Music as Heritage

Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives

Barley Norton, Naomi Matsumoto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315393841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

As economic, technological and cultural change gathers pace across the world, issues of music heritage and sustainability have become ever more pressing. Discourse on intangible cultural heritage has developed in complex ways in recent years, and musical practices have been transformed by safeguarding agendas. Music as Heritage takes stock of these transformations, bringing new ethnographic and historical perspectives to bear on our encounters with music heritage. The volume evaluates the cultural politics, ethics and audiovisual representation of music heritage; the methods and consequences of music transmission across national borders; and the perennial issues of revival, change and innovation.

UNESCO's 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage provides an essential reference point for studies of music heritage. However, this volume also pays attention to important spheres of musical activity that lie outside of UNESCO's reach and the reasons why some repertories of music are chosen for safeguarding while others are not. Some practices of art music in Europe explored in this book, for example, have received little attention despite being susceptible to endangerment. Developing a comparative framework that cuts across genre distinctions and disciplinary boundaries, Music as Heritage explores how music cultures are being affected by heritage discourse and the impact of international and national policies on grass-roots music practices.

Part I

Representing music heritage

1

Musical heritage as a cultural and global concept

Anthony Pryer

Introduction

The concern for endangered heritages around the world is now a multifaceted enterprise. Moreover, it now focuses not just on issues of support in relation to what used to be called ‘traditional’ cultures in economically struggling localities, but on all cultures – past and present, urban and rural, ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’, sub-cultural and national – and on the nature of their survival and development. Indeed this book aims to reflect the growing diversity of that activity and draw attention to some of its neglected aspects beyond official proclamations and institutional controls. Equally importantly, however, we have to accept that the success of these many enterprises depends in part on understanding as clearly as we can the background assumptions and concepts that drive them. For that reason this chapter is principally concerned with the generating ideas that lie behind our safeguarding activities and with the forces that brought those ideas into being and the contexts in which they arose.

An important milestone in the development of the safeguarding project, and one referenced by many studies in the field, was the 2003 declaration by UNESCO of The Convention for the Safeguarding of the [sic] Intangible Cultural Heritage.¹ What is sometimes not fully appreciated is that that Convention itself came to fruition in the context of wider international concerns about the ‘disappearing world’ and our ‘endangered planet’. Cultural heritages, in turn, were also seen as imperilled, and the Preamble to the 2003 document explicitly pointed to the ‘deep-seated interdependence’ between ‘intangible cultural heritages’ and the ‘natural’ heritages of the world. Moreover, concern for all of those various endangered aspects of the planet tended to be motivated by a background vision of a pre-industrial ideal, a world untainted by the ‘pollutions’ of the political, economic and globalising transformations of modern society. Some of the difficulties encountered by those involved in the safeguarding field arise from the dubious viability of such ‘back-to-nature’ ideals in a rapidly changing world.

Another important factor that makes cultural safeguarding on a global scale especially difficult is that it inevitably takes place in relation to two rapidly moving targets: the shifting sands of political and ideological alliances and the constantly evolving development of theoretical ideas in relation to some of its core concepts. These factors mean that many of the dilemmas experienced by those who work on musical heritages arise from, and are implicit in, the political situations and historical contexts from which their core operating ideas emerged. After all, concepts as well as cultures have heritages, and those concept-heritages continue to have both good and bad effects. This chapter will explore the notion of musical heritage and the criteria for its safeguarding in relation to four distinct contexts: (1) the international frameworks provided by UNESCO; (2) the conceptual legacies bequeathed by the histories of the disciplines of anthropology and ethnography; (3) the shifting background of theory in relation to its central ideas – heritage, culture, identity and the ethics of selection and intervention; and (4) the question of whether the supposed divisions between ‘the West and the Rest’ have any currency in our attempts to understand heritages. These are not simply abstract notions; they effect what we do and, in the end, whether we are able to do it.

The international safeguarding context: one framework, many agendas

The evidence is strong that UNESCO has done much to balance the demands of politics with a sophisticated approach to its organising principles in relation to endangered cultures. For example, in its 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, it made the important decision to draw the attention ‘of the relevant authorities’ to the ‘intellectual property aspects’ of safeguarding, in an attempt to bestow upon communal artefacts and their sometimes anonymous creators intellectual property rights,² a move which nonetheless has a tendency to create perplexing legal effects today, as we shall see. Another important shift has been the gradual acceptance of the notion of intangible as well as tangible heritages. Interestingly, however, although the consensus now seems to be that all cultural heritages are in certain respects intangible, that shift was never complete. The belief persisted that some aspects of culture could stand on their own as tangible objects, an idea that was reinforced through the Memory of the World project inaugurated in 1992. Its register of ‘documentary heritage’ has been updated every year since 2008,³ even though the cultural significance and authenticity of some of the listed documents (particularly those with overt political content) have been contested. Moreover it is also claimed that the documentary list unavoidably favours those settled societies with documentary resources and institutions at their service in one form or another.

This ‘infrastructure’ type of elitism has not been the only kind at issue. The 1998 Proclamation of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity faced considerable opposition based not only on its use of the (Western and gendered) term ‘masterpiece’, but on its tendency to favour ‘cultural professionals’ and a system of hierarchical values based on the notion of a kind of ‘cultural Olympics’ (Hafstein 2009: 97–101). Since 2008 the ‘Masterpiece’ list has been quietly elided with the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage,⁴ with items on the former being transferred to the latter. In some obvious ways the new list is more ‘democratic’, but it raises questions about whether a list potentially filled with almost any aspect of cultural life, commonplace or exceptional, can ‘represent’ anything except a vague and generic sense of variety. It also leaves open the question, important for this paper, of what the relationship is between the profusion of cultural survivals and heritages as such, and what distinction, if any, we should make between a cultural expression and a cultural heritage.

Nervousness over this issue seems to be signalled in the intriguing shift between the 2003 ICH Convention and the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (hereafter the 2005 Expressions Convention). Among the 35 detailed Articles of the latter the word ‘heritage’ is mentioned only once (in Article 4.1), where it seems to be equated exactly with the term with ‘cultural expression’. This is an issue to which we will return. After all, all cultural heritages are presumably cultural expressions in some sense, but it is unlikely that all cultural expressions are, or will become, heritages.

One aspect of UNESCO’s work that has remained unchanged has been its commitment to human rights and the requirement that those participating in its schemes adhere to those principles. Human rights are mentioned in the Preamble to the 2003 ICH Convention (paragraph 2) and in more detail in the 2005 Expressions Convention (Preamble, paragraphs 5 and 6), which states that support is available only to those who work within a framework of the ‘full realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms’, together with ‘democracy, tolerance, social justice and mutual respect’.⁵ Not surprisingly, various countries regard these conditions, or at least the full breadth of their applications, as at best contentious and at worst a barrier to the acceptance of UNESCO’s aims. After all, democracy may seem a ‘natural’ right for those societies brought up to believe that sovereignty ultimately resides in the will of the people – a notion derived in its modern form from the idea of a ‘social contract’ between free citizens as developed by Rousseau in the European Enlightenment period. However, its implications may be problematic, or even blasphemous, for those whose culture tells them that individuals must defer to the transcendent and revealed will of God (whatever their God happens to be called) or to some divinely ordained special ‘priesthood’ of persons with elite status.

There are other equally problematic difficulties in the relationship between human rights and the intangible heritage project. Studies by Langfield (2009), Logan (2007) and others have claimed that the project is subtly underpinned by Western mainstream intellectual, political and ethical ideas. After all, we find that there can be support for certain types of music, but not for bullfighting; for dignified rituals exclusive to women, but not for the traditions of marriage-by-capture (still not uncommon in the Caucasus, parts of Central Asia and certain regions of Africa); for ceremonies of harvesting and husbandry but not for headhunting; and so on. Anthropologists such as Laurajane Smith (2006) have dubbed this European approach the ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ and have written eloquently on its sometimes negative consequences and ethical difficulties.

It is hard, too, not to see a symbolic significance in the fact that UNESCO is based in Paris, the epicentre of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the place of origin of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen promulgated by France’s National Constituent Assembly after the Revolution of 1789. What is rarely noticed about that early declaration is that it welds the rights of ‘man’ (we will leave the gender issue aside for the moment) firmly to those possessed by a ‘citizen’ – that is, those possessed by an officially recognised member of a nation state. It is no accident that even today it is much easier successfully to claim human rights, or the safeguarding of heritages, if the claimant has full citizen status rather than is simply a member of a stateless, nomadic or suppressed minority. In fact the 2005 Expressions Convention (Article 11) explicitly calls upon parties to acknowledge the ‘fundamental role of civil society’ in the protecting and promotion of cultures. Human rights largely turn out to be citizens’ rights, and the problematic consequences of this are commonly encountered in the cultural heritage field.

Relatively few scholars seem to have qualms about acceptance of the human rights agenda, but less comfortable is the idea that safeguarding almost inevitably involves some problematic kind of intervention. This is particularly true when that intervention is by a ‘parent’ state which controls a culture and limits its opportunities for self-determination, one of bedrock notions of international human rights. In Japan, for example, the law for safeguarding the indigenous Ainu people, the Ainu Cultural Protection Act (1997), allowed for the display of traditional activities such as music and dancing, but lacked provision for transferring responsibility for the culture to the Ainu themselves, nor did it include the right to use and learn the Ainu language as an official language of Japan (Hasegawa 2010: 221–222). A less obvious ethical problem of intervention occurs when it not only counteracts wilful suppression or destruction, but also officiously strives to prevent any ‘natural’ change, decline or extinction of a community. This issue is contentious of course, but there is a danger that the international system for safeguarding heritages has created by default something rather close to a doctrine of the ‘immortality of cultures’ – and the immortality of their claims to their ‘cultural property’ and ‘cultural copyright’. We shall return to this issue later.

It is also clear that the UNESCO ‘agreement-among-nations’ approach to intervention is not always effective or adequate. Many culturally distinct groups – such as the Kurds (found in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran), the Hmong people (Laos, China, Vietnam and Thailand), the Tuareg (Algeria, Mali and Niger), and so on – are scattered across several nations, and so have an uncertain status amongst an organization of nation states. Again, there are nation-like communities – Tibetans, Chechens, Palestinians and so on – that are in effect drawn into the control of a single ‘host’ state. The lawyer-anthropologist Lucas Lixinski has explored this issue in relation to the case of Tibetan folk opera. When this genre (known locally as ‘Ache Lhamo’) was inscribed by China onto the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, there was a mixed reaction. Lixinski claimed that for Tibetan culture the process subordinated ‘its political caveats to tourism, promotion and other economic interests, as well as to a larger national Chinese identity, ultimately diminishing the political strength of the cultural … claims of Tibetans’ (2011: 96). In 2012, in order to subvert some of these difficulties, UNESCO introduced a ‘Mechanism for Sharing Information to Encourage Multinational Nominations’.⁶ Even so, in the international lottery of protection, some are born lucky, others unlucky and the question of the morality of this kind of ‘luck’ deserves deeper treatment than it can be given here (see Nagel 1979: 24–38; Williams 1981).

Shadows from the past: ‘primitive’ societies and colonialist legal systems

When the discipline of anthropology was established in the early nineteenth century, its initial development proceeded along two parallel lines: an interest in ‘primitive’ societies and a concern with tribal systems of justice. ‘Primitive’ societies – that is, those ‘non-literate’ societies, whether extinct or contemporary, whose practices seemed ‘early in time’ compared with the ‘cultivated’ nations – were of interest because they seemed to be a perfect fit for the latest and most unsettling theory of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (the Origin of the Species was published in 1859). Anthropologists spent much effort attempting to demonstrate that there had been a linear and coherent ‘progression’ from ‘savage’ societies to those that were ‘civilized’.⁷ Moreover, a movement began – the actual motivations and stages were complex – to ‘protect’ these ‘primitive’ cultures by preserving their artefacts in specially constituted collections and archives. An early proposal for such a scheme sprang from the huge increase in colonial activity in the early nineteenth century. In 1843 the German scholar and traveller Philipp Franz von Siebold in his Lettre sur l’utilité des Musées Ethnographique et sur l’importance de leur creation dans les états européens qui possèdent des Colonies not only established the term ‘ethnographic museum’, but also situated the enterprise within the warm protective embrace of western powers. Soon ethnographic collections could be found in Leiden, Copenhagen, Oxford and many other places (see Goldwater 1986: 315–319; and Howard 2012b: 2–7).⁸ This early practice of seeing the artefacts of ‘primitive’ societies as ‘coll...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures, tables and examples
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: historical and ethnographic perspectives on music as heritage
• Part I Representing music heritage
• Part II Safeguarding music heritage
• Part III Repositioning music heritage
• Bibliography
• Index