Music and musics
So, we ask, first: what is music? Dictionary definitions in European languages are not too helpful, as they inevitably foreground the art music of Western culture. It is difficult to take as a point of departure, however, anything other than Western music, because the holistic concept of “music” is in fact not shared with all or even many other societies. In European languages (but perhaps more
Some material in this chapter appeared in a different form in Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (Nettl 2010)
in English than in some others), music is an enormously overarching concept, including meaningful sounds made by humans and contrasted with speech, but extending further to sounds made by animals that remind us of music, sounds (e.g., industrial noises or silences) defined by musicians as music for the occasion, and further, to metaphorical extensions such as pleasant sounds of any sort. In contemporary Anglo-American use, all things considered to be music are music to an equal degree; they may not be equally good or valuable, to individuals or to society, but one does not speak of one piece being “very much music” and another one being “barely music.” Even in some other European languages, this unity does not quite apply – as in the distinction in German between Musik and Tonkunst (art music) and between Musikant (vernacular musician) and Musiker (practitioner of art music, and, along the same lines, between Czech muzika and hudba, and muzikant and hudebnik). In Persian, the distinction between musiqi (normally instrumental, metric, composed, often ensemble music) and khandan (lit., read, recite, sing; applied to vocal, usually improvised, nonmetric, soloistic) provide a continuum along which various sounds could be designated as very or slightly musical. In many of the world’s cultures, terms for music at large do not exist, but the entity that the English-speaking world considers to be music is represented by a variety of concepts or terms.
There appears to be no definition of music that would be accepted by all cultures; and our task here is not to look for one. Inevitably, we take as a point of departure the English form of discourse about music, but throughout our considerations, the variegated nature of the conception around the world ought to be kept in mind.
For some two centuries, beginning perhaps with Johann Gottfried Herder in the late eighteenth century (1778–9; see Bohlman 2002) and in any event with Ellis (1885) in the late nineteenth century, we have believed that each of the world’s societies has its own music – that is, that the world of music comprises a number of discrete musical systems most recently called “musics.” One might argue about the nature or requisite size of the culture group whose “music” deserves to be considered “a music”; for example, whether Native North Americans are members of one culture unit, or of a thousand. But the concept of “our” music being familiar and natural, while that of other peoples is strange, weird, perhaps ugly, most likely unintelligible, has been around for a long time. Only in the 1970s did ethnomusicologists begin to use the plural of music to specify this characteristic of their subject. It is a term that should have seemed easily acceptable, music and musics being analogous to language and languages, or to culture and cultures. It was, nonetheless, resisted by academics for several (not necessarily justifiable) reasons: foreign musics can be appreci- ated more easily than foreign languages; a music is not as coherent a system
as a language; the user of the word “musics” is “othering” the music of others. Maybe most important, in some possibly indefinable way, the musics of the world have more to do with each other than languages, and it behooves us to emphasize their unity more than the boundaries between them.
I have believed that the music/musics terminology is explanatory and dignifies the musical systems of the world’s cultures. Whether musical systems leak at the borders or not, languages are not all that coherent, being subject to constant change, and failing in the test of precise geographic borders. Whether there is something still to be said for the concept of music as the universal language of mankind, and whether enjoying the sounds of a foreign music is identical with understanding may be argued. The issue is not “one” or “many,” but in what ways the notion of music and musics provide insight. A history of world music should, if it does not come down on one side or the other, show how the two perspectives provide different interpretations of what happened.
Origin and origins
Theories of the origin of music play a role here, for a formulation of history may well be molded by the attitude taken to the question of origins. Thus, scholars and scientists coming from Western culture and seeing music as basically a unit were, while perhaps using as a basic assumption that each society has its own “music,” inclined to feel that at some level, all of the world’s musics are one, and that whatever the differences among them, in some respect they must have had a common origin. This is surely true of the older theories of the origin of music, formulated in the nineteenth century or soon after: music had a single origin. The options included imitation of animal sounds, communicat- ing over distances with the use of sustained pitches, producing sounds that support rhythmic labor and make it more efficient, the abstraction of emo- tional or formulaic speech. In general, these theories assumed a human society, with culture and language more or less in place, while music came along to help, fulfilling specific needs. Later on, additional suggestions were made: the invention of music as a way of communicating with the supernatural (Nadel 1930); music as a biological adaptation signifying fitness to mate (Miller 2000a; Wallin et al. 2000); an adaptation resulting from soothing sounds made by mothers to young babies (Dissanayake 2000); and adaptation support- ing cohesion of a society (Freeman 2000).
A history of world music, if in some sense it applies to all the world’s music, present and past, would have to take the origins of music into account. “World music” and origins of music, as concepts, connect significantly when we consider the question of “music” versus “musics.” Did music originate once, On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship 25
and then split into the musics of cultures, subcultures, idiolects? The alter- native possibility, of multiple origins, has received far less attention. Yet I must confess to being attracted to the idea that music originated in one prehistoric society as virtuosic singing signifying fitness to mate; and in another, as group vocalization to help a group of not particularly organized people feel unified; and in a third, to frighten enemy hordes elsewhere by developing powerful unison sounds; and in a fourth, developing a chant to address a fearsome deity. Of course, all of these might successively have appeared in one society, whose people might not have considered them to be the same thing at all, to have no sense that somewhere else, in the distant future, these would all be considered as “music.”
Since these different wellsprings might have resulted in some considerable variety of sounds or styles, the term “history of world musics” might be preferable to the singular even from the beginning. I would propose to replace the usual – often simply implied – model in which a single origin – invention, adaptation – of music gradually split into varieties of styles, genres, functions. There is a widely accepted chronology following on the single-origin theory in which a single moment of invention leads to inexor- ably increasing levels of complexity, from ditonic and tritonic melodies to pentatonic, heptatonic, chromatic; or from monophony to simple harmony to homophony and counterpoint, and eventually to dissonance. I am more persuaded by the suggestion that various kinds of sound communication were established at different times, in different societies or proto-societies, sometimes preceding and sometimes following the development of language, and that all of these were eventually many millennia later united under the concept of music in only a few cultures.
Which of the kinds of music – mating calls, war cries, lullabies, and the rest – came first, in the overall chronology, or in the history of an individual society of early humans? Of course we shall never know – which is why many ethnomusicologists around 1950 came to consider delving into origins as useless speculation. But the forms of proto- or pre-music that came, chro- nologically, second, third, or fourth, probably were developed by peoples who had no inkling of the earlier developments elsewhere. Yet if they had had this awareness, the suggestion that these kinds of probably contrastive sounds, different in function, performing personnel, and social context, might together be molded into a unified concept could well have seemed quite strange to them.
Clearly, this is all speculation, but it leads to a different model of the world’s musical history – one in which a diversity of social function and variety of musical style are there from the beginning.
Culture and cultures
History is written by the victors, so we are told, and as an extension, the interactions among musics have ordinarily been described and interpreted by scholars whose “own” music replaced or changed or strongly affected the music and musical lives of other societies. Thus, histories of non-Western music by European and North American scholars have normally looked at their subject matter as artifacts and activities moving from a distance to proximity to the Western models of styles and contexts. Music changes to become sounding more Western, peoples change their music by adopting Western practices and repertories, traditional perhaps religious functions of classical traditions may have been replaced by “art for art’s sake” and “great art for all time.” There may be a conventional view of world-music history: music came into existence after humans had other aspects of culture to provide for certain needs. For the people whose culture turned into Western civilization, music was then developed inexorably to greater complexity until it reached various kinds of climax in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other societies dropped off along the way, remaining stuck in monophonic, aural, functional practices until, recently, beginning in various ways to be reunited with the mainstream.
Of course, other societies may look at the history of the world’s music – from its origins onward – quite differently. In the context of a discussion of the histories of world music, the view of music history in various parts of the world ought at least to be touched upon (Allen 1939; Harrison 1973; Wiora 1965). Two brief examples, which in different ways see the emergence of music as preceding the coming of human culture – or “the rest” of culture. They involve a complex of myths found in both North and South American indigenous cultures, in which a woman is taken to a distant place – the sky, or under water, or a land in which the sun lives – and then returns to her people, bringing the gift of music or enabling her people to learn the fundamental songs of their culture. Central to it is a story studied by Stith Thompson (1953) and labeled the “star-husband” tale, although Thompson did not emphasize its relation to music.
In a myth of the Amuesha people of Bolivia (Smith 1971), a woman meets a stranger and agrees to marry him. He reveals himself as a star and takes her to live with him in the heavens. After a time, homesick, she asks to be allowed to return to her people. Her star-husband agrees but says that before she departs, he will teach her something essential; and he teaches her to sing, and songs. She returns to her people, who have all along been living in a state of non- civilized chaos, and teaches them to sing, after which they begin to live orderly On world music as a concept in the history of music scholarship 27
lives; in other words, they have acquired culture and its values and require- ments. Now, it is not clear whether this applies to the Amuesha alone, or to all peoples; many origin myths are essentially ethnocentric or at least culture-specific.
A related case comes from the Blackfoot myth that tells the origins of the beaver medicine bundle (Nettl 1989, 130, 134; Wissler and Duvall 1909, 79). This bundle, the most important complex of religious artifacts, is actually a group of perhaps close to two hundred objects that are kept wrapped together and opened for ceremonial purposes. The objects are the dressed bird and animal skins of all the local wildlife, plus a few other objects and a large number of sticks representing the songs that accompany the bundle. It is associated with the beaver, who is a kind of lord of the part of the world below the surface of water; and thus it is one of the principal ceremonies of the Blackfoot religious system. Before the bundle was opened and its ceremony carried out, the following story was told. I summarize:
A great human hunter has killed a specimen of each animal and bird, and their dressed skins decorate his tent. While he is hunting, a beaver comes to visit his wife and seduces her, and she follows him into the water. After four days she returns to her husband, and in time gives birth to a beaver child. Affairs were unforgivable in Blackfoot society, but the hunter continues to be kind to his wife and the child. The beaver, visiting, expresses pleasure at this and offers to give the hunter some of his supernatural power as a reward. They smoke together, and then the beaver begins to sing songs, each containing a request for a particular bird or animal skin. The hunter gives the skins, one by one, and receives, in return, the songs of the beaver and the supernatural power that goes with them, and thus, the principal Blackfoot ritual, which may be seen as a principal emblem of Blackfoot – and in traditional society – human culture.
This myth suggests important things about Blackfoot thinking about music. Here are some. Music comes from the supernatural. Songs come as whole units, and you learn them in one hearing, and they are objects that can be traded, as it were, for physical objects. The musical system reflects the cultural system, as each being in the environment has its song. Music reflects and contains super- natural power. It is something that only men use and perform, but women are instrumental in bringing its existence about. Music is given to a human who acts morally, gently, in a civilized manner. It comes about as the result of a period of dwelling with the supernatural, after which a major aspect of culture is brought, so in a way it symbolizes humanness. In the contemporary Blackfoot view of the history of world music, songs came about as told in myths. The world of music today contains many other kinds of songs and styles, principally of white (Western) origin, but also including other Native
peoples. But the basic conception is that these musics, like the peoples who brought them, came into history later. It is a view not too different from that of early Western historians of music, who saw primordial humankind as having music somewhat like that of Native Americans (or as the historians imagined these to be), while the things that characterize Western music came later. The conventional Western view of world-music history, nonetheless, provides for gradual unification under the umbrella of functional harmony. The Blackfoot view sees the (“their”) world of music as becoming increasingly diverse.