The ethnomusicologists whose historical work is examined in this volume were united by the common cause of discovering and representing the meaning of a music that belonged to those different from themselves: their others. As the contributors to this volume make clear in chapter after chapter, the alterity and difference implicit in distinguishing peoples unlike ourselves assume many forms, always, however, investing the history of world music with politics and power. Many chroniclers were motivated at the point of encounter by the strong desire to offer history – some form of Western history – to those who, to use Eric Wolf’s phrase, were “people without history” (Wolf 1982). Otherness was a condition rendered by the absence of history, making it impossible to abandon myth for the narratives of modernity, be these religious, cultural, or economic. The question of owning history remained open, not least because the earliest chroniclers – and ethnomusicologists today, as we witness in the chapters by Beverley Diamond and Bernardo Illari – were unsure who should and could represent their own music histories, and for whom they should be producing them. The discourses of alterity may have appeared to produce and reproduce a dialectic of self and other, but, in fact, alterity has never been dichotomous in the history of world music. That which has been “self and other” in the English-language tradition has already shifted to the conditions of ownership and alienation in the German Eigenes und Fremdes (one’s own and that of the foreign).
The crucial question that remains is whether the desire to give history to those whose cultures are sounded through world music is actually con- demned to alterity by the very narratives that are meant to rescue them from the fate of lacking history. Kofi Agawu, as noted in numerous instan- ces in this volume, has argued forcefully for what he regards as a deafness to similarity resulting from an obsession of hearing other music cultures as different; for example, in the obsessive concern for the essential principles
of African rhythm (Agawu 2003). Martin Clayton, following a similar vein in his chapter, describes the degree to which Western observers find cyclical time patterns in South Asian music and then connect that seemingly cosmic temporality to Indian music history, something Indian musicians themselves do not do. The others we study may not, therefore, desire the narratives we use to describe them. For the distant music cultures appropriated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by British imperialism – for example, the “isms” (developmentalism, evolutionism, polygenism, etc.) that Bennett Zon inter- pellates in his chapter – held little meaning and provided no means of tracking their way to anyone’s history, their own or that of the well-meaning West. The others of world-music history may reject the narratives devised from the self, or they may simply find them false, irrelevant to the narratives with which they understand their own musics and music cultures (see Fox and Jones in this volume).
It is with these unsettling questions about the concern for alterity as a condition of world music that I turn in this section from the music history of otherness to the music historiography of otherness, which is itself more properly the subject of the present volume. The music historiography of otherness reroutes the narratives of world music, through politics and ideology (e.g., Castelo-Branco, Manuel, and Middleton in this volume) or ethics and religion (e.g., Shelemay, Jones, and Qureshi). Historiographic alterity does not so much exit into or from history, but rather it challenges us to resituate power and relinquish power when writing the history of world music.
Missionized and colonized alterity
The missionary and colonial endeavors that led to the first encounters with those who performed world music were founded on many motivations, most of which began with an attempt to reconcile the relation between self and other, albeit by privileging the position of the former and by confronting the latter with narratives of the West (see Agnew 2008). Historiographically, it is important to remember that the first moment of encounter was not moti- vated by destruction and erasure; these would come later, when the other failed to yield to the self. Broadly speaking, missionaries sought to save souls, and colonial officials sought to utilize the lands they entered to extract raw materials that would produce global commodities. Music was a catalyst for both the saving of souls and the production of commodities (see Reily in this volume). As a catalyst, moreover, music could close the gap between self and other, but it could be effective only by foregoing its catalytic role, moving into history as an accompaniment to a violence that enforced the hegemonic narratives of the West.
Music entered the history of colonial encounter as a record of loss and death. In his volumes of folk song, “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” and Volkslieder (Herder 1778/1779), or world music as Philip Bohlman refers to it in his chapter, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) uses musical fragments taken from the encounter of early modern Europe to formulate a history that accrued at an accelerating pace from the earliest sections of the collections to the final sections, which appeared posthumously in print four years after Herder’s death in 1803. The teleology of Herder’s repre- sentation of encounter is powerfully eschatological, by no means surprising for, as a Lutheran pastor, by training and profession, Herder was acutely aware of the need for ethical underpinnings to the missionary encounter with otherness. Folk songs – the music of the many parts of the world to which he turned for his examples – were imbued with history and with ethical meaning that reflected moral practice. Increasingly, as we move through his collections of songs previously gathered in the colonial encoun- ter, the number of laments and songs of death proliferates. The laments record sadness and terror, the loss that occurs at moments of encounter.
In the posthumously published appendix, the violence of colonial encounter overwhelms Herder’s folk songs, particularly in the concluding folio of songs from and about the colonization of Madagascar, eleven songs – vocal commen- taries in various genres – that Herder has translated from the songs from Madagascar by the French colonial official, Count Évariste de Forges de Parny (1753–1814). The terror in colonial Madagascar is that of encounter with the armies and the missionaries of the Europeans, the racialized “white people” whose presence is vilified in the songs. In the first anthology of folk songs as world music, Herder captures the lament, the Totenklage, for the fallen son of the King of Madagascar, sung by King Ampanani himself, and in call and response by the people of Madagascar:
Ampanani: My son has fallen in battle! Oh, my friends, weep over the son of your leader. Take his body to the place in which the dead live. A high wall will protect him, for there will be the heads of bulls on that wall, which will be armed with threatening horns. Respect the place in which the dead live. Their sadness is terrible, and their revenge is gruesome. Weep over my son. The Men: Never again will the blood of the enemies turn his arm red. The Women: Never again will his lips kiss those of another.
The Men: Never again will fruit ripen for him.
The Women: Never again will his head rest on a tender bosom.
The Men: Never again will he sing, resting under a tree thick with leaves. The Women: Never again will he whisper new enticements to his beloved.
Ampanani: Cease, now, with your weeping over my son! Happiness should follow the mourning! Tomorrow, perhaps, we too will follow to the place he
has gone. (Herder 1807, from Parny; in Herder 1973, 540–1)
The history of encounter is one of subjugating and resistance to subjugation, yielding violence. Amartya Sen argues that violence results when encounter is between monolithic systems, the self and other as irreconcilably different entities resulting from what Sen calls the “illusion of singular identity” (Sen 2006, 175, and passim). Whereas encounter should bring “civilizations together,” it only heightens the gap between them, yielding Aimé Césaire’s “infinite distance” (Césaire 1972, 11). Critical to the recognition of violence as a persistent trope in the historiography of alterity is the reality that violence returns again and again to mark the music of encounter. For the Protestant missionary evangelical hymnody becomes the music of a Christianity going off to war on a global scale. Turkish music enters Europe with the sound of an invading army. Resistance resounds in the music of civil war and insurgency. Where there is violence at encounter, there is also music.
The search for alterity in early modern Europe challenges us to recognize a discourse that becomes particularly historical, for the violence of music at encounter is unidirectional and teleological. The violence of music at encoun- ter has the power to silence otherness. Once the colonized and the mission- ized become the same, once they become mere stereotypes, it becomes impossible to experience their music as theirs. We witness this in the very first transcription of music from colonial encounter, published by Jean de Léry (1536–1613), the Calvinist missionary writing of the Tupinamba in the region around the Bay of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-sixteenth century. Observing music and ritual carefully, de Léry acts to inscribe the music of the other as his own, through the image and iconography of Christian chant, sacred in its melodic aura (see Fig. 0.1).
Crucial for the themes in the present volume, Jean de Léry’s descriptions and transcriptions of musical alterity entered the early history of world music.
Fig. 0.1 Transcription of Tupinamba melody in de Léry 1578
It was de Léry’s missionary encounter with the Tupinamba that provided Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) with a model for his essay “De Cannibales” (Of Cannibals; see Montaigne 1587), in which form it would provide a model of alterity for early modern historiographers, reaching eventually Johann Gottfried Herder, who employed it as a model for folk song as world music.
The ciphers of otherness are too often reduced to sameness in music, for they inhabit the music history of the West, sounding the sonic Orientalism of Occidental selfness. It is in this projection of self and other in historical encounter that African bodies must make music by always dancing, thereby failing to enter history (see Barz in this volume); South Asian music is endowed with a universal and cosmic spirituality (see Clayton and Jones in this volume); exoticism levels the modal richness of East Asia; from perspectives politically both neoliberal and neoconservative, Latin American is always already hybrid; Islam comes to be constituted as radical, fundamentalist, extreme (see Qureshi in this volume). The history of encounter has so brutally violated otherness that it is hardly surprising that the music of otherness enters world-music history in such troubling ways. The paradox, nonetheless, remains that, because the violence of encounter refuses to subside, it becomes ever more pressing to turn ethnomusicology toward a music historiography of alterity.