Notes and Queries on ‘Global Music History’

The chapters that follow in this volume are case studies in music history

traditions that have sought some kind of global connectivity, or relativity. They

move towards a global history of music. They are guided by the hope that the

West might be decentered in such a narrative, and that music history writing

itself might be reimagined in the process.

A global music history project of this nature must take into account its various

pasts. In particular, it must ask what the prospects of success are when we take

into account the legacy of comparative musicology, and the ongoing questions

asked by ethnomusicology, postcolonial studies and globalization theory. We

might also want to think about how they are complicated by today’s sound

studies – a topic I will touch on at the end. One might say that all of these have

significantly complicated the idea that it is possible to think historically across

music cultures. Indeed, they have all left us with some serious questions about

whether a global music history is feasible at all. They also who would want such

a thing, and why.

The problems they raise might, indeed, seem insurmountable. Comparative

musicology is often understood to be entwined with intellectual projects that

saw history in terms of the inexorable ‘ascent of the West’, making it complicit

with the racial crimes of the twentieth century. We don’t want to go there again.

In reacting to comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, many would say,

advocated synchronic and functionalist modes of explanation in preference to

diachronic and historical ones. To the extent that ethnomusicology and popular

music studies now have a say in how music departments organize curricula and

present their research, space and geography have now supplanted historical

‘coverage’ as the organizing metaphor, and the field of music study is better for

it. Postcolonial theory, it is often suggested, has denied the possibility of

historical knowledge separable from the contexts of global power – ‘history’

would, in other words, forever be indistinguishable from ‘orientalism’.

Globalization theory, as is well known, has posited a number of well-known ‘end

of history’ scenarios. So all four, today, suggest serious limits to the very idea of

‘a global history’.

Rewinding to a simpler time, before the complications introduced by today’s

theory anxieties, is, of course, not an option. Indeed, the problem of global music

history is firmly on the critical agenda, these days; the questions are

inescapable.1 We clearly need to find some way of reckoning with these critical

challenges, learning from them past where we can, avoiding its mistakes, and

opening up some kind of dialogue with it. Only by doing so, I would suggest,

might a twenty-first century global music history take cautious steps forward.

With that in mind, let me take comparative musicology, ethnomusicology,

postcolonial studies, globalization theory and sound studies in turn. What

problems do they raise? What encouragement do they provide? And how does

the Balzan project situate itself amongst them?

Firstly comparative musicology. The predominantly German-language tradition

of comparative musicology is still difficult to think with and about, entangled as

it was with the colonial and evolutionist thinking of the early twentieth century.

As is well known, the ethnomusicology of the 1950s rejected what it called

‘armchair ethnography’ and its historical schemes. It considered the treatment of

living musical cultures as museum exhibits to be both methodologically and

ethically unsound. Comparative musicology was more or less invisible and

inaudible in my own ethnomusicology training, decades later. And yet many of

the questions that preoccupy the broader field of musicology now – the place of

knowledge about others in music pedagogy, imagining world music history in

more inclusive terms, understanding the material underpinnings of music

culture, thinking both historically and experimentally about musical experience –

might be said to be those of the comparative musicologists. Sensitive historical

work on the comparative musicological tradition has been going on for some

time, of course, giving non-German readers (for much of this is still un-

translated) a sense of the vitality and diversity of this still rather neglected field.

But it sometimes has the feel of special pleading, which underlines the more

general state of neglect.2

If methodological and ethical questions still surround the colonial thinking of the

comparative musicologists (evolutionist, kulturkries, diffusionist and so forth),

and if these, rather simplistically, can be understood in terms of later twentieth-

centuries anxieties about modes of historicizing that reduce living cultures to

museum exhibits, their psychological investigations have fared rather better. For

comparative musicology was defined, from the outset, by psychology’s status as

the new master discipline, and had something important to offer it: hard,

empirical data. With the invention of the phonograph, and with the energies of

the major phonograph archives – the Berlin Phonogram Archiv foremost

amongst them - directed towards collecting, transcribing and analyzing music

from round the world, scholars had data at their disposal to explore significant

questions in the psychology of sense perception. For example, how might feeling

- specifically consonance and dissonance in the context of ‘tone-systems’ - be

‘measured’? How might the complex diffusions of its cultural patterns might be

explained?3

The questions posed by a cognitivist music psychology today are, naturally, quite

different. However, the idea that music might provide illuminating and

measurable empirical data in the pursuit of otherwise complex or intractable

psychological issues – emotion, entrainment, ‘interaction’ for instance – is still a

lively one today.4 So it would seem we are happy to revive the memory of the

comparative musicological tradition to support musicology’s current cognitive

and ‘empirical’ moment.5 But we remain ambivalent, at best, about what the

comparative musicological tradition had to say about music history.

We continue, then, to remember an important, if once discredited, intellectual

scene in highly selective ways. There are some exceptions to this trend, worth

underlining. The figure of Robert Lachmann has stood out as one particularly

sympathetic to modern ethnomusicology.6 Lachmann’s North African expertise,

and his Jewishness, informed intense questions about the circulation of the

synagogue traditions around the Mediterranean – a Mediterranean Lachmann

saw in connective, rather than disjunctive terms. Lachmann’s sensibility to world

music history was one that insisted on the mutual entanglement of the Western

and Mediterranean world. This vision of things became more and more

anathema in Nazi Germany, of course. It pushed Lachmann, a trained Arabist, to

the remote Mediterranean margins – in particular the island of Djerba, off the

Tunisian coast. Here, the ethnographer felt he could identify the various layers of

Tunisian Jewish historical experience in their music, and begin to build up a

much broader picture of the global circulation of synagogue traditions. For him,

this was very much part of the story of ‘the West’. Methodologically, Lachmann’s

Djerba study still might be read as a model in how to listen, how to ask questions,

and how to sift complex data in a field in which people have no traditions of

writing, and little, indeed, in the way of talking about music. It is a model of how

one might patiently allow patterns to emerge and hypotheses to grow as the

fieldwork process progresses.7 It might also be read as an example of highly

localized ethnography saturated with global historical questions of a profoundly

critical kind.

Lachmann was dismissed from his position in the Berlin National Library in

1935, and he died in Jerusalem in 1939. In his latter years, despite struggling to

find a job, he managed to complete a series of recordings for the Palestine

Broadcasting Service. His ‘Oriental Music Broadcasts’ were, in part, motivated by

the pressing demands of the Zionist project at that particular moment – to

imagine the conditions of an inclusive and flourishing musical culture in the

Jewish state.8 In part it was also a more general exercise in comparativism, taking

advantage of the remarkable conditions of immigration and settlement that

prevailed there. The lectures that accompanied the broadcasts are in Lachmann’s

characteristically concise and rigorous style, each of the ten dealing with a

technical problem of explanation, analysis, or contextualization. Each revolves

around a case study – “Liturgical songs of the Yemenite Jews”, “Liturgical

Cantillation and Songs of the Samaritans”, “Men’s Songs for an Arab Village

Wedding in Central Palestine”, for example – and the case studies are explored

comparatively, sometimes wide-ranging, sometimes more narrowly focused.

But his comparisons proceed from the idea that the recordings represent mobile,

changing, and mutually influencing music cultures, not historically inert isolates,

like pieces in a mosaic. Rebaba (the Arab bowed lute) playing by Bedouins, for

instance, raises questions for Lachmann about the relationship of modality,

singing and instrument fingering, which sparks a comparison with gusle (the

Balkan bowed lute) playing. A broader argument, reminiscent of Max Weber’s

analysis of rationality in tonal systems, is adduced, in which ring-finger fingering

indicates a movement away from vocal mimesis, towards autonomous,

rationalized, tonal design in rebaba performances. We might now query the idea

that systemic autonomy and ‘rationality’ might always, qua Weber, be the logical

terminus of such developments. But Lachmann assumes, importantly, that each

of these ethnographic moments represented by the studio recordings captures,

fleetingly, music in historical motion, motion that is recuperable through a

variety of comparative, analytic and ethnographic methods. Music, in other

words, whose history connects with others.

The neglect of comparative musicology is unfortunate for two reasons. One is

that exemplars, such as Lachmann, might still be learned from – if, arguably,

there is still work to do in disentangling him from some of the pathos that

currently clings to him9, and locating him in broader intellectual histories. The

other is that it has deepened a sense today that the historical and ethnographic

traditions in music study are disjunct, separable. We tend to remember

comparative musicology for its hands-on attitude towards living musical cultures

– its recording, its archiving, its cross-cultural analysis, and, if somewhat

cautiously, its psychological lines of inquiry. We prefer to forget, it seems, its

historical methods, which are treated as though they can be separated from the

things we remember more favorably. This creates problems for thinking through

global histories of music, which I would argue, need to be simultaneously

historical and ethnographic. At a more general level, it has contributed towards a

distorted and extremely thin conception of what ethnography, itself, is.

Recent years have, indeed, seen the growth of the idea of ethnography as a

specific and isolatable technique, one to be employed amongst or combined with

others rather than, as it were, an all-encompassing method. For many now it is

understood to be little more than a question-and-answer technique for getting

informants to tell us (as it were, ‘outsiders’) what they (as it were, ‘insiders’)

know about the music culture in question. Understandably, such techniques are

deemed incomplete and theoretically inadequate by critics, because all they

provide us with are, inevitably, ideological constructions supplied by ‘insiders’

for their own complicated purposes.10 Ethnographic methods, thus conceived,

are deemed to be in need of supplementation by other techniques and methods

that push us beyond the discursive boundaries of insiders – statistical, music

analytic, experimental, philological, psychoanalytic and so forth. Nothing,

however, could be further from how ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of

music generally understand the term ‘ethnography’.

Let me explain. The rejection of comparative musicology by post-war

ethnomusicologists involved a rejection of a certain mode of historicizing, but,

emphatically, not historical thinking per se. The idea that the non-West was

different, that it could only be understood ethnographically, through methods

focused on the synchronic interdependence of institutional functions (i.e.

‘functionalism’) or of myth systems standing outside of time (‘structuralism’) –

ideas not of course incompatible with colonial governmentality - were already

being debunked in anthropology. By the 1950s Evans-Pritchard had thoroughly

critiqued Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalism (in which historical

methods were always an ‘add on’), and advocated for anthropology as a

humanistic, historical discipline.11 By the 1970s, primarily via Bourdieu, various

strands of Marxian anthropology began to problematize relationships between

structure and agency, from the intricate temporalities of feuding, to the historical

conjunctures that bring about revolutions, insurgencies and anti-colonial

struggle.12 By the 1990s, post-colonial theory and a ‘reflexive’ anthropology, one

critically focused on its own conditions of production, would ask what role

colonial and metropolitan histories had in shaping fieldworker/informant

encounters in the field.13 Historical questions and methods have been pushed

deeper and deeper, then, into the heart of the ethnographic project as it evolved

in the post-war years.

If some appear to us to ‘have’ history and others ‘do not’, the first question for

the ethnographer must, then, be how one explains the distributional imbalance,

the political economy. What role have we played, to start off with, in either

entirely removing people from history, or, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put, consigning

them to history’s ‘waiting room’? What is it that we are failing to notice in the

symbolic, ritual or other social performativities of those who might appear to

lack it that might articulate a sense of temporality, of relationships between

cause and effect, of understandings of transformation and change? And once

these performativities are noticed, which are privileged, which marginalized? In

other words, what gradations of history ‘presence’ and history ‘lack’ might we

note amongst those we had initially deemed history-less? Who, in these

communities, has the power to silence others? Who, conversely, has the power to

subvert or to resist? Through what agencies? Through what languages and

expressive means? Under what historical and political conditions?

Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, following Ralph Trouillot and others,

have always regarded ‘silence’ as an active proposition, usually with an agent

and a patient.14 Somebody has been silenced, by somebody, for a reason. ‘People

without history’ have been made so by others who gain from having it.

The (residual and mistaken) view that ethnography is present-tense focused and

ahistorical has driven the claim that ethnomusicologists have played a

particularly egregious role in silencing African music history. They have, the

argument goes, exoticised it by placing it outside time. They have focused

insistently on the ‘traditional’ at the expense of the emergent, the modern, the

popular, the translocal.15 This is, actually, quite hard to square with the Africanist

ethnomusicology of the 1950s. John Blacking’s South African Venda studies,

rooted as they were in the structural-functionalism of Meyer Fortes, were

preoccupied from the outset with the historical conditions of the tschikona dance

– and what in recent decades (for instance, labor migration) had made it into

such an important and intense focus for Venda collective life.16 Inevitably this led

him to a more and more politicized and historical sense of music in Black South

African life under apartheid. This led, equally inevitably, to his expulsion from

South Africa. On a personal note, Blacking’s department at the Queen’s University

of Belfast was my introduction to ethnomusicology. So the error of this

attribution of a lack of historical and (therefore) political awareness to

ethnomusicology in general and Africanists in particular has always seemed to

me a rather plain one.

But one might look elsewhere for further proof. Indeed to publications in the

field at an earlier moment. Take, for instance, Wachsmann’s Essays on Music and

History in Africa, which comprised proceedings from a conference at the Royal

Anthropological Institute in 1962.17 Music history here clearly meant rather

different things to the various contributors. Nketia alone voiced concern that

ethnography might sideline it, somehow denying Africans their past. But the rest

busy themselves with eminently historical questions – Rouget’s argument that

Dahomey court songs might be understood as historical ‘documents’, for instance

– advances with little sense of anxiety, defensiveness, or awkwardness. The West

certainly has deep habits of ascribing timelessness, of history-lack, to Others,

raising their mystique, as well as facilitating their subjugation and exploitation. It

would be strange if these habits were to be entirely absent from

ethnomusicology. But the anthropological and ethnomusicological study of

African music in the 1950s would not, actually, seem to have been especially

characterized by a programmatic determination to dehistoricize African music.

Many of their ethnographic lines of inquiry were, in fact, thoroughly historical.

It would be equally mistaken to suggest ethnography learned the error of its

ways and gradually ‘took on’ history – history here imagined as a kind of

supplement to ethnography. As I suggested earlier, ethnographers, including

ethnomusicological ethnographers, developed their own ways of thinking

historically, via Evans-Pritchard, Bourdieu, Sahlins and many others. What, then,

might a global music history project today learn from such history-saturated

ethnographic methodologies – of the kind that, I am arguing, have been a

consistent current in post-1950s ethnomusicology? Firstly, I would suggest, they

offer a sensitivity to the performativity of (music) history, a performativity

engaging the sensory apparatus and emotional worlds of audiences, involving

multiple performers and voices, rich, complex and often elusive symbolic

languages, and intricate transmission systems. Secondly, I would suggest, they

offer an understanding of the irreducible multiplicity of any performative or

expressive act. History-making performativities, in the broad sense outlined

above, speak with many voices, not just those of the dominant groups. One needs

to be attentive to the ways in which muted or silenced groups articulate their

worldviews within the languages fashioned by those who dominate them. One

also needs to be attentive to the historical conditions under which silenced or

muted groups might make the vocabulary of the dominant groups their own.

Thirdly, ethnography of any kind insists on the contingency and situatedness of

ethnographic knowledge. Today, ethnography involves a keen sense of

conversation, of dialogue, of the play of language. Ethnographic conversations

may often be a complex and poorly distributed matter, and thus limited – the

world we live in ensures that. But the ideal of conversation might push us

towards a view of ethnographic knowledge as participatory, networked and task-

oriented, rather than accumulating on higher and higher levels, from grounded

‘facts’ to abstract ‘theories’. Ethnography should then provoke the simple but

crucial questions: what, and who is a global history for?

Postcolonial theory, my third heading, has both stimulated, and posed some

distinct problems for the Balzan project. Post-colonial theory’s contradictions

have often been noted.18 It has purported to decenter the West, but insistently

speaks a first-world theoretical language. It has advocated action, but has tended

to confine itself to difficult writing. It has sought to envoice the subaltern, even as

it argues that the subaltern is doomed to colonial mimicry. It has claimed to

speak globally, but tends to restrict itself to British and French colonial and

postcolonial experience. It has demanded inquiry into the conditions of western

power and knowledge, but has placed the conditions of this inquiry itself outside

of historical understanding. This is, admittedly, to ignore the often playful,

dialectical and performative quality of postcolonial writing, and of course the

considerable differences in approach between Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and others.

It is also to ignore its rather complex and uneven impact on music studies.19

Many of those working in ethnomusicology and popular music studies, for

instance, had encountered related lines of thinking about the colonial

construction of knowledge by the 1980s - in subaltern history studies in India, in

underdevelopment theory in Latin America, in ‘Commonwealth Literature

Studies’ in Africa and the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Postcolonial theory, for

them, could be grafted onto ongoing, and quite long-standing arguments, often

experienced in regional studies terms, and already focused on the question of

how one might recuperate the historical agencies of the ‘non-West’. In

mainstream western historical musicology, postcolonial theory was primarily

mediated by Said, somewhat later, and focusing on orientalism in the western

18th and 19th century concert and opera repertoires. The picture developed here

was one of an ‘orientalism’ that animated subtle registers of social critique in the

societies that produced it.20

It continues to be difficult to consider postcolonial theory from a general

musicological perspective. But one challenge poses special problems – the claim

that history writing belongs amongst the works of literature and imagination

through which the West deals with the non-West, and that (true) historical

knowledge of global (west-east, north-south) relations will forever escape us.

This picture of knowledge/power relations, one that prevailed in Said’s

Orientalism, Foucauldian at root, has been hard to overcome in musicology, as

indeed elsewhere.21 The institutional rift between knowledge making about ‘us’

and knowledge making about ‘them’ has deepened, and the acts of translation

and conversation that might mediate them hedged round with qualifications, if

not deemed outright impossibilities. A steady withdrawal from aspirations to

explain, generalize and connect beyond the strictly local has been palpable.

Thinking globally in music studies has habitually taken the form of considering

isolated moments of colonial encounter, as though a focus on these moments

might somehow help us understand what subsequently went so terribly wrong

on a global scale.

The ongoing challenge, and provocation, of postcolonial thinking to a global

music history project lies in its unresolved, but continually energizing,

contradictions. What language, for instance, should a global history speak?

English might be ‘universally’ understood, but it is also (currently) the language

of global power. How do the key theoretical questions posed by a global history

look when expressed in German, French, Italian, Spanish? Or Arabic, Hindi,

Chinese? Or imagined in a space of translation and linguistic pluralism? What

interventions might be necessary at the level of language, then, to ‘decenter the

West’, and the metropolitan theory it claims as its privilege? And if we accept a

key proposition of postcolonial theory – essential if a ‘global history’ isn’t simply

to be a vast accumulation of detail devoid of causality and agency – that global

history is motivated first and foremost by the West’s irrepressible desire to

exploit and plunder others, we should surely not be too hasty in abandoning the

theoretical and critical languages that have proved themselves most adept at

exploring precisely these motivations and desires – post-structuralism,

psychoanalysis, Marxism. That is to say, ‘metropolitan theory’.

And what might be the aims of a global history be, thought through in

postcolonial terms? Do we work teleologically, that is to say, with a substantive

goal in mind? Such as: a resolution of historical grievances, a radical

redistribution of intellectual resources, the production of a globally unified field

of knowledge about musical instruments, institutions, aesthetic systems in and

across time? Or do we work procedurally, that is to say, thinking about processes

that might lead us towards justice, understood as a sense of direction rather than

a terminus? For instance, by thinking about how we might organize a more or

less global academic conversation about music history, regardless of where such

a conversation might lead us? The Balzan project tends towards the latter,

though the practical difficulties (where to meet, what language to speak in and so

forth) are significant here as elsewhere. Do we get, inevitably, get stuck in

bureaucratic questions about representation and equal opportunities? How, in

other words, does one keep such a project radically open, but also energized,

vital and effective?

How, too, is such a project to remain attentive to subaltern voices – to difference?

What is to be sacrificed, in terms of focus, coherence, thematic contour, to the

imperative of listening and learning from our global partners in the south –

listening for other ways of imagining these global musical relations, other music

histories that we have been inattentive to, or lazily ignorant of? Ideally, plenty,

but the demands of academic publishing and conference organizing impose

limits, and necessitate a process of negotiation – who can be invited, how they

might be selected, and so forth. One hopes and assumes that such a process

might be conversational and collegial – academia, worldwide, is for the most part

a friendly business. But hard questions must surely be asked, and they are not

easily settled. Have the north’s southern interlocutors been invited because their

viewpoints have, to a significant degree, already been anticipated and digested?

Or are we simply looking for recognizable versions of ‘our’ tried and trusted

music historical and ethnographic methodologies in parts of the world that have

hitherto escaped our attention?

A balance must clearly be struck between establishing provisional goals, and

providing the means by which we might reach beyond them. Dipesh Chakrabarty

as something similar in mind in his distinction between two kinds of historical

knowledge. On the one hand, for Chakrabarty, lie ‘history 1s’, a history that is

teleological, working towards known goals (for instance, histories of capital,

histories of nation-state formation). On the other, ‘history 2s’ that are, in effect,

histories of remainders and unassimilated elements that are significant in

constituting marginal and subaltern worlds, elusive spaces of emotion and

‘tradition’, and that press on ‘history 1s’ in unexpected but often highly

significant ways.22 This adds further weight to the idea that the production of

global music histories might be thought of in more networked, distributed terms.

This is to imagine a dispersal of authority, which helps keep open and fluid the

relationship between, as it were, ‘global music history 1s’ (histories of music and

empire, orientalism, religion, media, nation-building – things we have already

decided ‘matter’) and ‘global music history 2s’ (music in quirky global

subcultures, in transcultural sensory and emotional formations, in compositional

or performance experimentation scenes, in dance crazes, in traditions that have

‘refused’ to globalize, and so forth – things sometimes deemed marginal to what

‘matters’, but which constantly hover on the fringes of discussion).

A global history of music must also engage, if only to move quickly beyond, the

globalization debates of the 1990s. These had a swift impact on

ethnomusicology, initially taking the form of two rather distinct scenarios. Viet

Erlmann’s, deriving mainly from Jameson and Harvey, viewed globalization as a

distinct phase of capital accumulation, marked by various forms of space-time

compression.23 Black expressive practices, he shows, took shape globally in slow

processes of circulation between South Africa, Western Europe and North

America going back to the nineteenth century at least. By the late 20th these

processes of circulation had significantly accelerated. Black music culture

instantiated a broader process of cultural globalization - commoditized, playful

and ironic, circulating in a world of digital instantaneities and flows. Mark

Slobin’s, deriving mainly from Appadurai’s vision of global ‘deterritorialization’,

saw globalization in terms of a proliferation of novel cross-cultural

‘micromusical’ alignments, ranged across ‘subcultural’, ‘intercultural’ and

‘supercultural’ space.24 The micromusics of the West are fractal, in Slobin’s

depiction, forging global connections at a variety of scales, even if it was the

‘local’ (‘micro’) that interested Slobin most. Two contrasting pictures prevailed,

one portraying globalization in totalizing terms, the other in terms of

fragmentation, but both united in their sense that the temporalities associated

with ‘territorialization’ – the narratives that connected people to nation-states –

had been swept away by the current phase of world history.

Stepping back, Turino and others pointed out that these kinds of characterization

neglected the politics of globalization.25 For critics, such as Turino, globalization

theories consistently saw cultural politics as a kind of reaction to systemic

changes within the structure of global capitalism itself – changes imagined as

operating in a space somehow beyond human agencies and desires. In adopting

neoliberal governmentality’s rhetoric of global ‘flows’ and assumptions about

deterritorialization, and portraying ‘culture’ always in reactive terms,

globalization theory appeared to many to be in some sense complicit with it.

Whether such characterizations were celebratory (as in much World Music

discourse, for instance), or negative (as in Jamesonian critique), there was

something ideological about them, in other words. This sparked some radical

rethinking of the agencies at play in musical globalization. Musical scenes might

have long histories of border-crossing, mixing and hybridizing, attracting

musicians, entrepreneurs and audiences with quirkily cosmopolitan outlooks.

But who and what makes them ‘global’, or ‘world music’, when, and for what

purposes? Who has the power to define and exploit such situations, who to

resist? What are the political, financial and aesthetic stakes? What subtle

hierarchies and power structures persist amongst all of this language of sharing,

circulation and flow? What hidden and inaudible infrastructures channel this

flow, and who presides over them?26

The attempt to refocus questions of agency in a global world pushed music

research simultaneously in local, pluralizing and historicizing directions.

Globalization came to be seen as an accumulation of ‘world making’,

cosmopolitan projects, located in particular places at particular times, some

carrying the weight of the status quo, others resistive, others at a more oblique

angle to power. Some would be oblivious to others, seeing their global expansion

as a somehow inevitable, if not unambiguous good – the story of the western

classical tradition in Asia, for instance.27 Others would be more intensely aware

of their surroundings, understanding the threats they pose – the story of heavy

metal in Asia and the Middle East, for instance.28 When expanding global projects

meet others, and rub against them, Anna Tsing suggests we think in terms of

global ‘frictions’, rather than the ‘clash’ of civilizations.29 Friction, she notes,

produces heat, light, movement – moments of self-awareness, creativity,

mobilization, transformation. A ‘clash’, by contrast, is simply a collision,

inevitably with casualties, one coming off worse than the other, sparking panicky

defenses, a drawing up of lines.

A global history of music, surely, is unlikely to be inclined towards theorizations

of civilizational ‘clash’. Western music history has rarely regarded its others as

antagonists or persecutors. The worst that can probably be said of it is that it has

habitually regarded them as pliant sources of raw material. Despite predictable

jeremiads about the decline of Western civilization, its core institutions actually

seem to be thriving in an ideological environment of pluralism and

multiculturalism. But as Western art music itself becomes a ‘World Music’,

imagines ‘the world’, and not just the West’s concert halls and opera houses, as

its rightful place, the stresses are palpable. Do we see Abreu’s Sistema model in

Venezuela, for instance, as a crossing of the final frontier, making high art, and

high art careers, available to the poor and dispossessed, and Western art music

‘global’ in its reach across the world? Or do we see it as instrumental, coercive

and authoritarian, a fundamental betrayal of the western classical repertoire’s

promise of humanity and enlightenment?30 The language of a ‘clash’ of cultures of

civilizations makes little sense here – we are talking about ‘the same’ musical

culture or ‘civilization’, after all. But we are certainly observing ‘friction’ between

competing conceptions of what Western art music might means as it globalizes.

Tsing’s terminology suggests productive lines of inquiry for global music history.

It would be remiss, in closing, to neglect mention of sound studies as a potential

fifth ‘heading’. It is a diverse and emergent field, though recent collections

suggest a degree of consensus about the core critical methods.31 These are

historical, both in the sense of engaging sound cultures in different historical

periods, and in the sense of historicizing contemporary media systems, thinking

beyond the attributions of radical newness often attributed to them (for

instance, digital technologies). They are critical in the sense of their impulse to

defamiliarize the familiar, to put sound to work destabilizing conventionally

‘settled’ scenes of description and analysis. Defining statements in this field have,

however, been wary of anthropological and ethnographic voices. The dialogical

implications of Feld’s Kaluli acoustemology, has, it would be appear, been

supplanted by a drive towards metropolitan theory.32 Difference is approached

cautiously within the familiar categories of the West, but not (much) beyond. The

challenge of sound studies to a ‘global history of music’ is, at one level, obvious

and unavoidable. The category of ‘sound’ might be a far better way of focusing on

the institutional spaces (for instance, cities, concert halls, churches, recording

studios33) in which music circulates than ‘music’, a word attaching itself to some

auditory phenomena but not others according to notoriously capricious cultural

logics. At another, its insistence on returning us to a heavily normative ‘West’

would seem counterproductive. It is, as yet, early to say, and ethnomusicological

responses to this emergent field are still, themselves, developing.

In his introduction to The Cambridge History of World Music, Philip Bohlman

enjoins us to consider what it is, ideologically, materially, and technologically,

that characterizes music history’s ‘global moments’.34 This is useful concluding

advice. It assumes plurality, and does not privilege the West. It approaches

history writing as labor – an assemblage of social relations and technologies –

and not just as text. And it assumes that our current global moment – for such it

surely is – demands a close analysis of its own ideological, material and

technological conditions of existence. It is, of course, hard to say what kinds of

advances our early 21st century attempts at global historicizing might make on

those of the 19th and 20th. We might be destined to make the same errors, and

provoke the same, or worse, kinds of backlash. The risks seem worthwhile,

however, even if the stakes continue to rise. We undertake them in an

increasingly multipolar world, in which we are all going to have to work harder

to show what it is that connects, rather than divides, us.

1

See the various contributors to Philip V. Bohlman (ed.) The Cambridge History of World Music

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For a concise critical review, see also Jacob

Olley, “Towards a Global History of Music? Postcolonial Studies and Historical Musicology” in

Ethnomusicology Review, 2016, http://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/towards-

global-history-music-postcolonial-studies-and-historical-musicology. Warren Dwight Allen’s

Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music 1600-1960 (New York:

Dover 1962) lies in the background, representing an earlier moment of questions about the

limits of ‘general histories’ of music.

2 See, variously, Martin Clayton’s advocacy of comparativism, “Comparing Music, Comparing

Musicology” in The Cultural Study of Music, eds. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard

Middleton (London: Routledge, 2003), 57-68; David Trippet’s translation and edition of Carl

Stumpf, The Origins of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Albrecht Schneider,

“Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology” in Comparative Musicology and The

Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, eds. Bruno Nettl and Philip

Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 293-317.

3 See Albrecht Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology” in Comparative

Musicology and The Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, eds.

Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 293-317. On the

activities of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, see Suzanne Zeigler, Die Wachszylinder des

Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs (Berlin: Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, 2006).

4 See the various contributors to Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, eds. Martin

Clayton, Laura Leante and Byron Dueck (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).

5 See Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, eds. Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

6 On Lachmann see, particularly, Philip V. Bohlman, ‘La Riscoperta del Mediterraneo nella

Musica Ebraica: Il discorso dell’Altro nell’ethnomusicologica dell’Europa’ in Antropologia della

Musica e Culture Mediterranee (Venice: Il Mulino) 107-24; Ruth Katz, “The Lachmann

Problem”: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University

Magnes Press, 2003); Ruth Davis Robert Lachmann, The “Oriental Music” Broadcasts 1936-

1937: A Musical Ethnography of Mandate Palestine (Madison MA: A-R Editions). I have focused

here on Lachmann texts translated into English, reflecting contemporary interest in

Lachmann (as well as my own reading habits). His core methodological principles for thinking

globally and cross-culturally were, of course, worked out much earlier, in texts that have not

yet been translated into English. See, for example, Robert Lachmann Musik des Orients

(Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt) 1929.

7 Robert Lachmann, Jewish Cantillation and Song in the Isle of Djerba (Jerusalem: Azriel Press)

1940.

8 See Ruth Davis Robert Lachmann, The “Oriental Music” Broadcasts 1936-1937

9 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for referring me to the work

of Carl Engels and Peter Wagner, noting in particular the latter’s correspondence with

Abraham Zvi Idelsohn. Time has not permitted as full an integration of this into this chapter as

I would have liked, but it certainly helps me underline the complexity and subtlety of the ways

in which much earlier comparative musicological work integrated historical and ethnographic

thinking, in conversation with wide networks of scholars, connecting it with research in the

western tradition, notably on chant. See Carl Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National

Music: Comprising Research into Popular Songs, Traditions and Customs (London: Longmans,

Green, Reader and Dyer) 1866 and Peter Wagner, Introduction to the Gregorian Melodies

(London: The Plainsong and Medieval Society) 1901.

10 See discussions of ethnography in John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural

Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music: An Introduction

(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990).

11 Evans-Pritchard developed this argument in his Marett Lecture of 1950; see Edward Evans-

Pritchard “Social Anthropology: Past and Present”, Man 1950 no. 50, 118-124.

12 See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1977), Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1976).

13 James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography

(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986); see also, for its ethnomusicological

counterpart, Tim Cooley and Gergory Barz, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for

Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, second edition 2008).

14 Ralph Trouillot, Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon

Press 1995).

15 Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York:

Routledge 1992).

16 John Blacking’s work on the Venda is handily bought together in Reginald Byron (ed) Music,

Culture and Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking (Chicago: Chicago University Press

1995).

17 Klaus Wachsmann (ed.) Essays on Music and History in Africa (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press 1971), including important essays by Nketia and Rouget.

18 Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997).

19 See, for critical reviews, Tom Solomon, “Where is the Postcolonial in Ethnomusicology” in

Ethnomusicology in East Africa: Perspectives from Uganda and Beyond, eds. Sylvia Nannyonga-

Tamusuza and Thomas Solomon (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2012), 216-256 and Bridget

Cohen ed. “Round Table: Edward Said and Musicology Today”, Journal of the Royal Musical

Association 141 no. 216, 2016, 2013-233, with contributions by Kofi Agawu, Rachel Beckles

Willson, James R. Currie, Martin Stokes, and Sindhumathi Revuluri. 

20 Important points of reference are: Ralph Locke, “Constructing the Oriental Other: Saint-

Saens’ Sampson et Dalila”, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 no. 3, 1991, 261-302; Richard Taruskin,

“Entoiling the Falconet: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context”, Cambridge Opera Journal 4

no. 1, 1992, 253-280.

21 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(New Jersey: Princeton University Press 2000).

23 Viet Erlmann, Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press

1999).

24 Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover NH: University Press of

New England) 1993.

25 See, for a couple of articles representative of this line of critique, Thomas Turino “Are We

Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular

Music”, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 12 no. 2, 2003, 51-79 and, for a more panoptic

summary, Martin Stokes, “Music and the Global Order”, Annual Review of Anthropology 33,

2004, 47-72.

26 See, again as a representative sample exploring exactly these kind of questions, Thomas

Turino Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2000); Louise Meintjes Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African

Studio (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Johannes Brusila ‘Local Music, Not from

Here’: The Discourse of World Music Examined through Three Zimbabwean Case Studies

(Helsinki: The Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology, 2003); David Novak Japanoise: Music at

the Edge of Circulation (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

27 See Nicholas Cook, “Western Music as World Music” in Bohlman (ed.) The Cambridge History

of World Music, 75-99.

28 Mark Levine, Heavy Metal Islam (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008).

29 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (New Jersey: Princeton Unversity

Press, 2004).

30 I draw on Geoff Baker’s important and provocative study, El Sistema: Orchestrating

Venezuelan Youth (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013).

31 I have in mind primarily Michael Bull and Les Back (eds.), The Auditory Cultures Reader,

London: Berg, 2003) and Jonathan Sterne (ed.) The Sound Studies Reader, London: Routledge

2012).

32 Sterne’s more recent reader includes important and welcome selections from the work of

anthropologists and ethnomusicologists (Georgina Born, Ana Maria Ochoa Gaultier, Louise

Meintjes, Charles Hirschkind and Karin Bijsterveld) but they are a minority in a big book, and

for the most part keep us in worlds familiar to the West. Ethnomusicology does not, and

should not, of course, mean ‘non-Western’, but an important part of its critical strategies has

always been to insist on thinking beyond the West.

33 Emily Thompson’s work, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the

Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press 2002) has been

formative; see also Paul Green and Thomas Porcello (eds.) Wired for Sound: Engineering and

Technologies in Sonic Cultures (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and Eliot

Bates, Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Culture (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2016).

34 See “Introduction: World Music’s Histories”, in Bohlman (ed.) The Cambridge History of

World Music, 1-20.