Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions

Vesa Kurkela, Markus Mantere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317157205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

During the past two decades, there has emerged a growing need to reconsider the objects, axioms and perspectives of writing music history. A certain suspicion towards Francois Lyotard's grand narratives, as a sign of what he diagnosed as our 'postmodern condition', has become more or less an established and unquestioned point of departure among historians. This suspicion, at its most extreme, has led to a radical conclusion of the 'end of history' in the work of postmodern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Francis Fukuyama. The contributors to Critical Music Historiography take a step back and argue that the radical view of the 'impossibility of history', as well as the unavoidable ideology of any history, are counter-productive points of departure for historical scholarship. It is argued that metanarratives in history are still possible and welcome, even if their limitations are acknowledged. Foucault, Lyotard and others should be taken into account but systematized viewpoints and methods for a more critical and multi-faceted re-evaluation of the past through research are needed. As to the metanarratives of music history, they must avoid the pitfalls of evolutionism, hagiography, and teleology, all hallmarks of traditional historiography. In this volume the contributors put these methods and principles into practice. The chapters tackle under-researched and non-conventional domains of music history as well as rethinking older historiographical concepts such as orientalism and nationalism, and consequently introduce new concepts such as occidentalism and transnationalism. The volume is a challenging collection of work that stakes out a unique territory for itself among the growing body of work on critical music history.

PART I
Nationalism and Politics

Chapter 1
The Racial and Colonial Implications of Music Ethnographies in the French Empire, 1860s–1930s

Jann Pasler¹

Music has long been considered an audible representation, if not also the performance, of human differences – the performance of intelligence and character, an emblem of soul, or a sign to the distant past. However, if music offered a way to understand traditions and values of other peoples, the context for this in the nineteenth century was racial theories and racial hierarchies based on stereotypes. Stereotypes, besides simplifying and positing some form of homogeneity or coherence within a given category, objectify and imply an ahistorical stability. They also make possible and plausible an understanding of the Other as a function of one’s categories, allowing their use for a purpose. But when do stereotypes transmute into cultural action with consequences? Depending on one’s orientation, studying indigenous music was either a step toward an imagined universalism in the language of music or a mode for contemplating racial distinctions, both helping the French reflect on the ideology of western superiority. If the west could be represented by one idea, it was progress – albeit dependent on what one was pursuing and for whom.

Cultural activities and artifacts were often used to support theories of physiognomy and phrenology, serving as markers of moral character and intelligence. They also created contexts for understanding racial difference through comparison with the west, encouraging the perception of hierarchies within one race or among many races. Racial typology, of course, began with foreign peoples, especially those brought to Europe. The zoos across Europe took advantage of this. Beginning in September 1874, Carl Hagenbeck, a German merchant whose specialty was furnishing interesting specimens to Europe’s zoos and aquariums, also included some Lapps with the reindeer he brought to zoos in Hamburg, Berlin, and Leipzig. They were to enact daily life in Lapland. The Paris Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation also brought groups of foreign peoples annually, starting in 1877.² They provided the French with a purported means of studying racial origins – something of crucial significance to the colonialist project. Primitive peoples were understood as living remnants of the past, but largely a past without progress. Interestingly, most people exhibited at the Paris zoo did not come from countries the French was planning to colonize, but rather – the northern- and southernmost parts of the globe. Those from Tierra del Fuego could be seen topless, huddled around a fire, surrounded by bows, arrows, and spears. Depicted in the magazine L’Illustration,³ the reporter noted that, as representatives of ‘the first ages of mankind’, they had the characteristics of beasts – wide noses, preeminent cheeks; they fished, hunted, and lived in ‘miserable huts’. With Russian Lapps brought to Paris in 1878 and Norwegian Lapps in 1889, it was assumed these peoples were descended from prehistoric times – wanderers, like Africa’s oldest clan, the Bushmen. The Ashantis from equatorial Africa were presented as ‘the strangest and rarest people from afar, the most interesting specimens of primitive or decadent humanity’.⁴

Not all ‘primitive’ people brought musical instruments, but they did sing – the Ashanti songs having ‘strange originality’ and expressing ‘naïve gaiety’ and ‘the melancholic undulations and mysterious sadnesses of the human heart’.⁵ The Lapps sang ‘melancholic and sweet’ lullabies, the Galibis from Guyana laments for the dead, sung by soloists and a chorus until everyone was drunk. By 1889, it was admitted that most Lapp children went to school; but school encouraged children to adopt customs associated with progress and civilization, and as such was the ‘great destroyer of the Lapp nationality’. The author bemoaned ‘old Lapon’ as the ‘ancestor of prehistoric humanity’ in the midst of ‘disappearing’.⁶ The perceived primitivism of such peoples, as appealing as it may have seemed from the perspective of purportedly providing a link to the distant past, posed questions about geographical and biological determinism and provided a rationale for exclusion from French imperialist agendas.

Racial typology also extended to musical instruments. As I have written elsewhere, from 1870 to 1900 images of these instruments reproduced in L’Illustration were used not only to draw attention to the people the French were attempting to conquer, but also to shed light on the relative status of various cultures, as if they represented various ‘degrees’ of civilization.⁷ Comparing African and Asian musical ensembles depicted in L’Illustration, the latter appear larger and more diverse, suggesting that the sounds they made and perhaps the cultures that produced them were more complex. These differences cast doubt on the claims made by scholars such as Paul Greenhalgh, who in his study of the Universal Exhibitions assumes that the French considered both Asians and Africans as savages close to ‘the animal state’.⁸ L’Illustration’s choice of musical instruments follows instead the model of Gustave Le Bon, who proposed four stages of civilization, not two, and who acknowledged a third stage, or ‘average’ civilization, in Chinese culture.

Many considered musical instruments as keys to understanding foreign peoples. Any instrument from outside the western classical tradition allowed the French to come closer to something more authentic in a foreign culture than what was offered to their imaginations by histories or novels, and certainly an experience of difference not possible through language alone. Military explorers collected instruments in the same way as flags and military arms, not just as souvenirs but arguably as emblems of power – the power to kill or the power to enchant. For example, as the National Museum of Finland points out, the drum of the Turunmaa Regiment was carried to Russia as war booty in 1809. Instruments were also associated with monarchs, including those of Africa, and used to suggest racial links between neighboring countries, as if a byproduct of migration.⁹

Protestant as well as Catholic missionaries also took an interest in local customs, including music, using it to attract and create community among local peoples. However, if the images of musicians do not evolve over time, sometimes their meaning does. In Africa, study of local musical traditions was part of the competition between Protestants and Catholics, both seeking to convert new souls there. For example, Father R.P. Henri Trilles, from the Congregation of the Pères du Saint-Esprit, and the Protestant minister Fernand Grébert both spent much of their lives in Gabon, wrote on its music, and documented their experiences in texts and in photography or drawings – but with important differences. Grébert criticized Trilles’ publications as too anecdotal, perhaps because they tied music closely to its social life. Grébert aimed to be more ‘scientific’ in an essay focused largely on Fang instruments. And yet, just like Trilles – who included numerous transcriptions of Fang melodies in his work and occasionally a multi-part performance – in 1934 Grébert wrote a play on Gabonese culture, N’Sime, incorporating his transcriptions of their music, including a tam-tam with five kinds of instruments and song.¹⁰

In the 1930s, French government policy evolved as those teaching at the Ecole Coloniale and Institut d’Ethnologie promoted greater understanding of the realities, aspirations, and needs of colonial populations in hopes of developing ‘moral rapprochements’ between the metropole and the colonies.¹¹ Officials abroad increasingly were expected to play the role of ethnographer, providing not only close examination of various customs and beliefs, but also notations about their music – what they sang and danced, their instruments, their rhythms. The point was, the more the French knew about cultures the most distant from their own, the less susceptible they would be to ‘painful events, sometimes with huge consequences’.¹²

Similarly in Belgium in 1934, the composer/ethnographer Gaston Knosp was asked by its government to put together a survey about music in the Congo and send it to foreigners living in the various villages, mostly missionaries and some government officials. He received hundreds of responses, some hand-written, some typed, all offering precise details on the size and nature of local instruments and what they were used for.¹³ The 1930s also saw the growth of scientific classifications of instruments, such as by André Schaeffner in France.¹⁴

The question of racial origins and racial transformation underlies this fascination. Practice of the comparative method, essential to the early ethnographers, was based on the need to understand the extent to which interbreeding, the environment, and other forces could favor or retard a culture’s relative progress. Two theories were hotly debated in the late nineteenth century: monogenism, the idea that all races descended from one; and polygenism, belief in a separate origin for each human race and the idea that variations between human populations (and anything they produced, including music) reflect distinct racial characteristics.

In France, these conflicting beliefs were embraced, in general, by those espousing competing political positions, especially when it came to French colonial policy. Monogenists, many of them republicans, sought to understand universal traits throughout the globe. At the 1889 Paris Exposition, Julien Tiersot’s discovery of harmony in music outside the west led him to conclude that harmony is ‘natural to mankind, even savages and primitive people’, and therefore a cultural universal.¹⁵

Monogenists believed that racial diversity resulted from human migration and adaptation to shifting circumstances. Polygenists, many of them monarchists clinging to their long-held privileges, argued that the nature of a people was fixed and homogeneous, not alterable by education or intelligence. Ironically, this belief in irreconcilable differences led to more respect for indigenous traditions and eventually to the associationist colonial policy, inspired by that of the British. But were musical instruments ever fixed or stable enough to represent such difference? Race was thus used both to rationalize political differences and to insist on their validity.

Racial Origins, Assimilation, and Association

At the heart of this debate in France was their own identity as a people who had assimilated Celts and Gauls, Romans and Franks.¹⁶ Common racial origins would offer justification for French occupation and colonialism. In the 1860s, a French composer living in Algeria, Francisco Salvador Daniel, studied the music of the Kabyles, the country’s indigenous mountain peoples. What impressed him most was their warrior music in the Phrygian scale, used against the French in the conflict of 1857. Aware of the possibility of migrations, in his essays based on nine years of research in Algeria, collection of music in Malta, Morocco, and Tunisia, performances with North African musicians, and transcription of some 400 indigenous songs, Daniel studied scales not just as remnants of the distant past – like archaeological ruins – but also as the product of hybridities.

Daniel perceived resemblances not only between the Tunisian guitar (the kouitra) and the kithara of ancient Greece, but also between Arab and ancient Greek modes,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I NATIONALISM AND POLITICS
• PART II SILENCED AND SIDETRACKED
• PART III UPDATING THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONCEPTS
• PART IV PROBING CANONS
• Bibliography
• Index