Nettl's Elephant

Bruno Nettl

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090233
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From one of the most lauded scholars in ethnomusicology comes this enlightening and highly personal narrative on the evolution and current state of the field of ethnomusicology. Surveying the field he helped establish, Bruno Nettl investigates how concepts such as evolution, geography, and history serve as catalysts for advancing ethnomusicological methods and perspectives. This entertaining collection covers Nettl's scholarly interests ranging from Native American to Mediterranean to Middle Eastern contexts while laying out the pivotal moments of the field and conversations with the giants of its past. Nettl moves from reflections on the history of ethnomusicology to evaluations of the principal organizations in the field, interspersing those broader discussions with shorter essays focusing on neglected literature and personal experiences.

I

Central Issues
in a Grand History

1

The Seminal Eighties

Historical Musicology and Ethnomusicology

Adler’s Paradigm

This is a narration, and perhaps more, an interpretation, of what may be considered the beginnings of musicology as a coherent discipline and of its subdivision ethnomusicology. In 1885, Guido Adler (1885, 3), the man often credited with giving musicology its start, began his most influential article by asserting, “Die Musikwissenschaft entstand gleichzeitig mit der Tonkunst” (Musicology began simultaneously with music). Did he define Tonkunst as “music,” or did he mean “art music”? Either way, this origin occurred very, very long ago.

Since Adler’s time, music historians have declared several moments of creation: 1703, the publication date of Sébastien de Brossard’s Dictionnaire de musique; 1732, when Johann Walther’s famous first dictionary of music appeared; 1768, the publication year of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique; 1776, the year in which Burney’s and Hawkins’s histories of music were published; and 1863, when Friedrich Chrysander published the first volume of the Jahrbücher für musikalische Wissenschaft, (Chrysander 1863–69), maybe the first periodical that looks remotely like the Journal of American Musicology, or Musikforschung, or Music and Letters. But most typically, the beginning of musicology is assigned to the 1885 publication of the Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft and especially to Adler’s article because it lays out, in ways that have never been totally abandoned by music scholars in the Western world (and those elsewhere influenced by this tradition), the structure and fundamental function of this field.

My father, Paul Nettl, considered himself a disciple of Adler, having served for a time as his assistant, and thus frequently mentioned his name. He would allude to Adler’s great accomplishments—and sometimes also to his stiff-necked irascibility, which was probably responsible for many of his administrative successes: founding and supervising the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich; publishing a major compendium of music history, the Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1930); and developing a Ph.D. program that produced a generation of the most influential music historians. When my father assisted him in the 1920s, Adler was already over seventy years old but still going strong, and in 1927 he asserted Vienna’s hegemony as a musicological center by hosting an international centennial congress commemorating Beethoven. Paul Nettl was proud of his association with Adler, who like himself had been born to a Jewish family in a Germanspeaking community in the Czech lands (the little town of Eibenschütz, in southern Moravia, in 1855) and had held the celebrated musicology chair in Prague when my father was still a little kid.

Some sixty years later it was time for another centennial, this one in a small town well into the countryside of Lower Austria outside Vienna, a region dotted with churches and monasteries. There I attended—in a funny-looking hotel in a reconstructed medieval granary and thus comically named “Alter Schuttkasten,” (Old Granary)—a conference about Adler and the consequences of his article of 1885. Taken for granted in the 1930s, when Adler worked as a historian uncovering great music (and also some of the minor music) of that grand music history of Austria, the article began to stand out increasingly as Adler’s most significant accomplishment because it stated, in unprecedentedly broad perspective, that musicology should encompass all kinds of research on music. I believe it was this holistic approach to the field that set musicology apart from other disciplines among the humanities, and although most living musicologists have perhaps never read that article, it has always been the cornerstone of the field. To many, it qualifies as the moment at which musicology began.

In Adler’s world, there was no doubt that the true music was the music of Western culture and that the truest music was the art music of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austria and Germany and maybe Italy and France. Eventually Adler came to be considered the leader of paradigmatic conservatives among music historians, despite his interest in Wagner and his book on the (then) recently deceased Mahler (Adler 1916). What he says here and there about non-Western music shows that he saw it in a somewhat Darwinian style, as music representing an earlier stage of development far outstripped by European accomplishments. But in 1885, barely thirty years old, Adler was a kind of firebrand, bringing to the world of scholarship a vision of a new field—musicology—and approaching his task with a wide scope that was not soon if ever shared by scholarship in the other arts.

The importance of the 1885 article rests in the way it lays out the field of musicology. Let me remind you of the structure it imposes. There are two major divisions, historical and systematic, each with subdivisions. Historical musicology includes paleography, taxonomy, the study of chronology (in music, theory, and practice), and, as a kind of annex, the history of musical instruments. Systematic musicology includes theory—the bases of harmony, rhythm, and melody; aesthetics; music pedagogy; and, again as a kind of curious annex, something called “Musikologie,” defined as “comparative study for ethnographic purposes.” There are several auxiliary sciences whose inclusion persuades us that Adler regarded musicology as closely related to other fields. It’s important, by the way, to point out that the kinds of considerations appropriate to ethnomusicology are not found exclusively under “Musikologie.” Adler’s discussion of his chart places non-Western and comparative study, and music’s relationship to the rest of culture, also within other aspects of the systematic branch of musicology (particularly aesthetics) and in the historical branch as well.

The classes given in Adler’s article stayed around for a long time, for example, in his methodological handbook (1930) and in the textbook Introduction to Musicology, by one of his North American students, Glen Haydon (1941). Other outlines have been proposed (see especially C. Seeger 1977, 125–27). Despite some internecine strife and a lot of attitudes, however, musicology has remained for over a century a single field in which most individuals recognize that the rest, however far-flung their musical interests, are colleagues. It continues to be thus defined in dictionaries of music.

Well, the division of a holistic musicology into such categories has perhaps become old hat, but a hundred years ago it must surely have been a new thing. There were parallel stirrings elsewhere also: in Russia, in France, even of a sort in the United States. Adler had predecessors, too, most obvious among them Friedrich Chrysander, who for a few years beginning in 1863 published his Jahrbücher für musikalische Wissenschaft, in whose preface he asserts that this “Wissenschaft” has several branches: history, aesthetics, theory, folk music scholarship (including intercultural comparison), and the presentation—for practical musicianship—of newly discovered works. This periodical soon disappeared for lack of support, but Chrysander tells the reader that however many concerns are represented among scholars involved with music, they have much in common and ought at least to share a periodical.

In 1884, however, Chrysander, by then about fifty-nine and the distinguished biographer and editor of Handel’s works, and Philip Spitta, by then about forty-five and the great biographer of Bach, joined with the youthful Adler (who was living in Vienna but getting ready to go to Prague to assume the chair of musicology) in founding the new Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft. There was no fly on the wall, but I like to imagine the older, established scholars permitting Adler, with his youthful energy and enthusiasm, to be the principal architect of this venture while also leaving him most of the work. Anyway, Adler’s view of the field as encompassing all imaginable kinds of musical study seems to have dominated this journal throughout the ten years of its life. His own article leads the others and is presented as a kind of position paper for what follows. In some ways, it reads like the work of a seasoned scholar, stating its points with authority and even majesty. At the same time, to lay out a field with courage and conviction, from scratch, may have been the characteristic approach of a young man.

So far I’ve presented the founding of musicology as a function of the “great man” theory of history—acts of courage and conviction. But as an ethnomusicologist I’m much more inclined to look for cultural forces. Why should this periodical and its seminal article come about, and its impact stick, particularly in 1885 and in the German-speaking lands? Actually, the kind of grand entry that musicology experienced in the 1880s didn’t occur in a vacuum. This was a time when much was being done with a lot of courage and conviction, if not always with ethical conscience and good judgment. The notion of a grand vision for a new discipline and the publication of a periodical exhibiting this broad scope seem to fit beautifully into the 1880s, a period when thinking big, innovation, looking at the whole world, and looking at the whole nation were all very prominent in the minds of European intellectuals, and maybe most so in those of Germany and Austria. To illustrate the context in which Adler was working, let me list at random a few of the things that were happening in 1885, as well as just before and after that year.

Maybe most significant for the development of the concept of ethnomusicology was the beginning, in 1884, of a series of conferences where European powers carved up the continent of Africa for themselves in thoroughly cavalier fashion. In the United States, where ethnomusicology would take root most vigorously, this era saw unrest on the labor front and large-scale emigration from Eastern and Southern Europe; it was also the last period in which a group of Native Americans, in this case the so-called Plains Indians, used violence to oppose white domination, and it included the Ghost Dance movement, which culminated in the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The 1880s were a period of great technological innovation, too. The short period of 1884–86 saw the development of a practical phonograph, electrical devices in general, agricultural machinery, the single-cylinder engine, coated photographic paper, the rabies vaccine, cameras, the fountain pen, and fingerprinting. The notion of comfort for all was presaged in 1885 or thereabouts by the discovery of gold in the Transvaal, the introduction of golf to America, the opening of the first subway in London, and—in quite another way—the initial publication of the Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve mentioned only a few events, but enough perhaps to give something of the flavor of European thought and social relations of the time. More specifically, I suggest that the history of musicology in the 1880s can be understood through three related themes of the period.

First, European society was at this time ready to take on the world and devour it in various ways—politically and culturally, but also intellectually and aesthetically. People tended to think big during this period. Huge scholarly endeavors, incredibly ambitious schemes of invention, and vast projects in the arts are typical, paralleling the insupportably grand and, in retrospect, intolerable political, social, and military schemes. Second, there was an increasing interest in the concept of nationalism—something, to be sure, going back over a hundred years—a nationalism that involved understanding the cultural heterogeneity as well as unity of one’s own nation. Taking on the world was to some extent a function of the growing nationalism of the time—particularly, at that late date, the nationalism of Germany and the United States, both new participants in the colonial activities in which Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands were seasoned veterans. And third, a result perhaps of the first two, there appeared an interest in the relationships among cultures as Europe, devouring the world and trying to digest it in ways compatible with the notions of nationalism, also had to absorb and reinterpret its variety. Taking on the world and doing the impossible; collecting and utilizing one’s own national heritage; and seeing what the world was made of, how one could make use of it, and how it came to be—these are three major themes of the 1880s. Arousing admiration as well as dread, they are ultimately the wellsprings of musicology as it was fashioned by Adler. Let me comment on each, illustrating briefly from the musicological literature of this seminal age.

Thinking Big

It is easy to see how someone like Edison (who thought he was up to solving all mechanical and electrical problems), Ranke (who was confident of being able to present the whole history of the world), or Wagner (who presented central questions of human history in a confluence of all performative arts at unprecedented length) could be seen as a paradigm of an era in which people seemed to say, “Let’s grab the whole world”—or maybe, less politically and militarily, an era that said, “Let’s learn everything about the world,” “Let’s not be afraid to think big,” and also, with supreme self-confidence, “We can find out everything.” In the world of politics and economics and even the arts, musicology was (and is) a humble byway, but here too the concept of thinking big asserts itself. The establishment of musicology as a holistic field taking on all intellectual problems concerning music, as outlined by Adler, clearly fits the pattern, and it was at this time that the tradition of publishing complete collections such as the Gesamtausgaben of Bach, Handel, and Mozart, as well as comprehensive editions such as Denkmäler and collections of national folk songs, really took off. Other publications, too, contributed to this notion of comprehensiveness.

Take, for example, Victor Mahillon’s (1880–1922) celebrated five-volume catalog begun in 1880, of the instrument collection of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. The collection had some 3,500 specimens, and Mahillon developed a taxonomy (derived from an old Indian system) that eventually led to the now-standard classification of Hornbostel and Sachs published in 1914. Mahillon divides the instrument groups into European and non-European and gives a great deal of detail about many items, including scales, details of structure, and cultural context and interest. It’s a marvel of care and love, but the point I want to make here is that Mahillon conceived of this as a work in which all imaginable instruments might have a place—a work that encompassed the whole world of instruments. In the area of instruments, Mahillon was taking on the whole world.

The idea of establishing a kind of framework into which one might place all phenomena of a particular class within musical culture, from all societies, for the purpose of comparative analysis was to become a hallmark of later ethnomusicology. Chronologically the first example of this kind of framework was the practice devised by Stumpf, Hornbostel, and Abraham (in many of their joint publications—see, e.g., vol. 1 of Sammelbände, 1922–24) for describing, in similar terms, a great variety of the world’s music. More to the point, as this tradition was continued—and more analogous to Mahillon’s plan—was the approach of Mieczyslaw Kolinski (e.g., in 1965a and b), who in the 1950s and 1960s promulgated outlines for the comparative analysis of melodic contour, scale and mode, rhythm, and tempo; these outlines gave space to all extant and imaginable musics. Clearly related, too, is the analytical component of Alan Lomax’s “cantometrics” (first articulated in 1968), which tries to enable the analyst to create a profile of any imaginable musical style. There are also the first attempts at defining a universal, not culture-specific way of classifying the songs (folk songs and perhaps hymns) in a large collection, first in a rather simple-minded plan by Oswald Koller (1902–3), followed by a more sophisticated approach by the Finnish scholar Ilmari Krohn (1902–3), whose system was later adopted and thoroughly modified, with much success, by Béla Bartók (1931) in his fundamental book on Hungarian folk songs.

If the idea of taking on the world is reflected in musical scholarship, one would expect to find something like a world ethnography of music. After all, if Leopold von Ranke could claim to present a true history of the world (even though it turned out to be that of Europe to 1500), one might expect that someone would have attempted a history of world music. There isn’t really enough data to accomplish that even today, and there certainly wasn’t in 1885, and anyhow, the concept of music would have been quite narrow back then. Still, the first large attempt at a comprehensive history of Western music, by August Wilhelm Ambros (1862), merits consideration.

Ambros is worthy of a digression in any event, for he belongs to the “thinking big” movement. A musical polymath—composer, scholar, aesthetician, early Czech-German-Bohemian musical nationalist—who spent his life in Prague, he was born in 1816 and thus belongs to the generation of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Wagner; he was near the end of his life (in 1876) by the time the great Czech nationalists Smetana and Dvo ák were transforming musical life in Prague. Ambros was arguably the first person to hold a designated full professorship in musicology at a European university, having in 1869 been appointed professor of history of music and art at the German-speaking branch of the University of Prague (and thus forever justifying my native city’s claim to a place in the early history of musicology), and so he gets a few lines on these pages even though he doesn’t quite fit my theory, given that publication of his comprehensive Geschichte der Musik began in 1862. His appointment no doubt resulted in part from this great project.

Ambros, like Ranke, didn’t get far in the chronology—he left off with Palestrina, in volume 3 (1868). But his history is an astonishing work considering the modest amount of data then available, and it bids fair to be an ancestor of ethnomusicology. Ambros wrote not only music history in the narrow sense but also cultural and contextual history. It’s amazing, also, to find the first volume devoted entirely to non-Western music and ancient Europe: twenty pages on China, forty on India, thirty on the Islamic Middle East, and some four hundred on Egyptians, Hebrews, Mesopotamians, and Greeks. It was not an easy read, even for the reader of Ambros’s time, as he clearly knew when he famously said in his preface (xix), “Die Wissenschaft hat zu Zeiten das Recht, langweilig zu sein” (scholarship has the right, occasionally, to be boring). But he was determined to put together everything as he saw it and as it could be made available to him.

Since limited data ruled out any meaningful attempt at a comprehensive world music history in the 1880s, as well as any proper description of the contemporary musics of the world, we may look for the thinking-big principle in works that say everything about a given subject, and so we’re led to Theodore Baker’s published dissertation Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the music of North American savages [1882]), the first comprehensive book on Native American music. Born in New York in 1851, Baker went to study music in Leipzig, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword anthony seeger
• Introduction: Histories, Narratives, Sources
• Part I - Central Issues in a Grand History
• Part II - In the Academy
• Part III - Celebrating Our Principal Organizations
• Part IV - A Collage of Commentary
• References
• Index