The Passion of Music and Dance

Body, Gender and Sexuality

William Washabaugh

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000324150
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Etnomusicología

The late nineteenth century witnessed the birth and popularization of a number of highly emotional musical styles that played on the eagerness of modern Europeans and Americans to toy with the limits of sanity and to taste the ecstasies of living on the edge. This absorbing book explores these popular, passionate musical styles -- which include flamenco, tango and rebetika -- and points out that they arose as well-intentioned intellectuals co-opted the emotional experiences most closely associated with women. In drawing those experiences out of female practice, they defined, objectified, and turned them into strategies of domination, the deepest impact of which was felt, ironically, by modern women.In bridging anthropology, sociology, cultural, media, body and gender studies, this book broadens the base of theory which has ignored the transnational world of Latin and Mediterranean popular culture and makes a powerful statement about the intersection of nationalism, sexuality, identity and authenticity.

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Introduction: Music, Dance, and the Politics of Passion

William Washabaugh

Popular music and dance are about changing the world. Such has been the case since the 1790s when modern life was formed out of the cultural crucible of the French Revolution, Then, as now, the energy of music and dance was shifted away from praising God and entertaining kings, and toward the reputedly more important tasks of contacting reality, locating wholeness, and rebuilding the tracks along which any good society should move. During this same post-Revolutionary period, the term 'popular' began operating as a kind of neon sign for marking the place where stars are made, tickets are sold, endorsements are secured, identities are created, and where cities, states, and nations are emboldened by the sounds of their own musical souls. And if these latter aspects of 'the popular' seem strange bedfellows for the former, then we have succeeded in outlining the problem at hand: popular music and dance are puzzlements, full of self-contradictions. They are treated with churchgoing respectfulness (Gay 1995: 18; Johnson 1995), yet they overflow with licentiousness and banality. They are firmly stitched into the economic and political fabric of a this-worldly existence, but they persistently stretch and strain towards ecstasy and transcendence.

More confusingly still, popular music and dance became knotted with gender and nation in the nineteenth century, a knot that tightened as patriarchal regimes of the old order came unraveled. In the new modern order of things, womanhood and nation became tightly wedded, the former being the master trope for the latter (Parker et al. 1992: 6; Kittler 1991). 'Nation' was then understood in feminine terms, as the nurturing fundament of social life, source of all warmth and security. 'In 1800 the system of equivalents Woman=Nature=Mother allowed acculturation to begin from an absolute origin' (Kittler 1991: 28). Womanhood became the rock on which nations were built. Not for nothing are nations referred to with feminine pronouns and their languages are called 'Mother tongues.' Accordingly, womanly sounds and womanly movements came to symptomatize the vital soul of 'a people.' More than just 'Mother', it was 'Mother-at-song' that knotted the knot of modern political life, creating the modern triad of nation-gender-music that changed the world while simultaneously mystifying it. Hence, our scholarly attentions are directed to the matters of politics, gender, and popular song and dance.

What linkage can we discern between politics and the gendering of song and dance in popular performances? In the very earliest popular performances - in the cafes concerts of Paris, in the cafes cantantes of Seville, and in the music halls of London (see Attali 1985; Middleton 1989) - what political repercussions were set into motion by the trilling voices and the delicate steps of women? Contrastively, where did men stand vis-a-vis those brazen but lovely singers and dancers of the mid-nineteenth century? And why were males so fascinated with the emotion-charged movements of women, most notably by the chorea that came to be known as hysteria (Hacking 1995:212; McCarren 1995; Phelan 1996)? These questions draw us into the swirling energies of the gender and politics in the nineteenth century. Further, they prompt us to raise questions about who or what stands behind the scenes, pushing the buttons and pulling the strings that drive these performances forward. Is it the impresarios who produce the events? Or maybe the journalists and intellectuals who comment on them? Or perhaps, the audiences who attend them? Or is no one in charge? Perhaps popular music and dance phenomena piggy-back on, and spin-off from, the general force of bourgeois culture?

Twentieth-century developments have only complicated these questions, making them muddier rather than clearer, and distancing us from the possibility of generating satisfying answers. More than ever, we stand perplexed before musical events that have been inflated into extravaganzas, then amplified, recorded, and re-engineered before being selectively broadcast, competitively marketed, surreptitiously pirated, and conspicuously collected, classified, and displayed, all in keeping with the still developing profile of the global music industry. Through all these transformations, the critical features of popular music have been obscured and hidden from view. In short, popular music has become increasingly resistant to critical inquiry, discouraging the efforts of those who explore this domain in hopes of responding to it with just, equitable, and productive tactics.

As a guide to the musically perplexed, the insights that we offer here aim to penetrate some of these scumbling complexities of popular music and dance by going back in time to some of the earliest and most widely celebrated forms and styles that qualify as 'popular.' This is the reason for our focus on flamenco, tango, and rebetika. Each of these styles, more than merely emotional, is exaggeratedly so, as if each style had captured, distilled and crystallized the diffused discourses of womanhood that swirled about popular performances in the nineteenth century. Each remains highly gendered to this day. Each is distinctively national. All are vintage, with roots that stretch back deep into the nineteenth century. Moreover, their musical styles are riddled with traditionalisms that have been overlaid with discourses of authenticity and purity. With all these characteristics, flamenco-tango-rebetika cannot but offer us a coign of vantage onto the nineteenth-century triad of nation-gender-music.

In one sense, our method is age-old: we aim to attain an understanding of modern popular music and dance by tracing its development through time. In order to understand the majestic oak tree, one considers the lowly acorn. In order to understand Renaissance Europe, one studies ancient Greece. In our case, in order to understand contemporary popular music and dance, we consider early and elemental forms, flamenco, tango, and rebetika.

Such a strategy of gazing into the past in order to understand the present is common to the point of being conventional, but it is not without its dangers and traps. For one thing, such a strategy can often be manipulative. More than just attending to the past, we may well find ourselves co-opting it, enlisting our representation of the past into the service of a future that is never made explicit. Just so, Armbrust (1996), commenting on modernist aesthetics in Egyptian popular culture, found that the tradition-oriented song styles of al-Wahhab and Umm Kulthum drew from the humble and folkloric past, delighting audiences in the process. Paradoxically, however, their styles left the past all but eclipsed in the future. Modernism, Armbrust concludes, is a movement that pits tradition against itself. Such a co-optation is a trap that we aim to avoid here.

For another thing, rearward glances at music and dance may well result in essentialist visions, establishing a canon, and generating 'coherent, linear historico-aesthetic narratives' of the sort that raises red flags for Simon Frith (1996: 38). Under the influence of essentialist thinking, one might well be tempted to try to return to firm and fixed musical realities by peeling away stylistic accretions built up through time. But here, we aim to avoid such essentialist blunders. Like Steumpfle's concrete and detailed description of the development of steelband music in Trinidad and Tobago (1995), our studies must be historically well grounded. Like Finnegan's study of the musical practices of the people of Milton Keynes, we will discuss the behaviors of singing and dancing rather than the objectifications of such processes, the 'finalized results' of those behaviors (1989: 8). And following the lead of Middleton (1989), our discussions have been constructed with an eye to the aesthetic and political forces that have circulated as social energy, shifting and transforming as one era gives way to another.

We will elucidate elemental interconnections and negotiations rather than elemental forms, emphasizing moments of music and dance as occasions for people to relate to one another rather than as objects for them to trade. Moreover, while we will be attending to the local circumstances of performance, we will not neglect the large institutional forces that are continually introduced into the concrete events of music and dance. In line with Manuel, we will assume that 'popular music remains embedded in powerful commercial enterprises linked to dominant classes with their own ideological agendas' (1993: 6). As much as flamenco, tango, and rebetika might seem to be derived from and keyed to the national circumstances of Spain, Argentina and Greece, we will show that these styles spill beyond those borders, and in the current commercial scene, end up hybridizing the nationalist identities they themselves helped to create (Garcia Canclini 1995), deliberately disguising their own nationalist inventions in order to highlight aspects of their identity that cannot otherwise be expressed (Lipsitz 1994: 62). Like icebergs, the bulks of which are submerged and hidden from view, these musical styles, though seeming to be confined to properly national and musical spaces, are - and have been - on the move.

In general, then, our rearward glances will show that popular music and dance exercise influence in domains well beyond aesthetics, being deeply implicated in the struggles of genders and nations. In the end, by charting the connectivity of popular music, from past to present, we hope to draw a clearer picture of how popular music has contributed to changing the modern world.

For a number of reasons, the time seems right for a consideration of these elemental styles, not only in their earliest forms, but in their later stages of development, right down to the present. These reasons have everything to do with the current state of thought about social history and popular music. First, the staid discipline of musicology has been shaken since the late 1980s by scholars such as Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer, and Susan McClary¹ who have turned a critical eye on the gender relations that pervaded elite music in the nineteenth century. Their efforts guide this current investigation of root styles, paving the way for our reconsideration of the role of gender relations in flamenco, tango, rebetika, and other popular phenomena. Second, recent accounts of the history of bourgeois culture by Gay, Seigel, Hacking, and Huyssen have redirected scholarly attention to the ambivalence of gender identity in modern social life.² This ambivalence, we will show, is obvious and evident in the musical styles that we are considering here, thereby rendering these styles all the more promising as sites for critical study. Third, recent studies of flamenco, tango, and rebetika by Castro, Deval, Hoist, García Gómez, Savigliano, and Steingress³ have directed attention to musical experiences as cultural texts to which social energies gravitate and in which they circulate. In other words, musical performances are cultural lightning rods that have the power to reveal in condensed form the forces that are elsewhere diffuse. Accordingly and in contrast to earlier scholarship that confined itself to chronicling names, places, and events for purposes of applauding or lambasting artists and audiences, our discussions will treat these elemental musical styles as sites for understanding the general operations of modernity.

Popular Music, Gender, and Exoticism

Popular music has been turned into something of a commodity. It differs from singing-in-the-shower and from singing-in-the-choir insofar as it is bought and sold. Produced and consumed in the market place, it acquires exchange value, and, as such, a certain concrete abstractness. If we are speaking of a song sung in a coffee house or music hall, its concreteness is evident. The singers and the audiences are visible, audible, tangible, and palpable and, in all these respects, concrete. But in addition, the popular event is one that embeds this concreteness in a new context, one that silently redefines the music as a marketable object, a commodity. Ticket-sales, show-times, stage-lights, curtain-calls and, subtler yet, the practice, practice, practice that artists submit themselves to in order to market their musical virtuosity, all these serve to distinguish commodified music, invisibly hedging it off from street music on the one hand, and haute music on the other. This new and abstractly defined popular music never existed in the choir, or in the shower, or in the street or in the court. It is a distinctly modern phenomenon, produced, packaged, distributed, and consumed in the modern marketplace.

The commodification of music was a response in part to the dislocations associated with the French Revolution. Both Richard Terdiman and Paul Connerton have examined this period and have concluded that, while the king may have lost his head during this social upheaval, the far more distinguished victim of the Revolution and its aftershocks was social memory.⁴ In the wake of the quake, citizens of the new order could no longer remember what was important and fundamental for their social lives. Their time-wrought ceremonies and traditional practices were swept away, and in the bombed out landscape of Europe during the first decades of the nineteenth century, modern people were forced to reinvent the social ground that they were then and there already walking on.

Musical commodities came to the rescue, plugging the dikes, filling the gaps, and rescuing all of Europe, momentarily at least, from the aimlessness that threatened everyone. Little wonder that musical experiences quickly emerged as post-religious experiences (Gay 1995: 24; Berlin 1996: 178). Music was the only and proper form of religion once religion itself had been discredited. It was considered by many to be, in Carlyle's words, 'the speech of angels,' and that was especially so for the growing urban middle classes. According to Peter Gay, urbanization, the rise of the world market, the modernization of banking and commerce, favored an already growing middle class that had 'more time, money and energy for luxuries, however modest, and the devout enjoyment of music ranked high among them.'

Early on, this nineteenth-century cultivation of music went hand in hand with the task of creating nations. This was as true of Spain as it was of Germany. In Germany, the linkage between music, poetry, language, and politics had been hammered out in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, then to become emphatically clear a hundred years later in Wagner's Romantic music. Spain and Greece followed Germany's footsteps. Stoetzer argues that 'Spain had suffered for too long the excessive French influence, and German Romanticism had actually dug up the glories of the Spanish past that the Spaniards themselves had forgotten during the period of the Enlightenment. Since the Germans fought this French cultural domination, it seemed logical for the Spaniards to look for solutions in Germany' (Stoetzer 1996: 90; see also Isaiah Berlin 1990: 207-37). In consequence, the music and dance academies that flourished in Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century used musical commodities to effectively underwrite state-level politics. In Greece, as Michael Herzfeld has shown, folkloristic nationalists encouraged the search for national identity in cultural legacies of the past. Simultaneously, they recommended that extraneous traditions be rooted out and purged so as to cleanse the culture.⁵

By mid-century, however, populist Romanticism had lost its edge and was replaced by a politically languorous but psychologically vitalizing gospel that was associated with the French avant garde. Spain, like England, followed France's lead towards this new aesthetics of, what Peter Gay mimicking Baudelaire calls, 'the naked heart.' This new wave of Romanticism emphasized narcissistic introspection made possible by a self-indulgent inward turn. In contrast to the German Romantics who had predicted a political payoff for those who celebrated downtrodden people languishing on the borders of circles where power is played, this French version found psychological benefit in delivering oneself over to transgressive actions, to the lust for travel, and to passions and ecstasies of every sort. Sincerity, authenticity and intensity of feeling became sacred values. The heroes of this post-religion were the mavericks and misfits who spurned wealth, power, and fame so as to become emotionally rich.

Gypsies and the self-styled Gypsies known as bohemians were all the rage in Paris after 1840, as Seigel's history demonstrates. Defined by 'Carmen' on the front end (1845) and 'La Boheme' at the rear (1890), this era of bohemian Romanticism, with its tantalizing samplings of exotically edgy lifestyles, offers us a critical vantage point from which to appreciate modern popular music. Among the primary features of this era, we include its fascination with introspection, emotionality, and music all played out with fawning, tho...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Music, Dance, and the Politics of Passion
• 2 Flamenco Song: Clean and Dirty
• 3 Fashioning Masculinity in Flamenco Dance
• 4 Gendering the Authentic in Spanish Flamenco
• 5 Carlos Gardel and the Argentine Tango: The Lyric of Social Irresponsibility and Male Inadequacy
• 6 Tango and the Scandal of Homosocial Desire
• 7 From Wallflowers to Femmes Fatales: Tango and the Performance of Passionate Femininity
• 8 Rebetika: The Double-descended Deep Songs of Greece
• 9 The Tsifte-teli Sermon: Identity, Theology, and Gender in Rebetika
• 10 Passionless Dancing and Passionate Reform: Respectability, Modernism, and the Social Dancing of Irene and Vernon Castle
• 11 Social Theory and the Comparative History of Flamenco, Tango, and Rebetika
• References
• Index