view by arguing that the cultural imperialism model underestimates “the power of local and national cultures in developing countries,” and that it “assumes audience passivity in the face of dominant cultural power and neglects the active, creative dimension of popular music consumption” (ibid., 18). In a similar vein, Mark Slobin’s Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (1993) offered new frameworks for appreciating the intricate web of relations resulting from this new diversity. Martin Stokes delivered a more pointed critique of the cultural imperialism hypothesis a decade later and offered four specific counter-arguments of his own: First, there is no simple correlation between the more or less global spread of African-American musics and the activities of the multinationals . . . Second, the circulation of genres such as rock and rap cannot be entirely reduced to the

7 Robertson also states, however: “It is not a question of either homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both of these two tendencies have become features of life across much of the late-twentieth-century world” (Robertson 1995, 27; emphasis in original). 8 In countering the homogenization thesis, Appadurai claimed: “What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way” (Appadurai 1996, 32).

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circulation of sound recordings . . . Third, the question of “world music” cannot be reduced to the cultural-imperialism formula . . . one can no longer talk in simple terms about “the West” imposing itself culturally on the “third world,” or the “center” imposing itself on the “periphery.” It is far from clear where and what these might now be, and who is imposing what on whom. Fourth, the cultural imperialism hypothesis falsely assumes that “the global” is abstract, placeless, and at some conceptual remove from the particularities of place, history, and culture. (Stokes 2003, 301)

Of course, we may still hear an accelerated homogenization of musical styles in the absence of the financial and political mechanisms of cultural imperialism. In this debate, a good deal depends on where one’s primary concerns lie. Whether an individual listener hears increasing musical diversity or a trend toward global homogenization in Western stylistic terms depends greatly on that individual’s penchant for appreciating similarity versus difference in all music. It also depends on questions of scale, on the level of musical detail upon which one focuses. Feld has recently attempted to put musical globalization debates to rest along these lines: “Musical globalization is experienced and narrated as equally celebratory and contentious because everyone can hear equally omnipresent signs of augmented and diminished musical diversity” (Feld 2000a, 146). He concludes that, in recent discussions of musical globalization, [N]arrative positions on anxiety and celebration seem increasingly more intertwined, indeed with a real sensitivity toward the contradictions and subtleties that might connect them . . . in a remarkably short time, the diversity of “world music” – its promise – has come to be consistently suspended in the spectre of one world music – its antithesis – the anxious and celebratory both embrace musical plurality as a dialectical necessity in a world where “world music” circulation is increasingly dominated by predictable musical commodities. (Feld 2000b, 13)

If these debates appear to have arrived either at a stalemate or at more nuanced views of global musical circulation, perhaps it is time to focus more intently on regional musical networks. The assumption that musical globalization is primarily a flow from the West to the rest has recently been successfully challenged, as has the assumption that some undifferentiated entity that can be labeled “the West” exists.9 Just as examples of self- and intra-Asian exoticism unsettle our standard models of

9 For popular-music discussions, this is complicated by the fact that “the West” often refers to African American styles and musicians.

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Orientalist appropriation and representation, certain geo-cultural regions such as East Asia appear to be engaged in creating transnational musics more independently of the West, thus contradicting our standard models of musical globalization. These “rogue flows” or cross-cultural regional threads have existed throughout history, of course, but they have become rather tightly interwoven of late. As Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas have shown, “[I]ntra-Asian cultural traffic of popular and consumer culture . . . has produced a new mode of cross-cultural fertilisation and Asian modernities which cannot be a mere copy of Western counterparts” (Iwabuchi et al. 2004, 2).10 We discover below that the exploitation of Asianness within intra-Asian popular culture has been inspired by a wide array of motivations. My focus in the remainder of this chapter will be on examples of Chinese and Chinese diaspora popular music (particularly Taiwanese) from the more recent past that illustrate the roles of world music and Orientalist representation in proclaiming modernity and ethnic pride for Asian and Asian American musicians. Although I suggest that these developments increasingly proceed independently of direct Western/white intervention, many of these musicians were initially inspired by models of cross-cultural appropriation from EuroAmerican musics, both modernist and popular. These musicians have also responded to market pressures and opportunities in their engagements with Chinese traditional music. In addition, Western-trained ethnomusicologists have shaped this music both directly and indirectly. As Said writes: “The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined – perhaps even regulated – traffic between the two” (Said 1978, 3). It is here that the globalized becomes personalized.

“This is NOT one of those ‘world music’ CDs” Since the late 1990s, Wang Leehom (b. 1976) has been one of the most popular and prodigiously talented musicians in Taiwan and, increasingly, throughout East Asia – which is to say that he is one of the more popular musicians on the planet – and yet he is not well known in the West, at least to non-Asian American audiences. Leehom was born and raised in Rochester, New York and was trained as a classical violinist.11 He spoke little Chinese before attending 10 Such revisionist views owe a clear debt to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). 11 Given our personal association and the fact that he is most commonly referred to as “Leehom” throughout East Asia, I have used Wang Leehom’s first name in this chapter.

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Williams College, where he majored in music and Asian studies and was a student in two of my courses, including one focused on musical Orientalism, cross-cultural influence, and globalization in the twentieth century. Leehom’s recording career began in Taiwan while he was still in college. As an Asian American, he has enjoyed a certain exotic cachet that enhanced his appeal in East Asia. His earliest albums – often recorded in Los Angeles with studio musicians – remained primarily within the light R&B style central to mainstream Mandapop/Mandopop (popular music sung in Mandarin). Particularly since 2000, his music has been strikingly eclectic and his audiences have exhibited a remarkable musical sophistication and flexibility in their sustained enthusiasm, as Leehom veers between R&B ballads, jazz-inspired piano interludes, Broadway-inflected numbers, heavy metal, and hip-hop.12 In addition to emphasizing his musical hybridity, Leehom goes to some lengths in live performances and music videos to demonstrate his abilities on numerous instruments, including piano, drum set, guitars, violin, vibraphone, and erhu. As of 2008, he has released twelve original albums consisting primarily of his own songs and has won numerous music industry awards in East Asia. He has been with Sony BMG since 1998 and has acted as a celebrity endorser for numerous corporations in East Asia, including McDonald’s and Coca Cola, appearing on place mats at McDonald’s restaurants in Beijing and creating a song and music video for the McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” ad campaign. Like many Cantopop and Mandapop artists, Leehom has also pursued a movie career and played a major role in the 2007 Ang Lee film Lust, Caution. In spring 2007 he was named “one of the 100 most inspiring Asian Americans of all time” by Goldsea Asian American Daily, appearing at number seventy-six behind Yo-Yo Ma at number twenty, Bruce Lee at number two, and Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawai’i at number one.13 This recognition from a major Asian American news source is striking, given the fact that Leehom’s career has played out almost entirely in East Asia. Timothy Taylor notes that within world music, “[D]ifferent sounds are mobilized for a vast array of reasons, but, perhaps most often, as a way of constructing and/or solidifying new identities” (1997, 203). Issues of cultural identity have been central to the development of Leehom’s career and musical style. In 2000 Leehom wrote in his web diary: “I am 12 Leehom has offered a long and wide-ranging list of influences on his music. In one interview, for example, he cited Stevie Wonder, Prince, Alisha Keys, Outkast, Missy Elliot, R. Kelly, The Neptunes, Leonard Bernstein, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Kris Tiner, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans. See the transcript of his June 2006 interview on CNN Talkasia (Hahn and Wang Lee Hom 2006). 13 “The 100 Most Inspiring Asian Americans of All Time,” Goldsea Asian American Daily, www.goldsea. com/Personalities/Inspiring/inspiring.html.

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an American-Born-Chinese, or ABC, considered a foreigner in America, and also considered a foreigner in Taiwan. I find that quite funny. I grew up in the States, however, I compose Chinese music, speak Chinese at home, have Chinese blood, and lived half of my time during the last five years in Asia.”14 While insisting on a Chinese rather than Asian American or Taiwanese identity, he has traded on his foreign/exotic status in East Asia, most obviously by conspicuously inserting English words into his by now fluent Mandarin.15 His identity is perceived differently by different audiences, as are his songs, as he tours throughout East Asia and, occasionally, in North America. This bi-cultural emphasis and transnational reception were clearly relevant to his landmark 2000 recording of “Descendants of the Dragon.” “Descendants of the Dragon” was composed in 1978 by the Taiwanese songwriter Hou Dejian and was initially intended as a protest against the decision by the United States to grant the People’s Republic of China official diplomatic recognition. Hou emigrated to mainland China, however, and the song became hugely popular there, being largely interpreted as a pan-Chinese call for unification. When Hou supported the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, his song became an anthem for the student movement, and he was deported back to Taiwan.16 Leehom’s uncle Li Jianfu made a highly successful recording of “Descendants of the Dragon” in 1980 in Taiwan. With his own 2000 remake, Leehom “intended to encourage taking pride in who we are and creating a general awareness of this pride regardless of where we live or may have grown up.”17 His desire to affirm his own Chineseness and to celebrate a broader pan-Asian unity with this song led him to record “twenty-something tracks of vocals and background vocals so I could sound like a strong chorus of voices singing, ‘They are all the descendants of the dragon’!”18 In live performances of the song, Leehom calls upon his audience: “All those in the crowd who have black eyes, black hair, and yellow skin come sing this song with me, 14 Wang Leehom, web diary entry no. 3, June 23–30, 2000: www.leehomwang.net/gointopg/journal/ journal3.htm. Leehom’s web diary entries quoted here are all in English in the original. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Leehom’s lyrics and remarks from live performances appearing in this chapter were made for me by Steven P. S. Cheng. 15 Christine R. Yano, writing on the Japan-based Korean singer Kim Yonja, has noted that her “hybridity, her Koreanness-out-of-place, in fact, inevitably becomes part of the spectacle of her performances” and that Yonja’s exotic Koreanness often “takes the form of being unfamiliar with the Japanese language” as she turns her linguistic mistakes into “assets of charm” (Yano 2004, 163). On the parallel case of mainland Chinese stars performing in Hong Kong and making a fetish of their otherness by drawing attention to their efforts to speak Cantonese, see Witzleben 1999, 251. 16 On the history of this song, see Barmé 1999, 221, 227–8. 17 Wang Leehom, web diary entry no. 3, June 1–8, 2000, www.leehomwang.net/gointopg/journal/ journal1.htm. 18 Wang Leehom, web diary entry no. 4, July 1–7, 2000, www.leehomwang.net/gointopg/journal/jour nal4.htm.

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this ABC.”19 Leehom’s version begins with a pulseless, floating synthesized introduction, suggesting that the song is emerging from the mists of time, from China’s ancient past. However, snippets of a synthesized robotic voice and the industrial, vaguely futuristic setting of the music video point to China’s emerging ultramodernity. Leehom deleted a verse referring to the Opium Wars from the original and inserted a rap interlude in English about his parents’ immigration from Taiwan to the United States. This change removed the song’s reference to the lingering shame of past imperial subjugation and instead celebrated a current pan-Chinese, diasporic nationalism. The switch to English is marked musically by an abrupt stylistic shift, as though the rap and the immigrant experience it relates are but a brief interruption in a more continuous Chinese existence. Leehom also added a final verse that points directly to his new self-identification as Chinese: “I grew up in a foreign land, after I grew up I became an heir of the dragon.” “Descendants of the Dragon” marked Leehom’s first significant attempt to develop a “more internationally recognizable Chinese pop sound.” In considering the position of Chinese popular music in the world-music marketplace and musical globalization more generally, Leehom wrote in 2000: Based on my own experiences and past studies in ethnomusicology, Chinese music DOES have its own identity and soul, the trick is to take these characteristics and translate them into the pop music style . . . Will different cultures eventually fuse into one? Maybe, I don’t know. However, I think as the world gets smaller it has never been more important for different people to maintain and be proud of our differences. It would be a shame if an American pop artist were to travel to Asia and find that our pop music sounds the same as theirs, just with Chinese lyrics. Remember, it is our differences that entice us to travel, and keep us curiously studying other cultures. It is these differences that add spice and mystery to our lives.20

Note his use of “our” and “theirs” in this quotation. Leehom’s ruminations on his own and on Chinese popular music’s cultural identity, and his proclaimed desire to counter homogenization in musical globalization and undermine stereotypical Orientalism, inspired the creation of his widely acclaimed and self-designated “chinked-out” style in 2004. Elements of world beat – likely inspired by such figures as Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon – can be heard in the insertion of sub-Saharan African musical features in Leehom’s 1997 “Don’t Switch on the Lights” and in the brief 19 For a video recording of a performance by Leehom in Taiwan in 2006, see Leehom Live Concert (Taibei Shi: Xin lin Bodeman yin yue gu fen you xian gong si, 2006). 20 Wang Leehom, web diary entry no. 2, June 9–15, 2000, www.leehomwang.net/gointopg/journal/ journal2.htm.

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appearances of the Indian sitar and tabla and the Chinese guzheng and erhu on his 2000 album Forever’s First Day. With the 2004 album Shangri-la, Leehom answered his own call for the creation of a distinctly Chinese form of popular music, picking up on his inclusion of rap in “Descendants of the Dragon” and juxtaposing hip-hop and rock with Chinese traditional music to create what he dubbed a new chinked-out style. The brief introductory track on Shangri-la makes explicit this connection to “Descendants of the Dragon” by quoting that tune on a yangqin. In his liner notes, Leehom explains in English: In this album, I decided to implement some of China’s most precious and untapped resources, the musics of its “shao shu min zu,” or ethnic minorities, concentrating on the regions of Yunnan, Shangri-la, Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia. This is NOT one of those “world music” CDs. It’s an R&B/hip-hop album that creates a new vibe the whole world can identify as being Chinese.21

What exactly was he attempting to protect this album from by rejecting the world-music label? Perhaps he hoped to reassure his fans that this music – although unfamiliar to them – was not too exotic for the purposes of entertainment and that it was not an artifact unearthed by a Western ethnomusicologist and destined for a world-music class syllabus. Perhaps he wanted to situate Shangri-la specifically as a Chinese entertainment product for a Chinese audience, as music of the moment, or as music pointing toward a future in which, with luck, the rest of the world (specifically the West) might come to accept his music as world beat or even popular music. Of course, by writing about this music in a volume devoted to the history of world music and by placing Leehom on my syllabi, perhaps I have inadvertently claimed Shangri-la for the world-music category. In preparation for his composition of a chinked-out style, throughout 2004 Leehom turned to the advice of ethnomusicologists in Beijing and Taiwan and pursued a collecting trip in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Yunnan.22 The music video for Leehom’s version of “In a Far Away Place” offers a mini-documentary of his fieldwork, as we see him recording performances by dancers and musicians in traditional costume and attempting to play their exotic instruments and join in their dances. The results of this fieldwork are evident in multiple tracks on Shangri-la; for example, in “Deep in the Bamboo Forest,” a song with a particularly irrepressible refrain and beat, we hear 21 Wang Leehom, Shangri-la, Sony Music SDD0473/519578–9, 2004. 22 Personal email correspondence, July 19, 2007. This musical journey by a pop musician parallels two recent and high-profile examples from the classical realm: composer Tan Dun’s fieldwork in preparation for his 2002 multimedia orchestral work The Map and the pianist Lang Lang’s engagement with traditional Chinese music in his 2006 album Dragon Songs. It also might call to mind the current Han Chinese touristic interest in ethnic minority cultures.

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samples of Tibetan opera that Leehom recorded in Lhasa. His remake of “In a Far Away Place” features a Xoomei (Tuvan throat singing) sample, and “Astrology” includes the sound of a xun (an ancient ocarina). In a live 2006 performance of “In a Far Away Place” in Taipei, Leehom explained to his audience that this Mandarin standard is actually a traditional Uyghur folk song, that it exhibits influences from Muslim traditions of Central Asia and the Middle East, and that it has a mysterious exotic quality. After performing his version of the song, Leehom played the tune on the erhu while being elevated far above the stage, with smoke, falling confetti, and panning spotlights; this was accompanied by a powerful rock beat, chorus, and projected lyrics on the gigantic screens behind him. Given this musical apotheosis of a folk song, it should not surprise us that pop musicians are often accepted as quite persuasive ethnomusicologists. In his next album, Heroes of Earth (2005), Leehom extended his use of traditional Chinese material to include Beijing and kunju opera and made explicit the relationship between these models and expressions of Chinese modernity. For his target audiences, these operatic forms also carried an element of the exotic, despite their classical Chinese status.23 Leehom has explained that he first became interested in Chinese opera after watching one of his favorite films, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, and then decided that Li Yan, whose voice was used for the primary opera singer in that film, would be featured on Heroes of Earth.24 Leehom’s “Beside the Plum Tree” was inspired by Bai Xianyong’s “youth” production of the epic kunju opera The Peony Pavilion.25 The lyrics reference the opera itself and express a longing for its ancient ideal of love and its contrast with modern life: “[H]ow I wish to be in that story where the pace is slower, and the atmosphere mysterious.” The song features the clappers, cymbals, gongs, and drums of the operatic genre as well as the kunju performer’s voice. Leehom delivers lines of classical Chinese poetry in hip-hop style and includes a rap that, as it deals with the topic of the fast tempo of modern life, itself speeds up virtuosically. The music video for this song completely ignores the theme of idealized love and instead emphasizes

23 Leehom has also attempted to bridge the pop/classical divide in Western music, particularly in his December 2008 performances with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, when he conducted Bernstein, performed the second movement of the Wieniawski Violin Concerto, and performed on the organ in addition to performing his own songs with the orchestra. For video clips of this production see “Talk Asia Meets Wang Leehom” (2009). 24 See “Wang Lee-hom Singing hip-hop, Chinese style” (2006). On this film’s representation of Chinese opera, see Lei 2006 (226–7, 233–44) and Silvio 2002 (177–97). 25 The end of the twentieth century witnessed multiple prominent productions of this work, including the 1998 updated version by Peter Sellars and Tan Dun and the controversial production for Lincoln Center by Chen Shi-Zheng.

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similarities between hip-hop and Chinese opera.26 The camera moves with the grace of the flowing sleeves of Chinese opera performers and then switches to a choppier shot rhythm to parallel the rap sections. Break dance and operatic martial arts are also pointedly juxtaposed, as are the symbolic hand gestures of Leehom and the opera performer.27 The music video reveals that both art forms are intensely stylized performance traditions. As Leehom and the opera singer frequently occupy the frame together, Leehom nodding his head in approval and the opera singer seeming to dance to Leehom’s music, the video at first appears to place hip-hop and kunju on the same plane. At roughly three-quarters of the way into the video, however, the opera singer’s voice is manipulated electronically to sound as though it is projected through lo-fi speakers. The opera singer then appears within the frame of a vintage television set, suggesting that kunju opera is irretrievably of the past. The music video for “Mistake in the Flower Field” similarly explores the relations between modern life and traditional opera, while making multiple allusions to specific Beijing operas and also featuring Leehom on the erhu. In this video, Leehom and a young woman – lovers temporarily separated by a misunderstanding – are paralleled by two opera performers, whom we see dancing but do not hear. Leehom appears to travel through the video screen of his mobile phone to witness the operatic performance, entering the world of the female opera actress. In a sense, the traditional erhu and the modern mobile phone are pointedly juxtaposed and together encompass the ancient exotic and ultra-modern musical spheres. The modern musical technology enables transport back to the traditional. At the end of the video the contemporary couple reunite, as they approach each other contemplating the image of Leehom and the female opera performer on their mobile phone screens. Finally, in the title track “Heroes of Earth,” Leehom explicitly describes his aspirations for the album: “Tonight my goal is certain/To bring Chinked-out to the whole world/Adding in Beijing Opera and kunju/Hip-hop enters a new phase/With this new breakthrough, a new musical style produces new heroes.” In the video we see him following a young woman down a hallway, apparently attracted by the Chinese opera painted-face tattoo on her shoulder, as he pauses to admire posters of a similar image plastered on the wall. Technology again features prominently in this video. Leehom incorporates contributions from both a Beijing opera singer, whose image is projected on a wall as we hear

26 Recordings of the music videos for songs contained on this album are available on a DVD included in Heroes of Earth: Celebration Edition (Taipei: Sony, 2005). 27 Leehom’s 2006 concert in Taipei made a similar point by including a section in which a group of break dancers alternated with a group of operatic martial arts performers and the accompanying music switched back and forth between the two styles.

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an excerpt from a classic martial opera, and the Chinese American hip-hop artist MC Jin, who appears on a large TV screen at the click of a button by Leehom. He boasts in English that his “culture’s so contagious/They wanna know about us/We been around for ages.”28 Both Jin and Leehom, as representatives of a transnational pan-Asian modernity, lay claim here to an ancient and exotic Chinese cultural heritage and to the technology and musical styles of today. To what extent did Leehom recapitulate Western Orientalism in these examples of his “chinked-out” style? By celebrating and longing for the ancient past represented by Chinese opera in these music videos, Leehom simultaneously extols the technological power and striking modernity of China today. As I noted above, appropriating the exotic is a time-honored method of claiming modernity. Other examples from these albums point even more clearly to Orientalist models of musical representation, and specifically to the tradition of nineteenth-century Orientalist opera. In the music video for “Shangri-la: The Sun and Moon of My Heart,” from his Shangri-la album, Leehom assumes the archetypal position of the Western male encountering his ideal exotic flower girl. We see him hiking in a remote landscape, suffering a fall, and then waking in a mystical realm, as he is nursed to health by an innocent, exotic beauty who brings him a spiked fiddle and gazes at him longingly, before he is forced to say farewell. We are even treated to brief glimpses of exotic dancing girls. The narrative is framed as a flashback, as we see him composing this song to ease his pain over his separation from the irrecoverable Shangri-la. In the video for “Deep in the Bamboo Forest,” from the same album, Leehom sings of finding “the primitive me and you,” as he moves through the forest and joins temple dancers, who appear to worship a large bronze relief of a treble clef-shaped dragon – Leehom’s personal symbol, which adorns his chinked-out clothing and accessories in the video.29 This video opens with an image of a spinning mouth singing a Tibetan male vocal sample, followed by a few fragmented shots of a woman in Tibetan dress singing a second Tibetan sample. We also see gratuitous shots of a leggy Asian woman holding a dizi bamboo flute, of Leehom singing in front of a sizhu ensemble whose music we do not hear, and of Leehom completing an ink painting of a bamboo grove. In a sense, “Deep in the Bamboo Forest” is the primitivist counterpart to the Orientalist “Shangri-la.”

28 Here, Leehom’s video appears to reference the opening of Jin’s “Learn Chinese” music video, in which Jin’s character appears on a television screen watched by three male African American hip-hop musicians who sit on a couch expressing their approval. 29 The treble clef was also used as an alternative to the ampersand celebrating the merger of Sony & BMG.

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In justifying his use of the traditional racial slur “chink,” Leehom states, “‘[C]hinked-out’ repossesses the word, turns its negative connotations upsidedown, and uses them as material to fuel the new sound of this music.”30 Leehom’s use of this derogatory term echoes similar moves by Asian American rappers and by earlier African American gangsta rap. As Deborah Wong notes in an unpublished paper, Jin “refers to ‘chinks’ and to himself as the ‘original chinky eyed MC’ in an age-old strategy of reclaiming injurious language” (Wong, n.d.). Ellie Hisama has described a similar strategy in the work of Korean American rapper Jamez (James Chang) from the late 1990s. Jamez visited Korea and became interested in Asian traditional music. He then attempted to create a form of “anti-appropriation” with a brand of “Aziatic hip-hop” released on his “F.O.B.” (fresh-off-the-boat) label. As Jamez explains: “Fusing Korean folk music with Chinese music and hip hop provided the ideal social landscape I wanted to create,” and allowed him, as Hisama states, to encourage “young Korean Americans to reclaim their cultural traditions and identity through music” (Hisama 2002, 3, 14). The shock value of employing/redeploying racist terms to describe new forms of Asian and Asian American popular music was clearly inspired by the model of late twentieth-century African American usage of the “n-word.” As Brian Hu writes of Leehom’s “chinked-out” term: “Wang has found a safe space where he can exploit a problematic word to bolster his own ‘hip-hop’ (read: Black) credibility . . . Through the term and the hybrid music it describes, Wang Leehom is exploring and announcing a specifically Chinese-American identity on a grand and public scale not possible in the United States” (Hu 2006). By attempting to create a new Chinese school of hip-hop, was Leehom expressing solidarity with another historically victimized group, or was he appropriating their music and thereby placing Chineseness in a “whiter” position?31 Tony Mitchell has argued, “Hip-hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African American culture; it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world”; Mitchell also acknowledges, however, that the “flow of consumption of rap music within the popular music industry continues to proceed hegemonically, from the USA to the rest of the world, with little or no flow in the opposite direction” (Mitchell 2001a, 1–2).32 Asian and Asian 30 Wang Leehom, Shangri-la liner notes. On the historical uses of “chink” and other slurs for representations of Chinese and Chinese Americans in American popular music, see Tsou 1997; Garrett 2004; Lancefield 2004; Moon 2005. 31 On this issue, see also Sheppard 2005 (paragraphs 20–3). 32 As an Asian American, Leehom could perhaps be viewed as a participant in Mitchell’s Western musical flow, serving as an ambassador of hip-hop. In his 2006 live performance in Taipei, Leehom gained some comic mileage out of attempting to demonstrate the differences between Mandapop and hip-hop as though

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American musicians repeatedly turn to hip-hop as a sign of modernity and expressive authenticity when they create their own expressions of ethnic and nationalist pride and protest. At the same time, however, laying claim to hip-hop legitimacy inevitably raises racial boundaries. Oliver Wang notes, “[O]ne of the fundamental tensions with which Asian American rappers have to contend is the distance between Asianness and blackness” (Wang 2007, 40–1; see also Wang 2006).33 Leehom’s particular status as an ABC performing hip-hop in East Asia further complicates attempts to determine the extent to which Orientalism, self-Orientalism, and appropriation are at play in his chinked-out oeuvre. Perhaps by moving toward the “hood” of hip-hop Leehom was attempting to move out of the world-music ghetto and into the more desirable locations of popular music.

“. . . everyone was looking for their own ‘chinked-out’ sound” Wang Leehom’s incorporation of traditional Chinese music toward the revitalization of Chinese-language popular music was not unprecedented. In recovering from the Cultural Revolution and heavily influenced by models from Taiwan, popular music in mainland China took off in the 1980s.34 In the mid-1980s, a new style dubbed “Northwest Wind” (Xibeifeng) countered mainstream Mandapop by combining rock with folk melodies from the Xinjiang region. In 1992 the band Tang Dynasty, for example, employed “Uighur folk tunes and Western heavy metal riffs with Chinese melodic inflections and quartal harmonic orientation” (Huang 2003, 193). Their music video for “The Sun” places the band in a desert in Western China. The drummer holds a frame drum and the lead singer approximates the playing style of the dutar on his guitar. A somewhat similar musical development occurred across the Straits. Nancy Guy has detailed how Taiwanese pop musicians sought a specifically “Taiwanese” musical identity in the 1990s and drew upon Taiwan’s aboriginal musics. Guy writes, “As the Chinese unification discourse, which asserts that Chinese people and people on Taiwan are one and the same, becomes increasingly hostile, Taiwanese have he was introducing hip-hop to Asian youth. To illustrate his musical lesson, he started to sing the Teresa Teng Mandapop standard “Moon Over My Heart” with a hip-hop beat but broke off laughing at his own musical joke. 33 On Jin’s experience in dealing with racial tension in his battles against black rappers, see Coates 2004. 34 Many date the birth of Chinese rock to 1985 and the musician Cui Jian. On the impact of Taiwanese popular music in mainland China and Hong Kong, see Barmé 1999 (220–1) and Ho 2003 (146). On the development of Chinese popular music in the 1980s and onward, see Brace 1992, Dujunco 2002, and Huang 2003.

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become increasingly determined to define and assert their unique identity” (Guy 2001, 10). Perhaps Leehom and other recent Taiwan-based musicians are motivated more by financial realities than by political concerns as they point to a pan-Chinese or even pan-Asian cultural identity. In the lyrics of “Heroes of Earth,” Leehom praises the opera singer’s resonant voice and says, “It’s not going to be easy to imitate him.” Leehom does not attempt to take on the exotic voice of Chinese opera or ethnic minority folk music himself, but other popular musicians have. Looking back on the opening of the twenty-first century, Leehom has said, “[D]uring that time, everyone was looking for their own ‘chinked-out’ sound.”35 In their hit 2002 song “One Night in Beijing,” the Taiwanese rock band Shin employed a Beijing opera vocal style extensively. The surprise success of the singer Dao Lang in 2004 illustrates the depth of popular interest in traditional musics. Dao is a Han Chinese from Sichuan who moved to the Xinjiang region, where he studied and collected folk music and then released his first album, Songs from the Western Region, in 2001. He describes how he sought to create “something different” by combining “the bold and rough Uygur music with the high pitch of Sichuan opera.”36 Some of the more striking recent examples of exoticism in popular music have come from Leehom’s two most famous Taiwan-based male contemporaries, David Tao and Jay Chou. Tao was born in Hong Kong to Taiwanese parents – his mother was a Beijing opera performer – and spent his late teenage years in California. Chou was born and raised on Taiwan. Like Leehom, both of these singer-songwriters began working in a R&B style but have proved extraordinarily eclectic, incorporating traditional Chinese instruments and operatic vocal styles in their pop music.37 Tao has sung grunge and metal-inflected numbers alongside a straight rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in live performances, approximated a Hindustani melismatic vocal style in the opening of “What’s Love,” delivered a spoken and sung introduction to his “Susan Says” in full Beijing opera style while accompanying himself with a small gong – his 2006 Beijing and Toronto audiences received this as a great gag – and has included an entire ensemble of 35 Personal email correspondence, July 19, 2007. Dana Burton – a young hip-hop promoter from Detroit now active in Shanghai – is often credited with developing widespread interest in the creation of Chinese hip-hop since establishing the national Iron Mic competition in 2001. See “How a Muslim Convert from Detroit Became the Godfather of Chinese Hip-Hop” (2007). I thank Christian Thorne for bringing this report to my attention. I should note that some of Leehom’s vocal melodies, as in “Mistake in the Flower Field,” have been shaped by the playing style of the erhu. 36 “Dao Lang: I’m an Ascetic for Music” (2004). 37 On Jay Chou’s ability to present himself as a pan-Chinese cultural figure, thereby sidestepping political complications and achieving phenomenal success in the People’s Republic of China, see Fung 2008, 69–80. Fung (2003) has also written on this subject with regard to the Hong Kong-based superstar Andy Lau. On grass-roots efforts to develop hip-hop in China, and a rather disparaging view of Chou’s rap style, see Wang 2009.

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traditional Chinese instruments (the 12 Girls Band, to be discussed below) in his 2005 “The Art of War.” Jay Chou most frequently performs in a rap vocal style, but he has also sung in an operatic falsetto in his title song for Jet Li’s 2006 film Fearless (which includes a part for erhu as well as a pentatonic lick in the accompaniment reminiscent of David Bowie’s 1983 “China Girl”), played Chopin excerpts on the piano as interludes within his songs, performed on the zheng, and incorporated pseudo-Gregorian chant, Italian operatic singing, and Latin rhythms into his music. Surprising and unusual musical juxtapositions seem to be a fetish for him; for example, “Nanchucks” – a glorification of martial arts – starts with an old-school heavy metal guitar riff and Chou’s rap vocal delivery approaches a screaming nu metal style.38 The song also includes, however, a lyrical erhu solo and a sudden brief classical piano fragment. In his version of “chinked-out” music, Chou has been a good deal more aggressive than Leehom in his musical patriotism. In his 2002 “Dragon Fist” – perhaps a response to Leehom’s “Descendants of the Dragon” as well as a homage to a 1979 Jackie Chan film – Chou sets himself up as a hero for the Chinese: “Crave the blood ties that bind us – Infinite thousands upon ten thousands of brothers . . . One day the rising star of the East will shake space and time. Return to the primeval. Go conquer! Go take control! . . . The whole world is left with only one thought: waiting for a hero . . . I am that dragon.”39 The song opens with an imitation of ancient imperial bells and rumbling drums, which are abruptly cut off by a distorted guitar, scratching, and Chou’s angry rap voice; these, in turn, are interrupted by a brief pipa break. In line with the recent trend toward increased product placement and musical corporate endorsements in East Asian popular music, Chou’s martial arts-/video game-/manga-inspired music video for “Dragon Fist” is an explicit commercial for Pepsi (see Fowler 2005). The musical exoticism of Leehom, David Tao, and Jay Chou – however intricately enmeshed it may be with transnational corporate interests – is aimed squarely at East Asian audiences and appears to address intra-Asian concerns and aspirations. The self-exoticism of the mainland Chinese 12 Girls Band, however, has proved phenomenally successful both within Asia – particularly in Japan – and in the West. This instrumental ensemble was formed in 2001 in Beijing by the Chinese rock manager Wang Xiaojing (who served as Cui Jian’s agent in the 1980s and thus is credited with assisting at the “birth” of Chinese rock) and consists of erhu, pipa, yangqin, dizi, guzheng, and other traditional instruments backed by a drum set, electric guitars, 38 Chou’s martial arts-inspired rapping may remind some listeners of Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 album Enter the Wu-Tang 36 Chambers. 39 English translations of the lyrics to Chou’s songs are available at: http://jay-chou.net.

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and keyboards. The ensemble performs with an intense, virtuosic precision at a driving “Hooked on Classics” disco tempo. Solo breaks occasionally allow the distinctive qualities of some of these traditional instruments to emerge, as do rubato sections of atmospheric New Age mysticism, but these moments appear as rather brief interruptions in the otherwise continuous flow. The concept for the ensemble was inspired by the Tang Dynasty royal Yue Fang female ensembles, which consisted of twelve instrumentalists. Wang Xiaojing has explained: [T]he original idea was to produce a show pleasant to the eyes as well as the ears. I think people come to a show not only to listen but to look as well. So I chose some pretty girls, dressed them in fashionable outfits and topped it all off with fantastic stage design and lighting . . . The 12 Girls Band is a brand. Each of the 12 girls is a note in the score. People know the 12 Girls Band but have no clear idea who is who. Whenever one of them leaves the band, I will find someone to take her place. There are thousands of pretty young women learning traditional instruments. (Guixiang 2004)40

The ultimate target audience here is the West, and Wang Xiaojing has been explicit in his goal of earning a Grammy with this ensemble. The members of the 12 Girls Band have traveled in the opposite direction of Leehom. These conservatory-trained traditional instrument musicians now perform Western classical and popular pieces, most often in light rock arrangements, in addition to westernized versions of traditional Chinese tunes (including “In a Far Away Place”). They have performed arrangements of a wide range of Western pieces, including Coldplay’s “Clocks,” Enya’s “Only Time,” Sting’s “Fragile,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot, Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, and the “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen with Mexican American Lila Downs singing in Roma costume. They toured the United States in 2004, 2005, and 2007 and appeared in a live broadcast from Shanghai during the PBS (American public television network) June 2006 pledge drive. Their 2004 album Eastern Energy was rated sixty-two by Billboard, which was the highest-ever debut ranking for any Asian artist, and they hit the top spot on the Billboard World Music chart. Critics, however, have received the group less enthusiastically than has the general public. Don Heckman complained in the Los Angeles Times, “[A]side from an occasional melody or two, there was little traditional about the program . . . one couldn’t help but wish to hear more Chinese traditional qualities from the 12 Girls Band and fewer repetitious, recorded, groove and hip-hop tracks” (Heckman 2004). Several critics have noted the de-emphasis of timbral distinctiveness in the ensemble’s westernized 40 On the broader significance of this ensemble, see Yang and Saffle 2010.

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playing of traditional Chinese instruments. Gary C. W. Chun (2007), for example, dismisses the group as “a successful world pop formula, packaging culture, through music and dance, for export to armchair travelers everywhere, sanitized to ensure palatability” and Ilya Garger (2004) states that their music retains “just enough Chinese flavor to create an exotic sheen without alienating listeners unaccustomed to the moan of the erhu . . . or the plink of the pipa.” The 12 Girls Band engages in the classic Orientalist gambit of merging the ancient exotic with the modern. In their live 2006 concert in Shanghai, broadcast on PBS, the ensemble performed in front of the Oriental Pearl Radio and TV Tower – the ultimate symbol of Chinese modernity – playing a light rock arrangement of the canonic piece “High Mountain and Flowing Water.”

Parody and pan-Asian exoticism The pursuit of Orientalist and self-Orientalist artistic representation by the subaltern can be inspired by multiple motivations, including a desire to lay claim to a westernized modernity, to express national or ethnic pride, to popularize one’s own culture in another land, and to promote a transnational subaltern unity in opposition to the West. Chinese-language popular musicians have exhibited these and other aspirations in their musical exoticism, as have members of numerous other cultures long deemed exotic by the West. One additional impetus for the creation of musical Orientalism by East Asian and Asian American musicians has been the desire to undermine this mode of representing and understanding cultural others through parody. Musical parody can prove a highly corrosive weapon against cultural stereotypes, assuming one’s intended audience hears the music with appropriately receptive ears. It must also, in many cases, be shaped so as to slip beneath the radar of censors and to allow for deniability. Thus, critical certainty in classifying a given song under the parody label is necessarily plotted on a continuum. David Tao’s 2002 “My Anata” – particularly in its music video format and in his live and rather hammy performances of the song41 – displays Orientalist stereotypes of Japan for the purposes of light-hearted parody seemingly aimed at japonisme itself. Tao’s song shifts between tango verses and a rock chorus, is salted with Japanese words, and is performed in a mock-heroic vocal timbre. The video, framed as a dream, offers kitschy images of old Japan as Tao, dressed as a sword-wielding samurai, fighting another male for a Japanese woman, who is filmed as an analog to a figurine of the Japanese Maneki Neko, or beckoning 41 David Tao, Soul Power Live DVD (Hong Kong: Wide Sight, 2003).

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cat, commonly found in Japanese restaurants.42 Awaking from his dream, Tao’s character, now in jeans and T-shirt, fights another male over the last steamed dumpling in a vendor’s basket. The parodic aspects of Tao’s “My Anata” were likely aimed as much at Jay Chou’s Orientalism as at Japanese culture. Chou’s “Ninja,” from his 2001 album Fantasy, is also set in old Japan, though its parodic status is much less clear. The lyrics engage in stereotypical japonisme, as Chou raps about the little shrines and miniature hills and describes how the smell of the tatami mats evokes a Zen moment. His lines resemble a screenplay, and he raps that his Japanese fantasy is “like a silent film in the old times.” In the music video, Chou appears as a modern, red hooded-sweatshirt-clad tourist who becomes embroiled in a ninja fight. He then undergoes Japanese cultural training, practicing calligraphy, ikebana flower arranging, and sword technique; he suddenly appears in black garb, as though now certified as a ninja. In his rap, Chou counts in Japanese and briefly adopts a Japanese folk-style vocal delivery; we see, but do not hear, a woman performing on shamisen, and Chou ends with a noh kakegoe “i-yo” call. The exotic past and modernity are brought together as these elements of traditional Japanese music are juxtaposed with sampled video game sounds and Chou’s trademark choppy rap style. Chou’s earnest intensity in this and in similar Orientalist fantasies calls into question whether any parody is intended here. His apparent desire for such cross-cultural fantasies seems to outweigh any critical distance on his part from Orientalist representation. In both cases, Tao and Chou exhibit a certain cultural confidence in their use of these Orientalized Japanese images, particularly given the fact that their music is avidly consumed by the Japanese themselves.43 The potentials and perplexities of parody in self- and intra-Asian Orientalism are well illustrated by the career of the Singaporean pop star Dick Lee, which, in several dimensions, prefigured the musical exoticism and transnational success of Wang Leehom, David Tao, and Jay Chou. In his autobiography, Lee repeatedly focuses on his musical quest to express his Asian identity (Lee 2004). With such songs as “North and South” (from the Orientalism album), Lee explicitly called for Asian unification, for new Asians to arise who will successfully amalgamate the East and West, the traditional and the modern. His pan-Asian political message was often underscored by his use of

42 The video also shows a Maneki Neko with its moving paw as a familiar image shot and the Japanese woman’s image is manipulated so as to appear mechanical, thus recalling the moving figurine. Tao’s Japanese woman is clearly waving goodbye to him, suggesting that Tao himself seems unaware that in Japan the cat’s gesture is perceived to be beckoning. 43 On self-Orientalism and parody in Japanese popular music, see Hosokawa 1999 and Mitsui 1998.

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instruments and melodies from throughout East and South Asia. Tony Mitchell (2001b) has traced a trajectory in Lee’s career from the selfOrientalism of his 1989 album The Mad Chinaman (on the cover of which Lee appeared in Chinese opera make-up and costume) to the “reverse Orientalism celebrating a pan-Asian identity” in his 1991 album Orientalism to his relaxed exotica/lounge music on the 1999 Transit Lounge and finally to his “disappointingly monocultural” (i.e., Western) 2000 album Everything. Mitchell claims that, with the Orientalism album, Lee created a “self-consciously internationalist, pan-Asian notion of Orientalism that ironically mimics Western homogenisations of Asia” and, rather optimistically, that “both self-Orientalism and reverse Orientalism open up possibilities for bypassing rigid stereotypes and expressing an often playful form of identity politics in which East and West can explore each other’s exotic fetishisations and fascinations without being overcome by the anxieties surrounding notions of racial authenticity” (Mitchell 2004, 110).44 The question remains whether it is possible to parody Orientalist representation without perpetuating its cultural stereotypes and beliefs. Does Orientalist representation exist if the West does not hear it? At the start of the twenty-first century some economists predicted that Asian nations would soon find themselves less dependent on the US economy and more intricately tied to and reliant upon each other. In the spirit of Jacques Attali (1985), we may hear this development heralded by East Asian popular music of the recent past. Perhaps a greater degree of self-sufficiency is signaled by the production and consumption of Orientalist representation within the Asian sphere. Traditional Asian musics can now function as world music within Asia itself. As Philip V. Bohlman envisioned in his meditation on the globalization of world music at the end of the twentieth century, “[T]he people without history seize upon world music to construct the end of our century in their image, not ours” (Bohlman 2002, 27). Dick Lee has advocated for a pan-Asian form of popular music since the late 1980s and has brought together musical elements from throughout East Asia in his music. In doing so, Lee’s music has embodied what C. J. W.-L. Wee terms a “regional universalism” and has provided a “counter- or alternative model of modernity,” an “indigenized” or “neotraditional” modernity for the East (Wee 1996, 490). On the Japanese

44 This is a revised version of Mitchell’s 2001 article cited above. Frederick Lau’s discussion of Chinese avant-garde composers such as Tan Dun offers a striking parallel here: “In advocating a style that makes use of Chinese elements, the new wave composers are participating in a codified and globalized market in which they are being perceived through their music and the use of Chinese elements. They are clearly capitalizing on Orientalism as expressed in their music and in their own words in order to transgress the boundaries of Western Orientalist discourse with its emphases on difference, othering, and the exotic” (Lau 2004, 38).

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reception of Lee’s music, Koichi Iwabuchi writes, “[The] attractiveness of his syncretic music for Japanese audiences lies in its playful mixing of Western pop and various adaptations of traditional Asian music . . . Lee’s music made Japanese realize that Asian pop is not backward but represents a highly sophisticated mode of cultural hybridization” (Iwabuchi 2002, 164 ff). Taking Dick Lee’s lead, Wang Leehom has expressed a pan-Asian ideal in his music, collaborating with Asian American, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, and Korean musicians on his Heroes of Earth album and repeatedly trumpeting the pan-Asian origins of his audience in live performances.45 A pan-Asian pop-music culture offers some clear market advantages to transnational companies such as Sony BMG. And yet, this musical development may also reflect the cultural reality of twenty-first-century Asian urban centers. As James L. Watson has written of Hong Kong’s “flamboyantly transnational” lifestyle, in East Asia the “transnational is the local” (Watson 1997, 107–8; emphasis in original).

The future of “chinked-out”? Leehom’s live 2006 Taipei “Heroes of Earth” performance began with the striking of a gong, a flying acrobatic performer who slashed open the curtain with a sword, and the appearance of Leehom in a long golden silk robe engaging in a martial arts battle. This was clearly the height of “chinked-out” and even suggests the exaggerated display of parodic or kitsch performance.46 In the liner notes and publicity materials for his 2007 album Change Me, Leehom appears in casual modern clothes, and no exotic imagery is present. The album begins with a brief introduction of Western strings and chorus in a Baroque-inflected style that ends with a gong strike that is immediately muffled – in fact, we see Leehom perform this action himself in the “Change Me” video as though to signal the end of his chinked-out style. In “Chinese Forever,” his most overt statement of ethnic pride to date, Leehom declares, “I’m born in the USA but made in Taiwan,” and ends by name-checking several celebrities, including Chien-Ming Wang, Yo-Yo Ma, Ang Lee, Lang Lang, and Jackie Chan. He also points to the 2008 Beijing Olympics as an opportunity to celebrate Chinese culture, briefly adopting the Beijing accent while doing 45 Such pan-Asian idealism in popular music has been widespread in the early twenty-first century. Hong Kong-based DJ Tommy of the hip-hop group LMF released Respect 4 Da Chopstick Hip Hop in 2001. This album included Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese hip-hop artists and was intended to bring Asian youth together (see Bennett 2001, 66). 46 Clearly there is a continuum for expressing one’s “Asian-ness.” Jin, for example, has stated: “I am proudly Chinese. I’ll embrace it but never exploit it. During a show, I might say, ‘So where my Asians at?’ But I’ll never go out there with a sword, you know what I’m saying?” (see Chan 2003).

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so. Musically, however, this song and album are far removed from his earlier chinked-out style.47 Leehom’s stated desire to repossess the racial slur “chink” in the creation of his chinked-out style of music, music videos, and (increasingly) fashion immediately raises the question of whether it is possible to measure the degree to which negative connotations are overturned by such cultural countermoves. It also demands that we consider how the term “chinked-out” might be understood. From a progressive and overly optimistic vantage point, we might wish to read the term as indicating that at this point in history racial stereotypes are (or should be) “all played out,” that Orientalist representation is effectively eliminated by a new musical style that is itself “all chinked-out.” Now that our eyes have been opened to the damage of dumb racist stereotypes, have we not reached the end of their history? Can we envision a post chinkedout future? “Chinked-out” can also be understood as signaling a music that is “all decked out” in Orientalist fashion. In this reading, Leehom might be understood as having assumed an exotic Chinese mask, either to make a statement or to harness the appeal of exoticism. The crucial – and perhaps unanswerable question – is whether his various audiences perceive the mask as something separate from, and assumed by, this performer or whether performers of chinked-out music become chinked-out themselves. Does the short, sharp ringing sound (the “chink”) of the Peking opera cymbals escape sonic cliché when heard within a pop song? Or does the sound continue to provoke a smirk? Much of the cultural representation discussed here has been contained within an East Asian sphere. In the early twenty-first century, Western perceptions of China are likely to be shaped by similarly ambiguous chinkedout representations of the ultramodern and immeasurably ancient Chinese. In August 2007, to celebrate the start of the one-year countdown to the Beijing Olympics, the People’s Republic of China hosted a celebration that included 2,008 girls playing the zheng in Yangzhou. In his film and stage production promoting the Beijing Olympics during the closing ceremonies of the Athens 2004 games, Zhang Yimou repeatedly juxtaposed images and music signaling both ancient and ultramodern China. The stage show featured a female dance troupe in mini-cheungsams holding traditional instruments while dancing to a rock version of the famous folk song “Mo-li-hua” – clearly a 47 Leehom does feature the yangqin in “Cockney Girl” on this album and in its music video and the chinked-out style made something of a comeback in his 2008 single “What Happened to Rock ’n’ Roll?” (also referred to as “What’s Wrong with Me?”), in which punk-style vocals and heavy metal guitar playing are answered by a pipa performed by Janet Hsieh. The song’s music video offers a technological fantasy played out along the Great Wall and – along with the sardonic lyrics – suggests a parodic intent, situating the song in the realm of the Ramones or early Elvis Costello. In his 2008–9 tour Leehom has assumed the action hero role of “Music Man,” calling to mind the Ziggy Stardust days of David Bowie.

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replication of the 12 Girls Band. Zhang’s Beijing 2008 Olympic Ceremonies in the stunning “Bird’s Nest” national stadium similarly juxtaposed both the ultramodern prowess of contemporary China and the noble traditions of its ancient cultural past in the most public of forums. Leehom performed a rock song in tribute to the city of Beijing in the Closing Ceremonies with a few other superstars while surrounded by young women dancing with erhus. For Western audiences, both old and new China are likely perceived as exotic, suggesting that in the Orientalist imagination the Chinese still do not belong in the present. When will a fully post-chinked-out and postmodernization era begin for the Chinese, both in Western and Chinese imaginations? At what point does the other escape its exotic status? As Chinese culture and the People’s Republic of China continue in the ascendant, defining Chinese modernity assumes a certain urgency. At the moment, exoticism persists, serving both the West and the East in claiming modernity and in celebrating and policing difference.

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Dirlik, A. (2008) ‘Chinese history and the question of Orientalism’, in E. Burke III and D. Prochaska (eds.), Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 384–413 Dujunco, M. M. (2002) ‘Hybridity and disjuncture in Mainland Chinese popular music’, in T. J. Craig and R. King (eds.), Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 25–39 Erlmann, V. (1993) ‘The politics and aesthetics of transnational musics’, The World of Music, 35, 2: 3–15 (1996) ‘The aesthetics of the global imagination: Reflections on world music in the 1990s’, Public Culture, 8, 3: 467–87 (1998) ‘How beautiful is small? Music, globalization and the aesthetics of the local’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 30: 12–21 (1999) Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West, New York: Oxford University Press Feld, S. (1988) ‘Notes on world beat’, Public Culture Bulletin, 1, 1: 31–7 (1995) ‘From schizophonia to schismogenesis: The discourses and practices of world music and world beat’, in G. E. Marcus and F. R. Myers (eds.), The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 96–126 (2000a) ‘A sweet lullaby for world music’, Public Culture, 12, 1: 145–71 (2000b) ‘Anxiety and celebration: Mapping the discourses of “world music”’, in T. Mitchell and P. Doyle (eds.), Changing Sounds: New Directions and Configurations in Popular Music, Sydney: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, pp. 9–14 Fowler, G. A. (2005) ‘In Asia, it’s nearly impossible to tell a song from an ad’, The Wall Street Journal, May 31: A1 Fung, A. (2003) ‘Marketing popular culture in China: Andy Lau as a Pan-Chinese icon’, in C.-C. Lee (ed.), Chinese Media, Global Contexts, London and New York: Routledge Curzon, pp. 257–69 (2008) ‘Western style, Chinese pop: Jay Chou’s rap and hip-hop in China’, Asian Music 39, 1: 69–80 Garger, I. (2004) ‘A Dozen Roses 12: What has four erhus, three pipas and 120 nimble fingers? Meet China’s first exportable supergroup, the 12 Girls Band’, Time International (Asia Edition), 163, 21 Garofalo, R. (1993) ‘Whose world, what beat: The transnational music industry, identity, and cultural imperialism’, The World of Music, 35, 2: 16–32 Garrett, C. H. (2004) ‘Chinatown, whose Chinatown? Defining America’s borders with musical Orientalism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57, 1: 119–74 Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Goodwin, A., and J. Gore (1990) ‘World beat and the cultural imperialism debate’, Socialist Review, 20, 3: 63–80 Guixiang, L. (2004) ‘12 Girls major move or minor mode?’, China Daily, March 17: 63 Guy, N. (2001) ‘How does “Made in Taiwan” sound?: Popular music and strategising the sounds of a multicultural nation’, Perfect Beat, 5, 3: 1–17 Hahn, L., and Wang Lee Hom (2006) ‘Wang Lee Hom Talkasia transcript’, CNN Talkasia, June 16, www.cnn.com/(2006)/WORLD/asiapcf/06/16/talkasia.wang. script/index.html

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Heckman, D. (2004) ‘12 Girls Band bucks Chinese tradition’, Los Angeles Times, August 14: E8 Hisama, E. M. (1993) ‘Postcolonialism on the make: The music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn’, Popular Music, 12, 2: 91–104 (2002) ‘Afro-Asian crosscurrents in contemporary hip hop’, ISAM Newsletter, 32, 1: 3, 14 Ho, W-C. (2003) ‘Between globalisation and localisation: A study of Hong Kong popular music’, Popular Music, 22, 2: 143–57 Hosokawa, S. (1999) ‘Soy sauce music: Haruomi Hosono and Japanese self-Orientalism’, in P. Hayward (ed.), Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, Sydney: John Libbey and Company, pp. 114–44 ‘How a Muslim convert from Detroit became the godfather of Chinese hip-hop’ (2007) Foreign Policy, 15 November, www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4023 Hu, B. (2006) ‘Pop go the C-words’, Asia Pacific Arts (April 13: www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/ article.asp?parentid=42893 Huang, H. (2003) ‘Voices from Chinese rock, past and present tense: Social commentary and construction of identity in Yaogun Yinyue, from Tiananmen to the present’, Popular Music and Society, 26, 2: 183–202 Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Iwabuchi, K., S. Muecke, and M. Thomas (eds.) (2004) Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, Hong Kong University Press Lancefield, R. C. (2004) ‘Hearing orientality in (white) America 1900–1930’, PhD dissertation, Wesleyan University Lau, F. (2004) ‘Fusion or fission: The paradox and politics of contemporary Chinese avant-garde music’, in Y. U. Everett and F. Lau (eds.), Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 22–39 Lee, D. (2004) The Adventures of the Mad Chinaman, Singapore: Times Editions Lei, D. P-W. (2006) Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across the Pacific, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Manuel, P. (1995) ‘Music as symbol, music as simulacrum: Postmodern, pre-modern, and modern aesthetics in subcultural popular musics’, Popular Music, 14, 2: 227–39 Mitchell, T. (ed.) (2001a) Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press (2001b) ‘Dick Lee’s transit lounge: Orientalism and Pan-Asian pop’, Perfect Beat, 5, 3: 18–45 (2004) ‘Self-Orientalism, reverse Orientalism and pan-Asian pop cultural flows in Dick Lee’s Transit Lounge’, in K. Iwabuchi, S. Muecke, and M. Thomas (eds.), Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, Hong Kong University Press, pp. 95–118 Mitsui, T. (1998) ‘Domestic Exoticism: A recent trend in Japanese popular music’, Perfect Beat, 3, 4: 1–12 Mittler, B. (1996) ‘Mirrors and double mirrors: The politics of identity in new music from Hong Kong and Taiwan’, Chime, 9: 4–44 Moon, K. R. (2005) Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music, and Performance 1850s–1920s, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press Moskowitz, M. L. (2009) ‘Mandopop under siege: Culturally bound criticisms of Taiwan’s pop music’, Popular Music, 28, 1: 69–83

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(2010) Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press Moy, J. S. (1993) Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America, University of Iowa Press Mullen, B. V. (2004) Afro-Orientalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Nettl, B. (1985) The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation, and Survival, New York: Schirmer Books Pope, E. W. (2003) ‘Songs of the empire: Continental Asia in Japanese wartime popular music’, PhD dissertation, University of Washington Prashad, V. (2001) Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, Boston: Beacon Press Raphael-Hernandez, H., and S. Steen (eds.) (2006) AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, New York University Press Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage Publications (1995) ‘Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities, London: Sage Publications, pp. 25–44 Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books Sheppard, W. A. (2005) ‘Representing the authentic: Tak Shindo’s “Exotic Sound” and Japanese American history’, ECHO, 6, 2, www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume6-Issue2/shep pard/sheppard1.html (2010) ‘Tan Dun and Zhang Yimou between film and opera’, Journal of Musicological Research, 29, 1: 1–33 Shimakawa, K. (2002) National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Silvio, T. (2002) ‘Chinese opera, global cinema, and the ontology of the person: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine’, in J. Joe and R. Theresa (eds.), Between Opera and Cinema, New York: Routledge, pp. 177–98 Slobin, M. (1993) Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England Stokes, M. (2003) ‘Globalization and the politics of world music’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 297–308 ‘Talk Asia meets Wang Leehom’ (2009) CNN Talkasia (January 14), http://edition.cnn. com/(2009)/SHOWBIZ/01/09/ta.wangleehom/index.html#cnnSTCVideo Taylor, T. D. (1997) Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, New York and London: Routledge (2007) Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Tsou, J. (1997) ‘Gendering race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in popular sheet music’, repercussions 6, 2: 25–62 Wallis, R., and K. Malm (1984) Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries, New York: Pendragon Press Wang, J. (2009) ‘Now hip-hop, too, is made in China’, The New York Times, January, 24: C, 1 ‘Wang Lee-hom singing hip-hop, Chinese style’ (2006) Shenzhen Daily, February 28, http://english.sina.com/life/p/1/(2006)/(0228)/(6757)7.html

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Wang, O (2006) ‘These are the breaks: Hip-hop and AfroAsian cultural (dis)connections’, in H. Raphael-Hernandez and S. Steen (eds.), AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, New York University Press, pp. 146–64 (2007) ‘Rapping and repping Asian: Race, authenticity, and the Asian American MC’, in M. T. Nguyen and T. L. N. Tu (eds.), Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 35–68 Watson, J. L. (1997) Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, Stanford University Press Wee, C. J. W.-L. (1996) ‘Staging the New Asia: Singapore’s Dick Lee, pop music, and a counter-modernity’, Public Culture, 8, 3: 489–510 Witzleben, J. L. (1999) ‘Cantopop and Mandapop in pre-postcolonial Hong Kong: Identity negotiation in the performances of Anita Mui Yim-Fong’, Popular Music, 18, 2: 241–58 Wong, D. (n.d.) ‘Hip-hop generations in Asian America: Jin’s “Learn Chinese”’, unpublished paper Yang, H.-L. and M. Saffle (2010) ‘The 12 Girls Band: Traditions, gender, globalization, and (inter)national identity’, Asian Music, 41, 2: 88–112 Yano, C. (2004) ‘Raising the ante of desire: Foreign female singers in a Japanese pop music world’, in A. Chun, N. Rossiter, and B. Shoesmith (eds.), Refashioning Pop Music in Asia: Cosmopolitan Flows, Political Tempos and Aesthetic Industries, London and New York: Routledge Curzon, pp. 159–72

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PART IX

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MUSICAL DISCOURSES

OF MODERNITY

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Encountering African music in history and modernity GREGORY BARZ

The mbi’la was made of a block of wood about a foot long and some three inches thick, the lower end of which was partially hollowed out to give resonance, like a rudimentary sounding-board. Attached to the flat surface were thin tongues of metal, one end fastened to the instrument, the other free to vibrate when snapped downward and outward by the thumbs and fingers. At the lower end of the mbi’la were pinned thin disks of tin, two on each pin, which vibrated when the metal tongues were played upon. The silvery, tinkling tones accompanied by the constant jingling buzz of the vibrating disks sounded like a brook purling over stones amid rustling reeds. It was a most poetic and sylvan music, evoked by the little mbi’la which seemed the very voice of nature. Natalie Curtis, Songs and Tales (1920, 8)

Introduction – tradition and modernity reconciled1 An epigraph taken from Natalie Curtis’s Songs and Tales of the Dark Continent first published in 1920 might seem an unusual portal into an article on African music and ethnomusicology. Curtis had yet to set foot in her “Dark Continent.” She wrote at a time long before terms such as “world music” or “ethnomusicology” tripped easily over the tongue. Yet encountering Curtis in the twenty-first century necessitates purposefully unveiling artifacts and ideologies that lurk beneath the surface of colonial and turn-of-the-century verbiage – natives, biblical historical references, pagan villages, continued references to adult consultants as “boy,” and primitive contexts. Curtis represents Africa through its expressive culture, through songs and stories, extrapolating information about Africa through materials from two southern African ethnic groups – the Zulu and the Ndau – collected by Curtis from two informants, both of whom attended the Hampton Normal and Agricultural 1 This phrase appears as a mysterious, floating running header unattached to the title page of a published interview with J. H. K. Nketia (2004). While the header itself does not refer to a distinct section or chapter in the book, it nevertheless points to an important issue raised by Nketia, namely the value of recognizing the fusion of historical traditions within many musical traditions in contemporary African contexts.

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Institute (today Hampton University) in Virginia. Both transcriber and interpreter at a time when little more could be expected from her craft, Curtis’s glance was forced to imagine a context, to interpret music sounds based on what she already knew and to which she had access. Thus, the “traditional” musical elements represented by the mbira – the infantilized “little mbi’la” – could in fact do nothing but conflict with the modern sounds of the contemporary world. In Curtis’s glance, African music was understood as primitive because experience with the wealth of the continent’s cultures was not yet available to the scholar and researcher. At the same time, the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, for whom Curtis worked, produced a review of John Harris’s Dawn in Darkest Africa (1916) that was published in The Southern Workman, the organ of the Hampton Institute, in which reviewer William Aery articulated a mournful tone when commenting on the loss and change then experienced in many West African cultures: Soon the Africa we have known – yea, and loved – will have been hustled away. Its forests, rivers, and tribes will possess no more secrets; gone will be the simple old chief; gone the primitive village untouched by the European; gone the old witch-doctor; and gone, too, perhaps, that beautiful faith and trust in the goodness and honesty – of the white man – the pity of it all! (Aery 1916, 55)

One can only assume that the deeply felt “pity” and loss felt by Aery (and certainly by many others at the time) and the potential injustice of quickly abandoned cultural institutions easily ignited, perhaps even by extension to Natalie Curtis, particular preservationist and activist instincts. “Traditional” African musics were just as readily perceived as disappearing and thus worthy of any time spent preserving, transcribing, and documenting the expressive culture of what Curtis and others referred to since the nineteenth century in a highly romanticized tone as the dark continent.2 The ethnomusicological glance at the musics of sub-Saharan Africa historically wrestled with the issues of change and adaptation, especially in regard to the roles of traditional culture in tandem with modernity. In a 1998 interview with ethnomusicologist and musician J. H. Kwabena Nketia conducted by Carita Backström and Mai Palmberg, the issue of tradition and change surfaces as central to the experience of both Nketia’s scholarly analysis and his experiences as musician and composer: “I work between the 2 The “dark continent” is a term loaded with a troubled past and carries a pejorative significance first introduced by explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley in 1878. Due to its troubled linguistic past, this term is considered shameful, as witnessed by the backlash experienced by producers at National Public Radio in 2008 when a news program documented then American president George Bush’s trip to the “dark continent.”

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two areas, tradition and change. But in my own mind I have to keep those two categories somewhere, because if I talk about traditional music I am talking about a specific ethno style and things that go into it. If I move from there to another area I need another term to describe what I am doing” (Nketia 2004, 210). For Nketia, traditional musics and contemporary musics in African contexts are not in opposition to each other. They frequently merge, as he suggests, along a continuum “in terms of cultural policy and cultural development, bridging the gap between the old and the new is also an important dimension” (ibid., 211). In this chapter, a deliberate choice is made to frame an overview of African music within a history of discourse. Just as Nketia framed his thoughts around tradition and change above, so does this chapter focus on literature about African music as adaptive and responsive. The growth of literature on topics both general and specific has transformed the position of African music studies in the greater history of world music, and in this chapter an attempt is made to demonstrate several ways this discursive history has in fact shaped and informed ethnomusicological scholarship in general.

African music – narrowly defined This attempt at hybridizing would, at any rate, be an interesting experiment; but only great experts could succeed in growing an improved and fruitful variety of musica Africana . . . African music is not conceivable without dancing, nor African rhythm without drumming, nor the forms of African song without antiphony. It will be necessary to come to a definite decision and choose either African music or European custom. It is not possible to eat one’s cake and have it. (Hornbostel 1928, 62)

Just how and in what broad ways “African music” was historically conceptualized as distinct from European music quickly developed in the early part of the twentieth century, becoming a contentious issue when used as a unique collective noun. A cryptic epigraph appearing almost as if in the place of dedication in his book African Music in Northern Rhodesia and Some Other Places gave missionary and ethnomusicologist A. M. (Arthur) Jones opportunity to address this issue head on: “The first edition of this pamphlet was called African Music. In deference to critics the title is now more limited . . . It is the author’s conviction that with a growing body of evidence from different parts of the continent, the principles discussed here will prove to be the specific contribution of Africa as a whole to the world of music” (Jones 1958, 6). While seemingly bending to pressure to justify the use of the collective term “African Music,” Jones and others offered mid-century efforts to localize

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research on African music leading to rich studies that problematized the expectations of reflection on and analysis of African expressive culture. In a footnote accompanying Jones’s article, Scottish-born ethnomusicologist Percival Kirby, who would write The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa in 1934, underscores a shift, perhaps permanent by this time, away from scholarly analysis of African cultures conducted from afar, such as those studies produced early by Natalie Curtis. For Kirby, “the study of African music must be undertaken on the spot, and . . . the student must himself participate in native musical performances if he is to arrive at a real understanding of native musical art” (Jones 1958, 45). In one of the most exhaustive organological treatments of an individual African country, Klaus Wachsmann’s study of the musical instruments of Uganda (1953) demonstrates in detailed minutiae the need for contextualized local studies of material culture. The exhaustive detail afforded to Wachsmann’s documentation of Ugandan instruments demonstrates Kirby’s “real understanding” of African art and culture, but also suggests the problems and frustrations inherent in the need to provide exhaustive and accurate coverage of even a country the size of Uganda (let alone all of sub-Saharan Africa!). With the emergence of critical thought on African music, such as that provided by the writings of anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam, the very core issues assigned historically to African music are nuanced. For Merriam, rhythm becomes experiential rather than iconic. Rhythm in African contexts needs to be experienced in order to be understood and not essentialized for the entire continent: “It is open to question whether the importance of drums and other instruments of percussion has not been exaggerated in most writing about African music . . . We tend to think in terms of drums and drumming alone and to put aside that vast body of African music which in many cases does not use percussion instruments at all” (Merriam 1982c, 84). In addition, Merriam’s “you-have-to-be-there” attitude communicates to many a new generation’s approach in the late 1950s to hands-on, participatory approaches to engaging ethnomusicological field research in African music and musicians.3 For early collectors of African music such as German scholar Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, phonograph recordings served as an innovative primary source for approaching and interpreting non-European musical traditions: “As material for study, phonograms are immensely superior to notations of 3 In this chapter I rely heavily on Anglophone scholarship (and in particular American scholarship) on African music, though not exclusively. I do so not to create a false canon, but rather to demonstrate the emergence of a particular response in criticism and scholarship to African music studies. This strategy precludes me from taking on an exhaustive body of literature that would integrate substantial works from a variety of languages – including French, German, Swahili, Portuguese, and Afrikaans – which would result in a much larger study.

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melodies taken down from direct hearing; and it is inconceivable why again and again the inferior method should be used” (Hornbostel 1928, 32). While definite evolutionary undercurrents exist in Hornbostel’s seminal early work on African music, his analyses of form and melody nevertheless attempt to position African harmony as distinct from European musical composition, despite his assertion of a “natural development of polyphonic forms from antiphony” (ibid., 43).4 It is this valuing of African expressive culture that leads Hornbostel to support efforts to collect and document musical traditions in a timely fashion (salvage anthropology) in order to protect these traditions from the pollution of European religious-, popular-, and folk-music influences. In similar ways, Simha Arom’s African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology (1991) provides exhausting and highly detailed analyses of melodic and rhythmic elements of Central African performance practice that contribute to a preservation of sorts of a cultural tradition that is, according to the author, quickly vanishing. Ugandan Joseph Kyagambiddwa’s exhaustive local study Music from the Source of the Nile (1955) is an early attempt to document in detail the music (scales, songs, instruments, and rhythms) of a specific ethnic group, the Baganda (“Ganda”) of Uganda. The historically significant transcriptions support a highly nuanced set of analyses that incorporate deep textual exegesis. Kyagambiddwa’s text is both political (claiming a particular racial heritage for the Baganda) and preservationist (documenting as many melodic traditions as possible before “contamination” by external cultural forces precludes such efforts). Where Hornbostel’s early efforts to represent African music were based on phonographic recordings, Kyagambiddwa’s are based on his oral experiences in situ. The basic impulse of the two early publications is similar, however, that is, to represent and give authority to the unique nature and nuances of African musical traditions by documenting what were perceived as rapidly disappearing musical traditions.

African music – broadly conceived Scholarship focusing on the music in Africa is rewarding and complex, even in contemporary contexts when defining what is and what is not “African” in African music. In addition to the continent’s indigenous musical traditions there have, for example, been Arab-influenced traditions, as there are varieties of Asian traditions commingling with local traditions today in a variety of

4 In addition, there are markers of a certain relativistic bent in Hornbostel’s cultural stance as in his insertion of the qualifier “so-called” before “primitive man” (Hornbostel 1928, 59).

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contexts. There have long been areas of African and Islamic contact; there are traditions that demonstrate Euro-American musical influences resulting from colonialism; and there are syncretic musical traditions that developed within contemporary contexts. Many emergent musical traditions in Africa respond now to changes in political and social awareness. Yet historically, the political nature of defining what is “African” about African music is not just an activity in which ethnomusicologists engage. Africans themselves engage in this process, primarily in the organization of national, regional, and panAfrican events. For example, the first regional festival of what was labeled “African arts” held in Senegal in 1966, following colonial independence by many new nation-states, purposefully excluded any form of music from the Arab world with the justification that a focus on an “African” festival should be on native (i.e., “black”) traditions, inscribing a response to the emergent West African philosophy of négritude, or consciousness of black identity. More than a philosophy, in the writings of Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas, négritude became a vehicle beginning in the 1930s for Paris-based authors of Francophone African and Caribbean descent to address both colonial protest and local identity (see, e.g., Senghor 1988; Césaire et al. 2001; Damas and Racine 1979). In contrast, the second such festival, held in Algiers six years later in 1972 under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), embraced all aspects of African expressive culture as instruments used in the promotion of political unity rather than as a vehicle for the affirmation of négritude. After considerable debate, the third African Festival, held in Nigeria in 1977, simply recognized the coexistence of music and dance cultures throughout Africa as part and parcel of a pan-African reality. Thus, defining what is and what is not African music has always been a critical issue, for Africans, Africans living today in the diaspora, and for non-Africans. Overarching attempts by scholars long immersed in Africanist scholarship and practice proliferated in writings about “African Music” in toto. Klaus Wachsmann’s edited volume Essays on Music and History in Africa (1971) focuses on the potential for material and expressive culture related to music to contribute to historical questions related to Africa. As John Fage posits in the book’s final essay, the broad hypotheses raised in Wachsmann’s volume (e.g., Jones’s Indonesia-Africa musical migratory patterns) can only further extend our curiosity and ability further to hypothesize larger questions concerning music’s change and adaptation over time (as underscored in Fage 1971). Alan Merriam’s posthumous African Music in Perspective (Merriam 1982b) collects the author’s earlier work in such a way as to present more than an overview of his scholarship. In his final essay, “Rhythm and concepts of time-reckoning” (ibid., 293–311), he wrestles in a theoretical arena where

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opponents – African meaning vs. Western analysis – struggle to assert their position. The reader triumphs, however, due in large part to Merriam’s rich, deep ethnographic sense that reveals his analytical and experiential processes as the most rewarding aspect of his texts. Significant among these include Wolfgang Bender’s Sweet Mother: Modern African Music (1991), a study of popular musical traditions in a variety of African contexts, which cracked the door open permanently for understanding both the syncretic nature of popular musics and the interdependence of tradition and modern cultures. More recent efforts by African and European ethnomusicologists and musicians provide substantial analytical reflection on contemporary issues that are critical to the current generation’s glance across the African continent. Both Akin Euba’s Essays on Music in Africa (1988) and Meki Nzewi’s African Music: Theoretical Content and Creative Continuum: The Culture-Exponent’s Definitions (1997) provide new insight on complex, inherited theoretical models. Wolfgang Bender’s edited volume Perspectives on African Music (1989) contains recent research related to the popular-music industry and its record labels, as well as a detailed study by Gerhard Kubik on the ideology of colonialism and its effects on the identity of school children from 1945 to 1970. Kubik’s Theory of African Music (originally published in 1994 and republished in 2012 in an expanded two-volume edition) remains a rich resource of analytical concepts that pertain to psychological, cognitive, and sensory understandings of African expressive cultures. Perhaps the most fascinating and informative book of the last decade was the publication of the proceedings of the Forum for Revitalizing African Music Studies in Higher Education by the United States Secretariat of the International Center for African Music and Dance (ICAMD). The editor of the Proceedings (Gunderson 2000), Frank Gunderson, transcribes and synthesizes public presentations and conversations made by panels and forums that collected together the foremost scholars of Africanist musicology in the world. As a text, it is a fascinating snapshot of a critical moment in African music wherein scholars looked back as well as projected forward in regard to the role music of the continent in the academy. J. H. Kwabena Nketia’s recent release, Ethnomusicology and African Music: Collected Papers (2005), provides an overview of the collected work of one of the most significant thinkers on African music in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Included is a newly written introductory essay, “Thinking about music in ethnomusicological terms,” in which Nketia wrestles with the historical insider–outsider dichotomy in ethnomusicological research in Africa as well as issues related to interdisciplinary research agendas. Nketia’s in-depth overview of Africanist scholarship, “The scholarly study of African music: A historical review” (Nketia 1998, 13–73), pulls together

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sources from both African and Euro-American writers, with an emphasis not only on their scholarly production but also on the influence of their teaching and their impact on the development of fieldwork techniques. In addition to outlining a variety of themes and trends in Africanist scholarship, Nketia also unpacks several critical issues in the history of African music in ethnomusicological thought – Eurocentrism and the perception of scholarly competence among others. Always provocative, he concludes by challenging ethnomusicology to continue with its self-critique: “Ideas emanating from responses to the Western environment of African musicology may not only provoke discussion by Africans, but also stimulate ideas that may enhance the quest for an African-centered approach to African musicology” (ibid., 68). Significant early attempts to bring African music to wider audiences include Fred Warren’s textbook The Music of Africa: An Introduction (1970) and John Blacking’s chapter, “Trends in the black music of South Africa 1959–1969,” in Elizabeth May’s important early world-music text, Musics of Many Cultures: An Introduction (1980). In addition, Betty Dietz and Babatunde Olatunji co-authored a coffee-table book (with introduction by Colin Turnbull) in 1965 titled Musical Instruments of Africa: Their Nature, Use, and Place in the Life of a Deeply Musical People, which offers visually rich illustrations of instruments played in original contexts throughout Africa (see also Kubik 1982 for a loving tribute to East African music in photographs).

Fertile groves for African music The increased coverage of African music in the most recent edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Sadie 2001) is substantial when compared to the prior edition, released over twenty years earlier in 1980, indicating a coming-of-age of sorts. Significantly, the more recent edition did more than merely update the older entries. The efforts of the Grove editorial staff, in London and abroad, encouraged the volume’s editor and publisher to increase coverage of relevant materials, contracting a wider variety of individual authors to cover African individuals, countries, and genres in order to contribute to the richness of both contemporary and historical African soundscapes. It is worth noting that, in the new edition, there is almost complete geographic coverage of Africa; such treatment of the geographic region was either not valued or perhaps not even possible in previous editions. With such expansion came a wealth of bibliographic material that serves in many ways to underscore the need for further study in particularly understudied traditions and inaccessible areas. Given advances in data-organizing technology, the latest Grove was able much more easily to cross-reference musical instrument

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and performance genre traditions so that there is a much more fluid organizational scheme to this geographic area. Specific musical instrument entries point back to countries that in turn point to individual musicians who then point directly to musical genres. This became of even greater use value with online access to Grove and the continuing efforts to expand ethnomusicological coverage in Grove Music Online. A striking intervention in the 2001 edition is the inclusion of entries for a significant number of popular historical and contemporary African musicians. Artists such as Sunny Adé, Alpha Blondy, I. K. Dairo, Franco, Baaba Maal, Youssou N’Dour, Babatunde Olatunji, and others now have individual musician entries that include discographical information and relevant work-lists and bibliographic source materials. Academic access to popular African musicians has increased due in large part to the efforts of mainstream ethnomusicological scholarship emerging in the post-1980 Grove period (see C. Waterman 1990; Bender 1989; Erlmann 1991; Erlmann 1996, among others). The Africa overview articles of the two most recent editions highlight considerable ideological changes in the twenty-one years between the two publications. As one confronts the two overviews side by side, one not only reads for data related to African expressive cultures, but perhaps more importantly asks how the authors knew what they knew about African music, what they considered of value, and what they adopted and discarded from previous generations of scholarship on Africa. The differences between the 1980 Klaus Wachsmann/Peter Cooke and 2001 Gerhard Kubik overview articles transcend the obvious expansion of coverage from nine to twenty-one printed pages. The earlier article had perhaps a larger task in its need for general educational outreach to consumers of non-Western musical traditions: “If to the layman rhythm as heard in drumming is the most important feature of African music, this view is now regarded by African musicians as a Western overstatement” (Wachsmann and Cooke 1980, 149). Kubik’s task twenty years later was more exacting due to the perception of an increased knowledge of basic African musical forms and structures by general readers. In one of the more interesting twists of scholarship on African music, Kubik documents in his final section, “Modern developments” (Kubik 2001, 206), the decline in live popular musical performance, just as Wachsmann/Cooke hint at changes in contexts and venues for traditional musical performances (see the section on East African writer Okot p’Bitek in Wachsmann and Cooke 1980, 150). Given the expansion of coverage of African cultures, musical traditions, and musicians in the most recent edition of The New Grove Dictionary, and now with the continuous updating of New Grove Online, coverage of African musical traditions and musicians (traditional and popular) is assured.

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Teaching African music – epistemological transitions The history of knowing about African music cultures can be traced over the most recent three decades by examining materials published for teaching African music. One of the earliest and most immediate efforts was Jeff Todd Titon’s Worlds of Music, now in its fifth edition. The first edition of Worlds of Music (Titon 1984) featured a chapter on Africa written by James Koetting that focused almost exclusively on music from the country of Ghana (with a brief aside focusing on kiganda musical styles of central Uganda), extrapolating broader concepts of Africa from a few cultural contexts. In many ways Koetting’s approach mirrored the earlier entrance of the African music soundscape to the academy, whose way was paved by the introduction of ensemble musical traditions, musicians, and intellectuals from West Africa. The success of the materials used in Koetting’s original Worlds of Music chapter can be seen in the retention of his most intriguing field recording, “Postal Workers Canceling Stamps at the University of Ghana Post Office,” in the African music chapter, a relative tour de force of African music scholarship, in the most recent edition of Worlds of Music written by David Locke (2009). While Locke’s research interests map easily onto Koetting’s own geographic area of expertise, he expands the materials for teaching African music to include extensive examples from Southern and Central Africa, in addition to West Africa. A similar early effort by Thomas Turino in Bruno Nettl’s Excursions in World Music (1997) has helped countless students in world-music classes approach African music from a grounded perspective of a variety of geographic areas. In the classroom, Africa has become larger and perhaps more diverse due to the wider geo-cultural embrace of authors such as Koetting, Locke, and Turino. Ruth Stone’s edited volume, the Garland Handbook of African Music (2008), grew out of her path-breaking, collaborative effort, the Garland Encyclopedia (1998). Originally a large-scale reference book, the first Handbook was a retooling of the Encyclopedia’s materials intended to fill a void in the materials available to teach a broadly conceived African music course. Thus, the Handbook provided materials related to traditional and popular traditions throughout the continent, providing a comprehensive overview of African cultures grouped into historical, geopolitical regions – East, West, Central, Southern, and North. The second edition of Stone’s Handbook (2008) emerged within a critical moment, however, in the epistemological trajectory of African music. Included are additional materials related to both pan-African issues critical for studying and understanding music cultures in the twenty-first century (e.g., copyright [Perullo 2008] and HIV/AIDS [Barz and Cohen 2008]) and significant localized concerns (the Abayudaya

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of Uganda [Summit 2008] and dance in Christian contexts [Henderson 2008]). The first widely used and adopted African music classroom textbook, Stone’s Handbook confirms an epistemological shift away from the particular to broader conceptualizations of sound in African contexts. A recent South African publication, Musical Arts in Africa: Theory, Practice and Education (Herbst et al. 2003), brings together a variety of African perspectives on analyzing, interpreting, and representing African expressive culture, again with the purpose of teaching African music across a wide range of educational audiences. The theoretical framework of the book, conceptualized to reflect an African musical ensemble in order to identify and locate “indigenous knowledge systems,” supports its goal of applying this gained knowledge to contemporary modes of transmission in the musical arts of Africa. As Kofi Agawu suggests in the volume’s opening chapter, we should “value afresh the thoughts and expressions of indigenous musicians in our attempts to interpret African music” (Agawu 2003b, 10). Two significant texts by African scholars and performers from the 1970s reached a broad general readership and opened the door for texts such as Stone’s Handbook and Musical Arts in Africa. Published within a year of each other, J. H. Kwabena Nketia’s The Music of Africa (1974) and Francis Bebey’s African Music: A People’s Art (1975) achieved significant sales figures and adoptions by library collections. Perhaps more significantly, they introduced localized methods for “knowing” African musical traditions. Nketia relies on inherited classificatory systems (e.g., the Sachs-Hornbostel organological system for understanding and positioning musical instruments), but also introduces critical local constructs for understanding speech and melody as well as instrumental ensemble expectations. While relying heavily on examples from Ghana and Nigeria, Nketia draws extensively from his UNESCO-funded work in Tanzania. In addition, he attempts to include examples from a variety of regions in sub-Saharan Africa. Nketia’s brief “Summary” could easily function as required reading for any student of African music (Nketia 1974, 241–5). The summary problematizes basic core assumptions typically projected onto African cultures regarding individual versus collective musical specialization, roles of instrumental types, complexity of scales and rhythmic meters, changes in the transmission of traditions, and varying expectations in regard to audience–performer interaction. Rather than understanding change and adaptation as threatening to the continuity of African traditions, Nketia suggests that such aspects of modernity will in fact “keep the musical traditions of Africa alive” (ibid., 245). Bebey’s text provides rich illustrative materials that support a text that in many ways attempts to translate African music to a reading audience that is assumed to find such music “noise” and “bewildering”

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(Bebey 1975, 2). Relying heavily on comparison between Western art and popular traditions and African examples, Bebey attempts to fuse music to the concomitant cultural events within which they frequently occur. Music is thus a sister art that stands for an entire family of traditions. Drawing heavily on examples from West African and a variety of francophone musical cultures, Bebey nevertheless portrays as broad a collection of examples as conceivable at the time of first publication (originally published in French in 1969 as Musique de l’Afrique). Bebey grapples with the perhaps prescriptive approach he adopts in his text. He speaks clearly to nonspecialists and non-Africans by cajoling them to accept and appreciate African traditions on their own terms; a variety of appendices is included further to tempt such readers to pursue recordings of not only culture-specific traditions, but also function and contexts as well. Bebey speaks clearly to change and adaptation in African traditions that must participate, he suggests, in the changes and challenges of modernity. The only way to guarantee that musical traditions remain “100 percent African” is, Bebey suggests, to allow formal elements of music to change (Bebey 1975, 142–4). When read in the second decade of the twenty-first century, both Nketia and Bebey read as fresh, contemporary surveyors and analysts of cultural traditions; such is the wisdom and compassion with which they write about Africa.

African music and regional identity The emergence of studies focusing on specific geographic regions within Africa might have seemed a logical and organic next step in the development of African music scholarship after the sweeping, all-encompassing “music of Africa” publications mentioned earlier. However, the response to growing scholarship on the continent in regard to regional identity in fact occurred simultaneously; scholars began as early as the 1960s to sift through the field recordings and scholarship of historical divisions of the continent with the goal of producing large-scale efforts tying together local and regional musical traditions. Rose Brandel’s monumental work The Music of Central Africa: An Ethnomusicological Study: Former French Equatorial Africa, the Former Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Uganda, Tanganyika (1973) serves as the standard for early work in this regard. Jos Gansemans, Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger, and Simha Arom’s Zentralafrica (1986) continued Brandel’s focus on the central region of the continent. More recent efforts to represent the regions of Africa as distinct musical zones are the results of such early pedagogical publication efforts (see Muller on South Africa [2008]; Stone on West Africa [2005]; Barz on East Africa [2004]; Cooke on East Africa [1998]; Marcus on North Africa

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[2006]); DjeDje on West Africa [2000]; Wendt on North Africa [2000]; Kubik on Central Africa [2000]; and Kaemmer on Southern Africa [2000]).

African music and bibliography In the present era of instant access to digital bibliographies and articles easily downloaded directly from online databases, it might seem a bit odd to note a critical moment in Africanist bibliography. Two large-scale bibliographies have been published: one by Carole Lems-Dworkin (1991) and another by John Gray (1991). Both resources cull the literature on the musics of sub-Saharan African and the diaspora, making exhaustive citations available to precomputer generations of students and scholars throughout the world. Today these bibliographies stand as monuments to the representation of Africanist scholarship and perhaps more significantly to a signaling of a coming of age for the scholarly study of African music. Earlier significant efforts to represent African scholarship in bibliographies include Gaskin (1965), Merriam (1959, 1970), Thieme (1964), and Varley (1936), and despite online resources, newer African music bibliographies continue to be published (see Barz forthcoming).

African music and ethnomusicology at the Grammys In 1991, a new category was introduced at the Grammy Awards: Best World Music Album. Those nominated in that first year were Mickey Hart, Dori Caymmi, the Gipsy Kings, Milton Nascimento, and Salif Keita. From its inception, the annual world-music nominations included at least one African artist.5 In each subsequent year, the genre of Afropop became increasingly prevalent in this category. In terms of the Grammys, Africa was strong from the inception of world music as a category, and as a popular-music genre, Afropop quickly matured to a strong presence in the global world-music market. By 1999, four out of five nominees were African or could be considered Afropop-derived: Afro Celt Sound System, Cesária Évora, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, and Caetano Veloso. By 2004, however, the “World Music” Grammy category was abandoned, and two individual awards were introduced: Best Traditional World Music Album and Best Contemporary World Music Album. That inaugural year the monks of Sherab Ling Monastery’s album Sacred Tibetan Chant won in the “Traditional” category while West African Cesária Évora’s Voz D’Amor won in the “Contemporary” category. 5 It should be noted that ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann was nominated in 1987 in the category of Best Traditional Folk Recording for his Mbube Roots: Zulu Choral Music from South Africa, 1930s–1960s (Rounder Records).

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By the second year of the split, an ethnomusicologist of African musical traditions was nominated as producer in the Traditional World Music category. Jeffery Summit’s Smithsonian Folkways album Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda marked the entrance of Africanist scholarship to this new Grammy category. Three years later in 2008, Gregory Barz was nominated as producer of Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda – also a Smithsonian Folkways release – in the Traditional World Music category.6 The various media of recorded sound have long been the repository of knowledge of African music traditions – witness the variety of album series that have emerged over the years; for example, Hugh Tracey’s 218-LP Sound of Africa series published in the 1960s by the International Library of African Music in South Africa and his broad-ranging twenty-fiveLP Music of Africa, or the Nonesuch Explorer Series: Africa that began in 1969 with thirteen recordings. That the positioning of African music both in the Grammys and in large-scale academic recording productions has occurred easily and seemingly comfortably demonstrates an ease in the academic community of ethnomusicologists as well as among the general consumers of global music traditions to share Africa as both a topic and a source of inspiration. African music continues to appeal widely as a source for intellectual exercises, documentation, and analyses as well as primary contributing source for entertainment by Africans and non-African consumers in the general public and among ethnomusicologists alike.

Journals and book series It is significant to note that the only four international journals of African music and Africanist scholarship are published in South Africa. African Music, the journal of the International Library of African Music was started by Hugh Tracey and was recently reinstated and put into a regular publication cycle at Rhodes University. Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, now co-published by UNISA Press and Routledge, is a broadly conceived journal drawing on musicological and ethnomusicological studies of musical traditions, compositions, and cultures in Africa. South African Music Studies, previously the South African Journal of Musicology (SAMUS), is an annual publication focusing heavily, though not exclusively, on South African musical traditions. The Journal of Musical Arts in Africa, co-published by the University of Cape Town and

6 The director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and ethnomusicologist, Daniel Sheehy, broke African music’s hold on Grammy nomination by receiving numerous nominations and two awards, the latest of which was for producing the Texmaniacs’ 2009 recording, Borders y bailes.

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Routledge, is the newest journal of the four, and its new relationship with Routledge will no doubt broaden its scope beyond southern African traditions. To date, the only academic press book series devoted to African music is the African Soundscapes series at Temple University Press. Edited by Gregory Barz, this new interdisciplinary series highlights contemporary African music in its cultural contexts and the contributions of African expressive culture to global music traditions. The initial publications in the series demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship (see Gilman 2009; Tang 2007; Huntington 2009; Fales forthcoming; Jorritsma 2011). The Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series began publishing ethnographies in 1990, and in its first ten years of publication nearly one-third of the thirty-eight books published were dedicated to Africanist scholarship, clearly reflecting not only trends in area studies specific to Africa, but also clearly dominating, even setting the tone for, future intellectual directions in the field of ethnomusicology (see Waterman 1990; Bender 1991; Erlmann 1991, 1996; Coplan 1994; Blacking 1995a; Friedson 1996; Danielson 1998; Muller 1999; Charry 2000; Turino 2000). Similar representations of Africanist scholarship in ethnomusicology exist in the publication efforts of other publishers such as Oxford University Press, Indiana University Press, and Routledge (see Floyd 1995; Erlmann 1999; Barz 2004; Stone 2005; Marcus 2006; Barz and Cohen 2011; Muller 2008; Monson 2003; Agawu 2003; Barz 2006; Nannyonga-Tamusuza 2005; Reed 2003; Perullo 2011; Charry 2012).

Encountering Africa in activism Africanist ethnomusicologists have so far shown little interest in thematizing their colonial filiations and affiliations. Nor have they rushed to work toward the transformation of the very conditions of political society so as to liberalize, for example, the movement of global labor. Think how dramatically research into African musics might change if Nigerian or Malian fieldworkers, say, could enter the United States as readily as Americans visit Nigeria or Mali. This is not necessarily to recommend that every ethnomusicologist become a placard-bearing activist advocating the removal of travel restrictions. Rather, it is to remind us that the asymmetrical relation between the ethnomusicologist and his or her subjects is not fortuitous; it is, in fact, the very condition of possibility for the production of ethnomusicological knowledge (Agawu 2003b, 155). Taking action, getting messy, and becoming a cultural advocate have perhaps always been responses of the ethnomusicologist, but now more than ever they are being foregrounded and discussed more openly in African contexts. Specifically referring to equalities regarding basic research access, Kofi Agawu

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raises issues in Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (2003b) of the potential role for contemporary Africanist ethnomusicologists to serve as social activists alongside the cultures with whom they are privileged to live and conduct field research. Agawu’s parenthetical “necessarily” points to a long-perceived tension between the researcher and the community: the researcher should leave no footprints and do no harm; the researcher should not effect change on the actual material he or she is studying; the researcher should not advocate. Yet ethnomusicologists now studying political movements or medical and healthcare issues frequently find themselves in the position of collaborating, intervening, meddling, and becoming politically active in tandem with the musical cultures they study (see Barz’s Singing for Life, specifically the “Conclusion: ‘Getting the message across without music is sometimes shaky’” section [2007, 215–24] for more details on the politics of field research in this regard). Often within the contexts of ongoing research projects, cultural advocacy and activism often rely on the production of knowledge as well as reflect on the cultural situation. Michael Frishkopf ’s Giving Voice to Hope: Music of Liberian Refugees is a CD that documents the popular music of a specific Liberian refugee community. Among its stated goals – global education, fund-raising, and research – the University of Alberta’s Buduburan Project clearly situates its efforts within the context of a musical intervention, within which music is situated as a specific form of post-conflict healing. As the product of an academic institution, Giving Voice to Hope (2009) clearly dismisses the need for impartiality and distance – the home academic institution in fact assumes the role of partner rather than adopting a perhaps artificial research distinction – the University of Alberta is “walking with this community on their voyage of return to Liberian society” (Buduburam CD Project website). Similarly, Kampala Flow: East African Hip Hop from Uganda (2010) grew out of a university-based, student-led research project. Vanderbilt University’s Kampala Project was sponsored by the university’s Department of Medicine, Health, and Society for four years, affording students from the United States the opportunity to participate in local Ugandan health clinics and schools, while participating in the everyday use of music, dance, and drama in relation to HIV/AIDS in local communities. Out of the project grew an awareness of the frustrations of the local hip-hop community about what they were not able at the time to record and get airtime for. Kampala Flow was conceptualized as an intervention by which local MCs could give voice to “socially conscious” lyrics relevant to the community. In a collaboration between theologian Gerald Liu and ethnomusicologist Gregory Barz, tracks were laid down in Kampala recording studios highlighting issues of local concern, such as rape, HIV/AIDS,

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school fees, gender issues, spousal abuse, and inheritance rights. A more recent effort, Inanga: A Song of Survival in a Daughter’s Rwanda (Inanga 2011) combines a documentary film with an accompanying CD focusing on the contemporary use of the Rwandan inanga, a chordophone once associated with the royal Tutsi court but now embraced in a post-genocide Rwanda as a pan-ethnic instrument. The players of this instrument are the activists for unity and reconciliation in a contemporary context riddled with issues of pain and anger. Ethnomusicologists working in contemporary Africa on highly charged topics are often requested to advocate for their colleagues, often to intervene with local and governmental authorities. Research on medical and healthcare issues is often characterized by such “activist” interventions. As many of the authors suggest in the edited volume The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing in Music and the Arts (Barz and Cohen 2011), passive reflection, documentation, and analysis is no longer an option for ethnomusicologists as they approach myriad ways of partnering with the local cultures with whom they are privileged to live and learn.

Books about African music that have changed people’s lives It is no small achievement when an ethnomusicological text becomes a classic not only within the discipline, but also within the larger public of consumers. For whatever reason, a variety of texts on African music subjects have had broad appeal and have contributed significantly to the awareness of other global music traditions. African music has been popularized as an academic topic among the masses in large part due to the early efforts of Colin Turnbull and John Chernoff. Turnbull’s bestselling ethnography The Forest People (1968) wove musical performances into the narrative fabric of his study, including a chapter on the “Song of the Forest.” Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (1979) has long been a touchstone among Africanist scholars, and it is difficult to imagine that the growth in popularity of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology does not owe a significant debt of gratitude to the appeal of Chernoff’s study of African rhythm. In The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, Paul Berliner (1993) pushed organological studies of African musical instruments in a new, culturally situated direction. His text continues to motivate scholars and students not only in regard to the complexities of the mbira as a musical instrument, but also as to the complexity of ethnography as art form. Charles Keil’s now classic Tiv Song: The Sociology of Art in a Classless Society (1983) continues to serve as a model for a beautifully crafted and

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poetically written ethnography. John Blacking’s published lectures, How Musical Is Man? (1973), challenges us to consider the corporeal (even biological) interactions with music among the Venda people of South Africa. His analyses of basic music ability challenge us to consider cross-cultural notions of talent and basic musical experience as an acquired process. Kay Shelemay’s moving ethnography of the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, solidified the importance of the study of religious rituals and traditions within ethnomusicological thought (1989). Coupled with her reflexive ethnography, A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991), Shelemay’s writing is compelling not only for its rigorous interaction between theory and practice, but also for its humanistic appeal. Michelle Kisliuk’s study of the BaAka so-called pygmy people of the Central African Republic, Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (1998), aided in ushering in an era that demanded the coupling of published texts with recorded audio CDs. Her ethnography propels ethnomusicology into exciting interdisciplinary analyses of African communities long romanticized and objectified in perhaps artificial ways. That ethnomusicologists such as Turnbull, Chernoff, Berliner, Keil, Blacking, Shelemay, and Kisliuk have produced classic ethnographies both within the discipline as well as among the public serves as a healthy reminder of the importance of African music scholarship in igniting interest in the larger field of world music.

Conclusion By presenting an abbreviated (and admittedly biased) discursive history of African music in ethnomusicology, an attempt was made to address the challenge posed by Hornbostel in one of the opening epigraphs of this chapter, namely the difficulty in having one’s cake and eating it too. In the earliest efforts to document the musical cultures of Africa, African and European music traditions were clearly understood as distinct, and in the publications and recordings that were subsequently issued, those distinctions resulted in a reinforcing of many of those distinctions, perhaps preventing change and adaptation that might have naturally occurred, as Nketia suggests in the interview cited earlier (2004). Early writers on African music such as A. M. Jones (1958) clearly understood that part of their primary goal in providing knowledge of “African music” as a collective whole was to provide a contribution to a greater understanding of the entire world of music. So, rather than debate the translation of African music systems from local contexts and forms of analyses into Westernized forms of representation – as evidenced in the early work of local scholars such as Kyagambiddwa and others or in the

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more contemporary efforts of Arom to transcribe polyrhythmic hocketing patterns in Central Africa – this chapter instead presented ethnomusicological thought that contributed to a greater system of knowledge about music throughout the world. This brief discursive history therefore takes into account the perceived historical ability of African music scholarship to support the needs of multiple and perhaps disparate populations. From the start, representations of African expressive culture have assumed a comfortable position on both the coffee tables of the general public and on the library shelves of academic institutions. Ethnographies of African music in everyday life appealed to the general public as they also did to students and scholars. In addition, academic LP recordings of African music were just as comfortably shelved in living room hi-fi cabinets as they were filed away in the listening rooms of academic libraries. Will it surprise us years from now if the efforts to document, analyze, and translate African musics contribute to the preservation, reinvention, and stabilizing of traditional and popular musics in Africa? Will we be shocked when undergraduates studying abroad in Ghana play Koetting’s field recording of postal workers for outlying rural postal workers on their iPods? Now that the two Grammy World Music categories have been (re-)conflated, will we think it odd when the distribution of traditional African recordings is affected? Perhaps each of these processes has already begun. And perhaps such assimilation, change, and adaptation has always been a part of African music’s contribution to world music at large.

Bibliography Aery, W. A. (1916) Review of John H. Harris’s Dawn in Darkest Africa, The Southern Workman, 44: 54–7 Agawu, V. K. (2003a) ‘Defining and interpreting African music’, in A. Herbst, M. Nzewi, and V. K. Agawu (eds.), Music Arts in Africa: Theory, Practice and Education, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, pp. 1–12 (2003b) Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge Arom, S. (1991) African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology, Cambridge University Press Barz, G. (2004) Music in East Africa: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, New York: Oxford University Press (2006) Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda, New York: Routledge (forthcoming) Music of Sub-Saharan Africa: A Research and Information Guide, New York: Routledge Barz, G. (prod.) (2007) Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

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Barz, G., and J. Cohen (2008) ‘Music and HIV/AIDS in Africa’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge, pp. 148–59. Barz, G., and J. Cohen (eds.) (2011) The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope, and Healing in Music and the Arts, New York: Oxford University Press Bebey, F. (1969) Musique de l’Afrique, Paris: Horizons de France (1975) African Music: A People’s Art, New York: Lawrence Hill & Co. Bender, W. (1989) Perspectives on African Music, Bayreuth African Studies Series 9, Bayreuth University (1991) Sweet Mother: Modern African Music, University of Chicago Press Berliner, P. (1993, orig. publ. 1978) The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, University of Chicago Press Blacking, J. (1973, orig. publ. 1990) How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press (1980) ‘Trends in the black music of South Africa 1959–1969’, in E. May (ed.), Musics of Many Cultures: An Introduction, Berkeley: University of California Press (1995a, orig. publ. 1967) Venda Children’s Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis, University of Chicago Press (1995b) Music, Culture, and Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking, University of Chicago Press Brandel, R. (1973, orig. publ.1961) The Music of Central Africa: An Ethnomusicological Study: Former French Equatorial Africa, the Former Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Uganda, Tanganyika, The Hague: M. Nijhoff Césaire, A. et al. (2001) Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Charry, E. S. (2000) Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa, University of Chicago Press Charry, E. S. (ed.) (2012) Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Chernoff, J. M. (1979) African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms, University of Chicago Press Cooke, P. (1998) ‘East Africa: An introduction’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 1, Africa, New York: Garland, pp. 598–609 Coplan, D. B. (1994) In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants, University of Chicago Press Curtis, N. (1920, orig. publ. 2002) Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent, Meneola, NY: Dover Damas, L., and D. L. Racine (1979) Léon-Gontran Damas, 1912–1978: Founder of Negritude: A Memorial Casebook, Washington, DC: University Press of America Danielson, V. (1998) ‘The Voice of Egypt’: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago Press Dietz, B., and B. Olatunji (1965) Musical Instruments of Africa: Their Nature, Use, and Place in the Life of a Deeply Musical People, New York: The John Day Company DjeDje, J. C. (2000) ‘West Africa: An introduction’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, New York: Garland (2008) Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

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DjeDje, J. C., and E. D. Brown (1999) Turn up the Volume! A Celebration of African Music, Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Erlmann, V. (1991) African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance, University of Chicago Press (1996) Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa, University of Chicago Press (1999) Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West, New York: Oxford University Press Euba, A. (1988) Essays on Music in Africa, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, Universität Bayreuth Euba, A., B. Omojola, and G. Dor (2005) Multiple Interpretations of Dynamics of Creativity and Knowledge in African Music Traditions: A Festschrift in Honor of Akin Euba on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, Point Richmond, CA: MRI Press Fage, J. D. (1971) ‘Music and history: A historian’s view of the African picture’, in K. Wachsmann (ed.), Essays on Music and History in Africa, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 257–66 Fales, N. (forthcoming) Whispered Inanga: Music and Tradition in Burundi, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Floyd, S. (1995) The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States, New York: Oxford University Press Friedson, S. M. (1996) Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, University of Chicago Press (2009) Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land, University of Chicago Press Gansemans, J., B. Schmidt-Wrenger, and S. Arom (1986) Zentralafrika, Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik Gaskin, L. J. P. (1965) A Select Bibliography of Music in Africa, African Bibliography Series B, London: International African Institute Gilman, L. (2009) The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Giving Voice to Hope: Music of Liberian Refugees (2009) compact disc, liner notes by E. Pourbiax, M. Frishkopf, and B. Tonge, Edmonton: University of Alberta Gray, J. (1991) African Music: A Bibliographical Guide to the Traditional, Popular, Art, and Liturgical Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Gunderson, F. (2000) Proceedings of the Forum for Revitalizing African Music Studies in Higher Education, University of Michigan, April 6–8, 2000, Ann Arbor, MI: ICAMD Henderson, C. E. (2008) ‘Dance and gender as contested sites in Southern Malawian Presbyterian churches’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge, pp. 429–48 Herbst, A., M. Nzewi, and V. K. Agawu (2003) Musical Arts in Africa: Theory, Practice and Education, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press Hornbostel, E. M. von (1928) ‘African Negro music’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 1, 1: 30–62 (1975) Opera Omnia, ed. and trans. K. Wachsmann, D. Christensen, and P. Reinecke, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Huntington, J. (2009) Sounding Off: Rhythm, Music, and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels, Philadelphia: Temple University Press

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Inanga: A Song of Survival in a Daughter’s Rwanda (2011) (film documentary and audio CD), prod. by G. Barz, Nashville, TN: Lime Pulp Records Jones, A. M. (1958) African Music in Northern Rodesia, and Some Other Places, Livingstone, Zambia (Northern Rhodesia): The Rhodes-Livingstone Museum (1959) Studies in African Music, London: Oxford University Press (1971, orig. publ. 1964) Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and Cultural Factors, Leiden: E. J. Brill Jorritsma, M. (2011) Sonic Spaces of the Karoo: The Sacred Music of a South African Coloured Community, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Kaemmer, J. E. (2000) ‘Southern Africa: An introduction’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, New York: Garland Kampala Flow: East African Hip Hop from Uganda (2010) Audio CD, prod. by G. Barz and G. Liu, Nashville, TN: Lime Pulp Records Keil, C. (1983, orig. publ. 1979) Tiv Song: The Sociology of Art in a Classless Society, University of Chicago Press Kirby, P. (1968, orig. publ. 1934) The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press Kisliuk, M. (1998) Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance, New York: Oxford University Press Kubik, G. (1982) Musikgeschichte in Bildern: Ostafrika, Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik (1994) Theory of African Music, Wilhelmshaven: F. Noetzel (1999) Africa and the Blues, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (2000) ‘Central Africa: An introduction’, in The Garland Handbook of African Music, ed. R. M. Stone, New York: Garland (2001) ‘Africa’, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 1, London: Macmillan, pp. 190–210 (2010) Theory of African Music, 2 vols., University of Chicago Press Kyagambiddwa, J. (1955) African Music from the Source of the Nile, New York: Praeger Lems-Dworkin, C. (1991) African Music: A Pan-African Annotated Bibliography, London: Hans Zell Locke, D. (2009) ‘Africa/Ewe, Mande, Dagbamba, Shona, BaAka’, in J. T. Titon (ed.), Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World’s Peoples, 5th edition, Belmont, CA: Schirmer, pp. 83–144 Marcus, S. L. (2006) Music in Egypt: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, New York: Oxford University Press Meintjes, L. (2003) Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Merriam, A. P. (1959) ‘An annotated bibliography of African and African-derived music since 1936’, Africa [London], 21, 4: 319–29 (1982a, orig. publ. 1959) ‘African Music’, in idem, African Music in Perspective, New York: Garland, pp. 65–108 (1982b, orig. publ. 1959) African Music in Perspective, New York: Garland (1982c, orig. publ. 1959) ‘Rhythm and concepts of time-reckoning’, in idem, African Music in Perspective, New York: Garland, pp. 293–311 (1970) African Music on LP: An Annotated Discography, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

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Monson, I. (ed.) (2003) African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, New York: Routledge Muller, C. A. (1999) Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa, University of Chicago Press (2008) Focus: Music of South Africa, New York: Routledge Nannyonga-Tamusuza, S. A. (2005) Baakisimba: Gender in the Music and Dance of the Baganda People of Uganda, New York: Routledge Nketia, J. H. K. (1974) The Music of Africa, New York: W.W. Norton (1998) ‘The scholarly study of African music: A historical review’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), Africa: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol.1, New York: Garland, pp. 13–73 (2004) ‘“Contemporary is only an analytical tool”: Interview with J.H. Kwabena Nketia’, S.-M. Thorsén (ed.), Sounds of Change: Social and Political Features of Music in Africa, Stockholm: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, pp. 199–211 (2005) Ethnomusicology and African Music: Collected Papers, Accra: Afram Publications Nketia, J. H. K., J. C. DjeDje, and W. G. Carter (eds.) (1989) African Musicology: Current Trends: A Festschrift Presented to J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Los Angeles: University of California African Studies Center Nzewi, M. (1997) African Music: Theoretical Content and Creative Continuum: The CultureExponent’s Definitions, Olderhausen: Institut für Didaktik populärer Musik Perullo, A. (2008) ‘Conceptions of song: Ownership, rights, and African copyright law’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge, pp. 44–53 (2011) Live from Dar es Salaam: Popular Music and Tanzania’s Music Economy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Reed, D. B. (2003) Dan Ge performance: Masks and Music in Contemporary Côte d’Ivoire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Sadie, S. (ed.) (2001) The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. edn, London: Macmillan Senghor, L. (1988) Ce que je crois: Négritude, francité et civilization de l’universel, Paris: B. Grasset Sheehy, D. (prod.) (2009) Borders y bailes: Texmaniacs, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Shelemay, K. K. (1989, orig. publ. 1986) Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press (1991) A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Simon, A. (2008) Ethnomusikologie: Aspekte, Methoden und Ziele, Berlin: Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswesen Stone, R. M. (2005) Music in West Africa: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, New York: Oxford University Press Stone, R. M. (ed.) (2008, orig. publ. 1998) The Garland Handbook of African Music, New York: Routledge Summit, J. A. (prod.) (2003) Abayudaya: Music From the Jewish People of Uganda, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (2008) ‘Music and the construction of identity among the Abayudaya (Jewish People) of Uganda’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge, pp. 312–24

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Tang, P. (2007) Masters of the Sabar: Wolof Griot Percussionists of Senegal, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Thieme, D. L. (1964) African Music: A Briefly Annotated Bibliography, Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Reference Department, Music Division Titon, J. T. (ed.) (1984) Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World’s Peoples, 1st edn, New York: Schirmer Tracey, H., G. Kubik, and A. T. N. Tracey (1969) Codification of African Music and Textbook Project: A Primer of Practical Suggestions for Field Research, Roodepoort, South Africa: International Library of African Music Turino, T. (1997) ‘The music of Sub-Saharan Africa’, in B. Nettl et al. (eds.), Excursions in World Music, 2nd edn, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 161–90 (2000) Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, University of Chicago Press Turnbull, C. (1968) The Forest People, New York: Simon and Schuster Varley, D. H. (1936) African Native Music: An Annotated Bibliography, London: The Royal Empire Society; repr. edn, Folkestone and London: Dawsons, 1970 Wachsmann, K. (1953) ‘The sound instruments’, in M. Trowell (ed.), Tribal Crafts of Uganda, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 311–415 (1971) Essays on Music and History in Africa, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press Wachsmann, K., and P. Cooke (1980) ‘Africa’, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 1, 1st edn, London: Macmillan, pp. 144–53 Warren, F., L. Warren, and P. Naylor (1970) The Music of Africa: An Introduction, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Waterman, C. A. (1990) Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music, University of Chicago Press Wendt, C. C. (2000) ‘North Africa: An introduction’, in R. M. Stone (ed.), The Garland Handbook of African Music, New York: Garland

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The politics of music categorization in Portugal SALWA EL-SHAWAN CASTELO-BRANCO

Introduction The categories of music are ideologically grounded symbolic constructs that are assigned meanings through interpretive processes. From this perspective, music categories are not bounded ahistorical domains characterized by constellations of presumably authentic and perennial traits (Lima dos Santos, 1988), but rather subjective interpretive models that are in constant flux. As symbolic constructs, music categories have been used as effective mechanisms for emphasizing unity or difference, constructing identities, inculcating or combating nationalist ideologies, mobilizing and integrating rural populations in the modernist state, and exercising power. Whether common-sense notions, scholarly concepts, or what Richard Middleton refers to as “interest-bound categories” (1990; see also Middleton in this volume) formulated by cultural politicians, journalists, or the global recording industry, music categories affect the ways in which musical worlds are constructed, the ways musicians and listeners perceive and participate in music making, as well as the ways disciplines and fields of study are configured. In ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore, popular-music studies, and related disciplines, categorization has been the subject of recurrent debate. Definitions and critical discussions of notions such as “the folk,” folklore, tradition, “high” culture, art, folk, and popular music were at the core of the demarcation of disciplinary subject matter. Until recently, the tripartite paradigm differentiating repertories into “art” or “classical,” folk, and popular music has been widely used in scholarly and journalistic discourse. Critical of its ideological underpinnings and of the criteria according to which musical repertories are classified (rural or urban provenance, social class, oral or written transmission, communal music sharing, and musical complexity), many scholars have pointed out the shortcomings of notions such as folk music (Keil 1978;

An earlier version of this chapter was published in Portuguese in the Galician journal, Etno-Folk: Revista Galega de Etnomusicoloxia, 3, 2 (2008).

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Porter 1993) and the tripartite paradigm (art, folk, and popular music) as an analytical tool in any context, but particularly outside Europe and North America where musical styles and genres are differentiated according to distinct criteria. For example, Bruno Nettl’s discussion on the interrelatedness of musical styles in Tehran (1978), Jihad Racy’s studies of Arab music (1982), and my own work on musical domains in Cairo (El-Shawan [Castelo-Branco] 1980, 1981), and Jocelyn Guilbault’s (1993) analysis of the politics of labeling in the Francophone Caribbean. More recently, Mathew Gelbart (2007) discusses the origin of the notions of folk and art music, demonstrating their interdependence as a binary dialectical pairing; Fabian Holt (2007) problematizes genre in popular music and Anthony Guest-Scott (2008) and Heather Sparling (2008) deal with issues of genre in music-store guitar lessons and Cape Breton Gaelic culture, respectively. The mutating nature (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) of our disciplinary subject marked by the impact of technology and globalization, the disjuncture between names and what they stand for, “the danger of over-rigid definitions usually built on a failure to recognize underlying assumptions and ideologies” as Middleton has pointed out, call for revisiting the issue of music categorization (Middleton 1990). We could undertake several tasks. First, redefine old concepts, rendering them adequate for the analysis of the processes that characterize the musical worlds of the twenty-first century. Second, we could propose new concepts that represent the multiple processes that characterize contemporary musical production. Third, resonating with Charles Seeger, Richard Middleton, and other scholars, we could conceive of music as a single domain of cultural production with differentiated practices, and develop analytical tools that can provide an understanding of the web of connections between technology, political, and social institutions and cultural production on the local, national, and global levels. Fourth, we could attempt to gain a better understanding of the politics and discursive dynamics of music categorization, explore its impact on disciplinary formations and on ethnomusicological practice. It is this latter point that I address in the present chapter, for by understanding the politics of categorization we could theorize about one of the ways through which difference and power are historically recognized and historiographically exercised through music. Drawing upon my ethnographic and historical research on nationalism and cultural politics in modern Portugal, this chapter address the following questions: How are musical categories formulated discursively? How are they assigned meanings and by whom? How and why do these meanings change? Who affects those changes and why? How does music categorization affect music discourse and the ways it is marketed? How are difference and power recognized and exercised through categorization?

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Ethnography, music discourse, and nation-building in Portugal I now turn to a discussion of the issues I delineated above as they pertain to Portugal. I focus on three distinct periods marked by political transformations that had a major impact on Portuguese society and culture. The first period extends from the mid-nineteenth century up to the first quarter of the twentieth century. It saw two major political regimes: the monarchy and a shortlived republican government that was established in 1910 and ended with a coup d’état in 1926. A period of turmoil followed, leading to the establishment of the totalitarian regime dubbed Estado Novo (new state) led by António de Oliveira Salazar in 1933 and lasting just over forty years before ending with the April 25, 1974 revolution. The third period of democratic rule extends from 1974 to the present, the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Music categories and the construction of nation: povo, cultura popular, and folclore In Portugal, the perception, performance, collecting, and research of expressive culture in rural areas were grounded in notions such as “povo” (roughly translatable as the folk), “cultura popular” (literally, popular culture; however, as discussed below, cultura popular in Portuguese does not have the same meaning as popular culture in English, as is the case in other Latin languages), and “folklore.” Widely used within and outside scholarly discourse since the nineteenth century, these polysemic concepts were assigned diverse meanings in distinct periods by different actors (politicians, scholars, collectors, journalists, and musicians, music industry agents), and were associated with nationalist ideology, political opposition to totalitarian rule, local and regional politics, and the marketing of music products. In the second half of the nineteenth century, within the framework of the Romantic and nationalist movements, cultura popular was an object of study within the then-emerging fields of ethnography, philology, and music folklore. It included songs, poetry, dances, and artifacts, as well as other expressions of material and immaterial culture. During this period, intellectuals and social elites, especially the bourgeoisie, sought the “roots of the nation” in what they designated “cultura popular” (Leal 2000; Pina Cabral 1991, 15) or, more rarely, folklore, roughly conceptualized as the authentic and unique heritage of rural populations, presumably united by a common spirit (Castelo-Branco and Cidra 2010). This connection of cultura popular to the essence of the nation was clearly articulated in the following definition of the goals of ethnography by José Leite

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de Vasconcelos (1858–1940), the most prolific Portuguese ethnographer, whose monumental work spanned the final quarter of the nineteenth century until the late 1930s: [Ethnography aims at] examining what provides character and cohesion to a “povo,” distinguishing it from another, [defining] what is congenital and primitive, or what, through time, and the appropriation of what was brought by other peoples, turned typical, direct and indirect products of its psyche, or (Leite de Vasconcelos 1933, 2; cited in Cabral 1991) thus judged.1

Committed to the liberal Republican left, Leite de Vasconcelos shared the same political agenda with other intellectuals who collected and created the texts of cultura popular, such as the writer Almeida Garrett (1799–1854), the politician and literary scholar Teófilo Braga (1843–1924), and the ethnographer Adolfo Coelho (1847–1919) (Ramos 2003, 26). Their work was an instrument of what the historian Rui Ramos has designated “civic patriotism” (ibid.), which, so these intellectuals claimed, should be based on knowledge about the nation as a “scientific fact” (ibid., 27). In 1910, the year the Republican regime was installed, the writer Afonso Lopes Vieira launched a campaign for what he designated as the “re-portuguesifying” of Portugal by creating a “modern art” inspired by rural models in the domains of music, painting, architecture, and literature (ibid., 30). In fact, re-Portuguesifying the country on the basis of “positive knowledge” about rural cultures, subsumed under the rubric cultura popular, became one of the cornerstones of the short-lived democratic regime (ibid., 35). The connection between cultura popular and the nation was also articulated through a cycle of commemorative expositions inaugurated in 1880 with the tercentennial of the death of the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões (1524–80). During the Estado Novo, such events exhibited stylized representations of the rural world as well as indigenous people and artifacts from the former Portuguese colonies, in an attempt to configure a continental national identity grounded in rural patrimony, and an overseas one encompassing the ethnic diversity of the Portuguese Empire. The first colonial exposition (Exposição Colonial Portuguesa) took place in Oporto in 1934. It was followed by the exposition of Popular Art in Lisbon in 1936, culminating in the 1940 Exposition of the Portuguese World (Exposição do Mundo Português) that exalted Portugal’s historical heritage, Christian faith, colonial empire, and rural patrimony. At the close of the twentieth century, Lisbon 94, the recognition of Lisbon as a European Cultural Capital, highlighted the

1 All translations from Portuguese in this chapter are by the author.

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well-known popular-song tradition fado as an ingredient of the capital’s identity. Later, the Expo-98 World Exposition in Portugal exhibited popular musics from the lusophone world as a central ingredient in the construction of the modern nation. From the final decades of the nineteenth century until the 1930s, cultura popular figured as part of the entertainment of urban aristocrats and bourgeois circles. In their parties and social gatherings, they wore costumes inspired by rural models and performed arrangements for piano and voice of songs collected in rural areas and canonized in a handful of songbooks published between the 1850s and 1900s (Castelo-Branco and Branco 2003). The threevolume Cancioneiro de Músicas Populares, containing over 600 harmonized arrangements for voice and piano, was intended for performance by amateur musicians in Lisbon and Oporto’s salons, each song being dedicated to a woman from aristocratic or bourgeois social circles. Compiled by the composer and music teacher César das Neves (1841–1920) and journalist Gualdino Campos (1847–1919), this landmark publication included rural and urban genres that were popular in Portugal at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as songs from other parts of Europe and the lusophone world (Lisbon’s fado, Brazil’s lundum and modinha, and Goa’s mandó), thus extending the concept of “música popular,” which until then had provided an index to rural patrimony. The notion of música popular has been part of academic and journalistic discourse since the mid-nineteenth century and has acquired several meanings. It referred both to music in rural areas as well as to urban popular musics. The broader meaning attributed to música popular used in nineteenth-century songbooks was short-lived. During the first half of the twentieth century, many collectors used the term “música popular” to refer to rural musics that they associated with authenticity. In the 1960s and 1970s, música popular, to which the qualifier portuguesa, or Portuguese, was often added, designated a new eclectic urban musical idiom, partly inspired by rural musical styles. Created and performed by politically engaged musicians such as José Afonso, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, and José Mário Branco, this repertory became a locus for political resistance against totalitarian rule. The resignification of the concepts of música popular, povo and cultura popular should be viewed within the framework of nation-building in which expressive culture played an important role. Following 1974, cultura popular was used to reinforce revolutionary ideals, with which notions such as povo and música popular became associated because of the ways they symbolically incorporated the working class after the revolution. Música popular portuguesa was also the designation given to urban music revival groups that

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proposed a new model for the representation of music from rural areas that is distinct from the folkloric model institutionalized by the totalitarian regime. Some of these groups have been integrated into the global performance circuit of world music and Celtic music. In the 1990s, música popular was again resignified, and was used to designate a diverse array of vernacular musics. At the same time, música popular as a label for presumably authentic rural musics was replaced by música tradicional. At the same time, the term “folclore” was reserved exclusively for folkloric representation and the social practices associated with it (see the discussion below).

“Politics of the Spirit” and the categorization of cultural phenomena (1933–1974) The totalitarian regime, known as Estado Novo (new state), was established in 1933 and lasted just over forty years. The regime’s cultural policy, dubbed Política do espírito (Politics of the Spirit, a notion that stood for cultural politics), was designed by António Ferro (1895–1956), a journalist and writer who headed the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN; the Secretariat of National Propaganda) from its founding in 1933 until 1949, the governmental institution that conceived and implemented the Salazar regime’s propaganda and cultural policy in Portugal and abroad. He also directed Portuguese State Radio from 1941 to 1949, a medium that since its founding in 1934 was designed to inculcate the regime’s ideology. Based on the regime’s ideological cornerstones – namely, nationalism, Catholicism, authority, ruralism, and traditionalism – the Política do Espírito primarily aimed at the construction of a national identity grounded in the regime’s ideology. It was implemented by a network of governmental institutions integrated within the corporatist structure of the Estado Novo, ensuring state control over expressive culture by defining aesthetic ideals, modeling, regulating, and monitoring expressive behavior and cultural activities, fabricating cultural products and modes of expressive behavior that embodied the regime’s ideology, instrumentalizing expressive culture for political propaganda (couched as the political education of the people), and controlling cultural production by censoring texts and performances, licensing musicians, and authorizing performance venues and events (Côrte-Real 2000, 47). The categorization of cultural phenomena provided a framework for designing and implementing the Estado Novo’s strategy for culture and was used by government institutions and censorship agencies as a highly effective mechanism for controlling expressive behavior (ibid., 49–50). A conceptual and programmatic distinction (Nery 2010) was made between alta cultura

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(high culture), cultura popular (popular culture), and espectáculos (roughly, performance). Alta cultura included the arts and sciences, and was the domain of the intelligentsia. Cultura popular was a broad notion that designated the most widespread modes of rural and urban expressive culture, to the degree, that is, that these did not contradict the regime’s ideology. It was anchored in the notion of povo (folk) that in the definition of the National Foundation of Joy in Work (a government organism that supported the leisure activities of workers) includes “workers of all professions, and not only industrial workers . . . and is constituted by stable families, guaranteed by the diverse professions of their heads” (Pelouro da Cultura da FNAT 1944, 8; cited in Melo 2001, 65). In the absence of other criteria, education was emphasized as an important element in the definition of povo: “We can consider as povo all those men who did not receive the benefits of higher education or who, as autodidacts, did not reach the same level” (ibid., 10–11). From the perspective of FNAT, the connection between povo and cultura popular is direct, given that cultura popular “emanates from and circulates among the povo” (ibid.). Cultura popular was especially associated with supposedly traditional and conservative expressive culture from rural areas, considered a foundational element of national identity that must be protected from the threats of modernity (ibid., 66–7). Until World War II, the Salazar regime had an ambiguous or even hostile stance toward fado, which was initially left out of its taxonomy and master plan for culture. Following 1945, after recognizing fado’s potential as propaganda, the government reversed its stance, and fado was incorporated within the realm of música popular and appropriated as canção nacional (national song) to promote the regime’s populist image (Nery 2004, 238, 240). In post-World War II Portugal, the majority of the government’s attention and resources were directed toward modeling, regulating, promoting, monitoring, and instrumentalizing representations of cultura popular for political and ideological indoctrination. The notion of espectáculo (performance) was used by the Estado Novo’s complex web of regulating, censoring, and propaganda institutions to refer to a wide range of domains in which performance was central, including theater, dance, cinema, bullfighting, and football, to name only a few of these domains.

Folclore Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the notion of folclore was occasionally used interchangeably with cultura popular, denoting orally transmitted patrimonies associated with rural areas, authenticity, and archaism.

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Since the 1930s, this notion became associated with the folklorization model that was institutionalized by the Estado Novo. A central component in Salazar’s nation-building project, folkloric representation was used as a means of ideological indoctrination and as a code for interpreting the nation destined for both internal and external consumption (Castelo-Branco and Branco 2003). Formally structured groups designated ranchos folclóricos were formed to represent fragments of the music, dance, and costumes of a rural parish (freguesia), a municipality (concelho), or a province (província). Within this process, canonic genres, styles, and repertories associated with specific regions were established. The dance genre vira, for example, became almost exclusively associated with the northwestern region of Minho, notwithstanding its dissemination in many other areas of continental Portugal under the same or other distinct designations. Similarly, two-part polyphonic singing by men’s choral groups was promoted by governmental institutions and their local mediators as the representative singing style in the region of southern Alentejo in the south of Portugal, neglecting women’s participation in polyphonic singing as well as myriad other genres and styles that thrive in the region. How was the model for fabricating folklore configured and implemented? What were the meanings attributed to the notion of folclore? How did the opposition to Salazar’s regime counteract the Estado Novo’s “official” folclore? What was the trajectory of folclore following the revolution? Anthropologist António Medeiros has shown that the process of configuring folclore as a mode for representing the regime began within the framework of the First Portuguese Colonial Exposition organized by the Bureau of National Propaganda (Secretariado Nacional de Propaganda) in Oporto in 1934, emulating the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris in which Portugal had participated. The exposition presented the first formulation of modernized and stylized representations of fragments from the cultures of rural Portugal and selected African colonies within an invented format especially conceived for this purpose, the “ethnographic procession” (cortejo etnográfico) that exhibited music, dance, costumes, handicraft, and indigenous peoples brought from Portugal’s African colonies for the occasion (Medeiros 2003). The same format was used six years later in a large-scale celebration, the Exposition of the Portuguese World (Exposição do Mundo Português), that commemorated the centennial of the foundation of the nation in 1140, and the regaining of Portuguese sovereignty following sixty years of Spanish domination in 1640. In short, within the framework of the first Portuguese Colonial Exposition, the Secretariat for Propaganda provided guidelines and created opportunities for fabricating an appropriate symbolic discourse imbued with the regime’s

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ideology, combining modern and traditional elements (ibid.). Within this framework, the main ingredients of a model for the fabrication of folclore began to take shape and the ideal of rural patrimony as one of the foundations of the nation was inculcated.

The competition for the “Most Portuguese of All Villages” A single event – the competition for the “Most Portuguese of All Villages” (Concurso a Aldeia mais Portuguesa de Portugal) – organized by the National Secretariat of Information and Propaganda in 1938, established a model for the visual and sonic representation of the nation through formally structured music and dance groups that performed local repertories in costume, supposedly going back to an idealized past situated between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Emphasizing authenticity, antiquity, and uniqueness, the competition endeavored to select the most Portuguese of all villages on the European continent. The winning village should demonstrate (and I quote the competition’s regulation) “[the] greatest resistance . . . to decomposition [of local tradition] and foreign influences . . . conserving [them] in their purest state” (SPN 1938). The items taken into consideration were – and here I am using the competition’s categories – housing, furniture and domestic objects, costumes, craft, forms of commerce, transportation; poetry, stories, superstitions, games, chant, music, choreography, theater, festivals (festas), and other local uses and functions; topography and landscape. Each village had to compete before a national jury on a specific day, staging its local traditions in the most “natural” way. In addition to presenting existing resources, the competing villages were allowed to organize original events or local traditions that represent “its ethnic milieu and administrative area” (Regulamento 1938). Coached by local culture brokers and urban-based intellectuals, the villagers recreated traditions that had fallen out of practice, invented new ones, presented ritual out of its original context, and constituted music and dance groups that performed recreations of local traditions. All competing villages attempted to represent an image of the “perfect Portuguese village,” using a rhetoric that emphasized its mysterious, transcendental, old, traditional, and natural characteristics (Felix 2003). The jury selected Monsanto, a village in central eastern Portugal close to the Spanish border, as the Most Portuguese of All Villages. As a reward, Monsanto was offered a Silver Rooster, a new road that led to the medieval castle situated on top of a hill, and an inn to accommodate visitors. Conceived by urban politicians and intellectuals to promote Salazar’s nationalist ideology, the competition was decisive in institutionalizing a

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model for staging local expressive culture, and transforming it into a commodity for urban consumption and tourism, that was subsequently reappropriated in rural areas as the authentic representation of local culture (ibid.). Following the competition, the notion of folclore that had been previously associated with rural culture became indelibly linked to the model of the representation of rural expressive culture configured for the event and embodied in the performances of ranchos folclóricos. As one of ethnomusicologist Maria do Rosário Pestana’s interlocutors in Manhouce, a village that participated in the competition, remarked, the 1938 contest represented the “beginning of folklore” (Pestana 2003). Following the competition, the government supported and monitored folklore groups through its local and national network of institutions. By the 1950s, a full-fledged folklore movement was clearly underway. Following the establishment of democracy in 1974, contrary to the expectations of cultural politicians and intellectuals, the folklore movement that was institutionalized and promoted by Salazar’s regime expanded considerably (Castelo-Branco and Branco 2003, 15). According to the data gathered through a questionnaire administered to folklore groups in 1999 by a research team at the Instituto de Etnomusicologia at the New University of Lisbon, over 3,000 groups were reported to have been active throughout the country, mobilizing more than 100,000 members of both genders and covering a wide range of ages, from children under the age of ten to adults over the age of seventy (Castelo-Branco et al. 2003). The constitution, repertory, and performance practice of folklore groups institutionalized in 1938 has been maintained until the present, but their sponsorship was transferred to the municipalities and other local institutions. The regulation of folklore groups has been essentially ensured by a private voluntary association, the Federation of Portuguese Folklore, by local associations, and by the groups themselves. No longer established officially to represent the nation, but guided by the ideal of authenticity, most groups seek to represent music, dance, and costumes of the locale in which they are based which usually corresponds to a parish (freguesia). By the end of the twentieth century, folklore groups in Portugal mobilized thousands of performers and attracted large audiences, perpetuated memories, recreated repertories, animated public spaces and events, provided new contexts of sociability, reconstructed and negotiated local identities and powers, and provided commodities that incremented the tourist and culture industries. As Freitas Branco and I have suggested (2003), the continuity of folklore practice within the framework of different political regimes suggests that folklore performance has been a valuable resource for

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mobilizing populations both socially and politically, a fact that accounts for the continuity in democracy of a model for folklorization that was instituted in 1938 by the authoritarian regime. Within the universe of ranchos folclóricos, the notion of folclore continues to signify the music and dance repertory of rural origin that they represent. In democracy, folclore came to denote the model of folkloric representation of rural patrimony, as well as the associated repertory, and performance style. It has also come to denote a broader meaning, as anthropologist João Vasconcelos points out, a social field that includes rancho members and leaders that constitute formal and informal networks, its sponsors, regulating institutions on the national and local levels, costume and music instrument makers, a market that includes events such as festivals and fairs, and tourist venues (Vasconcelos 2001). In addition, as ethnographer Kimberly Holton (2005) has shown, since the 1990s folclore as a social field also operates within a local–global nexus, drawing “on a transnational network” of Portuguese emigrants to create what Arjun Appadurai calls “communities of sentiment,” communities comprising individuals across disparate locations who “begin to imagine and feel things together” (Appadurai 1996, 8). The community of sentiment that developed around folklore performance provides an emotional sense of purpose, cultural venues, and funding opportunities for ranchos to travel and perform in various hubs of lusophone emigrant settlement (Holton 2005).

Opposition to the Estado Novo: the cultural militancy of Fernando Lopes-Graça There were also scholars and musicians, some of whom integrated the regime’s opposition, who contested the model of representation of rural expressive culture conceived and implemented by the cultural policy of the Estado Novo. Composer Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906–94) was a leading figure in the opposition against the Estado Novo, a stance that cost him the loss of a teaching position at the National Conservatory in Lisbon, as well as generating permanent political persecution. His struggle was both ideological and aesthetic. His work as composer, scholar of Portuguese music, pianist, choral conductor, and music teacher was guided by his conviction of the symbolic power and transformative potential of music. He used his harmonizations of music from rural areas and other choral works as a “pacific weapon” against the regime. Inspired by Béla Bartók and other nationalist composers, he sought to find in music from rural areas the essence of Portugueseness, a basis for the creation of a Portuguese musical idiom, and a vehicle for educational and ideological combat. For Lopes-Graça, music from rural areas was a “refuge,” a “salvation,”

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and a “flame for combat and affirmation of a truly national spirit” (Lopes-Graça 1974, 44). Apart from a few field trips in the regions of Beira Baixa and Alentejo, LopesGraça’s contact with rural musics was through extant publications including musical notation as well as through the ethnographic recordings made by the Corsican collector Michel Giacometti (1920–90) between 1959 and the 1980s that he analyzed, selected, transcribed, annotated, and published. A prolific author, Lopes-Graça published over thirty volumes of essays and, jointly with Tomás Borba, a two-volume Dictionary of Music (Lopes-Graça and Borba 1956). Covering a wide range of topics, his writings argue for the aesthetic value of authentic Portuguese rural song, which he designated canção popular portuguesa (popular Portuguese song), a term which he used interchangeably with canção rústica (rural song) or canção regional (regional song). Avoiding the use of the term “folklore” in his discourse, a notion that he associated with the Estado Novo’s fabricated model, he contrasted canção popular with what he sometimes referred to as “folkloric counterfeit” (contrafacção folclórica), a symptom of what he ironically diagnosed as “severe folkloritis” (folclorite aguda). He was also highly critical of fado and other genres of urban popular music, which were subsumed under the label música ligeira (light music). Through his action as an arranger of songs from rural areas and choral conductor, and through his writings, musical transcriptions, and ethnographic recordings, Lopes-Graça had a vast influence on urban musicians and intellectuals prior to and following the 1974 revolution. His ideals, methods, and discourse were emulated in the work of the generation of collectors that followed and were echoed in journalistic writing. His association of música popular with what anthropologists Branco and Oliveira referred to as “cultural militancy” (Branco and Oliveira 1993) and the recordings and transcriptions that he made available were instrumental in the development of a politically engaged urban popular music in the 1960s and 1970s and in the adoption of música popular portuguesa (popular Portuguese music) as its generic designation.

Música ligeira Música ligeira (light music) was yet another category used by the Estado Novo’s organizations. In the early twentieth century, it denoted music composed within the framework of the operetta and the revista theater, a kind of Portuguese vaudeville that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. The concept, however, gained new substance within the framework of the music production system launched by Portuguese National Radio (Emissora Nacional) inaugurated in 1935 (Moreira et al. 2010). Under the administrative

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structure of the Bureau of National Propaganda, National Radio defined as one of its priorities, “Portuguesifying” música ligeira (Moreira 2013). This goal was carried out by sponsoring the creation of a Portuguese popular idiom inspired in music from rural areas that, in the government’s view, could help combat the then popular foreign styles such as jazz and tango (also subsumed under the label música ligeira), and provide an alternative to fado and revista songs. State radio also encouraged instrumental practice within the domain of música ligeira by sponsoring an orchestral complex that included classical, light, and folk-music orchestras as well as smaller instrumental groupings (ibid.). In the 1960s, within the framework of the Television Song Festival (the national festival that selected the song that was to compete in the annual Eurovision Song Contest), a new emphasis was given to the concept of canção ligeira (light song), providing continuity to the model configured and disseminated by state radio (César and Tilly 2010). Composers and performers who were involved in this event also appropriated the concept. Following 1974, música ligeira continued to bear connotations from the Estado Novo and its cultural policy, leading to the replacement of this notion by música popular. Música ligeira, however, is still used by Portugal’s “Authors Society” as a generic term for classifying all compositions that are not considered “art music.”

Música popular, ethnomusicology, and popular-music studies The institutionalization of modern ethnomusicology and popular-music studies in Portuguese academia represented, and continues to represent, a major challenge. In Portugal, as in some other European countries, the borders between academia, political and cultural institutions, and the media are porous. The politics and discursive dynamics of categorization reflected in cultural policy, in action, and in the discourse about music that I have attempted to characterize, constitute a legacy with which disciplinary institutionalization has to grapple. While modern ethnomusicology as a scholarly discipline is only known to a few within academia, in journalistic discourse the term “ethnomusicology” has been used at least since the 1980s and is indelibly associated with the mythical figure of the lone male collector in search of a lost world, wandering from village to village with his recording machine, an image that was associated with the collector Michel Giacometti. Interestingly, Fernando Lopes-Graça always emphasized that he was not an ethnomusicologist, but rather a composer who was interested in rural music primarily as a source for the creation of a national music idiom. The rural world having been lost and

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reinvented, the ethnomusicologist found it necessary to turn to recordings. I refer here to an interview with a collector of 78 rpm recordings of fado and other popular-music genres published in the daily newspaper Jornal de Notícias in 2007, in which the collector was identified by the interviewer as an ethnomusicologist. In journalistic discourse, ethnomusicology thus has become an ideologically grounded symbolic construct that serves as an index to salvaging patrimony, live or recorded, rural or urban. These two references would not be significant if it were not for the fact that journalistic construction of the ethnomusicologist creates an impact on decision makers, in funding agencies, local and national government, and even in academic institutions. As we seek to assess our terminologies and categories, and those of our interlocutors, and to refine our analytical concepts given the changing nature of our disciplinary subjects, we must also evaluate the social role of our discipline and the ways we could engage with the musical and cultural worlds we study. The term “música popular” has been central in discourse about music since the late nineteenth century and has been resignified several times, designating “authentic” music collected in rural areas, broadly based urban song, and finally a politically engaged eclectic repertory. In fact, the question of categorization and terminology has been a challenge in both the structuring and the editorial process of the Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, a reference work addressing all musical domains that aims at addressing the specialist as well as the general readership (Castelo-Branco et al. 2010). Since I launched the first program in ethnomusicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 1982, I have been emphasizing that modern ethnomusicology provides the conceptual and methodological tools for studying any kind of music, and that popular music constitutes an object of study within the discipline of ethnomusicology, and it has done so throughout its modern history. The graduate program in Lisbon has attracted a small but steady number of students, mostly with a conventional academic background. Most students begin their studies in a conservatory or music school, continuing within a university program. In 2006, we launched a postgraduate program in Popular Music Studies. To my surprise and satisfaction, the program initially attracted musicians from the universe of música popular (urban popular music). To my knowledge, none of the students was aware of the field of popular-music studies before they enrolled in the program. I suspect that it was their close identification with the notion of música popular that attracted them to advanced ethnomusicological study, which they saw as a possibility of acquiring the tools for better understanding their own work as musicians and their milieu.

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Final observations A critical examination of the politics and discursive dynamics of music categorization contributes to clarifying the relations between music and power. It allows us to verify how the classification of musical phenomena can be used as mechanisms for musical and social differentiation, ideological indoctrination, political control, and commercial interests. Music categorization conditions the production and consumption of music. The appropriation of music categories and the underlying ideologies by musicians has an impact on music production, stimulating musical changes that reconfigure styles to conform to the criteria used by collectors and scholars to demarcate musical categories. A case in point is provided by formally structured groups in Portugal that have opted for limiting their repertories to the canon established by folklorists, crystallizing performance styles, or over-emphasizing stylistic elements evaluated by folklorists as traditional. For example, choral groups in Alentejo associate slow tempo and profuse ornamentation with authenticity, exaggerating these traits in their performances (Moniz 2007). The association of musical styles and repertories with specific concepts conditions the contexts and meanings of musical performance. In contemporary Portugal, referring to a composition as música pimba (a controversial journalistic term used to label strophic songs with simple melodies intended for social dancing) or música popular is a decisive factor in marketing performances and commercial recordings, in selecting performance venues and attributing symbolic value to the music, and in the audience it draws. The distinct meanings attributed to the same concepts by different actors and their resignification throughout more than one hundred years emphasizes the need to situate discourses about music historically and ethnographically, and to develop the historiographic tools that allow us to understand music as a domain of cultural production with differentiated practices, and the ways through which these practices are part of complex webs of social, political, and commercial relations on the local, national, and global level.

Bibliography Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Branco, J. F., and L. T. Oliveira (1993) Ao encontro do Povo: I. A Missão, Oeiras: Celta Castelo-Branco, S. E.-S. (ed.) (2010) Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, 4 vols., Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores

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Castelo-Branco, S. E.-S., and J. F. Branco (2003) ‘Folclorização em Portugal: Uma perspectiva’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco and J. F. Branco (eds.), Vozes do Povo: A folclorização em Portugal, Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 1–24 Castelo-Branco, S. E.-S., and R. Cidra (2010) ‘Música popular’, in S. E.-S. CasteloBranco (ed.), Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores Castelo-Branco, S. E.-S., J. S. Neves, and M. J. Lima (2003) ‘Perfis dos grupos de música tradicional em Portugal em finais do século XX’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco and J. F. Branco (eds.), Vozes do Povo: A folclorização em Portugal, Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 73–142 César, A. J., and A. Tilly (2010) ‘Festival RTP da canção’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores Côrte-Real, M. de S. J. (2000) ‘Cultural policy and musical expression in Lisbon in the transition from dictatorship to democracy 1960s to 1980s’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University El-Shawan [Castelo-Branco], S. (1980) ‘The socio-political context of Al-Musiqa Al-Arabiyyah in Cairo, Egypt: Policies, patronage, institutions and musical change 1927–1977’, Asian Music, 12, 1: 86–128 (1981) ‘Al-Musiqa Al-Arabiyyah: A category of urban music in Cairo, Egypt, 1927–1977’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University Félix, P. (2003) ‘O Concurso “A Aldeia Mais Portuguesa de Portugal” 1938’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco and J. F. Branco (eds.), Vozes do Povo: A folclorização em Portugal, Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 207–32 Gelbart, M. (2007) The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner, Cambridge University Press Guest-Scott, A. (2008) ‘Categories in motion: The use of generic multiplicity in music store guitar lessons’, Ethnomusicology, 52, 3: 426–57 Guilbault, J. (1993) Zouk: World Music in the West Indies, with G. Averill, E. Benoit, and G. Rabess, University of Chicago Press Holt, F. (2007) Genre in Popular Music, University of Chicago Press Holton, K. (2005) Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos from Lisbon to Newark, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Keil, C. (1978) ‘Who needs the folk?’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 15: 263–5 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1998) ‘Folklore’s crisis’, Journal of American Folklore, 111: 281–327 Leal, J. (2000) Etnografias portuguesas 1870–1970: Cultura popular e identidade nacional, Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote Leite de Vasconcelos, J. (1933–42) Etnografia portuguesa, 3 vols., Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional de Lisboa Lima dos Santos, M. de L. (1988) ‘Questionamento à volta de três noções: A grande cultura, a cultura popular, a cultura de massas’, Análise Social, 24, 101–1: 689–702 Lopes-Graça, F. (1974, orig. publ.1953) A canção popular portuguesa, Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América Lopes-Graça, F., and T. Borba (1956) Dicionário de Música (ilustrado), Lisbon: Edições Cosmos Medeiros, A. (2003) ‘Primeira exposição colonial portuguesa (1934): Representação etnográfica e cultura popular moderna’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco and

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J. F. Branco (eds.), Vozes do Povo: A folclorização em Portugal, Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 155–70 Melo, D. (2001) Salazarismo e Cultura Popular 1933–1958, Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais Middleton, R. (1990) Studying Popular Music, Milton Keynes: Open University Press Moniz, J. (2007) ‘A folclorização do cante alentejano: Um estudo de caso do Grupo Coral Os Ceifeiros de Cuba 1933–2007’, MA thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa Moreira, P. R. (2013) ‘“Cantando espalharei por toda parte”: Programação, produção musical e o “aportuguesamento” da “música ligeira” na Emissora Nacional de Radiodifusão’, PhD dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa Moreira, P., R. Cidra, and S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco (2010) ‘Música ligeira’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores Nery, R. (2004) Para uma história do fado, Lisbon: Público (2010) ‘Política cultural,’ in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX, Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores Nettl, B. (1978) ‘Persian classical music in Tehran’, in idem (ed.), Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Neves, C., and G. de Campos (1893–8) Cancioneiro de músicas populares, 3 vols., Porto: Tip. ocidental/Empresa Editora César, Campos & Cª Pestana, M. do R. (2000) ‘Vozes da Terra: A folclorizaçao em Manhouce, 1938–2000’, MA thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2003) ‘Folclorização em Manhouce’, in S. E.-S. Castelo-Branco and J. F. Branco (eds.), Vozes do Povo: A folclorização em Portugal, Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 387–400 Pina Cabral, J. (1991) Os Contextos da Antropologia, Lisbon: Difel Porter, J. (1993) ‘Convergence, divergence and dialectic in folksong paradigms: Critical directions in transatlantic scholarship’, Journal of American Folklore, 106: 61–98 Racy, A. J. (1982) ‘Musical aesthetics in present-day Cairo’, Ethnomusicology, 26, 3: 391–406 Ramos, R. (2003) ‘A ciência do povo e as origens do estado cultural’, in Salwa E.-S. Castelo-Branco and J. F. Branco (eds.), Vozes do Povo: A folclorização em Portugal, Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 25–36 Sparling, H. (2008) ‘Categorically speaking: Towards a theory of (musical) genre in Cape Breton Gaelic culture’, Ethnomusicology, 52, 3: 401–25 Vasconcelos, J. (2001) ‘Estéticas e políticas do folclore’, Análise Social, 158–9: 399–433

. 27 .

The world according to the Roma MICHAEL BECKERMAN

History is the study of what we know about the past and how we come to know it, but it is also the study of what we do not, and perhaps, cannot know about the past, and why that is so. The proper study of history embraces both the knowable and unknowable and proceeds by taking time to accept or reject null hypotheses. Oswald Lansky, What Is History? (2007)1

Introduction: 1730 – the Uhrovská Zbierka I am holding in my hand a Slovak facsimile of what was also considered a Hungarian manuscript that may contain some of the only collected musical material from the early eighteenth century documenting the presence of Gypsies or Roma in Central Europe. Slovaks, Hungarians, Gypsies (Uhrovská Zbierka). There are enough problems in these designations to occupy us for quite a while. What do such things mean? And what did they signify in 1730, and specifically what might they have meant to the musicians who may have used the manuscript in their performances? We have no real answers to any of these questions, and especially know nothing about the performers who used the collection. It goes without saying that we also know very little about the way their music might have sounded to us, and even less about the way it sounded to its contemporary audience. The manuscript contains a large group of pieces labeled “1730 Hungarici Saltus,” referring to a particular dance style, and other things labeled aria or ballet ad mensam, or some kind of “Tafelmusik,” and something else called

1 Lansky 2007 is a classic example of a fabricated footnote. Despite all the uncertainty of history, I am sure that I made up this footnote and that Lansky, the book, and the press cited in the bibliography do not exist. And, of course, when one rereads this note, one knows this is the case. The purpose of this note is both to suggest that footnotes are far more soporific than they need to be, and that, as much as any text, they are in need of thorough deconstruction; and also to suggest that the reader ought to believe nothing without thinking it through. Ironically, though, the quotation itself, written by me, actually does pretty much represent what I think. These, too, are questions raised when we write the history of world music.

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“Asztali Nota” (since “Asztali” means “table” in Hungarian, this is perhaps the same as “ad mensam”). There is an entire Faust ballet, various types of dances, marches, and even entire songs with Slovak texts. Stuck in the middle of these approximately 350 pieces, however, is a single composition marked simply “Czigany.” What does it mean? A recent recording by Ensemble Caprice insists that the entire collection is largely music played by Roma, or what they call “Gypsy Music.” Yet a major article on the collection by a Slovak scholar does not mention Romani musicians even once (Mózi 1978). The only literal trace of Roma in this collection is the word “Czigany,” yet this does force us to think about the role of Gypsy musicians in establishing and maintaining this kind of music, and challenges us to write the history of vanished pasts. But why waste time considering vanished pasts when so much of the past actually survives? Just what is the problem with writing down . . . what happened?

2012 – writing history, or, beware my case studies! Writing history is a praiseworthy endeavor. The only problem is that it is so difficult, far harder than it seems. In fact, “history” is one of those words that we think we understand best when we do not try to understand it, and progressively fail to comprehend the more we examine it. Despite our certitude in things, or our almost physical sense of knowing, it is clear that the terms and words we use were invented by us, and nothing must mean one specific thing: in this history of our planet, there has never been complete agreement on the meaning of a word or sentence. Thus “history” is an invented word that has been used in many different ways. So it is always a toss up whether we ought to consider the word as “simply” the sum total of all the ways it has been used, or try to privilege some meanings over others (or shrug our shoulders and say that it’s a rubric that needs no definition or clarification). For example, history could mean those data points from the past that allow us to imagine we can access it and/or the stories we tell when we try to put those points together. Whether we call the process deduction, narrative, or plain old storytelling it comes out pretty much the same. A point in space – a fact, a date, a document, an image – gives us both too much and too little information. It makes us too sure of what we must be skeptical about. Anything we consider a “historical document” is seductive, because it promises more than it can deliver, which is loosely this fantasy: if I only had all of these I would know what happened. But obviously one can never have “all of these” and so the point in space is forever inadequate without all the other points.

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One approach to writing history consists of taking a series of these points in historical space and stitching them together in a manner so satisfying that it seems as if it were the only possible story to be told. This is the province of those who become recognized as the great writers of historical nonfiction – David McCullough, Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Timothy Snyder. Yet experience – from everyday life to the courtroom – tells us that in almost no case can a single narrative fully account for all the implications of a set of points; in fact, a nearly infinite number of stories can be woven from the same pieces of evidence. Under the influence of the charm, will power, and methods of such writers, we happily suspend our disbelief as if we were audiences at the theater. Let us go through the process and watch the moves. As an example, I use a question I have been dealing with over the last few years. Several composers in the Terezín concentration camp wrote music in the summer of 1944, a few months before the camp was liquidated and the composers sent to Auschwitz where all of them perished. Various moments in their compositions, particularly one solo cello passage in a Trio by the young Czech composer Gideon Klein (1919–45), suggest that they were aware of their final destination and that they knew about the death camps. (Klein, in fact, was killed at one of the Auschwitz satellite camps called Furstengrübe.) How do we prove this in the absence of any evidence? Despite the lack of agreement by scholars on this issue, there seems to be a consensus that the top “Elders” probably knew something of this, though once again, there is nothing like complete proof. Interviews with survivors do not shed light on the matter, with some suggesting that “everyone knew,” and others saying that “no one knew.” Let us imagine we decide that there is a 70 percent chance that 30 percent of the prisoners knew what was likely in store for them. It follows, then, there is only a 20 percent chance that a particular person knew. Or to make it more complicated, let us imagine that among the “in-crowd” 70 per cent of the people knew, and then there is a 60 percent chance that Klein was part of the in-crowd. Then there is only a 42 percent chance Klein knew anything. In other words, there is not enough to hang a hat on; it is back to our three friends – surmise, storytelling, wishful thinking. No wonder the world has turned away from this cosmic algorithmic mess to something far neater: critical and cultural theory! Here, you hardly have to know anything, the illusion is in fact that trying to write “history” is some lower order of intellectual being, like a rudimentary clinical science, while “high” theory is analogous to genuine basic sciences approach. This, too, is an illusion. What makes critical theory valuable is its aesthetic beauty, and sometimes its poetry, not necessarily the light it can shed on any

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genuine reality. Considering that such theoretical and philosophical approaches have been used to problematize, and even invalidate, “the musical work,” it is ironic that they share so much with it, including mystification and the cult of the author to name just two things. For there is rarely just “a symphony” and “a theory,” but rather “a Brahms symphony” and “Foucault’s theory.” Both “high music” and “high theory” may be entertaining and uplifting, but only the theory makes claims for itself that are false: that it by its very nature speaks of reality. So how do we access the past? The answer is mostly bad news, since investigating the past is at best a treacherous slog through factoids, theories, stories, and what I call the historical algorithm. As above, the latter involves a series of imaginary and cautionary progressive equations based on certitude designed to remind us that often our sense of knowledge is an illusion. For example, if we make an argument based on six pieces of evidence for which we have, respectively 98, 90, 86, 80, 74, and 63 percent certainty, the likelihood of the whole being correct is about 28 percent. Thus stringing along collections of partially known details makes strong arguments impossible, even though it is easy enough to create illusions and delusions based on them. Of course some aspects of the historical algorithm are clearly misleading, or at least it would seem so, having more in common with Zeno’s paradox than anything else. Achilles always defeats the tortoise in a “real” foot race, and things happen in the past: We see them, feel them, and experience them. It is just that we cannot prove them quite the way we think we can. In this glorious absence of proof, how best to write about the past, especially those wisps of the past related to the even more ineffable substance we call “music”? Perversely, let us begin by returning to those traces of traces associated with our impossible-to-define group that provides an apt metaphor for the difficulty of creating something like a historical record – the Gypsies or Roma – and specifically the Czigany melody from the Uherská collection (Fig 27.1). The tune itself is unusual, with its downward leap of a major seventh in the second measure and its repeated notes. It is difficult to imagine how it would have been performed in 1730 and still harder to figure out “how it would sound to us” if we could have heard it. From there we might push ourselves further to think about how it might have sounded to the audiences of its own time, and if they had any sense of its difference. My sense is that it is highly unlikely it would have stood out in such a collection. So the designation “Czigany” remains a mystery.

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Fig. 27.1 The Czigany melody from the Uherská collection

1840 – Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies/Germanness and Gypsiness/changing the conversation If a tune marked “Gypsy” tells us almost nothing about what might have been played, how can we hope to track the historical connection between Roma and musical sound? It is all well and good to suggest that if one wants to study “real Gypsy music,” one should avoid simply studying how classical composers from Telemann forward employed constructions of it in their music. Yet, because most things that could go under the rubric of Romani music were not written down, its traces are sometimes only preserved in notated music. They are not easily disentangled, nor is any actual music played by Roma easily separated from the use of Roma to make points about Western European struggles for identity. For example, in the last hundred years, Franz Liszt has been largely condemned, lampooned, or at least corrected for his writing about Gypsies, starting with figures such as Béla Bartók and proceeding forward through Zoltán Kodály, Bálint Sárosi, and others. Liszt’s attempt to set up Gypsies as an antipode to “us” (i.e., free, inspired, and unfettered by high-culture conventions) seems a classic example of ethnocentric nonsense, where the Other is the featured act onstage, yet never gets to speak. This may well be true in all its details, but there was another reason Liszt focused on the Gypsies, and it is one that confuses reality and illusion. In an organized society there is nothing more powerful and intimidating than accepted practice. If one does not produce credible products in such a world, one is condemned out of hand, but not nearly so much as someone wishing to create a new practice. We are familiar with what happens in our own field when scholars seek to tinker with an accepted Master Narrative.

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While such tinkering may end up becoming its own accepted truth over time, at first opponents will do everything they can to discredit a novel approach, including nasty and even eviscerating ad hominem attacks on anyone who tries to upset the intellectual apple cart. During the time that Liszt’s “Gypsy” legacy has been reformulated one might expect that we would have made great strides in our understandings of musical meaning, but this is not necessarily the case at all. What makes music worthy, and how we apprehend it, is also largely a faith-based operation. For Liszt, it appears that sound, showmanship, special effects, and illusions were an essential part of his earlier work for keyboard. Whether or not his aesthetic actually clashes with that of Beethoven and subsequent German composers is debatable, but it certainly clashed with the pedagogical and “scientific” wash that followed in their wake. In this reformulation of German art, an approach featuring formal clarity, interiority, and professionalism was valorized. To make sense a work had to exhibit a certain degree of conscious control (even though it was perfectly clear that such masterpieces as Mozart’s Magic Flute and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony did not trade in such characteristics), and if virtuosity was in the mix, it was supposed to be of the “selfless” kind, drawing attention to the inner world of the work rather than distracting the audience by showcasing the skills of the performer. In elevating the Gypsies, Liszt sought to call attention to another way of doing things, to another possible conversation. He was in a position to do this for two main reasons. First, and perhaps most important, he was widely recognized as the greatest performer of his day and a musician of legendary gifts, and one who (and this is critical) had mastered the very style he was thought to be challenging. He may have been incredible, but he was also highly credible. But there was another reason for his effectiveness as a challenger, and that is where Gypsies come in. For in his mental world, the Gypsy became a proxy, not simply for some notion of the Other, but as a specific source of what might be called “momentariness.” In his Hungarian Rhapsodies, and other works on a similar model, Liszt invokes an aesthetic we could summarize by the maxim: anything can happen here at any time. Obviously, a completely balanced and ordered formal scheme can admit no outbursts, at least none that are not carefully prepared and subjugated along the way. Among other things, Liszt wanted to create a world where it would seem that the volition, the momentary moods of the player, had a place in the whole, that far from a negative disruption of the balanced form, the intensely lived moment was the only justification for having a form in the first place: that moments are all there are.

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That he seized on the Roma as a source for intense nowness was both, from our vantage point, tasteless and completely understandable. More to the point, Liszt believed that by changing the story of what music should be – and it was a story – he could actually get audiences and critics to respond positively to the revolutionary choices he was making. That far from violating established norms and changing the narrative, he could be seen as simply fulfilling a mandate. This is not unlike the process whereby a composer, let’s call him Beethoven or Berlioz, wants to make unconventional sounds and so designates a particular section of a symphony a “storm,” allowing the listeners to experience simultaneously something in all its newness and have a ready-made justification for violating convention. Gypsiness seemed to provide a way out of Germannness, and while Liszt’s book has its unpleasant side – and can be read side by side with Wagner’s writing about the Jew in music – the intent is utterly different. The Jew in Wagner exists to set off his concept of the vastly superior German; Liszt hoped for the opposite: that valorizing the Gypsy would allow him, and other like-minded composers, to breathe fresh musical air.

1949 – Django Reinhardt and the dance of the categories On October 25, 1949, Django Reinhardt recorded a version of Grieg’s Norwegian Dance, Op. 32, No. 2 with his quintet at Radio Geneva.2 André Ekyan performs the Gershwinesque clarinet solo at the beginning, and Django and Ekyan are accompanied by Francois Vermeille on piano, Jean Bouchety on bass and drummer Gaston Léonard. The above represents a standard way of writing history. We begin with hyper-specificity. I mean, why does it matter that the date is October 25? If I had written “In late October, 1949,” or “In the Fall of 1949,” or even, “On October 25th, which is my daughter’s birthday, Django recorded etc.” would it have been more or less meaningful or accurate? History may be written from a vantage point stressing the certainty of the few things we know. Probably this seems to make more sense (and is less annoying) than the following kinds of questions: Is it unfair to suggest that Django Reinhardt was one of the only non-African Americans to get a place in the jazz pantheon because he was doubly “maimed,” first as a “Black” Gypsy in Europe, and second as the survivor of a fire that deformed his hand? Is Django’s 2 I am indebted to Siv Lie for her ideas about Django and the Norwegian Dance.

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“Norwegian Dance” an example of Romani music? Jazz? Norwegian music? French music? Or even Swiss music, since it was recorded in Geneva? Is the original source tune “Norwegian music”? And is there really such a thing? Grieg based his famous piece on a folk tune, but do we even know what that means? Is the middle part of the Grieg arrangement – which Django does not use – less “authentic” because Grieg made it up, based on a fragment of the original tune? And considering that Grieg’s source was a collection arranged for piano and already subjected to traditional Western harmony, what might the original have sounded like? More like Django than Grieg? And what of Django’s recording? Is it any place to look for our vanished Romani traces? What, actually, do we make of the recording? After the Gershwinesque opening, Grieg’s arrangement (of Lindeman’s arrangement of a lost “original”) holds sway for one iteration, simultaneously literal and mischievous. When Django enters for his solo, however, it might as well be an entirely different composition, such is the rift between the head and the material it gives rise to. What does this difference tell us, and wherein lie its roots? In the twenty-first century, we take it as axiomatic that there is an obvious and unbreakable connection between music and the culture from which it emerges, or further in the popular locution, that “music is socially and culturally constructed.” For all its implied power, however, this is not a simple matter that can easily be illustrated. In fact, the statement is simply an article of faith. Yet we may still ask on what level music and culture interact, and this is so even if we cannot define either of these terms properly. For the more the relationship is thought to exist on a general level, the less any single example may be invoked as evidence, and as with all such things, if we insist on finding specific examples to illustrate our argument, we could conclude that some pieces are “more” a product of their culture than others, and ultimately we might be left with the absurdity that certain pieces do not adequately reflect the world from which they came and are therefore somehow wanting (or maybe better?). What culture are we speaking about when we consider Django’s solo? French culture run through an African American strainer? “Western culture” broadly, where the use of the tune may be thought of as endless reflecting mirrors of appropriations? Or is it another example of what we might call the iterative Talmudic, whereby some kind of fresh and bold meaning is extracted from a source? And finally, what role does Django’s Romani consciousness play in his musicality? Is the seemingly unerring rightness of his musical choices racial and ethnic or personal, and can the two ever be separated, especially at a historical moment which has problematized notions of both race and personality?

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1940 – the Gypsy child Writing about the ways in which African American music came to be considered exquisitely expressive to white audiences, sociologist Jon Cruz has coined the term “ethnosympathy” to describe what happens when progressive attitudes regarding a particular group are combined with romantic ideas about them, especially their suffering (Cruz 1999). Such a term fits the way in which Roma have sometimes entered the musical landscape throughout Europe, and nowhere more so than in the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Though one can assume that there was always strong anti-Gypsy sentiment, there were not sufficient numbers of Roma in the Czech Lands to lead to the level of malevolence we observe at present. In fact, whether for Antonín Dvořák in his Gypsy Songs, Leoš Janáček in his Diary of One Who Vanished, or the Gypsy in Bohuslav Martinu ˚’s Julietta, the Roma tend to be portrayed as primitive, and in the case of Janáček’s work, highly erotic. Cruz coined his term to describe responses to the American spiritual, since American ethnosympathy was meant to be an explicit indictment of racism and slavery. The Czechs were engaged in their own social critique. In 1940, Josef Bohuslav Foerster wrote a short melodrama titled Ciganské děcko. Based on a poem by Josef Sládek, who had also translated Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, it tells the simple story of a Gypsy girl who, hearing the bells tolling on Christmas Eve, is drawn to sneak out of her encampment at night and run through the woods to the church. When she arrives, however, the parishioners will not let her in. She waits “by the iron gate,” outside, while inside the bright, warm, and sonorous church the organ intones fragments of the Czech Christmas carol “Christ Is Born” and the poet muses, “He was born, but where is he today?” Not, he concludes, in the church, where instead of genuine compassion, we find congregants shedding crocodile tears that flow “only from the ice in their hearts.” Christ instead, “was standing with the Gypsy child at the wrought iron gate,” and when the worshipers came out of the church, “He was there where millions of white stars eternally shined, leading his child.” The Gypsy child in a forest camp (How crudely slept the clan there; Above them, dark snow covered the pines And the stars danced like snowflakes. A woman wailed in her dreams. Her husband swore; Their nursling was like snow.) The child heard the tolling of distant bells As they rang through the woods and called to her: Come! She picked herself up, barefoot and in rags,

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Through the woods across the plain, Fell and rose again, to the place where the great bell called. Until she saw the dark roofs of human habitation And went to the church Where a clear light shone from a window And people from all sides gathered On that night when the Lord was born. But the people did not let the Gypsy child into the church. So she stayed where the brilliant church light fell on many a snowy grave, Where a Master and his servant peacefully slept, And leaned her head against an iron gate. And the priest came up to the altar And the church vibrated with organ and song, “The Savior was born unto us.” He was born. But where is he today? He could not be found where one sang; another slept and others shed tears That flowed only from the ice in their hearts. No, he was standing with the wretched Gypsy child at the wrought iron gate, And when the people returned from Midnight Mass To their thousand hard and frozen paths. He was there where the millions of white stars eternally shined, leading his child.

True, this is a far cry from a sensationalized version in the boulevard press, “Gypsy girl freezes outside church on Christmas Eve, Jesus takes her to Heaven,” but it has some of the bathos we might expect to encounter in such a publication. It is simultaneously an indictment of white guilt and an advertisement of our own moral superiority. In fact, one might argue that the poem has nothing to do with Roma, but is a celebration of Christ’s grace, the girl being merely an example of “the wretched of the Earth.” Foerster, nonetheless, has his own point of view; the composition is thick with tolling bells, hints of carols, and at the end a lovely example of what one might call, “the icy, starry Christmas idyllic,” as the last words of the poem are followed by bagpipe drones in the bass and repeated octaves and sixths in the upper register. This suggests that a progressive vision can only come into being when the lowest in the social strata are included in the larger congregation known as “nation.” Thus, like all ideas, it is both “good” and “bad.” Good, because an inclusive vision strikes us as superior to an exclusive one, and bad, because it needs the wretched to be wretched in order to set up the equation in the first place. Josef Sládek was a great friend of Antonín Dvořák, and it is thought that the composer’s fascination with Longfellow’s Hiawatha goes back to his experience reading the poet’s widely disseminated translation. There is, in fact, the same

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sense of elevating the wretched to a state of nobility we see in “The Gypsy Child” that animates Longfellow’s poem about the noble chieftain. One could argue that in some ways Dvořák’s American excursus was an exercise in “Ethnosymphony,” in Cruz’s sense, as the “New World” Symphony incorporates and valorizes stylizations and fragments of African American song. But perhaps the most explicit example of incorporating the lowest social class in any concept of national music may be found, simply, in the song “Happy Birthday.” Written by the white critic, composer, and ethnographer Mildred Hill, the song was at least in part compiled out of black street cries from Louisville, Kentucky. That it was first published as part of a secular liturgy for kindergarteners is fitting: Hill and her sister Patricia believed that no education of Americans could begin without including musical fragments from those at the very bottom of the economic and social ladder.

1977 – Černý cikán In 1977, a new hit song appeared in Czechoslovakia.3 Called “Černý cikán,” it was a waltz in the dechovka or brass-band style that is ubiquitous throughout several parts of Europe, especially the Czech Lands, Austria, and Germany.4 “Černý cikán” was first played live on the radio, and within weeks the station had received hundreds of requests, insisting that they play it over and over again. It was recorded and has remained a hit for years; it is still popular. I first heard “Černý cikán” in the spring of 1979 while doing research for my Janáček dissertation at what is today Masaryk University in Brno. The musicology department was on a courtyard where in the early spring forsythia (known as “golden rain”) had blossomed. Three of the four sides of the courtyard belonged to the university; the fourth was a private apartment. At some point in spring 1979, a gentleman in the private flats started playing “Černý cikán” on his portable phonograph. The rumor was that he was showing the great and mighty university just what he thought of it (i.e., snobs, nest of spies, etc.). It was one of the first dechovka songs I had heard, and the combination of lilting tune, brass arrangement, the Black Gypsy, and the unavoidable question: “Kdo to byl?” “Who was it?” made a strong impression on me. I did not at that time understand Czech well enough to understand that the song is one of secret lusts and conquests following the trope of a dark stranger,

3 I would like to thank my colleagues Don Sparling and Milos Stedron for ongoing help with this inquiry. 4 For audio examples of the genre, there is a Radio Dechovka online where one can treat oneself to the eternal succession of polkas and waltzes.

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in this case a Rom, coming into the village and stealing the heart and body of a local virgin who is all too willing to yield (see Appendix). The most conspicuous gestures in the song are the fall of a fourth from the song’s highest pitch in the third phrase and the setting of the words we have already noted: Kdo to byl? Who was it? This sharp interjection fights with the smooth and repetitious rhythms of the opening, and injects a small patch of drama and a kind of arresting present narration into the song (see Fig. 27.2). Dechovka songs are not fundamentally listening songs, rather they are for dancing. I am not sure what verses were included in the various recordings and performances I heard in the 1970s and early 1980s. Actually it was not until the 1990s that I got my own recording and became aware that the last verse severely undercuts the mood of the whole. In fact, “Černý cikán” is one of those rare melodramas that actually has a tragic end: The farm is burning, the hay is burning, With love in his heart and a hole in his side, The Black Gypsy lies dying in the foothills.

In “Černý cikán” there is no last minute rescue. So one might say that the most glaring clash (if one listens) lies between the affective nature of the charming waltz and the surprisingly violent ending, which, to put a fine point upon it, is “unacknowledged” by the music or the performance style. Sweet songs with lurid texts are nothing new, but when Brecht and Weill wrote the “Song of Mack the Knife” they were shooting for a particular effect of a certain cutting quality, a bitter satire. That does not seem to be the intention here; in several discussions I had with colleagues in the Czech Republic, most people were not even aware of the violent final verse. So we may well ask just how the Black Gypsy suddenly ended up with a hole in his side? In order to find out why and how this happened, we have to go back in time to another venue, another genre and a missing verse, and search for another imaginary Gypsy. Judging by the musical style of “Černý cikán,” I thought I might find the answer to this question somewhere in the 1950s. But it took me several months of searching and the help of colleagues to make further inroads.5 Song catalogues list “Černý cikán” as having been composed by Jiří Červený and Tomaš Hertán, but this seemed odd. Červený was somewhat famous as the founder of the “Červená sedma” or “Black Seven” cabaret in Prague which thrived from 1907 to 1922, which in its heyday had an all-star group of performers. It was hard to imagine that the lilting “Černý cikán” had started its life as a cabaret song, although when

˚ Study 5 I am indebted to Kateřina Mayrová of the Museum of Czech Music, Ales´ Březina of the Martinu Center, and Eva Velická from the Dvořák Museum for their assistance in this project.

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Fig. 27.2 Score of “Černý cigán”

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Fig. 27.3 Cover of original “Černý cigán” (1922) sifting through the past, almost anything is possible. And yet I found a publication date of 1922 for the song. This would have been in the waning days of the Red 7 Cabaret, which, in fact, closed down after that year. Did the song have an earlier incarnation? Was it this very sense of the cabaret’s declining fortunes by the early 1920s that got Červený thinking about the lurid subject? Or perhaps “Černý cikán” was written and performed earlier and only published in 1922. It was difficult to get information on this, but through some contacts I was able to get a copy of Červený’s original published sheet music (see Fig. 27.3). This cover, with its burning farms and romantic black man, has its allure, but the real surprise is inside, because while this piece, called “Cigán,” has almost the same text as “Černý cikán,” but with one conspicuous difference, the music could not be more dissimilar. What could be farther from a dechovka waltz than a dramatic cabaret song with enough different stylistic “looks” in its ten core measures to encompass the different moods from the sensuous to the violent and from the lively to the deadly (see Fig. 27.4)? While “Černý cikán” is almost always performed with at least two singers, and often with many more, we know that “Cigán” was a piece for an ingénue

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Fig. 27.4 Score of “Cigán”

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and we even know which ingénue. Right there on the published sheet music we have the evidence that the glamorous actress and singer Jarmila Kronbauerová created the role, so much so that she got credit.6 The cabaret version has three or four different kinds of material. The opening frame sets the tone, relating something catlike jumping, moving forward, and associates itself with multiple parts of the text. Next, there is the sexy, creeping music that can paint the “Cigán” stealthily slipping through the village, but also amorous whispers and their slow sensuous night. And there, as if by magic, is a waltz-let embedded in the very center of the song, containing simultaneously a moment of dramatic conflict, but also the most exotic musical vocabulary, a virtual “Gypsy” cliché. Two subsequent measures reconnect with the creeping motive at the beginning, but at a higher level of intensity, and the song concludes with an inevitable downward spike, with an almost painful major chord at the end, with anapestic thrusts, violent and sexual. In short, each of the six, tenmeasure stanzas of the song recapitulates the whole essence of the drama. Looking at these parallel texts, we can surely answer the question posed in the lyrics about what happened to the protagonist of “Černý cikán.” It is all about the missing fifth verse from the original in which the hospodář, or “Man of the House,” comes home and stabs the Cigán, who cackles as he goes out the window. Despite the greater amount of violence in Červený’s original, the last verse is somewhat elliptical – it seems likely that the Cigán survives to seduce another day while his later counterpart expires in the foothills: The sun is burning, the farm is burning The alarm sounds in the villages With love in his heart, and a hole in his side In the mountains in the valleys.

The cover art (Fig. 27.3) also implies that the Black Gypsy survived and here the title character projects an exotic image of strength and sensuality. It appears that far from running away in fear, he is in fact fleeing from an explosion he has himself set. This character may have more agency than we might like to admit. Another question still remains: how did this brave “Cigán” turn into the “Černý cikán” who perishes? It turns out that there is another name listed along with certain recordings preceded by the word “Upravil,” or “arranged”: Adolf Školka. Although several recordings of his were listed, there has been nothing written about him, and

6 For more about Kronbauerová there is a film clip on YouTube of the movie Cintamani, based on a Čapek short story, featuring the ingénue at about the age of seventy-five. Note the monotonous all-purpose exotic music in the score as the scene progresses. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyx525wlXpE (accessed on December 5, 2012).

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no attempt to connect him more certainly with “Černý cikán.” I tracked him down in the small town of Lipnice in Southern Bohemia and asked him if he was the composer of “Černý cikán.” “No,” he responded, “not the composer. I arranged it.” He explained that in the 1970s he was looking for new material for his dechovka, Budvarka, which he had led since 1957, and someone, he could not remember who, came across the text of “Cigán.” Školka was not able to remember precise details about the arrangement, and claimed to have taken the tune from a local folk song. The expression “folk song,” as we all know, is problematic, but the tune of “Černý cikán” is in no known rural song style in Southern Bohemia, but rather a composed song, possibly another dechovka melody. It is also possible that he came up with the tune himself. I have not been able to find anyone who has heard it before, nor is there any trace of it in various collected songs. As I have already established, the song’s popularity dates back to 1977 when it was first heard on radio, something Školka described as a “calamity for the radio station.” From that time on the piece has become an evergreen on the dechovka circuit, whether in the Czech Republic, Germany, or the United States. Aside from dropping the fifth verse, and altering lines to fit the waltz rhythm, there are a few other conspicuous changes, and the most significant ones involve the end of each stanza. “Cigán, Cigán, Cigán” (Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy) becomes “Kdo to byl? Cikán, černý cikán” (Who was it? The Black Gypsy). Once again, Školka could not remember the details of the arrangement, but it is possible that the rhythmic gesture for which “Kdo to byl” was supplied was in the borrowed song already. The other, equally important point is that the Gypsy became black. And this is vexing because the original triple invocation of “Cigán” would have fit. The final version, “Cikán, černý cikán,” gives us three poorly declaimed words, with the word accents on the wrong syllable, probably further evidence of a borrowed song.

Who was the Black Gypsy? No matter what the origin of the words “Kdo to byl,” which simultaneously stop the song short and anticipate its violent end, the presence of that phrase is almost too good to be true because that is so obviously the next question: Who was the Black Gypsy? Who was he or she in 1730 or 1949? Who in 1922, who in 1979, and who might they be today? In 1922, there were few “Gypsy problems” in the Czech Lands. With a small Romani population, the Roma played a series of familiar roles in Czech society that can be articulated by comparing Červený and Hertán’s “Cigán” with a more famous piece written around the same time, Janáček’s Diary of One Who

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Vanished. Janáček’s song cycle, perhaps the only one in that genre actually to bring the “immortal beloved” onstage, was supposedly based on poems left behind by a Czech lad “from a good family” who had run off with a Gypsy woman – our “Cikán” but with gender reversal. At least that part of it is fake since the “anonymous” poems were actually written by a very real poet of the time, Ozev Kalda, something only discovered in the last decade or so. Not only were the Roma a source of erotic charge for the Czechs, but they were also a group that allowed Czechs to show some self-congratulatory empathy. For example, in this odd passage from his letters, Janáček praises his Muse, Kamila, for the wonderful way she looked after Roma children whose parents had been jailed in Pisek: “See now, Maestro! They caught the Gypsies again but put the children into ‘care.’ Will the Pisek people guess who’s praising them? Will they guess that it’s Kamila?” We have already seen an example of this sentimentalizing in Foerster’s “Cikánské dítě,” “The Gypsy Child.” In 1940 one could still perhaps sentimentalize the Roma in Central Europe. But that was all to change quickly and drastically.

1943 – In Auschwitz stands a large house/Roma and the Bloodlands The most famous appearance of the Auschwitz song occurs in the film Latcho Drom, a staged documentary telling the musical story of the Romani journey from India to Spain, stopping at places such as Turkey, Egypt, Romania, Hungary, and France en route for mostly energetic performances by leading Romani musicians. Just after a parable of “Light Folks/Dark Music” at a Hungarian train station, where a listless very white mother and her clueless very white son are first mesmerized, and then awakened by a fiery fusion of music and dance and song, the train the viewer has been following continues. Without warning barbed wire appears along the tracks. Snow. A whistle sounds, then the brakes. Suddenly we hear voices singing. “Aušvicate hi kher baro” (In Auschwitz there stands a large house), footprints in the snow and then a figure in black walks in the background. The landscape is vast; a huge castle is visible. The other-worldliness of the images is short-lived. The camera cuts sharply to an older woman singer. She wears a brightly colored scarf. In each verse she modulates up a half step, giving the tune an even more wrenching quality. This is important because first the viewer sees a box of matches in her hand with an impossibly young-looking Vaclav Havel on the front, locating us in Czechoslovak space, and then almost imperceptibly the viewer’s gaze glides down her arm until we see the number, 2–9267, on her wrist.

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The difficulty of writing history, and agreeing on “what happened,” is seen nowhere more clearly than when trying to determine the experience of the Roma during World War II. There is ample evidence that Roma were singled out, racially, as were the Jews, and there are attempts to argue that the comparison does not hold. Yet there can be no doubt that new historiographic approaches render this question almost irrelevant. In his Bloodlands (2010), Timothy Snyder looks at such places as Poland, Ukraine, Western Russia, Belarus, and the Baltics and tries to calibrate the effect of marauding armies, repressive and violent policies, famine and disease on a broad population, concluding that at least fourteen million civilians lost their lives there between 1933 and 1945. There has been ample documentation of Jewish suffering, although some would say there can never be enough. The Jewish experience also lives on in music – we know about the Auschwitz orchestra, songs about the “Muselmann,” the lowest of the low from Sachsenhausen, and the entire repertory of Terezín/Theresienstadt has been used to invoke both suffering and the “triumph of the human spirit.” Musically, the Roma Holocaust, which is called “Porajmos,” or “the devouring,” is mostly known through this single example. The song in Latcho Drom, however, is quite special. As ethnographer Dušan Holý shows in his book Zalujici písen (Plaintiff’s song), it is both embedded in earlier texts and separate from them (Holý and Nečas 1993). One verse, about the “black bird” bringing a letter to or from the imprisoned beloved, probably goes back to the first part of the twentieth century, and perhaps much earlier, while the first verse was made up in the camps. The song seems related to local styles in Moravian Slovakia, but no one can say for sure that the opening has analogues to any specific model. The song, once again, is both completely of its surroundings, and completely separated from them. We see this in a larger sense as we try to write history and account for the gulf between individual experience and broad-brush renderings during World War II. Timothy Snyder and others, without minimizing the special aspects of the Jewish experience, nonetheless wish to draw attention to how such things fit in with other fraught circumstances. In the opposite direction, national and ethnic groups strive to maintain their own personal, indivisible identities, insisting that their suffering has somehow been misunderstood. Words, of course, do matter. The “Holocaust” matters, and if that word is to be used to describe primarily or only the experience of Jews (or people the Nazis thought of as Jews – there is a difference), then who shall study the sounds and musics of the other millions?

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2012 – the Black Gypsy again By 1977, when “Černý cikán” first appeared, the world had turned many times. The Bloodlands had enacted their horrifying toll on the region and the existence of Czech camps such as Lety and Hodonín u Kunštat have only slowly become known among the vast array of concentration camps that stretched across Europe. “Černý cikán” with its um-pah-pah obliviousness is characteristic of the vacuum which existed during the period of so-called “normalization,” that time between the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 and the revolutions of the late 1980s and 1990s. Such unreconstructed notions of national purity, embodied by the whitebread sexuality of couples singing in thirds, could only have evolved in a region which seems ethnically pure, if only because the vast majority of Germans, Jews, and Roma had been ethnically cleansed. And, of course, the Roma are not the only ones whose absence and powerlessness allows for songs based on the sexual insecurities of “white people.” There is also a dechovka piece in the “voice” of a man whose wife is running around with a Jew. One cannot imagine singing such a song unless the mentioned group is invisible or at least without any influence. Whereas “Černý cikán” seems to be something akin to “Mack the Knife” – that is, a lurid tale with a lilting tune – it both is and is not. In my conversations with Adolf Školka, it became clear that the violence in the last stanza meant little to him, it entered the dechovka in the same way a whale might swallow a life preserver when going for a huge mouthful of fish. Still, standing freely as “what it is,” “Černý cikán” is simultaneously a charming and artless ballad, and also a strange and powerful indictment of those times, and ours. Intentionally or not, the song is a primer for how to create the exotic we call “Gypsiness” while at the same time revealing the violence that is often at the very heart of such constructions. If we conflate the final verses of the two “Cikáns,” with the farm burning, the alarm sounding, the smoke from the burning hay rolling through the village, and the Gypsy dying in the foothills, we are much too close, unpleasantly close both actually and metaphorically, to many situations Roma encounter today in dechovka-land and elswhere. A song like “Černý cikán” becomes what it is not, and is what it cannot be.

2013 – investigations or manifestos? In the end, we might conclude that we can create only levels of falseness in historical writing and that nothing is more seductive and misleading than a fact, which is, as I suggested at the outset, simultaneously everything and nothing. We

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are forever caught between two truths: if we write from the top-down, the richness and variety of human experience always allows us to find proof that sustains our arguments. If, however, we try to write from the bottom-up, the process is too agonizing; one can become so mired in the process of locating and vetting evidence that any larger picture seems to be an eternity away. Now, this does not matter if writing history is a matter of entertainment or a pretext for making ideological statements, but “history” as I imagine it, “scholars’ history,” is far from these. Surely, we witness the complexity of such distinctions in the pages of the Cambridge History of World Music. Everything must be tested, and everything rejected at least once for good measure. Of course, the truth is that in the end, we all compromise, otherwise we must follow the protagonists of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co. and renounce the act of writing. Perhaps the most daunting reality we face when we investigate as historians has to do with how we respond to the world. I believe that the urge not to understand what we truly value is as strong as our desire to comprehend it. This is what makes art different from science. Like proper theologians, we both want to understand things in the fullest, clearest, and most prosaic way, and at the same time, obfuscate, avoid, and preserve mystery. The paradox may lie in the reality that we can only understand those things we do not care about deeply, and therefore have no great motivation to understand. The attempts of mostly white academics to locate, interpret, and somehow understand the Roma have usually run aground on just such a shoal, and the conflict between mysterious wholes and the prosaic analysis of parts has become a central problem in the academy. The vast majority of academics consider themselves to be progressive, and that is all well and good, though what it means is not always clear. The danger occurs when investigation is conflated with the cherry-picking of facts and theories in order merely to confirm what one has decided one wants to find. It is, however, no easy matter to distinguish between a putatively objective investigation – where the future is as yet unknown and one may at any point turn up evidence leading to conclusions one might find repugnant – and other inquiries where nearly every step is guided and skewed by the investigator’s conscious preferences, or more problematically by a scholar’s desire to show that they are “part of the solution not part of the problem.” For how can we investigate if some conclusions are a priori out of bounds? In a sense none of this matters. We trudge on, and must acknowledge in the end that we do not fully understand why we investigate, since it is such a tangle of personal curiosity, professional ambition, our desire to

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simultaneously know and not know, and the constantly nagging sense that if only we could get our facts straight we could know the world. But we cannot. To this dilemma of history writing, music – both real and imagined, both Roma and non-Roma – is simultaneously a way out, a solution, and a further level of conundrum. But it is a crucible that raises questions that can nowhere else be raised with such richness. Sound sticks in our imagination like the hidden designation “Czigany” in the Uhrovská manuscript, evidence of a potent reality that seems to recede even as we vigorously probe it.

APPENDIX

Černý cikán (1977)

The Black Gypsy

Noc je krásná, noc je tichá. Na horach a na dolině. Kdo sem zdáli, tak pospíchá lehkým krokem ku dědině? Kdo to byl? Cikán, černý cikán.

The night is silent, the night is quiet In the mountains and the valleys Who hurries with light steps to the village Who was it? Gypsy, Black Gypsy.

Milka leží v nocí jasné. Na miláčka vzpomíná si. Ach můj bože, jak jsou krásné, černé oči, černé vlasy. Kdo to byl? Cikán, černý cikán.

Mara is lying awake in the clear night thinking of her boyfriend My God! How beautiful are his Black eyes, black hair Who was it? Gypsy, Black Gypsy.

Jak jsou krásně, dívka jihne. Hlava se ji kolem točí. Kolem oken stín se mihne, do světnice někdo skočí. Kdo to byl? Cikán, černý cikán.

How beautiful they are, the girl melts Her head is spinning. At the window a shadow flits Someone jumps into the room Who was it? Gypsy, Black Gypsy.

Milá se mu chvilku brání. Potom ale sladce vzdychá. Noc je krásná do svítání, slyšet jenom slůvka tichá. Kdo to byl? Cikán, černý cikán.

For a moment Mara struggles and then just had sweet sighs Beautiful is the night until daybreak to hear whispered words Who was it? Gypsy, Black Gypsy.

Hoří statek, hoří sláma. Dým se valí dědinama. V srdci láska, v boku rána, zmírá cikán za horama. Kdo to byl? Cikán, černý cikán.

The farm is burning, the hay is burning The alarm sounds in the villages With love in his heart and a hole in his side The Gypsy is dying near the foothills Who was it? Gypsy, Black Gypsy.

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Cigán (1922)

The Gypsy

Noc je tichá, noc je hříšná na horách i na dolině kdo se pliží jako kocour tiše lesem ku dědiné? Cigán, Cigán, Cigán

The night is silent, the night is sinful In the mountains and the valleys Who sneaks like a cat quietly through the woods to the village? Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy

Mara leží, Mara nespi na muziku vzpominá si Bože můj, jak je to hříšné! Cerné očí, cerne vlasy . . . Cigán, Cigán, Cigán

Mara is lying down, Mara can’t sleep thinking about the music My God! How sinful! Black eyes, black hair Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy

Jak byl krasný, jak byl teplý, s Marou se až postel točí V tom však v okně stín se mihnul do světnice někdo skočí Cigán, Cigán, Cigán

How beautiful he was, and how warm as if the bed were turning round with her But then at the window a shadow flits Someone jumps into the room Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy

Chvilku se Mara brání a pak jenom sladce vzdychá Dlouha noc je do svítání, dlouho slyšet slova tichá Cigán, Cigán, Cigán

For a moment Mara struggles and then just had sweet sighs Long is the night until daybreak A long time to hear whispered words Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy

Hospodář však vesel náhle nůž mu v ruce zablýskal se, a pod oknem vyhozený divým smichem zachechtal se Cigán, Cigán, Cigaán

But the man of the house entered suddenly The knife in his hands gleamed Under the window the tossed out Gypsy cackled wildly Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy

Hoří slunce, hoří statek Poplach běží dědinami V srdce lásku, v boku ranu za horami za dolami Cigán, Cigán, Cigán

The sun is burning, the farm is burning The alarm sounds in the villages With love in his heart and a hole in his side In the mountains in the valleys Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy

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Bibliography Anon., (1974) Uhrovská Zbierka: Piesní a tancov z roku 1730 [Uhrovská Collection [Songs and Dances from 1730], Bratislava: Matica Slovenská Martin Beckerman, M. (2004) New Worlds of Dvořák, New York: W. W. Norton Brown, J. (2000) ‘Bartok, the Gypsies and hybridity in music’, in G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 119–42 Cruz, J. (1999) Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation, Princeton University Press Dregni, M. (2008) Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhard and the Soul of Gypsy Swing, New York: Oxford University Press Gooley, D. (2004) The Virtuoso Liszt, Cambridge University Press Hamilton, K. (2005) The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, Cambridge University Press Hancock, I. (1987) The Pariah Syndrome, Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Press Holý, D., and C. Nečas (1993) Zalující píseń [Plaintiff’s song], Strážnice: Ustav lidové kultury Lansky, O. (2007) What Is History? Case Studies from the Irish and Bosnian Wars, Dublin and Sarajevo: Target Press Lewy, G. (2000) The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, New York: Oxford University Press Liszt, F. (1859) Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie, Paris: Bourdillat Loya, S. (2011) Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition, University of Rochester Press Mózi, A. (1978) ‘Heyduck dances from the Ugróc Manuscript Collection (AppnyOponice)’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 20: 75–96 Sárosi, B. (1978) Gypsy Music, Budapest: Corvina Silverman, C. (2012) Romani Routes: Cultural Politics & Balkan Music in Diaspora, New York: Oxford University Press Slavický, M. (1995) Gideon Klein: A Fragment of Life and Work, Prague: Helvetica-Tempora Publishers Snyder, T. (2010) Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Vintage Vila-Matas, E. (2004) Bartleby & Co., New York: New Directions Books Wagner, R. (1869, orig. publ. 1850) Das Judentum in der Musik, 2nd edn, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel

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PART X

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MUSICAL ONTOLOGIES

OF GLOBALIZATION

. 28 .

Disseminating world music TRAVIS A. JACKSON

Although there were ample precedents for the study of musics outside European concert-music traditions before the late nineteenth century (Myers 1992a, 3; Bohlman 2002), those studies took on a new cast in the late 1880s, spurred on partly by the work of Alexander Ellis (1885) and Guido Adler (1885; see also Mugglestone 1981). Whereas the former relied on measurements and work with native informants to debunk the notion that there were universal tonal laws, the latter proposed a program for the study of music, with three branches intended to bring musical research in line with experimentally driven work in the physical and natural sciences. Neither Ellis nor Adler, however, evinced much concern with or knowledge of two far-reaching, related inventions from 1877. In fact, it was only several years after Charles Cros presented his ideas for the paleophone and Thomas Alva Edison patented the phonograph that researchers found uses for recording devices that went beyond the two music-related items – preservation of musical sounds and use in musical boxes and toys – on the list of eleven possible uses Edison imagined for the phonograph (Harvith and Harvith 1987, 1). Building on the pioneering, immersive fieldwork conducted by Frank Hamilton Cushing with the Zuñi in the 1880s (Hinsley 1983; Sanjek 1990, 189–92), Jesse Walter Fewkes, for example, took a phonograph with him to the southwest of the United States in 1890 to make recordings of Zuñi language use, rituals, prayers, and songs with clearly comparative aspirations (Fewkes 1890, 688). It seems that his use of the phonograph, in practice, was more “proof of concept” than anything else, since he abandoned the use of recordings in his own research after 1891 (Cottrell 2010, 6), and since, lacking the ability to analyze the music he recorded in a manner he thought sufficient, he left much of the analysis of the recordings to others (e.g., Gilman 1891). Still, his early adoption of the phonograph and his encouragement led researchers like Alice C. Fletcher and Frances Densmore to make extensive use of recording to study and to preserve Native American languages and songs, and even Franz Boas provided devices for his graduate students’ research (Hickerson 1982, 68). In contrast, Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel approached their

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research as a laboratory endeavor. While acknowledging both the value and limitations of textual sources – treatises, transcriptions, and ethnographic accounts – and those of scientific measurements, the two of them believed the greatest potential for audio recording – first with the Edison phonograph and later with a recording device from the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv, a hybrid device which combined elements of Edison’s machine with Emile Berliner’s gramophone – lay in its facilitating comparative musical research (Abraham and Hornbostel 1975, 195–6, 198–9). Like Fewkes, they saw the new possibilities afforded by audio recordings – particularly their repeatability – as providing music researchers with objective data to rival that contained in biological specimens brought back from the field. These two orientations – working in the field contrasted with working in the archive (Bohlman 1991, 147) – do not exhaust the ways one might understand recording and its relation to ethnomusicology. In fact, Abraham and Hornbostel’s inclusion of instructions for operating the phonograph in an appendix to their essay (Abraham and Hornbostel 1975, 200–2), a point to which we will return shortly, indicates that a wide range of practitioners, including missionaries and other collectors, were already producing field recordings. One might, then, read the scholars’ list of desiderata alongside other attempts to prevent diverse others from usurping the authority that anthropologists, folklorists, and comparative musicologists were trying to claim for themselves (Pratt 1986, 27; Clifford 1988) as the modern academic disciplines took shape (see Sewell 2005, 2–3 for an abbreviated discussion of that process). Moreover, the contours of these early scholarly attempts to grapple with the significance and potential of technology would continually be replicated in different guises and with conflicting emphases as nascent ethnomusicologists, collectors, and commercial concerns worked to disseminate the musics of the world in recorded forms. The motivations of those three primary groups have remained mostly distinct, although the lines separating them have been porous. At the least granular level, ethnomusicologists and other researchers have been oriented toward whatever questions and methodological interventions held sway in their respective fields at specific historical junctures. Collectors have generally sought materials for their own edification and enjoyment, sometimes as a means of gathering raw materials that might be transformed into compositions for the concert hall; and recording companies, especially those operating across national borders, have been primarily interested in expanding the markets for their products. At other times, however, both ethnomusicologists and collectors have worked in collaboration with commercial recording concerns; collectors like John Lomax whose work was the result neither of particular research questions nor

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of academic capital accumulation have been honorifically described as ethnomusicologists; and commercial concerns, independent of the other groups, have produced materials that have proved useful for research. What those three groups shared was at least one common assumption about their work, an unexamined premise that also animates almost all scholarship on the relation between recording technology and ethnomusicological research: that (field) recordings should be faithful, transparent representations of musical performance. The instructions offered by Abraham and Hornbostel, then assistants to Carl Stumpf at the Psychology Institute at the University of Berlin, were similar to those contained in Notes and Queries on Anthropology1 in that they allowed so-called armchair ethnologists to exercise some control over the quality of what people in the field procured for them. The B section of that appendix, on recording, is perhaps the most detailed, as it anticipates the kinds of questions laboratory analysts might have upon encountering field recordings: What are the absolute pitches performed on a recording? Is the temporal complex of sounds metrically organized by or derived from a single tactus? What is a singer’s pitch range? What is an instrument’s range? What scalar configurations, if any, support the performance? Who is performing? What are the title and the occasion for the piece? And so forth. These questions index a desire to have the most accurate data for scientific analysis and to eliminate anything that might taint that data by removing the subjectivity of or discouraging independent decision-making from the recordist. In addition, the scholars’ instructions are an attempt to avoid acknowledging that recording, as an act of re-presentation, is always an act of mediation. Indeed, during what Kay Kaufman Shelemay (1991) has described as the “phonograph era” of comparative musicology, the majority of noncommercial scholarly recording was archival in nature and oriented toward an antimediated standard. The preservation impulse behind the work of Fletcher and Densmore and the scientific aspirations of Abraham and Hornbostel, despite their differing in the emphasis they placed on a researcher’s proximity to the researched, were ultimately compatible in that sense. Recordings made by researchers and collectors alike would increasingly populate the archives established at the dawn of the twentieth century and in the years that followed, sometimes being produced specifically for them (Porter 1974, 4). The Phonogram Archive of the Austro-Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1 Notes and Queries (British Association for the Advancement of Science 1874) originally appeared as a slim volume, and five further, expanded editions (British Association for the Advancement of Science 1929, 1951; Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912; Garson and Read 1892, 1899) were published through the early 1950s. See Urry (1972) and Stocking (2001, 164–206) for background and Sanjek (1990, 203–17) for discussion of W. H. R. Rivers’s genealogical method, its inclusion in the fourth edition of Notes and Queries, and Bronislaw Malinowski’s eventual turn from Notes and Queries-style fieldwork.

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Vienna was established in 1899, followed the next year by the now betterknown Berlin Phonogram Archive, which, after 1905, was under the direction of Hornbostel. Official, institutionally supported archives were established subsequently in the United States with, among others, the opening of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress on July 1, 1928; the founding of the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music at Columbia University in 1936 – the collection moved with George Herzog to Indiana University in 1948; and the creation of the Northwestern University Laboratory of Comparative Musicology in 1944. As characterized in publications (e.g., Bartis 1982, 22–35; Merriam 1958; List 1959, 1960), these archives were places for serious study, each having its own style of organization, controlled vocabulary for searches, inventories of specialized equipment for sound playback, duplication, and processing, and detailed information on the provenance and permitted uses of recordings.2 The authors of such publications, generally archive directors, treated recordings as data carriers, and their descriptions contained almost nothing critical of recording media, at least not in the present tense. The specific properties of recorded media were notable, in fact, only to the degree that they compromised the integrity or utility of data in the past. Abraham and Hornbostel, for example, observed that by the early 1900s, recording technology and recording duplication processes were so sufficiently well developed that “nothing else is wanting for the establishment of an archive of lasting musical documents of exotic music and for the nurturing of this branch of ethnology” (Abraham and Hornbostel, 1975, 199).3 Writing about more or less the same corpus of Berlin Phonogram Archive materials after the 1950s, in contrast, Kurt Reinhard was less sanguine about Abraham and Hornbostel’s time, praising the fidelity and flexibility of magnetic tape relative to the deficiencies of previous media: “The new tape recordings offer greater advantages for research because of their better technical quality, and even more, because each musical item is now recorded in its entire length, and not interrupted or broken off after two minutes, as was the case with cylinder recordings” (Reinhard 1962, 2). Similarly, George List, describing the process whereby older materials were transferred to tape at the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, wrote: 2 While none of them believed their archives represented the totality of what might be available in given locations, their processes of selection were clearly and unavoidably driven by concerns beyond the purely scholarly. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) and Gerald Sider (1997) have produced thoughtful meditations on the politics and power imbalances that archives introduce into and/or exacerbate in the writing of history. 3 Some of the celebratory language, though, might be a result of this essay functioning as a pitch for the archive. The remainder of the essay reads as follows: “which has been thus far seriously neglected. It would be ideal if the scientific institute would assume this responsibility soon, because the rapid expansion of European culture threatens to erase the primordial character of exotic music.”

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The basis of the operation is magnetic plastic recording tape. The Archives [sic] recording laboratory is equipped to transfer onto tape materials originally recorded on any media in present or past common use in the recording industry . . . The archival assistant effecting the transfer in the recording laboratory prepares a concordance of the original and the Archives’ [sic] numbering system as he works. He also prepares work notes. In these the acoustical quality of the recording, errors found in the original catalogue, etc., are noted. (List 1959, 1)

One might reasonably infer from List’s matter-of-fact description of the transfer process (and his discussion of no alternatives) that tape was an advance over (or superior to) other methods of preservation. The seeming unwillingness of these writers to acknowledge, on the one hand, the limitations of magnetic tape and, on the other, the different mediations between events and archival data is by no means novel. In examining Victor Records advertisements for releases by Geraldine Farrar and Enrico Caruso, respectively, Jonathan Sterne observes that marketers focused on their recordings’ fidelity to their source material, to the correspondence between an event and a recorded representation of it: The ads present a general equivalence of singer and recording . . . In both ads, the person is placed side by side with the technology – either the record player or the record. In both cases, the person and the medium are the same size. The ads establish their equivalence by manipulating images and by providing text that is taunting and tautological (tauntological?): “Which is which?”; “Both are Caruso.” (Sterne 2003, 216)

Within the discourses of sound fidelity, Sterne argues further, “the technology enabling the reproduction of sound . . . mediates because it conditions the possibility of reproduction, but, ideally, it is supposed to be a ‘vanishing’ mediator – rendering the relation as transparent, as if it were not there” (ibid., 218).4 Such an ideal, however, can never be realized, for as both Sterne (ibid., 236–8) and George List (1972, 446–7, 449–50) argue in different contexts, what one hears on a recording is, in fact, something that has no independent existence in that particular form outside that recording itself. Or, to put things more simply, “[no recording] preserves sounds. What it preserves are [selective] interpretations of sounds – interpretations made by the people who did the recordings and their equipment” (Seeger 1986, 270, emphasis in the original; see also Morton 2000, 27). In fact, Sterne’s careful examination of the history of sound reproduction indicates that the continual introduction of newer, more technologically 4 For a more pronounced version of this position, see Perlman (2004) on audiophiles.

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advanced means of recording and reproduction, since the 1870s, has resulted in “repeated declarations of perfect reproduction” (Sterne 2003, 274–5) that supersede all prior claims of perfection. The gramophone is an advance over the phonograph, just as electrical recording methods are superior to acoustic ones, stereo to mono, digital to analog, SACD to CD, and so forth. The flaws of any current technology cannot be fully acknowledged, in this view, until something that “corrects” those flaws comes along. Thus, it should come as no more surprise that Abraham and Hornbostel did not dwell on the temporal constraints imposed by cylinder recording than it might that Reinhard and List made no mention of third-order harmonic distortion in extolling the virtues of magnetic tape. Whatever is most modern, in public discourse at least, is perfect – until the next thing comes along.5 The desire of comparative musicologists and ethnomusicologists for unmediated data led as well to their distrust of musics that seemed to be mixtures of otherwise “pure” traditions as well as popular musics that reflected the influence of Tin Pan Alley popular song, jazz, rock, or other Western styles of music. In that sense, the kind of world music that ethnomusicologists felt most comfortable researching, archiving, and disseminating – known variously as “folk,” “ethnic,” and “traditional” – was decidedly noncommercial. It would be incorrect, however, to assume that when companies like Gramophone (1894), Gramophone and Typewriter Limited (later His Master’s Voice, 1902), Columbia, Victor, and Edison (after 1903) started making recordings of local musics, they were interested only in what researchers were not. Instead, their concern was to record and distribute whatever would convince those with sufficient means in those locales to buy playback machines (Cottrell 2010, 8–10). For instance, a Columbia Phonograph Company memo from 1909 makes those motivations clear for the marketing of “ethnic” music in a manner easily extensible to traditional musics from outside the United States: [R]emember that in all large cities and most towns there are sections where people of one nationality or another congregate in “colonies.” Most of these people keep up the habits and prefer to speak the language of the old country. Speak to them in their own tongue, if you can, and see their faces light up with a smile that linger [sic] and hear the streak of language they will give you in reply.

5 Third-order harmonic distortion is a by-product of analog tape recording that is partly the reason for the subjective “warmth” some listeners attribute to analog recordings. Its absence on digital recordings, likewise, helps to account for the early assessments of the newer technology’s sound as “harsh.” While public acknowledgments of imperfection seem rare, researchers, archivists, and musicians are clearly aware of the capabilities and limits of their tools, as they spend considerable time investigating equipment purchases, weighing the advantages of one tape machine over another, consulting with colleagues, etc. See Chaudhuri (1992), Myers (1992b), Post (1994), and Théberge (1997) for useful, if slightly dated, discussion of these issues.

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To these people RECORDS IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE have an irresistible attraction, and they will buy them readily. (Quoted from Gronow 1982, 3)

In some cases, major recording companies might have hired a group of studio musicians to record “a waltz, a polka, or another dance with multinational appeal” only to obscure artistic attribution on disc labels so as to market one recording to several different nationalities (Spottswood 1982, 56). For the most part, however, the relation between researchers and commercial concerns was more complementary and overlapping than distinct, for the labels’ personnel seemed less interested in creating music than in selling it: In many instances, representatives of the early record companies preceded ethnomusicologists into the field, themselves functioning as fieldworkers in locating and then recording local talent . . . Through much of the phonograph era, the major record companies published ethnic recordings . . . sometimes collaborating with ethnomusicologists. Hugh Tracey published “The Sound of Africa” series in cooperation with Eric Gallo, a commercial record manufacturer in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Shelemay 1991, 280–1)

Those collaborations, nonetheless, were limited to musics already within the purview of comparative musicologists or ethnomusicologists. When, in fact, the introduction of lower-cost and relatively portable magnetic tape machines in the late 1940s made high-quality field recordings and sound production more affordable, the institutions, labels, and series that started marketing recordings – Musée de l’Homme in Paris (1948), Folkways (1950), the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (1955), Ocora-Radio France (1957), the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music of the World (1961), and Nonesuch Explorer (1966), for example – focused on traditional styles (see Cottrell 2010, 11; Reigle 2008) almost to the exclusion of modern, hybrid, electronically mediated ones. The ethnomusicologists and collectors who supplied the recordings had in fact reached a point at which the question was not whether to make field recordings, but how. For a number of reasons, many of them settled on the eighteen-pound, battery-operated Nagra II C recorder enthusiastically recommended by Alan Lomax in the tenth issue of the Ethnomusicology Newsletter: It is the best field recorder for folk music that I have come across – rugged, hi-fi, easy to operate, and unaffected by temperature, dust, etc. Actually, the engineer who designs and makes it is a fan of explorers etc., and he designed the machine for people like us. As he is a graduate of the Swiss Watchmakers University and of a radio engineering course as well, he combines both skills. The result is a beautiful little machine which delivers quality as good as the Ampex or Magnecord, but with no weight, no fuss, no power problems. (“Notes and News” 1957, 42–3)

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From Lomax’s endorsement – as well as a later one by George List (“Notes and News” 1959, 101) – and references to temperature, dust, explorers, and the like, one can infer that his focus was recording nonhybrid traditional musics without studio conditions and perhaps outside urban locales. Their selective emphases notwithstanding, the recordings made by Lomax and others for world-music labels and series had a profound impact on music makers and listeners, especially in the United States and Western Europe, where jazz, rock, and experimental musicians attempted to learn from and about the musics of other cultures, in some cases directly altering their sounds and approaches in response (see, e.g., Schwarz 1980; Weinstein 1993; Farrell 1988, 1997; Feld 2000b; Pond 2005).6 The predilection for the preindustrial, of course, was itself redolent of comparative musicologists’ and ethnomusicologists’ (not always comfortable) ties to colonialism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism (Danielson 2007, 226–30) as well as their concomitant reluctance, before the 1970s, to engage with change and music in urban spaces – beyond, of course, identifying the survival of traditional musics in those locales (Nettl 1978). Again, such approaches were not restricted to world-music researchers (and continue not to be), but were instead one result of a globalizing, capitalist system’s expansion over a few centuries, an expansion that enabled those from wealthy, more industrialized nations to view the people and products of other nations in romantic, orientalist, and primitivizing terms (Said 1978; Erlmann 1999). There were also similar processes at work internally in the more powerful nations in which elites sometimes saw their racialized, ethnicized neighbors in flattened, exoticized terms (Torgovnick 1991; Radano and Bohlman 2000; Scully 2008; Adinolfi 2008). Even in the absence of such deliberate “othering” based in divergent access to economic, social, and cultural capital, musicians had been encountering one another, innocently adapting and brazenly copying elements of each other’s musics – sometimes with the result that the purity they exhibited on field and commercial recordings had no simple analogue in dayto-day musical practice (Miller 2010). Even more, however, while the means of dissemination of world musics and the sizes of those styles’ audiences changed in the period following World War II, recordings as objects remained resistant to criticism beyond nearAdornian complaints that the (popular music) recording industry was a corrupting influence and any recording that went beyond a “live” rendering of experience was somehow false. One dramatic – and frequently cited (Shelemay 6 Instructive in this regard as well is experimental rock group can’s Ethnological Forgery Series, which features the band sometimes parodying, sometimes reverently emulating the sounds on recordings of traditional music. can, Unlimited Edition, Harvest 29653/54, 1976.

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1991, 279; Wong 2004, 85; Cottrell 2010, 14) – expression of the first position came from Charles Keil: I have nurtured a deep ambivalence, at times masking outright hostility, toward all media for many years. I treat records badly; they aren’t real music. I resent the accumulation of tapes I haven’t listened to since the day I recorded them . . . Until a few years ago my position on all electronic media was basically Luddite, a desire to smash it all on the grounds that it substituted machines for people, replaced live music with canned, further alienated us from our already repressed sensoria, and enabled capitalists to sell us back our musical and emotional satisfactions at a profit. (Keil 1984, 92)

The object of Keil’s complaint, however, is not electronic reproduction per se: it is the very fact of mediation. When he wrote about urban blues and jazz rhythm sections in the 1960s, he based his arguments in part on the evidence of commercially released recordings, which he saw in a much less cynical light (Keil 1966, 343–4; 1991, 70–95). What bothered him, more accurately then, was excessive, obvious mediation, where something stood between him and what sounds might have signified. One might reasonably argue, moreover, that the second position – that recording debases music – is but a variant of the first.7 If musical events are indeed multivalent in that they potentially engage all of one’s normally functioning senses, a recording which represents only the sonic components of such events will of necessity be ontologically different (Jackson 2012, 8). Commentators like Philip Auslander (1998) have argued that because recordists largely respect (live) performance conventions in editing the results of disparate sessions for eventual release, they themselves are asking to be judged by a live performance ideal, but he overlooks a more basic fact. What recordists strive for is less liveness than it is recognition and intelligibility: they make music for audiences acquainted with musical conventions that performers and listeners alike have learned as much from recording as from face-to-face encounters. While recordings – of musics in any tradition – have analogues in so-called “live” events, they remain distinct enough that musicians of all kinds deliberately alter what they do in recording studios (Gracyk 1996; Zak 2001,

7 Even among earlier generations of scholars, there are exceptions to this position. In African Polyphony and Polyrhythm (1993), Simha Arom made novel use of multiple tape machines to analyze the complex, interlocking organization of Central African musicians. As he described his method, he first recorded an ensemble and then, as the first recording played on one tape recorder with its output fed to one track of a second recorder, he successively had individual musicians replay their parts wearing headphones, for recording on another track of the second recorder, while listening to the group playback (ibid.: 102–18). While methodologically innovative, this strategy might be described as adapting to the field the strategies that recordists, without analysis as a goal, use when overdubbing parts or otherwise of recording musicians who cannot be present at the same time.

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2005, 2010; Katz 2004). Thus, one might convincingly assert that individual listeners with a strong “recording consciousness” (Bennett 1980, 126–9), or at least no strong ideological commitment to liveness, are likely in any event to recognize that live settings and recording studios have different affordances and to adjust their expectations accordingly. In perhaps extreme cases, such listeners might reverse Auslander’s argument and regard live performances as unfaithful to a recorded ideal. Since the 1960s, the production and dissemination of world music seems to have escaped the near-exclusive curatorial grasp of scholars, collectors, and recording labels obsessed with liveness and authenticity. Shelemay has argued that the era from the end of World War II through the end of the 1960s, the “LP era,” was one in which the long-playing album, as the primary scholarly and commercial distribution medium, had little-or-no impact outside the United States and Western Europe (Shelemay 1991, 278). During the LP era and since, radio and small-media technologies (e.g., audio cassettes) have instead permitted “easy dissemination of and access to previously unknown, remote, or socially exclusive musical styles” (Stokes 2004, 47–8), despite cassettes’ being perhaps the first medium that producers could not market as being higher in fidelity than what preceded them.8 What they lacked in quality, however, they made up for in portability and replicability, facilitating do-ityourself recording and distribution, as well as piracy in India (Manuel 1993) and Algeria (Langlois 1996; Langlois 2005; Schade-Poulsen 1999) and elsewhere. The arrival of low-cost synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, and samplers as well as digital signal processing tools and portable four-track recorders in the 1980s complemented greater access to distribution by making the tools of the LP-era multitrack recording studio more widely available (Vail 2000; Anderton 1983; Hunter 2004; Bartlett and Bartlett 1998). Moreover, those tools and devices sometimes accelerated developments in musical style, leading both to changes in ensemble sizes and timbral experimentation (Rasmussen 1996; Théberge 2003). The relative ubiquity of compact-disc, VCD, and DVD recorders, as well as the increasing ability of consumers to download recordings from the internet at the turn of the twenty-first century, was less a herald of further sweeping change than it was an amplification of processes already underway, creating not only new commodities but also

8 Despite manufacturing processes and different tape materials and coatings intended to mitigate such issues, audio cassettes were more inherently noisy than previous media. Consider, for example, that a minimum speed for high-quality studio tape recordings was fifteen inches per second. Audio cassettes were manufactured, however, to operate at one-eighth that speed, one and seven-eighths inches per second, partly because such speed would allow one to use thinner tape. For more detailed information on the compromised quality of audio cassettes, see Myers (1992b, 50–1).

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new opportunities for agency through “cosmopolitan consumption” (BeasterJones 2007). These developments, more precisely, have to be viewed, in Raymond Williams’s terms, as emergent in a field that includes a dominant, recording industry-branded style of world music and residual traditional and ethnic musics. World music as a term for the marketing and promotion of music can be traced fairly precisely to the “Empress of Russia” meetings of June and July 1987,9 though the term itself has both a broader use and a more complicated history, as Bob White observes (2012, 2–4). It had been featured both on concert programs such as Peter Gabriel’s first World of Music, Arts, and Dance (WOMAD) Festival in 1980 and in the discourse of United States music conservatories, for example. In the former case, it connoted the festival organizers’ capacious embrace of a wide range of musical styles already apparent in Gabriel’s work – as well as Brian Eno’s and David Byrne’s (Feld 2012) – from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the latter case, similarly, it was circulated beginning in the 1960s to “celebrate and promote the study of musical diversity,” but quickly reinscribed the discursive and ideological divide between “music” – that is, European concert music – and nonWestern music (Feld 2000a, 146–7). Although commentators in and beyond the world of academic music discourse expressed skepticism about the very existence of world music in the marketing sense (White 2012, 4), the term did focus attention on the hybridizing work musicians had already been doing, partly out of personal interest and partly to secure audiences with increasingly diverse tastes. Indeed, one of the most striking developments in the study of world music during this most recent period, beyond the embrace of popular musics from various locales by ethnomusicologists, was a profound scholarly commitment to treating the mediation of music in the recording studio as constitutive rather than corrupting. In part, one might attribute the shift to the broad interests of young scholars who came of age immersed in jazz and popular-music traditions before and/or as they underwent graduate training in ethnomusicology. Similarly, one might recognize the importance of scholars who, like the recordists they studied, had developed facility with the technologies of performance, recording, reproduction, and dissemination at earlier stages in their lives. In an impressive body of work dating from the late 1980s, these writers alongside some of their predecessors have described and used modern

9 See “World Music History,” www.frootsmag.com/content/features/world_music_history/minutes/ (accessed January 1, 2012).

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technologies in ways previous scholars might have denied were possible or even advisable. Along the way, they have gradually brought the tools and techniques, as well as the theoretical outlooks, of ethnomusicological research closer to those of the musicians they have studied. Christopher A. Waterman’s Jùjú (1990) is notable in part for its addressing a popular, urban music using the form of the classic, traditional-music focused ethnomusicological monograph (e.g., McAllester 1954; Berliner 1993; Feld 1982). Even more, Waterman found over the course of his research that, for his consultants, modern technologies were not inimical to traditional values. One of his most striking assertions is the idea that the wider availability of public address systems after the 1950s had an authenticating rather than diluting effect on jùjú: “The amplification of voices and guitar allowed jùjú groups to expand along patterns grounded in traditional Yoruba values and techniques. In particular it enabled the incorporation of more drummers without upsetting the acoustic balance between singing and instrumental accompaniment” (Waterman 1990, 84). Similarly, Michael E. Veal compellingly argues that an elastic approach to form and the creative (mis)use of multitrack recording technology and synthetic reverberation by dub reggae producers and engineers helped to grant listeners in postcolonial Jamaica (and the African diaspora) “virtual access to a new vision of the African past” (Veal 2007, 200). For Waterman and Veal, then, the introduction or use of new technologies has the opposite effect from what earlier generations of ethnomusicologists or comparative researchers might have feared. Veal, in fact, takes things a bit further, when he argues – and here the historical record from late 1970s post-punk forward bears him out – that Jamaican dub remixers were simultaneously technological vanguardists: “The country’s recording engineers and sound system operators have consistently pushed the envelope of what is expected of sound technology in terms of both aesthetics and performance capability, and some of their most imaginative ideas are said to have prefigured later developments in sound technology” (ibid., 210). An important, relatively new focus for research on world music has, in fact, made those very technologies of sound reproduction and the ways that musicians use them the primary objects of investigation (see Greene and Porcello 2005). Writing from a background as a recording engineer and a linguistic anthropologist, Thomas Porcello has explored the nuances and specificity of engineers’ and musicians’ discourse about sound and sound reproduction in the recording studio (Porcello 1996, 1998, 2004). His work has shown that, along with the mediations that produce recordings from noncontinuous, noncontiguous “performances,” such recordings also

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emerge from negotiations that mix technical and metaphorical language use,10 as well as institutional and apprenticeship-based pedagogies. Leslie C. Gay Jr.’s work with rock bands in New York City has also shown that nontraditional, nonelite musicians have sophisticated ways of mapping language onto what they hear and how they perform on stage and in rehearsal (Gay 1991, 176–85). And Meryl Krieger’s work has focused attention, among other things, on the way that women and men negotiate the male-dominated, gendered space of the recording studio, where women often find that they need male mediators to argue for the legitimacy of their creative choices (Krieger 2009, 131–8). The work of Christopher Washburne (2008) and Travis A. Jackson (2012), respectively, has explored the differences between salsa and jazz musicians’ particular approaches to recording and live performances. For the former musicians, the priority accorded to live performance in scholarly and popular discourse at times seems reversed: as is often true for rock, recording precedes performance. Assorted musicians work in the studio at separate times, recording their parts to a click track under the supervision of a producer. Only after the resulting tracks have been edited and mixed and after gigs have been secured might a leader form a band. A particular ensemble, which may be completely ad-hoc, assembled solely for a short tour, not only has to learn the material – often from the recording or from other musicians – but it also has to rely on its own flexibility to elongate three- to four-minute pieces for dancers who typically prefer much longer turns on the dance floor (Washburne 2008, 47–68). Jackson’s work, similarly, emphasizes the different kinds of preparations musicians make depending on whether musical events are framed by their taking place in a recording studio, nightclub, or concert hall. Although individual musicians might prefer one setting over another, they all recognize that the settings themselves impose different temporal and interactive constraints upon them and other event participants (and therefore require different kinds of engagement). Musicians in the recording studio, for example, have much more flexibility to correct what they perceive as performance mistakes, and because of the more permanent nature of recording, they may be less inclined to let such mistakes pass uncorrected. Musicians performing in front of a live audience, in contrast, sacrifice the ability to correct themselves for the opportunity to get immediate, hopefully sympathetic responses from audiences (Jackson 2012, 144–51, 158). He argues as well that knowledge of

10 Much technical language, of course, also has a strong metaphoric basis, as does all language in the sense that Mark Johnson describes (1987).

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what happens in the recording studio enhances how one uses commercially released recordings for analysis rather than renders them invalid as sources. Other ethnomusicologists have looked more directly at the ways in which specific technical decisions made by engineers and producers facilitate particular forms of imagining. In her work on recordists working in South African studios, Louise Meintjes pays close attention to the dynamics of race, technical skill, and notions of musical belonging and otherness. Through richly detailed vignettes, she reveals the amount of thought, negotiation, and work that go into producing the sound of “liveness,” thus calling into question whether the live is to the recorded as the real is to the artificial (Meintjes 2003, 109–44). In addition, she shows that there is a broad continuum connecting the traditional and the modern and that recordists in South Africa make deliberate choices regarding timbre, rhythm, and language, among other possibilities, based on their knowledge of local and international musics as they position themselves on that continuum by imagining how their work will (re)sound overseas (ibid., 217–41; see also Guilbault et al. 1993, 180–2). Likewise, in his work on Turkish music, Eliot Bates explores similar issues in ways that build on and extend prior work on recording studios in and beyond ethnomusicology. Working both as a recording engineer and as a performer, Bates was able to add to prior discussions of recording practices detailed consideration of the means through which and reasons why skilled engineers manipulate individual tracks using traditional studio technologies as well as the capabilities of computer-based digital audio workstations (Bates 2008, 155–79, 275–83; see also Bates 2010). He explains: After recordings are done, the arranger-engineer team decides on the necessary edits to the recorded parts. To an extent, notes can be moved earlier or later, short passages can be adjusted in intonation, and timbre can be altered (through the use of EQ, compression, and reverb). Certain small details (breath sounds, clicks, intonation discrepancies, ornaments, and groove discrepancies) are either determined to be detrimental to a piece or, conversely, foregrounded as characteristic musical features. The part must ultimately fit in to an ‘ensemble’ context that [a studio] musician probably did not hear while tracking. Thus the engineer and arranger have control over participatory discrepancies and expressive microtimings, choosing to edit them out, let them be, foreground them, or create them from scratch. (Bates 2008, 204)

Again, what is important in the work of Meintjes and Bates is that recording is a creative rather than destructive process, comprising complex, social negotiations that are aesthetically oriented in addition to being commercially motivated.

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While these recent writings are not concerned specifically with the distribution of world-music recordings (for earlier writings, see Malm and Wallis 1984, 1992; Malm 1992; Negus 1999), they provide insight into the ways that musicians themselves – along with other recordists – think about what they will distribute. Analysis of the choices musicians make regarding what and how to play and record opens a vista onto music making where the focus has shifted from implicitly defending how one constructs certain musics as objects of research to explaining how certain musicians construct music. Without responding directly to it, these younger researchers seem to be taking up the implicit call Stephen Blum issued at the end of an essay on musical analysis: “Wherever we turn, we can find skilled performers engaged in the exercise of their musical knowledge. It is difficult to avoid the impression that analysts of music often fail to recognize much of the guidance that is readily available to us” (Blum 1992, 213). In taking the guidance offered not only by musicians, but also by as many other parties as possible, in the creation of music, modernday ethnomusicologists are moving the field in promising directions. To be sure, the archives created in the past and the vast array of field recordings made by folklorists, comparative musicologists, collectors, and ethnomusicologists alike remain valuable. The preservation and restoration projects at the Berlin Phonogram Archive (Koch et al. 2004; Gómez-Sánchez et al. 2011; Koch et al. 2009; see also the chapter by Koch in the present volume) as well as the work under the aegis of the Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive11 attest to the importance of those materials, not only for what they tell us about musical practices in different places and times, but also as indications of the changes over time in the field of ethnomusicology and in the musical traditions its practitioners have studied. Commercial recordings, whether produced with the input of researchers or not, will, moreover, continue to resound in ways that will change as the questions we bring to our confrontations with them do. Indeed, the need for the near-indiscriminate preservation of both old and new materials seems as necessary as ever, in part because today’s scholars, collectors, and recordists – through their creative acts – are producing the materials that will appear in tomorrow’s archives (Hooper 2011, 45–6). To the degree that all three groups participate in the dissemination of world music, they must do so ever more attentive to their responsibilities to a broad range of constituencies: the traditions of practice and scholarship from which they emerge; their field-specific ancestors, contemporaries, and successors; and the varied audiences from beyond their fields who will engage their work. 11 See www.eviada.org/.

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Meintjes, L. (2003) Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Merriam, A. P. (1958) ‘The Northwestern University Laboratory of Comparative Musicology’, Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, 1, 4: 1, 4 Miller, K. H. (2010) Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Morton, D. (2000) Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Recording in America, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press Mugglestone, E. (1981) ‘Guido Adler’s “The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology” (1885): An English translation with an historico-analytical commentary’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 13: 1–21 Myers, H. (1992a) ‘Ethnomusicology’, in H. Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 3–18 (1992b) ‘Field technology’, in H. Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 50–87 Negus, K. (1999) Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, London: Routledge Nettl, B. (1978) ‘Introduction’, in B. Nettl (ed.), Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 3–18 ‘Notes and News’ (1957) Ethnomusicology Newsletter, 10: 41–6 ‘Notes and News’ (1959) Ethnomusicology, 3, 2: 98–105 Perlman, M. (2004) ‘Golden ears and meter readers: The contest for epistemic authority in audiophilia’, Social Studies of Science, 34, 5: 783–807 Pond, S. F. (2005) Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Porcello, T. (1996) ‘Sonic artistry: Music, discourse, and technology in the sound recording studio’, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin (1998) ‘“Tails out”: Social phenomenology and the ethnographic representation of technology in music-making’, Ethnomusicology, 42: 485–510 (2004) ‘Speaking of sound: Language and the professionalization of sound-recording engineers’, Social Studies of Science, 34, 5: 733–58 Porter, J. (1974) ‘Documentary recordings in ethnomusicology: Theoretical and methodological problems’, ARSC Journal, 6, 2: 3–16 Post, J. C., M. R. Bucknum, and L. Sercombe (1994) A Manual for Documentation, Fieldwork and Preservation for Ethnomusicologists, Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology Pratt, M. L. (1986) ‘Fieldwork in common places’, in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 27–50 Radano, R. M., and P. V. Bohlman (eds.) (2000) Music and the Racial Imagination, University of Chicago Press Rasmussen, A. K. (1996) ‘Theory and practice at the “Arabic org”: Digital technology in contemporary Arab music performance’, Popular Music, 15, 3: 345–65 Reigle, R. (2008) ‘Humanistic motivations in ethnomusicological recordings’, in Mine Doğantan-Dack (ed.), Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections, London: Middlesex University Press, pp. 189–221 Reinhard, K. (1962) ‘The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv’, Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, 5, 2: 1–4

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Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Sanjek, R. (1990) ‘The secret life of fieldnotes’, in R. Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 187–270 Schade-Poulsen, M. (1999) Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of Raï, Austin: University of Texas Press Schwarz, K. R. (1980) ‘Steve Reich: Music as a gradual process, part II’, Perspectives of New Music, 20, 1–2: 225–86 Scully, M. F. (2008) The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Seeger, A. (1986) ‘The role of sound archives in ethnomusicology today’, Ethnomusicology, 30: 261–76 Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005) Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, University of Chicago Press Shelemay, K. K. (1991) ‘Recording technology, the record industry, and ethnomusicological scholarship’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 277–92 Sider, G., and G. Smith (eds.) (1997) Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, University of Toronto Press Spottswood, R. K. (1982) ‘Commercial ethnic recordings in the United States’, in J. McCulloh (ed.), Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage, Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, pp. 51–66 Sterne, J. (2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Production, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Stocking, G. W., Jr. (2001) Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Essays and Reflections, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Stokes, M. (2004) ‘Music and the global order’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 47–72 Théberge, P. (1997) Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (2003) ‘“Ethnic sounds”: The economy and discourse of world music sampling’, in R. T. A. Lysloff and L. C. Gay, Jr. (eds.), Music and Technoculture, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 93–108 Torgovnick, M. (1991) Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, University of Chicago Press Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press Urry, J. (1972) ‘“Notes and queries on anthropology” and the development of field methods in British anthropology, 1870–1920’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 1972: 45–57 Vail, M. (2000) Vintage Synthesizers: Pioneering Designers, Groundbreaking Instruments, Collecting Tips, Mutants of Technology, San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books Veal, M. E. (2007) Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Washburne, C. (2008) Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Waterman, C. A. (1990) Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music, University of Chicago Press

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Weinstein, N. C. (1993) ‘John Coltrane: Sounding the African cry for paradise’, in A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz, New York: Limelight Editions White, B. W. (2012) ‘Introduction: Rethinking globalization through music’, in B. W. White (ed.), Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–14 Wong, D. (2004) Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music, New York: Routledge Zak, A. J., III (2001) The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, Berkeley: University of California Press (2005) ‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and transformation “All along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57, 3: 599–644 (2010) I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

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Musical antinomies of race and empire WAYNE MARSHALL AND RONALD RADANO

Introduction Exploring the significance of race in world-music history is a little bit like trying to snare an elusive animal or, even better, to change the perspective of the faithful. Because race is more belief than tangible reality, it inevitably remains in the realm of ideas, and it is for this reason that its very existence continues to be a matter of debate. Evidence of the racial may seem nearly everywhere among the popular forms circulating around the globe, as a never-ending array of figurations casts about in repetition. Yet because racial appearances in music lack specification, their identification is always contingent on context and subject to interpretation. What might appear racially intentional to a North American observer, for example, may operate according to a very different semiotic universe among audiences and listeners in Mumbai, Lagos, or Rio. There is, moreover, a reflexive tendency to assign to the primary American musical index of race, blackness, an undeniable attribution of meaning. Because this sign has circulated and undergone multiple transformations across the twentieth century and into the present day, however, it has been difficult to discern the intelligibility of its racial consequence throughout world cultures. If hearing and seeing race everywhere is problematic, denying its existence is more troubling. Whatever the challenges we face in investigating the racial aspect in music, however difficult it may be to surmise racial significance, “the fact of blackness,” as Frantz Fanon called it, seems beyond question, even if it remains hidden from plain view (Fanon 1967). The invisibility of race is particularly common to urban, metropolitan contexts of the West, where primarily white youth cultures across multiple economic classes have historically exploited the musical traditions of others and particularly those marked racially as black. Such denials of race tend to privilege whiteness as a transcendental category and help to explain why white people have repeatedly appeared atop a deracinated cultural hierarchy. Prominent examples include: Irving Berlin, the preeminent “ragtime” composer; Paul Whiteman, “The King of Jazz”; Benny

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Goodman, “The King of Swing”; and Elvis Presley, “The King.” While racially determined status positions no longer play out so obviously, we can still locate the primacy of whiteness operating within the scales of cultural authority, from the enduring strength of European art music in the American academy to the seemingly egalitarian circumstance of contemporary club cultures, which, despite celebrations of multiculturalism and racial/ethnic plurality, typically valorize cultural cosmopolitanism linked to white-dominated hipster and educated classes. These manifestations of what Étienne Balibar calls “differentialist racism” reveal thinking about otherness that carries forward the prejudices and suspicions of inferiority without the imposition of biological marking (Balibar 1991). Such challenges to the interpretation of figurative transferences of American racial signs thus become all the more vexing as the rapidity and global flow of sound and image accelerates through the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. How, then, do we make sense of a musical–social phenomenon that seems at once ubiquitous and absent? In this chapter, we offer a historical mapping of musical/racial alignments that have emerged in the context of the modern world system since the eighteenth century, with special focus on the social consequences of their various reformations in the new global networks over the past one hundred years. While racial figurations in music have taken many forms throughout the world (Radano and Bohlman 2000), we focus in this chapter on what remains the primary figure of race in world popular expressions: the American cultural articulation of blackness. The primacy of this phenomenon extends in large part due to the global reach of American and European economic and communications networks. While suggesting a point of origin in the earliest incarnations of American pop, this sign quickly became a much more expansive, and consequently more powerful, figure – one that was variously rearticulated and reinvented in a world complex of musical vernacularity, which gained wide visibility within modern commodity capitalism. The paradoxical celebration of blackness, as an international sign of freedom and resistance emerging from an American minority class that has been afforded only a qualified claim on the status of American citizenry, will be a central determining point of analysis. Part I offers a set of contours, outlining the historical trajectories of race that eventually established an American-centered idea of blackness as the key signifier of musical difference within popular world-music practices in Europe, Africa, and across the Americas. As blackness identifies what many people believe makes African Americans distinctive and particular, so too does it mark the cultural production of difference, widely embraced in the name of unity and universal claims of belonging. Blackness in sound appears along the

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margins of the public domain, having been excluded from the body politic, just as its popularity and appeal encourages its status at the center of the social, representing the voice of the included. While black music’s actual expressions may take countless forms, the contradictory pattern of difference formation (as a particularity expressing the whole) appears again and again across national boundaries. Take, for example, the former band Monteniggers, whose name claims heritage from Montenegro as homeland while alluding to the ghettoized position of Montenegrins in Yugoslavia. In addition, the hip-hop audiences of Tokyo who embrace and critique American styles, in order to articulate a new Japanese exceptionalism, represent a similar phenomenon (Longinovic´ 2008; Condry 2006). In rhythm, finally, we locate a key signifier of racial blackness, which becomes the most powerful formal aspect in the circulation of world pop in the first half of the twentieth century. As a racial sign, rhythm has had a remarkable effect, orienting musical and bodily behavior from New York to Havana to metropoles and provinces worldwide. Part II explores how the antinomies of inclusion/exclusion and black particularism/deracinated (white) universalism amplify and expand, as part of the global circulation of American popular culture after World War II. Here, we demonstrate how the elevation of the status of public arts, together with the new economic and institutional commitments to popular culture among Western professional and managerial classes, has brought about a fundamental cultural shift across global metropolitan contexts. This shift has suggested in some instances the emergence of new social possibilities, encouraging claims of a postnational, post-American and even postracial cosmopolitanism; in others, it has inspired legitimate concern about music’s power to perpetuate status and distinction. In world musics today, we hear the legacy of national/imperial commitments to the racial and of music’s place within a capitalist economy. Productions themselves can fragment and undo those modern legacies, proposing possibilities for new social movements and democratic coalescences of a multitude informed in sound (Hardt and Negri 2004; Middleton forthcoming). The power and appeal of the social movements, largely centered in youth cultures, reminds us of the deep-seated connection between music and race as a dominant topos of modern music.

I The equation of music and difference is arguably as old as the very recognition of others – of a people viewed exterior to and apart from a common group. In this general way, race is consistent with other modes of distinction – gender,

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class, age, etc. – and is, according to some theorists, essentially a political economic category (Wallerstein 2004, 38–41, 60–75; Hardt and Negri 2000, 190–8). More commonly, however, when we speak of race, the concept of difference relates particular markings of division and separation. Often cast as a physical expression or intellectual deficiency or attribute, in social terms race is a mode of defining those excluded from groups otherwise inhabiting the same physical space. This marking of difference is historically connected to the production of dominant communities across modern capitalism, in large part integral to the international economic project of slavery, which, by the late eighteenth century, established a set of fairly stable indications of social hierarchy along racial lines. Musical productions of these excluded peoples, when they were acknowledged, tended to conform to perceived racial differences. The music of Europe, however, defined majority norms and stood beyond and outside of race, although racial discourses could also be applied internally on occasion (Potter 1998; Bohlman 2000a, 2000b, 2004). Significantly, the musical productions of excluded classes eventually became points of interest to the majority, precisely because these musical differences marked the cultural terrain of a newly recognized subjectivity beyond themselves. As a result, difference grew increasingly important to the definition of European subjects in an unstable moment of self-identification (Kristeva 1982; Bhabha 1994). Race and racialized “black” musical particularism thus established a cultural contradiction of enormous consequence in the making of national cultures, world-music history, and the greater social life they informed. The linkage of the musical and the racial acquires various articulations across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, informing representations of colonial and imperial projects, as the institutional formations and discourse networks of Europe and the United States carried around the globe. The musical–racial figurations informing Rousseau’s depictions of national difference (1779) and François-Joseph Fétis’s claims of European superiority in Histoire générale de la musique (1869) took on new manifestations in the Dutch comprehension of Indonesian-Chinese performances and in the vast representation of African music in colonial literatures (Kartomi 2000; Agawu 2003). Race also informed Europeans’ understanding of their own music. It determined weakness and inferiority in Richard Wagner’s famous characterization of Jewish music (Wagner 1869), helped to reestablish French categories of musical form in the fin de siècle (Pasler 2006), and underpinned early musicological depictions of musical origin, which positioned Germany and the harmonic systems of Europe at the center of history (Rehding 2000). Depictions of otherness, finally, reach even farther back, as Gary Tomlinson observes in his study of the Aztec cantares, even if these particular depictions lacked the accompanying

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ideological apparatuses of inferiority and contempt consistent with later versions of racial thought (Tomlinson 2007). In the United States, where colonial and imperial projects were by and large yet to come, racial–musical formations appeared primarily in depictions of African American expressions that musically challenged various local conceptions of auditory culture. Initially, these centered on slave songs as the point of reference for blackface minstrelsy, which grew into the first great popular genre, carrying outward by the mid-1840s in performances in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. These minstrel performances established a prototype that reiterated the previously identified social contradictions inherent to racial taxonomy. The musical practices of slaves became the inspiration for white people to produce creative forms that affirmed white mastery and the containment of African Americans, for these performances, as parodic forms of mimesis, simultaneously revealed the racially determined inaccessibility of black expressive culture. In southern antebellum contexts, black forms had already been recognized by white planters and even among the nonpropertied white populace as extensions of the master’s property that somewhat miraculously transformed into an insider, propertied value of African American cultural formation (Radano 2010). In this way, a key cultural value in the production of American popular culture proceeds from the contingencies of the master–slave relation: a sound world at the heart of an emerging national culture grew out of an unstable economic relationship, in which a coveted national treasure called “black music” derived from a marginalized population that was previously enslaved. In blackface performance, the racial mimicry of slaves became central to a broad American self-identification, which simultaneously affirmed white mastery as it revealed mastery’s dependence on race. This musically and racially based self-image became so influential that, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry made first contact with Japan in 1853–4, his crew chose to introduce American culture to their Japanese guests by engaging in a blackface performance (Torii 1997). With the rise of slave music and its parodies, black music became the primary cultural expression of what nineteenth-century Americans meant by race. The racial–musical phenomenon in the United States would soon multiply exponentially to establish a dominant position in the history of world music. The music’s new, global presence relates to two primary causes: the rise of the United States as a military–economic power, whose reach became extended worldwide after the colonization of the Philippines and American intervention in two world wars, and the emergence of popular culture within massmediated consumer society and its consequent world distribution as a primary representation of the United States (Maier 2006; Kaplan 2002). During the first

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decades of the twentieth century, the invention of the phonograph and the radio, together with the eastward movement of African American populations to Europe during World War I, enabled a new level of cultural exportation, as black American performances became an affecting presence that coincided with the rising status and power of the United States. By the late 1920s and 1930s, American musical styles, and particularly black styles, became increasingly pervasive – from spirituals in Germany to ragtime in South Africa to jazz in China. The musical productions and recordings, in turn, inspired foreign musical inventions that interplayed with local expressions of difference (concert jazz in Berlin, isicathamiya in Johannesburg, “yellow music” in Shanghai), many of which carried forward a complicated, transnational language of racism extending out of the legacy of American blackface minstrelsy (Erlmann 1996; Jones 2003; Miller 2010). If there was one formal feature that stood out as a racial marker in American musical exportations, it was rhythm (Brennan 2008; Marshall 2007; Moreno 2004; Radano 2003). Into the first half of the twentieth century, black performances in the United States made rapid transferences and exchanges with musics in faraway places; for example, South African jive, Cuban mambo, Brazilian samba, and many others. Foreign listeners, who were similarly engaged in their own African American-based rhythm practices, were drawn to the production of styles that articulated an America-centered idea of black rhythm (Garcia 2006; Coplan 2008; Hertzman 2008). Rhythm emerged as a primary syncretic figure in a global circuit of musical production, carrying with it American attachments to racial imagery: freedom, resistance, and primitivist notions of the illicit and sexual. As these sounds acquired appeal, they would be harnessed more and more by nation-state apparatuses. After World War II, the United States State Department employed black music, notably jazz, as a means of assisting American influence abroad (Von Eschen 2004). Ironically, a music that appealed to many for its symbolism of freedom (as the representation of an oppressed minority) became accessible through the very state-institutional powers that had previously acted in African American oppression. This, in turn, helped to inspire local, musically generated social movements standing in opposition to dominant, official versions of the state. The antinomies of racial particularism – represented as a cultural property claimed by those previously enslaved – and universalist consumer culture – imagining utopian possibility through the reification of commodified forms – played out again and again, forging racialized rhythm music’s inimitable status as a popular form (Jameson 1979; Denning 2004). In popular representations, black-derived rhythm has been commonly interpreted as a powerful, seemingly natural expression intimately connected to the

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body and distinctive to African-based musics. What Charles Keil has named “groove” is a performative orientation, in which asymmetries appear physically and mimetically related to a kind of bodily motion that is observed in contrast to a normative Anglo-white European order (Keil 1995). While we uphold the basic parameters of this thesis, as it relates to legacies of African influence in the Americas, we would also suggest that the very language that identifies rhythmic power is inextricably connected to dominant racial discourses, which tend to particularize a quality seemingly inherent to people of color. What such proposals of groove play down is how the power of rhythm has accrued through its circulation in modern musical economies: rhythm’s status as a racial signifier becomes attributable less to bodies in motion or egalitarian collectivities than to its transferences and exchanges within an economic circuit controlled hegemonically by the United States across the better part of the twentieth century. These rhythm circuits, as we would like to call them, acquire value through their conspicuous performance and exchange, linked as they are to a system of signs that draw upon the commercial representations of American world myths: freedom, play, and power. As they recall the organic–physical–biological references of early political theory – rhythm circuits of the body politic (Radano forthcoming) – we can recognize how cultural value (what we might term black music’s symbolic capital) is deeply invested in an economy of empire, as authentic rhythm represents a form of cultural currency in world-music systems. Rhythm circuits were established in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the international circulation of popular forms, in large part informed if not dominated by styles generated in the United States. Indeed, beginning with the rise of ragtime, we can trace rhythmic invention as the primary impulse in the development of African American style, as rhythm revealed a socially recognized sensibility attributable to blackness (Radano 2003). By mid-century, moreover, rhythmic practices became the centerpiece of a firmly established black particularity that was central to the commerce system of black pop (Green 2007). The degree and nature of these flows, however, would change dramatically after the social, political, and economic upheavals of the 1960s, when new, vocal social movements among formerly oppressed groups established a range of new global practices, identifying a world constellation of minority protest. At this point, American black music’s global presence would grow even larger, and its rhythmic orientation would come to inform world popular practices in a give-and-take reciprocity between metropoles and provinces.

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II Despite being forcefully projected via American-dominated networks of imperial and commercial power, African American music and musically propelled styles – among them sartorial and rhetorical – have enjoyed a popularity deeply connected to their ambivalent relations to mainstream American culture. Ubiquitous as a consequence of American expansionism yet empowering as symbols of freedom and resistance, such putatively black genres as jazz, rock, funk, and hip-hop have animated a great deal of postcolonial cultural politics. These rhythmic figurations of global humanism often partake in a racialist primitivism even as they support local movements for equal rights against colonial legacies and enduring, Eurocentric hierarchies of value. The increasing presence of transnational media, a product of information and communication technologies as well as migratory pressures, has reinforced circuits of exchange – from colonies to metropoles but also involving lateral movements – trading in sounds and images that paradoxically confront imperial power through a musical language forged in the crucible of racialized representation and subjugation. While any site might theoretically serve as an illuminating study of the musical circulation of racial signifiers, we focus here on a few nodes that seem particularly revealing within the constellation of circulating signs described above: the Philippines (and the United States), India (and the UK), and Jamaica (in relation to both the UK, as former colonial master, and to the United States, its dominant neighbor to the north). Embodying the enduring structural relations of metropolitan/provincial exchanges, while complicating traditional colonial models through the displacements of diaspora and information technologies, these examples demonstrate the complex, contingent, and elusive meanings of race in a globalized, postcolonial moment. In each case, we witness performances of alterity and modernity figured as American blackness, expressed through common tropes of rhythmic primacy and the paradoxical embodiment of self-controlled possession, the artful representation of the self as other. When, after a half century of American administrative control, the Republic of the Philippines became a sovereign and independent nation on July 4, 1946, General Douglas MacArthur, who had presided over American and Filipino military forces, reportedly told a friend, “America buried imperialism here today” (McMahon 1999, 28). The strange fruits of that burial, however, bring into focus how racialized modes of musical performance often undergird an ambivalent relation to enduring structures of imperial domination. Having maintained military bases and propped up corrupt rulers even after the formal

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transfer of sovereignty, while simultaneously serving as a beacon of freedom for economic and political refugees over the course of the twentieth century, representations of the United States have offered contradictory meanings to Filipinos who have acted out these contradictions on the national and global stage. For decades, but most spectacularly with the rise of internet video, Filipino men and women have performed versions of American blackness that are downright uncanny in their disciplined embodiment of American racial signatures. The advent of sites such as YouTube and imeem, which allow users to upload an ad hoc archive of audio and visual content, represents – despite the trappings of a democratized mediasphere – a key extension of American participation in the constellation of unstable circuits we describe in this chapter. As with the emergence of earlier forms of transnational mass media (especially television), internet video today serves to amplify racial ideologies within a global flow of ideas subject to structural cooptation by the forces of corporate capitalism; indeed, such appropriations extend to the commodification of liberationist rhetoric, a process that ironically lessens and amplifies its power as a resistant form (Nakamura 2007). There is perhaps no better contemporary representation of embodied, racialized, musical discipline than the spectacle of hundreds of Filipino prison inmates dancing in-sync as they rehearse well-known routines originally performed by African Americans. The men of CPDRC (Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center) have become “viral” video stars by reproducing, virtuosically and in staggering number, the familiar music video choreography from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the gospel kitsch of “I Will Follow Him” from Sister Act, Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat,” and MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” to name a few. They were brought to the attention of the wider world via YouTube, where “provincial security consultant” and initiator of the dance program, Byron Garcia (brother of Gwendolyn Garcia, governor of Cebu province), uploaded dozens of the inmates’ routines. Most of the acts involve not just racial but gender cross-dressing, and the waves of orange-clad inmates moving in unison make for an irresistible sight, especially for American viewers. Indeed, that these performances of American blackness circulate and resonate back to the United States calls attention to the central position of the United States within an increasingly global circulation of racialized riffs and rhythms. It is no coincidence that the repertory of choice for these inmates is American black music. The CPDRC videos that have received the most views on YouTube are songs and dances originally performed by African Americans. On the one hand, these songs and dances circulate as “universal” signs of

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humanness and participation in global modern culture; on the other hand, they are strongly marked not just as American, but as African American, a racial category whose exceptionalism represents something desirable to embody. As such, the routines are inherently vague in their reproduction of race and nation. If such performances are intrinsically unstable, however, it makes them no less suggestive and no less powerful as vehicles specifying difference. Their reception abroad calls attention to the paradox by which we recognize racial signifiers as the products of culture rather than nature, even as the act of bearing witness to such performances serves to reaffirm deep-seated commitments to ideologies of race. In this regard, another striking example from the Philippines is the emergence of Filipina teenagers so fluent in the gestures of gospelized, African American “diva” singing – another style at once marked as black and transcendent – that their performances on YouTube and American television offer spectacular affirmations of black music’s universal yet particular appeal. Indeed, they become “American Idols” of a rather special sort. The clips of fifteen-year-old Charice Pempengco channeling Whitney Houston for Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey reveal the talk-show hosts and their audiences to be utterly taken aback and charmed by such an apparently unlikely performance. A diminutive Asian girl belting out ballads heavily marked by melisma and falsetto proves an awesome and endearing sight, as if those watching are witnessing a spirit possession and an enactment of race incarnate. Another example is Ramiele Malubay, a singer who was born to Filipino parents in Saudi Arabia before moving to Florida as a young girl and who advanced to the Top 10 of American Idol in 2008 after auditioning with an extremely accurate version of Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman.” Malubay presents not just a fascinating example of cross-racial performance and of African American style as universal (as all Idol contestants do with their gospel-inflected vocalizing) but of triumphant American multiculturalism. She becomes a symbol of sentimental populism, a treacly embodiment of the songs she sings and a fresh face for American fantasies of integration and meritocracy. As Winfrey said to Pempengco after her affecting performance, interpolating with a casual and commonplace term of African American vernacular endearment, “Girl, that was fantastic!” As we track such apparent repetitions of familiar signs of race and transcendence (e.g., the gospelized diva vocalist), we must acknowledge that this interpretation carries with it an assumption of a certain stability of these signs. The central question is whether a global semiotics of blackness, crucially inflected by American racial ideologies, operates without much local recreation. Does the “diva” figure, as well as the musical gestures associated with it,

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convey a meaning of cross-racial performance for Filipino audiences, or is this association an American obsession that serves to project a certain exceptionalism, even in interpretive works such as this chapter? Notably, Pempengco deflects Oprah’s questions about her spiritual sources – questions seemingly triggered by the cognitive dissonance of her appearance and performance – in order to focus on the corporeal disciplines she employs: Winfrey: Girl, that was fantastic! Wow, wow, wow . . . So that voice comes from something bigger than yourself? Pempengco: Yeah, some people ask me, “Oh my god, what a voice! Where’s it come from?” Winfrey: Yeah, where is that? You’re, like, pulling it up out of some place – deeper than your little body. Pempengco: In singing, there’s so many techniques. I don’t know. I’m just using some diaphragm, chest, head tones. Although our overarching argument may appear to disregard Pempengco’s resistance to bringing race into the foreground, through a reliance on a European-derived lexicon of vocal technique, it underscores the problems of interpretation invited by the complex positionalities of subjects who are involved in a global transmutation of American-generated signs of race and blackness. Offering his own analysis of the interplay between global forces and local meanings in the Philippines, Arjun Appadurai argues that “disturbingly faithful” foreign renditions of American popular song should not be confused with such a “pallid term” as “Americanization” (Appadurai 2008, 49). Rather, we should see in such performances the “subtler play of indigenous trajectories of desire and fear with global flows of people and things” – or, to return to our original: “American nostalgia feeds on Filipino desire represented as a hypercompetent reproduction” (ibid.). In “The Philippines: Born in the USA,” a chapter from his 1988 travelogue, Pico Iyer, one of Appadurai’s principal ethnographic sources for the quotation above, affirms the relation between local performances and imperial forces, even while complicating any assumed purity or direct correspondence within such circuits of repetition. “The Philippines is not just the site of the largest US military installations in the world,” writes Iyer, “It is also perhaps the world’s largest slice of the American Empire, in its purest impurest form” (Iyer 1988, 168). The attention to imperial networks of desire, and to the musical acts of racial articulation and disarticulation within these global contexts, allows us to connect a putative American colony such as the Philippines to a former English colony, Jamaica, which achieved nominal independence in 1962.

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Jamaica offers another important and revealing angle from which to examine the global circulation of racialized musical expressions. Despite never having been a formal colony of the United States in the way that the Philippines was, Jamaica is a place that, as sociologist Orlando Patterson contends, “has perhaps been more exposed to the full glare of American culture than nearly any other” (Patterson 1994). The modern history of Jamaican popular music is one in which American black music plays a central, if again ambivalent, role. In the decades leading up to independence from Britain in 1962, the local and regional genres mento and calypso found themselves increasingly drowned out by the black masses’ preference for American jazz and rhythm and blues. Against enduring colonial hierarchies of value and a concentration of wealth along color lines, these Yankee sounds represented black modernity and mobility for Kingston’s disenfranchised (Thomas 2004). The increasingly transnational experience of the Jamaican working class, through migration to metropoles old and new (London, New York, Toronto) and through seasonal farm labor in the circum-Caribbean and American South, accounts as much for these new musical predilections as the military and media presence of the United States across the hemisphere. The rhythmically weighted dance music of black Americans has enjoyed a conspicuous presence in Jamaica’s soundscape from the swing era to hip-hop. That these genres were cast as black music – aesthetically and discursively – has always been a part of the conversation, such that Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, one of the island’s foremost soundmen and studio operators, repeatedly rehearsed the story of turning to locally produced versions of rhythm and blues at the dawn of the rock ’n’ roll era. Despite the shift to local production, however, American black music has remained a common touchstone for generations of Jamaican musicians and audiences. And while Jamaica certainly had precedents for racially mobilized politics, especially in the allegiances to Marcus Garvey and Rastafarianism, the seductive projections of black pride and power via American soul and funk, later picked up by hip-hop, have left an audible mark on reggae – an umbrella term employed in Jamaica to describe everything from early 1960s ska to contemporary dancehall. What is especially remarkable about Jamaican music is how reggae’s distinctive filtering of American racial ideologies has helped to propagate further and reinvent those ideologies. In Jamaica and the Caribbean more widely (especially the Latin Caribbean), racial distinction frequently departs from American theories of hypodescent (the “one drop” rule) in favor of something more like shade-ism, wherein color still closely correlates to wealth. Reggae’s politics are, however, decidedly pro-black – even if this is most powerfully

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espoused by a biracial or “brown” avatar such as Bob Marley. Like the American genres that helped to inspire it, reggae foregrounds rhythm. Indeed, the locally inflected term riddim, which refers both to the music’s properties of temporal organization as well as to the instrumental accompaniment undergirding vocal performances, offers a telling synecdochic shorthand. Remarkably, reggae and its riddims have resonated around the world almost as pervasively as American forms. From expected diasporic sites such as London, New York, and Toronto, where reggae suffuses public soundscapes, to countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, where reggae resonates widely as both rebel music and tourist soundtrack – inflecting local styles and informing the creation of new scenes altogether – Jamaican popular music enjoys an influence unrivalled by any country of comparable size or geopolitical power (Hebdige 1987; Manuel and Marshall 2006; Baulch 2007; Veal 2007). Jamaica’s access to imperial networks of language, culture, and commerce help to explain this reach, but reggae’s interplay with American black musical forms, even as it offers a somewhat different meaning for “New World” black music, is not to be underestimated. For all its inextricability from North American notions of race and nation, reggae resonates as a resistant sound from the belly of the beast precisely because it circulates as a black, modern form without an explicit degree of complicity with empire. As such, reggae animates minority discourse cultural politics from West Africa to East Asia without the same taint as American black music. Even so, the frequent hybridization of reggae, together with American genres such as hip-hop and house, bears witness to a continued conflation of race and rhythm, from South African kwaito and Tanzanian bongo flava to many other global hip-hop styles. The reggae-inflected global hip-hop confluences that are centered in and radiate from London point us to yet another revealing circuit of music, race, and representation. The postcolonial society and culture of London have produced a stunning multiculture and yet one where, as Paul Gilroy has observed, the psychic damage done by the brutalities of colonial rule have yet to be assimilated, leading to a kind of national melancholia (Gilroy 2004). This sentimental sense of self and nation is hardly audible, however, in the pulsing dance music – often baldly referred to in the press as MOBO (music of black origin) – that animates cultural life in London. Instead, we hear something rather commensurate with a colonial history and an enduring commitment to Anglo-American imperial projects. There are traditional versions of American hip-hop, Jamaican reggae, Trinidadian soca, Nigerian highlife, Punjabi bhangra, and a host of other national styles. Significantly, we also hear a plethora of fusions of these: grime, dubstep, funky house, modern bhangra/desi beats, and so on. These latter genres are striking for their combination of rhythmic,

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melodic, and textural/timbral signifiers of home (more often these days, one’s parents’ or grandparents’ homelands) with the sounds of the modern and of the cosmopolitan. Because diasporic postcolonial circuits have become increasingly active and complex, fueled by new technologies of information, communication, and transportation, these metropolitan genres and practices rapidly circulate back around. The “remix,” for example, was introduced to India by Bally Sagoo in the early 1990s. Born in India but raised in Birmingham, Sagoo made a name for himself in Britain and India alike by using a sample-based club-music aesthetic – deeply influenced by contemporary hip-hop and reggae – to refashion the nostalgic sounds of bhangra and filmi for South Asian audiences in both the subcontinent and the diaspora. In the years since, Indian popular music has been increasingly defined and divided by the ubiquity of the remix (a term which can refer to cover versions of previous hits as well as productions employing direct samples). An examination of the complex circuitry and representational practices revolving around a recent example helps to round out this overview of race and world music. Let us proceed chronologically in an attempt to keep the lines of influence clear. In 1981, a Bollywood film called Jyoti featured a song called “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai,” which plays during a scene of seduction, supporting the belly-dance-inspired moves of actress Aruna Irani. The song was sung by the legendary Lata Mangeshkar and composed by Bappi Lahiri, one of the more prolific film composers of the late twentieth century, whose frequent borrowings from American and European pop have created considerable controversy (Manuel 1993). Neither the song nor the film became major hits in the 1980s, but two decades later a chance viewing of this scene inspired Los Angeles-based hip-hop producer DJ Quik to sample the recording and use it as the basis of an accompanimental track supporting the song “Addictive” by rhythm and blues singer Truth Hurts. Quik’s production became a worldwide hit in 2002. The original recording already featured a propulsive beat, but Quik sutured it to a sample of the drum break from “Do It (Til You’re Satisfied)” (1974) by the funk/disco group B. T. Express – a favorite source for hip-hop producers. Even so, the added layers of a synthesizer, a bass, and the vocals of Truth Hurts and rapper Rakim fail to mute the constant presence of Mangeshkar’s vocals, which are treated as yet another textural (rather than lexical) element. Inspired by the clip from Jyoti, the video for the song features a haremlike setting with choreography alternating between sartorial and gestural Indian and Arab signifiers – a fairly typical example of post-9/11 hip-hop Orientalism, complete with “Arab-face” (Maira 2008).

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Circulating as a hit song and video, “Addictive” was responsible for initiating an Indian remix of “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai.” This new title, “Kaliyon Ka Chaman,” was sung by film-star Meghna Naidu and released just months after “Addictive.” The Naidu recording, which became a major hit, caused quite a stir in India both because of its blatant derivation from Mangeshkar’s song and its risqué accompanying video, which borrows heavily from the Truth Hurts production. Interestingly, with “Addictive” and “Kaliyon Ka Chaman,” the primitivist staging of the sexual and illicit often projected onto black music was grafted onto another kind of ethnic otherness, with blackness as a rhythmic subtext for the video’s more explicit gestures to Arab otherness, suggesting a racialized mode of reception with a long historical arc. If that does not bring us full-circle in some sense, it should also be noted that “Addictive” inspired a Jamaican dancehall riddim called “the Bollywood.” Reggae producer Computer Paul replayed several elements from DJ Quik’s production, sampled Mangeshkar’s voice, and added additional synthesizer lines of his own in order to create an instrumental track that supported more than two-dozen different vocalists. Beenie Man’s “Red Red,” for instance, used the riddim to assail the United States as a site of corrupt, immoral sexual practice. He criticizes a hip-hop recording by borrowing its melody and changing its text, while extolling his own (traditional) prowess. What are we to make of this messy circuit of racialized representations? In his attempt to recuperate the multiculture of London, where at the time he was writing one could have heard all the songs discussed above, Gilroy reads contemporary cultural practice in the postcolonial city as expressing a kind of conviviality. This mode of cohabitation and interaction “does not describe the absence of racism or the triumph of tolerance” (Gilroy 2004, xv); rather, it “glories in the ordinary virtues and ironies – listening, looking, discretion, friendship – that can be cultivated when mundane encounters with difference become rewarding” (ibid., 67). Attending to the sounds of bhangra, hip-hop, dancehall, and more in London and beyond, however, we hear how such a “convivial” state is repeatedly interrupted by music’s power simultaneously to project the pastness of race, the primitive, the negative, and the spectacular notions of difference we have inherited. As Gilroy recognizes, the convivial must repeatedly attend to the force of pastness that race musics enable, a pastness that while enacting imaginations of liberation and belonging simultaneously articulates those racialized expressions qualities of separation and distinction. It is one of the remarkable capacities of the musical within the racial and the global to play out these paradoxes. Such endurances of antinomy might accordingly make us cautious in our claims of music’s unifying capacities and in our hope that it can someday bring about something truly postracial.

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Bibliography Agawu, K. (2003) Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge Appadurai, A. (2008) ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, in J. X. Inda and R. Renato (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, 2nd edn, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 47–65 Balibar, E. (1991) ‘Is there a “neo-racism”?’, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, London: Verso, pp. 17–28 Baulch, E. (2007) Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge Bohlman, P. V. (2000a) ‘The remembrance of things past: Music, race, and the end of history in modern Europe’, in R. M. Radano and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Music and the Racial Imagination, University of Chicago Press, pp. 644–76 (2000b) ‘Composing the cantorate: Westernizing Europe’s other within’, in G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 187–212 (2004) The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Brennan, T. (2008) Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz, New York: Verso Condry, I. (2006) Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Coplan, D. B. (2008) In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press Denning, M. (2004) ‘The end of mass culture’, in idem, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, New York: Verso, pp. 97–120 Erlmann, V. (1996) Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa, University of Chicago Press Fanon, F. (1967, orig. publ. 1952) ‘The fact of blackness’, in idem, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markman, New York: Grove Press, pp. 109–40 Fétis, F.-J. (1869) Histoire générale de la musique, Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères Garcia, D. F. (2006) Arsenio Rodriguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Gilroy, P. (2004) Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press Green, A. (2007) Selling the Race: Culture, Community and Black Chicago, 1940–1955, University of Chicago Press Hardt, M., and A. Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Books Hebdige, D. (1987) Cut ’N’ Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music, London: Comedia Hertzman, M. A. (2008) ‘Surveillance and difference: The making of samba, race, and nation in Brazil 1880s–1970s’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison Iyer, P. (1988) Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-so-Far East, New York: Vintage Books Jameson, F. (1979) ‘Reification and utopia in mass culture’, Social Text, 1: 130–48

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Jones, A. F. (2003) ‘Black Internationale: Notes on the Chinese Jazz Age’, in E. T. Atkins (ed.), Jazz Planet, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 225–44 Kaplan, A. (2002) Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Kartomi, M. (2000) ‘Indonesian-Chinese oppression and the musical outcomes in the Netherlands East Indies’, in R. M. Radano and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Music and the Racial Imagination, University of Chicago Press, pp. 271–317 Keil, C. (1995) ‘The theory of participatory discrepancies: A progress report’, Ethnomusicology, 39, 1: 1–19 Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press Longinovic´, T. (2008) Personal communication Maier, C. S. (2006) Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Maira, S. (2008) ‘Belly dancing: Arab-face, orientalist feminism, and US empire’, American Quarterly, 60, 2: 317–46 Manuel, P. (1993) Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, University of Chicago Press Manuel, P., and W. Marshall (2006) ‘The riddim method: Aesthetics, practice, and ownership in Jamaican dancehall’, Popular Music, 25, 3: 447–70 Marshall, W. (2007) ‘Routes, rap, reggae: Hearing the histories of hip-hop and reggae together’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison McMahon, R. J. (1999) The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II, New York: Columbia University Press Middleton, R. (forthcoming) ‘Jazz: Music of the multitude?’, in P. V. Bohlman and G. Plastino (eds.), Jazz Worlds/World Jazz, University of Chicago Press Miller, K. H. (2010) Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop in the Age of Jim Crow, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Moreno, J. (2004) ‘Bauzá – Gillespie – Latin/jazz: Difference, modernity, and the black Caribbean’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 1: 81–99 Nakamura, L. (2007) Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Pasler, J. (2006) ‘Theorizing race in nineteenth-century France: Music as emblem of identity’, Musical Quarterly, 89, 4: 459–504 Patterson, O. (1994) ‘Ecumenical America: Global culture and the American cosmos’, World Policy Journal, 11, 2: 103–17 Potter, P. M. (1998) Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Radano, R. (2003) Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music, University of Chicago Press (2010) ‘On ownership and value’, Black Music Research Journal, 30, 2: 363–9 (forthcoming) ‘Black music’s body politics’, in P. V. Bohlman and G. Plastino (eds.), Jazz Worlds/World Jazz, University of Chicago Press, Radano, R., and P. V. Bohlman (eds.) (2000) Music and the Racial Imagination, University of Chicago Press Rehding, A. (2000) ‘The quest for the origins of music in Germany circa 1900’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53, 2: 345–85

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Rousseau, J. J. (1779) A Complete Dictionary of Music, trans. W. Waring, 2nd edn, London: J. Murray Thomas, D. A. (2004) Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Tomlinson, G. (2007) The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact, Cambridge University Press Torii, Y. (1997) ‘The American entertainment in 1854: Perry expedition to Japan and blackface minstrelsy’, MA thesis, Doshisha University Veal, M. (2007) Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Von Eschen, P. (2004) Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Wagner, R. (1869, orig. publ.1850) Das Judenthum in der Musik, Leipzig: J. J. Weber Wallerstein, I. (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

. 30 .

Globalized new capitalism and the commodification of taste TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR

It always comes down to taste. Rick Rubin

Introduction Looking back, the period of the late 1980s to early 1990s was an extraordinarily exciting intellectual moment. The “cultural studies” boom was influencing more and more disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond; anthropologists were increasingly studying their own cultures; various kinds of social and cultural theory were becoming the lingua franca for many scholars; and there were extremely productive debates about the nature of the present. Was it postmodern? Or a moment best characterized by a change in capitalism, identified by terms such as “late capitalism” (Mandel 1980; Jameson 1991), “disorganized capitalism” (Lash and Urry 1987), “post-industrial capitalism” (Bell 1973), “post-Fordism,” or “flexible accumulation” (Harvey 1989)? Or was the present an information age? a network society? transnational, global, or postcolonial? More recently, Richard Sennett (2006) and others have employed the term “new capitalism,” which I will adopt in what follows, for, like “late capitalism,” it preserves something of the historical dimension of the different phases of capitalism. Despite the flurry of interest in these (and still other) theories of the present and the vast amount of writings on such phenomena as postmodernism, most approaches gave way to one: globalization. Globalization seems to have subsumed or supplanted the others and assumed the dominant position remarkably quickly – a symptom mistaken for the cause. This chapter considers the rise of globalization as a discourse about the present and how it has missed some of the underlying processes of the new capitalism with respect to cultural production. Scholars of the present have utilized a

I would like to thank Robert Kraft, President of Fox Music, for his time and insights, Charles B. Ortner, Bob White, and, as ever, Sherry B. Ortner.

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number of different frameworks in their theorizations, resulting in a proliferation of signs of all kinds – including those from non-Western elsewheres. What this has meant in the realm of cultural production, however, is that navigating through this welter of signs has changed the nature of cultural production. Producers of media that employ music, such as television and film, have increasingly come to rely on “music supervisors,” people who have marketable tastes in music that can add cachet to films or broadcasts in which their chosen music appears. They and everyday listeners increasingly depend on various online collaborative filtering systems or recommendation systems (e.g., the service at amazon.com that recommends items to customers) to find what they want. Thus, although the cultural importance of taste has a long history in the West, I argue that taste as a faculty in globalized new capitalism has taken on a new importance and, at least in the realm of cultural production, has become newly commodified, both in the new profession of the music supervisor and in the form of recommendation systems.

Globalization as cover [The term “globalization”] operates both as a password and as a watchword. Pierre Bourdieu

Globalization was part of some of the considerations of the present during the 1980s and 1990s (see Giddens 1990; Hall 1991; Jameson 1991), but it quickly began to emerge as its own discourse of the contemporary that paid little attention to other ways of thinking about the present. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced in one of the most widely cited early writers on globalization, Arjun Appadurai, who founded one of the main discourses about globalization. With a focus on “flows” and various “scapes” (Appadurai 1996), other contemporary trends, including new modalities of capitalism, were not always part of such analyses. Appadurai’s and many other writings on the subject of globalization have been extremely influential, not only in their useful insights, but also in their relative lack of attention to the workings of globalized new capitalism that were so central to some other works on the contemporary moment appearing around the same time. Indeed, a random check of some recent readers on globalization reveals that capitalism, as a theme prominent enough to be indexed, appears infrequently (see, e.g., Held and McGrew 2004; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Ong and Collier 2005). Today, globalization – as a media term and as a word used in everyday conversation and on university campuses – seems to trump all other ways of

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describing the contemporary. Globalization is routinely offered as an explanation for something current, not as a historical condition, and it is treated as an agent of change rather than a particular facet of today’s capitalism (Tsing 2005, 3). It was striking to hear Anthony Giddens deliver a recent lecture on globalization; where it had once been a component of the late modern world that he described so cogently in books such as The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens 1990), globalization has now, in his estimation, taken on a life of its own. Globalization is rarely seen now as a salient feature, or even as one narrative among many, of late modernity, but has become its own reality with its own agency. What Pierre Bourdieu wrote about capitalism and economics could be extended to globalization: “Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism” (Bourdieu 1986, 242). To the extent that economic matters still figure into academic discussions of globalization, or of the present more generally, they have most commonly come to be seen as effects of neoliberalism, that set of ideologies originating in the 1950s and taking off in the 1980s that advocated deregulation, privatization, the withdrawal of the state from many of its former responsibilities to its citizens – all facilitated by the rise of new communications technologies (Harvey 2005; Ferguson 2002; Klein 2008). For some authors, globalization is the effect of neoliberalism and its policies. Bourdieu, who in his later works frequently uses the terms interchangeably, writes that globalization “is merely . . . the imposition on the entire world of the neoliberal tyranny of the market and the undisputed rule of the economy and of economic powers” (2003, 9). I would argue instead that neoliberalism is the core of the new capitalism and must be understood as part of this wide-ranging historical system. “In a general way,” writes Bourdieu elsewhere, “neo-liberalism is a very smart and very modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the oldest capitalists” (1998, 34). Yet most intellectuals’ discourse on neoliberalism shares the same features as those of globalization: it is seen as inevitable, all encompassing, and runs the risk of being fetishized, disconnected from broader trends within historical capitalism. Scholarship on neoliberalism can also fall prey to reductionism. Theodor Adorno’s comment on studies of industrial society works just as well in this more recent context: one cannot deduce the nature of contemporary society by focusing only on neoliberalism (Adorno 1987, 241). Marx, after all, did not attempt to understand merely the liberalism of his era but also historical capitalism as a wideranging historical system.

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Something is lost when capitalism as a historical system is removed from the equation and replaced by neoliberalism and/or globalization as its most recent incarnation. Like other terms that delineate a small slice of history (such as “postmodernity”), it becomes too easy to reify that slice and to disconnect it from the history that produced it.

The new capitalism and cultural production/ consumption today: introduction I view globalization, and neoliberalism for that matter, as not only narratives of observable phenomena – with histories, of course – but as symptoms of capitalism today, what I have been calling the new capitalism. More precisely, it is a historical development of capitalism that is extremely globalized – but not newly globalized – via neoliberal policies, new communications technologies, and other well-known developments. Capitalism – new capitalism – is the primary framework for analysis. It is the transcendent category. Since studies of capitalism have largely fallen by the wayside since the heady days of the early 1990s, for the purposes of this chapter I refer to a seminal writing on the subject of late capitalism, Ernest Mandel’s book of that title from 1980. I take a moment to recapitulate his major arguments here. This discussion may sound familiar to most readers, since many of the same features of the contemporary are included in other analytical rubrics, such as globalization itself, or neoliberalism, or postindustrial society, or other such frameworks listed above. The “late” in late capitalism refers to most Marxists’ belief that capitalism, as an economic system, is neither natural nor inevitable and will someday end, though it has proved to be endlessly adaptable. It is possible, nevertheless, to periodize capitalism into different stages, the last of which, late capitalism, is marked by a number of different traits, according to Mandel: the declining importance of the state; the global growth of monopolistic and oligopolistic pursuit of massive profits; the increased concentration of capital in huge corporations; the defeat or decline of labor and other kinds of oppositional movements; the globalization of financial capital; the rise of transformative new technologies such as personal computers; an economy increasingly dependent on the defense industry; the growth of debt; new forms of colonialism; an increasing polarization of wealth; heightened consumption; and, according to some scholars, still more. In another major writing on capitalism since Mandel, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (published in English in 2005),

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the authors adopt more of a Weberian than a Marxian perspective, as is evident from their title. They argue that capitalism since the 1970s has become less hierarchically organized, successfully absorbing and adopting the critiques leveled at it during the various uprisings of the 1960s for being bureaucratic, uniform, and inflexible. Boltanski and Chiapello carefully mine recent management literature for signs of a shift to a new phase, embodying a “connexionist” perspective that values networking, diversity, and social capital. A powerful symptom of this shift is the advertising industry’s co-optation of the hip and the cool to sell goods (Frank 1997; Taylor 2009; Taylor 2012). Today’s capitalist heroes are less entrepreneurs than geeks such as Bill Gates, or cooler geeks like the late Steve Jobs. Both perspectives are useful for understanding today’s capitalism. It is important to emphasize, however, that to comprehend the present as late capitalist instead of something else is more than analyzing it with a list of trends and traits. It is to ask that certain themes associated with Marxian and Weberian understandings of capitalism remain in the foreground. First and foremost is the centrality of capitalism itself, but following from this are commodification, social class, and forces of production. Adopting these viewpoints is also a way of insisting that cultural production is not something separate from economic forces. Finally, it helps to historicize the present moment and to conceptualize it in broader terms: how is today’s capitalism different from that of earlier eras? If we think of world music – and the music industry more generally – as being caught up in the processes of globalized new capitalism and not simply globalization, what can we learn? How does the above relate to the production of cultural forms, such as music? The main effect that the globalization of capitalism has had on music is the fact that more music from the West’s elsewheres has been arriving in the West’s metropoles and entering into the commodity system and consumer economy of the new capitalism. This is a commonplace observation and does not need to be elaborated upon here, except to note that this is part of the globalization script itself – that is, our world of plenitude is ascribed to globalization. Otherwise, however, recent changes in the world of music are more attributable to the workings of the new capitalism than to the globalization narrative. While there are a number of shifts in the culture industry one could explore, some of which have been widely reported in the media, what I would like to focus upon here is an examination of new computerized forces of production that have led to, among other things, the informationalization and commodification of taste.

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The informationalization of music and musical taste in the new capitalism Most readers are probably familiar with Fredric Jameson’s widely cited and influential essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991; first published in 1984), which did more than any other single work to advance the framework of late capitalism. Jameson’s major contention – that late capitalism manifested itself in terms of style – and about which he writes at great length – represents, nevertheless, one of the problems of his argument. Style was and remains the main locus of the bourgeois study of high culture; it is assumed to be the essence of a particular individual, transmuted into what Jameson calls the “objectal form” of an artwork (Jameson 1991, 8). If we think instead in terms of the means of the production – and distribution – of culture, it is immediately clear that the individual, artisanal nature of the production of artworks remains much the same as ever. It may be that, in the realm of artistic cultural production, style as the essence of the individual creator could be seen as the locus of the workings of the new capitalism, but it is always difficult to locate the machinations of capitalism – or any large-scale system – in a single work by a single individual. What has changed dramatically since the advent of the age of mechanical reproduction is less the means of production of artworks than their distribution. Artistic cultural production, while not having changed much over centuries, relies on recent modes of dissemination, distribution, and marketing, and it is there that shifts in the workings of capitalism can be better located. Distribution in the internet age, however, has made more commodities available than ever before. Many scholars have written about the huge variety of goods accessible to Western consumers today – a variety that anthropologist Grant McCracken (1997) has termed “plenitude”: more commodities are more easily available than ever before, including commodities from abroad such as various kinds of music. At the same time, in a world suffused with goods it becomes increasingly difficult to find what one wants, and thus means of searching have become increasingly important. The stock value of the most popular search engine on the internet, Google, is many tens of billions. One observer on the problem of searching for classical music online, which is a more complicated search than for popular music, says, “niche search technology is one of the hottest areas of technology developing at the moment” (Seno 2007, 33). The importance of searching is such that in 2007, Advertising Age (the main weekly chronicle of the advertising industry in the United States), began to include a special annual section entitled “Search” in one of its issues, including a conversation with their resident

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guru, who points out, “Marketers understand search is more important” (Klaassen 2007a, S3). “Search” – it has become its own category. Later, the magazine began to include a special supplement simply entitled Search; the first issue noted, “[S]earch composes 40% of online ad spending” (Klaassen 2007b, 3). Even with the onset of the Great Recession that year, searchmarketing spending continued to increase; estimates from early in 2010 held that spending would increase from $13 billion in 2009 to $26 billion in 2014 (Lyons 2010). While the culture industry continues to seek blockbusters to minimize production costs and maximize profits, retailers are increasingly moving to what has been called a “long tail” model of sales (Anderson 2006), warehousing a vast inventory and selling only a few of each item. In this kind of retail environment, finding the product one wants has become all-important. If world music in the past was sucked into the commodifying world of capitalism as songs, or portions of songs, as I have written elsewhere (Taylor 1997; Taylor 2007), now it is as bytes: digitized, informationalized, data-based – fodder in the machine of the new capitalism.

The advent of the music supervisor The explosion of music in digital form, this plenitude, has given rise to a new worker in the culture industries: the person who can navigate skillfully through the vast labyrinth of recorded music for use in film and broadcasting. Producers of a film or television program may decide to hire a music supervisor – someone who is hired for his or her taste in music – to select music for a film or television program, along with engaging someone to write original music. The music supervisor, the person with “taste,” now competes with cultural creators themselves for prestige and authority. Elsewhere I have discussed the rise in importance of the music producer and his (they are virtually always men) auteurization (Taylor 2007, 130). This process was not confined solely to the music producer, and has been extended to the nonmusician and nontechnician on the axis of taste. In a growing jumble of sounds, the one who has taste is king: “It always comes down to taste,” says legendary music mogul Rick Rubin (quoted in Hirschberg 2007, 49). Distinction is not made anymore just for differentiating one social group from another, though of course this still matters (see Coulangeon 2004). Taste is a necessity in today’s world; in popular music, someone has to navigate all of the world’s sounds. The placement of effective music, including world music, in film and television soundtracks has become a lucrative business.

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The profession of the music supervisor arose with the profits realized by the sales of soundtracks to such films as The Big Chill (1983); people in the industry realized that it was possible to garner substantial profits from such collections. Music supervisors, labeled by one industry insider as “the purveyor of the playlist, the idolater of iTunes, the search engine-ear” (Rabinowitz 2008, 17), began to boom in the early 1990s and can wield extraordinary power in deciding what music appears in films or broadcasts – to the extent that they are sometimes referred to as the new A&R (artist and repertoire) people (Kraft 2007). Says one music supervisor, “If your band is successful locally and you are playing a great gig that gathers a large crowd, and you look out into the audience and ask yourself if there might be someone in that audience who might help your career, it’s more likely that a music supervisor is out there scouting than a record company executive” (Levine 2007, 82). He also says, What will work for me and my film will also work for those artists in their careers. Obtaining a film placement or a television placement is a very valuable and positive step in a live musician’s career. It’s kind of like what getting on the radio meant in 1955 . . . [A] lot of [television] shows are music driven. A huge percentage of the people who are of record-buying age buy their music based on what they’ve seen on television. The people who are selecting music for television shows are trusted; show viewers trust their taste. So in a weird twist of fate, I am able to function in much the same way that, say, Wolfman Jack did back in 1970 – by finding songs and helping people discover new music. (Ibid., 80)

While, according to one industry insider, the music supervisor boom seems to be over (Kraft 2007), the phenomenal success of the soundtrack to the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with music supervision by T-Bone Burnett, has ensured the longevity of some; Business Week recently called music supervisors “Hollywood’s new power players” (Lowry 2006, 80). One such player recently formed her own record label after enjoying massive success choosing songs for use on the hit television series Grey’s Anatomy (Garrity 2007). Music supervisors’ chosen tracks often appear on CD compilations that sell extremely well; Warner Bros. released five compilations of music from the television series The OC that sold cumulatively one million copies (Trakin 2006, S9). As a result of successes such as these, music supervisors have come to be seen as music professionals, even though they are not always musicians themselves (Farinella 2001, 4; Levine 2007). As one television music composer told me, with some indignation, music supervisors’ names can be listed on movie posters, a tangible sign of legitimacy and influence; indeed, I have seen an increasing number of recent films in which the music supervisor is credited before the composer of original music.

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The practice of using popular songs in television programming has grown to the extent that on American television, many programs now employ them at the conclusion of the broadcast without dialogue. Interested viewers/ listeners can visit the program website to find out what song it was, view playlists from other songs heard on the program, find out more information about the music heard on that broadcast, and in some cases, follow a link to iTunes to purchase it. The cachet of this field seems to have grown to the extent that my university’s (UCLA’s) extension arm now offers a course called “Music Supervision.” For $415, students can take eighteen hours of a course that introduces them to music supervisors, composers, filmmakers, producers, music licensing executives, and other executives. The course promises to “defin[e] the role of the music supervisor in drawing on the combined resources of the film and television communities to marry music and moving images.” In such an environment, any music is fair game. Music supervisors are tapping into what is a growing preference for the use of world music in film scores, whether written by a composer who uses a non-Western instrument, or using a sample or licensed preexisting recording. For reasons familiar to scholars of world music – a desire for local color, “freshness,” and so on – some of these world music tracks appear in rather incongruous places in films. One of the most spectacular recent uses of world music in a film was Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), which uses “Chaiyya Chaiyya,” a Bollywood film-music song by A. R. Rahman, in its opening credits. But it was probably the music by David Robbins – credited as both composer and music supervisor – for Dead Man Walking (1995) that alerted most listeners to the use of world music in films, with its extensive use of singing by the late Pakistani qawwālī singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. One composer has even remarked upon “the increasing prevalence of what might be called a ‘world music sensibility’ in modern film scoring, where an Armenian duduk is as likely to be heard under dialogue as a saxophone, and it’s clear that the film-music melting pot is once again on the boil” (Bond 2006). Music supervisors view world music in much the same way as the rest of the mainstream music industry – it can be seen as fresh and different. In films and television programs, it can add a touch of local color. A recent article touting some unknown bands says that the musicians considered in its article “have strong ethnic components to their sounds, and each could add world-music flair to a score or soundtrack” (Crisafulli 2006). Composers will occasionally work with music supervisors to try to capture a particular sound for a film or scene. For the 2006 film Babel, the director Alejandro González Iñárritu was said to collaborate with the composer, Gustavo

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Santaolalla (who “composed” some world music), and the music supervisor: “Iñárritu worked closely with Santaolalla, Anibal Kerpel (Composer and Music Editor) and Lynn Fainchtein (Music Supervisor) to capture the traditional sounds of both Marrakech and Tijuana via the music of Gnawa and other traditional Arab musicians in Morocco and various Norteño sounds from Mexico” (IGN Music 2006). Most music supervisors, however, tend to use search tools such as MySpace, YouTube, and iTunes (Crisafulli 2007). The conventional music industry is catching on; BMG recently launched an online search website, MovieTunes, aimed at filmmakers and music supervisors seeking music for use in video productions (Gallo 2008, 4); a music publisher, Primary Wave Music Publishing, has entered the fray as well (see Christman 2008, 15). Music supervisors are human search engines and taste machines, scouring the web for music, employing recently developed online search engines that allow them and others in the entertainment industry to search for music – by genre, style, and, sometimes, mood – fulfilling their rule as music tastemakers in the world of globalized new capitalism, a world in which commercial interests have pervaded virtually all arenas of cultural production. They are what Boltanski and Chiappello call “managers,” one of a new kind of service provider whose “talent for sniffing things out” is increasingly common (Boltanski and Chiappello 2005, 444).

Everybody search now While the advent of the music supervisor is a fairly recent development, it would be difficult to ascribe its rise to an effect of the new capitalism. Music supervisors are taste arbiters in a recognizably old-fashioned way: they are individuals selling their labor. What is new in the new capitalism, however, is the use of new forces of production in the form of computers and complex algorithms, which are employed as search systems known as recommendation systems or collaborative filtering systems. These complex algorithms provide users with recommendations based on their previous purchases and the purchases of others – a service with which frequent users of amazon.com and other commercial websites are familiar. Such systems postdate the rise of the personal computer and the World Wide Web and were designed to bring to the attention of users in small groups documents that might interest them, based on the systems’ compilation of users’ search data. These systems have somewhat different genealogies and work in different ways. One of the earliest systems, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of

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Technology, became known as Firefly, which was sold to Microsoft in 1999.1 The main researcher behind the development of this software described such systems as “electronic word of mouth” (Patton 1999, G22).2 Some of these systems are for active searches – the user surfs to a website that specializes in making recommendations. One early example of this type was called Mubu, short for “Music Buddha.” This site, which is no longer active, was launched in 2000 and was described by its creator thus: “It’s like having a friend who knows what kind of music you like.” The system’s developer said, “We want it to be the consumer’s best friend. We’re not going to push Metallica at a jazz fan” (Hartigan 2000, D8). The site’s database was compiled by hundreds of characteristics for thousands of songs, characteristics such as instrumentation, tempo, feel, and mood. On the website, users chose from a variety of music categories, such as Anarchy, Ambient, Gospel, and Evil, and rated a number of song clips. After clicking on a button that read “Enlighten Me,” Mubu recommended recordings. A more recent British service called The Filter, backed by rock musician Peter Gabriel, makes recommendations of films and music. Gabriel says, “One of the many joys of the Internet would be freedom of choice, but many of us are now drowning in an ocean of options. An intelligent filter can remove the burden and boredom of choice” (quoted in Hayes 2008, 6; see also Wollenberg 2008, 4). The system works, as they all do, by employing complex mathematics that allow the site to become “smarter” as users make more and more choices. Another example is not a website but a feature in Apple’s iTunes, called “Genius,” which makes playlists of songs similar to those selected by the user. It works by analyzing the tastes of millions of users around the world and making guesses for individual users. According to late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “With Genius, you can automatically make playlists from songs in your music library that go great together with just one click. It could help you to rediscover music in your library and make a playlist of songs you wouldn’t normally put together.” Genius examines what users already have in their collections, looking at genres, number of songs and albums by a particular artist, ratings users have given them, and characteristics of the song itself. It takes this information, renders it anonymous, and communicates it to Apple, allowing the company to build playlists based on all of this collected information (Beaumont 2008, 20). It is probably Amazon’s system that has received the most attention. A writer in the Wall Street Journal in 2002 said that Amazon’s 1 A useful history of the development of these systems is in “United we find,” 2005. See also Lyons 1997, 36–40. 2 These systems are extremely technical, the subject of many scientific papers; for a recent example, see Zhu et al. 2006, 917–25.

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recommendation system had come to rival his music aficionado brother for sound advice. Amazon’s system culls purchase data from its millions of consumers and pools it anonymously, matching each consumer with others who have similar purchase histories and making recommendations for purchases. Rating an item tweaks one’s profile (Frangos 2002, R15). Other systems are based not on people’s purchases but on the nature of the music itself; users can seek music they like based on characteristics of databased music. One of the more sophisticated of these recommendation systems, Pandora (originally called Savage Beast), is an internet radio service launched in 2005 that employs the “music genome project.” The developers categorized music by “genomic” traits unique to individual songs; songs are thus converted into stored, searchable, information. The company’s CEO, Joe Kennedy, said in 2005, “We were interested in having trained musicologists analyze an enormous number of songs based on anywhere from 150 to 350 ‘genomes’ per song. It was a way of understanding and matching music to consumers’ tastes, as opposed to a simplistic recommendation some of the consumer sites were offering” (quoted in Kubal 2005, 48). Another source says that the genomes are identified by “a team of analysts, musicians who have studied music formally for at least four years and regularly play professionally. They listen to songs and rate them using up to 400 individual parameters,” the development of which was aided by a Stanford University Music Department lecturer with a PhD in musicology (Bradbury 2005, 47). He says, “You look at melody and harmony and form and rhythm and texture and instrumentation to see how all of these fit together to make a composite piece of music” (ibid.). Other parameters include the voice employed, gender, high, low, smooth, or gravelly. As of early 2006, they had a database of over 70,000 songs by more than 10,000 artists; by the end of the year, the database contained over 500,000 songs (Lupton 2006; Leeds 2006). Today, the company does not list the size of its database but simply states, “The Music Genome Project is updated on a continual basis with the latest releases, emerging artists, and an ever-deepening collection of catalogue titles.”3 The company’s founder hoped to realize the “long tail” theory of sales in the internet age, enabling purchasers to find their way among millions of individual songs (Bradbury 2005). To use Pandora, the user surfs to the website, where he or she is prompted to enter a favorite artist’s name or song title. This generates a response that the system is creating a “station” with that artist’s music, or, if none is in the database, music similar to that artist’s. Not surprisingly, world-music artists’ representation in such systems is spotty at best, though this has improved 3 www.pandora.com/corporate/mgp (accessed October 6, 2011).

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over the years. Typing in “Angélique Kidjo,” I received the latter message, followed by an explanation: “To start things off, here’s a track that’s musically similar to Angelique Kidjo called ‘Amore (Sexo)’ by Santana, that features latin influences, extensive vamping, a busy horn section, minor key tonality and a vocal-centric aesthetic.” What, in reality, a Beninoise singer has in common with a guitar hero is not clear. Underneath, there is a link that reads, “Why we’re not playing Angelique Kidjo” that takes me to Pandora’s FAQ, which simply says that they have not licensed the music for playback on their system. Searching Youssou N’Dour brought up Sarah Brightman on my first try; the second (from another computer, since the system recognizes one’s searches after a first attempt) resulted in a track called “Flying Saucer” by Astronaut Wife, which “features electronica influences, paired vocal harmony, prominent use of synth and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.” This is another pointless comparison, for N’Dour sounds nothing like these other musicians.4 If Pandora has the requested artist’s music, the track played comes with a brief description as above. Some names, such as Lata Mangeshkar, result in a message saying that she is not in the database. Late in 2007, Pandora became available on AT&T cellular phones. It is currently one of the most downloaded apps from Apple’s App Store. Other systems classify music by genre and its seemingly infinite subdivisions. Genres are tagged, creating “tag clouds” that may contain many subgenres or other categories of music thought by programmers to be related. Last.fm, a website that offers streaming music “based on what you listen to,” according to its website, proffers world-music genre tags such as these: ethnic funk rock lesser known yet streamable artists stick it to the man trippy va va silvermine woodstock gurus5

Clicking on one of these links takes users to a selection of musicians, as well as a list of “genres” considered to be related.6 These systems do not always work to customers’ satisfaction, of course. Developers say that determining what consumers do not want is difficult. One says, “The holy grail is to be able to capture all the customer’s interactions in detail and get smarter about what not to recommend. We can recommend very well. Knowing when not to bother someone is much harder” (Guernsey

5 www.last.fm/music/World+Music/+tags. 4 N’Dour was later added to Pandora’s selections. 6 There is a large and growing technical literature on the nature of genre for the purposes of classifications to be used in online search systems. See Aucouturier and Pachet 2003, Aucouturier and Pampalk 2008, and Lambiotte and Ausloos 2005.

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2003). A 2002 survey of such systems reported that “users felt that recommendations from online were often new and unexpected, while items recommended by friends mostly served as reminders of items users had already planned to pursue,” according to one researcher (Ryan 2003). Of course, then there is the problem of immensely popular musicians such as The Beatles, whose songs are likely to be found in many people’s music collections. This is known as the “popularity effect”: developers do not want their systems to recommend items that users might already have or make recommendations that seem to be unimaginative (Guernsey 2003). An anthropologist friend some years ago bought a copy of my book Global Pop from Amazon and was annoyed for some months that their system kept recommending other music books, for he had purchased my book out of friendship rather an interest in the subject.7 There is also the problem that content producers could manipulate systems so that they recommend a certain publisher’s books over another’s. Of course, more systems have been developed to find such instances (“United we find” 2005). And there is the inevitability that people’s tastes change. Despite their drawbacks, such systems are dramatically changing the music business. Late in 2006, a senior vice president for digital strategy and business development at Warner Music said, “You now have music fans that are completely enabled as editorial voices. You can’t fool those people. You can’t put out an album with one good single on it. Those days are over” (quoted in Leeds 2006). These systems are still being employed and refined. After Pandora, the next major phase was to pool information from more than one website, combining social networking with music recommendation systems. By late 2006, some fans were beginning to demand better recommendation systems; other were turning to music-oriented social networking sites such as Last.fm and MOG (“A place for musical nourishment,” according to the latter’s website), where they could make recommendations to like-minded users. MOG finds music files stored on users’ computers, analyzes which ones have been played the most, and posts this information in users’ profiles; MOG members can examine each other’s profiles (Bruno 2006a). The first such system was called MyStrands (originally MusicStrands), which required users to download a small application to their computer that tracked their music purchasing and listening habits. The data it collected was compared to other users’ listening and purchasing habits, in order to make recommendations (Tarzian 2006). Another new trend is the employment of an algorithm that searches the web for reviews of books and recordings, analyzes the communities that made the comments, and uses the collected data to make recommendations 7 For a discussion of other problems, see Flynn 2006.

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to its customer (Tham 2008). Yet another strategy has been to hire high-profile musicians as “critics,” who assemble playlists and make recommendations in other ways, such as David Bowie, who was named the “godfather” of Nokia’s service (Bruno 2006b). In the spring of 2008, MySpace Music appeared. Billboard magazine heralded this event with the sentence: “Years from now, when the pundits talk about the turning point for digital music, they will point to the launch of MySpace Music” (Bruno 2008). This venture was a partnership between the social networking powerhouse and the music industry. MySpace Music improves on some of the earlier services by combining advertising-supported streaming and Digital Rights Management-free downloading (music files with DRM can only be shared a limited number of times and are thus unpopular with most listeners). Users can also access concert tickets and merchandise. Billboard reports that the CEO/Chairman of Warner Music Group issued a press release marking the website launch that said, “This venture may provide a defining blueprint for this next important stage in the evolution of social media, benefiting consumers, artists and music companies alike.” Billboard’s author thought that the “warehouse model” of Amazon.com and iTunes would begin to fade away in favor of such social networking models, and he thought that subscription services such as Rhapsody were in an even more precarious position (ibid.). Though the site is still operating as of this writing, MySpace Music did not fare as well as these rosy predictions had it, having to fight off competition from several newer social networking and music sites (“Turning it up to 11” 2009). MySpace has been hemorrhaging fans who have been heading toward Facebook, which is becoming increasingly hospitable to bands (Music Ally 2010). MySpace Music has, however, partnered with search giant Google, which added a music search feature in autumn 2009. Users who search a particular musician or song can find a link to that song, which is streamed by MySpace Music; an option to purchase the MP3 is also offered (Bruno 2009). In September of 2010, the biggest music retailer in the United States, Apple, launched Ping, a “social network for music,” as Steve Jobs said repeatedly in his introduction. “It’s like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” said Jobs.8 Ping is embedded in Apple’s iTunes and is also available as an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Ping allows users to follow artists, follow their friends’ recommendations and favorites, and other activities. Ping was phased out in September 2012, but the idea of combining social networking with music as

8 The quotations from Jobs were from a press conference on September 1, 2010, available at www.apple. com/apple-events/september-2010/ (accessed September 21, 2010).

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the main business model for users searching for music has only strengthened, with the recent entry of Facebook into the realm of the social experience of music, pairing with music streaming services Spotify and RDIO.

The commodification of taste While the rise of the music supervisor is a reasonably familiar extension into new arenas of the role traditionally accorded to taste arbiters, the advent of extremely complex algorithms to make wanted or unwanted recommendations to listeners and viewers represents another kind of development. The rise of the music supervisor is an old form of the commodification of taste, extended into previously unknown places such as choosing music for television programs or films; music supervisors are still people whose expertise is thought to be necessary. With algorithms, information about music, films, and books that was once stored in people’s heads is replaced by a database (see Poster 1995). Knowledge about music becomes informationalized, commodified, and employed to sell music. Clearly influenced by Paul Virilio and other theorists of technology and the information society, sociologist Scott Lash has written, “[I]n a very important way it may no longer be commodification that is driving informationalization, but instead informationalization that is driving commodification. Information explodes the distinction between use value and exchange value . . . But then it is recaptured by capital for further commodification” (2002, 3). Lash is making a distinction here between an older manufacturing economy, in which power was tied to commodities, and today’s world, in which physical commodities are increasingly informationalized – made to be hip, cool, desirable, or what have you – and profit is increasingly tied to intellectual property rather than to physical goods. Lash also revisits Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message,” saying that the message is “the paradigmatic medium of the information age” (ibid., 2). What matters in the era of the new capitalism, however, is not simply the medium; rather, the means of the delivery of various media – the iPods, personal computers, and websites that help people find content – matter a great deal. Yes, this content is informationalized, and commodified as individual songs, or as bits of songs as samples. But finding and storing them are what users care about, and these means, both in terms of hardware and service and in the form of recommendation systems, are socially and culturally more important than bytes. Lash argues that the manufacturing capitalism of the past was propelled by the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, commodification

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(exchange-value) and its critique (use-value). He argues that informationalization is entirely different: it is not driven by this conflict but rather “explodes and partly marginalizes the exchange-value/use-value couple” (Lash 2002, 9). That is, experience of culture today is no longer between a listener and a work of music, a viewer and a painting; there is a whole host of people and technologies and networks that mediate between people and cultural forms that have rendered those forms as informationalized objects, no longer as transcendent works, and, I would argue, increasingly in competition for cultural significance with the machines and technologies of their distribution. The distinction between exchange-value and use-value has become harder to discern, as the two have moved closer together in the informationalized world of the new capitalism, perhaps especially with respect to cultural commodities such as music. At the same time, however, what has become clear is that manufacturing capitalism, with respect to cultural commodities, is doing well – whether it involves the production of iPods, cellular phones that can play music and videos, Blu-Ray DVD players, or something else. Devices that can deal with information still matter, and delivery systems more generally, be they hardware or software, also matter. Theodor W. Adorno, writing in the late 1930s about music reproduction technologies of his day, mainly radio and phonograph, argues, “Music . . . serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music” (Adorno 2002, 295). Today, the pace at which such technologies are developed – including music recommendation systems – has increased to the extent that there is now a continuous rhythm of their release, muddying the difference between music (with whatever use-values one believes it to have) and the devices that purvey it (with their exchange-values). Despite the omnivorous nature of new capitalist commodification and the growing informationalization and databasing of, and taste for, music, worldmusic artists are no less marginal than they were a decade or two ago. I have written elsewhere of the world-music audience being much the same as the audience for classical music, in terms of educational and cultural capital (Taylor 2004), but it is difficult to imagine that these people will search as assiduously for world-music musicians – or that a sophisticated search engine for them to use will be devised. The discourses of globalization, academic and otherwise, have been helpful for understanding the flow of musics around the world – its speed and reach – but they have been less useful, if indeed they have been useful at all, in explaining what is done with those musics when they travel to the metropolitan centers of the West, where they become quickly informationalized, databased, and incorporated into a complex game of taste, whose

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anointed possessors can become influential and powerful cultural arbiters. The recent phase of globalization is an effect of today’s capitalism, not something in and of itself. Cultural production in today’s globalized new capitalism owes some aspects to the current modality of globalization, but not everything can be explained by it. Because of the plethora of goods, the importance of “taste” has risen to the extent that people with it can be considered to be as necessary and important as cultural creators, while at the same time everyday people’s taste is increasingly gathered through commercial means and stored in databases. In the world of globalized new capitalism, it all comes down to taste – informationalized, databased, and commodified.

Bibliography Adorno, T. W. (1987) ‘Late capitalism or industrial society?’, trans. by F. Van Gelder, in V. Meja, D. Misgeld, and N. Stehr (eds.), Modern German Sociology, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 232–47 (2002) ‘On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening’, trans. by S. H. Gillespie, in R. Leppert (ed.), Essays on Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 288–317 Anderson, C. (2006) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, New York: Hyperion Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Aucouturier, J., and F. Pachet (2003) ‘Representing musical genre: A state of the art’, Journal of New Music Research, 32: 83–93 Aucouturier, J., and E. Pampalk (2008) ‘From genres to tags: A little epistemology of music information retrieval research’, Journal of New Music Research, 37: 87–92 Beaumont, C. (2008) ‘The latest iPod has more to offer than looks’, Daily Telegraph, September 13: 20 Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books Boltanski, L., and È. Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by G. Elliott, New York: Verso Bond, J. (2006) ‘International composers’, Hollywood Reporter, August 22 Bourdieu, P. (2003) Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, trans. by L. Wacquant, New York: Free Press (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, in J. G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press (1998) Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, trans. by R. Nice, New York: Free Press Bradbury, D. (2005) ‘Mapping the music genome’, (London) Independent, September 14: 47 Bruno, A. (2006a) ‘Sites tap friends for music’, Billboard, July 1: 18

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(2006b) ‘The human touch’, Billboard, October 28: 26 (2008) ‘In with the new’, Billboard, April 12: 10 (2009) ‘Google vows music search service’, adweek.com, October 29 Christman, E. (2008) ‘The publisher’s place: Tunes you can use’, Billboard, November 1: 15 Coulangeon, P. (2004) ‘Classes sociales, pratiques culturelles et styles de vie: Le modèle de la distinction est-il (vraiment) obsolete?’, Sociologie et société, 36: 59–85 Crisafulli, C. (2006) ‘Flavor faves – Summer film & TV music’, Hollywood Reporter, August 22 (2007) ‘YouTube, iTunes transform music supervision’, Hollywood Reporter, April 17 Farinella, D. J. (2001) ‘Music supervisors’, Mix, April: 4 Ferguson, J. (2002) ‘Global disconnect: Abjection and the aftermath of modernism’, in J. X. Inda and R. Rosaldo (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, 1st edn, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 136–54 Flynn, L. J. (2006) ‘Like this? You’ll hate that (Not all web recommendations are welcome)’, New York Times, January 23: C1 Frangos, A. (2002) ‘Here’s my advice . . . If Amazon has a suggestion for you, be prepared for some good ideas – and a lot of confusion’, Wall Street Journal, January 14: R15 Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, University of Chicago Press Gallo, P. (2008) ‘Sony BMG builds movie music site’, Daily Variety, September 16: 4 Garrity, B. (2007) ‘Music supervisor Patsavas forms record label’, Hollywood Reporter, March 27 Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press Guernsey, L. (2003) ‘Making intelligence a bit less artificial’, New York Times, May 1: G1 Hall, S. (1991, orig. publ. 1997) ‘The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity’, in A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 19–40; orig. publ. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton Hartigan, P. (2000) ‘Mubu works online magic on your musical ear’, Boston Globe, July 21: D8 Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press Hayes, D. (2008) ‘Rocker runs content through filter’, Variety, April 21: 6 Held, D., and A. McGrew (eds.) (2004) The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Hirschberg, L. (2007) ‘The Music Man’, New York Times Magazine, September 2: 26 IGN Music (2006) ‘Babel soundtrack to resonate with world music; Composer Gustavo Santaolalla scores Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film’, IGN Music, November 1, http://music.ign.com/articles/743/(7430)80p1.html Inda, J. X., and R. Rosaldo (eds.) (2002) The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Klaassen, A. (2007a) ‘Pioneer bullish on local, video, Google’, Advertising Age, July 30: S3 (2007b) ‘Search marketing’, Search, supplement to Advertising Age, November 5: 3

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Klein, N. (2008) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Picador Kraft, R. (2007) Telephone interview with T. D. Taylor, October 19 Kubal, L. (2005) ‘The hidden values of proprietary information’, Venture Capital Journal, May: 47–8 Lambiotte, R. and M. Ausloos (2005) ‘Uncovering collective listening habits and music genres in bipartite networks’, Physical Review E, 72: 066107–1–11 Lash, S. (2002) Critique of Information, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Lash, S., and J. Urry (1987) The End of Organized Capitalism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Leeds, J. (2006) ‘The new tastemakers’, New York Times, September 3: 2/1 Levine, M. (2007) ‘Q&A: Jack Rudy’, Electronic Musician, February 1: 80 Lowry, T. (2006) ‘Finding nirvana in a music catalog’, Business Week, October 2: 80 Lupton, M. (2006) ‘Buy with a little help from your friends’, The Guardian, January 5: 5 Lyons, D. (1997) ‘The buzz about Firefly’, New York Times Magazine, June 29: 36–40 Lyons, K. (2010) ‘2010 Search marketing spend trend survey’, WordStreamInter netMarketing blog, 11, www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/(2010)/02/11/sem-spendsurvey-results Mandel, E. (1980) Late Capitalism, trans. by J. De Bres, London: Verso McCracken, G. (1997) Plenitude, Toronto: Periph Fluide Music Ally (2010) ‘Social networks: Time to revive old friendships?’, Music Week, March 13: 18 Ong, A., and S. J. Collier (eds.) (2005) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Malden, MA: Blackwell Patton, P. (1999) ‘Buy here, and we’ll tell you what you like’, New York Times, September 22: G22 Poster, M. (1995) The Second Media Age, Cambridge: Polity Rabinowitz, J. (2008) ‘With the brand: Jingle in your pocket’, Billboard, January 19: 16–17 Ryan, M. (2003) ‘“Recommended” reading given a new twist’, Montreal Gazette, June 14: E13 Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Seno, A. (2007) ‘The sounds of success’, Newsweek [Europe], July 30: 32–3 Tarzian, J. (2006) ‘MyStrands adds music to Web 2.0’s Mix’, Business Week Online, September 11: 3 Taylor, T. D. (1997) Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, New York: Routledge (2004) ‘Bad world music’, in C. Washburne and M. Derno (eds.), Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate, New York: Routledge, pp. 83–103 (2007) Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2009) ‘Advertising and the conquest of culture’, Social Semiotics, 4: 405–25 (2012) The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture, University of Chicago Press Tham, I. (2008) ‘The secret to netting customers on the Web’, (Singapore) New Straits Times, November 2 Trakin, R. (2006) ‘Alexandra Patsavas, music supervisor’, Advertising Age, May 15: S9 Tsing, A. L. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton University Press ‘Turning it up to 11’ (2009) Revolution, October 31: 38

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‘United we find’ (2005) Economist, March 12: 26–30 Wollenberg, A. (2008) ‘Technophile: The filter wants to offer you content based on your preferences, but it’s not ready to compete yet’, The Guardian, September 25: 4 Zhu, X., Y. Shi, H. Kim, and K. Eom (2006) ‘An integrated music recommendation system’, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 52: 917–25

Webography www.hollywoodreporter.com www.last.fm http://mog.com www.mystrands.com www.pandora.com www.salon.com

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PART XI

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BEYOND WORLD-MUSIC HISTORY

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The time of music and the time of history MARTIN CLAYTON

Introduction What relationships exist between the time of music and the time of history? The question is a tantalizing one: the timescales involved are utterly different, and yet, somehow, we manage to adjust both to a common measure of human thought and discourse. They cannot be compared, but at the same time we seem compelled to do so. Might musical time map onto historical time in some meaningful way? In what sense does musical time have its own history? Might some music, by virtue of its time organization, lie outside of global historical narratives, or resist the advance of modernity? This chapter considers the juxtaposition of musical and historical times, their interpenetration in the discursive realm, and the lessons of this process for our understanding of both. The chapter is illustrated through a number of examples, but makes reference throughout to North Indian raga music. The issues of time at the core of the chapter have, in fact, a particular resonance in the Indian context, where homologies between structures on very different timescales have been suggested, and have consolidated notions of music as a symbolic representation of a traditional Hindu cosmology, reinforcing along the way the idea of an essential difference dividing East and West. In this chapter I contest the traditional Indian view, but also honor its significance, since the very fact that commentators are drawn to make such assertions is evidence both of the power of the imagination in comparing the incommensurable and of the strength of the ideological imperatives that motivate them – while music’s resistance to such schemes confirms the failure of knowledge fully to constrain practice. By asking my initial question in a spirit of criticism and with reference to both musical reality and ethnographic study, I aim to demonstrate how time in all its dimensions and scales is fundamental to the experience and meaning of music. In the next section I set out in detail the kind of arguments that have been made regarding the symbolic function of musical time, with particular reference to India, and outline some problems with these arguments. In order to prepare for a more substantially grounded approach to the issue of time and

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music, the third section discusses some relevant arguments in the main disciplinary contexts of relevance here, namely history, anthropology, and psychology. In the final section I offer an alternative reading of a typical raga performance, and start to develop a model of the relationship between musical and historical time.

Temporal symbolism in Indian and other musics Symbolic readings of Indian musical time In the following section I outline some of the claims made that music symbolizes basic cultural ideas regarding processes occurring over much longer timescales. I concentrate particularly on the idea that Indian music symbolizes cosmological processes – here it is necessary to go into some detail in order to make my argument fully – referring also to related cases in other musical traditions. The Indian examples illustrated below, and others to varying degrees, can be described as homology theories (since they propose similar structures in different domains), or as claims of iconicity (since they concern resemblance between these forms). I argue that temporal processes on different scales can refer to each other iconically only when their forms are mediated – for instance, through representation as either “linear” or “cyclical” – since human beings cannot perceive these relationships directly. The first work considered here for its attempts to effect mappings between Indian cosmology and music is a paper by Such and Jairazbhoy. Their analysis begins from the premise that Indian time is cyclical and “since music is symbolic and reflects the conceptual structures and organization of a community, one would expect to find similar cyclic structures in certain aspects of Indian music” (Such and Jairazbhoy 1982, 105). The authors find such structures – identified outside music in the concept of the yuga (era or “worldcycle”) – first in tala (meter), whose principles “contrast sharply with the rhythmic principles of most western music” (ibid., 106). They go on to invoke the concept of reincarnation, comparing “a single tala cycle . . . to a single human life” and “successive cycles of the tala . . . [to] the successive lives experienced by the individual soul” (ibid., 106–7). A complete raga performance, beginning and ending with the drone, can accordingly be seen as cyclic on a grander scale. Simms proposed an equally detailed reading of cyclicity in Indian music, based on the premise that “virtually all aspects of Indian culture are founded upon knowledge of the transcendent, metaphysical order” (Simms 1992–3, 67); his reading of North Indian musical forms aims to illustrate “the unusually high degree to which they exhibit a formal symbolism of

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Hindu cosmological doctrine” (ibid., 67–8). Again, the key concept is yuga, according to which doctrine the manifested cosmos “descends” through accelerated periods (respectively 4, 3, 2, and 1 units of 432,000 years), the descent representing increasing separation from the Absolute. (The most clearly elaborated form of yuga doctrine describes this as a linear process: larger measures do exist, however, implying the cyclic repetition of the entire mahayuga of 4,320,000 years.) The key mapping to musical form invokes a typical performance in the dhrupad genre, in which the start of the alap corresponds to “the primordial krtayuga state of near identity with the Absolute at the onset of manifestation”; the subsequent nomtom section “perhaps reflecting the tendencies of the tetrayuga: an increase in separation (cf. with extended tonal ambitus) and solidification (rhythmic density) resulting in a faster pace of activity.” Finally a fixed composition, the introduction of tala, and acceleration all symbolize the transition “from the serenity of the krtayuga to the speed and complexity of the kaliyuga.” The terms here refer to the first, second, and fourth yugas: the third, dvaparayuga, is introduced later as an analogy to the transition from slow to fast composition in the (historically later) khyal style. Finally, the beginning and end of the performance both comprise “silence – symbol of the Absolute”: Simms is careful to point out that only silence, not the drone, can symbolize the absolute (ibid., 76–9). Lewis Rowell’s contributions in this area are both more detailed and more critical (and therefore harder to summarize). In an early article, he argues that “the cyclic organization of the underlying tāl is a microcosmic parallel to the macrocosmic cycles within which Indian time unfolds” (Rowell 1981, 207). In his later work, the symbolism is deeper: Gesture and breath are the archetypal forms of music making and may be interpreted as both symbols and means of sacrifice: like the ancient vedin, the Indian musician controls audible time by actions – the motions of his hand and the outflow of his breath. With the gestures of tala he regulates the illusion of outer time with its gross divisions and audible forms, while with the controlled emission of vocal sound he manifests the true, continuous, inner time. (Rowell 1992, 186)

These four authors, then, present a range of interpretations of the “cosmic symbolism” idea, which are clearly distinguishable (Table 31.1). Interestingly, Indian-based musicologists seem to have been more circumspect in their claims on this point. Deva describes tala as “cyclic,” invoking the “feeling of ‘coming back’ to the origin, [due to which] the arrangement becomes repetitive or cyclic; for it is only in a circle that one returns to the beginning” (Deva 1974, 38). Still, he neither claims this as cosmic symbolism

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Table 31.1 Interpretations of cosmic symbolism Such and Jairazbhoy Tala cycle = Human life; Performance = Successive lives of an individual Simms Performance = Mahayuga; Alap, nomtom, composition relate to different yugas Rowell Tala cycle = Yuga; Gesture and Breath represent Outer and Inner time respectively

nor implies a profound difference from Western music. Chaudhary discusses the same issue in her study of meter and form, combining elements of circular and linear images: The āvartana [cycle] of tala bears similarity to the circle since we return to the . . . starting point. The measuring of time is the main purpose of tala and, since the time which has been elapsed in one āvarta[na] of tala cannot be recaptured, there is a forward movement in time, as a result of which there is a “cycle” of tala, not a “‘circle.” (Chaudhary 1997, 35)

Again, no claim is made regarding essential difference or cosmic symbolism. In fact, the notion that Indian musical time needs to be explained in terms of cosmological symbolism seems to be, primarily, a phenomenon of twentiethcentury ethnomusicology. I have previously offered a critique of these notions in the Indian case, which I shall not reprise in detail here (Clayton 2000, 15ff.). A few of the objections I raised previously can, however, be summarized as follows: *

*

*

Cyclicity was not noted as a feature of musical time in pre-Muslim Indian musicological texts. Cyclicity can be related rather more directly to Sufi practice, which is not considered by any of the “cosmic symbolism” theorists cited above. The notion that Indian music is inherently more cyclical than any other form of music (e.g., Western art music) is itself debatable.

To some extent, these objections have been considered by the authors cited above, particularly Rowell and Simms. The former wrestles with precisely the problem that in discussions of tala in ancient theoretical treatises, “the concept of cycle is conspicuously absent from [the] set of topics [discussed],” noting in comparison with modern Karnatak theory that “cycle” has become “an implicit assumption of the system” (Rowell 1992, 192). His attempt to square the circle, so to speak, relies on a theory of “mutual feedback and a development of . . . ‘resonances’ between a musical tradition and its controlling

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ideology” (Rowell 1988, 330), which introduces a time-lag – of perhaps many centuries – into the homology of musical and cosmological time concepts. Another possible objection raised, and answered, by Simms, is summed up in the question, “To what degree does such correspondence constitute a symbol, and for whom is it a symbol, if this is so?” (Simms 1992–3, 80). His answer is, first of all, that the correspondences are real, whether or not they are perceived. Second, such symbols appeal to the intellect, and thus popular consensus is irrelevant: “From the traditional perspective . . . esotericism . . . is by definition relegated to a small minority within a community” (ibid.); in other words, it is not surprising that such knowledge is the preserve of an elite, or that musicians themselves may not be aware of it. In fact, the notion that Indian music manifests a “cyclic” conception of time and that this is an example of difference from Western music is commonplace, when interviewed about the meaning of performance and musical time, musicians very rarely invoke the notion of cyclicity or circularity, let alone its symbolic importance. As for my final bullet point, note that none of the authors cited above convincingly argues that in representing aspects of Hindu cosmology, Indian music manifests a basic difference from Western. Such and Jairazbhoy make the claim, briefly, with respect to tala, but do not offer a convincing argument with which to back up their claim; in fact, whenever Indian music is described in detail as manifesting cyclical structure, invariably an equivalent claim could be made for Western music. The notion of difference is more implicit in Simms’s and Rowell’s accounts; nonetheless, the motivation for all of these speculations seems to be a perceived need to explain Indian difference, and they are undermined by a failure to demonstrate wherein that difference lies.

Indonesian, African, and cross-cultural studies At this point it is instructive to bring in reflections on other parts of the world, explaining how and why musical time might represent deep cultural ideas. I briefly mention two case studies: Indonesian gamelan, which has been subjected to comparable readings to the Indian case, and so-called “African rhythm,” which has been the focus of long debate and high-profile critique of the assumption of essential difference. In between, I reflect on Alan Lomax’s attempts to consider the issue cross-culturally. The symbolism argument, in the case of gamelan, hangs less explicitly on cosmology and more on time concepts manifested in calendrical systems. For our purposes, the similarities between the two approaches are more important than the differences – although why Indian music attracts speculation on philosophical constructs and Indonesian on calendrical systems is itself an interesting question. Influenced by Judith Becker (see 1981), Hoffman

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has argued that the way we structure knowledge in music is not different from the way in which we structure knowledge in other domains (Hoffman 1978). Time in Java is essentially cyclical, the argument goes, as manifested in calendrical systems: Javanese calendars have concurrent five-, six-, and seven-day weeks, the whole pattern repeating every 210 days. The most important function of gong-ensemble music (a more generic term encompassing gamelan) is to accompany ritual, and therefore it is to be expected that the music too manifests cyclical structure: “The most important function of gong ensemble music is to accompany rites and ceremonies . . . At these times of transition – births, marriages, exorcisms, coronations – the order of the universe is in danger of being upset. The cyclic notion of time . . . is a part of that order, if not central to it. The symbolic statement of the nature of cosmic order through music and ritual is at once its definition, confirmation, and transmission” (ibid., 78). This broad approach has retained some currency, although it is not always accepted without ambivalence. In Michael Tenzer’s more recent study of Balinese music, for instance, the author’s treatment of this issue takes into account more recent critical perspectives, and he summarizes equivocally that “what we . . . gain by considering these issues is . . . a poetic metaphor for how music embodies ingrained attitudes and beliefs” (Tenzer 2000, 75). Although the specifics of this case differ from those of Indian music, some of the same objections can be made to this argument. First, of course, it has not been demonstrated that Javanese music is inherently more cyclical than Western music; one might argue that it is equally true that Western music manifests the cyclical epistemology evident in the Gregorian calendar. If so, why does the observation appear to carry more explanatory weight in Indonesia than it does in Europe? Second, if the common epistemology is so important, why does Javanese music not use simultaneous time cycles of five, six, and seven beats? Of course, it would be extremely difficult to play such music, and, moreover, its significance would not be clear unless it were to be explained verbally – but it is easy to forget that musical practice has its own constraints and is not able freely to symbolize external ideas. Perhaps the most detailed and comprehensive attempt to map rhythmic style onto culture cross-culturally has been that of Alan Lomax, as part of his cantometrics project. This ambitious project, which involved a search for statistical correlations between aspects of musical style and ethnological findings, is well known and critiqued within ethnomusicology. In all the (often justified) criticism of cantometrics, however, the value of Lomax’s intuitions and of his more supportable findings have unfortunately been ignored, and this is the case in his approach to musical time. Lomax, crucially,

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starts from the premise that rhythm plays a vital role in social relations and communication; in other words, he is more interested in what people achieve through musical rhythm than in what it might symbolize. Thus, Rhythmic patterns facilitate the co-activity of groups and aid their members in coordinating energies and resources in work, nurturance, defense, social discourse, rites of passage, interchange of information, and, above all, expressive acts. The important role of rhythm in group behavior suggests that we can view the rhythmic aspects of communication as essentially social in nature – a system that binds individuals together into effective groups and links groups into communities and polities. Each such “rhythmic style,” passed on generationally, shapes many aspects of each cultural tradition. (Lomax 1982, 149–50)

While Lomax is too quick to essentialize the rhythmic styles of particular cultures – and here his results can sometimes be less than convincing – two main points can be drawn out which do bear further consideration: 1) that it may be possible to see in musical time the traces of social interaction; and 2) that rhythmic styles have histories. I argue below that these observations may help to lead us away from the search for “symbolism” and toward a more productive reading of musical time in its relation to history. Lomax, like most of the authors considered above, believed that a form of cultural symbolism argument remains valid (ibid., 158): his detailed findings support the contention that rhythmic styles can index their cultural environments, but not that they reflect them iconically. As for the extensive ethnomusicological literature on African rhythm, attempts to link musical time to different knowledge structures have not been so prominent. Ruth Stone has tried to link African rhythmic practice to a notion of an “African sense of time.” Although she does not offer a token of difference as easily recognizable as “cyclicity,” she nonetheless concludes that: “Here [in African music] we have a view of time that on certain levels is an alternative to linear progression calculated quantitatively” (Stone 1986, 124) – in other words, to what she and others take to be the standard Western view. Significantly, no doubt, the differences invoked otherwise have been more often to do with that between knowledge and practice: African rhythm is construed as different because it is fundamentally connected to movement, dance, and the ergonomics of the human body. Kofi Agawu’s extensive treatment of the topic develops from a description of an archetypal day in Northern Ewe culture, which juxtaposes the rhythms of music with those of everyday life (Agawu 1995). He does not claim any simple causal connection or symbolic relation between the domains, however, and he emphatically denies the notion of essential difference. Agawu has subsequently expanded his attack on the concept of African

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rhythm (Agawu 2003): he accuses ethnomusicologists of being too quick to assume essential difference, and, as a consequence, of fundamentally misunderstanding musical time in Africa. My reading of the literature on Indian and Indonesian music bears out his core argument that ethnomusicologists have been premature in assuming difference, and have as a consequence reproduced misleading views on different regimes of musical time. Why this might be so, and how we might move to a more productive investigation of the relation between musical time, culture, and history, is the subject of the next section.

Temporal symbolism in context: history, anthropology, psychology Time, history, and anthropology Historian E. P. Thompson set a benchmark for studies of the politics of time with a 1967 article in which he traced shifts in time concepts associated with the industrial revolution, which he explains in terms of technological developments (for instance, the use of the pendulum in household clocks from 1658), as well as what he calls the “marriage of convenience” between Puritanism and industrial capitalism (Thompson 1967, 95). He might have added another factor, at least from the later nineteenth century, namely evolutionism, thanks to which the notion of historical “progress” became more prominent. It is significant, although Thompson does not remark on the fact, that one of the main drivers for the development of clock technology was the need for accurate maritime navigation (Sobel 1995): the connections between industrialization, modernity, and colonialism are many-layered and partly mediated by time concepts. Before large-scale industrial capitalism, Thompson argues, work was timed according to “task orientation,” in Britain as in other societies. In other words, jobs were done when they were needed; it was large-scale industry and the need to synchronize labor more precisely that led to a greater emphasis in Europe on “clock time.” There are a couple of other interesting points to note in Thompson’s account. First, he mentions (but develops only briefly) the idea that the time concepts associated with Western industrial capitalism have also been imposed on the so-called developing world, thus: “what was said by the mercantilist moralists as to the failures of the eighteenth-century English poor to respond to incentives and disciplines is often repeated, by observers and by theorists of economic growth, of the people of developing countries today” (Thompson 1967, 91). Second, he makes the case that this shift was an antagonistic one, in which religious moralists and capitalists attempted, in the face of considerable

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resistance from the peasant and industrial working classes, to impose a new time discipline. Notions of time concepts as political and intimately related to power relations have been significantly developed since Thompson’s time by postcolonial historians, who have linked the joint development of European modernity and colonialism to the “historical mode of thought” and hence to a particular conception of time. The so-called “linear-progressive” model of time may not have been the only one available within Europe, but it is the conception that helped to drive the industrial revolution, colonial expansion, and the emerging concept of modernity itself. Prathama Banerjee coins the term “colonial modernity” as a means of arguing that, in fact, there is no other kind: [T]he figure of the “primitive,” constructed through colonial encounters, was foundational to Europe’s imagination not only of the world but also of itself, and to its own self-critiques. In this sense, there seems to be no modernity, European or otherwise, which is also not colonial modernity . . . [I]t was the invention of the “primitive” through colonial encounters which led to the defining trait of modernity, namely, the imperative to produce time as a linear, chronological extension, the ground for historicality as it were, in which nations could be serialized in progression, such that the non-modern no longer appeared as present and contemporary to modern historical subject. (Banerjee 2006, 13)

Colonialism was sustained by the historical mode of thought and by the idea that this was a mark of progress that modern humans possessed and “primitives” still lacked: Banerjee attributes to Hegel, the key philosopher of European modernity, the assertion that “the primitive condition was a state where time was (mis)apprehended as an uninterrupted present, where the subject-object distinction had not yet emerged and therefore, where the mind was incapable of abstraction” (ibid., 5). This distinction between the modern and the primitive is linked further to the opposition of knowledge and practice: the primitive is relegated to a mode of pure practice, with practice itself “reinvented as the ‘primitive’ other of thought” (ibid., 3). The link to representations of African rhythm as essentially bodily action – distinguished from Western musical forms conceived as structured by the intellect – is clear enough. These ideas played out in complex ways in India. Although India’s intellectual achievements were acknowledged in Europe by the time of Hegel, for instance, he nonetheless denied them “history” since India had not achieved statehood (Guha 2002, 9ff). Rather than indexing a split between knowledge and practice, the distinctions claimed in ethnomusicological literature on India suggest the mapping of different forms of knowledge. The cosmic symbolism argument thus acknowledges the intellectual component of Indian music while also insisting on difference between

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cyclical and linear-progressive notions of time. Another effect of this writing, intended or not, is the partial denial of history to Indian music: if the key concepts are essentially unchanging, historical change is a superficial matter. Where musical time is linked to notions of essential difference, especially where this difference invokes the West as linear, progressive, and teleological and the other as circular, static, and unchanging, we need to be alert to the political implications of such arguments (Chakrabarty 2008). Anthropology must be considered in its own right here, not least because of the accusation that ethnographic texts fed into Europe’s own imagination of itself as the privileged site of modernity. The notion that different societies possess fundamentally different modes of temporal thought can indeed be traced in anthropological texts. Alfred Gell, in his critical discussion of the topic, lays the responsibility for what he sees as a fundamental misapprehension at the door of Emile Durkheim, who insisted that time, like other basic categories, was socially constructed. For Gell there can be only one metaphysics of time, although there are undoubtedly multiple contingent beliefs about time in operation in different societies, or in different contexts within the same society. There is no fairyland where people experience time in a way that is markedly unlike the way in which we do ourselves, where there is no past, present and future, where time stands still, or chases its own tail, or swings back and forth like a pendulum. All these possibilities have been seriously touted in the literature on the anthropology of time . . . but they are all travesties, engendered in the process of scholarly reflection. (Gell 1992, 315)

The idea that anthropology as a whole proposes a clear distinction between modern, Western, linear-progressive time and primitive, present-oriented, cyclical time is a great over-simplification, as Gell’s critique makes clear. Difference in time concepts, nonetheless, has been a recurrent theme – evident in writers as various as Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, and Geertz – from which ethnomusicology has drawn inspiration; for example, Geertz’s presentation of Balinese time concepts has influenced discussions of the time structure of gamelan music (Geertz 1973). Arguments on difference and cultural symbolism in relation to musical time draw, then, on anthropological ideas that are now fiercely contested, and which carry some of the same ideological baggage as has been identified in historical scholarship.

Musical time and psychology It is easily forgotten – and the discussion thus far demonstrates that it has too often been forgotten – that structures of knowledge (discourses, ideologies,

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epistemologies) are not free to constrain musical time as they will. I turn now to a discussion of this theme by referring back to Banerjee’s postcolonial history, and in particular her take on practice: “I understand practice, as that mode, beyond the theoretical and the representational, in which we must engage with time . . . What theory always explains as the failure of practice is what practice must be, as that which effects something other than what was foreseen” (Banerjee 2006, 33, 35; my emphasis). I argue here that one can understand practice as a mode in which we must engage with fundamental constraints on temporal perception and production; and I wish briefly to sketch some of the ways in which those constraints can give rise to effects other than those foreseen by knowledge structures. Practice, in other words, is not the domain of the primitive, of those cultures lacking overt music theory, it is a part of the complex reality of all musical cultures. The terms I should like to discuss here concern the psycho-physiological constraints within which music is practiced and experienced. Psychological research has identified and confirmed both natural limits and preferences in the domain of human time perception. To cite briefly a couple of musically relevant examples, the minimum interval required to perceive one sound event as following another is c. 50 milliseconds (if the interval is shorter than this, the order of the events is impossible to determine); the shortest intervals defining a “beat” or pulse in music are, in practice, around 100 milliseconds. At the other end of the scale, the longest duration possible between elements if they are to be heard as part of a coherent sequence is c. 1.5–2 seconds (Handel 1989, 385). The “psychological present,” within which multiple perceptions are integrated into a perceptual “now,” typically extends up to two or three seconds. In the middle of that range, individuals asked to tap a regular beat will normally do so with a time interval between taps of 200–900 milliseconds, with the range 600–700 milliseconds particularly salient (ibid.). Human action also has its temporal constraints: How quickly can a sequence of sound-producing movements be produced? How long can a sung note be held or a plucked string persuaded to vibrate? Actual figures would depend on the instrument or the particular kind of singing or playing concerned, but no one would doubt that natural limits exist. Human perception and action fall within definite temporal constraints, then, which can be transcended only through the use of medium- and longterm memory and by the use of imagination and metaphor. Biology does not present only constraints, however; it also offers a predisposition to interaction, and to the making of order and meaning. One of the most important things people do through music is interact, that is, they coordinate actions and perceptions (limb with limb, hand with eye, individual with individual).

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Tendencies to periodicity in both repeated motor behavior and attention, together with an innate predisposition to entrain (in particular, to entrain attention to regularities in the environment), make synchronization between and within individuals a feature of musical events (Clayton et al. 2005). It is clear that all music making and listening has to work within certain biological constraints: musical time scales are far from being unconstrained. While a musical performance can be extended indefinitely, it is made up of actions and perceptions taking place in the range of roughly one hundred milliseconds to three seconds; this range is further differentiated, with particular time scales relevant for the perception of pulse and meter. Taken as a whole, psychological and physiological factors provide a range of constraints and affordances with which any music making or listening must engage: musical behavior operates only within specific timescales. Drawing on Banerjee’s formulation of the knowledge–practice dichotomy, musical practice is a domain in which we are forced to engage with natural temporal constraints. Knowledge structures may be more susceptible to influence from other domains, such as the application of metaphors of cosmological processes, but where these manipulations run contrary to innate predispositions that lie beyond the limits of discourse, tensions will inevitably arise. However musical time is theorized, in brief, knowledge structures can only partially be converted into practice.

Conclusions Reading the time of Indian music In this section I offer an interpretation of a typical raga performance that contrasts with the “cosmic time” interpretations. This reading comes out of the psychological perspectives and the notion of practice discussed above; in other words, it assumes that Indian music practice develops from sociobiological tendencies, but is developed in culturally specific ways. The latter, however, have relatively little to do with the notion of cyclicity, and much more to do with social hierarchies, interactions, and power relations; thus, musical meter – and the temporal order in general – emerges as a form of regimentation. A form of order is seen to emerge spontaneously, but the explicit control and manipulation of that order is interpreted here as a process of bringing people together in a common temporal order – a process which can be glossed either as one of communion (which affords a positive “fellow-feeling”) or as one which breeds antagonism (as commonly observed in tensions between soloists and accompanists in Indian music).

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The most profound aesthetic experience of raga is supposed to be afforded by alap, a special duration unconstrained by metrical order (though, of course, still subject to limits on the temporal scales of action and perception, and to constraints on the extent of a singer’s breath or a string’s vibration, and still subject to interpretation in terms of order and development). The time of alap is one which tends to deny synchronization between individuals: tanpura (long-necked lute used for drone pitches) players perform periodic patterns that should not be attended to as such but as a kind of arhythmic background; drummers should remain silent but attentive (playing the part of the ideal listener); while a soloist should deploy his or her actions in order to give an impression of irregularity and deny the entrainment of attentional rhythms. The aim, at this stage, is to attract and sustain the listener’s attention on aperiodic phenomena (at least within the time scales defined here, 100 milliseconds–3 seconds) – intonation, fine pitch inflections, subtle dynamic and timbral manipulations, and so on. As raga moves into jor and a steady pulse is introduced, this pulse begins to organize both action and perception. In the transition to jor an organizing pulse is imposed – or is this an intrinsic pulse, which has hitherto been suppressed, now being allowed to emerge? Now the listeners and co-musicians can refocus their attention, as pulse affords entrainment, and thus both predictive listening and coordinated performance. From the simple pulse, moreover, more complex forms of order emerge spontaneously, and where these can be perceived they can be consciously ordered. My own study of entrainment in jor demonstrates how a singer and her harmonium accompanist are able to sustain a loose coordination, and how the musicians’ tendencies to entrain result in intermittent (and inaudible) entrainment between tanpura players organized with reference to this pulse (Clayton 2007a). I also show how this entrainment can encompass a number of different polyrhythmic relationships, so that the musicians’ mutual attention results in the emergence of unstable, imperceptible, but nonetheless complex forms of temporal organization (which I have termed proto-meter). As tala – and drum accompaniment – are introduced, a hierarchical organization of time becomes explicit, conscious, and perceptible. This organization is directed by the soloist, who has the authority to select tala and tempo, although these are chosen from within a narrow range of options dictated by past practice and understood by all the musicians and many listeners. Time is now regimented, with the drummer following the accompanist’s lead in maintaining temporal order, and other accompanists and listeners falling in with the same temporal pattern. This dynamic – the drummer, musically subservient, acting as the enforcer of temporal order on behalf of a soloist

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who is expected to remain above the fray – is a crucial one in Indian raga performance. While as listeners we may welcome this imposition of order on our experience – it is an agreeable price to pay for the aesthetic enjoyment offered for our appreciation – it can also be a source of considerable tension between musicians. The next, crucial stage of this process of regimentation comes with the imposition of a definite metrical framework or tala. Tala affords both a spontaneous entrainment and a conscious knowledge of complex temporal patterning: it structures experience in a predictable, sharable form (Clayton 2007b). This organization of time affords a kind of communal experience – listeners can move from internally tracking an irregular sequence of events to demonstrably tracking a definite periodic sequence, complete with hand gestures, foot taps, and vocal interjections, so that listeners attend to each other almost as much as they track the soloist’s performance, one which can be intensely satisfying for an appreciative audience member. This is a hierarchical, structured mode of mutual engagement in which the drummer keeps order on behalf of all and under instruction from the soloist. It also becomes a site for tension and contestation, albeit usually covert, particularly between soloist and accompanists, who are required to submit to the order imposed by a soloist. This development from alap to tala-bound composition may afford, as we have seen, interpretation as a cosmic icon, but my description above highlights a different interpretation. An Indian raga performance can be read as a transition from a personal and highly individuated mode of experience, through the spontaneous emergence of regularity as a result of interaction, and on to the imposition by a dominant individual of a particular temporal regime, an act that confirms him at the head of a hierarchical ordering of the individuals present. Subsequent intensification explores the ramifications of this order and demands continued submission, before the tensions in the temporal hierarchy make it unsustainable and it collapses once more into separation and individuation. In some details this reading is supported by empirical evidence: entrainment can be observed and measured, audience involvement likewise, and tensions between soloists and accompanists can be brought to light easily enough ethnographically. Of course, even if parts of a performance involve the imposition of temporal order, the maintenance of hierarchies and their covert contestation, there is no reason to insist that entire performances must be read as political allegories. On the contrary, whole performances only act consistently as largescale allegories where there is a conscious intention to do so, and there is no evidence of any such intention on the part of Indian musicians. I do argue,

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nonetheless, that like any kind of music making, such a performance is the result of human interactions; individuals are more or less entrained; this entrainment is more or less symmetrical; and patterns of interaction are maintained on a continuum from the egalitarian to the hierarchical. Therefore, like any kind of musical performance, the presentation of a raga can be read in terms of interaction, coordination, regimentation, and hierarchy, and therefore in political terms. There is no need to invoke a culturally unique cyclicity to explain Indian musical time. Where one does, as I have argued above, the effect is to introduce an ideologically charged layer of paramusical discourse that has little relevance to practice.

The time of music and the time of history A key difference between musical time and historical time is the way in which each can be experienced by a human subject. The time scales at which musical actions take place are highly constrained: time may be infinitely scalable, but our perceptual mechanisms are not. Historical time, in contrast, is always reconstructed and imagined – whether based largely on documentary evidence, on philosophical argument or on speculation. What the two have in common is that both involve both change and recurrence, and thus afford both linear and circular descriptive metaphors. Being dependent on metaphor and reconstruction, however, history is a form of knowledge, and far less constrained than music by the imperatives of practice. If the time of modernity is driven by mechanization, regimentation, and socially coordinated time patterns, how does the time of Indian music interact with this? Listeners’ reports on their experience of Indian raga performance speak of “naturalness” and, implicitly, of using the music as a retreat from mechanized, noisy reality to an idealized, ahistorical “nature.” The reading above suggests a transition from the individualized to the interactive, with tensions developing around the power of a dominant individual to regiment the group. “Cosmic time” readings suggest, in contrast, a retreat from the social to a focus on iconic signification, in a domain freed from linear development – a more complete rejection of the modern world. In an era in which metropolitan India is experiencing unprecedented economic growth, raga performance is a site which allows listeners a brief time-out from a routine regimented for maximizing production and profit. I do not, however, take this as evidence for a cosmic time reading. Performances of Indian raga music can be intensely contemplative, but they are also richly social occasions – they emphatically do not entail an escape from social hierarchies. They offer not a complete escape from modernity, or the contemplation of pure symbolism; rather, an intensely practical, socially interactive site within

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which moments of individual escape can be embedded. In this respect, in fact, their role may be remarkably similar to that of many kinds of music making in the West. One of the questions I posed at the beginning of this chapter was: could particular musics lie outside global historical narratives? Or even, we might add, the history of world music? If we assume that music reflects profoundly different epistemologies in different societies, then perhaps so: Indian music, for example, might have survived the ravages of colonialism with its features basically untouched, and thus offer an escape from postcolonial modernity. I argue, nonetheless, that this is an illusion, that far from evading history, change and encounter have left their mark on present-day Indian music. To illustrate this I will cite one piece of ethnographic evidence. I noted above that musicians rarely draw attention to cyclicity as a token of difference. The following quotation from Abhijeet Banerjee, a tabla player, is an exception. What it illustrates is that far from indicating separation from the flow of world history, Indian musical time is a space of encounter, of tensions, and of resolutions; and finally that embodiment and social interaction are at least as important from an Indian master musician’s perspective. In our tradition, there is no metronome concept . . . Rather people say here in this country, or in our tradition, that a human being reacts to the other human being, so the beat goes little bit up and down. If it is very straight, it is like a machine. So, in Indian film music or recording music, it gets very hard for a classical musician to go with the clicks. It’s very hard. But what my Guruji did, is [train me a] little bit with metronome. And our (pause) it’s not a linear, it’s a circular thing. So that is more important for us. So this is the basic difference. For us to get the one, (starts counting tala with hands while talking) now I can talk and I can feel wherever it is. I always feel, you know, when the one is coming. It should flow in your blood, in your mind, everywhere. (Banerjee 2007)

To conclude this chapter I will organize my observations on the relationship between musical and historical time under two broad headings, arguing (a) that musical time carries traces of histories of social interaction, and (b) that musical time can partially reflect ideas current in other domains through the imposition of knowledge structures on practice. First of all, as Lomax suggests, musical time can be regarded as the trace of social interaction. In this sense, musical time always affords an indexical interpretation because it points toward the interactions associated with it (whether in a ritual, entertainment, or other contexts). Musical rhythms are in this sense dependent on social variables; however, it should be borne in mind that the opposite may also be true, that is, social interactions that are not afforded by available musical genres may not take place. In this sense, music

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does not simply reflect social relations, but also constructs them. These indices can be remarkably robust, for instance in the case of dance rhythms that survive the transformation of dance music into “listening” music (an Indian example can be found in the thumri genre). They should not be confused, however, with the iconic symbolism indicated in homology theories. Musical indices do not require verbal mediation or conscious recognition, whereas iconic representation of the kind described above is a form of knowledge, and requires discursive framing. Musical time, then, can index social interaction and can survive over historical time as the trace of previous patterns of interaction. Second, there is another important way in which musical time is linked to its sociocultural context, and that is through structures of knowledge, as opposed to practice. These knowledge structures include formal music theory as it exists in the West or in India, as well as more informal beliefs regarding “what we know” about music. Such forms of knowledge necessarily operate by means of metaphor, which has the property, among others, of making musical time commensurable with historical timescales (including both the calendrical and the cosmological). The kinds of metaphorical mappings that are made tend to be of similar types to those made in other cultural domains; in this sense, Hoffman is right to talk of shared epistemologies. However, knowledge structures can neither completely describe nor completely control practice: because musical time is also constrained by human cognitive faculties, whose affordances can make theoretically desirable temporal relationships highly unstable, and instead favor temporal relationships with no particular salience in the knowledge domain. We can see, therefore, that relationships exist between musical and historical time on a number of levels. Musical time indexes social relations, and the fact that musical forms are repeated when their indexical referent no longer pertains (e.g., obsolete dance rhythms) means that some forms of music may be read as palimpsests, layered histories of social interaction. Musical forms also embody histories of this dialectical engagement between knowledge and practice, and may in some circumstances be read as such – the ideas people hold about music can help to shape musical practice, within certain constraints. Neither of these two interrelated phenomena mean, however, that musical forms should be read uncritically as symbols or representations of cosmological beliefs or other cultural forms; nor should the differences between rhythmic practices be read simplistically as indices of profoundly different epistemologies. The evidence adduced in such arguments is in fact extremely weak, while they can be critiqued in exactly the same way as they have been in anthropology and in historiography. Wittingly or otherwise, this approach helps to reinforce an unsupported view of essential difference between cultures. In earlier times

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the most basic difference would have been construed as that between “modern” and “primitive,” the former exemplifying a linear-progressive metaphysics of time, the latter an ahistorical, present-oriented cyclical view, a construction whose political implications have rightly been critiqued by postcolonial theorists. Whether or not the more recent incarnations of this approach in ethnomusicology can be said to be so politically potent is a matter for debate, but I argue here that a deeper understanding of musical practice requires a serious attempt to understand the relationship between the time of music and the time of history in all its complexity.

Bibliography Agawu, V. K. (1995) African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective, Cambridge University Press (2003) Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge Banerjee, A. (2007) Interview with Martin Clayton, February 8 Banerjee, P. (2006) Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society, New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press Becker, J. (1981) ‘Hindu-Buddhist time in Javanese gamelan music’, in J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, and D. Park (eds.), The Study of Time IV: Papers from the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, Alpbach-Austria, Berlin and New York: Springer Chakrabarty, D. (2008) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Colonial Difference, Princeton University Press Chaudhary, S. (1997) Time Measure and Compositional Types in Indian Music: A Historical and Analytical Study of Tala, Chanda and Nibaddha Musical Forms, trans. by H. Ramanathan, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan Clayton, M. R. L. (2000) Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre and Form in North Indian Rag Performance, Oxford University Press (2007a) ‘Observing entrainment in music performance: Video-based observational analysis of Indian musicians’ tanpura playing and beat marking’, Musicae Scientiae, 11, 1: 27–60 (2007b) ‘Time, gesture and attention in a khyal performance’, Asian Music, 38, 2: 71–96 Clayton, M. R. L., R. Sager, and U. Will (2005) ‘In time with the music: The concept of entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology’, European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 11 (ESEM Counterpoint 1): 3–75 Deva, B. C. (1974) Indian Music, New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Culture, New York: Basic Books Gell, A. (1992) The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images, Oxford: Berg Guha, R. (2002) History at the Limit of World-History, New York: Columbia University Press Handel, S. (1989) Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

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Hoffman, S. B. (1978) ‘Epistemology and music: A Javanese example’, Ethnomusicology, 22, 1: 69–88 Lomax, A. (1982) ‘The cross-cultural variation of rhythmic style’, in M. Davis (ed.), Interaction Rhythms: Periodicity in Communicative Behavior, New York: Human Sciences Press, pp. 149–74 Rowell, L. E. (1981) ‘The creation of audible time’, in J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, and D. Park (eds.), The Study of Time IV: Papers from the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, Alpbach-Austria, Berlin and New York: Springer (1988) ‘The idea of music in India and the ancient West’, in V. Rantala, L. E. Rowell, and E. Tarasti (eds.), Essays on the Philosophy of Music, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 43, Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland (1992) Music and Musical Thought in Early India, University of Chicago Press Simms, R. (1992–3) ‘Aspects of cosmological symbolism in Hindusthani musical forms’, Asian Music, 24, 1: 67–89 Sobel, D. (1995) Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time, New York: Walker Stone, R. M. (1986) ‘The shape of time in African music’, in J. T. Fraser, N.M. Lawrence, and F. C. Haber (eds.), Time, Science and Society in China and the West (Study of Time V), Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 113–25 Such, D., and N. A. Jairazbhoy (1982) ‘Cyclical manifestations in Indian music’, Journal of Asian Culture, 6: 104–17 Tenzer, M. (2000) Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music, University of Chicago Press Thompson, E. P. (1967) ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, 38: 56–97

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The ethics of ethnomusicology in a cosmopolitan age KAY KAUFMAN SHELEMAY

This chapter presents a broad discussion of ethical discourses and practices in the study of world music by ethnomusicologists. In recent ethnomusicological literature, the term “cosmopolitan” has been invoked to refer to “cultural formations that are . . . always simultaneously local and translocal” (Turino 2000, 7).1 In the present chapter I give attention to ethical issues surrounding the study of music in an increasingly cosmopolitan age, one in which both people and the music they transmit are simultaneously local and translocal. Ethnomusicological engagement with musics in a cosmopolitan age has transposed long-standing ethical issues into increasingly complex contexts as well as raising new considerations altogether. Philosopher K. Anthony Appiah has proposed that two moral strands intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism: One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences . . . There will be times when these two ideals – universal concern and respect for legitimate difference – clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge. (Appiah 2006, xv)

In the chapter that follows, I wish both to acknowledge the challenge of formulating ethical values in a cosmopolitan world and to set forth some of

I thank Benjamin Coen, Timothy Cooley, Steven Kaplan, William P. Malm, T. S. Scruggs, Mark Slobin, Doris Sommer, and Judith Tick, for advice and comments on aspects of this chapter. Responses from colleagues present at seminar discussions of this chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto, were also invaluable. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for fellowships that gave me release time from teaching to write this chapter. 1 Philip Bohlman’s ‘Becoming ethnomusicologists’ column in the SEM Newsletter discussed the connection of ethics with cosmopolitanism (Bohlman 2006, 4–5).

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the dilemmas that arise as research in cosmopolitan settings proliferates. In the first section, I briefly situate ethics in ethnomusicology within a broader framework of philosophical thought and commentary. Next, I trace the history of discourses about ethics within ethnomusicology, addressing issues within the study and pedagogy of world music that either have been or could be the subject of ethical concern. In the third section, I address the growing move in ethnomusicology and sister fields of scholarship into domains of activism and advocacy. In the conclusion, I explore ways in which each individual can articulate ethical codes congruent with his or her research and personal commitments. At the same time, however, I suggest that individual ethics must be anchored by a community of scholars working together to direct attention to positive moral outcomes in ethnographic practices, publications, pedagogy, and activism. At points throughout the chapter I adopt a more reflexive tone, chronicling ways in which my own ethical concerns have both been shaped and transformed over time and within the landscape of different projects.

Ethical frameworks and musical scholarship What are ethics and how do they relate to ethnomusicology’s study of music traditions around the world? Ethics, incorporated within the field of moral philosophy, are generally defined as the moral principles governing or influencing conduct (‘Ethics’ 2007). Within the field of philosophy, ethical inquiry extends across three domains moving from the most general and broad examination of the origin and meaning of ethical principles (metaethics), to the more practical moral standards that regulate conduct (normative ethics), to ethics of specific issues (applied ethics).2 Ethnomusicological discussions of ethics have tended to focus on normative ethics with occasional consideration of the morality attached to specific issues. However, there appear to exist shared assumptions about the metaethics of studying world music that implicitly guide ethical philosophy in ethnomusicology. These include, first, that ethics are inflected by a Western notion of human responsibilities of scholars and second, that ethical issues emerge from values of Western culture (Slobin 1992, 330). Ethical thinking in ethnomusicology is surely shaped by the concept of cultural relativism, which has been a powerful force in the ethnomusicological worldview since at least the mid-twentieth century. I can recall from my own graduate studies in the 1970s the strong relativist credo articulated by

2 See Fieser n.d.; see also Fesmire 2003, 4, who adds a fourth category, descriptive ethics, which subsumes “neutral descriptions of moral thinking and behavior.”

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my adviser, William P. Malm, who frequently advised his students that “music is not an international language. It consists of a whole series of equally logical but different systems” (Malm 2007). Twentieth-century philosophical relativism, which moved, along with so much of culture theory, through anthropology to other fields (Geertz 2000, 42–67), remains in the twentyfirst century a powerful backdrop to cross-cultural musical studies and its ethical values. Moral philosophy in fact incorporates a range of positions on cultural relativism: The term “moral relativism” is understood in a variety of ways. Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes “moral relativism” is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act toward those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them. (Gowans n.d.)

There are those who have argued that relativism, especially when combined with the practice of participant-observation, has served to distance the ethnographer from ethical issues in the field, impeding one’s “ability to write against injustice” (Bourgois 2006, x). Some philosophers today are working to reconcile tenets of relativism with issues of ethics and equality worldwide, acknowledging that desires to respect cultural particularity in ethical and political choices can come into conflict with universalist views (Nussbaum 1995, 5–6). Anthony Appiah argues against a type of relativism that ends discussions by simply articulating different cultural positions and thus discourages conversation in a shared world; he suggests that a cosmopolitan approach must ask what system of international rules will respect the more legitimate human interests at stake (Appiah 2006, 126–7). Appiah goes on to propose that cosmopolitan ethics must incorporate “universality plus difference” (ibid., 151). A summary of the full range of philosophical approaches to ethics is obviously beyond the purview of this chapter, but there are approaches, such as that of Appiah cited above, that grapple with issues very close to ethnomusicological concerns. Appiah’s thinking also resonates with Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s “ethical postulate”; Dewey suggested “that there is a reciprocal relation between the realization of each individual’s interests and the realization of the interests of all . . . Individual and communal self-realization are thus mutually interdependent” (Welchman 1995, 82). I will return to some of John Dewey’s ideas in the conclusion. Given the deep ethnomusicological engagement with cultural relativism and the centrality of ethical concerns to

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the field, it is useful to explore the history of discourses about ethics in ethnomusicology. This is the subject of the next section of this chapter.

Discourses about ethics in ethnomusicology and sister disciplines: a brief overview Despite the long history of cross-cultural music studies, the subject of ethics entered into the public discussions among music scholars only in the last three decades of the twentieth century. No doubt sparked in part by the lively discourse in anthropological associations,3 public debate about ethical issues in ethnomusicology apparently dates to a panel at the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual meeting in 1972, followed by the establishment of the Society’s Committee on Ethics one year later (Slobin 1992, 329–31). Surely the challenges facing ethnomusicologists in the field and the many questions surrounding ethnographers’ roles in these settings sparked much of the early interest in ethical questions. Processes of participant-observation, at their core an intensely personal pursuit of “people studying people,”4 provided clear and immediate ethical challenges. But these ethical concerns quickly deepened as, with the emergence of the postcolonial literature and cultural studies, ethnomusicologists began to realize that virtually every aspect of their engagement with the world of music, past and present, required close scrutiny. While ethnomusicologists have always faced ethical challenges, an acknowledgment of these concerns in print surfaced explicitly only in ethnomusicological publications of the 1980s. One early discussion is found in the first edition of Bruno Nettl’s The Study of Ethnomusicology, which included ethics as one of its twenty-nine issues and concepts (Nettl 1983, 290–300). With the exception of Mark Slobin’s overview article on ethical practices (Slobin 1992), there is a paucity of anything extending beyond brief discussions of ethics in the literature.5 A deep concern with ethical and moral issues, however, is increasingly evident as an unarticulated background issue within many ethnomusicological publications. For instance, although the volume of essays on ethnomusicological fieldwork first published in 1997, Shadows in the Field, did not contain an essay dedicated solely to the subject of ethics, there are substantial discussions 3 For details of the long history of ethical issues and edicts in anthropology, see Berreman 2003. 4 This is a paraphrase of the title of one of the early sources on human relations – and ethical and unethical behavior in the field – by Georges 1980. 5 In 1984, David P. McAllester published a short article detailing ethical issues he encountered when making a film of a Navajo Blessingway ceremony, one of the first such discussions in the literature. I thank Benjamin Brinner for bringing this article to my attention.

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of ethical issues in five of its chapters. That volume was also pointedly dedicated to those who have “challenged us to reconsider the fundamental nature of human relationships and understanding in research, fieldwork, scholarship, and life.”6 It seems clear that ethics have long been among the “shadows” that confront every ethnomusicologist in the course of the ethnographic research process and that these shadows extend well beyond the field into many other domains. For most ethnomusicologists, ethical issues have been acknowledged to come to the fore within specific situations that arise in the course of the scholarly research process. The Society for Ethnomusicology’s formal ethical statement dates from 1998 and is published on the Society’s website (Society for Ethnomusicology n.d.). This statement sets forth broad expectations for an ethical code while acknowledging that individual values and decisions about courses of action will in many instances differ. This carefully calibrated and brief text begins with several general propositions, acknowledges the importance of ethical dialogue and debate, and invites comment and suggestions. The statement reaffirms principles of cultural relativism and acknowledgment of difference, presenting both as vital to ethical behavior among ethnomusicologists and between ethnomusicologists and the peoples with whom they work. The statement then articulates normative principles informing activity in three different domains of ethnomusicological work: field research, publication, and education. The section on the ethics of field research is, not surprisingly given the centrality of ethnographic method to ethnomusicology, the most detailed, addressing individual responsibility for ethical conduct and sensitivity while in the field to matters ranging from informed consent to personal privacy to economic concerns. In general, the SEM statement outlines important areas of ethical concern and serves as a checklist for potential abuses. It does not, however, offer guidance into what may be termed “best practices” for handling a particular ethical dilemma at a given moment. Indeed, the document gently suggests that specific ethical choices must be left to the individual scholar, no doubt for the very good philosophical and pragmatic reasons briefly sketched above. Other music societies, notably the American Musicological Society in the 1990s, also adopted statements about ethics that are posted on their websites. The AMS “Guidelines for Ethical Conduct,” authorized in 1993 and adopted in 1997, is, in contrast to that of the Society for Ethnomusicology, quite 6 Barz and Cooley 1997; see essays by Babiracki, Beaudry, Noll, Shelemay, and Titon. The second edition of this volume contains passing discussion of ethics in the introduction and reprinted and revised chapters, as well as more commentary on ethics in new essays by Berger, Cohen, Kippen, Seeger, and Stock and Chou.

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detailed (American Musicological Society n.d.). The Society for American Music authorized its own detailed “Guidelines for Ethical Conduct” based on the AMS statement in 1998 and prepared in 1999.7 Professional work in ethnomusicology necessarily raises issues not explicitly addressed in the “Statement on Ethical Considerations” (Society for Ethnomusicology 2007). Scholars are frequently challenged by the ethics associated with the study of musical performance, ranging from the issues surrounding the acquisition of performance skills in the field, to representation of performance in publications, to transmission of performance skills in pedagogy, and to presentation of research associates in performance contexts.8 Although a recently published volume of essays addressing the role of performance in ethnomusicological publication and pedagogy does not have an entry for ethics in its index, discussion of the “contested space” of musical performance and the many challenging issues raised throughout the volume clearly engage with a full range of ethical challenges (Solis 2004, 2). Long-standing issues surrounding ethics of documentation, preservation, and repatriation merit close consideration and should probably receive explicit mention in ethical codes. Although archives have been part of the ethnomusicological heritage for more than a century, concerns have emerged that the materials they house can both canonize certain practices as “authentic,” and, under given circumstances, provide “potential tools for political control and the exercise of power” (Klein 2007, 117). The very process of gathering and archiving data can itself raise important ethical issues. For example, questionnaires administered and archived by the Nordic Museum of Sweden since 1905 about various cultural topics were recently shown to have been manipulated by archivists in many aspects of the collection process (ibid., 123). Troublesome practices included eliciting responses by linking pay to length of answers; alternately encouraging or rejecting certain responses; and then excerpting passages from questionnaires with “some conspicuous deletions and word changes . . . in spite of the editor’s assurances that the editorial changes have been mainly linguistic” (ibid., 130). Clearly, the processes of archival preservation prominent in ethnomusicological practice deserve ongoing, critical appraisals in order that the issues ranging from collecting practices, to consent (Fjell 2007, 96–113), to access,

7 See Society for American Music (n.d.). The Society for Music Theory does not have ethical guidelines posted, but does have a statement in their 2007 Bylaws that prohibits any sort of organized political activity (Society for Music Theory n.d.). The SMT website also contains a section on ‘Other Policies and Guidelines’ that contains documents regarding accessibility, sustainability, language, and mentoring. 8 See Conquerwood 1985 for an early discussion of the ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance.

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become subjects of an ongoing critical discourse. I return to some of these issues in the conclusion. In the realm of interaction between professional and personal domains, there is a growing literature in ethnomusicology about personal relationships in the field (see, e.g., Babiracki 2008, 167–82, and Shelemay 1991a), but little in the way of focused discussions about the ethics of these relationships. During my own graduate student years at the University of Michigan, we used to comment about the number of us who had met our spouses while in the field and to quip that acquiring a partner was an informal requirement of the research process. While the subject of personal relationships in the field has remained largely within the oral tradition of pedagogy and advising, the range of relationships established and their differing impacts on the research process, as well as on individuals involved, merit serious, public discussion. If existing guidelines do not set forth specific courses of action, one can surely extract from them an implicit list of ethical “taboos.” The most salient taboo seems to be the following: no scholar should neglect to consider carefully her or his behavior in all its aspects and its ethical implications, short and long term, at every stage of her or his professional life. Other discussions are not yet on the ethnomusicological map, and some are still highly contentious in other disciplines. These developments may, in the future, raise new questions – and provide new insights – of direct relevance to the study of world music, on the levels of metaethics, normative standards, and applied responses. For instance, recent research in evolutionary psychology has proposed a concept of “intuitive ethics,” arguing that a subset of ethical sensitivities – such as reciprocity, loyalty, and respect – are innate and intuitive to human beings. At the same time, these intuitive ethics are said to “undergird the moral systems that cultures develop, including their understandings of virtues and character” (Haidt and Joseph 2004, 56). The discussion of intuitive ethics may be of interest if it generates a deeper understanding of shared human ethical qualities while respecting cultural differences.

The ethics of world-music scholarship multiplied The existing code of scholarly ethics in ethnomusicology bears traces of its genesis as a guide for a lone scholar in a bounded cultural locale. It is clear that ethics must be continually rethought in the light of a bewildering array of challenges to ensuring moral behavior in increasingly complex research processes and in new settings. While the Society for Ethnomusicology has taken

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steps to open a more engaged discourse about ethics and to expand the range of subjects that might be discussed in this regard, there is still room for additional thought. Of the many ethical challenges that confront ethnomusicologists, here I briefly address a complex of issues that relate to ethical issues in plural. By “plural” I mean: 1) the manner in which ethics are multiplied in collaborative research projects, where several individuals or a group must work together, increasing the potential for both good and bad outcomes; 2) the ethical complexity of research pursued in institutional settings or within multiple research sites; and 3) the ways in which the research process can embed or link to other moral concerns not necessarily directly related to music, multiplying the ethical decisions a scholar must make. Much of the discussion to date about ethnomusicological ethics tacitly assumes that an individual fieldworker can make his or her own ethical decisions on the ground, in the field. This reality, if it ever existed, is fast receding as informal collaboration in the field is more fully acknowledged and as structured team research becomes more common. Front and center of any team effort are the constant, tricky challenges of deciding on and adhering to ethical standards as a group, whether that team involves collaboration among ethnomusicologists or between an ethnomusicologist and multiple consultants in the field, or both. That a recent book on collaborative ethnography devotes one entire chapter to “Ethics and Moral Responsibility” and a second to “Ethnographic Honesty” underscores this point (Lassiter 2005, 79–116). An entire collaborative research process can be held hostage by a single individual’s ethical lapse. The sheer magnitude of a team project makes it potentially suspect in the way in which an individual’s research often is not; trust is harder to establish when a large number of people is involved. In a team project I directed among Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York, during which a dozen music graduate students interacted at any one time with as many as twenty-five members of the Syrian Jewish community, the entire project was nearly derailed by a student not participating in our project whose surreptitious research on a nonmusical topic came to light in the middle of our carefully negotiated work with the community (Shelemay 1988). It took multiple, painful consultations to reassure the community, as well as the apologetic intervention of the student’s advisers to resolve what had become a very volatile situation. Although the community with whom we were engaged recognized that no one from our team had been party to the deception, the additional risks of admitting multiple researchers were now clearly evident. As researchers, our team learned that ethical challenges in the field could arise

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from unsuspected sources, reverberate more loudly amidst a team effort, and jeopardize even the most carefully designed project. Nowhere are ethical issues more daunting than in institutional research settings. Fieldwork in institutions inevitably requires a series of formal permissions, the use of consent forms, and, often, the signing of privacy agreements well beyond those required for individual or team fieldwork elsewhere, even given the growing presence of institutional research guidelines. When I was invited to spend a summer as an ethnomusicologist at what was then CBS Records in New York City during the mid-1980s, I had to sign confidentiality agreements due to my access to privileged corporate materials and presence at executive meetings. I honored confidentiality and, in the end, was able to write about that experience only indirectly. But this corporate-based ethnographic experience did serve to catalyze my interest in the impact of recording technology and its industry on the history of ethnomusicology (Shelemay 1991b). In the end, the bulk of my observations and increased knowledge about the record industry most directly informed my pedagogy, which is where I transmitted through the oral tradition, with discretion, much of what I had learned. My own brief experience with institutional/corporate fieldwork aside, the entry during the last fifteen to twenty years of so many music researchers into the world of popular-music research and studies of its global industry suggests that institutional research may demand its own subset of ethical guidelines in the future. Multisite research introduces yet more complexities to the ethical equation, multiplying ethical challenges within a single project taking place in different geographical, cultural, national, and/or technologically mediated settings.9 In short, ethical demands in the study of world music have increased exponentially, at many moments extending well beyond the boundaries of existing ethical guidelines.

The practice and ethics of an activist ethnomusicology The lengthy entry on “Ethnomusicology” in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians notes that the substantial critiques of the culture concept have led to a large literature addressing what may be described as the morality of the ethnographic method; this concern has also sparked interest in the ways in which the notion of culture has “often nurtured

9 Ethical concerns in virtual fields has generated a large literature of its own; see Lysloff and Gay 2003, Cheng 2012, and Miller 2012.

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radical activism by and for the sake of minority, peripheral or disadvantaged groups” (Stokes 2001, 387). Within recent decades, scholars have begun openly to criticize musical scholarship’s lack of engagement with music’s role in social crisis, as well as assumptions “that its preoccupation as a field with music immunized it from the crises affecting other disciplines within and without the academy” (Bohlman 1993, 414). If the literature of the last decade tends to address only indirectly the ethics of the ethnomusicological research process, publications have given considerable attention to articulating the responsibility of scholars of world music to issues beyond the conventional boundaries of the research process. One finds ample precedents for and parallels to ethnomusicological activism in fields ranging from anthropology to art. Unlike ethnomusicologists, anthropologists have moved aggressively not just to consolidate and publish histories of their discourses about ethics (Fluehr-Lobban 2003), but also to generate a new literature that privileges practical ethical engagement over theoretical discussions (Meskell and Pels 2005). In anthropology, the personal activism of scholars such as Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski anticipated by decades the inclusion of a section on “Responsibility to the Public” in the 1971 American Anthropological Association Code of Ethics, which affirms the professional obligation of researchers to “contribute their expertise to public policy debates” (Sanford 2006, 3). Within the world of visual artistic practice and exhibition, the 1990s saw the emergence of relational artistic practices known by a variety of names, including socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory, interventionist, research-based, and collaborative arts. A diverse group of artists and the scholars who studied them varied in their objectives and artistic media, but were “linked by a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas” (Bishop 2006, 179). While the discourse in art focuses in part on the nature of the artistic process and its ethical dimensions, individual artists and projects varied in their desire for specific outcomes, with some seeking mainly interchange and dialogue, not necessarily social change (ibid., 180). In the foundational work of Bourriaud on relational aesthetics and its philosophical precedents, however, art is seen to hold the possibility of defining new cultural and political goals (Bourriaud 2006, 161). Art and arts-related initiatives such as the Harvard University-based Cultural Agents seek direct social and political impact from creativity and scholarship “that measurably contribute to the education and development of communities worldwide” (‘Cultural Agents’ n.d.).

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Political activism has also found its place in public ethnomusicological discourse. In 2005, the Society for Ethnomusicology opened a new space on the SEM website for discussion of very specific matters, situational issues of collective concern, and potential action. These issue-oriented statements related to ethics and values are termed “Position Statements,” which address “issues that affect the field of ethnomusicology, our membership, and the people with whom we work.” The statements are accompanied by a brief history of such positions taken by the SEM in the past as well as guidelines for submitting position statements to the SEM Board of Directors. By 2012, the SEM website included six position papers, including the “Statement on Ethical Considerations,” but also discussions of Institutional Review Boards, music and torture, and music and fair use.10 While “The Position Statement on Fair Use” clearly addresses major issues germane both to the research process and to publications in the field, the “Position Statement on Torture” resonates with growing concerns across music disciplines and beyond about the uses to which music may be put in political contexts related to conflict and war.11 Other music societies have posted statements about issues of ethical concern, such as updates on the August 2006 detention of American Musicological Society member Nalini Ghuman on her return from a research visit to the United Kingdom and the subsequent denial of her reentry into the United States, found on the AMS website (Atkinson n.d.).12 The Society for American Music subsumes additional ethical issues under “Resolutions Introduced at the SAM Business Meeting, March 3, 2007.” These include a resolution, similar to that of the Society for Ethnomusicology, protesting the use of music as part of psychological torture. The second posting protests suspension of habeas corpus under the Military Commissions Act signed by President Bush in October 2006; it is presented as the subject of a petition circulated to SAM members, but not as an official statement of the Society for American Music as an organization (Society for American Music 2007). Surely most ethnomusicologists, along with many other music scholars, share convictions that music opens windows on domains extending beyond the performative (cf. Sommer 2006). Engagement with extra-musical events and issues has a long history in ethnomusicology, particularly among those in the ethnomusicological community who pursue careers outside the university. 10 The position paper on Fair Use was prepared by ‘The Music and Fair Use Forum of the Popular Music Section of the SEM’, dated March 2005. The ‘Position Statement on Torture’ was posted on February 2, 2007. ‘Position Statement on Ethnographic Research and Institutional Review Board’ is dated 16 January 2008. 11 Cusick 2006 brought these issues to a broad audience of music scholars (see also www.sibetrans.com/ trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm). An emerging literature on this subject is found in the general press as well; see, for example, Bayoumi 2005. 12 SEM added a similar statement to the SEM website on October 4, 2007.

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Usually termed “applied ethnomusicologists,” they utilize their knowledge of cross-cultural musical styles within a full range of governmental agencies and cultural institutions. The prominence of applied ethnomusicology from the 1970s onward can be seen from a historical perspective as a continuation of an engaged ethnomusicology similar to that advocated and practiced by Charles Seeger in the 1930s (Seeger 2006, 227–8). By the 1990s, there was a deep reappraisal underway among many colleagues in the academy about their responsibilities not just to ensure an ethical scholarship, but to acknowledge their responsibility for its impact outside the ivory tower (Shelemay 1999). One notable milestone in the move toward social activism was the appearance of a special issue of the journal Ethnomusicology on “Music and the Public Interest.” The articles in this volume hold in common “work whose immediate end is not research and the flow of knowledge inside intellectual communities, but, rather, practical action in the world outside of archives and universities . . . In the final analysis, of course, public ethnomusicology does result in knowledge as well as action” (Titon 1992, 315). As ethnomusicological activism has moved through and beyond the public sector, scholars simultaneously began to turn their attention to new research domains that put them into direct contact with pressing social and political issues. Recent work on Nicaraguan song, for example, focuses on “how cultural workers used music to attempt to confront and supersede the varying legacies that prolonged societal violence left in its wake.”13 The move from close readings of “the relationships between political aspirations and musical performance” (Blacking 1995, 198) was made in some cases to activity with immediate practical outcomes, such as Gage Averill’s turn to music journalism as an outgrowth of his scholarship on music and politics in Haiti (Averill 1997, xix–xxi). Simultaneously, the contexts in which ethnomusicologists worked and the subjects they could address began to expand, increasing the prospects of social engagement and the growth of an issue-oriented ethnomusicology. New research initiatives include inquiry into medical ethnomusicology, which links grounded ethnography and conventional interpretive scholarship to servicebased experimental work and activism in domains such as creative healing arts for both adults and children (Koen 2008; Barz and Cohen 2011). Studies of conflict and violence, such as those carried out by Samuel Araújo and members of the Group Musicultura in Brazil, have both expanded ethnomusicological research interests to domains of urban conflict as well as questioned

13 See Scruggs 2006. I thank T. M. Scruggs for providing an English translation of this article (Scruggs 2008).

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whether ethnomusicology is doing anything to help disentangle these situations of violence (Araújo et al. 2006).14 Thus, ethics in ethnomusicology and other music disciplines have for some time extended beyond the conference panel, the printed page, and the classroom into fields of social and political action. Some of the most promising ethnomusicological options for the future are undoubtedly the study of topics that raise, and, hopefully, help to resolve, social problems of ethical and moral concern. The domain of what may be termed “musical activism,” which is of clear and growing concern to the ethnomusicological community as evidenced in both individual publications and Society for Ethnomusicology initiatives, demands continuous reappraisal and public discussion, not just at the level of individual issues as they arise from time to time, but from broad, metaethical perspectives. Collective interventions by like-minded groups of colleagues on social issues beyond those related to musical life and its study raise many of the same quandaries shadowing the search for best applied ethical practices within the research process itself. Indeed, the “Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association” acknowledges this complexity by positioning activism beyond the boundaries of professional ethics altogether and leaving it to individual decision: “Anthropologists may choose to move beyond disseminating research results to a position of advocacy. This is an individual decision, but not an ethical responsibility” (American Anthropological Society 1998, in Fluehr-Lobban 2003).

Ethical options in a cosmopolitan discipline How does one bring a discussion of ethics to an ethical conclusion? Surely one cannot present a road map for ethics in the field or prescribe the course of its discussion. It is clear that ethnomusicologists are now part of a larger process of ethical reappraisal occupying scholars across the disciplines and that this process should and will be ongoing. One can hope that the broader community of music scholars will revisit the tenets of a shared, metaethical philosophy regularly and remain open to critical discussion of the normative ethics that guide professional behavior in its many aspects. The ultimate decisions, however, should remain the domain of the individual, who must weigh each ethical or moral challenge in the context of broader propositions and in relation to the particular cultural domain in which the issue has arisen. For pedagogical purposes, it is surely useful to present case studies along with their outcomes both in the oral tradition and in print so that students may be 14 See also O’Connell and El-Shawan Castelo-Branco 2010.

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fully aware of the challenges that await them in every aspect of an ethnomusicological career. I should like to end this chapter with some very personal musing. My own experience suggests that there is only occasionally a single best ethical option, and often there are several possibilities that would have desirable outcomes. One cannot always know which path will ensure the most ethical result at the moment of decision. In my own consideration of professional ethics, the concept and practice of reciprocity has moved front and center. I find quite powerful John Dewey’s notion that the relations between individuals are like the relations that hold between members of an ecosystem: “In an ecosystem, no act is without some effect upon the whole . . . Individual and communal self-realization are thus mutually interdependent” (Welchman 1995, 82). Dewey’s notion of “symmetric reciprocity,” the idea that there is a reciprocal relation between each individual’s interests and the realization of the interests of all (ibid.), seems especially apt, and its outcomes, on both professional and personal levels over the course of time, highly desirable. According to Dewey and other American Pragmatist philosophers, ethics must be subject to inquiry and there are no metaphysical guarantees that any of our beliefs will not need revision (Putnam 1995, 200 and 222). The challenges of reciprocity have come full circle in my own work with Ethiopian immigrants to North America, part of a far-flung Ethiopian diaspora that sprang up in the mid-1970s out of the perfect storm of the Ethiopian revolution and a string of natural disasters including drought and famine.15 As a dual effort to establish reciprocity and to document otherwise ephemeral individual musical contributions within what is now the second-largest African community living in the United States,16 I have organized a collection on the music and musicians of the Ethiopian diaspora at the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Culture.17 Along with each interview, of which the individual musician received a copy, I deposited each musician’s published CDs in the archive so that their music and performance skills are represented in a manner that the musicians themselves controlled. We co-signed a letter of agreement in 15 In a few cases, I have been able to work in the United States with the same individuals I had contact with in Ethiopia. For instance, Tesfaye Lemma, who was the director of Orchestra Ethiopia when I did participant-observation with that ensemble during 1974–5, remained until his death in 2013 a close research associate and friend in the United States (see Shelemay 1983, 571–92 and Shelemay 2011). For additional background on the Ethiopian diaspora, see Shelemay and Kaplan 2011. 16 According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Ethiopians are surpassed only by the number of Nigerian immigrants (Census Bureau, United States Census 2000) (www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html). 17 I am grateful to the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington for a residency as the Chair for Modern Culture that made it possible for me to spend the summers of 2007 and 2008 in Washington, DC, initiating this project.

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which each musician gave permission for the deposit of the oral history and detailed how he or she wished to be cited in future scholarship that may be based in part on these materials. In some cases, individuals provided additional documentary materials for deposit beyond their own copyrighted musical recordings, ranging from videotapes, to scrapbooks, to newspaper clippings, to notated chant manuscripts. In these cases, I tried to reciprocate by providing, as appropriate and feasible, remastered copies in digital formats so that the musicians could more easily access and, if desired, distribute these materials on their own. It is my hope, shared by those who participated in this project, that the collection will provide in perpetuity a history of a moment in time when an unusually large number of talented Ethiopian musicians gained asylum in the United States and became part of the larger fabric of American life. In retrospect, I can identify three main areas of this project in which reciprocity emerged both as an opportunity and as a challenge. The first involved ethics surrounding processes of documentation and preservation. Archives preserve the materials that they house, but they can also canonize certain practices, and, under certain circumstances, raise a degree of risk. I tried to avoid obvious pitfalls by including musicians from the widest array of musical genres, and actively sought interviewees from across the full spectrum of Ethiopian/African Horn ethnic/national backgrounds, generations, and genders. While I hope that its inclusiveness will defeat efforts at canonization, it is possible that some materials in the collection (such as details of individual human rights activity that a number of interviewees insisted be included) might prove embarrassing or even dangerous if circulated in the politically charged Ethiopian diaspora or homeland. Throughout the project, I also had concerns that my initial contacts and invitations to participate in the project, circulated both personally and through various community internet networks, might have unwittingly caused distress (and self-exclusion) among musicians who did not have legal residency status. A second issue revolves around the complex challenges of reciprocity on the individual level. While some would separate compensation – something material given to another – from reciprocity, which is seen as sharing of things that are comparable (Pekkala 2007, 177–8), I have found that distinction quite difficult to maintain in this project. Most of the musicians with whom I worked struggled economically; they worked as taxi drivers, hotel clerks, and healthcare workers, performing at night in area restaurants or traveling on weekends to appear in newly founded Ethiopian communities all over the United States and Canada. These individuals gave generously of their limited time in conversations with me about their music and its role in their lives; they invited me to their homes and to their performances; and they often gave me copies of CDs they published, refusing reimbursement.

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Offering material compensation to individuals is an option little discussed in the ethnomusicological literature except in passing and it is not mentioned in SEM ethical guidelines. Giving gifts has long been an important act in Ethiopian society, at once closely linked to principles of both prestige and obligation; gifting has continued valence in Ethiopian diaspora social life. Sitting for an interview was surely considered to be, in part, a gift by the individual to this researcher. It also took time away from work or family for the individual and sometimes resulted in direct expenses for transport or even a babysitter. My direct offers of reimbursement for expenses incurred were more often than not refused as a matter of pride. After a great deal of thought, I decided to give individuals participating in the project gift certificates for local Ethiopian restaurants as a practical yet symbolic gesture of thanks. The gifting was done by mail after the interview to forestall any embarrassment as well as perceptions of a reward for certain types of intellectual material. Thus gift certificates in this instance provided a graceful way to satisfy cultural and economic considerations. A third concern was how to extend reciprocity more broadly and to be of help to the musical community at large. I was able to use my knowledge and contacts to recommend musicians for performance opportunities that were remunerated, both at universities and through local presenting networks. Helping to identify grants available to individuals through state arts councils was another option, as was nominating accomplished individual musicians for honors, ranging from citations presented by local municipalities in which the musicians dwelled to recommendations for state or national honorary fellowships. Many musicians aspire to more education; in this context, I was able to help individuals prepare their CVs and to aid them in locating appropriate institutions as they worked to establish new professional lives. But these reciprocal efforts were admittedly uneven in their outcomes since some musicians were better positioned by virtue of their musical repertories, educational backgrounds, and other qualities for an ethnomusicologist to be able to help them in substantive ways. For instance, most available “folk arts” fellowships privilege traditional musical repertories and their official transmitters in diaspora, and make no provisions for the many talented musicians who cross boundaries and seek to innovate. There are also finite limits to an individual scholar’s own time and resources, even when they exceed those of the individuals with which one is working. What expectations are raised by reciprocity? What should expectations be for sharing royalties or even grants obtained to carry out the research? These questions are important ones that defy simple answers, although financial reciprocity ideally needs to be balanced with broader efforts that will benefit both individuals and the communities of which they are a part.

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My activities described here are a recent iteration of my search for opportunities for reciprocity with people with whom I work; all are contingent and must be subject to constant reevaluation. Each researcher must choose his or her own path with sensitivity to shared ethical considerations in musical scholarship as well as to the people with whom they are engaged. While the current trend toward social activism among scholars is surely vital to an ethical scholarship, at some moments, a best practice can constitute what one does not do, a moment when scholarly intervention can generate a truly negative outcome.18 I have also found that the highly charged political environment of the Ethiopian and Eritrean diasporas, not to mention the factionalized world of homeland ethnic politics, raise constant questions of what an appropriate intervention might in fact constitute. There is no “end” to ethnography or to the human relationships established as part of that process. One must behave ethically if one is to live with the outcomes of one’s own work, not to mention the colleagues who are either helped by one’s success in the moral domain or held hostage by one’s ethical failures as they come along afterwards. What is sure, as Anthony Appiah has so cogently noted, is that: figuring out moral principles, as an idle glance at the history of moral philosophy will show you, is hard . . . One reason that life is full of hard decisions is that it’s not easy to identify single principles . . . that aim to tell you what to do . . . Another reason is that it is often unclear what the effects will be of what we do . . . On the other hand, many decisions aren’t so hard, because some of our firmest moral knowledge is about particular cases. (Appiah 2006, 162)

In an essay on “Thinking as moral act,” Clifford Geertz wrote that one of his more disturbing realizations after thinking long and hard about a particular problem was that his thoughts were much more effective in exposing the problems than in uncovering solutions to them (Geertz 2000, 24). I share this sentiment, believing it is one to which we should all aspire: to expose the problem and, in so doing, open pathways for new ethical solutions.

Bibliography American Anthropological Society (2003) ‘Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association’, approved June 1998, Appendix A, in C. FluehrLobban (ed.), Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, pp. 247–54 18 See Shelemay 1999 for a discussion of an ethical conundrum in which I had to refrain from political action on behalf of the community because my scholarly findings had the potential to damage their political aspirations. A recent discussion of related issues can be found in Reigersberg 2011.

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American Musicological Society (n.d.) ‘Guidelines for Ethical Conduct’, American Musicological Society, www.ams-net.org/ethics.html Appiah, K. A. (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton Araújo, S. (2006) and members of The Grupo Musicultura/Universidade Federal e Rio de Janeiro, ‘Conflict and violence as theoretical tools in present-day ethnomusicology: Notes on a dialogic ethnography of sound practices in Rio de Janeiro’, Ethnomusicology, 50, 2: 286–313 Atkinson, C. (n.d.) ‘From the President’, American Musicological Society, www.amsnet.org/from_the_president Averill, G. (1997) A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti, University of Chicago Press Babiracki, C. (2008) ‘What’s the difference? Reflections on gender and research in village India’, in G. F. Barz and T. J. Cooley (eds.), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 167–82 Barz, G. F., and J. M. Cohen (eds.) (2011) The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing through Music and the Arts, New York: Oxford University Press Barz, G. F., and T. J. Cooley (eds.) (1997, 2nd rev. edn 2008) Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 1st edn, New York: Oxford University Press Bayoumi, M. (2005) ‘Disco inferno’, The Nation, December 26, www.thenation.com/ doc/(2005)(1226)/bayoumi Berreman, G. D. (2003) ‘Ethics versus “realism” in anthropology: Redux’, in C. FluehrLobban (ed.), Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, 2nd edn, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 51–83 Bishop, C. (2006) ‘The social turn: collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum, 44, 6: 178–83 Blacking, J. (1995) ‘The music of politics’, in idem, Music, Culture, and Experience, ed. by R. Byron, University of Chicago Press, 198–222 Bohlman, P. V. (1993) ‘Musicology as a political act’, Journal of Musicology, 11, 4: 411–36 (2006) ‘On cosmopolitanism: Our journeys with others’, SEM Newsletter, 40, 2: 4–5 Bourgois, P. (2006) ‘Foreword: Anthropology in the global state of emergency’, in V. Sanford and A. Angel-Ajani (eds.), Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. ix–xii Bourriaud, N. (2006) ‘Relational aesthetics/1998’, in C. Bishop (ed.), Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 160–71 Census Bureau, United States Census (2000), www.census.gov/main/www/cen(2000). html Cheng, W. (2012) ‘Role-playing toward a virtual musical democracy in The Lord of the Rings Online’, Ethnomusicology, 56, 1: 31–62 Conquerwood, D. (1985) ‘Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance’, Literature in Performance, 5, 2: 1–13 ‘Cultural Agents: Building Society through Arts and Humanities’ (n.d.) Harvard University, http://culturalagents.org/ Cusick, S. (2006) ‘Music as torture, music as weapon’, Revista Transcultural de Música/ Transcultural Music Review, 10, www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm

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‘Ethics’ (2007) in C. Soanes and A. Stevenson (eds.) The Concise Oxford English Dictionary Online, 11th edn, New York: Oxford University Press Fesmire, S. (2003) John Dewey: Moral Imagination, Pragmatism in Ethics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Fieser, J. (n.d.) The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Ethics, Dictionary MSN Encarta, http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_(1861)(6092)83/ethics.html Fjell, T. I. (2007) ‘Research in the minefield of privacy and intimacy: The problems of consent’, in S. Apo et al. (eds.), Research Ethics in Studies of Cultural and Social Life: FF Communications, Edited for the Folklore Fellows, vol. 140, 292 Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia and Academia Scientiarum Fennica, pp. 96–113 Fluehr-Lobban, C. (ed.) (2003) Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, 2nd edn, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton University Press Georges, R. A. (1980) People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork, Berkeley: University of California Press Gowans, C. (n.d.) ‘Moral Relativism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/ Haidt, J., and C. Joseph (2004) ‘Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues’, Daedalus (Fall): 55–66 Klein, B. (2007) ‘Folklore archives, heritage politics and ethical dilemmas’, in S. Apo et al. (eds.), Research Ethics in Studies of Culture and Social Life: FF Communications, Edited for the Folklore Fellows, vol. 140, 292, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia and Academia Scientiarum Fennica, pp. 114–36 Koen, B. (ed.) (2008) The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology, New York: Oxford University Press Lassiter, L. E. (2005) The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, University of Chicago Press Lysloff, R. T. A., and L. C. Gay (eds.) (2003) Music and Technoculture, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Malm, W. P. (2007) Personal communication, December 31 McAllester, D. (1984) ‘A problem in ethics’, in J. Kassler and J. Stubington (eds.), Problems and Solutions: Occasional Essays in Musicology Presented to Alice M. Moyle, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, pp. 279–89 Meskell, L., and P. Pels (2005) ‘Introduction: Embedding ethics’, in L. Meskel and P. Pels (eds.), Embedding Ethics, Oxford: Berg, p. 126 Miller, K. (2012) Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance, New York: Oxford University Press Nettl, B. (1983) The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts, 1st edn, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Nussbaum, M. C. (1995) ‘Introduction’, in M. C. Nussbaum and J. Glover (eds.), Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–34 O’Connell, J. M., and S. El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (eds.) (2010) Music and Conflict, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Pekkala, A. (2007) ‘Persuasion or coercion? Striving for understanding in conducting open interviews’, in A. Satu et al. (eds.), Research Ethics in Studies of Culture and Social

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Life: FF Communications, Edited for the Folklore Fellows, vol. 140, 292, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia and Academia Scientiarum Fennica, pp. 167–91 Popular Music Section, Society for Ethnomusicology (2005) ‘The Music and Fair Use Forum of the Popular Music Section of the SEM’, March Putnam, H. (1995) ‘Pragmatism and moral objectivity’, in M. C. Nussbaum and J. Glover (eds.), Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 199–224 Reigersberg, M. E. S. (2011) ‘Research ethics, positive and negative impact, and working in an indigenous Australian context’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 20, 2: 255–62 Sanford, V. (2006) ‘Introduction’, in V. Sanford and A. Angel-Ajani (eds.), Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp, 1–15 Scruggs, T. M. (2006) ‘Música y el legado de la violencia a finales del siglo XX en Centro América’, Trans-Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review, 10, www. sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/indice10.htm (2008) Personal communication, January 5 Seeger, A. (2006) ‘Lost lineages and neglected peers: Ethnomusicologists outside academia’, Ethnomusicology, 50, 2: 214–35 Shelemay, K. K. (1983) ‘A new system of musical notation in Ethiopia’, in S. Segert and A. T. E. Bodrogligeti (eds.), Ethiopian Studies Dedicated to Wolf Leslau, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, pp. 571–92 (1988) ‘Together in the field: Team research among Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York’, Ethnomusicology 32, 3: 369–84 (1991a) A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (1991b) ‘Recording technology, the record industry, and ethnomusicological scholarship’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 277–92 (1999) ‘The impact and ethics of musical scholarship’, in N. Cook and M. Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, pp. 531–44 (2006) ‘Ethiopian musical invention in diaspora: A tale of three musicians’, Diaspora, 15, 2/3: 303–20 Shelemay, K. K., and S. Kaplan (2006) ‘Introduction’, in K. K. Shelemay and S. Kaplan (eds.), Diaspora, Special Issue: Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora: Perspectives Across the Disciplines, 15, 2/3: 191–214 Slobin, M. (1992) ‘Ethical issues’, in H. Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 329–36 Society for American Music (n.d.) ‘Guidelines for ethical conduct’, The Society for American Music, http://american-music.org/organization/ethics.php (2007) ‘Resolutions introduced at the SAM Business Meeting, 3 March 2007’, Society for American Music, http://american-music.org/organization/tick_resolution.php Society for Ethnomusicology (n.d.) ‘Statement on Ethical Considerations’, Society for Ethnomusicology, www.ethnomusicology.org/?EthicsStatement (2007) ‘Position Statement on Torture’, February 2 Society for Music Theory (n.d.) [Bylaws on political activity], http://societymusictheory. org/administration/legal Solis, T. (ed.) (2004) Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles, Berkeley: University of California Press

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Sommer, D. (ed.) (2006) Cultural Agency in the Americas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Stokes, M. (2001) ‘Ethnomusicology’ (part 4), in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan, pp. 386–95 Titon, J. T. (ed.) (1992) ‘Introduction: Music, the public interest, and the practice of ethnomusicology’, Ethnomusicology, 36, 3: 315–22 Turino, T. (2000) Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, University of Chicago Press Welchman, J. (1995) Dewey’s Ethical Thought, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

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Toward a new world? The vicissitudes of American popular music RICHARD MIDDLETON

Christopher Columbus discovered a New World – or so it was (and has been) widely thought, not least in the United States, where the implications have been vigorously pursued. When Columbus’s first landing was celebrated 500 years later, in 1992, it was against the background of a particular understanding of a “New World Order,” which, developing after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, seemed increasingly to take on the character of an attempt to Americanize the entire planet. The New World, then, was at one and the same time geographically specific (contrasted – but also, as it would turn out, in intricate relationship with – the Old World of Europe, Asia, and Africa) and universal: Shakespeare, absorbing the meaning of the trans-Atlantic discoveries, made his “brave new world” both a concrete place and a utopian image of the “great globe itself.” But “all the world’s a stage” as well, an arena for the dramas of human transaction. Earth becomes “world” only when it can be subjectively seized as such – imagined, claimed, colonized mentally as well as physically. “World music,” as concept, is inconceivable outside this nexus whereby a subjective world and the world of political and cultural commerce set themselves in a dialogue marked by an elaborate theater of inclusion and exclusion, in which each side produces and is produced by the other in an alteritous dance of projection and introjection, appropriation and disavowal. The American case is again exemplary. “Filling” out the world, colonialism finds in America first an object, then an agent, a force of expansion and at the same time of exclusions and appropriations. This relation – faithfully tracked by the history of American music – has the structure of a Möbius strip, in which the status of colony and that of imperium, of inside and outside, master and slave, subject and object, are twisted together in a continuous pattern with no end or first cause, a pattern that problematizes all clear distinctions, and that, following Giorgio Agamben’s meditations, in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, on the contemporary meanings of sovereignty, totality, and exclusion, we might think of in terms of a structure of “exception” (Agamben 2001). If, however, American music asks, “What is a world?,” this question is posed, typically, in a more specific way. For by and large, to the outside world (as well as [807]

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many Americans), this music, the American music they know, is a popular music. The question becomes, then, “What is a people’s world?” – a question raised insistently when the American Revolution pioneered the democratic turn that set off the modern era, and pursued in American politics, society, and culture, albeit in variable and often ambivalent ways, ever since. “We the people,” constituted as subject of the Constitution of 1787, inherited the legacy of Enlightenment universalism (the Declaration of Independence had held it to be “self-evident” that certain truths applied to “all men”) but at the same time presents itself as a national polity (“the people of the United States”). From the start, therefore, species and nation were at odds. The national family – torn between ethnos and dēmos – was further fractured by distinctions between men and women, masters and slaves, civilized and barbaric. The founding “we” was limited, in fact, to (white) men of property; and, as the internal contradiction this reveals came under further pressure in subsequent years – from immigration and racial conflict, for example – we begin to see not only where the vicissitudes of American popular music are to be located but also how the American case enacts, in microcosm, the formations of inclusion and exclusion that have gone to produce the modern sense of a world society as such. The concept “people” is always already split, as Agemben (among others) has pointed out: One term [people] . . . names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics . . . In the American Constitution one thus reads, without any distinction, “We the people of the United States.” Yet when Lincoln invokes a “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” in the Gettysburg Address, the repetition implicitly opposes the first “people” to another “people” . . . It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies. (Agamben 1998, 176–7)1

This (impossible) figure points again to what I have called the structure of exception. This structure maps, too, to the historical formation of “world music,” as constructed by the discipline of ethnomusicology and by the music’s wider audience. Forever oscillating between the spirits of its two Enlightenment forebears – Kantian universalism on the one hand, Herderian pluralism on the other – ethnomusicology finds itself enmeshed in the aporias of the inclusion/ exclusion couple. Again the American case is exemplary, at both popular and scholarly levels, for the hegemony of American popular music in the global arena 1 For a similar argument, applied specifically to the musical context, see Middleton 2006, ch. 1.

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and the hegemony of its mainstream styles at home constantly try, but fail, to mask the music’s own miscegenating structures of difference (or rather, différance): the work of exception, defined as that “form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion,” or as “what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included” (Agamben 1998, 18; Badiou 2005, 25). Since the history cannot be covered in detail in the space available here, my discussion will focus on moments when the work of exception took particularly dramatic form.

Tales of Yankee Doodle power: the moment of revolution The fledgling republic quickly moved to represent itself in the form of national songs: “Hail Columbia” (1798), to the tune of “The President’s March” (1789?); “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), set to the tune of the eighteenthcentury English glee, “To Anacreon in Heaven”; “America” (1832), appropriating the tune of the British national anthem, “God Save the King.” All three songs take over, directly or through imitation, musical styles associated with the European elites and use them to create expressions of national purpose and unity in the service of the bourgeois state. (Both “To Anacreon” and “God Save the King” had been employed in America before for other patrioticnational songs.) At just the moment when the problematic of representation had come to the fore – the Constitution is of course concerned precisely with the mechanisms of representation at the political level, while, as Jacques Attali has shown, the contemporaneous techniques of the bourgeois musical forms were designed to enable new ways of representing social space – these songs offer themselves as vehicles of that “unisonality” that Benedict Anderson has described as a key instrument of national “imagined community” (Attali 1985, 46–86; see also Middleton 2006, ch. 1; Anderson 1991, 145). That they should accompany all subsequent moments of intense American patriotic feeling, such as 9/11 memorials, comes as no surprise. Yet, as Anderson reminds us, for the nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, “the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common and also that all have forgotten things” (Anderson 1991, 6, 199). In this drama, the memories going to cement the national family together require that some events, some characters, some ways of imagining, that would derail its genealogy are “forgotten” – expunged, misrepresented, or else reconstructed. What is it that our three national songs forget?

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Perhaps it can be found in a contemporaneous tune, put to a huge number of song texts, ubiquitous in the Revolutionary and Federalist eras, and widely considered by Americans, at the time and since, to embody the down-to-earth, common-man demotic spirit that marked out their difference: “Yankee Doodle.” As an 1826 lyric commented: Yankee Doodle is the tune Americans delight in ’Twill do to whistle, sing or play, And just the thing for fighting.

Though varied in detail, all early versions of “Yankee Doodle” share both the jaunty, dance-like quality of the tune and a rough humor that is characteristic of the lyrics.2 Not only did the tune quickly embed itself in the national “unison,” it subsequently came to occupy a key place in the museum of American cultural heritage, from where it could constantly generate new references. According to legend, “Yankee Doodle” originated with the British military, who used it to ridicule the quaint local simpletons; “Yankee” was certainly at first a term of derision, and a “doodle” in eighteenth-century England was a simpleton. The locals then appropriated the song in a spirit of ironic inversion. There is no doubt that the British sang and played it during the revolutionary war, and that the Americans took it up in a big way. Many of the earliest publications are British. From the 1770s on, references and variants multiply. However, the first published reference is in an American ballad opera, The Disappointment (1767), and there is good reason to think not only that elements of both tune and words go back further still, perhaps to 1740s New England, but also that they circulated and evolved after the mode of folk song. At the same time, though claims that the tune has a European origin have never been convincingly substantiated, it is of a recognizable Anglo-Celtic type.3 Still, whatever the exact details of the cultural exchange, it is clear that, as Oscar Sonneck puts it, the song “turns the world upside down” (Sonneck 1909, 109). By deploying vulgarity against British condescension, the Americans turned the colonial encounter to their advantage, playing on British credulity about Yankee simplicity by playing up to it. Fostering that ambivalence, that multisided mimicry, which Homi Bhabha has identified in colonial discourse (Bhabha 1994, 84–92), “Yankee Doodle” as it speaks back so innocently to imperial power might even be considered the first postcolonial song. And, speaking from below as it does – locating the “people” within the “People” – it

2 Sonneck 1909 gives many of the early versions, and also the 1826 lyric (p. 79). 3 On the early history of “Yankee Doodle,” see Sonneck 1909; Lemay 1976.

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might claim a status too as the first popular song of a recognizable modern type, not least because, as it enters speedily into the circuits of both commercial exploitation and of folky nostalgia, its multivalent history comes to encapsulate the relations characteristic of this new cultural economy. From both points of view, “Yankee Doodle” has a mythic quality: its contested origins and heterogeneous texts result in a malleability that can serve to produce, paradoxically, an inclusiveness that is a mark of national belonging. Only, however, by performing its own act of forgetting. In The Disappointment, “Yankee Doodle” is sung by a blackface character, Raccoon (sic). The British theater composer Charles Dibdin has a version in his Musical Tour (1788), in which the chorus runs as follows: Yankee doodle doodle doo black Negro he get sumbo And when you come to our town we’ll make you drink with bumbo.

Dibdin’s shows were noted for blackface characters – their songs are often not dissimilar in style from that of “Yankee Doodle” – and this device became widespread in both the British and American theaters from around 1770. Similarly, James Aird’s A Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs (Glasgow, 1782), which contains one of the earliest printed versions of the “Yankee Doodle” tune, also includes an “African Jig” – possibly a transcription (however Europeanized) of the jigs sometimes referred to in white descriptions of Southern slave plantations at this time. Its short units, hypnotically repeated, would resurface many times in subsequent waves of “black music” (Epstein 1977, 120–4). Not many years later – certainly by about 1815, according to W. T. Lhamon (1998) – working-class men in rougher areas of New York, both black and white, were putting together a rebellious plebeian street culture of dance and song that in due course would feed, in more codified, visible form, into the caricature routines of the minstrel show. Blackface (mis)represents by masking. “Irish song” was far more visible, if only because of the popularity – in America as much as in Britain – of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (published from 1808 onwards). But though Moore’s adaptations of the old tunes fitted them for the respectable drawing room, qualifying them to join the larger Eurocentric body of domestic song forming the mainstream popular repertory in the period, how well they spoke to the thousands of proletarian Irish immigrants, the original “white Negroes” in parlance common at the time, is a matter for doubt. Folk song of this type (mis)represents by mystifying. The New England psalmody associated with William Billings and others offered a religious equivalent to “Yankee Doodle’s” demotic vigor; but

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as increasing urbanization brought demands for more genteel music, it fell victim to reformers – or rather, its style was pushed southwards, to form the ‘spiritual folk song’ of the Sacred Harp tradition. Here it came into productive contact with new types of song – spirituals they would later be called – thrown up in the ferment of the Second Awakening of the early 1800s. Both white and black people were involved (the first independent African American churches were founded in the 1790s), and again we can recognize musical features that would come to identify black music. This music was virtually unknown outside the South – except for the reports of intrepid travelers, as fascinated by its exotic strangeness as were contemporary missionaries and other ethnographers describing the cultures of remote sub-Saharan Africa (Epstein 1977, passim). Here misrepresentation takes its deepest form, as fascination gives to exclusion the intensity marking forbidden desire. The moment of revolution represented in “Yankee Doodle” and the other national songs was real – and was recognized in the world at large: “Yankee Doodle” was played by the Paris guards after the fall of the Bastille, for instance (Lemay 1976, 464). But its “unison” depended on what could not be represented.

Interstice: battles, brothers, and masks Benedict Anderson points out (Anderson 1991, 199–203) that in the dramas of memory and forgetting that formed imagined community, a key role is played by “reassuring fratricide.” If old differences cannot be remembered as fraternal – that is, if exclusionary interpretations are not forgotten – family unity fractures. Belonging is sealed in blood. This is why, he adds, the American conflict of 1861–5 has to be styled a civil war – a war between brothers – rather than one between distinct nations or peoples. At stake here as well – for the war was fought in part over the issue of slavery – was the status of the black members of the household, dramatized by the “one drop” that would signify miscegenation; whose brothers (and sisters?) were these? (The term “miscegenation” was invented in 1864.) Published in 1862, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by liberal reformer Julia Ward Howe quickly became the quasi-official campaign anthem of the Unionist side.4 Annie J. Randall notes (2005, 5–24) that it featured in patriotic events after 9/11, as well as having a long prior history of adaptation to texts of protest (of the suffragettes, labor activists, civil rights campaigners, antiVietnam demonstrators, etc.). How could this song – known in other versions

4 It can be found in Jackson 1976, 22–5.

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as “John Brown’s Body” – serve both People and people in this way? The solution to this conundrum lies in the answer to another question: Where, in Ward’s text, is John Brown – he whose body lies a-mould’ring in the grave but whose soul goes marching on? Randall describes how the countless versions of “John Brown” circulating after 1861, some by African Americans (e.g., Sojourner Truth), celebrate the militant abolitionist, John Brown, leader of the abortive violent raid in 1859 on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, for which he was later executed. Topoi of slavery, race, and rebellion – expunged in Ward’s lyrics along with Brown himself – are widespread in these vernacular texts. The tune to which all versions were sung originated as a camp-meeting hymn, probably beginning its life in the South – “Say Brothers Will You Meet Us”; and even this, in its published forms, may be a cleaned up version of rougher forebears (possibly African American, according to some speculation, including that of W. E. B. Du Bois). Was “Say Brothers” originally a coded “freedom spiritual,” and did this meaning travel with it into the demotic versions of “John Brown”? Whatever the answers to these questions, the act of censorship performed in the official “Battle Hymn,” in the interest of family respectability – revoking terrorism, occluding the black cause, expunging the plebeian – is spectacular. The Confederacy had its own “national anthem”: “Dixie”; although at the war’s end it was quickly appropriated by Lincoln to serve as a national tune for the renewed Union (Jackson 1976, 61–4). The song was written in 1859 by Dan Emmett, noted minstrel-show performer and probably its foremost composer in this, minstrelsy’s early period of commercial success. It was intended as a “walkaround” – the closing number of the show, for the whole company – but once the war began, and despite the fact that Emmett was a Northerner, it was taken up as the South’s chosen anthem, no doubt because of the declaration in its chorus: “In Dixie Land I’ll took my stand, To live and die in Dixie.” A vernacular flavor survives much more than in the “Battle Hymn,” partly in the lyrics, which are liberally sprinkled with pseudo-black dialect, and partly in the pentatonic shapes of the chorus melody, akin to both Anglo-Celtic folk song and to contemporary African American repertories (which undoubtedly were thoroughly intermingled in the music culture of the South by this time). But this black quality is of course highly mediated; it is blackface. If the “Battle Hymn” averts its eyes from actual slaves, “Dixie” appropriates them, reactionary paternalism running parallel with liberal hand-wringing. By this date, the minstrel show, its beginnings identified in legend with the success of Thomas D. Rice’s 1828 song-and-dance hit, “Jump Jim Crow,” was undoubtedly the most popular musical (and theatrical) genre in America. Though this success was linked to the populist political turn associated with

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Jacksonian democracy, far more was involved in its grotesque caricatures of black culture than straightforward lower-class racism (Toll 1974; Lott 1993; Cockrell 1997; Lhamon 1998). Protected by the blackface mask, white performers, as well as asserting their difference from those below them (notably but not exclusively black people), could also satirize their “betters” – not to mention (via cross-dressing) women; at the same time, their material was dependent on, fascinated with, its object of derision:5 in this carnivalesque theater of “love and theft,” the interpenetration of desire and disgust produced exclusion and inclusion as each the price of the other. When African Americans began to enter minstrelsy (not, in any numbers, until after the Civil War), they too had to black up in order to appear “truly” (that is, falsely) black. In a complementary way, the first significant published collection of black spirituals, Slave Songs of the United States (1867), channeled its “mad gold rush of appropriative desire” (Radano 2003, 182) into the reifying forms of Western notation, just as the jubilee choirs of the first black colleges took these songs into the suitably sanitized environs and performance modes of the bourgeois concert hall. As the minstrel show too began to clean itself up to attract middleclass audiences – indeed, in the later nineteenth century spirituals often appeared on the bill – a negotiation that had opened in the 1850s when ballad composer Stephen Foster established a novel blackface genre of plantation nostalgia was sealed, and the roles that would constitute the price of black admission to the national family were made clear – either primitive grotesque or lovable simpleton. Along with actual civil strife, these cultural negotiations played their part in reconstructing the national-popular during the middle years of the nineteenth century. A multitude of social struggles – the “American 1848,” as it has been called – was accompanied by dramatic territorial expansion, notably as a result of the Mexico War of 1846–8. A colonizing push into the Southwest threw into relief the need to deal with America’s internal colony. As both blackface minstrelsy and the spirituals were disseminated abroad – minstrel troupes toured Europe as early as the 1840s and the Fisk Jubilee Singers did likewise in the 1870s, but both genres were spread much more widely, to South Africa, Australia, Asia, and elsewhere – they not only set out frameworks for the cultural work of black music in America, they also offered lessons globally – that is, lessons for the emergent category of world music – in modes of management of the Other.

5 For documentation of the likely black input (however mediated) to minstrel-show music, see Nathan 1962.

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After the ball, and after you’ve gone: ballads and blues at the moment of mass culture The 400th anniversary of the “Columbus moment” was celebrated (albeit a year late) at the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893. Some African American performers appeared, but their programs were limited to classical music and spirituals. Emergent “lowdown” genres – cakewalk, coon song, ragtime, which “got a running start” here, according to African American composer, Will Marion Cook – were included by exclusion, confined to the red light entertainment district of Chicago’s Midway Plaisance, outside the area of the Columbian Exposition itself. The first “world music” recordings were made, documenting the repertories of visiting musicians from many parts of the world. Only three years before, John Philip Sousa had published his National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands, a collection embracing virtually every part of the planet, from Afghanistan to Zanzibar (and including “Yankee Doodle”). Not much later (in 1901) the ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore began her mammoth series of recordings and transcriptions of Native American music. Around the same time, John Lomax and other collectors were embarking on the systematic documentation of American folk song, and, starting in 1903, Francis O’Neill was creating “traditional Irish music,” publishing the collections that would go to define this repertory as a national heritage, but sourcing it from the diaspora in Chicago. This moment of intense revival and reinvention of folk and traditional music, however, was also a moment of modernity. The Columbian Exposition celebrated, above all, the triumphs of industry and technology, and did so at a time when the power of monopoly capital and of the assembly-line methods that would become known as Fordism were transforming America’s social structures and its economic status in the world, just as a confident imperial push, marked most dramatically by the Spanish-American War of 1898, was transforming its political weight. Huge waves of internal migration, from country to city, from South to North (including many black people), were accompanied by equally huge influxes of new immigrants, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe (including many Jews). Turbulent debates around concepts of race and national belonging, matched by collisions of musical cultures, led to racial conflicts (the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed its greatest success in this period) and to a polarization between discourses of assimilation and pluralism: Israel Zangwill’s great metaphor of the “melting-pot” is often taken to point toward assimilation, understood as homogeneity, but Zangwill’s description – “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming” – seems rather to envisage a process of hybridization (Zangwill

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1909, 36).6 Yet the fires of modernity also entrench traditions, memories of past homes, protective barriers and exclusions (at an extreme, reserves – literally so in the case of Native Americans). Each ethnicity was quickly identified, or each identified itself, phonographically. The new recording technologies encapsulate a symbiosis whereby the potentials and anxieties of the new actually produce the old, whose loss, conceptualized as tradition, homeland, identity, is then lamented, inscribed, memorialized. The “reigning song success of the World’s Fair,” at least according to its composer, was Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball,” which had come out in 1892 (Freemont 1973, 1–5). Played there by Sousa’s band, and plugged in every other way Harris could think of, it embodied his dictum: “A new song must be sung, played, hummed, and drummed into the ears of the public, not in one city alone, but in every city, town, and village, before it ever becomes popular.” “After the Ball,” the first million seller in popular-music history, perhaps even the first global hit (as a result of its Chicago exposure, it “spread throughout the world . . . translated into every known language”; after this, in a certain sense, American popular music would be the music of the world), encapsulates the emergent Tin Pan Alley process, which, as the musical manifestation of Fordism, would see the figure of “the masses” (national and international) come to inhabit the body of the People (quotations from Harris 1926, 87, 40, 87). The Tin Pan Alley model, organized around large markets, economies of scale, relentless plugging, exploitation of the new mass media, and formula songs produced through rational division of labor, also quickly spread throughout the world. It produced the sense of a mainstream, which marginalized or even excluded the peripheries – “ethnic” musics, for example – only to find that these often had a way of seeping back in. “After the Ball” is a ballad, one of the two main generic foundations on which the Tin Pan Alley repertory was built, and it stands at the cusp of a development that, beginning in the nineteenth century, saw a shift in ballad form from story (as in the folk ballad) to the presentation of and expressive meditation on an emotional drama, typically involving a romantic couple, represented through an I-You mode of lyric construction. As part of this development, the verse section of the characteristic verse-and-chorus form tended to shrink in importance while the chorus took on the core expressive function. Already in “After the Ball” it is the swinging, waltz-time tune of the chorus that, musically and emotionally, forms the “hook.” By the 1920s, the verse had almost disappeared and the chorus, more expansive and varied in style, provided the arena for a new breed of soul-baring singers to cultivate celebrity stardom. This privatization of feeling speaks of a shrunken “family” – body politic at one and 6 Elsewhere Zangwill does not limit the process to “the races of Europe.”

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the same time attenuated within the soulless landscapes of urban mass society and reduced to the scale of individual desires, which, in a reciprocal movement, are then blown up on the giant screen of mediated voice and image. It is a structure of feeling that has spread throughout the modernizing world wherever the American popular ballad has traveled. The other main generic foundation of the early Tin Pan Alley repertory was the novelty song, epitomized by coon song, ragtime, and then jazz. The racist grotesqueries typical of 1890s coon song continued the lineage of blackface – but also, in a sense, enabled a subsequent licensed infection of the mainstream by African American rhythm, extending not only to ragtime song but even to the ballad: the invention of the “rhythm ballad” around 1910 by Irving Berlin (so he claimed) presaged a more thorough (if, still, closely policed) interpenetration of styles and modes which, by the 1920s, had resulted in the ethnic explosions, both enticing and alarming, of the Jazz Age. A dance of desire and disgust, operating at the levels of both individual and social imaginaries, is characteristic of this entire period, nowhere with more pregnant effects than in the case of blues. Emerging probably as an identifiable genre in the early years of the century, blues burst into mainstream visibility in 1912, with the publication of “Dallas Blues” by (the white) Hart Wand and “Memphis Blues” by (the black) W. C. Handy. The first recordings, starting in 1915, were by white singers, the earliest African American blues record dating from 1920. Black performers in the 1920s blues boom were confined to the enclave of separate labels – so-called Race Records – and although some of the women, such as Bessie Smith, crossed the racial divide, the more “down-home” male singers rarely did so. Understandings of blues were thus variable and broad – bluesy ballads such as “After You’ve Gone” (1918) by African American writers Henry Creamer and Turner Layton, but made famous by the white singers Marion Harris and Sophie Tucker, were common – but at the same time the territory was contested and racially fraught: white ventriloquism stimulated black ownership claims, hence the powerful trope of authenticity, grounded most commonly in the “gritty” essence of the twelve-bar form; but “‘real’ blues,” we can see, “is a construction always mediated by white desire – which thus also enfolds black people within this structure” (Middleton 2006, 43).7 It is a process that makes clear that the limits to the professional emergence of African American composers and performers – Cook, Handy, Scott Joplin, Bert Williams, James Reese Europe, and others – beginning in the 1890s were not just quantitative but, precisely, structural. As the torch singers of the late 1920s – white women, but widely regarded as “dusky” exotics, several of them 7 I explore the racial politics of blues in more detail in Middleton 2006, 37–63.

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Jewish – engineered yet another amalgam of blues and ballad (their greatest legacy, however, being to the black Billie Holiday), it becomes ever clearer that the two genres share a concern with love and loss; but blues, far from sanctifying the romantic couple, deploys the vicissitudes of the sexual relationship to register a wider social breakdown, the significance of which, in light of both the musical history and the history of the black family and community under slavery and after, can only be regarded as a symptom of racial fratricide. In the world dissemination of American popular music, ballad and blues comprise, arguably, the two most influential constituents, both in their own right and as models of the sexual and racial negotiations pressed by the forces of modernization. More influential than jazz? No; but jazz is inconceivable without its blues core, and would be very different without ballad as source material and structural mold. Moreover, while jazz tells a parallel story of “exception,” it does so in such a specific and spectacular fashion as to require much fuller treatment than is possible here.8 Jazz, emerging most influentially in the melting pot of New Orleans, speaks crucially to the African American experience, as we can now see; but the imprint of a white embrace, which again colors the picture, takes on a particular focus in the broader field of jazz as it was understood in the early twentieth-century period, when Jewish singers – Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, who all performed in blackface – Jewish songwriters – Berlin, Gershwin, Arlen, and many others – and a Jewish hegemony in the popular-music business together created the essential framework of mediation. This alliance of ethnicities was widely noted at the time, when jazz was often seen as a conflation of black and Jewish qualities, and has been theorized more recently in terms of a melting-pot politics – “Yiddish blackface” enabling Jewish assimilation at the price of African American exclusion, in an encounter taking place under the sign of a double exile, indeed a doubling of the “double consciousness” famously identified by W. E. B. Du Bois, and resulting in a “diasporic uncanny” in which each partner is perpetually in the process of recognizing, misrecognizing, and disavowing the other. The wider white reception of jazz – as ambivalent, as hysterical, as the reception of ragtime and blues before it – marks the extent to which cannibalism – or is it miscegenation? – always reshapes the host (the children infect the parents).

Interstice: all shook up, but that’s all right (mama) When Elvis Presley exploded into national (and international) consciousness in 1956, shaking up the popular musical body with the virus of rock ’n’ roll, he did 8 I try to do this in Middleton 2009, 307–27, which includes references to other relevant literature.

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it with a song that sounded like both a blues and a ballad – “Heartbreak Hotel.” Rock ’n’ roll is conventionally described as a fusion of (black) rhythm and blues and (white) country music, both genres bursting out of their ethnic enclaves (country – or “hillbilly” – had earlier been largely confined to its own record labels, its equivalent of “race” records). Its rewriting of the blues-ballad nexus stands synecdochally for this encounter, its dissection of family relations now refocused on an emergent new market: youth. Against a background that combined economic dynamism – capitalism entering its consumerist phase – and social conservatism – Cold War threat and McCarthyist paranoia pressing the case for patriotism and respectability – youthful rebellion offered a challenge but one that could be readily commodified. This double-faced location, in which subversion and legitimation would appear only through the window of the other, and which would go on to govern the subsequent history of rock music, spread widely wherever similar conditions applied; most new popular-music styles worldwide became youth-led. It was first embodied by Elvis Presley, surly but also respectful, sexually explicit but also romantic, both rocker and balladeer, both icon of the underclass and pliant GI. The scandal of Elvis centered on his performance style, that is, on his body – his physical gyrations (especially of the pelvis), mirrored in his hiccupping, “boogifying” vocal style; in the words of one of his hits, he was “all shook up.” Much of this had been absorbed from black music, with which Presley had been fascinated and familiar since his childhood in Mississippi and Memphis. Indeed, of all the rock ’n’ roll styles, Memphis “rockabilly” puts in view the legacy of the South’s lengthy musical miscegenation. Against the backdrop of the contemporaneous Civil Rights struggle (1954, when the Supreme Court delivered its desegregation judgment, is the key date), rock ’n’ roll can plausibly be presented as racially progressive; and the outraged response from conservatives to this new bout of “jungle music” comes as no surprise. At the same time, the patterns of white mediation are still in place. Elvis’s performance style is rooted in blackface caricature, his repertory of sexual innuendo striking knowing sparks from entrenched myths of the lustful black body – but in a way that problematized his own self-knowledge: At the start, Elvis sounded black to those who heard him; when they called him the Hillbilly Cat, they meant the White Negro. Or as Elvis put it, years later: ‘made a record and when the record came out a lot of people liked it and you could hear folks around town saying, “Is he, is he?” and I’m going “Am I, am I?” (Marcus 1991, 152)

If Elvis can be situated historically as (and sometimes sounds like) an updated Al Jolson, his stance, and that of white rock ’n’ roll in general, represents

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blackface unmasked (but still in play). Few black performers matched white performers for commercial success; many (white) hits were covers of (black) rhythm and blues originals (this is true of “Hound Dog” and of his first [regional] hit, “That’s All Right, Mama”). The discourse of cover, authenticity, and sell-out, taken over from folk, blues, and jazz, but with an intensified racialized dynamic, would go on to become pervasive not only in rock but also throughout the culture of commercialized world music. At first sight, Elvis’s sexuality seems unrepentantly macho. But he has been claimed by queer theorists and even feminists, partly on account of his sentimental ballads but also as a result of the gender-disruptive effects of his singing techniques and of his rather feminized facial appearance and mannerisms. This ambivalence, which in Elvis’s case produced a transgressive body so shook-up as to suggest the symptoms of gender and racial hysteria, took even clearer form, both vocally and visually, in the performances of the bisexual (black) Little Richard, and would go on to comprise an important strand in subsequent rock and pop music. As, notoriously, a “mammy’s boy,” Elvis can be heard as addressing his acceptance of ambivalence – his “That’s All Right” – not only to putative lovers but also to the mother-figure whose guarantee of family norms was actually under threat. Axes of gender and racial hierarchy always mediate, even produce each other; when positions on one are disrupted, those on the other come under pressure – a phenomenon reaching even the relatively conservative sphere of white country music, where the bluesy laments of Presley’s near-contemporary, Hank Williams, frame a parallel ambivalence of gender representation (Leppert and Lipsitz 2000).

Black and white, unite and fight (the power): pop music at the moment of ‘empire’ Some thirty years later, such disruptions reached, it would seem, a stage of meltdown in the work of Michael Jackson. Jackson, initially the child star of the African American group the Jackson 5 (originally the Jackson Brothers), had subsequently pursued a solo career whose development paralleled the mutation of his own body: by the 1990s, as a result (allegedly) of chemical and surgical interventions, he looked as much white as black, as much female as male, while his virtuosic dancing, though clearly indebted to African American lineages, appeared to problematize his corporeal identity through quasirobotic (post-human?) moves and obsessive crotch-centered gestures, and his singing pushed the young Presley’s techniques – sudden register shifts (including childlike falsettos) and fractures (hiccups, gasps, and “pops”) – to new

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lengths. By this date, Jackson’s audience was multiracial, multinational, global. In 2006, the Guinness World Records described him as “Most Successful Entertainer of All Time”; he had thirteen Grammy Awards, thirteen US No. 1 singles, the best-selling album of all time (Thriller), and fifteen World Music Awards; he had been the first significant black performer on MTV, and was a veteran of world tours. This trajectory can be traced back to his beginnings with Motown, the first mass-market black-owned record company, whose slogan – “the sound of young America” – consciously targeted a cross-racial audience (and provoked much criticism from purists and cultural separatists). Jackson’s subsequent stylistic development, drawing on rock, pop, soul, funk, and disco, encompasses and in a sense summates an expanded popular-music mainstream with a significantly broadened repertory of racial and gender references. The biographical narrative again runs parallel. Product of a dysfunctional family (but also of the fraternal Jackson 5), Jackson is best regarded as a sort of “orphan”; his relationships with adoptive “mothers” (Elizabeth Taylor, Oprah Winfrey) and, notoriously, with young children fit this image. Though there is a frisson here, overall the Jackson message was presented (by himself, by the entertainment business) as benign: the melting-pot has done its work, the black exception has, finally, been welcomed into the national family. From Elvis to Jacko – crossover (or is it miscegenation?) reversed: an irony neatly tied by his short-lived marriage to Presley’s daughter. In 1993, a special issue of Time, celebrating the United States as “the first universal nation . . . a multicultural superpower,” devoted its cover to a picture of “Eve,” “The New Face of America.” “Eve” was a virtual hybrid, created by computer morphing technology out of photos from a range of racial sources; she was the future (Roediger 2002, 3–26). Yet Eve looks (a tastefully dusky shade of) white, and conforms unproblematically to Eurocentric notions of femininity; no African American faces were, it seems, used in her construction. (The real Eve was, of course, African.) Two years earlier, Michael Jackson’s single (with video), “Black or White,” insisted that “it’s not about races, just places,” and proclaimed, “I’m not gonna spend my life being a color . . . It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” The setting of the accompanying video (premiered simultaneously in twenty-seven countries to an estimated 500 million viewers) has a planetary scale. Jackson’s dancing is backed successively by troupes of Africans, Asians, Russians, and Native Americans, each in their “native” costume, but their moves follow his, melding them with the appropriate colonialist dance cliché. Later, to a repeating lyric of “It’s black, it’s white,” a multiracial sequence of computer-generated faces (“Eves” and “Adams”) morph one into the next, as a global family is magicked up. The inclusion/exclusion oscillation

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is reinscribed here as universal harmony. But only, it might be argued, at the price of universal exchangeability – each cultural difference absorbed into, as it circles round, Jackson’s hegemonic center, which itself is a rather bland, albeit skillful and engaging, piece of black-tinged pop (based, actually, on the twelvebar blues sequence). Jackson comes across, musically and visually, not so much as any sort of “trans” but as a curiously blank space, that is (in the most ironic inversion of all), as a representation, or quotation, of whiteness. For “whiteness” is produced (most especially in America) as an absence, an unmarked norm, precisely a blank, but can only do this by setting itself off implicitly from its Other; Jackson’s mimicry, then is “almost the same but not quite/white” (Bhabha 1994, 89). And it too has its price, first hinted at in a rap interpolation in the song (lamenting “turf war on a global scale”), then dramatized in the extended and controversial finale to the video, in which Jackson, morphing from the image of a black panther, acts out a ghetto-set sequence coupling violence and simulated masturbation in an unmistakable cry of anguish directed at the historical burden of the beastly black phallus. The force of this anxiety is registered even more explicitly in rap music, a genre whose rise and success runs exactly parallel to Jackson’s. Though rap’s variety precludes easy generalization – it can be protest, party music, educational tract, gender politics, glitzy entertainment – the legacy of blackface is unmissable. When rap cultivates tropes of violence, misogyny, nihilism, lust, and noise (“bring the motherfucking ruckus,” as the Wu-Tang Clan have it), it offers itself in effect as the Other of Jackson’s whiteface mask, constructing white America’s moral panic for it, consciously inhabiting the caricatured Zip Coon body of the rampaging ghetto beast. “Fight the Power,” ordered Public Enemy, while Ice Cube (formerly of the Los Angeles group Niggers With Attitude) addressed it: “I’m the nigga you love to hate” (and young suburban white people quickly became the music’s biggest market). But there is another inversion here too. Commercial success enabled an ostentatious caricature of commodity culture; authenticity (“keeping it real”) oscillates with bling (just as the egalitarianism of “Black or White” is belied by Jackson’s wealth and megastar status). The divergent trajectories in the structure of the cultural imaginary illustrated here – on the one hand, a technologically mediated expansion of perspective to a global level (“fear of a black planet,” as Public Enemy put it), on the other, a narrowing of the focus of belonging from nation and family down to the level of multitudinous bodies (voices, beats, and gestures of the “orphan bodies” making up rap gangs, crews, and posses) – calls up the theory of “empire” put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 2005). According to this theory, the moment is one in which the structures of nation

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and imperialism are replaced by more distributed, deterritorialized networks, with control vested in multinational organizations in the interest of transnational capital, and the figure of the People/people gives way to that of the homeless “multitude.” A new focus on bio-production creates consumers as repositories of “bare life,” as the state of exception – of exile – becomes the rule and “world” becomes global: there is no more “outside.” This somewhat overexcited theory nevertheless catches important shifts. If we take it to mean not that tactics of exclusion disappear but that, turned back inside, they are actually intensified, forced into the open and at the same time into the innermost sanctuaries of subjectivity, new light is cast on the intensely fragmented, malleable, generically multivalent environment of American popular music at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, its increasing openings for women, marginal ethnicities, and heterodox sexualities and political positions, and on the ever-changing alliances formed with other musics around the world. Take jazz, for example, from its beginnings, we can now see, a modernist music but one with a difference, its gestation in blackface exile meaning that “its negotiation with cultural power always tends toward an evacuation of the centre, to a move ‘outside,’ refusing stasis. In this sense it was the first postcolonial music” (Middleton 2009, 312). This is a history that enables jazz to offer now, via its loose, often improvisatory structures and diverse voices, a multitude of possible modes of individual, collective, and generic dialogue. Still, such shifts are partial and conflicted. Jazz, along with rock and rap, is now a “world music.” Yet, as these genres travel, they cannot also help but mark American hegemony. Crossovers cannot altogether escape the power of entrenched social hierarchies (so rock and rap come still, with a racial difference attached). Creative fragmentation can also be read as niche marketing in the service of global capital. The American market for recorded music is still, by some distance, the biggest, and English is still the default language worldwide for popular music. (And the United States is still an imperial power, an Empire in the old sense.) Just as “People” and “people” still twist around each other, so too do “empire” and “Empire,” and the specter of “multitude” forms and de-forms as the two levels in turn twist together. This reveals one further twist to the structure of exception. For “America,” producing itself by its exclusions, at the same time produced itself as an exclusion. American exceptionalism, underpinned by manifest destiny, locates itself qua sovereign power as far outside as, at the other extreme, the multitudinous Others on whose exclusion it depends. For “multitude” to dispossess P/people – that is, for sovereign power to begin to undo itself, and for “representation” to cede to more direct forms of mimesis, leading to de-oedipalization of the body politic at all levels of belonging, and to de-territorialization of its

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cultural relations – would be to refound the New World as utopian ideal. An indispensable first step would be that America come to terms with the contradiction between continuing exclusion (misrecognition, exploitation, oppression) of (nonwhite) Others and, on the other hand, the fact that “its” music is indelibly colored by black inventiveness. To recognize its own “inside” in this way would allow those who have borne the burden of exception (and who are already in a sense inside anyway) their own autonomy – a condition, one might think, for the emergence of a progressive world music tout court.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford University Press (2005) State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, University of Chicago Press Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn, London: Verso Attali, J. (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi, Manchester University Press Badiou, A. (2005) Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, London: Continuum Bhabha, H. K. (1994) ‘Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in idem, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, pp. 85–92 Cockrell, D. (1997) Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World, Cambridge University Press Epstein, D. (1977) Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Fremont, R. A. (ed.) (1973) Favorite Songs of the Nineties, New York: Dover Hardt, M., and A. Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2005) Multitude, London: Hamish Hamilton Harris, C. K. (1926) After the Ball: Forty Years of Melody, New York: Frank-Maurice Jackson, R. (ed.) (1976) Popular Songs of Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Dover Lemay, J. A. L. (1976) ‘The American origins of “Yankee Doodle”’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 33, 3: 435–64 Leppert, R., and G. Lipsitz (2000) ‘“Everybody’s lonesome for somebody”: Age, the body, and experience in the music of Hank Williams’, in R. Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, Oxford University Press, pp. 307–28 Lhamon, W. T. (1998) Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press Lott, E. (1993) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York: Oxford University Press Marcus, G. (1991) Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, 4th edn, London: Penguin Middleton, R. (2006) Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music, New York: Routledge

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(2009) Musical Belongings: Selected Essays, Aldershot: Ashgate Nathan, H. (1962) Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press Radano, R. (2003) Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music, University of Chicago Press Randall, A. J. (2005) ‘A censorship of forgetting: Origins and origin myths of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”’, in A. J. Randall (ed.), Music, Power, and Politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 5–24 Roediger, D. (2002) Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, Berkeley: University of California Press Sonneck, O. G. T. (1909) Report on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” “America,” “Yankee Doodle”, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office Toll, R. (1974) Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press Zangwill, I. (1909) The Melting-Pot, New York: Macmillan

Afterword: a worldly musicology? MARTIN STOKES

It is becoming difficult to define ethnomusicology in theoretical terms. This is the inevitable consequence of postcolonial anxieties, perhaps also the ongoing priority of a hermeneutics deeply invested in cultural translation and “interpreting others.” “Theory” implies people – the people we have historically looked at across the colonial divide – lacking theory. Once this was an easy way of defining ethnomusicology’s objects. Now we have a more sophisticated understanding of our own historical compulsion to define others in terms of what they lack. The “interpretation of others” paradigm, dominant throughout much of the last decades of the twentieth century in anthropology and ethnomusicology, erodes theoreticism by relativizing it. This kind of thinking establishes difference, though hesitates to explain it. This would, after all, be at odds with the relativizing instinct. So “post-theoreticism” might well be our current theoretical condition, a point I have argued elsewhere (Stokes 2003). If not theory, what is it, then, that defines ethnomusicology? It is not “fieldwork” per se, since many others in music studies would now lay claim to this and related anthropological concepts, and ethnomusicologists’ own fieldwork practices are changing so rapidly. It is not simply a matter of repertory, or a geographical location, since some study practices outside of the Western canon using methods that either owe little to ethnomusicology or explicitly reject it (e.g., Agawu 1995). Definitional difficulties prompt uncomfortable questions. If everybody is an ethnomusicologist now, if almost all fields of music study engage the idea of music in culture and endorse ethnomusicology’s radical relativism, and many advocate fieldwork, ethnography, and other anthropological methods and techniques, might the time have come finally to dispense with these cumbersome, perhaps even embarrassing, qualifiers – World Music, ethnomusicology? These are fair questions. Ethnomusicology can no longer meaningfully be thought of as the study of world music. The connotations of the phrase are problematic. Many people in ethnomusicology either do their research “at home,” or interest themselves in only one non-Western tradition. [826]

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“World music” now implies hybrid musical practices designed, by and large, for Western media markets, not the actually existing diversity of musical practices in the world. “Ethno” musicology implies a musicology of others, imagined as discrete cultural units viewed from a scientific distance, or a view achieved from within these other musical worlds. It assumes clear boundaries separating “us” from “them.” Everything we know about the modern world now throws the taken-for-grantedness of these boundaries and the otherness of others into question. Philip Bohlman’s introduction and the chapters that follow suggest another response. In studying the music of the world we strive toward a worldly musicology. This has been a fairly consistent principle in the various traditions of thought that conventionally feed into today’s ethnomusicology. I will say something in these final pages about what I believe this has meant in the past, and what it might now entail, critically speaking. My observations here complement others. Comparative musicology, for instance, drew on the cosmopolitan intellectual formations of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Central European scholarship. The intellectual history and politics of this moment have been well explored (Bohlman 1992, 1991; Davis 2005). Though fashions have changed, ethnomusicologists have reason to feel proud of these achievements and to continue to identify with them. Perhaps even with a touch of nostalgia, I propose a more general and, perhaps, more critical view. What has musicological worldliness meant? How has it generated questions, methods, technologies, theories? How has it questioned itself? And what might it yet mean? Since the earliest days, as Nettl’s first chapter in this volume indicates, ethnomusicology has defined its intellectual genealogy through scholarship oriented to the big questions of the past: “What are the origins of music?” “What are the bases of musical perception?” “What are music’s universals?” Such questions involved a kind of worldly curiosity. For the Enlightenment man of letters, encounters with savages at the edge of the world (Montaigne’s cannibals, discussed in Bohlman 1991) or with the local riff-raff (Rousseau’s Swiss soldiers, discussed in Rouget 1985) provoked radical thoughts about music as a sign of human nature. The emergence of concepts such as “culture” and “the folk” as key concepts in the study of music (especially in the writings of Herder) was closely related to the cosmopolitan formations of courtly and bourgeois life in later eighteenthcentury Europe. As Elias showed, the term Kultur separated the aspirations of German-speaking bourgeois and administrative society from those of the court, “civilized” on the French model (Elias 1982, 8–9). Zivilisation, again following Elias, linked individual behavior to universal norms.

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“Kultur” came to be distinguished as an inner virtue (not the mere observation of form and etiquette), the property of collectivities rather than individuals, and a mark of difference and plurality. As this same bourgeois and administrative society created the modern nation-state, the culture concept took root at its very heart as a way of underscoring the naturalness and inevitability of its borders, and as a means of enabling social mobility within them (Gellner 1983). To speak of music in culture in this context was a way of talking about it as a means of collective self-fashioning. It implied plurality (cultures, musics, ways of life; Herder 1993, 183), and with this plurality the necessity of a vantage point outside culture, from which cultural difference might be recognized and theorized. A cultural understanding of music thus involved a rejection of a certain kind of cosmopolitanism (courtly notions of civilization), but it took a certain kind of Enlightenment cosmopolitan, like Herder, to articulate it. What was tacit in the late eighteenth century – the idea that one might observe the diversity of music cultures from a space somehow separate from and beyond them – demanded more explicit articulation in the nineteenth. A developed colonial order made encounters with others simultaneously more routine and more threatening. More routine, because the colonial powers had by the end of the nineteenth century developed sophisticated and effective ways of administering these encounters and subordinating natives. More threatening, because prosperity and a sense of progress in the Western metropolis was at stake. Both routinization and a heightened climate of anxiety about others can be seen in the world-music scholarship of the high colonial moment. As Bruno Nettl shows in the opening chapter to this volume, Guido Adler argued for a comparative musicology to sit alongside a professional, academic musicology intended to reproduce the Western canon and its central institutions. Comparative musicology asked, and provoked, big questions about music in human life principally focused on questions in the psychology of perception. But these were questions methodologically, administratively, and technologically distanced from the historical study of Western music, which continued untroubled by such concerns. The cosmopolitanism of the comparative musicologists was one mediated by the methodological, administrative, and technological processes of this specific juncture. A methodology of hard science prevailed in the search for measurable data to probe questions of perception globally (Schneider 1991; Stock 2007), and to elaborate the key analytical concepts of the moment: Musiksystem (music system), Tonvorstellungen (pitch representations), Melodiebewegung (melodic movement) (Blum 1991). A new technology,

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Edison’s phonograph, provided measurable data and kept colonized others at a remote and sanitized distance.1 Administratively, the comparative musicologists found themselves increasingly distanced from a musicology oriented to the canons of Western art music. The retreat from the radical implications of the earlier Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft described by Nettl (see Chapter 1) in Adler’s later work is symptomatic. Comparative musicologists found themselves more at home in their conversations with psychologists and ethnologists, or in the phonogram archives. It was also a cosmopolitanism mediated by the political circumstances of early to mid-twentieth-century Austria and Germany, especially the rising anti-Semitism of the period. As musicology attempted to affirm its Aryan roots (Allen 1962) and declare its historical privilege and exclusivity, the links that had, in an earlier period, connected early European music history with that of the Greeks and Jews of Antiquity were increasingly disavowed. As Bohlman has shown (1992), comparative musicologists associated with German and Austrian folklore clubs (e.g., the Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde) mounted a quiet resistance to this public disavowal. Ethnographic research into both local and trans-Mediterranean Jewish musical practices demonstrated links and connections. Later projects by Robert Lachmann, A. Z. Idelsohn, and others, milestones in the history of comparative musicology, were the consequence of such early efforts. They had, however, already been sucked into the political chaos of the moment, and their cosmopolitan legacy is still, in some regards, hard to fathom. The view of the world after World War II from an academic discipline in North America now labeled ethnomusicology was quite different. Anthropology, and anthropological notions of culture, dominated the landscape, a fact that overrode fierce polemics over whether ethnomusicology was properly an anthropological or a musicological discipline. Few ethnomusicologists at work in North American universities in the 1950s or 1960s would have disagreed with the idea that musical practices should be understood in their cultural contexts, that the contexts were, in some way, bounded and comprised various functionally and meaningfully interrelated elements, that a year or more of fieldwork immersion in an alien musical culture was the way to figure out these interrelations, and that the results of this process were to be 1 Taussig suggests the effects of this mimetic technology on either side of the colonial divide were significantly more complex, and more disturbing. Colonized populations heard in this new recording technology the power to abstract and control, and made their own efforts to appropriate this appropriating force. These, in turn, fascinated observers of early contact with indigenous people. The violence of colonial encounter in the Central American context played itself out over, and through, such exchanges, endowing the power to copy with lively properties poorly recognized in the Western philosophical traditions (see Taussig 1993).

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represented in ethnographic monographs. In Europe, where museums as well as university departments played a role, and where anthropology was less hegemonic, other methods continued to thrive. But it is probably fair to say that – as far as the history of the discipline as a whole is concerned – American models exercised significant influence. North American ethnomusicology benefited from the ongoing professional consolidation of academic disciplines, the development of the tenure system, the prominent role of highly trained émigré scholars from Central Europe, the buoyancy of the university presses, and the wealth and relative autonomy of the university system and research funding organizations, particularly in the United States. Ethnomusicology in this period reflected campus cosmopolitanism in the American university. This, I would suggest, had two components, often in conflict. One was the vibrant mix of ambitious, energetic scholars and intellectual traditions on the postwar American university campus. The other was a growing and quasi-colonial distance between the United States of America and most of the rest of the world, particularly in the years after the Marshall Plan. The first subjected all received hierarchies to withering critique, insisted on understanding intellectual life in terms of dialogue, and sought the inclusion of the marginalized, repressed, or excluded at every turn. The second insisted on English as the medium of intellectual exchange and produced epistemologies that turned others into Others (i.e., objects of social scientific and humanistic discourse that firmly located them on the margins of a putatively “Western” modernity). The dynamism of the field in North America, from roughly 1950 to the end of the 1980s, might be understood at least partly in terms of the ferocious energies generated by this powerful contradiction. Theoretical language mediated this dialectic. Where the language of a functionalist anthropology – kinship, ritual, myth, symbolism – prevailed, it did so in ways that simultaneously created a subject–object relationship between the ethnographer and the field, and undermined it. That is to say, an ethnomusicology that insisted on understanding another music culture in these terms was to “other” that music culture and to imply its fundamental difference. If “theirs” is a music that is about maintaining the functioning of the cultural whole, “ours” is about play, creativity, the transformation of selves, if not society in its entirety. “They” go about their task as automatons, “we” as creative individuals. But it was also to open up the possibility that we might turn the mirror back on ourselves, to use ethnography to see ourselves afresh. If an ethnography of exotic people describes a music system saturated with thought and practice related to kinship categories (as among the Suyá of Brazil, or the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea), so too might musical practices closer to home. The Western musical canon might be understood in terms of

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its constitutive myths, rituals, and symbolic practices (Nettl 1995). Dense patterns of “hidden” music making in an English town may suddenly become visible when approached using the methods ethnographers once took with them to Pacific atolls (Finnegan 2007). The kind of ethnography I was taught to value in the mid-1980s showed the similarity of the different, and the difference within the similar. If we were to understand the self “by detour of the other” (in Ricoeur’s terms, fashionable after the publication of Clifford and Marcus 1982), the self was understood as the real puzzle, and its relation to others highly unstable and problematic. However entangled with colonial or nation-state efforts to project power and control peripheries, the culture concept could thus articulate a more radical politics. Ethnomusicologists began to explore situations of rapid social transformation (urbanization, the cultural politics of modernization and westernization, migration; see Nettl 1978), and the consequences of slavery and the African diaspora in the western hemisphere. To assert that rural–urban migrants in the shanty towns of Third World cities or that descendants of African slaves possessed a “culture” was to argue against those who would see their lives as a pathological state of in-betweenness, an argument that could, and usually did, legitimate authoritarian strategies to intervene and manipulate these communities.2 Methods designed to track musical change in situations of dispersal, movement, and mass mediation could, of course, produce narrowly functional accounts (music as a “means of coping” with change, marginalization, and so forth). But they could just as easily be turned in the direction of political engagement, advocacy, and solidarity with oppressed groups (Weiner 1995, 18). It is still hard to characterize and locate historically the subsequent critical moment – roughly 1980–90 (though see Anderson 1998). It involved the translation (and marketing by publishers) of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault into English. It involved convulsive debates within disciplinary areas already heavily invested in Marxian and Freudian traditions of scholarship. It opened the traditional humanities, especially literature, to methods of inquiry formerly dominated by the social sciences, creating still keenly perceived splits between “ancients” and “moderns,” and new spaces of interdisciplinarity. It pushed many in the social sciences, notably history and anthropology, to grapple with social life as a kind of text, and texts of the more conventional sort as agents in, rather than simply reflectors of, social process. The undisguised neocolonial ambitions of post-Cold War America focused attention on persistent global inequalities, and sharpened the view that scholarship was 2 See introduction to Keil 1966 on the Herskowitzian legacy in African American musical studies.

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necessarily political, with a role to play in making heard voices from the margins of twentieth-century history. It was postcolonial scholarship, notably that of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, that brought these and earlier currents together in a peculiarly compelling form. The contradictory nature of these energies has often been noted. If the avowed intention of postcolonial scholarship was to decolonize metropolitan discourse, it was heavily reliant on Western critical and philosophical methods. If it was to have political effect, its language was too opaque and complex for any conceivable real-world political purpose. If it was to reveal the global patterns of exploitation on which the Western canon rested, it could also be highly deferential to this canon, and humanistic notions of complexity. Much has been said on this topic.3 However one assesses this (still reverberating) moment, its impact in the world of Englishlanguage scholarship was undeniably enormous. The relation between anthropology, sociology, and English literature, all mediators of Theory in and to the humanities, changed. Theory was increasingly understood as detachable, in disciplinary terms, floating, as it were, above them all. Either directly, or filtered through anthropology and area studies, many in ethnomusicology began to orient themselves toward a new theoretical literature, a new language, a new set of methods, and new constellations in the academic star system. The colonial dimensions of comparative and early ethnomusicological scholarship, and their ongoing reverberations, were explored. Questions of diaspora, migrancy, and hybridity occupied center stage. The new theoretical language permitted a focus on texts (commercial recordings, films, advertisements, music video) putting aside, if only temporarily, nagging doubts about method. Efforts to interpret the products of mass media did not always sit well with ethnomusicology’s historical commitment to fieldwork, the performance moment, and the traditional forms of ethnography, for instance. But ethnomusicology had acquired a new momentum. Within AngloSaxon university departments and professional organizations, efforts to decolonize a space dominated by white males, the English language, the written word, expensive technology, and prestige institutions, gathered pace. This was also a moment of simply enormous growth within the field, particularly in departments of music. One has to speak impressionistically in this regard, but the basic facts seem hard to deny. The study of ethnomusicology in the United States had been confined to relatively few strongholds as late as 1990, and very few indeed in Europe. In the decade that

3 See Moore-Gilbert 1997 for a birds-eye view of the field. For an overview of postcolonial issues in music study, see Stokes 2005.

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followed, the representation of ethnomusicologists in the large research universities in North America and Western Europe expanded significantly. The real expansion in numbers seems to have occurred in liberal arts colleges, nearly all of which now would seem to consider the presence of an ethnomusicologist in their music program indispensable. On the one hand, this has much to do with the vibrancy of the field, and the strength of its professional organizations, particularly the Society for Ethnomusicology and the International Council for Traditional Music. On the other hand, ethnomusicology has its more cynical uses: as multicultural window dressing in deeply conservative institutions; as tokenistic interdisciplinarity to preserve disciplinary retrenchment in other areas of music study. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about how and why ethnomusicology has grown in such a dramatic manner over the last decade. If more and more people know what ethnomusicology is, they have been helped in this by the world-music phenomenon, and the roughly coterminous emergence of globalization as a topic of public debate and discussion. As many have pointed out (Frith 2000; Brusila 2003; Turino 2000; Stokes 2004; SchadePoulsen 1999) world music was very much the creation of enthusiasts within the recording industry, well-traveled, well-read, and conscious of energetic new sounds in the migrant sectors of Western cities, and of a potential market among like-minded folk. Barclay’s signing of Khaled in the late 1980s, and the tremendous success of Didi, showed what could be done. Migrant musicians representing hybrid genres marginalized both at home and in host environments found themselves being courted by the recording industries and music journalists, and pushed in the direction of further crossovers, intercultural explorations, and collaborations. Producers and listeners learned how to consume marginality, in-betweenness, and hybridity. Musicians from many parts of the world were able to find a niche for themselves in this new space (Kapchan 2002; Meintjes 2003; Schade-Poulsen 1999); many others found themselves excluded. The relation between ethnomusicology and this new consumer cosmopolitanism has generally been a thorny one. Ethnomusicologists have tended to be critical, both of the broader theoretical shape of the discussion about globalization and of the more specific effects of world music. As in other fields, feelings polarized around two broad propositions as the millennium approached: one doom-laden, the other optimistic; one seeing the relentless creep of an illiberal global capitalism, the other stressing new opportunities for creative and political work in the global margins and interstices; one demanding a top-down reading of musical globalization, the other a bottom-up. Many, however, were impatient with this dichotomization of theoretical positions,

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insisting on a both/and version (rather than an either/or), or on a renewed focus on the production of the local in the light of global processes (Meintjes 2003), or on a critique of the very terms of the debate, seen by some as complicit with, or not sufficiently distant from, the public discourse of multinational corporations and their friends in government and the media. Yet others focused attention on dimensions of transnational musical experience marginalized in dominant representations of globalization: spirituality, religion, and pilgrimage (Bohlman 1996; Jankowsky 2006; Engelhardt 2005); theorizations of the auditory and the spectacular in the mediation of global process (Erlmann 1999); critique of globalization paradigms in music from regional perspectives (Ochoa Gautier 2003); music in war, violence, and torture (Cusick 2006). Discussion about globalization in ethnomusicology has been impelled by a double anxiety. On the one hand, this discussion has been conducted either with an explicit or with an implicit view of carving out a properly critical space, vis-à-vis globalization theory – this latter being for many a rather problematic set of propositions. On the other hand, it has also been seeking an appropriate critical distance from world music. This has been less straightforward. For some, the latter has been a matter of identifying its core ideological propositions, and explaining them institutionally and historically (Frith 2000; Feld 2000a). For others, world music communities (festivals, trade fairs, multicultural projects in media or local government) have suggested the need for fieldwork and ethnographic representation. These communities may claim “The World” as their scale of operation, but do so usually in local terms and in a local context, with complex effects in the musical worlds they lay claim to (Brusila 2003). Yet others have found themselves reflecting on the nature of their professional expertise in this new space, and what it has been historically (Feld 2000a, 2000b). World-music radio, concert organization, and journalism need experts, and many in academia (myself included) have been glad of the bigger platform, a different kind of audience, and opportunity to reflect on what our more public message to the world might be. Little in an academic training, however, prepares one for professional media culture: the speed at which decisions must be made, text produced, sound-bites devised, all to drive a story one might find limited, embarrassing, missing the more interesting points, or with negative effects nobody seems to be noticing. Our friends in the media are, perhaps rightly, impatient with our slowness and our habits of pontificating on a media world many of us academics often know relatively little about. And yet, it seems, we need one another.

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Ethnomusicological cosmopolitanism at this particular moment is a complex and rather anxious proposition. It is, I would argue, aware of its privilege, its increasingly uncontested place in academic music departments, with a great deal of institutional support. It is aware of the fact that it sits perhaps too comfortably with a general public discourse of globalization and multiculturalism. The relatively simple moral positions associated with being on the margins and representing the margins have necessarily given way to a more ambivalent and self-doubting atmosphere. Many in the academic field of ethnomusicology are aware of its growing size, which has turned relatively small face-to-face communities into massive and necessarily bureaucratic organizations. Many will also have pondered the relation between the dramatic institutional growth of ethnomusicology and a steady process of change in the structure of the modern university, especially the promotion of interdisciplinarity as a means of eroding disciplinary boundaries and departmental autonomy. Ethnomusicologists are increasingly aware of the complex ways in which their work is now entangled, as often in problematic as mutually beneficial ways, with the work of journalists and the mass media, world-music producers and concert organizers, multicultural experts in local government, and NGOs. Ethnomusicological worldliness has invariably been a complex issue, as I have been trying to demonstrate throughout this afterword. But the current juncture, I would suggest, is marked by an anxious awareness of complexity and complicity, a cosmopolitanism, as it were, ill at ease with itself. Contemporary cosmopolitanism is, more broadly speaking, a melancholy and insecure affair, a matter of nostalgia, haunted by anxieties appropriate to an age defined by some in terms of the “war on terror” and the “clash of civilizations.” In what ways, however, do these anxieties shape the way in which ethnomusicologists inhabit the musical and academic “world?” A ruthless critic might suggest that the main response to these anxieties has been an intensification of bureaucratic and administrative energies, at the expense of a serious theoretical engagement within and outside the subdiscipline. There would be a germ of truth to this. Ever-growing conferences and publications series need to be run. The expansion of the professional field needs to be overseen, recruitment panels sat on, tenure letters written, ever-larger undergraduate classes and cohorts of graduate students attended to, specialist publications edited. The current generation of ethnomusicologists has particular reason to feel administratively overextended. No wonder the response to some heavy critiques of the ethnomusicological enterprise in recent years (e.g., Agawu 2003) has been somewhat muted.

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This, however, would be to draw an overly harsh conclusion. The present volume suggests, on the contrary, a gathering of theoretical energies and a variety of new directions. These have a conversational tone, which seems new to me. At least in certain regards, ethnomusicology is increasingly conceived by its practitioners as part of a broader discussion in music study, rather than a theoretical and methodological isolate. This has, in part, been a matter of ethnomusicologists bringing a certain worldly wisdom to bear on topics well discussed in other subdisciplinary areas, notably jazz, country music, blues, pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop (also claimed, as it were, by popular-music studies, American studies, film and media studies, and so forth). These are, after all, genres that have drawn on complex patterns of migration and cultural interaction in the New World; they benefit from an approach that situates them globally. Jazz, for instance, is an African American musical practice, but it was always, and remains, a Latino musical practice; also an Italian, Iranian, South African one (Bohlman and Plastino, forthcoming). Patient site-bound fieldwork practices are required if one is to understand these genres in terms of what they mean and do in specific contexts and spheres of circulation, and if one is to avoid discussing them purely in terms of their own dominant myths, representations, and discourses. A core ethnomusicological argument seems, by and large, to be increasingly accepted. Ethnomusicologists, meanwhile, have been learning from their colleagues in media and popular-music studies how to think about media institutions, the recording industry, material culture, and technology, and how to adapt notions of fieldwork and ethnography in the wake of these insights.4 These developments necessarily push ethnomusicologists homewards. “Ethnomusicology at home,” however, is no longer the simple proposition it once was. The musical practices of home, we now see, are intricately entangled with the musical practices of the outside world, and always have been. There are some radical opportunities to be seized here. The point might be emphasized with reference to growing interest in an ethnomusicology of Europe. This continues, in some regards, the postwar North American fascination with the exotic (and, until recently, politically alien) Southern and Eastern European fringes. But in other respects, the theoretical prospects currently at play are less predictable and stable. Europe still constitutes a benchmark in the world’s cultural hierarchies, an orientation in terms of which cultural practices can be publicly defined as “high” or “low,” as “ours” or “other.” Most musicology has been, and in many ways continues to be, deeply invested

4 For meditations on technology, fieldwork, and ethnographic representation, see, in particular, Greene and Porcello 2005, Porcello 1998, Lysloff and Gay 2003, Meintjes 2003, Taylor 2001.

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in this notion of Europe – “Europe 1,” if you will. In musical terms, “Europe 1” boils down to the story of how Austro-German symphonic music came to set the standards (and the intellectual procedures) according to which all music is to be understood, and according to which alternative narratives are delegitimized. European musical practices are, in fact, very little known. A conventional division of labor has consigned ethnomusicologists to the exotic peripheries, folklorists to the post-peasant cultures of Western Europe and “historical musicologists” (i.e., musicologists of the Western art-music tradition) to the courts, churches, and concert halls. Convention has also dictated a highly circumscribed conversation between these different scholarly communities, so that, for instance, the rich folk traditions of the Iberian peninsula, Central Europe, and the Nordic regions only tend to figure in historical musicology as background to Debussy, Bartók, or Sibelius, and that ethnomusicologists tend to know much more about the folk-music traditions of Eastern Europe than those of Western Europe. The legacy of orientalism ensures that former Ottoman-dominated Islamic Europe continues to be largely ignored, in musical matters as in much else. The legacy of the Cold War has generated a certain antipathy to the invented traditions and official folklore of the former communist states. Scholarly interest in European pop and rock suffers from attitudes that see it as derivative, secondary at best to an African American authenticity across the Atlantic.5 The musical cultures of migrants from Muslim-dominant countries across the Mediterranean fall problematically between various domains of scholarly expertise. Though they are never exactly ignored, it is hard for the musicologists to build up a broad picture. Most European music making – let’s call it the music of “Europe 2” – is, in short, invisible to academic musicology. I am less interested here in the empirical and historical issues at play than the institutional ones. Western art-music musicology and ethnomusicology are institutionally separated in most academic departments. Much conspires to make conversation across this divide difficult; the same might be said of music theory. An ethnomusicology oriented to “Europe 2” could do valuable work in making a conversation across these occasionally intractable subdisciplinary borders desirable and interesting to all parties.6 5 The British-based journal Popular Music has been a singular exception. Note, for example, the recent special issue on Italian popular music (Plastino and Santoro 2007). 6 The process is well underway within ethnomusicology. I might note in this regard a variety of new MA courses in Mediterranean and European musics in various British universities, a new and large European special section in the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Rice et al. edited Garland Encyclopedia volume on Europe (Rice et al. 1999), and Bohlman and Stokes’s “Europea” series with the Scarecrow Press. See also Stokes 2003.

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This is, perhaps, to exaggerate the importance of the role I am imagining for an ethnomusicology of “Europe 2.” One might reasonably point out that the process is already well underway in other disciplinary areas. Popular-music studies have seen some quite sharply polemicized debates about how various kinds of music analysis might be integrated into (or challenge) the Gramscian core of subcultural theory.7 The topic may still be contentious, but does not generate the kind of verbal anxiety I remember hearing expressed at meetings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in the late 1980s. Historical, ethnographic, and analytical approaches seem to have coexisted peaceably in jazz studies in the United States. Popular-music studies and jazz share a certain institutional marginality, which helps matters. And even in the institutional musicological mainstream (conventionally divided, in most academic departments in the United States, into “music history,” “music theory,” “ethnomusicology,” and “composition”), there have long been centripetal as well as centrifugal forces at work, even if they have only been generated by anxiety about disciplinary fragmentation. Whatever has motivated the current intensity of conversation within the discipline, it is a welcome development. But much still hangs in the balance. Ethnomusicologists risk subtler kinds of marginalization. The idea that ethnomusicology is a “contextual” tradition of study often gains sway in, for example, efforts to organize cross-disciplinary “approaches and methods.” Ethnomusicologists may have a hard time resisting this characterization. Theirs is a tradition of study, after all, that has often been alone in stressing the necessity of understanding contexts. Such conversations, nonetheless, strengthen a sense of divide between those who deal with, as one sometimes still hears it put, “the music itself” and those who (merely) work on “contexts.” This divide is clearly hierarchical, with the institutional benefits accruing to those involved in the higher-level operations. A number of ethnomusicologists in the Anglo-Saxon world, where such notions seem deeply entrenched, have struggled energetically against this, but they have done so against the grain of institutional life. A small handful of studies have stood out as exceptions proving the general rule.8 The current climate of conversation between

7 The cautious and occasionally hostile tone struck in reviews of Moore 1993 are interesting in retrospect. Since the 1990s, the idea that one might want to talk about rock in music theoretical/ analytical detail has become far less remarkable; the field has recently seen some lapidary publications (e.g., Tagg and Clarida 2003) and edited collections embracing diverse approaches and debates (see Moore 2003). 8 Michael Tenzer’s study of Balinese Gong Kebyar (2000) and Marc Perlman’s study of Javanese gamelan music theory (2004) are recent landmarks in the rapprochement of ethnomusicology and music theory in the North American world.

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music theorists and ethnomusicologists, particularly those animated by cognitive theory, is an exciting and welcome development.9 There are potential problems here, too. Cognitive psychology is a rapidly developing field, which has in recent years reinvigorated scholars of music psychology and engaged music theorists, both keen to think with and about other musical cultures. Ethnomusicologists, once prominent partners in the discussion, may well be concerned about a situation in which their expertise is solicited purely for the provision of case studies for metropolitan theorizing. As was the case a hundred years ago, ethnography could easily revert to a kind of “reporting back” from the colonial peripheries. Ethnography in ethnomusicology is not a matter of providing raw data for theory. It is theory. And it insists on the possibility that those we theorize about might question us as we question them. Ethnomusicologists have every reason to be attentive to, and anxious about, these developments. A new period of self-conscious globalization and neoimperial dreaming has encouraged many in the metropolitan West to look on others, once again, as steps on the ladder of progress and enlightenment. The privatization of the most basic functions of the nation-state and the technologies of neoliberalism encourage ever-more instrumental and manipulative attitudes toward culture (Yúdice 2003). Ethnomusicologists have insisted that academic musicology attend to music’s complex social and political entanglements, to global relations of encounter, and to the possibility that music – and the study of it – might change us collectively. There is, in my view, an extraordinary urgency to these claims today. Much hangs in the balance. It may be increasingly difficult to understand world music in terms of a benign academic cosmopolitanism. But we may still be able to aspire to a properly worldly musicology.

Bibliography Agawu, V. K. (1995) African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective, Cambridge University Press (2003) Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge Allen, W. D. (1962) Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music 1600–1960, New York: Dover Anderson, P. (1998) The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso Blum, S. (1991) ‘European musical terminology and the music of Africa’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays in the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–36

9 See in particular Zbikowski 2002, Clarke 2005, and Clayton 2008.

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Bohlman, P. V. (1991) ‘Representation and cultural critique in the history of ethnomusicology’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays in the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, 131–51 (1992) ‘La riscoperta del Mediterraneo nella musica ebraica: Il discorso dell’Altro nell’etnomusicologia dell’Europa’, in Tullia Magrini (ed.), Antropologia della Musica e Culture Mediterranee, Venice: Il Mulino, pp. 107–24 (1996) ‘Pilgrimage, politics, and the musical remapping of the New Europe’, Ethnomusicology, 40, 3: 375–412 Bohlman, P. V., and G. Plastino (eds.) (forthcoming) Jazz Worlds/World Jazz Brusila, J. (2003) ‘Local Music, Not From Here’: The Discourse of World Music Examined through Three Zimbabwean Case Studies: The Bhundhu Boys, Virginia Mukwesha and Sunduza, Helsinki: Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology Publications 10 Clarke, E. (2005) Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, New York: Oxford University Press Clayton, M. (2008) ‘Towards an ethnomusicology of sound experience’, in H. Stobart (ed.), The New (Ethno)Musicologies, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Clifford, J., and G. Marcus (1982) Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press Cusick, S. G. (2006) ‘Music as torture / Music as weapon’, Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música / Transcultural Music Review, 10, internet Davis, R. (2005) ‘Robert Lachmann’s Oriental music: A broadcasting initiative in 1930s Palestine’, in D. Cooper and K. Dawe (eds.), The Mediterranean in Music : Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 79–96 Elias, N. (1982) The Civilizing Process, trans. by E. Jephcott, New York: Pantheon Engelhardt, J. (2005) ‘Singing in “transition”: Musical practices and ideologies of renewal in the Orthodox church of Estonia’, PhD diss., University of Chicago Erlmann, V. (1999) Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press Feld, S. (2000a) ‘A sweet lullaby for world music’, Public Culture, 12, 1: 145–71 (2000b) ‘The poetics and politics of Pygmy pop’, in G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 280–304 Finnegan, R. (2007, orig. publ. 1989) The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Frith, S. (2000) ‘The discourse of world music’, in B. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 305–20 Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell Greene, P., and T. Porcello (2005) Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Herder, J. G. (1993) Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language and History, ed. and trans. by M. Bunge, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Jankowsky, R. (2006) ‘Black spirits, white saints: Music, spirit possession, and sub-Saharans in Tunisia’, Ethnomusicology, 50, 3: 373–410

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Kapchan, D. (2002) ‘Possessing Gnawa culture: Displaying sound, creating history in an unofficial museum’, Music and Anthropology, 7, www.muspe.unibo.it/period/ma/ index/number7/ma_ind7.htm Keil, C. (1966) Urban Blues, University of Chicago Press Lysloff, R., and L. Gay (eds.) (2003) Music and Technoculture, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Meintjes, L. (2003) Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Moore, A. (1993) Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock, Buckingham: Open University Press (2003) (ed.) Analyzing Popular Music, Cambridge University Press Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997) Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso Nettl, B. (1995) Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (1978) (ed.) Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press Ochoa Gautier, A. (2003) Musicas Locales en Tiempos de Globalización, Bogotá and Buenos Aires: Editorial Norma Perlman, M. (2004) Unplayed Melodies: Javanese Gamelan and the Genesis of Music Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press Plastino, G., and M. Santoro (2007) ‘Introduction’, Popular Music (Special issue on Italian Popular Music), 26, 3: 385–8 Porcello, T. (1998) ‘“Tails out”: Social phenomenology and the ethnographic representation of technology in music making’, Ethnomusicology, 42, 3: 485–510 Rice, T., J. Porter, and C. Goertzen (eds.) (1999) The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8: Europe, New York: Garland Publishing Rouget, G. (1985) Music and Trance: A Theory of Relations between Music and Possession, trans. by B. Biebuyck, University of Chicago Press Schade-Poulsen M. (1999) Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of Raï, Austin: University of Texas Press Schneider, A. (1991) ‘Psychological theory and comparative musicology’, in B. Nettl and P. V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays in the History of Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago Press, pp. 293–317 Seeger, A. (1987) Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People, Cambridge University Press Slobin, M. (1993) Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England Stock, J. (2007) ‘Alexander J. Ellis and his place in the history of ethnomusicology’, Ethnomusicology, 51, 2: 306–25 Stokes, M. (2003) Review of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8: Europe, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56, 1: 214–20 (2004) ‘Music and the global order’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 47–72 (2005) ‘Postcolonialism’, in J. Shepherd et al. (eds.), Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, vol. 1: Media, Industry and Society, London: Continuum, pp. 103–6 Sumarsam (1995) Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, University of Chicago Press

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Tagg, P., and B. Clarida (2003) Ten Little Title Tunes: Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media, New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge Taylor, T. (2001) Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture, New York: Routledge Tenzer, M. (2000) Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music, University of Chicago Press Turino, T. (2000) Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, University of Chicago Press Weiner, A. (1995) ‘Culture and our discontents’, American Anthropologist, 97, 1: 14–20 Yúdice, G. (2003) The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Zbikowski, L. (2002) Conceptualizing Music: Structure, Theory and Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press

Index a cappella, 63, 234 Abraham, Otto, 480, 705, 708 Adler, Guido, 33, 705, 828, 829 Adorno, Theodor, 59, 746, 760 aesthetics, 67, 79, 84, 88, 189, 191, 282–3 Enlightenment, 259–61, 269, 277, 288 relational, 795 religion and, 229–30, 456, 602 Africa, 655 African American music, 726–40, 811–18, See also blues, hip hop, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock spirituals, 575, 731, 812, 814–15 African music, 79, 88, 655, 729, 773 rhythm, 639–41, 653, 771, 773, 774, 775 Afropop, 65, 71, 80, 649 al-Fārābī, Abu Nasr, 104, 107–16 amateurism, 60, 64–5, 70, 332, 665 Ambros, August Wilhelm, 31–2 American Anthropological Association, 9, 795, 798 American music, 807–24, See also African American music, Native American music American Musicological Society, 11, 790, 796 ancient cultures, 35, 39, 48, 129, 130, 131, 146, 292, 449, See also antiquity Anderson, Benedict, 809 anthropology, 283, 298–315, 495, 776, 783, 788, 826, 829–32 activism and, 795 birth of, 257–9 comparative method, 299, 303–9 Marxist, 447 antiquity, 38, 42, 131, 305, 307, 405, 669, See also ancient cultures apartheid, 85, 87 Apple iPod, 70, 91, 655, 758–60 Apple iTunes, 69–70, 527, 578, 752, 753, 754, 758 appropriation, 13, 87, 88, 206, 270, 362, 597, 611, 619, 667, 670, 673, 810, 813 Arab music, 78–9, 107, 499, 504, 510, 753 archeology, 169

archives, 719, 791, See also sound archives repatriation, 522–53 Arendt, Hannah, 449–50 Argentina, 371–90 Aristotle, 111–14 Aristoxenus, 110, 112, 115, 116 authenticity, 32, 48, 50, 266, 282, 285, 288, 368, 388, 505, 507, 620, 665, 667, 669, 670, 674, 675, 714, 817, 820, 822, 837 Averroës, 114 Avicenna, 104, 110–15, 116 ballads, 50, 56, 60, 267, 270–2, 612, 816–20 banda, 67 Baroque, 229–30, 234–7, 249, 373–6, 377 Bartók, Béla, 355–7, 363, 671, 682 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 30, 33, 50, 77, 84, 89, 94, 331, 683, 684 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 11 Berlin Phonogram Archive, 7, 354, 475–96, 499, 510, 526, 707–8, 719 Bhagavad Gita, 207 bhajan, 57, 145, 202, 209–10, 219, 220 bhaktism, 207–10, 215, 218 bhangra, 738, 739, 740 black music. See African American music Blacking, John, 507, 644, 654 blues, 343, 713, 817–20, 822, 836 Boas, Franz, 705, 795 Bollywood, 60, 66, 80, 202, 462, 739–40, 752 Boulton, Laura, 522–53 boundaries, 827 Brazil, 223–49 broadcast media. See television broadcasting. See radio broadsides, 271, 381 Buddhism, 128, 133–4, 135, 139, 203, 204, 210, 212, 213, 418–19, 420, 421, 422, 435 Burney, Charles, 29–30, 190 cabaret, 689–93 Cage, John, 37, 83

[843]

844 Cairo Congress of Arab Music, 4, 78, 479, 510 Cantemir, Dimitrius, 278 cantometrics, 772 Cantopop, 80, 89, 612 capitalism, 57–9, 72, 80, 89, 441–66, 593, 712, 727, 728, 734, 774–5, 819, 833 Fordism, 744, 815–16 forms of, 744 late capitalism, 747, 749 means of production, 749 new capitalism, 744–61 Caribbean, 557–80 cassette cultures, 63, 66, 69, 210 caste, 58, 217, 328, 443, 447, 449, 456, 459 castrati, 249, 449 Celtic music, 666 censorship, 343, 433, 434–5, 666–7, 813 ceremony, 28, 77, 81, 105, 164–7, 169–70, 289, 417, 422, 454–9, 772, See also ritual chant, 15, 26, 128, 133, 150, 216, 220, 235, 277, 386, 423, 622 Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, 651 chicha, 63, 68 children’s music, 325, 341, 342, 426, 527 China, 397–414 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 77, 84, 405, 620 Chopin, Frederic, 90 choral singing, 87, 234, 326, 374, 668, 671, 675 Christianity, 15, 75, 170, 204, 215, 218, 225, 229–32, 272, 324, 358, 422–3, 435, 575–7 Catholicism, 230, 248, 323, 358, 423, 563, 666 conversion. See missionaries, missionization Eastern Orthodoxy, 358, 366 Jesuits, 230, 280, 292, 323 Protestantism, 229, 230, 358, 563, 575 class, 359, 748 classical music. See Western art music classicism, 377, 380 Cold War, 59, 352, 530, 540, 819, 831, 837 collectors, 7, 17, 82, 244, 355, 486, 522–3, 533–4, 672–4, 706–7, 711, 719, 815 colonialism, 4, 7, 13–15, 57, 75–7, 81, 82, 156, 158, 184, 188, 205, 223–7, 229–37, 242–3, 261, 314, 324, 362, 373–4, 422–31, 557–60, 563, 597, 637, 642, 730, 733–4, 738, 774–5, 807, 810, 826, 828–9, 831, See also empire, postcolonialism ethnomusicology and, 171, 196, 523, 712 occupation, 498, 518 Columbian Exposition. See World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago

Index Columbus, Christopher, 557, 807 commodification, 13, 68, 595–6, 601–3, 670, 734, 745, 748, 750, 759–60 communism, 355, 357, 359, 362, 427 comparative musicology, 8, 16, 30, 353–7, 475–96, 706–12, 719, 827–9 composers, 50, 77, 83–7, 151, 234–7, 280, 325, 335–41, 414, 431–2, 505, 565, 683, 817 Confucianism, 323, 330, 406 Cook, James, 185–9, 192, 195, 303 copyright. See intellectual property cosmology, 2, 577, 767–71, 783 cosmic symbolism, 769–70, 775 cosmopolitanism, 77, 144, 361, 378, 381, 390, 409, 445, 457, 461, 600, 715, 727, 728, 739, 786–8, 827–30, 833 country music, 434, 819, 820, 836 court music, 30, 77, 106, 140, 143, 147–9, 271, 278, 324–5, 328–9, 331, 337, 404–9, 416, 421–2, 427, 431–2, 449, 480 courtesans, 57–9, 331, 449 creole, 561 critical theory, 680, 826–32 cultural diversity, 31, 49, 174, 183, 249, 299, 609, 664 cultural exchange, 184, 365, 408, 568, 810 cultural heritage, 87, 451, 465, 499, 518, 525, 548, 618, 810 cultural imperialism, 609–10 cultural relativism, 259, 277, 787–9, 790 cultural studies, 365, 744, 771, 789 culture areas, 42, 43, 81, 352, 353, 416, 530, 645, 651, 832 culture concept, 794, 828, 831 culture industry, 748, 750 cyclicity, 212–14, 401, 768–73, 778–82 dabke, 518 dance, 65, 87, 165, 286–7, 343, 360, 381, 422–6, 568–9, 639, 642, 733–40, 783 ballet, 290, 678 break dance, 617 choreography, 579, 669, 739 communal, 56, 541 drum dance, 172, 332 ensembles and associations, 78, 246, 643, 669 iconography of, 148 relation to music, 196, 773 ritual, 161–2, 166, 217, 453, 586 social function of, 544–7 theories of, 42, 114 dancehall, 64, 66–7, 70, 562, 569, 737, 740 Darwin, Charles, 301, 309, 310 de Léry, Jean, 15–16 deejays, 64, 65, 72

Index deities, 26, 166, 216, 218, 219, 418, 443, 455–6 Densmore, Frances, 7, 705, 707, 815 developmentalism, 13, 298–315 devotion, 57, 143, 145, 202–21, 424, 426, 428, 446, 586–8, 599, See also sacred music dhikr, 602 diaspora, 8, 64, 69, 80, 133, 410, 445, 499, 507, 557–80, 600, 611, 614, 642, 649, 733, 738–9, 799–800, 818, 832 Digital Rights Management (DRM), 758 drama. See theater drumming, 148, 150, 238, 246, 547, 565, 566–7, 639, 640 dub, 64, 570, 716 Durkheim, Emile, 776 Dvořák, Antonín, 686, 687 Eastern Europe, 352–68 El Cid, 264–74 electronic dance music, 63, 66, 71, 368, 570 Ellis, Alexander, 33, 427, 506, 507, 705 emotion, 25, 42, 113, 117, 160, 208, 230, 303, 308, 402, 456, 499, 585, 587, 671 empire, 76, 80, 129, 132–3, 134–5, 144–5, 149, 313, 314, 397, 423, 732, 738, 822, See also colonialism American expansionism, 733, 736 encounter, 3–5, 13–18, 75, 83, 93, 133, 156, 171, 184–5, 193, 196–7, 229, 261, 280, 282, 285, 293–4, 495, 557–9, 578, 595, 839 Engel, Carl, 33, 308–10, 314 Enlightenment, 16, 192, 255–62, 269, 277–96, 298–306, 373–80, 808, 827–8 epic, 255, 264, 268, 274 epistemology, 260, 777, 782, 783, 830 eroticism, 305, 411, 686 ethics, 14, 258, 448, 453, 525, 553 branches of, 787 ethnomusicology and, 523, 786–802 fieldwork. See ethnography ethnicity, 67, 243, 359, 364, 365–6, 816, 823, See also identity ethnic cleansing, 697 mixing, 371, 378 ethnography, 4, 17, 195, 257–61, 282, 367, 532, 640, 663–4, 776, 826–32, 839 fieldwork ethics, 787–90, 793–5 methods, 40, 353, 481–4, 488–93, 705 ethnology, 307, 312, 475, 495, 708 ethnomusicology, 8–10, 33, 44, 50–1, 196, 303, 308–12, 408, 412, 430, 432, 475, 493, 495, 505–7, 706, 719, 786–02, 826–39 activism and advocacy, 651–3, 787, 795–8

845 applied, 796 critiques of, 644, 772 institutionalization of, 526, 530, 535, 673–4 medical, 797 public, 797 Eurocentrism, 159, 379, 644, 712, 733, 811, 821 Eurovision Song Contest, 368, 673 everyday life, 93, 225, 466, 655, 773 evolution, 301–3, 306, 310, 362, 606 evolutionism, 13, 298–303, 308, 310–15, 774 exoticism, 81–3, 282–7, 293–5, 606–29, 693, 697, 836, See also Orientalism gender and, 618 Facebook, 758 fado, 70, 665, 667, 672–4 fandango, 425 festivals, 78, 151, 208, 220, 230–2, 243–8, 362, 446, 457, 460, 566–7, 570–3, 575–9, 601, 642, 715 feudalism, 593 fieldwork. See ethnography file sharing, 65, 69, 71, 714 film, 60–1, 62, 70, 72, 76, 219, 412, 433, 460–4, 545, 598, 600, 602, 612, 616, 622, 628, 695, 745, 750–1, 752–3, See also music supervisors documentary, 653 ethnographic, 9 first contact, 184, 282, 730 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 814 flamenco, 70 Fletcher, Alice C., 7, 48, 49, 89, 172, 705, 707 folclore. See folklore folk music, 30–3, 40, 47, 260–3, 267, 330–2, 352–68, 372–7, 381, 619, 661 folk song, 14–16, 29, 34, 255–74, 326–9, 500, 616, 694, 811–15 collection of, 9, 268, 360 folklore, 267, 356–62, 373, 382–5, 498, 518, 663, 667–72, 829, 837 Fonton, Charles, 277–9, 280, 281, 293 Fox, A. Lane (Pitt Rivers), 306 funk, 578, 733, 737 fusion, 339, 344, 433 Gabriel, Peter, 92, 599–600, 614, 715, 754 gagaku, 77 gamelan, 50, 78, 91, 418, 420–2, 424, 426, 428, 432, 771, 776 shadow plays, 421–2 Gandhi, Mahatma, 205, 209 Gauchos, 372–3, 378, 381, 385, 389–1, 390 Geertz, Clifford, 776, 802

846 gender, 48, 148, 283, 388, 431, 442, 653, 695, 717 cross-dressing, 734 exclusion, 668 labor and, 449 race and, 728, 820–2 genre, 55–73, 80, 103–11, 156, 164, 168, 202–11, 266, 272, 341, 381–3, 388–9, 411, 421–6, 561–2, 569, 609, 644, 661–75, 733, 737–9, 754–6, 815, 819, 833, 836, See also music categories Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid, 105 Ghunyâtu’l Munya, 142–3, 146 globalization, 5, 66, 259, 261, 445, 569, 626, 662, 760, 839 capitalism and, 748 discourse on, 833–5 homogenization and, 614 sacred music and, 584–604 theories of, 612 Gnawa music, 753 Golden Atlantic, 223–49 Grammy Awards, 649–50, 655, 821 guaguancó, 568 Guy de Chabanon, Michel-Paul, 288–94 Gypsies. See Roma Hanslick, Eduard, 192 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 263, 775 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 477 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 14, 16, 24, 29, 30–1, 255–74, 282, 352, 353, 384, 500, 828 reception of, 262–5 hereditary musicians, 443, 453, 464, 594 Herzog, George, 487, 531, 708 highlife, 561, 738 Hindi film songs. See Bollywood Hinduism, 130, 133–5, 145, 202–21, 306, 418–22, 428, 435, 442–3, 456, 593, 767–71, See also Tantra Saivism, 418–20 Hindustani music, 145–51, 202–3, 206–10, 213, 449, 594 hip hop, 63, 70, 569, 570, 578, 612, 615, 616–20, 652, 728, 733, 738–40, 822, 836 gangsta rap, 619 historical musicology, 837 historiography, 1–18, 29, 31, 185, 255–74, 352, 444, 495, 592–4, 679–681, 696, 699, 783 historical algorithm, 681 history, 774–6 Holocaust, 262, 356, 453, 680, 695–7 concentration camps, 697 homologies, 768, 771, 783

Index Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von, 16, 478–95 human rights, 451–3, 800 Huxley, Thomas, 301 hybridity, 16, 89, 202, 225, 240, 248–9, 261, 288, 371, 445, 567, 612, 619, 715, 815, 821, 827, 832 hymnody, 15, 128, 158–9, 172, 322–3, 325, 548, 598, See also missionaries, missionization, sacred music Ibn Khaldūn, 4, See also Muqadimmah iconography, 15, 125, 141, 143, 419, 460 Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi, 8, 499–507, 829 identity, 81, 84, 88, 165, 338, 357, 367, 377, 382, 459, 461, 498, 503, 529, 542, 566, 594, 597, 626 alterity, 12–16, 733 collective, 183 construction of, 363, 661 cultural, 184, 398, 416, 451, 612–14, 619–21 ethnic. See ethnicity folk music and, 362, 363–7 indigenous. See indigeneity local, 85, 382, 670 national, 81, 90, 208, 219, 314, 339, 362, 664, 666–7 otherness, 2, 12, 281, 285, 374, 727, 729, 740, 823–4, 827, 830 place and, 447, 502, 563 regional, 648 religious, 204, 598 transnational, 574, 575–8 ideology, 76–7, 81, 94, 209–10, 309, 360, 513, 516, 661, 666–8, 671, 698, 715 immigration, 80, 389, 425, 508, 514, 614, 671, 808, 815, See also migration imperialism. See empire improvisation, 72, 140, 245, 272, 330, 490, 544, 600 India, 125–52, See also South Asia South, 441–66 indigeneity, 4, 81–2, 85–9, 155–7, 172, 184, 187–97, 452, 453, 525, 528–9, 546, 597, 647, 736 industrial revolution, 57, 66, 249, 774–5 informationalization, 749, 759–61 intellectual property, 451, 525, 528, 533–5, 551, 759 International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 838 International Council for Traditional Music, 361, 833 internet, 749–61, See also file sharing music recommendation systems, 757, 760 musical algorithms, 753, 757, 759 search technology, 749

Index Islam, 3–5, 103–19, 138, 142–5, 203, 206, 210–12, 217–18, 358, 424–5, 427, 435, 566–7, 584–604, 837, See also Qur’an, Muhammad (Prophet), Sufism call-to-prayer, 210, 358, 500 conversion, 141, 421–2 fiqh, 424 h ạ jj, 424 sharī‘ah law, 424 Shi’ism, 567 Sunni, 424 zikir, 424 Israel, 498–519 Jackson, Michael, 734, 820–2 Jainism, 128, 143–4, 203, 204, 210–13, 215, 218 Jamaica, 737–40 jazz, 40, 55, 673, 684, 712, 713, 717, 731, 733, 737, 817–18, 823, 836 Jewish music, 8, 499–500, 503–5, 517, 684, 729, 829 jigs, 811 jive, 731 Jones, William, 30, 130, 135, 146, 206, 306 Judaism, 358 ethics, 507–9 Reform, 508 jùjú, 60, 68, 561, 716 junkanoo, 562, 575–9 Kant, Immanuel, 257–9 karaoke, 64, 72, 80 Karnatak music, 145–7, 151, 203, 208, 210, 213–14, 455, 465, 770 Keil, Charles, 653, 713, 732 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali, 92, 443, 596, 598–604 kinship, 243, 527–9, 543, 548, 564, 830 kitsch, 627, 734 Kolinski, Mieczyslaw, 10, 43 Koran. See Qur’an Korea, 321–44 kugak, 321–44 Kulturkreis. See culture areas Kunst, Jaap, 419, 425, 428, 507 kwaito, 738 labor, 441–66, 557, 651, 667, 753, 774, 816 division of, 401, 463 exclusion, 452 movements, 460 technology and, 450 unions, 452, 459, 464 Lachmann, Robert, 8, 38, 502, 509–19, 829 Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 88

847 language, 103, 111, 114, 128, 164, 247, 289–91, 360, 738 music and, 24–6, 289, 311, 352, 353 origins of, 30, 257, 283, 289 use, 133, 206, 381, 705, 823 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 282 Library of Congress, 708, 799 List, George, 708–9, 712 listening publics, 441, 461 Liszt, Franz, 682–4 literature, 261, 378, 390, 426 liturgy, 133, 217, 232–7, 241, 419, 423 Lomax, Alan, 43, 711, 771, 772 lusophone world, 665, 671 Mahabharata, 132, 419, 420 Malinowski, Bronisław, 795 mambo, 731 Mandopop, 612, 620 manuscripts, 137, 147, 233–5, 261, 357, 678–9 maqām, 210, 500, 503 marabi, 59 Marx, Karl, 447–8, 458, 746 mass culture, 59–61, 817 mass media, 50, 55–6, 59, 62, 70, 72, 367, 734, 816, 832, 835 material culture, 127, 418, 450, 640, 836 meaning, 105, 313, 353, 603, 777 memory, 125, 168, 170–1, 244, 247, 432, 563, 777 forgetting, 811–12 history and, 155, 160, 164, 174, 416–17 music and, 215 Merriam, Alan, 9, 640, 642 metaphor, 47, 82, 95, 164, 374, 449, 505, 507, 681, 777–8, 781–3 meter, 108–17, 150, 325, 647, 778 MIDI, 69–72 migration, 65, 172, 365, 421, 445, 454, 500, 560, 815, 833, 836, See also immigration military bands, 77, 324 mimesis, 160, 169, 295, 608, 730, 823 minorities, 143, 204, 206–8, 364, 408, 432, 608, 732, 738, 795 minstrelsy, 88, 194, 730, 731, 813–14, See also African American music, race missionaries, 13–15, 75, 80, 89, 188, 194–5, 284, 292, 294–5, 322, 325, 423, 489, 639, 706 missionization, 162, 184, 425, 539–40 mobility, 445, 601, 828 mode, 34, 43, 45, 49, 105–10, 115–18, 130, 136–8, 140, 147, 342, 386, 403–5, 427, 486, 504–5, 647 intervals, 106, 108–11, 113, 115–17, 131, 140, 192, 285, 305, 486, 504, 681

848 modernity, 1–2, 12, 57–8, 67, 94, 204–5, 262, 265, 273, 457, 538, 606–29, 637–8, 647, 746, 774–6, 781–2, 815, 830 Montaigne, Michel de, 16 Moore, Thomas, 269, 560, 811 Motown, 821 MP3, 65–9 Muhammad (Prophet), 216, 217, 588, 598, 601 multiculturalism, 727, 735, 740, 835 Muqaddimah, 105, 111, 118 museums, 170, 791 music categories, 661–75, 684, 754, See also genre music education. See pedagogy Music Genome Project, 755 music industry. See recording industry music supervisors, 750–3, 759 music theater, 58–9 music videos, 68, 343, 603, 612, 614, 615–18, 620–2, 624–5, 740, See also YouTube musical analysis, 360, 719 musical instruments, 92, 131, 135–6, 189–92, 195, 225, 277, 293, 295–6, 304–6, 340, 359, 397, 407, 417–23, 427, 451, See also organology ‘ ud, 116, 500 alpine horns, 359 as cultural signifiers, 170, 615 bagpipes, 359 bowed lutes, 359 chimes, 420 Chinese traditional, 621–3, 624, 628 chordophones, 653 collections of, 486–7, 533 cymbals, 407, 420 drums, 407, 417, 419, 420, 443 duduk, 752 fiddles, 185–6 flutes, 189, 193, 327, 341, 344, 359, 407, 418, 419, 420, 486, 589 gamelan. See gamelan gongs, 420 guitar, 163, 378, 385, 716 harmonium, 322, 423 harps, 420 horns, 86, 418 iconography of, 134, 148, 331, 385, 460 idiophones, 136, 418, 486 kemengeh, 305 lithophones, 417 lutes, 406, 407, 419, 420 mbira, 638, 653 metallophones, 420 mouth organs, 407, 420 organ, 75, 186, 323, 435 panpipes, 189, 193

Index pipes, 486 pitch-pipes, 404 qin, 78, 92, 414 rabab, 149, 305 record players, 63 reed pipes, 418, 420 ritual function of, 456 shawms, 418 shell trumpets, 420 sitār, 149 steel pan, 574 stringed, 136, 187 synthesizers, 66–7, 341, 344, 460–1, 465, 714 tabla, 150 tanpura, 779 traditional, 344 violin, 151–2, 423, 435 violins, 359 xylophones, 417, 419, 420, 486 zithers, 135, 140, 323, 328, 337, 344, 397, 418, 419, 420, 598 musical notation, 30, 71, 77–8, 138, 173, 268, 293, 310, 329–30, 343, 414, 814 musical theater, 232, 237 MySpace, 753, 758 mysticism, 585, 623 mythology, 159, 166 national anthems, 34, 208, 324, 325, 335, 380, 809, 813 national music, 4, 32, 78, 210, 220, 298, 306–10, 314, 321, 338, 501, 673, 688 nationalism, 83, 204–10, 240, 260–5, 269, 273, 328, 338, 355, 362, 371, 378, 427–8, 500, 501, 508–9, 661, 663, 666, 669 Native American music, 155–74, 815 Nātyasāstra, 135–9 neoliberalism, 16, 445, 461, 464–5, 746–7, 839, See also capitalism networks, 601, 671 norteño, 63 nostalgia, 195, 389, 412, 562, 567, 736, 811, 814, 835 Oceana, 183–97 ontologies of music, 11, 256, 588, 590, 602 opera, 33, 35, 232, 237, 290, 294, 381, 621, 810 Chinese traditional, 616–18, 621, 628 exoticism and, 82, 282–6, 618 oral history, 174, 800 oral tradition, 255, 266, 498, 501, 593 orality, 6, 173 organology, 136, 419, 479, 481, 640, 653 Sachs-Hornbostel system, 481, 647

Index Orientalism, 83, 95, 205–6, 284, 294, 314, 592, 606–29, 739, 837 self-Orientalism, 607, 624 origin myths, 28, 589 orthodoxy, 207, 210, 218, 424, 585 Ottoman Empire, 499, 502, 508, 607 p’ansori, 330, 331–3, 337–8 painting, 149 Pandora, 755–7 Paris Exposition, 427 parody, 67, 607, 624–5, 627, 730 patronage, 57–9, 145, 148–9, 151, 422, 426, 428, 446, 451, 458–9, 463–4, 592, 595, 599, 600 peasants, 354, 355, 362, 566, 775 pedagogy, 49, 76, 105, 115–17, 145, 237, 326–30, 430, 607, 647, 674, 787, 791, 794, 798 philology, 31, 130, 427, 428, 592, 663 philosophy, 103–19, 129–31, 139, 257–9, 260, 282, 787–8, See also ethics moral, 787–8, 802 pragmatism, 788, 799 picó, 65, 72 pilgrimage, 220, 323, 445, 500, 834 Plato, 103, 115 poetry, 106, 110, 117–18, 143–4, 268–72, 361, 380–7, 389, 405–6, 584–6, 589–90, 595, 599, 686–8, 695 music and, 103, 112–15 sung, 103 political economy, 447, 449, 593 politics, 205, 227, 362, 380–1, 389, 407, 434, 671 polka, 77 polyphony, 43, 234, 280, 423 popular music, 38, 50, 55–73, 89, 219, 432–4, 562, 569, 578, 607, 611–29, 643, 672, 715, 738, 750, 807–24 exoticism in, 621 markets, 433 popular-music studies, 673–4, 836, 838 Portugal, 661–75 postcolonialism, 78, 85, 205, 584, 733, 738–9, 740, 777, 782, 789, 823, 826, 832 postmodernism, 11, 67, 744 power relations, 82, 173, 225, 452, 557, 567, 675, 775, 778 powwows, 162, 169, 173–4 Presley, Elvis, 44, 727, 818–20 primitivism, 38, 39, 289, 294–5, 299, 302, 305, 311, 488, 530, 538, 539, 606–7, 618, 638, 712, 731, 740, 775–6 propaganda, 380–1, 666–7 protest songs, 343

849 psychology, 33, 312, 477, 488–90, 495, 777–8 cognitive, 839 evolutionary, 792 of perception, 828 public culture, 445, 600 Pythagoras, 106, 130, 293 qawwālī, 149, 202, 210, 216, 584–604 Qur’an, 217, 425, 588 recitation of, 210, 217, 218, 585–6 race, 183, 248, 299–302, 620, 718, 820–4 blackface, 811–20, 822, See also minstrelsy blackness, 620, 726–40 capitalism and, 729 colonialism and, 729 constructedness of, 726 eugenics, 300 ideologies of, 730, 735, 737 miscegenation, 812, 819, 821 mixing, 228, 232, 241–2, 248 rhythm and, 731 stereotypes, 628 theories of, 192 racism, 2, 5, 299–300, 533, 619, 686, 727, 731, 740, 814 anti-Semitism, 507, 829 racial slurs, 619, 628 radio, 91, 334, 598, 624, 714, 731 state, 599, 666, 672, 673 rāga, 3, 5, 30, 138, 143, 145, 214, 219, 455, 456, 595, 767–8, 778–82 ragtime, 731, 732, 817 Rahman, A. R., 460–5, 752 raï, 59, 63, 66 Ramayana, 132, 419, 420, 422 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 283–96 rap. See hip hop Rara, 565–6 Rastafarianism, 569, 574, 737 rebetika, 59 reception, 8, 268–9, 735 cross-cultural, 627 race and, 188, 740 reciprocity, 292, 542, 549, 551–2, 603, 604, 792, 799–802, See also ethics recording industry, 56, 61–2, 67, 69, 173, 342, 344, 434–5, 445, 594–9, 627, 661, 706, 753, 758, 836 ethnomusicology and, 61–2 independent record companies, 60, 452 world music and, 11, 80, 596, 715, 833 reggae, 64, 66, 89, 343, 569–70, 574–5, 716, 737–9 reggaeton, 562 regionalism, 184, 432

850 Reinhardt, Django, 684, 685 religiosity, 95, 229–32, 575 religious music. See sacred music remix, 64, 739–40 representation, 83, 268, 280, 298, 375, 385, 545, 606–7, 666, 668–71, 809, 820, 823 music as, 214, 767 musical, 125, 189–91, 618, 729 of the other, 282 of the self, 77, 83, 87, 733 Orientalist, 625–8 race and, 733, 734, 738, 740, 822 revivalism, 208, 210 Rhodes, Willard, 10, 531 rhythm, 13, 112, 114, 731–2, 738, 772–4, 782, 817 polyrhythm, 655, 779 pulse, 110, 777–9 race and, 728, 731–2 rhythm circuits, 732 rhythm and blues, 569, 570, 578, 612, 737, 819 riddim, 64, 67, 738, 740 Riemann, Hugo, 35, 47 ritual, 28, 136, 164–5, 171, 202, 203, 210, 212–18, 219–20, 237, 289, 331, 333, 358–9, 417–21, 428, 430, 435, 442–3, 447, 449, 455, 539, 563–7, 576, 585, 587, 593, 602, 604, 669, 772 rock, 56, 62, 84, 412, 432, 435, 622, 712, 737, 819, 836 death metal, 71 heavy metal, 612, 622 post-punk, 716 punk, 343 Roma, 359, 366, 623, 698–9 Romanticism, 256, 268, 270, 373, 383–9, 663 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 258–9, 287, 294, 299, 304, 376, 386, 387, 729, 827 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad, 218 rural, 30, 32, 68, 362, 371–90, 410, 412, 661–75 Sabri, Ghulam Farid, 598–600 Sachs, Curt, 42–3, 48, 49, 426, 480, 486, 510 Sacred Harp, 812 sacred music, 202–21, 428, 563–4, 567, 590, 597 Said, Edward, 83, 223, 313, 606, 611, 832 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, 94–5 saints, 207, 215–20, 226, 230, 231, 242–3, 421, 587, 590, 592–3, 601 salsa, 67, 562, 717 samā‘, 105, 217, 584–604 samba, 247, 344, 731 sampling, 67, 618, 714, 739

Index satire, 114, 689 scale. See mode scenes, 57, 58–61, 71, 72, 343 secular music, 232, 594 Seeger, Charles, 662, 797 semiotics, 283, 735 sentiment, 85, 207–8, 211, 306, 387, 671, See also emotion September 11 attacks, 739, 807, 809, 812 sexuality, 58, 301, 382, 400, 442, 693, 697, 731, 740, 817–23 shamanism, 158, 332–3, 539 shōka, 325 Sikhism, 202–21 Silk Road, 94, 133–4 Simon, Paul, 88, 614, See also Ladysmith Black Mambazo Graceland, 88, 92 slavery, 223–49, 557–80, 686, 730, 808, 812–13, 831 Slavic languages, 353 soca, 66–7, 562, 578, 738 social hierarchies, 58, 448, 778, 781, 823 social life as text, 831 social media, 758 socialism, 352, 364, 409, 459 Society for American Music, 791, 796 Society for Ethnomusicology, 9–10, 363, 789, 792, 798, 833 position statements, 790, 796, 801 songbooks, 56–7, 665 sonideros, 65 soukous, 63 sound archives, 5, 501, 532, 534, 829, See also Berlin Phonogram Archive national, 354, 498, 502, 514–19 Vienna Phonogrammarchiv, 499, 515, 706 sound media. See technology South Asia, 202–21, See also India Southeast Asia, 416–36 Soviet Union, 342, 352, 363, 409, 540, 807 Spencer, Herbert, 298, 301–3, 310–11 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 83, 93 storytelling, 332, 412 strophes, 272, 360–1, 675 Stumpf, Carl, 196, 354, 427, 478, 480, 488, 493–4, 495, 707 subalternity, 63, 205, 268, 371–4, 381, 584, 591, 624 subcultures, 26, 44, 55, 64, 72–3 subjectivity, 9–10 Sufism, 142, 148, 202, 210, 212–18, 421–2, 428, 584–604 syncretism, 47, 62, 79, 91, 159, 204, 208, 216, 423, 425, 433, 563, 627, 642, 643, 731

Index Tagore, Rabindranath, 208, 209 Tagore, Sourindro Mohun, 5, 35, 131, 206, 209 tāla, 140, 143, 768–71, 779–80, 782 tango, 59, 60, 343, 449, 673 Tantra, 135, 419, 420, 421, 429 t ̣arab, 79, 586 taste, 744–61 technocultures, 71 technology, 6–9, 11, 16, 57, 65, 163, 353, 463, 490, 505, 597, 618, 662, 774, 794, 828, 836 computers, 460, 462, 465, 718, 753, 759 ethnomusicological research and, 707 fidelity of, 709 gramophone, 91, 333, 334, 451, 457, 501, 597, 706, 710 liveness and, 602, 713–14, 717–18 magnetic tape, 709 mobile phones, 617, 756, 760 phonograph, 482–6, 491, 501, 507, 640, 705–6, 710, 731, 829 reel-to-reel, 526, 536, 541 sound media, 5, See also cassette cultures, vinyl records traditional values and, 716 wax cylinder, 7, 481–3, 495 tejano, 63 television, 70, 431, 461, 551, 599, 623, 735, 745, 750–2 state, 334, 599 temporality, 1, 13, 95, 159, 203, 211, 214, 590, See also time terrorism, 813, 835 teyyam, 216–17, 442–3, 446, 456–60 theater, 135, 272, 331–2, 420, 422, 426 Tiananmen Square, 84, 613 timba, 68 time, 767–84, See also temporality cosmic, 781 metaphysics of, 776, 784 temporal perception, 777 time scales, 778, 779, 781, 783 Tin Pan Alley, 608, 710, 816–17 tonality, 287, 504 topography, 171–2, 669 tourism, 90, 157, 359, 426, 428, 430, 432, 434, 445, 452, 578, 601, 670 Tracey, Hugh, 650, 711 traditional music, 78, 321, 329, 430, 502, 611, 615, 619, 639, 815 trance, 603 transcription, 82, 193, 307, 325, 329, 356, 503, 524, 533, 544, 655 translation, 146, 152, 256, 264, 268, 270–4, 329, 816, 826

851 transmission, 3, 10, 194, 215, 255, 265, 268, 330, 336, 338, 454, 592, 647 travel literature, 194, 303 tristes, 377, 379, 382 Turnbull, Colin, 644, 653 universalism, 16, 25, 94, 259, 279, 280, 288, 290, 291, 295, 296, 298, 311, 808 of music, 277–8, 279, 287, 292, 295, 310, 705 universal history, 4–5, 35, 105, 190, 259, 281 urban, 58, 59, 149, 152, 234, 332, 382, 383–5, 410–12, 500, 571, 627, 665, 672, 712–13, 716, 817 vaudeville, 608, 672 vinyl records, 61, 63–7 78-rpm, 674 violence, 2, 13–14, 15–16, 186–7, 192, 224, 453, 456, 557–9, 561, 797–8, 822, 834 virtuosity, 45, 139, 219, 234, 323, 599, 683 Vodou, 564–6 voice, 588 Volkslied. See folk song Volksmusik. See folk music Wang, Leehom, 611–29 war, 15, 94, 157, 164, 188, 248, 324, 357, 424, 426, 429, 432, 557, 796, 812–13, 814, 834 weddings, 106, 458, 518 Western art music, 23, 29, 61, 71, 235, 292, 410 appropriation of, 607, 622 as world music, 75–96 colonialism and, 75–81 complexity of, 290 composition, 335–41 crossovers, 343 education, 326–7 mimesis and, 241 nationalism and, 90 popularity of, 334–5 scholarship on, 2, 11, 29, 31–42, 46–50, 196, 727, 828, 836 westernization, 336, 606–8, 831 work. See labor world beat, 11, 50, 80, 608, 614–15 World War I, 36, 362, 425, 479, 495, 508, 731 World War II, 8, 56, 78, 83, 168, 354–7, 362, 416, 495, 512, 667, 696, 712, 731, 829 World’s Columbian Exposition, 7, 815 yaraví, 377–9 YouTube, 68, 597, 601, 603, 734–5, 753 Zionism, 499, 507–9, 512, 514 zouk, 562