Philip Bohlman (2002) makes a case for the invention of world music by Johann Gottfried Herder, whose “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” (1778–9) may be the first work to propose that each people has its music – that there is such a thing as folk song, Volkslied, which is peculiar to each people, but some of whose characteristics all peoples have in common. Not the first to notice musical diversity, Herder may indeed have been the first who prominently made the point and suggested a term. His works of 1773 and 1778–9 proposed a new approach to the understanding of music, introducing the concept of oral tradition, but these works also appeared in a period in which a major principal tradition of music historiography had its first flowering with the virtually simultaneous publication of some of the earliest expansive histories of European art music (see Bohlman on Herder in the present volume). The following paragraphs summarize some of the landmarks among the early works that may claim in some way to be, or were considered to be, histories of world music.
Charles Burney
The 1770s formed a major period in the history of musicography. In 1776, Charles Burney and John Hawkins published the two earliest influential histories of Western music. Burney’s, thought by some to be the less scholarly and more popularizing, has always received more attention. It sees music as a feature of human culture, but in its excellent and proper form, it is specific to certain peoples. It contains no mention of India or China, nor of Africa or Native North America, but there is a large section – approximately 20 percent of the total work – devoted to “ancient” music with chapters on Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek music, all of these presented as complex systems. Burney does opine on the origins of music, asserting that “the art or practice of music cannot be said to have been invented by any one man, for that must have had On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship 29
its infancy, childhood, and youth, before it arrived at maturity” (Burney 1776–89, 164). And also, “the first attempts must have been rude and artless: the first flute, a whistling reed, and the first lyre, perhaps the dried sinews of a dead tortoise” (ibid., 165). There is a concept of music as something that developed gradually, but it is not true music until it has a conceptual body of theory and, so Burney implies, at least a rudimentary system of notation. And further, Burney, rather in concert with modern evolutionists but also with Native American tribes, suggested that the origins of song are “coeval with mankind . . . This primitive and instinctive language . . . is still retained by animals” (ibid.).
Burney and Herder thus represent two viewpoints that have divided music scholarship, though not necessarily scholars, some of whom try to mediate between the two: 1) All peoples have their own music, or 2) all music is part of a single development leading to – well, is it Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or high-tech?
Actually, the concept of a “world” of music made occasional appearances before Burney and Herder. One of the high points in musical thought is Rousseau’s dictionary of 1768, in which the musical world is illustrated by three notations – Chinese, Native Canadian, and European folk music – a harbinger of the dominant division of musics under the purview of comparative musicology before c. 1950.
The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth provide the earliest important reports on the musics of Asian cultures: most prominently the works of Amiot (1779) and du Halde (1735) on Chinese music, of William Jones (1784) on the Indian rāga system, and of Raphael Kiesewetter (1842) on Arabic music. Taken as a group, these examples, along with numer- ous less prominent others, show that in the consciousness of European scholars the concept of music as a world of musics began to grow. These works, and some others like them, seem to have had an effect on the authors of some nineteenth-century works that claim to be “histories” of music.
Johann Gottfried Herder
Philip Bohlman has discussed Herder in a number of publications (see, e.g., Bohlman 2002, Bohlman 2007, Bohlman 2010, Bohlman 2011, and in the present volume) and lists him as an inventor – sometimes the inventor – of world music. There are a number of ways in which Herder deserves that title: by paying attention to the music of the ordinary and rural people in addition to the art music of court and church; by considering and collecting the folk music of diverse peoples in Europe – and by adding, late in life, some interest, as Bohlman (2007, 4) points out, to non-Western music; perhaps most important,
by coining the term Volkslied, which labeled a genre that all peoples were thought to possess, the common core of a world music. Surely he had ideas of what the history of music, and of the folk music of the world’s cultures, might have been, but in his day this subject was not one of the issues of scholarship. Suffice it to say that were he writing today, he might, like many others, have been of two minds: music had a single origin – he considered it coeval with speech, something inherent to humans (“hard-wired” one would say today), its character represented by what the world’s folk musics more recently, perhaps in his time, had in common. But also, each “Volk,” each nation, had its own distinct folk music with its own long history. Although he was principally concerned with the words of songs, he was a competent and active musician; and his work pointed the way for a number of disciplines – folklore, philology, literary scholarship, historiography, and even ethnomusi- cology. He speaks to us from another age, virtually another culture, but the musical issues that he illuminates – universals versus cultural diversity, music as isolated art versus music as a mainstay of life – are in various ways still with us. His importance to humanistic scholarship, nonetheless, was so great that many articles in standard reference sources (e.g., Encyclopedia Britannica) hardly mention his interest in folk music and do not credit him as a seminal figure in the discipline of folklore.
August Wilhelm Ambros
The first author who seriously confronted the issue of music and musics was August Wilhelm Ambros, whose Geschichte der Musik, which began publication with its first volume in 1862, is regarded by many scholars as a major landmark in the history of musicology. The first volume (of what was intended as five volumes) is entirely devoted to non-Western music, the music of the ancient Near East, and the classical cultures of Greece and Italy. His discussion of non-Western musics, based almost entirely on second-hand apprehension of theoretical sources along with quotation of a small number of transcriptions (made, naturally, without the use of recordings) does more than pay lip-service to a world-music concept. He sees the world of music as consisting of a number of areas that developed as a result of diffusion from culture centers – China, South Asia, and the Arabic world, to which he adds, by implication, the ancient Greek–Egyptian culture that led to Western music. Claiming that the ability for “musicking” is – using the modern term – imprinted in humans, he describes a series of situations (Ambros 1862, 3–4) – conflict, child-rearing, expression of joy or sorrow – that as a group look like a precursor to the multiple-origin concept (cf., however, ibid., xvi–xvii). Ambros suggests that the non-Western art musics should be seen as parts of his overall chronology because 1) the music On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship 31
of non-Western cultures should be acknowledged as ancient, perhaps predat- ing the origins of Western culture, but 2) that their development was truncated at a certain point, and they were overtaken by Western music, which continued to develop further. Without explicitly claiming to be writing about world music, Ambros tries to establish it in both geographic and chronological frameworks.
Carl Engel
On a somewhat parallel track, the older of the two unrelated Carl Engels’ active in music research followed Herder as a precursor of twentieth-century ethnomusicology with its concern for the musics of the world. Engel (1818–82), who lived largely in England, pursued a number of interests in his career, including organology and piano music, but it is for his work on “national music” that he is best remembered. In his principal book on the subject (Engel 1866), he defines national music as music “appertaining to a nation or tribe, whose individual emotions and passions it expresses, which distinguish it from the music of any other nation or tribe” (ibid., 1). Rendering it as equivalent to Volksmusik, he nevertheless avoids throughout the work issues that later came to dominate scholarly thinking about folk music, such as its presumed (and required) great age (as both style and repertory), its association with particular social classes, its rural provenance, and the question of authenticity; rather, he discusses a great deal of music that in the twentieth century would have been labeled as vernacular – functional folk songs, hymns, patriotic songs, some European and a lot of non-European popular art music.
Engel’s Introduction to the Study of National Music is not a work that could today be used as documentation of ethnographic or historical research. Yet it is astonishingly broad and broad-minded. There are abundant notations, mainly from published sources, but many other transcriptions made by ear, and while the emphasis is on Europe (and mainly England, Germany, and Central Europe), Engel tries to include music from many cultures, managing to present examples and comments on music of Africa, Native America, Persia, India, Central Asia, and China. Engel’s principal purpose was to demonstrate that each culture has its own music. But following upon the heels of that aim is an insistence that the world’s musics have a lot to do with each other. He tells us that among nations and even continents there are significant parallels in performance practices of many kinds, in social functions, and even in specific tunes. He works hard at providing ways for comparing musics, and even when these, in retrospect, turn out to be wrong-headed or of dubious relevance (e.g., ibid., 174, a table indicating percentages of songs in major and minor in
twenty-two European nations and ethnicities), they show Engel as a uniquely forward-looking scholar. Arguably, this is the first general book about world music.
It is worth mentioning, as virtually contemporary to Engel’s, the work of Wilhelm Tappert (Tappert 1968), whose small book, Wandernde Melodien (Wandering Melodies), suggests that we look at the world not only as a group of musics, but also as a group of melodies each of which has diffused throughout the world (at the very least, throughout Europe) and maintained its integrity while taking up, in each venue, significant characteristics of local music.
Guido Adler
If musicologists agree that they have a disciplinary father, it is likely to be Guido Adler, who was the author of the most influential article laying out the field (Adler 1885) and principal editor of the first successful musicological journal. The field that was to become ethnomusicology, with its concern with the musics of the world, makes a cameo appearance in Adler’s outline, but it is there as “Musikologie – Untersuchung und Vergleichung zu ethnographischen Zwecken” (Musicology – investigation and comparison for ethnographic purposes). The music of the world is there for more than just a speculative introduction to Western art music. The journal, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (Musicological Quarterly) (1885–95), in its first two volumes, makes a stab at looking at the entire world, or at least the part of it to which musicologists had access. Thus, besides studies of music from European history to c. 1800, there are articles on ancient Indian music, music of Native Americans, medieval Arabic music, and related materials – for example, psychology of music and the origins of music – and there are reviews of Alexander Ellis’s pioneering 1885 article and of publications on folk music. One might maintain that the Vierteljahrsschrift qualifies as the first journal to use a world-music perspective, despite its grounding in the European canon. The only thing conspicuously missing is discussion of recent music (e.g., folk songs collected in the 1860s, Asian music in more or less contemporary manifestations, and, most surprising, Mozart, Beethoven, and nineteenth-century opera).
Forty years and many research projects later, at the age of almost seventy, Adler had moved away from a broad world view, editing an influential compendium, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924), which very clearly inter- prets the history of music as the history of Western music. In the second edition, there is a brief chapter (about thirty pages, 2.5 percent of the book) by Robert Lach, titled “Die Musik der außereuropäischen Natur- und orienta- lischen Kulturvölker” (Music of the non-European natural and oriental On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship 33
peoples) (1930), which looks at the history of world music as a sequence of increasingly complex scales, avoiding separation of nonliterate from Asian high cultures, and beginning with several pages on origins. Evidently, it was Adler’s view that there is a history of music; even the individual nations of Europe are not accorded separate histories until the modern era, from 1880 to 1924. Folk music is mentioned occasionally, but the concept of folk song as a point of departure for art music, perhaps on a national basis, does not come to the fore. Adler’s collection is characteristic of many larger histories of music published in the seventy years after the 1885 breakthrough.
Sourindro Mohun Tagore
The first prominent book that interprets the world of musics as a group of musics, each with its own history, though not neglecting interrelations, is by a scholar who worked outside the European scholarly canon, though he was significantly influenced by Carl Engel’s work – the Bengali intellectual Sourindro Mohun Tagore. Tagore’s Universal History of Music (first published in Calcutta in 1896) is perhaps the earliest book in which some measure of equality is given to the treatment of the various continents. This is one of Tagore’s last publications, as it follows a long series of scholarly and hortatory works on Indian music and other subjects; much of his work is discussed in publications by Charles Capwell (especially Capwell 1987 and 1991; see also Bohlman’s introduction to this volume), who also describes his involvement in the creation of a national anthem appropriate to India as a constituent part of the British Empire. Active in many projects developing musical life in Bengal, Tagore organized his ambitious history of world music principally by discus- sing each of a multitude of nations, but he consistently emphasizes, as well, the ways in which music crosses national boundaries. Thus, he begins by pointing out that “the primitive tones of the human voice are much the same in all countries” but quickly moves to assert that “the Moors have exercised a perceptible influence upon the music of Spain” and “the well-known German ‘Dessauer March’ is of Italian origin” (Tagore 1896, 11).
Tagore’s Universal History, based on fragmentary secondary and tertiary sources (except when dealing with South Asian subjects), is valuable princi- pally for its perspective: it tries to tell some important things about the music of every nation. Beginning with “The Savage Nations” (tribal societies of the Americas and North Asia), it devotes about one hundred pages to Asia (forty of them unsurprisingly on India – subdivided by regions – but devoting several pages each to China, “Siam,” Japan, Korea, Tibet, Persia, etc.); about 45 pages to Africa, 115 to Europe, 35 to the Americas, and 25 to Oceania. In each case there is some account of older traditions currently still
practiced, instruments, and a few assorted (and not very organized) facts on history. Often, the matter of national anthems comes up, as does the use of foreign musics (e.g., Italian music performed in Germany). There is a brief account of opera in Germany (ibid., 217), and Tagore provides a few words about Mozart (and a list of six major works) and mentions minor figures such as Louis Spohr and Gyrowetz. The main point is that there are actually chapterlets on such obscure regions as Iceland, Borneo, Tyrol, and Dahomey. No doubt, Tagore knew that his information was spotty and superficial, but he considered it important to make a gesture, showing that all nations had their music, that each deserved appropriate attention, and that the universe of music consisted of these separate, though interrelated, musics. Tagore’s was a viewpoint that did not become prominent until several decades after his death in 1914.
An Indian successor to S. M. Tagore’s universal history, almost a century later, is Music of the Nations by Swami Prajnanananda (1973), who presents his book as a comparative study of the “musical systems of the civilised nations of the world.” With chapters on India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, on Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Burmese, and Korean music, and on Russian and Western European musics, it cannot claim great authority. It is worth mentioning, nonetheless, as a modern attempt by a non-Western scholar to write about world music, and, parallel to its Western counterparts, it does so from an Indian perspective, devoting its longest chapter to Indian music, and providing a separate chapter on the influence of Indian music on the rest of the world. I do not know whether Swami Prajnanananda was inclined to irony, but it seems that he might have been saying, “If you Europeans think I’ve provided an unbalanced, Indo-centric view of world music, this may tell you how we are usually made to feel.”
Hugo Riemann
In his long career as a musicologist and theorist, Hugo Riemann touched on an immense variety of musical subjects. Central to his output was his Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, a five-volume publication more or less contemporary to Tagore’s. Enormously erudite and in control of the voluminous European literature on music, Riemann devotes the entire first volume of the work to ancient Greece, beginning with a thorough account of Greek and Roman sources, but he starts out with several caveats. Extolling the recent develop- ment of “musikalische Ethnographie” (musical ethnography; see Riemann 1904, vi, for perhaps the earliest use of this term), Riemann maintains that this is not history, but rather observation of the present, from which, he warns in a precursor of more recent thought, one must not extrapolate earlier stages On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship 35
of history. He further points out (ibid., 1) that while it has been customary to include Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian music as a prologue to the history of Western music, because these cultures were well advanced at the time of the flowering of ancient Greek culture, he feels that they should not be seen as part of Western music history. Chinese music is too distant, Egyptian music known only from depictions of instruments, and Indian music a mix of materials of ancient provenance with influences from the beginning of the Islamic period in South Asia. Thus these and other non-Western cultures are only mentioned