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Ideas
of Culture and the Challenge of Music
It would seem natural that
anthropologists who are students of culture would be deeply involved
with the arts, but anthropologists think of culture within a
specialized frame of reference that stands in ironic distinction to
widely held ideas that identify culture with art. To be sure, the
artistic artifacts of ancient civilizations are a significant focus of
archaeological interest, as are any artifacts that seem to be
expressions of the mentality of living groups that anthropologists
study. By and large, however, in anthropological thought the arts
are derivative of other factors of human life that relate directly to
evolutionary adaptation and survival. From such a perspective,
culture is based on patterns of interaction with the material world,
and art is a reflection and affirmation of that level of culture, not
even necessarily self-conscious. It is not surprising that in
anthropology, the least considered art is the least material one:
music.
To many people in the world,
music is a universal language. Some have even speculated that
music might offer a way to communicate with aliens from beyond the
stars. To anthropologists, however, music is something that
separates people as much as it connects them — indeed, even connects
some people in order to exclude others. The idea that different
people have different tastes in music inspires no debate, perhaps
because the issue seems of little importance. People can really
hate other people’s music, but I do not remember the last time anyone
fought a war over music. Nor do I know anyone who would argue
that we all need to listen to the same music, except maybe on certain
special occasions involving sports or patriotism, and then the issue is
once again about who we are or are not. For social scientists,
especially anthropologists, issues involving different musical
preferences are codes for parochial perceptions. Until just
recently, Western anthropologists worked mainly in places where, in
Western perception, the local music was denigrated in equal measure
with the particular locals under investigation. And of course,
even with the invention of media that can take sounds from one place to
another, the music of those other people has generally been a big
stumbling block on the path toward empathy.
Non-Western music: How
are anthropologists to talk about it? Whenever an anthropologist
stayed in the field long enough to learn to appreciate the music there,
the overwhelming fact about the music remained how odd it sounded to
European ears. As social scientists, anthropologists have held to
two rudimentary ideas about music. First, any particular type of
music itself is less important than the various ways people in
different cultures deal with it. Second, musical taste is
entirely relative because it is a product of culture: music is
culturally organized and culturally meaningful sound. Thus, the
fact that some people can completely fail to appreciate noise that
others find musical, and vice versa, is a good example of cultural
relativity, but not much more. Music is significant as an aspect
of culture, but music is difficult to talk about, and anyway, music is
something like a residue of more fundamental cultural concerns.
Clear enough, one might say,
but such ideas are qualified by the ambiguities of culture, in
particular the differences between social scientific discussions of
culture as a way of life and the more common use of the concept to
indicate refined and enlightened development in arts and letters.
This division of thought remains as influential today as ever: in
a multicultural world where people of diverse heritages mingle,
anthropologists have been champions of toleration and have maintained
their focus on social customs and group life. Many
anthropologists would proudly claim credit for their discipline’s role
in advancing the idea of cultural relativity, an image of the world as
a pluralistic and continuously changing place where all points of view
are relative and somehow complementary, where lots of little lower-case
truths provide cumulative complexity, a variety of alternatives and
thus a presumption of choice. And we should note that asserting
the relativity of human experience ironically certifies anthropology’s
main mission of comprehending the human species — its origins, nature
and diversity — as a unified picture. Apparent differences are
really variations of a theme, and nuanced cultural portraits reveal the
hidden complementarities that can connect cultures. The
intellectual agent of anthropological relativism is the sophisticated
significance that has accrued to the concept of “culture” as an
alchemical term used to straddle the old philosophical problem of the
One and the Many.
“Culture” is an amazingly
plastic concept, ever ready for further articulation, something
somewhat ineffable that characterizes a distinct group of people and is
passed down from generation to generation as a medium for growth and
adaptation. The root ethno-
in ethnography and ethnology denotes a folk or a
nation or a people united by culture. But whether cultivated from
the inside or imposed from the outside, cultural identity is an elusive
vision that always degenerates into a muddle at its boundaries.
Cultural anthropologists work at these boundaries, germinating their
theories out of the muddles. Anthropological writings about
culture typically stand as testimony to overcoming boundaries through
the face-to-face encounters and relationships between an anthropologist
and “other” people who are “different” from the anthropologist.
Nevertheless, the anthropologist seeks and finds evidence of a shared
humanity. Wherever they are, human beings have to get food,
organize their communities, raise children, deal with death, and so on,
handling all the imperatives of life amid all the institutional
permutations and solutions that their ecology, history, and
imaginations can produce. In this cultural laboratory, our common
humanity is elevated to truth in various theoretical systems of
classification and comparison of cultural responses to basic human
needs. Ultimately, though, when everything has become comparable
and the hidden complementarities are explained, the last thing to be
understood is that which is thought to be farthest from the necessities
of life: art. Indeed, in mainstream Western intellectual
traditions the notion of pure aesthetic judgment is defined negatively,
that is, by the absence of interest based on need. Thus within
the anthropological agenda, art is normally seen as an expressive and
derivative element of culture, something that enhances structures and
functions that are already there, and therefore something about as far
as possible from real significance. With its emphasis on the
physical factors of life, anthropology seems an infertile field for
comparative aesthetics.
In the centers of Western
civilization, a narrower concept of “culture” dominates intellectual
exchange, in which culture occupies its own territory within society
instead of permeating the whole. Culture is seen as a refinement
of human experience, approaching the spiritual, representing people’s
identity in an essential way that is separate from what they have to do
to survive. Culture in this sense is often associated and
appropriated by people of means and power, those seemingly least
affected by life’s bodily struggles because they are above the nitty
gritty and the hoi polloi. They and those who interpret culture
for them have not completely forgotten the allusion of culture to
ethos, but there are distinctions: real art occupies the elevated
realm of “high” culture; other creative expressions that celebrate
“low” culture or “popular” culture are understood as “folk” art,
folklore or crafts. Along with the associations of social class,
the distinction is poignantly indicated in that the higher art normally
has to be subsidized, while the lower forms support themselves with
more immediate forms of participation or give and take. What
message could anthropology contribute in such an incongruous
climate? Committed to demonstrating what alien peoples have in
common by rationalizing their differences into larger systems,
anthropology would seem forced into a posture critical of such divisive
discourse. Nonetheless, from anthropology’s early years, when
Western world dominance was being articulated in every way,
anthropology did not challenge this competing model of culture, and the
discipline has had little to contribute directly to the broader issues
pertaining to art.
And so what would
anthropology have to do with music? Answering that question is
something of a minor project that reflects the character of
anthropology’s intellectual mission. Because music is the least
material of the arts, people can more easily get an idea of other arts
that can exist in some sort of physical form: much sculpture and
decorative arts can be carried from place to place; poetry, drama and
literature can be written; architecture and some paintings and
sculpture can be portrayed in drawings or somewhat adequately described
in prose. Until recently, however, music could not be heard
outside an actual performance context. And in the highly critical
world of music appreciation and music scholarship, where even today
people are still holding on to belief in a Western canon and defending
its accustomed place in Western education, anthropology has had little
impact. Perhaps art is the last bastion of parochialism that
anthropology could not surmount; perhaps anthropologists have not tried
very hard.
Nevertheless, since
anthropology’s territory is the whole species for the last few million
years, then music-making, while not thought particularly important
except as an evolutionary marker, is certainly grist for the
mill. Thus there is a slightly obscure discipline,
“ethnomusicology,” that joins anthropology and musicology. Since
anthropology’s early years, however, the root ethno- and the word ethnic have had a privative
connotation, designating people by what they are not, which was that
they are not Western, reserving the more restricted concept of high
culture for the West and signalling the application of the broader and
lower concept of culture elsewhere. Ethnomusicology conforms to
that outdated heritage. Ethnomusicology is usually seen not as
the study of music in culture but as the study of music in “other”
cultures. The territory comprises any music that is not in the
canon of European classical music, a difference that in practice
separates Western “art” music from non-Western music as well as
folkloric music and popular music.
Accepting this division in
fields of study has had broad consequences with regard to the very
conception of music per se, reflected in the existence of very
different epistemologies, that is, different ideas about methods of
studying music and about what constitutes an understanding of
music. One can infer that originally such a division separated a
type of music — Western — that was to be criticized or appreciated from
“other” types of music that required “understanding” validated by
objectivity instead of judgment. Today, this latter type of
understanding of “other” musical idioms is based on the explanation of
the cultural meaning of the music. Indeed, ethnomusicology itself
can be defined by the anthropological proposition that musical idioms
should be understood in context and that musical meaning is culturally
determined. But this central demonstration of ethnomusicology did
not happen overnight. A century ago, the matter was not even much
of an issue. A few idealists might have viewed music as a
universal language, capable of creating bridges across cultural
boundaries. For the most part, separating Western art music from
other musics merely reflected the way of world, in which almost
everything about the former was elevated and refined — the patrons, the
presumed aesthetic effects, the discourse, the performance skills, the
expensive elite venues. The ethno-
in ethnomusicology affirmed a
scholarly division of labor that continues to relegate ethnomusicology
to a marginal position (if any position at all) in music schools.
As scholars, ethnomusicologists remain members of the elite culture of
universities and museums. But even today, ethnomusicology is seen
as separate from historical musicology or music history, also similarly
defined in department guides as the study of music in its wider
cultural and social contexts, as if the mainstream historians deal with
genuine music and the ethnomusicologists deal with curiosities.
Even today, musicologists are naively capable of attending a lecture by
an ethnomusicologist and blithely asking, “What does your talk tell us
about music?”
One of the problems with the
prefix ethno- is that it is
almost by definition in opposition to the pluralistic and multicultural
world that is emerging. The very name of the discipline links it
to an inherent and invalid negation that alienates anything non-Western
in many subtle ways. In today’s world, the existence of such a
division is grating in some cases, absurd in others, and quite
frequently an embarrassment. The word ethnomusicology also seems to link
the field to colonialism and to anthropology’s role in that historical
time as well as to contemporary neocolonialism and racism.
Admittedly, it is a bit risky to use colonialism as an emblem of racism
and exploitation: the colonial period was a time when the larger
historical movement of humanity toward a multicultural world took major
steps forward. Nonetheless, I think most people today would agree
that the idea of defining a subdiscipline as the study of non-Western
anything is politically loaded. The prefix ethno- certainly is a stumbling
block that has real impact on just about anybody who is tuned into the
kind of soundscape our modern world provides.
There are many complicated
and ambiguous reasons why ethnomusicology is studied in music schools
instead of anthropology departments. Anthropology departments do
not generally teach courses on the music of Africa, India, Indonesia,
Native America, or any of the places that anthropologists might think
of as their province for social scientific work. Of course, until
recently, such courses were not part of any music curriculum
either. A century ago, when one could only hear music where it
was performed, only a few early travelers had written descriptions of
musical events in various parts of the world, and most of these
descriptions had not been culled from archives for general scholarly
consumption. It was well into the twentieth century before
scholars could get samples of non-Western music to listen to, apart
from local or staged folk music. By the same token, non-Western
music was also inaccessible to the paradigms and terminology
anthropologists used. Also, in the not-so-distant past
anthropology was not yet promoting relativism but was more concerned
with understanding cultural evolution and where different societies
should be placed on an evolutionary scale. Non-Western music was
therefore something for which they sought material examples for
museums, to be exhibited alongside prehistoric bones and stones.
It is not clear whether those in the vanguard of European colonialism
actually disliked indigenous music. I have not read an account of
a district commissioner dancing or doing anything at local festivals
except watching. In films set in the colonial era, when we see
isolated Westerners made desperate by local music, the music mainly
serves as a symbol of an ubiquitous and overwhelming presence of the
“other” culture; more significant, perhaps, is the implication that
music can fittingly represent the “otherness” of a culture and thereby
become a symbol of a realm beyond the limits of understanding.
Let us not yet talk about missionaries, who have been such a convenient
target for concerned intellectuals; everyone is implicated in history.
Nonetheless, while
closed-minded people burned sculptures deemed to be pagan idols, a few
of the more open-minded who gathered idols to take home must also have
gathered musical instruments as if they were accumulating power
objects. I once visited the back rooms of the Musée de l’Homme in
Paris: uncountable musical instruments were piled to the ceiling,
like bones in a Capuchin crypt. I suppose the scene is the
same in the storerooms of other museums of former colonial
nations. Indeed, musical instruments are still displayed as art
and artifacts in contemporary exhibitions, for example, such as one
just a few years ago at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African
Art, where despite contemporary technology, one could not press a
button to hear a recording of any displayed instrument.
But why were these
instruments carefully collected and shipped and catalogued at
all? Perhaps curators and collectors hoped that African or Native
American music could here or there contribute an intriguing motif for
refinement in European art music, as other folk traditions had already
done. One can assume that the collectors, whether anthropologists
or not, had other priorities besides music, but at least they had a
regard for cultural acquisitiveness. After all, the same elites
who patronized and sponsored European museums also patronized
orchestral music in concert halls. As seems always the case
everywhere, at the centers of power, where the highest artistic
expression is achieved, things tend to get a bit stuffy. Folk
traditions from the periphery, from the provinces or colonies, or
revived from the past, are tapped to provide creative inspiration for
the development of sophisticated styles at the center. At the
center the folk traditions are both stylized and refined with technical
innovation, becoming distinctive and often classical. When the
classical tradition becomes too mannered or academic, new ideas from
the periphery again infuse the high art of the center and help it reach
a further elaboration of style. Those instrumental artifacts in
the museums are testimony to some very tentative musical excursions in
the vanguard of this process that never came to much.
During the colonial period,
the most serious engagement with non-Western music was probably
occurring in Christian missions. In the face of varying degrees
of contestation, a trend gradually emerged toward the translations of
more and more sections of the liturgy into the vernacular. The
anthropological subfield of linguistics benefited greatly from the
challenges of translating the Bible and from the philosophical subfield
of hermeneutics, which featured discussions of the limitations and
complexities of translating sacred texts. Hand in hand with these
undertakings, missions often took the lead in educational and literacy
efforts to cultivate leadership and devotion, with two musical
consequences. First, indigenous music was the gradually adapted
and adopted into the liturgy. Second, several products of the
local schools became knowledgeable about Western music and were able to
contribute to the adaptation of hymns and other works as well as
compose significant works on their own for use in local services.
If conservative souls were concerned about the effect of indigenous
styles within the musical traditions of sectarian worship, indigenous
composers for their part worried about preserving what they understood
as the defining elements of their traditional styles. All the
people involved in these processes made some sort of peace with
hermeneutic issues and had hands-on learning experiences at the meeting
of musical worlds.
Given the linkage between
missions and education, the local academic presence of local music has
often reflected the legacy of such composers, whose social and
intellectual inclinations were more toward musicology than
anthropology. Moreover, their cross-cultural efforts at the edges
of Christendom found an occasional audience or forum among their
colleagues in music schools, where their compositional idioms conformed
to recognized genres. Whatever the extent that ethnomusicologists
see themselves as positioned between musicology and anthropology, the
logical extension of initial encounters with non-Western music was
toward musicology. It was unquestioned that musical notation
could provide a more adequate representation of the music than a
descriptive text. The problems the early ethnomusicologists faced
had much to do with responding to the challenges of non-Western music
in musical terms, and they saw themselves as working toward the
development of music theory, finding ways to enhance their own
community of scholars by hammering out a common language. Like
anthropologists, they assumed a fundamental universalism, and they
sought the conceptions and principles that could encompass additional
musical diversity and thus sophisticate comparative musicology.
Far removed from the
religious needs of new, non-Western congregations, scholars of music
theory found a lot of ready-made data in any available non-Western
music, which contained all kinds of unfamiliar ways of structuring
sound. The people who created those musical structures had
already made their contribution and were of only circumstantial
interest: they could fill in circumstantial details about the
music, such as how they designed and made the instruments that produced
the sounds. Anthropologists could help in this latter area, the
study of musical instruments, by collecting them, though — judging from
the piles of unused ones in the museums — mainly for others to
analyze. Up to now, a weird fetishism seems to have attached
itself to musical instruments from far-off places, and people get
excited about ones that are older than others or were associated with
non-Christian religious rituals. Such estimation resembles the
way commodity value is determined for the plastic arts. As for
the music itself, nascent ethnomusicology was so specialized — so
musical — that anthropologists observing musical events were either
intimidated or disinclined. The retrospective consensus among
ethnomusicologists is that anthropologists felt they lacked the
training or techniques or skills to work on music. Given the
nature of the beast at that time, the anthropologists were right.
Ethnomusicology belonged in music schools where people did musical
analysis. Anthropologists were peripheral characters who worked
in other buildings on campus or in the museums.
By the mid-twentieth century
in Europe and America, the situation began to change, and non-Western
music served as a different type of artifact for a different
theoretical purpose. Many anthropologists were still attached to
museums and still helping to plan displays about material culture in
less developed societies, but evolutionary paradigms gradually gave
ground in intercultural encounters between trained anthropological
researchers who were only indirectly related to colonial agendas of
social administration or religious conversion. Many social
scientists who viewed Western chauvinism as a curable disease argued
strongly about the relativity of cultural practices, including, by
extension, cultural judgments. Musical life also came under the
anthropologist’s lens, perhaps as something derivative or peripheral to
what a social situation was really about, but certainly something
there. From this invigorated social scientific perspective
emerged a potential anthropology of music. Music-making is a type
of behavior, and people interested in music can study the
institutionalization of music-making in that light: the
recruitment and training of musicians, performance styles, performance
venues like festivals and celebrations, religious and political roles
of music, song texts, composition, patronage, ecological and
instrumental resources, and so on. Information about music was
considered complementary to the information about more significant
institutions in the economic and political realms. There was a
general conviction in social and cultural anthropology that any valid
observation was data that could eventually be plugged into a systematic
network of information, a permanent store of knowledge that could be
codified and correlated in myriad ways. Ethnographers everywhere
accepted the idea that their work was relevant to this grand
project. Musical activity was an hors d’oeuvre on the smorgasbord
at which they feasted.
It is somewhat strange,
though, that in the anthropological record, there are many descriptions
of events that contain little or no reference to the music that we know
was a part of the scene. And indeed, music was very often
there. Western observers felt that abdicating aesthetic issues
was justified: unlike Western music which exists in its own
bounded world, non-Western music often appears attached to other
activities and thus somehow related to institutional functions.
The basic assumption has always been that music makes whatever is
happening more itself, no small feat when one thinks about it;
nonetheless, one can understand whatever is happening perfectly well
without needing that extra bit of intensity for one’s descriptive
palette. Reading ethnographies, you might even think that people
in the non-Western world rarely make music. It is an ironic and
shocking contrast, no doubt intentional at the time, that Colin
Turnbull’s classic 1961 book on the people formerly known as pygmies, The Forest People, begins with a
strange survey of previous cultural portraits, which he assesses with
regard to the degree the authors note the continual singing, dancing
and music-making that dominated his own perception of the people.
Turnbull was skeptical of anyone who did not deal with music.
Anthropology would be a far different discipline than it is today if it
had been immersed in the same questions about art that have concerned
its elite patrons in their own cultural reflections. Missing in
the early images of non-Western music was a sense that the music as an
art presented evidence of high cultural development. Indeed,
there seemed to be no interest in the questions of why music seems so
important to so many people, why music refers to so many things beyond
itself, or how music could become so highly developed in so many
materially impoverished societies. The non-Western world is full
of such places where music has been elevated by intensive intellectual
and creative energy to levels of sophistication that challenged almost
every other image of these societies in the Western agenda.
Mid-twentieth-century social
scientists were likely to reply with kneejerk relativism, maintaining
the significance of context over expression. Aesthetic matters,
if they are to be addressed at all, should be framed by ethnographic
knowledge of the surrounding cultural context, and knowing the symbolic
associations and social significance of any art is the key to
understanding it. The idea of a common humanity inspired the
modern notion of cultural relativity, but it was generally thought that
such affinities could not be reliably extended into the ambiguous realm
of artistic sympathy. But then again, getting too involved in
ethnographic details pretty much precludes any sense of artistic depth
— just the opposite, in effect: all that cerebral mediation can
be alienating and dull. The whole matter has always been a real
conundrum. In mid-century, it was possible for a leading
anthropologist like Robert Redfield to be self-consciously heretical in
commenting on the possibility of transcending cultural boundaries at a
museum exhibition, by suggesting that Westerners cultivate the
immediacy of direct encounters with non-Western art and by arguing
against the discipline’s inclination toward studied contextual
explanations.
Professionally,
anthropologists collect information about the social location and
social role of art, but it takes a long time. Until recently,
anthropologists stayed so long in the field that they really believed
that they knew, truly and deeply, the people they studied. That
deep knowledge, paradoxically, established their credibility through
the systematic intricacy of their writings more than through the
replicability of their observations. After all, there are not a
lot of anthropologists, and they are spread out. When they have
achieved that depth, typically alone in their mission, has it not been
their great temptation to believe that they, at least, had transcended
the complex and different cultural configurations that their work
objectified? Thus tempted, some would become possessive of their
empathy and hold it up as a bulwark of authority against anyone else,
especially some of their colleagues who worked in the same place.
But would not the larger spirits among them hope that others could also
achieve it — could move beyond an ideal of respectful relations between
strangers toward a true community of humankind? Back in the
museums through most of the twentieth century, paleontologists were
convinced that humankind is a single species, and they were on the
track of a single ancestor. The human sentiments through which
people could actually recognize themselves in “others” might also allow
the possibility of an unmediated appreciation of art.
In the museums, nobody can
play the instruments well enough to command a public performance venue,
and the instruments have remained on shelves, except for those of
exquisite manufacture that can be displayed among the plastic
arts. Interest in non-Western art was stimulated by the expanding
contacts of the age of imperialism, but that interest had deeper
precedents, starting from the Renaissance fascination with the pagan
world and the Enlightenment projection of the ideal of natural law and
the noble savage. Manifestations of both alienation and quest,
these conceptions existed in counterpoint to the dominant history of
control and consolidation. As noted, the museums that display the
evidence of paleontology and archaeology also participated in
collecting evidence of achievements in the realm of culture, and
artifacts verifiably collected on location partake of this projected
value. Within a notion of cultural evolution, non-Western
cultural achievements could be compared, unfavorably, to those of the
Western world. However, from another well-grounded Western
perspective, in which the way of the world is the corruptor of the
human spirit, the value of these artifacts actually increases with
their distance from the Western centers of power. It is spurious
to compare wood carvings to a Michelangelo sculpture or musical
instruments to a Stradivarius violin. In a polarized world of
“us” and “others,” distance from the Western centers implies closeness
to the opposite centers. Documentation of the non-Western
artifacts thus has carried the burden of demonstrating the roles of the
objects in native life, particularly how much and for how long the
objects have played those roles in the institutions of their
locales. For anthropological purposes, as comparative criteria
moved further toward issues of cultural integrity, the denotation of
authenticity has defined the commodity value of any given object.
On its own terms,
anthropology came to advocate a contextual approach that did not go as
far as the approach evident in other types of modern art criticism,
such as, for example, attempting to view a Renaissance painting or a
Greek temple with reference to the creative period’s cultural milieu as
an interpretive tool, a potential pathway toward culturally informed
experience and a perspective on the participatory nature of the art’s
aesthetic mediation. Instead, concerns of tradition and
authenticity led to aesthetic perspectives based on form and style and
to explanations of mediation based on cognition and knowledge. In
promoting this limited type of cultural relativism, anthropologists and
ethnomusicologists abdicated broad aesthetic issues of perception and
feeling. In the mid-twentieth century, probably influenced by
Western concert-hall performance models, ethnomusicologists accepted a
narrow Western definition of aesthetic values as judgments on matters
of beauty and feelings about art objects. From a musicological
perspective, the task was to study and analyze abstracted forms that
were or could be removed from their original creative context.
Many ethnomusicologists would have asserted that aesthetic concerns are
inaccessible to comparative research and even irrelevant to art that
explicitly serves a social purpose in cultures without traditions of
artistic criticism similar to those in the West. It would be
another generation before scholars would look at a performance context
with the idea that the aesthetics of music could be tied to how the
music achieved its effectiveness in social situations. We now
appreciate how rhythms can be used to establish and coordinate
distinctive patterns of interaction among participants in a musical
context, and as such, musical structures and performance dynamics can
be interpreted as significant contributors to cultural style and social
cohesion. Even well into the 1960s, however, as the colonial
period was formally ending and anthropologists were focusing on the
transformation of traditional societies, ethnomusicologists pursued
their musicological mission in harmonious concert with an increasingly
out-of-date anthropological vision that valued precolonial traditions
for exemplary cultural integrity. For example, there were
scholarly articles taking the position that non-Western popular music
played by non-Western musicians using Western instruments in dancehall
settings was derivative and not within the scope of the discipline; in
contrast to the music of indigenous historical traditions, the popular
music lacked depth, symbolic complexity and cultural inspiration.
Even though the local people liked it and gravitated toward the
intermingled forms, scholars were unprepared to deal with the music and
tried to ignore it.
But at least anthropology
had entered the game for real. As the discipline has increased
its presence in the Western intellectual environment, many
ethnomusicologists have moved toward the anthropological side of their
disciplinary axis. In a pattern that continues to remain
compelling, the contributions of mid-twentieth-century anthropology to
the study of non-Western music have been made not so much by people
with degrees in anthropology as by musicologists and musicians who are
influenced by anthropology. Anthropology has always had its share
of seekers, but those who have advanced the field of ethnomusicology
are basically people who love music. Perhaps the process was a
luxury in the twilight of the colonial era, but more and more people
have been documenting the stunning variety of musical traditions in the
world, and thus has the cumulative record acquired weight. The
legacy of the seekers has changed almost every aspect of
ethnomusicology except for its usual location in music departments, and
despite what some musicologists would prefer, anthropological
perspectives have assumed intellectual dominance in the field.
Functionalism, structuralism, semiotics, symbolic interactionism,
symbolic anthropology, and so on: all have their influence.
More important, perhaps,
ethnomusicologists have adopted the anthropological method of
participant-observation, and they have spent lots of time with
music-makers in other cultures. A musical apprenticeship often
provides the framework for their intercultural relationships, a role
that often prompts their teachers to offer a more detailed and intimate
understanding than could ever have been available from a consistently
analytical or objectifying approach. As participants in the
musical traditions, disciples of their performance masters,
ethnomusicologists gain evidence for a refined understanding of
tradition’s movement from generation to generation. Early models
of non-Western art were based on a rather static image of
tradition. These models presumed a stability in style that
attributed superiority to earlier forms which preceded cross-cultural
contact as definitive — hence the concern with artifacts and their
authentication. One correlated idea was that artistic forms were
passed down from generation to generation, and performers mainly had to
learn or master the idiom of the tradition. As Western
apprentices have become involved with living artists and more aware of
local critical contexts, they have gained insight into the challenges
that various artforms pose to aspiring practitioners, challenges that
link the personal and the aesthetic realms and reflect considerably the
art’s current location in the social environment, including the
mind-boggling vicissitudes inherent in the possibility, explicitly
accepted by their teachers, that a Westerner can be trained to be a
vehicle for the tradition.
Anthropological interests
have thus led ethnomusicology further into the study of music as human
behavior and into uncharted territory in cross-cultural
relationships. Suspended in an uneasy limbo remained the
fundamental issue of the difference between anthropology’s wide
conception of culture and musicology’s elitist conception.
Although many scholars continue to address theoretical concerns about
music as structured sound, the main influence of anthropologically
informed studies of music has been to undermine the musicological
approach. An effort to ground music in a cultural context does
not merely reflect a social scientific inclination to the abandonment
of musicological analysis, nor does it merely reflect the belief
that issues of musical meaning should be addressed with regard to
the
references and associations of indigenous people. More than that,
the case has been argued persuasively that it is not possible to
understand a piece of non-Western music from a score or a
recording. Efforts to isolate or abstract so-called musical
elements analytically have tended to yield not just one-sided or
limited descriptions but rather have often led to actual mistakes in
perception and analysis.
In Africa, for example, the
types of musical decisions that musicians make are generally based on
the situational or symbolic dimensions of the musical
performance. Quite apart from such obvious factors as the
relationship of music to language, as both speech and oral art, what a
musician plays is generally determined by the specific people who are
at a performance, why they are there, what they are doing at a given
moment, and even what may be happening in the general society beyond
the context of the particular gathering. The dynamics of the
performance also reflect the dynamics and pacing of the ongoing event
the music enhances. Although African musical performances can
often be characterized as improvisational, the improvisation generally
has a social or situational reference that may be more important than
any reference to generative musical structures. Therefore,
without an orientation grounded in a performance’s social dimensions,
matters as diverse as choice of repertoire or choice of improvisational
motif cannot be understood. Both theoretically and practically,
Western composers and music theorists interested in cultivating African
influences may find this state of affairs frustrating, as most efforts
to abstract African musical structures are generally superficial by
definition.
For example, at a dance
gathering in an African society, what might sound like a complex
rhythmic elaboration may rather be a proverbial praise-name articulated
on an instrument in recognition of a particular person’s lineage, or
perhaps represent an invocation for a particular deity or
ancestor. What might seem to be creative inspiration in changing
a rhythmic or melodic line might turn out to be a musical allusion to
another dance, inserted as a joke, as an experiment, or because of
confusion. The types of dances played and their stylistic
variations may vary from situation to situation as a reflection of the
composition of the assembly. Particular pieces or even inserted
motifs might reflect mythic or historical allusions, or they might
reflect the presence of a particular dancer. Such widely varying
contextual elements are the kinds of things many African musicians
think about and focus on while making musical decisions, and what they
are doing musically cannot be inferred from the musical elements that
would be evident from an audio recording or a score. As a result,
in-depth studies of African musical idioms must be more ethnographic
than musicological in perspective. Some people still venture
purely musicological analyses out of allegiance to the old presumed
canon asserting the priority of musicology in ethnomusicology’s
interdisciplinary disposition; later, perhaps, someone who knows more
about the social and cultural context of the performance, or who knows
the musical repertoire in greater detail, will provide data to
demonstrate that the first scholar overinterpreted the musical elements
with the aid of an active and hopeful imagination. Occasionally,
of course, misinterpretations can serve a useful purpose when
transported to other realms of creativity, but they do so as an ironic
victim of the relativism they were projected to overcome.
As might be expected,
culturally informed approaches to music derive the greater part of
their significance in cultural terms more than in musical terms.
The most obvious consequence is simply increased respect for
non-Western people and cultures. As I noted, music can be the
focus of tremendous intellectual and artistic creativity in societies
that have been demeaned by various standards — as materially
impoverished, as technologically underdeveloped, as historically
vulnerable to exploitation and oppression. Whatever music’s
weight in theories about social structure, people value music:
they frequently have a surprising ability to appreciate a foreign
musical idiom, and even if they cannot easily appreciate it, they still
give it respect as a higher order of achievement. Music, like
other arts, does help people establish connections with other people
they do not know; as such, music traverses cultural boundaries and
plays a role in overcoming prejudice and negative images.
Although there is an inherent friction between an unmediated experience
and a culturally informed experience of art, there are many cases where
the two perspectives work in concert, where people like an unfamiliar
music to begin with and like it even more when they understand the
creativity involved.
A place where I spent many
years, in northern Ghana among the Dagbamba people, exemplifies this
point well. The Dagbamba generally were not interested in
adapting to the institutions of their British colonizers, many of whom
in turn considered the Dagbamba stubborn and backward; the Dagbamba
remain somewhat vulnerable to domination by the national government and
by economic interests from the more developed southern regions of
Ghana. Their musical institutions, however, offer a key to
understanding the depth of their cultural life and the validity of any
claim they might make for a well-lit place on the world stage.
Their music is anchored in epic songs that convey episodes in the
history of a six-hundred-year-old dynasty of chiefs, one of the oldest
continuous father-to-son dynasties in the world, and perhaps the
oldest. Apart from having a performance context reminiscent of
pre-classical Greece, the epic history informs other Dagbamba musical
idioms which branch out into drumming and singing that bestow
proverbial praise-names onto chiefs. These names are applied to
descended members of various chiefs’ lineages, whether or not the
people still have any claim to chieftaincy. The musicians know
the family lines of people in their communities, and with the help of
musicians, everyone in Dagbamba society can trace his or her ancestry
to some point on a chieftaincy line. In effect, music is what
lets people know that they are one family. More than that, the
rhythms of the proverbial praise-names are used as the foundations of
wonderful drum ensemble pieces for social dancing. More than that
again, this dancing is done by individuals at events like weddings,
funerals and festivals; people dance to the names of past chiefs and
publicly demonstrate their relationship to the dynasty and to other
members of their lineage segment. This incredible degree of
historical consciousness is thus more than a focus for thought:
historical knowledge, instead of being learned cognitively or
represented through various symbols, is brought down to the level of
social interaction, where people embody their personal relationship to
history by dancing in musical contexts while others in their community
are looking at them. I know of nothing really comparable in the
Western world, but many societies in other parts of the world — Africa,
Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Oceania, Australia — do amazing
things within their musical traditions. In all these places,
anthropologically informed ethnomusicologists have debunked racial,
cultural and historical stereotypes at the same time as they have
enriched people’s understanding of the creative and intellectual
potentials of human beings, and both these aspects of their work have
contributed to discourse on the world’s crucial concerns.
It has taken some time, but
gradually the documentation and description of cultural achievements in
the world’s musical traditions have become an impressive body of
knowledge, all the more impressive because it only represents a
fragment of those traditions. Ethnomusicologists have returned
the favor to anthropologists and have demonstrated many ways in which
the study of music can yield insight into social and cultural issues,
insight that is profoundly humanistic and fundamentally
humanizing. This level of awareness about musical meaning relies
on possibilities and sensitivities of musical appreciation that
formerly seemed unattainable or unproductive. Looking back at the
class consciousness and cultural chauvinism of the colonial era, we
might wonder how people could not be self-conscious of the seemingly
transparent way they used their own music to support their sense of
their identity and their ideas of what was best about themselves.
We might also wonder why it has been so difficult for members of the
intellectual elite, especially those who should know how important
music is, to recognize that music could present a similarly elevated
view of other societies and to apply alternate standards to counteract
the imagery of derogatory views. Certainly, too, scholars have
not been quick to see the opportunities for fresh and innovative
perspectives on a host of big issues about artistic style, about
stylistic boundaries, about influence and change, about craftsmanship
and artistry, about distance and meaning and usefulness and so
on. Every idea in art history ever debated by classicists,
archaeologists, philosophers, or historians could have been put to a
new and intriguing measure with every “other” tradition studied.
Today, these opportunities remain only partially explored.
With a few exceptions, it is
only recently that ethnomusicologists have truly looked as much at the
people who are the world’s music-makers as at the merely sonic
character of the world’s music. For those people, music has
served as a positive force to strengthen identity, revealing processes
of cultural resistance and potential redemption. In courtly
contexts of the colonized, we see reaction and the codification of
classical idioms. In less organized places where people have been
thrown together from diverse backgrounds, musical activity has been one
of the means with which subgroups consolidate their sense of
themselves, giving themselves coherence in their relations with other
groups similarly defined; the evolution of their musical idioms has
been an added means to develop and display a broader or more
generalized sense of their combined identity. Examples of this
kind of musical contribution are easily found in such cultural
processes as the coming together of African cultural groups from the
earliest days of the African Diaspora, the Zionist formulation of
non-Western elements of Jewish heritage to counter assimilationist
trends in nineteenth century Europe, or the continuous creation of new
oppositional youth idioms as earlier idioms are appropriated and
commercialized by mass culture. Such processes can be extremely
complex.
The insights that reward
people who think of music primarily in cultural terms are simply not
available to those who think mainly in musicological terms; indeed, the
latter group is often victimized by a narrow conception of music that
practically precludes their understanding the breadth of the artistic
conception of many non-Western idioms. The fact that music points
to so many things beyond itself is another way of saying that musical
contexts pull many things together, and sometimes it is only in musical
contexts that certain parts of society come into relationship or that
certain social relationships become visible. Thus, beyond the big
identity issues of group cohesion and community boundaries, of
authenticity and traditional change, of inclusiveness and
exclusiveness, or of dominance and resistance, music is also important
just because musical contexts are places that people invest with
meaning. Many institutional and personal players struggle to
realize various benefits around musical performances, where there are
stories upon stories of poignance and significance involving money,
love, values, work, status, persuasion, visibility, artistic
growth. Isn’t it odd that many social scientists still consider
music to be derivative of culture when so many people, including
Westerners, devise their musical events to bring to unique display that
which they feel can represent their culture at its best — and by
extension represent what they deem to be best about themselves?
It is this territory of cultural imagery and self-portraiture that
ethnomusicology is particularly qualified to explore.
In the final quarter of the
twentieth century, the old ideals about music’s capacity to transcend
boundaries have reappeared in multicultural settings around the world,
and quite a few old perspectives have been inverted. Although a
number of prescient musical ethnographies have cleared the ground for a
new understanding of older issues, it is mainly the increased movement
of people from continent to continent that has challenged the
relativist model of discrete musical traditions. Again, too, it
is musicians who have taken the lead in exploring and combining diverse
musics. To them, there is nothing strange in getting together
with musicians from other cultures and expecting to make satisfying
music, and it is legitimate to blend samples of sounds or actual
musical pieces into their work to add texture or allusion. But to
a conservative practitioner of a culturally identified tradition, or to
an ethnomusicologist who has elaborated that musician’s repertoire, the
way that these other musicians use the indigenous music can seem
everything from naive to ruinous. Proponents of multiculturalism
could maintain that even when music from one part of the world is
appropriated based on misperception, the resulting music can still
quite adequately serve different expressive purposes in its new
context. This kind of transformation has occurred frequently in
the history of music, and it is even more prevalent now.
On the other hand, this
process is more commercialized than ever before, and non-Western
musicians are acutely attentive to potential ways to make their music a
commodity. In some cases, their patrons are abandoning indigenous
music for imported products of mass media. The younger musicians
are caught in multiple ironies. They believe in the intrinsic
genius of their local tradition and in its capacity to extend its
beneficial effects into the world. They believe that they need to
modernize their music to help it attract interest at home and cross
cultural boundaries into larger markets abroad, but they are afraid
of losing their music’s special qualities. They are either
dependent upon or willing to trust foreign producers or collaborators
who often lack adequate understanding of the deeper structures of the
local tradition. They and their patrons become starstruck by the
relative wealth or presumed success of local musicians who have worked
abroad, or who one way or another gain access to mass media, and they
do not learn enough from the generation of more aged musicians who know
more about the traditional substance of the idiom. At the
extremes, we see musicians in the vanguard of the new age who are ready
to hear diverse musics in any combination as beautiful, contrasted with
venerable musicians from local traditions who see modernization in all
its aspects as a threat that will attenuate the most culturally
distinctive and valuable aspects of their style.
In this confusing situation,
the cultural perspective that has characterized anthropology as an
avatar of a multicultural world also ironically appears to be aligned
with forces of conservatism and reaction. From some vantage
points, globalization seems an irrevocable process that aims to
minimize the importance of culture by reducing it to the role of adding
local color in a small, small world. In today’s centers of power,
the technical-scientific, financial, corporate, and political elites of
the world’s nations have already defined a conception of the world in
which everything is getting hooked up, in which privative issues of
otherness, like notions of Western and non-Western, are irrelevant to
the new realities that are being established. Culture has become
an enigmatic obstacle to this process: when things do not go as
intended, the reason usually has something to do with local
culture. In a contrasting view, culture’s most important function
is to link generations as a tool for survival; the loss of cultural
perspective is linked to anomie, frustration and a loss of historical
perspective and values that could reflect a long-range
multigenerational view. Some people who resist the new world
order are ethnic chauvinists or religious radicals; others allege the
shallowness of mass media and assert the richness of local knowledge
and its expressive forms. Thus has culture itself become the
focus of debate and contestation. With regard to music, the
convenient and facile division of cultural territory among
musicologists and anthropologists has simply become outdated.
There are now many more players involved in interpreting cultural
meaning, and now we see more clearly how important music is for
people’s ideas of themselves. For many people, more than ever,
music represents their own cultural distinctiveness and their claim to
a place in a multicultural world where issues of ethnicity, race,
transnationalism, pluralism and nationalism highlight culture’s meaning
in multiple ways. Those whose experience of modernization and
whose cross-cultural interactions anthropologists would normally study
have themselves brought music into the mix.
What happens to the
traditional musical idioms and artists? On the international
scene, they are still subsidized, particularly by Western museums and
universities. Collectors of non-Western plastic arts are running
out of traditional pieces to collect, and they are gradually becoming
open to the qualities of modern non-Western art that incorporates
different cultural elements in refreshing and intriguing ways.
When such art is exhibited, though, the entertainment at the opening is
likely to be supplied by an ensemble of traditional musicians and not
by a pop band from the promoted region. The new art, like the new
music, is fun, but the traditional or older arts still have
cachet. On the local scene, the record shows that the traditional
musicians of many societies have previously exercised strong influence
because of their broad knowledge of social concerns and important
social events. They are often among the most conservative in
their societies because of their links to older patterns of patronage
and reciprocity. As they watch the increasing commodification of
their social world reach into the realm of music, they are concerned
that the changing scene is incompatible with the dedication and
spiritual generosity their art has demanded of them. They are
comfortable asserting moral authority because they see themselves as the
ones who know what is best in their culture. Despite the
ambivalence with which people in some societies view musicians, or
possibly as an aspect of that ambivalence, musicians are a kind of
elite group resembling intellectuals. They are the ones who know
their culture and have a role in events — ritual, ceremonial, communal,
festive — that are most significant for maintaining cultural identity
and continuity.
These indigenous
intellectuals stand in an intrinsic conflict with other groups who
would also claim that same cultural knowledge or preservative function
in a modernized world: first, those from their own societies who
have become intellectuals in universities and other educational
institutions, and second, decision-makers in their government who are
concerned with matters of national identity and wish to control the
role of traditional culture within it. In societies where older
systems of authority are being replaced, people are status-conscious,
and literacy is a definite marker of status; it can be difficult for
educated people to humble themselves before their illiterate
elders. Nonetheless, the educated people and bureaucrats
communicate first with foreign commercial and academic interests, and
they can present themselves as insiders, even though they often may not
have access to the cultural knowledge of the local elders.
Meanwhile, musicians playing in popular idioms have accepted the
commercial nature of the system; they are searching their culture for
roots they can connect with their own musical mission. And in the
powerful centers of international mass media, musicians and culture
brokers are ever alert for new ideas and new sounds to energize their
music or musical products.
All this contestation about
cultural knowledge and authority has shifted one connotation of culture
as a heritage toward culture as a specific inheritance from a group’s
forebears. This idea has informed ethnic perspectives for a long
time, but the contestation has expanded this aspect of cultural meaning
toward a sense of culture as actual property which people have or do
not have. “Culture,” that plastic concept of ambiguous reference,
is frequently discussed as if it were an objectifiable entity.
Cultural interlopers are sometimes accused of stealing culture.
People who work with outsiders or share information about customs are
sometimes accused of selling their culture. In formerly colonized
nations particularly, new intellectual and administrative elites
maintain that the non-literate musicians are naive cultural stewards
and need protection against outsiders who are capable of exploiting
them. Many local musicians in turn believe that the new elites
have no claim on their knowledge and are interfering with their
relationships. When cultural influence and cultural transmission
imply theft and appropriation, one logical conclusion is the
application of legalistic perspectives on intellectual property and
copyright, shifting the realm of discourse to the authority of the
literate. But how is ownership of culture determined? Is
culture — and by extension, identity — something that can be
stolen? Could a traditional musician hold a copyright on a piece
of music that has been passed down from generation to generation?
If not, who holds the copyright and who collects the royalties?
Does a Western musician or scholar do the right thing or set a bad
precedent in making payment to an organization and thereby validating
its representation of indigenous musicians as a class? How
explicit could an ownership definition become? Could it apply to
a rhythm, a chant or a dance style? Add courts, position papers
and various commissions to other efforts to define a position of
authority over cultural processes. All these efforts are
increasingly congruent with contemporary processes of commodification
and metaphors of value.
What is amazing is that
music, which time and again has been considered superficial, should
bring to a unique resolution and display so many variations of the idea
of culture, so many cultural problems that have no clear solution, so
many relationships that are otherwise unacknowledged. Probably
the underlying questions are not supposed to be answered but are raised
only to challenge and engage people to respond, to enter a world of
players and participants. Even in its most formal venues, music
exists in a realm of play. In that realm, discourse is peripheral
and tends to be transparently motivated and personal. The
ultimate benefit of studying music in context has been understanding
the value of musical contexts in themselves over any intrinsic value in
the music itself. Music’s main value reflects music’s
impermanence: it accrues mainly to the experience of those who
are involved and doing things in musical contexts and only to a lesser
extent, if at all, to anything that can be taken away. Music has
always been something of a mystery, somehow beyond words, something
beyond rational understanding, or, conversely, something that indicates
the limitations of understanding. Modern philosophers and
theologians discuss divinity in such a manner, by talking around the
idea, focusing on effects and manifestations but not attempting to
understand their subject in itself. In the same vein, music may
partake of qualities considered to be spiritual, but in a secular
world, music provides a comparable forum for discourse about things
that have no substance but only effects and manifestations.
These effects and
manifestations have nourished the cultural perspective that
anthropology has championed, and it is now clearly the musicologists
who occupy a more bounded world of culturally relative insight.
Still, among even the most up-to-date scholars — those who note the
multifaceted and relative complexity of the contemporary world and who
proclaim its defining characteristic to be irony — most have difficulty
accepting and working with ironic concepts as the focal points of their
knowledge. When knowledge is ironic, then who is to say who knows
what? But what one knows about music is not the main issue.
The academic study of music started when intellectuals were peers or
adjuncts to the elite, but the cultural influence of the Western elite
is fading. Certainly, people from everywhere are moving through
the world more than ever before, and there is no shortage of people
capable of challenging anyone else’s statements about music. More
important, though, our ideas about culture have changed. Our
understanding of music has reached the point where we recognize that
musical performances are momentary events and that music’s cultural
meaning lies within its potential to transform the people who
participate in, attend, or are involved in musical events. This
meaning is not to be abstracted into knowledge but rather recreated and
experienced anew. If every aspect of musical meaning seems
changed, this one has not changed. Is it possible that
intellectuals can grasp this further irony about the abiding nature of
impermanence? Could they take the measure of music as a model for
their work, striving not to promote an idea of truth but to create a
vehicle for participation and transformation?
-- John M. Chernoff
This essay was originally published in Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, edited by Jeremy MacClancy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 377-98.
Suggestions for further reading:
Rather than listing a large number of distinguished ethnomusicological
writings, many of which informed this essay, I would recommend the
following as an introduction to various ways of interpreting music by
linking it to broader manifestations of cultural meaning.
Berliner, Paul F. 1993. The
Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of
Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blacking, John. 1973. How
Musical is Man? Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Chernoff, John M. 1979. African
Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in
African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Stoller, Paul. 1989. Fusion
of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of
Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thompson, Robert F. 1974. African
Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katherine
Coryton White. Los Angeles: University of California
Press.