Music and the New Global Culture

From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age

Harry Liebersohn

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226649306
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and the New Global Culture, Harry Liebersohn traces the origins of global music to a handful of critical transformations that took place between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Britain, the arts and crafts movement inspired a fascination with non-Western music; Germany fostered a scholarly approach to global musical comparison, creating the field we now call ethnomusicology; and the United States provided the technological foundation for the dissemination of a diverse spectrum of musical cultures by launching the phonograph industry. This is not just a story of Western innovation, however: Liebersohn shows musical responses to globalization in diverse areas that include the major metropolises of India and China and remote settlements in South America and the Arctic. By tracing this long history of world music, Liebersohn shows how global movement has forever changed how we hear music—and indeed, how we feel about the world around us.

PART I

Craft

1

A German Connoisseur in Cosmopolitan England

Provincial beginnings can widen out to global perspectives: so it was in the biography of Carl Engel, who taught his contemporaries to compare music across times and places.

German by upbringing and inclination, he moved to Victorian England as a young man and had to define his place in its society and cultural institutions. At first Engel supported himself with piano lessons in Manchester, but before long he married into an upper-class English family and moved to London. By then he had also made the transition from musical performance to scholarship. Through his writings, musical instrument collection, and museum activities, he turned into an early exponent of the idea of world music. With his historical writings and surveys of musical instruments, he asked his readers to put aside their local prejudices and become connoisseurs of musical offerings through time and across continents. His sweeping view of music around the world made him a founder of the comparative tradition that influenced the early music, folk music, and ethnomusicology movements of the twentieth century. His legacy of cosmopolitan scholarship shaped the work of younger contemporaries like A. J. Hipkins and Alexander Ellis.1

Engel’s vision of world music was nurtured by the idealism of the post-Napoleonic era. After decades of violence beginning in the French Revolution and engulfing large parts of Europe from Portugal to Russia, Europeans sought after 1815 to construct a peaceful political order. Visionary intellectuals recalled traditions dating back to the late eighteenth century and imagined a continent, and indeed an entire world, of nations that could cultivate their own arts at home and honor the creations of their neighbors. As we have seen, in the 1820s Goethe recommended the idea of world literature in part as a means to enhance sympathetic understanding between peoples. A realization of this kind of openness was the nineteenth-century English reception of continental and especially German music and musicians. Carl Engel became one of the many Germans with musical expertise to become a beneficiary of English cosmopolitanism; he used his welcome to widen English sympathies and encompass broad reaches of humanity.2

From Small-Town Germany to Cosmopolitan London

Engel’s journey began in the hamlet of Thiedenwiese, near Hanover, where he was born in 1818. The starting point is significant, for his later work contained a deep appreciation of the local origins of musical styles within the chorus of humanity. His early years belonged to a remote place—to an older Germany not yet linked to the outside world by the railroad. It was a north Germany of a kind whose musical life was recollected by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus, where music as a form of entertainment and source of spirituality pulsates from patterns formed in the Reformation.3 Engel left his own unpublished description of that provincial world in a manuscript now housed at the Royal College of Music in London (where one reads it in the right atmosphere, in a reading room with long dark tables lit by old lamps while horn music or singing wafts in from elsewhere in the building). Engel composed the autobiography as a preface to an unpublished essay collection. He recalled his childhood “fondness for sweet sounds; my ear caught some of the beautiful national airs with which the country abounds; I sang them, and soon learned to play them on the piano, to the delight of affectionate aunts and puzzled peasants.” The nine children of the Engel family grew up in a large, squat country house, to which the father added a smaller dwelling, rather stately in its own right, which was used as a schoolhouse. The long winter evenings in the isolated household were frequently filled with musical performances, declamations of poetry, or readings of a translation from Shakespeare; they often ended with everyone singing or a dance or two while Carl Engel accompanied his family on the piano. He recalled the beginnings of his interest in what we would today call folk music and salvage anthropology: “My leisure hours were mostly spent in composing music, collecting national songs, and pursuing national history in the neighboring forest,” he wrote. “As the intellectual inclinations of the child are generally those which afterwards mould the man, these facts may account for my later fondness for the study of national music and ethnology.” So began a musical career that otherwise followed an unexceptional path as he enjoyed the rich offerings of teachers in Hanover, Weimar, and Hamburg before accepting a position as tutor in an aristocratic household in Pomerania—still in the peaceful countryside, but linked by railroad to Berlin, which he could easily visit for concerts.4 Engel also received an attractive offer to serve as family tutor to a Russian general whose regiment was stationed in Warsaw. “However, the unhappy condition of the oppressed Poland, for which every liberal German naturally felt deep sympathy, was not likely to render the life of a young artist in the family of a Russian General at Warsaw an enviable one.” Even a visit by the general’s wife to Thiedenwiese (she brought a special cake from Hanover) could not reconcile his mother to the thought of her son living amid the occupation. Engel’s “national” and folkloristic interests were cast in the pre-1848 mold of liberal humanitarian sympathies.

After several years on the Pomeranian estate, Engel was restless to travel abroad. When a wealthy English gentleman whom he met in Berlin offered him a tutoring position in Manchester, he accepted, moving there in 1846. The Midland city was one of the bustling centers of British industrialization, rapidly growing with the attendant horrors and middle-class indifference that Friedrich Engels, two years younger than the musician, had just analyzed in The Condition of the Working Class in England.5 There is no written record that Carl Engel paid any attention to the condition of Manchester’s working class; as his communist countryman wrote, the city’s bourgeoisie could easily ignore the misery that supported their wealth. What he did appreciate was a city that was “a musical Mecca,” with a concert life going back to the eighteenth century and only growing more vibrant over time. During the first half of the nineteenth century a large number of Germans moved to Manchester in order to take advantage of its opportunities for business and industry; their support for music became so legendary that the author of today’s Grove’s dictionary entry on the town begins by disputing the notion that they were solely responsible for its brilliance. Engel’s four-year stay overlapped with the arrival of the German-born musician Charles Hallé, who decisively elevated the quality of music making in Manchester. Well known in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, after the Revolution of 1848 he moved to London and thence to Manchester, where he rapidly began organizing concerts that by the following year were playing to a wide public.6 For Engel to leave the vicinity of Berlin for Manchester was not so much to leave a musical metropolis for the provinces as to enter a lively and open milieu.

Manchester was also where Engel made his entrance into English society. The gentleman who persuaded him to emigrate was an unnamed member of the Bowman family—possibly Henry Bowman, an architect in Manchester who wrote two books on medieval English architecture. Henry’s brother William was one of the outstanding ophthalmologists of nineteenth-century Britain, and later personal eye doctor to Queen Victoria. Another family member who was close to Engel, his wife’s nephew Herbert, became director of the Bank of England. The Bowmans were newly wealthy. Their grandfather was a tobacconist; their father had gone through business ups and downs before making a fortune as a banker in the 1820s, after which he retired and devoted himself to his naturalist interests. It may have been through the Bowman family that Engel met his future wife, Louisa Paget, who was William’s sister-in-law. Members of the Paget family, originally Huguenot refugees who settled in Leicestershire, were well known for their innovations in sheep and cattle breeding as well as their hosiery and lacemaking firm. Louisa’s father was an ophthalmic surgeon in Leicester who was also well known for his support of science and music. Together the two families fit the image of ambitious, hard-working, moralistic Victorians. Their Whiggish politics were a satisfactory fit with Carl Engel’s German liberalism. The bits of surviving correspondence suggest that they had a warm relationship with Engel and took an active interest in his scholarship, while for his part Carl Engel took pride in his English family.7 Engel somehow had enough money in the 1850s to build a new house for himself and his wife, though not to cover everyday expenses. In 1853 he reported to his mother that he was giving private lessons and teaching music in two schools. He also gave her an enthusiastic report on the surprisingly brisk sales of a manual he had published that year and was sending her, the Pianist’s Handbook.8 Nonetheless he was scrambling to keep up with the high cost of living in London.

Music around the World

After his arrival in the metropolis, Engel traded his composing and performing ambitions for the life of a scholar. A decade and a half later, he revealed the ambitious sweep of his research in his first major book, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864). Within the compass of the ancient world, this work made a first attempt at a broadly comprehensive study of the music of the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Hebrews. But the introduction ranged more widely, announcing a historical program for what he called an ethnology of music. He had to combat a widespread public belief in the insignificance of non-European music:

Besides the music of the ancients, we have become gradually more familiar with that of contemporary nations in every part of the globe;—at all events, more attention is paid now to national music than formerly, though this subject does not yet in my opinion receive that consideration which it deserves. Hitherto it has been almost entirely disregarded by musical savants. Sir John Hawkins, in the preface to his “History of Music,” says: “The best music of barbarians is said to be hideous and astonishing sounds. Of what importance then can it be to inquire into a practice that has not its foundation in science or system, or to know what are the sounds that most delight a Hottentot, a wild American, or even a more refined Chinese?” I have transcribed Hawkins’s own words, because he precisely expresses the prevailing opinion, not only of his own day, but also of the present time. I think, however, a few moments’ reflection will convince the reader of its fallacy. The study of national music is especially useful to the musician, because it enlarges his musical conception and secures him from one-sidedness and an unwarranted predilection for any peculiar style or any particular composer.9

Engel’s belief that he was combating a deep-seated public prejudice received some confirmation with the reprinting of Hawkins’s five-volume history of music eleven years after Engel published his book. Engel’s critique was a continuation of an eighteenth-century debate, since Hawkins for his part was responding to Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, and in particular his contemporaries’ admiration for China. The hardening of upper-class attitudes came later. After the relatively open moment of the late Enlightenment, Europeans lost sympathetic interest in non-European cultures as their own expansion seemed to set them apart and the Evangelical movement added to prejudice toward non-European cultures. While one can variously date this decline of cosmopolitanism, the mid-nineteenth century was arguably a low point.10

It was not hard for Engel to point out the ignorance behind remarks like those of Hawkins when it came to the well-developed science of music of the Chinese, “since they, as well as the Hindoos, Persians, Arabs, and several other nations, all of which are entirely ignored by him, actually possessed musical systems long before our own was developed.” But Engel wanted to go beyond this qualification to a more general reappraisal of music from what he called “a national point of view.” By “national” he meant either folk music or music in a characteristic local style. Today the term sounds ominous: every claim to a “national” culture could, and in the nineteenth century often did, slide in the direction of demands for political autonomy and subordination of nonnationals who did not share the Volksgeist; national cultures were conceived of as timeless entities, metaphysical essences derived from some remote moment beyond the reaches of historical time. National culture could find expression in language, customs, character, or anything else setting neighbors apart. Music played a large part in the formation of this nationalist ideology and its transition from culture to politics. Yet this was not what Engel had in mind. Instead, he wrote in protest against the appropriation of music by the upper reaches of European society. “National” music extended to popular classes and had a dignity and vitality all its own. If there was a politics to his use of the term, it lay in his elevation of the lives and work of ordinary people.

Engel defended national music on both pragmatic and aesthetic grounds. For musicians to study music far and wide kept them from getting stuck in provincial preferences. Many national tunes, he added, were “delightfully beautiful” and improved the taste of the listener; Handel had borrowed from a song of Calabrian peasants, and Mendelssohn from a Scottish melody. Anticipating Bartók’s research, he added that the music of the Hungarians and Wallachians might sound “strange and unsatisfactory” at first, but had “great charms for the initiated.”11 Exposure to foreign instruments, too, had practical value, suggesting ways of improving one’s own.12 Engel may have been steeped in German music, but from early on he had broadened his own taste (secretly playing Beethoven sonatas when they were forbidden by his first teacher). By the 1860s his taste had broadened to the point where he chided contemporaries who failed to grasp the utility of learning about foreign musical cultures. Later he completed the manuscript of a history of Chinese music which did not make it into print in his lifetime and has since disappeared, but was an unusual venture in the late nineteenth century.

Engel was not a cultural democrat. He shared his contemporaries’ belief that there were more and less civilized nations, and that the same was true for their musical achievements. Yet the direction of his thought was a significant departure from the conventions of mid-nineteenth century Europe, a turn from qualitative evaluation and hierarchy to interest in all musical cultures as expressions of a common humanity. In contrast to the widely held belief in musical progress, he argued “that among the most ancient nations known to us—the Assyrians as well as the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews—music had already attained a degree of perfection considerably higher than we meet with in many nations of our own time.” He also rejected the view that “savage” vocal compositions were imitations of the natural world; “expressive melody” was “an innate gift” of all peoples.13 Never had the triumph of European civilization seemed more complete than at the mid-Victorian moment when Engel wrote. The critique of a hierarchical and evolutionary view of culture took place only slowly and irregularly in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century; Engel’s plea for a universal ethnology was an untimely observation.14

Engel generalized his argument for an ethnology of music two years later in his Introduction to the Study of National Music. It was a plea for salvage anthropology, the enterprise for recording and preserving indigenous peoples’ way of life before their inevitable destruction. Following a widely held belief of his time, he assumed that peoples like Polynesians and Native Americans were on their way to extinction, as was European folk music. Yet music cultures were a resource that his cultivated European contemporaries could not afford to ignore. On first impression, foreign music was apt to appear “unimpressive, strange, and perhaps even ridiculous, so that we find it difficult to understand how it can appeal to the heart at all.” Engel combated this kind of musical provinciality with a Herderian belief that different musical traditions were varieties of the universal human expressive capacity: “. . . National music, be it ever so artless and simple, is in most cases, what music in the first place always ought to be—a faithful expression of feelings.” Western music was just as unintelligible to others: intelligent Chinese, he tartly observed, could not make sense of the music of Rameau when the late eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary Amiot performed it for them.15 With all of his observations, Engel was an innovator poised between two more sympathetic epochs: the late Enlightenment as articulated by Herder, and the late nineteenth century with its comparative analysis of musical systems.

One argument that anticipated the course of musical cosmopolitanism to come was Engel’s disagreement with the widespread belief in the naturalness of the Western diatonic scale. Europeans believed that it was natural, he wrote, because they were used to it. But the Greeks used other scales, and so did other countries in his own day, with everyone no doubt thinking that their own scale was the natural one. To counter European notions of naturalness, Engel pointed out the wide diffusion of microtones (a remarkable point to put forth, given that a half-century after he wrote, sophisticated Europeans still had trouble hearing them as anything more than off-key). Overall, he observed, the evidence showed that “the construction of the musical scales is not entirely d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I   Craft
• PART II   Science
• PART III   Commerce
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index