Music, Global History, And Postcoloniality

Music, Global History and Postcoloniality 1

Johann KroierSchwedter Str. 250D-10119 Berlin

Music, Global History, and Postcoloniality

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, philosophy, and even by a certainconception of science. . . However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different; it evokes "care";it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that

is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certaindetermination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a

passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditionalhierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

---Michel Foucault ("The masked philosopher")

The history of American popular music in the 20th century can yield a distinctive understanding of thegreat transformation we have recently become obliged to call globalization It can complicate the economic

logics that have been employed to define those complex processes. It can disrupt the over-simplehistorical periodization that has been provided for them so far, and it can suggest useful if unorthodox

ideas as to what the cultural and indeed the political forms of that globalization may be and become in thefuture.

---Paul Gilroy

1. "Globalization and world music": a dead end?

From a historical point of view so-called world music is a rather recent phenomenon. Whenmusicologists started in the 20th century to explore the musics1 of non-European people, itseemed almost impossible that these could become an everyday-commodity. Their apparentstrangeness made them largely indigestible for the distributing media and institutions of music.Still during the seventies most critics of the dominance and expansion of western cultureindustries implicitly assumed that its power would automatically be based on the stylistichegemony of Western popular music. The ruling counter-discourse of culture critics andethnomusicologists was focused on the possible disappearance of global diversity in music. Thiswas not only a scientific problem: the loss of sources necessary for writing of a worldwide musichistory; at the same time it was also an ethical problem: the loss of arguments againstEurocentrism. It was part of a humanist mission to spread the insight into the relativity of culturalvalues. Music as a learned system of cultural practices was an outstanding example for theincomparability of tastes. Learning to appreciate some sort of non-European music was seen as akey experience that could trigger the process of intercultural understanding.

Meanwhile the situation has changed drastically, at least in part.2 The digital mediarevolution seems to have shrunk the scale of strangeness to the same extent as the distances inglobal communication. The easy and fast accessibility of any kind of music in the Internet hasdeep consequences for the general parameters of cultural perception. You can call thisphenomenon the "play-list syndrome": the forced comparability of incomparable styles, thecomplete de-contextualization of music and its perceptual reshaping in a standardized mediaformat. The postmodern listener of the 21st century jumps through the global landscape of music


in the same way he is zapping between television channels (Fabbri 57-60). His identification withspecific styles and tastes is in dissolution while he incorporates the most weird and exoticexamples of music into his play-list. He enjoys the full freedom of cultural relativity anddevelops an ever-changing cosmopolitan pattern of musical preferences. Esthetic tolerance withrespect to the strange and unusual has become a matter of audio mastering--or of the mood of thelistener. The anarchic fun of border jumping has become the antidote to the dictate of the canonsas well as to that of cultural imperialism. It leads into the global mash up as the musicalgesamtkunstwerk of international network society.

Nevertheless, not only the culture critic may feel uneasy with this "play-list syndrome."Everyone who has the privilege to know more about the historical, cultural and politicalcircumstances of music can be baffled when he sees and hears an experienced internet usercombine the seemingly incompatible: the most "authentic" with the most "inauthentic"3, thedaringly artistic with the excessively commercialist, the politically engaged with the bluntlyconformist. The ignorance with regard to the respective contexts of music may result in bizarrerevaluations and creative misinterpretations. The play-list listener may have his pleasure inunderstanding tragic things as funny, or parodies as serious. His unit of reference is the audio fileas a surprise bag that fell out of time and space. His cosmopolitan taste manifests an esthetictolerance without exactly knowing what it is that he tolerates. In this way he exercises a powerthat doesn't hurt anybody but the heart of the musical connoisseur. This power seems innocent,but it deeply affects the esthetic dignity of music.4

Apparently this power cannot be criticized in the same way as the power of the globalmusic industry. The plea for a "historically informed listening"5 is here as valuable as elsewhere.But my aim here is not to give advice to the listener; instead I want to look for the consequencesthat the aforementioned shift of perception has for the scholarly reflection on music. We canargue that paradigmatic shifts on the material level are producing paradigmatic shifts on thescientific level. It was, for example, the factual process of neo-liberal globalization that had aheavy impact on the development of a global approach in history (Cooper 31). The widening ofhorizons migrated through the subsystems of society and made it possible to reformulate thegeographic range of research. In this sense we can look for a starting point from which it ispossible to formulate an adequate concept of music that counters the arbitrary structure of "play-list listening." But first of all I want to use this starting point to recapitulate the debate onglobalization and world music that has been going on since the end of the eighties.

Remarkable is the neat historic parallelism in the ascent of both terms to public discourse."Globalization" entered as catchword that covers different notions: in its descriptive sense it isrelated to the widening of international exchange of people, goods and knowledge. This process,mainly a consequence of changes in the technologies of transport and communication, concernsall levels of society and raises questions of cultural change and identity. On the other hand theterm was linked from the beginning to the normative concept of neo-liberalism: put simply, theidea that the best thing for the world's future would be the unlimited expansion and deregulationof capitalist markets. This neo-liberal attitude gained its credibility not least from the fact that itdistanced itself from the older normative model of modernization with its cultural Eurocentrism.Following its assumptions, "development" happens more or less spontaneously if only the forcesof the market are set free.6

The term "world music," which was coined in 1987 for promotional use,7 certainly sharesthe historical circumstances behind the first notion of globalization. Its premise was theaccelerated communication between metropolis and peripheries in the context of decolonizationand media revolution. "World music" was a movement in a rather abstract sense. I am inclined to


see it as a sort of deal: the promise for third world artists to get a worldwide audience was paid bytheir adaptation to the customs of international music business. The ideology that each partywould get its "fair share" from this deal was accompanied by the philanthropic propagation ofcosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. The good conscience of this artificial movement wasbased on the assumption, that its positive effects would in the end overcome its concessions tothe capitalist music industry (see Hutnyk 19-49; Murphy).

It is not surprising that this world music "movement" became a provocation and challengefor ethnomusicology, a discipline up to then oriented towards the terms "folklore" and"traditional music." Martin Stokes in 2003 published a revealing summary of the debate.Following his line of thought there can be identified two opposed two approaches:8 the oneincludes world music in its critique of globalization; it sees it in the vein to differentiation oftarget groups typical of post-fordist economies and interprets it as some sort of a new form ofcultural imperialism. The other approach stresses the innovative aspects of cultural globalization.It highlights hybridity as a new form of authenticity and stresses the local as a field of reactiveadaptation to globalization. Diasporic musics as the outcome of international migration,following their own dynamics of syncretism and particularism, are replacing the older models ofmore or less closed cultures as units of reference. While the first approach focuses on the unequaldistribution of power, the second discovers productive forces in the dissolution of nationalcultures. As Stokes writes, an "opposition between global and local, system and agency,pessimism and optimism, top-down and bottom-up approaches to globalization, and Marxian andliberal has thus been inscribed firmly in the ethnomusicological approach to globalization fromthe beginning" (Stokes 50).

At least in part this schism can be related to shifts within the critical theories of globaldevelopment (see Kapoor). It reflects the shift from older theories of dependency to a bundle ofnewer approaches usually labeled as "postcolonial." The Marxist top-down approach waschallenged by voices from the periphery, which protested against their passive role in the thendominating dependency model. With the focus on asymmetrical power relations importantaspects of agency are put aside; the cultural changes on the global periphery are unequivocallyqualified as losses, while attempts to overcome the limits of isolated (sub-)cultures are seen onlyas corrupting influences. So the model of dependency seems to be too coarse to seize realities,which are very concrete for a perspective radically centered on the standpoint of the globalperiphery.

This strain of thought will be elaborated later in this text. For the moment it shows thatthere is no easy conciliation of postcolonial arguments with the hyper-sociological critique ofglobalization. As a result of this, "world music" must be seen as based on a bundle of complexinteractions which include mechanics of adaptation as well as strategies of resistance, hegemonicforces as well as subversive influences, the dissolution of cultural meanings as well as thecreation of new ones. Musical globalization comprises not only effects of the economic power ofWestern music industries; it includes at the same time cultural exchanges between the powerlessthemselves, and the possibility to articulate counter-hegemonic means of expression beyond thelevel of local cultures. With the assertion that global relations are determined by Westerndomination, there comes too often an attitude of alternativelessness. Nevertheless, thisunderestimates that reality might yet be the alternative: not the un-reflected product ofsubmission under the rule of global culture industries, but the only historically possible deflectionfrom it. So the unidirectional pattern of international exploitation is complemented and counteredby a rather complicated pattern of communication.9

The debate on world music may be seen today as partly obsolete. It was formulated with


regard to the expansive phase of the world music phenomenon, which seems to be over now. Thisperiod was characterized by the marketing of compact discs as its basic commodity and thepromotion of live-performances within the international concert circuit.10 By now the generalstrategy of the music industry has changed in a significant way as a consequence of the ongoing"digital revolution." With the Internet, not only the conditions for the global distribution of musichave changed drastically. The economic interests involved are increasingly operating in waysdifferent from the "classical" model of capitalist entrepreneurship. Meanwhile the industrialstrategies comprise the far-reaching acquisition of copyrights, the promotional freezing of thesuccession of fashions, and the sellout at dumping prices of unprofitable sectors. In particular, thegeneral juridification of the music business has created new frontlines in economic powerrelations, which follow the factual limits of transnational corporations to execute their acquiredrights on "intellectual property" (Laing 315-319). In this context, world music may become aminor field of interest and can be subject to a regime of market stratification. Culture industriesare profit-sensitive but culture-blind, so that their primal target groups will remain the newaspiring classes of metropolitan consumer societies, independently of their cultural affinities. Inthe course of this world music may appear as replaceable and fall back into sub-markets off-screen of a broader public inteRest.

Apparently the critical analysis of the global culture industry has to be redone at least everyten years. Nevertheless, the world music phenomenon has established itself within the musichistory of the last century. The possibility to think about music globally is an achievement thathas its effects not only on the practice of music and on the ways of its marketing but also on ourconcepts for scientific reflection. The world music debate can be seen as a step in the process ofwhat Ulrich Beck has called "reflexive modernity." Yet, in 2003 Martin Stokes stated a massivetrend to mediate the opposing positions (Stokes 50). The seemingly incompatible approacheswhich are both critical of the "culture imperialism" underlying recent globalization lead only to adead end if we suppose an unchanging principle at work. However, this misses the dynamiccharacter of globalization. With the flexibilization of market mechanisms the critics are alsochallenged to think in time. The "play-list syndrome," the commercial sellout of certain genres ofworld music and the persistence of regional bootleg markets indicate the imponderability ofcultural and economic developments in a globalized world. What I want to suggest here is that wemust comprehend the contrasting views as part of a wider dialectic that itself is in constantchange. It would be naive to forget that all transnational corporations are acting in strategic ways,and it would be naive also to consider their power as unlimited. Although globalization isworking on the gradient of global economic inequality, it leaves inequality of cultural prestigeuntouched as a field that can be influenced much more easily. With the emergence of non-profitmovements in the Internet, not only the mechanics of public success have changed considerably.The dissolution of the borders between advertising and content has created a vast array of tacticaloptions far from the conventional mode of commodity marketing.

The task will be ongoing to analyze the current trends and fluctuations of musical creativityand power relations in the globalized world; but the speed of change makes it to easy to forgetthat the cultural material involved is embedded into history.11 Music gets its cultural meaningfrom its past, even if the listener does not know it. The short term calculations of the versatileglobal players and the short term memory of the internet user are the signs of a time thatderacinates music in a way that might lead to its cultural de-valorization. It is not about replacingan old pessimistic attitude with a new one. It is about the acknowledgement of the semiotic levelof global power relations. Understanding music's message correctly is the only practicalalternative to the lament about inequality: if we cannot help the poor artist, we can help the


misunderstood one. This is no excuse for exploitation but a plea against one-sidedepistemological materialism. Only the streams of music can eventually flow faster than thestreams of global capital, and the power of music is based not only on its saleability but also onits capacity to include or to exclude. We have to consider the ever-changing habits of musicalperception, as we have to remind of their relation to knowledge.

It is also the ruling concept of history that associates European modernity with dynamicchange and assumes for the rest of the world more or less an ahistorical existence, unless provenotherwise. In this way, it joins the timelessness of the postmodern mode of perception andreproduces the stereotype of the "unconscious culturedness" of the cultural other. History in thissense is inseparable from the idea of a master narrative that allows alternative histories only in alocally limited range. So the methodological turn into a global history is not only a consequenceof recent globalization, and neither only a reaction to postcolonial critique. It is also a result ofhistorical self-reflexivity in deconstructing the assumptions of Western superiority andEurocentrism in history (Conrad, 2002; Conrad, 2007). To apply this shift on the history ofmusic12 is a task that transcends the discussion of globalization and world music by far. Itcomprises the social context as well as the music itself. In the same way as the real extent ofglobal exchanges in culture has to be revealed, the histories of peripheral musics have to be takeninto consideration. The discussion of globalization and world music will not be a dead end if itleads into a two-sided history of musical globalization. To this end it is necessary to re-evaluatethe conceptual parameters of tradition and creativity, custom and art, text and sub-text,exclusivity and inclusivity. Music in its global dimension maintains a tight relationship todialectic processes of change and reactive adaptation. These processes have formed the prehistoryof world music, which can now become our topic of interest.

2. The postcolonial13 challenge

The world music "movement" certainly did not come out of nowhere. If we follow its streamupwards we may encounter pioneers like Indian film music, American exotica music, South-African jazz, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Hawaiian steel guitar music or the global charisma of artists likeHarry Belafonte, Carmen Miranda and Don Azpiazú. We meet a grey zone between curiousexoticism and modernist departure, between naive imitations and clever crossovers, betweenambassadorial self-consciousness and trans-cultural entertainment. If we focus on the cultureindustrial aspects, we might detect half-bred fakes, dull stereotypes or even involuntary parodies;but if we concentrate on the innovative side of the phenomenon, we can see its historicalrootedness in a postcolonial context. In all cases, it is in some way a by-product of postcolonialsearch for identity. The impulse to create hybrid means of expression or to step towards newaudiences originates in a historical situation of change. It is the dismissal of the colonial past andthe vision of new possibilities, the commonness of migration and the search for mediationbetween local affiliation and a culture of cosmopolitanism, which drives the development ofcultural border crossings.

When after the Second World War the process of decolonization reached its final phase, thequestion of postcolonial identities became urgent. Yet since the twenties metropolises like Parishad become centers of critical reflection and cultural inventiveness that attracted the upcomingintellectual elites of the former colonies.14 Then, in the progressive climate of the sixties, theimpetus of the American civil rights and black power movements, political dreams of a "thirdway" and the emergence of nonconformist youth cultures formed the background for the creation


of new styles like funk, Chicano-rock, Afro-beat, reggae or tropicalismo15, that played a catalyticrole in the evolution of "world music." Their wide reaching circulation and resonance met theworldwide sensibilities of the time for cultural liberation and rejuvenation. The slogan "do yourown thing" was the common denominator that linked the various cultural movements in an anti-colonial vein.

Meanwhile it was the institutional surrounding of rock music with its partly practicedprogrammatic openness to global trends that determined the perception of these musicalmovements.16 The proud assertions of new identities and the subtle transformations of "ethnic"materials were drowned by the ubiquitous symbolism of the electric guitar and the technicalappeal of amplifiers. The project of hybrid autonomies in a postcolonial world was increasinglyhidden behind a rock-centered concept of popular music. To understand the world music complexjust as an appendix to international pop business is misleading insofar as its political context ispushed aside. It was a sort of "globalization" that concerned the idea of independence thatpreceded the globalization fostered by the music industry. The global network of postcolonialbuds had served as a mutual reference of respect and inspiration in an era that experienced historypositively as movement in the spirit of internationalism. It should not be forgotten that what latertransformed into world music got the label "popular" not least because it distanced itself from thestrongly nationalist affinities inherent in the concept of folklore.17

So behind the globalizing strategies as well as behind the surface of "ethnic" othernessappears a different reality. Its entry into academic discourses is an achievement associated withthe advent of postcolonial thinking. This thinking is not only about the deconstruction ofEurocentric narratives but revaluates experiences until then excluded from history. Its politicalproject is to "decolonize" theories about society and culture and to correct the habitual biases ofperception stabilized during the period of incontestable dependency. Its critique goes beyond theone of power relations and concerns the impact of these relations on the structure of Westernknowledge. To this end, it must consider the blank pages of history neglected by colonialisthistoriography. It has to reconstruct the mutilated voices of the subaltern, missing in the dominantpicture of global society. Their difference has become radical since it was long enough dismissedas moribund and thus to be neglected by the ruling gaze. Nevertheless, the submission of thecolonial subject was never a total one, although this was assumed as normative in colonialthinking. The formal liberation of this subject changed the role of its difference and revealed thesubtext of resistance silenced by the colonial discourse.

The challenge of postcolonial theory forces a rethink of the parameters of human equalityas well as difference. It leads to the destruction of essantialist assumptions, which have createdtheir own realities that remained for a long time unreflected within the academic system.18 Thepostcolonial challenge contains not only an ethical issue; its epistemological consequence will bethe reworking of concepts and the readjusting of significances. For the cultural study of music itdemands a threefold task: first, to reconsider the sociological presumptions that have becomecommonplace in the scientific treatment of music beyond the territory of Western art music; whatwas usually taught as basic knowledge about "folk" and "popular" merits a re-examination in thelight of postcolonial critique.19 Secondly, it should become a scientific rule to mistrust thecompleteness of historical sources; it affords some courage to dismiss the idea of securedknowledge until the dimension of the omissions is clear. And thirdly, the existence of apostcolonial music must be taken into consideration; the concepts of modernization andWesternization are not sufficient to understand the meaning of a music that was created in thespirit of postcolonial liberation and identitary transformation.

Paul Gilroy with his groundbreaking work The Black Atlantic (1993), conceived for the


first time a postcolonial theory that gave music its place. It dismembers the general concept ofblack music into a complex diasporic system characterized by hidden resistance, strategicadaptation, paradoxical identity formation, mutual encouragement and fluid cultural transfers.Gilroy not only sketches the geographic frame of history to the breadth of transatlantic relationswhich cover the range of Europe, Africa and the Americas; he sets the historic scratch at the pointof slave emancipation to evaluate the post-slavery situation of re-enforced racial imagination andits identitary consequences, characterized by W. E. B. Du Bois as "double consciousness." It isimportant to note the shift from the older schools of Afro-American studies to thedeconstructivist theory suggested by Gilroy. In avoiding any essentialism of culture he describes"blackness" and "African-ness" in their ambivalence of myth and authenticity, or of racistascription and cultural resource. His theory is not about cultures and their contact or spontaneouscreolization but about uncertain identities, far-reaching misunderstandings and self-fulfillingprophecies. So the "black Atlantic" is at the same time an overlooked cultural unit as well as a setof avoidable and unavoidable projections and expectations. "Black" music in its postcolonial,post-emancipation context is intrinsically political since it cannot abstain from articulating asignificant attitude towards its social role in a racist society.20

Gilroy's theory of afro-modernity has freed the study of African-American music from adual trap: from the wrong alternative between a folklorist search for African retentions and theintegrationist subsumption under an emergent national culture. His eccentric standpoint affiliatedwith the Caribbean diasporic culture of Great Britain gives way to a wider understanding ofsolidarities and differences, sources and identifications that interact in the process of culturalchange. It has far reaching consequences for the conceptual treatment of African derived musicunder the conditions of modernization or diaspora. The path opened up by Gilroy was followedby several scholars in the United States who started to question the well-established narratives onAfro-American music.21 It has influenced the critical semiotic study of the history of blackfaceminstrelsy as well as elaborate analyses of the construction of "race" in black music. It made itpossible to rewrite the early history of jazz in way that revaluates its artistic contribution withreference to its social creativity in a situation of delicate transformation of racialized patterns;thereby it shifts the range of perception towards musical practices and traditions up to thenneglected and deconstructs the discourses of purity and authenticity established by white jazzcritics. And finally, the fence that had been erected between the study of African-American musicin the United States and the field of its Latin American and Caribbean relatives has been brokenup (e.g. Brennan). This fence had existed for a long time to further what was called "theassimilation of the negro" in a national frame, since the struggle for civil rights was bonded tohistoric arguments that made it a struggle of black citizens of the United States. This politicalcontext had been a serious obstacle for recognizing the analogies, differences and interactions ofNorth American jazz with its Afro-Latin counterparts.

It is especially interesting to re-conceptualize the understanding of jazz under a postcolonialsignature. This allows a differentiated view of jazz as a dual phenomenon that was notnecessarily understood in the same way by black and by white audiences. It is involved in aprocess of construction and diffusion of identity that plays on different levels. There is itssignificance for blacks in the US; there is the issue of its recognition as "American music"; andthere is its international radiation as an abstract model for a liberated, modern and self-determined practice of music. This differentiation is not only obscured by the usual treatmentwithin the framework of American national history; it is equally hampered by nationalsensibilities of other countries that are reluctant to admit the influence of jazz. What the globalview reveals here is not so much culture imperialism but a neo-African internationalism that


worked even beyond the borders of racial lines. In the same way jazz had assimilated in itsoriginal phase inspirations from outside the US, it later became an inspirational force forautonomous musical developments in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. The "blackAtlantic" clearly is a product of racial imagination, but at the same time it gave way toclandestine exchange of ideas and local movements for cultural emancipation.

Meanwhile even the doctrine of African music's fundamental otherness came underattack.22 Kofi Agawu in his startling book Representing African Music has shown howethnomusicology was from its beginnings fixed on difference. The expectation to find in Africa akind of music completely strange to European ears has automatically created its outcome. Theself-attributed role of the researcher who claims to understand this "strange" music and to be ableto reveal its true value has become an epistemological pitfall that results in selective perception.Agawu's criticism, which follows partly the spirit of Edward Said's Orientalism, deconstructs"African music" as a concept that has more to do with European projections than with empirism.It is based on generalizations that fit the differential bias inherent in the researchers philanthropicattitude. This bias was also responsible for the until recently prevailing neglect of popular musicin the scholarly literature on African music (Agawu 117-150), which was based on the axiomaticjuxtaposition of traditional and popular music. As long as the professional ethos of theethnomusicologist implied the protection of traditional music from Westernizing influences, itseemed impossible to give credit to genres apparently linked to Western modernity.

In the meantime, the delayed paradigmatic turn has brought ethnomusicology into anabsurd exigency: the difficulty to explain to disciplinary outsiders why the scientific interest hasshifted from traditional to popular music. How is it that research funds are spent to study the mosttrivial and ephemeral musical expressions instead of helping to save the disappearing testimoniesof dying-out cultures? The established discourse on "traditional" music had delivered comfortablejustifications, as long as it specialized in "precious artifacts" that fit the concepts of culturefavored by Western museums. It is this seemingly infallible "purist" approach that strikes backnow and brings ethnomusicology into trouble of legitimation. In this way, the obsession withdifference has created a conceptual vacuum that leaves scientific interest on a shrinking ice floewhere no arguments are available concerning the apparently less traditional.

Instead of deploring this situation I'd suggest to carry on Agawu's critique to connect it withthe critique of globalization. For a long time the scientific weakness of the concept of "popularmusic" has been commonplace. It is in use for merely practical reasons which are nurtured by abundle of dubious evidences: the impact of electronic media, the existence of historically youngnational styles, the obvious distance with regard to tradition and the connection withglobalization. The idea of "popular music" seems so overwhelmingly self-explanatory that it iseasy to miss its crucial defect of construction: the uncontrolled mingling of sociological andhistorical arguments. There is no scientific need to evoke the term "popular music" for things thatcan be qualified as postcolonial, post-traditional, trans-ethnic, urban, modern, contemporary, neo-African, recreational, or the like. Globalization also pertains to words and ideas, and the notion ofthe "popular" has brought about the globalization of a wrong evidence that was molded after themodel of Western mass culture. So the concept of popular music is involuntarily tied to anoutdated theory of modernization and seems to confirm the unavoidable triumph of the Westerntype of cultural stratification. The "people" implied in "popular" is inherited from the Europeannational state of the nineteenth century and its destiny is assumed to follow the usual way ofglobalization. But the postcolonial realities suggest a completely different sociology: one ofmultiple identities, ethnic restructuring, unstable class formation, imagined communities andtransnational networks. The "people" of non-Western popular music is a people in transition; the


power of the Western discourses lies in their presumption to know where this transition has to go.These discourses are not only patronizing the postcolonial subject; at the same time they miss thepoint that in a postcolonial situation the notion of popularity may acquire a depth of politicalsymbolism and charismatic empathy unimaginable in an industrialized Western context.

The postcolonial challenge may seem incidental as long as matters of the global aredelegated to a minoritary group of specialists within the academic system. But the factual wavecaused by globalization won't stop at the doors of university. Its not only in the United Stateswhere students and scholars with non-white or non-European background are reclaiming aserious discussion of postcolonial positions that is apt to shake the conceptual fundaments ofacademic music departments. Even in Germany postcolonial theory enjoys a lively interestamong the younger generation, which promises to have long-term consequences also formusicology.23 It is not arbitrary that until now there has existed hardly any point of contact: thetraditional target group of musicological reasoning not only is imbued with the values of Westernmusic; it intuitively identifies with them in the confidence of having privileged access toknowledge about "music." So the ethnomusicologists are trapped easily on a one-sided frontlineof arguing and are unprepared if a partner from a peripheral standpoint enters into dialogue. Thepolitics of disciplinary allotment follow their own logic, especially when the category of "art" isinvolved. Therefore, the first task is to rewind the whole story of the Western interest in themusics of the world.

3. From comparative musicology to ethnomusicology

The potential knowledge about music tends towards the infinite. On the other hand the mainapplication of such knowledge is the making of music--but this is something different thanscientific proof of that knowledge. What remains is just the work of interpretation, whichhistorically was a passion of the educated music amateur. These are not good conditions for thedevelopment of a serious scientific discourse. The field of music is determined by its irreducibleplurality: it seems like a cosmos of different languages, which are more or less untranslatable intoeach other. In contrast to this, the language of science refers to universal meanings. It is generallyconsidered that science is "objective" while music is "subjective." Music involves matters of tasteand differences in the human capacity for analytic hearing. Musical notation is the only tool forobjectivation, but is only of limited scientific value.

The above generalizations are less general than they may seem. They are subject to a majorfactor of relativity: historicity. We have to keep in mind that music is profoundly embedded intohistory, and so is musicology. To speak about musical knowledge in such a liberal and distancedway is clearly an achievement of Western postmodernity. Musical discourses are linked to theirplace in time and space in a way that exceeds the methodological limitations of perspectiveusually discussed in the social sciences. This problem has seduced some scholars into evoking anapocalyptical scenario of complete relativism. I don't think that such a pessimistic attitude is anunavoidable consequence of the present state of knowledge for a thinking centered on history,enlightenment and critique. Such thinking might detect within music history a playground offruitful misconceptions, of pseudo-scientific ideas that pushed creativity forward. Great musicdoesn't need to be scientifically correct. Errors can crate respectable results, but nevertheless theycan be identified as errors. This is all the more important if there are outdated ethnocentricprejudices involved--beyond the reflex of quick exculpation by means of discourses of Westernself-accusation.


Here is not the place to reconstruct the contradictory history of Enlightenment as far as itconcerns music.24 It is sufficient to presuppose that as it progressed the paradigms of rationalityand human equality underwent a unique entanglement that became crucial for the history ofEuropean music. The historical association of music with the mathematical sciences had leftbehind a problematic heritage of self-conscious dogmatism. So older pleas for global toleranceand a cosmopolitism of respect remained without effect until the ruling discourses of culturalsupremacy were challenged by the "hard" sciences. It was Hermann von Helmholtz who tried todevelop a new understanding of music's basic materials in accordance with modern physics. Hisachievement, called "the objectivation of music" by Matthias Rieger, was to abstract from theculturally shaped categories solidified in musical terminology. Starting with acoustics hedeconstructed the myth of a special human sensory organ for European music and equatedmusical sounds with sounds of different origin as objects of perception. Broadly speaking, hereduced musical esthetics to the relationship between vibrations and their decoding by the humanear. Helmholtz's efforts to give musicology a renewed foundation in the natural sciences can beseen as a delayed impulse of Enlightenment: the effort to discover the "real" rationality behindthe apparent functioning of musical perception. Therefore he tried to expand his mechanisticapproach as far as possible into the sphere of psychology and labeled it "Ton-Physiologie."

With Helmholtz the historically first attempt was undertaken to treat music apart ofnormative esthetics. The deductive inclination of traditional music theory was replaced by aninductive method of experiment. Up to then the empirical resolution of musical research was tiedto the elementary units of practical music like tones and notes. Only in the second half of the 19thcentury did it become imaginable to replace this coarse grid with a finer one represented by theconcept of sound. This approach was a prerequisite for a kind of objectivation that could result ina more general idea of music: theoretically it was suitable for any kind of music, independent ofits origin. It is worth noting that it was the "exact" sciences that served here the goals of culturalrelativism. This happened again when Alexander Ellis introduced his cent-scale for microtonalmeasurement to be able to quantify the differences between the tonal systems of differentcultures. Far from any empathic crossing of cultural borders it was the refinement of quantitativeanalysis that gave way for a broadening of the horizon of perception concerning the globalrealities of music. It was the temporary suspension of matters of cultural value and theradicalization of the mathematical bias of European music that historically preceded theunderstanding of music as culture. The Eurocentric fiction of an "objective" music accessible toscientific measurement seems to have been a necessary stage in the development towards adismissal of Eurocentrism.

Helmholtz's scientific achievements were not really welcomed by the musicologicalestablishment of his time (Rieger 142-144). Instead they should form the basis for the foundationof comparative musicology by his disciples Curt Sachs und Erich Moritz von Hornbostel,together with the advent of the phonograph as a new tool for research. The phonograph was thedefinitive materialization of the idea of an "objective ear": it didn't care at all about musicality. Infact its technological evolution was related much more to phonetics than to musicology. At thattime the revolutionary potential of sound recording for the study of music was far from beingevident and rewarded an extra effort of discovery. In Berlin it was the phonographic collection ofspoken word recordings for linguistic use that inspired the project of a first recorded survey of themusics of the world: the legendary Berlin Phonogram Archive established by Hornbostel andCarl Stumpf in 1899. This collection was the cornerstone for an evolution that finally resulted inEthnomusicology as well as in world music. But in the beginning the curiosity for global musicwas the privilege of a few dedicated specialists, because of the poor quality of sound


reproduction alone. To analyze the noisy and narrow sound of a phonograph roll was a job thatrequired an amount of sonic imagination that was likely to counteract the objectivizing effects ofthe medium.

The technology of sound recording opened up a completely new range of empirical data;but the question was, to which kind of knowledge these data could attribute. The young disciplineof comparative musicology suffered from the lack of an adequate culture theory that couldtranscend the European scope. So almost inevitably it fell under the influence of the paradigm ofevolutionism. It seemed obvious to interpret differences in the construction and style of music asstages of a universal history--an idea which existed yet long before the 19th century. Togetherwith the success of the evolutionary model in biology and its adaptation for anthropology, itfurnished a model of thought that could process the widening of the global horizon in accordancewith the idea of European superiority. The quest for the origins of music got a new significationunder the conditions of evolution theory. This theory was understood as a promise to look intothe past of European music by studying the musics of the world. So, the music of the"primitives", which was considered up to then as negligible for a history of the arts, became atleast an object of scientific interest.

It would be unfair to attribute to early comparative musicology an overwhelming desire toprove European superiority.25 Considering its objects ranged from European folk music to themusic of Oriental and Asian "high cultures", the data were much too diverse to suggest aunilinear evolution from the archaic to the elaborate. It was more an attitude of showing that"primitives are not so stupid as they may seem" that emerged from these comparative studies.Their music was understood as a key to the soul of humanity and as a sign of the universalinventiveness of mankind. The issue of real comparison was not so urgent as long as the availabledata were so scarce that scientific conclusions could hardly be justified on a solid methodologicalbasis. The project of comparative research was more or less delegated to the future, where it hasremained until today. For the moment the problem of understanding such disparate modes ofexpressions that were not predicted by Western musicology offered enough occupation. Theproblem with the evolutionist approach was not so much one of racist hubris, but situated on adifferent level. First, this approach was only possible under the assumption that the studiedmusics were part of ahistorical cultures. It would have been useless to speculate about thebeginnings of music without the presumption that "primitive" cultures were survivals of earlierstages of the evolution of mankind. Secondly, this direction of research implied a preference forthe remote past as well as for " pure" cultures. The idea of a global history understood in aretrospective way backwards from the present was far off the ruling currents of thinking. So ithappened that a good deal of musical phenomena that would seem today invaluable forunderstanding the recent past could completely escape the interest of early comparativemusicology and remained undocumented. Historians of the "black Atlantic" for example willthere hardly find much valuable information there, since comparative musicology lacked anyparadigm to qualify the musical outcome of this cultural complex as testimonies of scientificimportance.

Comparative musicology's connection with colonialism was rather loose in comparison tothe beginnings of anthropology and the museological collection of artifacts, since at that timenon-European music involved hardly any material interests. The global view of the discipline wasmore positivist than imperialistic. It had to manage a field full of unusual discoveries andsurprises, and had difficulties coming up with appropriate questions that could be scientificallyanswered. Unlike biology--and unlike musical instruments--music itself resisted anyclassificatory approach. So the only promising strategy of research was to start with empirically


observable similarities: to compare isolated traits and to identify their distribution withingeographic space. This methodological stance temporarily synchronized comparative musicologywith the diffusionist school of Ethnology. It was mainly the German branch known as"Kulturkreislehre" that stimulated this direction of inquiry (see Schneider): to reconstruct large-scale movements of cultural diffusion, which could reveal processes of migration and contact.But the paradigm of the "Kulturkreis" remained a short-lived enterprise. It suffered from severalspeculative flaws. Not only did it imply a sociologically unspecified idea of "folk culture", whichwas assumed as the human basis of cultural transfers; it also referred to a rather vague historicalframe that couldn't easily be brought into accordance with the results of historiography. But mostimportant, the idea of the "Kulturkreis" was speculatively presupposing the existence ofidentifiable centers of invention and was thus committed exclusively to a monogenetic theory ofcultural creativity.

Nonetheless the shift from evolutionism to diffusionism rescued comparative musicologyfrom biologist analogies and redirected it temporarily towards history. The comparative approachwas detached from hierarchical models of cultural progress and fitted into an analyticalframework of time and space. With this early "spatial turn" the discipline undertook a sidestepthat kept it away for a while from the gravitation towards racism. An important question wasopened up again: how could a comparative approach deal with difference? Was there anycorrelation between differences concerning music and the differences of the humans that madethe music? Could "archaic" music be interpreted as an expression of a "primitive" mind? Suchquestions, albeit not being theorized, were underlying the exploration of music on a global level.The Idea of a musical history of progress was a suggestive temptation that was questioned onlyby examples of factual incomparability, which led to the conclusion that music is different per se.

It shouldn't be forgotten that at this time the parallel development of atonality incontemporary art music was challenging the traditional concept of European music from within.Simultaneously the current of primitivism was notorious in the visual arts and accidentallyleaping over into composed music. So for example the composer Carl Orff had consulted thecomparative musicologist Curt Sachs for his pedagogical project of a reformed elementary musiceducation (Elste 15-16). This project which resulted in the use of pentatonics as a means tointroduce children into music, may be seen as rather ambiguous today: On the one hand itadopted principles of non-Western music as suitable for the education of European children; onthe other hand it was based on the idea of an analogy between phylogenetic and ontogeneticevolution, an idea that not only may seem too speculative nowadays but also involves a good dealof evolutionist thinking. The actual success of Orff's pedagogical project may be seen as aconfirmation of the underlying theory; but equally it can be interpreted as a sign of the universalhuman capacity to empathically apprehend whatever system of music. In any case, the historicaldimension was pushed aside in favor of an esthetic of timeless archaism that could, in itsmonumental version, easily join the mythological preoccupation of German Nazism.

There were several factors that kept early comparative musicology away from history: itwas its methodical foundation on the very new technology of sound recording which enforced asynchronic perspective as the only serious alternative to risky speculations about the past; it wasthe strong institutional monopoly of Western musicology on the concept of history; and it was theimpulse towards an objectivation of music advanced by Hermann von Helmholtz, which favoredempirical methods to distance itself scientifically from the esthetic presumptions of Europeanmusicology. What remained for a global history of music, tended to be imagined in a remote anddiffuse past, while the idea of the historical significance of the present for the future was reducedto the gesture of conserving the last testimonies of dying-out cultures. Finally, it was also the


affiliation of the remaining part of German comparative musicology to theories of race duringNazism, which contributed to the discrediting of the diachronic approach.

Meanwhile the scholars who had emigrated from Germany to the US fell under theinfluence of American Cultural Anthropology. At the same time they had to adapt to the newscientific context, which was influenced by the surrounding of a multi-ethnic society. Theirinvolvement as teachers with a younger generation of researchers resulted finally in thefoundation of Ethnomusicology. It was specially the anthropological concept of culture whichoffered now a much more appropriate frame for the study of non-European musics. It enabled thecomplete discarding evolutionism and offered a model to interpret such musics in their own termsand with reference to a system of cultural meanings empirically accessible through ethnography.This concept of "culture" was not only largely detached from associations with high culture butalso much more individualized than the macro-theories of large-scale cultural regions or thehighly generalizing "Kulturkreislehre." It implied a rather "exemplary" approach, which, far frompostulating the complete autonomy of cultural systems, tried to study the context of music in itswhole depth within a locally limited range. The method of Ethnomusicology as outlined by AlanP. Merriam, Mantle Hood, Bruno Nettl and others, was a interdisciplinary one that shouldintegrate disciplines like sociology, linguistics, dance research, the study of religion and oralliterature. It was centered on the uniqueness, functionality, and immanent plausibility of music; tounderstand music in this way its many relations to the whole complex of a particular "culture"had to be considered in order to empathically grasp its own esthetics.26

By and large Ethnomusicology is dedicated to an ethos of cultural pluralism. It appreciatesdifference as richness and continuously recalls the mutuality of cultural strangeness. Incidentally,the interest in comparison is in decline since it lacks a comparative method that could fit thepluralistic stance. The paradigm of "music and culture" seems to exclude any "music and music"paradigm. With the liberation from Eurocentric preoccupations there remains apparently nomeaningful question that could be answered by a comparative approach. In a world consisting ofa multiplicity of ethnocentric views in need of mutual respect and cultural negotiation, it isworthless to insist on similarities and differences except perhaps for a pre-scientific kind ofintercultural communication. It is the ambition of scientific self-reflexivity that results in apreference for a dichotomic model of Western versus non-Western culture; this is not at least dueto a critical aim. It counters attitudes of cultural imperialism and confronts European self-indulgence with its other. To this end it can also be a revealing experience trying to learn to playthe music from another culture. The practical experience of bloody practicing and amateurishmischief can be a remedy to Eurocentric hubris and a means for the education of futurecosmopolites.27

4. Historical turn?

Of course this is a rather one-sided portrait of ethnomusicology that ignores important trends ofthe last decades. Musical phenomena associated with diasporic cultures28, urban subcultures,migration, acculturation/ transculturation, hybridity, cultural change and transfer, are currenttopics of research within the recent past that all take into account the historical context ofglobalization. They bring the factor of time back into ethnomusicology by expanding theoccupation with the ethnographic present into a processual understanding of culture. In a similarway for about twenty years the habit of thinking in terms of closed and timeless cultures hasgiven way to a critical concept of ethnicity. This concept follows a constructivist strain in two


ways: it offers a sociological model for the explanation of the maintenance of cultural borders;and it considers the past not only as a source of cultural traditions but also as a temporal screenfor retrospective projections that serve to stabilize present claims of identity. Thus, theanthropological idea of "culture" has transformed in a way that features its self-generating anddynamic aspects.

With respect to music this conceptual shift in anthropology questions some familiarpatterns of legitimacy. For ethnomusicologists the habitual use of the term "musical culture" hadbeen a professional trademark that defined their place within scientific discourses and served as aprotective shield against the rival concept of "high culture" with its Eurocentric implications.Now, that "musical culture" has become an unstable unit of reference, the issue of value arisesagain in confrontation with an enduring pretension for eternally valid works of art. As long asethnomusicologists could identify themselves as defenders of cultural purity against a globalwave of Westernization and blunt global leveling, their methodological preference for staticmodels was backed by an ethical mission. Now they have to reorganize their arguments tovalidate the changeable and syncretistic without losing the claim for "culture" that warranted themeaningfulness of the musical phenomena under examination. The uncontestable value oftradition was founded on admiration and respect for the stability and functionality of oralcultures; their assumed oldness was the symbolic counterweight to the historicity of Europeanliterate culture. But if we accept that our accessible knowledge of the global past is incisivelycrossed by modernity, the criteria for judging the old and the new are in need of re-evaluation. Atthe same time, the authority of the specialist loses ground, as the object of his competenceappears more and more as an arbitrary curiosity without connection to the proceeding of culturalglobalization.

It was particularly in the United States where ethnomusicology was welcomed by "liberal"forces as a promising freshening-up of academic structures that could be apt for reformingencrusted music departments and to reconcile political claims for multiculturalism. Meanwhilethe discipline seems to have undergone some sort of crisis. Its standing has become precariouswith regard to its mediating position between artistic and critical discourses within thehumanities. It is in danger of getting lost in an increasing cleavage between a factual pluralism ofaccessibility and growing desires for a restoration of cultural standards and liabilities. The more itopens up for contemporary discourses of cultural studies and the social sciences the more it risksbeing pushed aside as a peripheral sub-branch of sociology. This situation was problematizedexemplarily by scholars like Ellen Koskoff (1999) and Deborah Wong (2006) who hadexperienced the difficulty of introducing ethnomusicology into institutional practice. Theycomplained their exposure to systemic contradictions and their enforced role as a buffer in the"culture wars" (Wong 259-263) of American society, squeezed between movements of identitypolitics and powerless with regard to the anti-pluralistic propaganda of a restorative "high-culture-ism." So their "idealistic" identification with allegedly marginal cultures seems to resultin a marginalization of the discipline itself.

Apparently ethnomusicology has a shortage of the convincing arguments needed in order tonot be reduced to a mere movement among others. Its humanistic and multicultural ambitionssuffer from a lack of theoretical support and its efforts to reach out and conceptually bridge thegap to the "critical discourses within the humanities" are hard work. The engagement withdifference leads it easily into the offside of political controversies and undermines its academicstand as a serious field of research. Incidentally the reflection of the whole context underdiscussion seems to drift irresistibly towards a subjective rhetoric of concern since it is hardlycovered by the disciplinary framework. We may ask what is left from the project of an


objectivation of music proposed by von Helmholtz one and a half centuries ago. Is it just thedefensive "self-pluralization" of a scientific department of minority specialists? Hasethnomusicology no other truth to reveal than to continuously remember of the existence ofdifference? Or does it need some sort of "turn" in the way other disciplines had to rethink theirtheoretical foundations?

I want to suggest here that there are historical reasons for that bumpy road from a sciencewith ambitions for exactness through a collecting discipline under the influence of transitoryanthropological macro-theories up to a branch of the humanities that has to represent the clearconsciousness of the cultural sciences. These reasons have not only to become a matter of self-reflection; the required way of self-reflection has to follow a constructivist path in order tounderstand how the objects of research are formed by historically grown assumptions andsociological oddities of the academic world. European music as an outstanding example ofcultural "Western-ness" may appear as an opaque power that heavily determines the direction ofthe discourses; but this Western-ness can theoretically be analyzed as a sub-intentionalconstruction designed by social forces as well as the immanent logics of music. Therefore, theframe of reflection has to be stretched historically to include a virtual standpoint from which thenotorious dichotomy in its modern sense isn't yet obvious.

The call for objectivity may seem outdated but it cannot be dismissed easily; it has to berepositioned in its historical frame in order to be able to qualify the reach of the concepts ofmusic involved. To properly define the borders between objectivity and subjectivity seems to bea task in constant conflict with the amount of artistic subjectivity, which in real life is theinevitable foundation of any kind of interest in music. A musicologist may be passionatelyengaged for "his" music; but nonetheless his job is to abstract his knowledge in a way that isaccessible to a more general scientific public not necessarily sharing his special engagement.Therefore, he has to objectivize not only music on its different levels: the composition, the audiorecording, esthetic values, musical terminologies, social functions, or artistic aims, all havingtheir own kind of reality. Likewise musicology itself has to be objectivized by articulating itsconceptual interfaces within a larger context of cultural sciences. However, for this context theonly imaginable reference of objectivity is history.

The concept of history necessary here is not exactly the one of traditional historiography; itis a concept that is large enough to include the opposition of Western and non-Western musicitself. This means the systematic deconstruction of an outdated model of thinking that opposespeople "with history" to people "without history." The fact that European music historiographyhas accumulated a solid stock of literature while ethnomusicologists often completely lack anysources that may reveal to them more than the immediate past must not be confounded with theactual historicity of any music. The inequality of knowledge reflects relations of power, and thestudy of this inequality within a historical frame has to complement the study of differences inmusic itself. A serious analysis of the claim for supremacy of European music will reveal theeffects of power relations on the level of linguistics as well as in the field of cultural hegemonyand the inequality of social conditions determining the practice of music.

From here the way is open to join the endeavors for a new global history. This will effectthe tentative replacement of the ethnographic bias for untouched cultures by the general suspicionof some sort of globalization. It means also the discarding of the familiar concept of "Westerncontamination", which reproduces methodologically exactly the imbalance of power it pretendsto criticize. Instead we have to assume a multiplicity of actors, each of them equipped with theirhistorically acquired (or denied) amount of power and cultural resources. Recent theories aboutmultiple, alternative, global or entangled modernities can offer here very useful approaches and


terminologies.29 They have been taken up for the study of culture in different fields, but rarely formusic. They are suitable to show that in this field the kind of Western modernity which, isexperienced by its former outsiders represents a significantly different reality than the one whichcan be extrapolated from the bulk of literature on European music. The analysis of this differencecan disclose the cultural embedded-ness of music on both sides including misunderstandings,ethnocentrisms, shifts of signification, ignorances, popular myths, and theoretical preoccupations.So the old project of Ethnomusicology to understand "music in culture" should be transformed byexpanding it in a self-reflexive way to the European as well as to the global field. In this way,ethnomusicology could escape the "trap of synchronism" and develop historically founded andcritical arguments for whatever "culture wars."

This kind of global history doesn't refer to the indifferent globe of geography but to asocially constructed one. It is not dedicated to the search for general laws that "rule the world",nor does it pretend to advance a global theory of music. It just follows the historical traces of aglobalization the beginnings of which may fade into the speculative dawn of the remote past. Itconsiders the narrowness of music histories, which traditionally were obliged to a stronglynational orientation and tries to sketch out the scope of the gaps between them. It is specially thehistory of transcontinental trade, colonialism and slavery within the history of the last centuriesthat merits attention as a two-sided story whose blank side contains the accounts of resistance,flight, camouflage, syncretism, or creative adaptation. In this way global history can fitpostcolonial theory, which is its necessary supplement.

So the meandering direction of research, which at last passed the paradigm ofethnomusicology, seems to reach a point of turn into history. Once again it is anthropology thatinitiates the turn, not musicology. There is a huge detour from European music history thatalways has been rather removed from general history, through an anthropology discovering thehistory of globalization up to an updated ethnomusicology stripped off its obsession for theethnographic present and the difference of the local. We have to trace this way in order to effectthe paradigmatic turn first to the cultural context and then, in another step to music.

5. Reconstructing the colonial context

Of course the colonial context under discussion here can't embrace the whole world; it will focuson the Atlantic cadre which is not only the author's main field of study but also of special interestbecause of its impact on the evolution of international pop music in the 20th century.30 This caseis exemplary because it can reveal the dialectic character of global power relations. Historically itwas the ambition for white supremacy that dominated the narratives in a way that correspondedthe imagined story of success of European imperialism. But in the run of time cultural andpolitical resistance to this pattern of domination has left a completely different reality that is notonly manifest in a massive trend for musical re-Africanization and the global success of Afro-European hybrids in music; finally it has also freed the counter-narrative of a "black Atlantic"that had historically ripened in the shadow of European hegemony. Besides, this dialectic hasinfiltrated the concept of Western music itself with its contradictions: the idea of a culturalWestern-ness of pure European origin cultivated in academic ivory towers is increasingly sweptaway by a new conceptual regime of globalization that considers--geographically correct--rock'n'roll and hip-hop as Western.

Long before Paul Gilroy's it was the pioneering work of the anthropologist Sidney Mintzthat prepared the ground for a reconstruction of the colonial context (1985). In the meantime


Mintz, who worked methodically along the interface of anthropology and history, has acquired areputation as godfather of the new global history. It is noteworthy that it was not theory but hisradical empirism that confronted him with the facts of globalization (Palmié 6, 12). Doingresearch in the Caribbean, Mintz couldn't avoid registering the multiple connected-ness in spaceof daily life within the colonial context. This was true not only for the white elites but also for theslaves on the sugar plantations. They were not only linked to the wide array of culturally andlinguistically diverse people of Africa that underwent enslavement. They were economicallyintegrated in the whole Western hemisphere by the products of their work as well as by theirpatterns of consumption. The whole complex of the sugar economy was based on a far-reachingsystem of economic specialization that condemned suitable regions to the production of luxurygoods. Taking the European greed for sugar as a starting point Mintz was able to show howWestern modernity had penetrated colonial reality in the Caribbean at a time when it was stilldawning for a good part of the European people.

The complex of colonial sugar economy that was established in the 18th century and deeplyindustrialized in the 19th had brought along a hierarchical society that included human workforces from a variety of origins. The European concept of race is certainly the fundamental ideabehind this hierarchy, but not exclusively. The existence of a multi-ethnic slave population aswell as a multi-ethnic class of free labor determined a kind of pseudo-urbanization that created acomplex system of attribution and domination. It made an average worker of color well aware ofhis particular role in a differentiated hierarchy of racial, legal, and economic status, aconsciousness that eventually could inspire him to join movements of revolt. The extent of slaverebellion, maroonage and escape by suicide was for a long time underestimated by historiographyand merits placing in its historical context. For at the latest when the news of the FrenchRevolution was spreading in the colonies the asserted power relations came into danger. Thefollowing turmoil that had seized the political climate of the whole region has been portrayed in avivid way in the novels of the Cuban author and musicologist Alejo Carpentier. Carpentierdescribes a historical scenery full of hope, violence, terror and absurdity, which appears like ademonic underside of the European narrative of progress (1980, 2004).

Well-informed historical novels may suggest virtual perspectives of subjectivity that cancomplete the picture of a contradictory epoch.31 But to understand these contradictionssynchronically and diachronically within a framework of policies, institutions, ideologies, andethnicities, requires an analytical approach to history which puts "culture" in the right place.Beyond his research devoted to the social effects of sugar as a key produce of colonial economySidney Mintz together with Richard Price has tried to give a closer outline of social structuresand the conditions and circumstances of cultural communication in the Caribbean of colonialtimes. Their meanwhile "classic" book An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past:A Caribbean Perspective32 seems to be until now the most prolific attempt to reconstruct thecolonial context with reference to African-American cultures in a systematic way. They start withquestioning the usual anthropological concept of culture which "cannot applied without somedistortion to the manifold endowments of those masses of enslaved individuals, separated fromtheir tribal and familial settings, who were transported, in more or less heterogeneous cargoes, tothe New World" (4). So the question is, which kind of work anthropologists can do in theCaribbean. Mintz and Price insist, "that the present can [not] be 'understood'--in the sense ofexplaining the relationships among different contemporary institutional forms--without referenceto the past. We suppose this to be the case, whether our interest be in the European peoples whoconquered the world they called 'new', the Indian peoples they destroyed and subjugated with it,or the African--and, later, Asian--peoples they dragged into it" (45).


The sociological model put forward by Mintz and Price which considered cultural contact,creolization and the institutionalization of traditions was not necessarily welcomed positively.33 Itwas criticized by American Anthropologists adhering an "Afro-centric" strain of thinking forallegedly playing down the link to Africa and overemphasizing the creative adaptation to the newenvironment. This controversy, which is influenced by identity politics specific to the UnitedStates, cannot be put easily aside as long there are powerful discourses of national integration--not only in the US but for example in Cuba too (compare Moore)--that count African-Americansprimarily as contributors to emerging national cultures of the New World. However,contradictory circumstances can create contradictory arguments, and so it would be equallyplausible to criticize an attitude of tutelage in the depicting of African-Americans as tradition-bound and immature for modernity. This discussion, which partly results from differing regionalangles of sight and exaggerated generalizations, has to be pursued by feeding it back intoempirical research. What seems more important here is to uncover another problem tacitlyunderlying that discussion: How can we handle the fundamental asymmetry of power involved inthe colonial encounter? How can we handle the fact that the word "culture" carries differentassociations when used with respect to Europeans than it has in the context of Africanistanthropology?

The idea of a "black Atlantic" suggests the existence of a "White Atlantic" as its logicalcomplement. Certainly emigrants from Europe were also threatened by deracination, exposed tothe centrifugal forces of colonial society and confronted with the irritating effects of earlyglobalization. They were involved in differing solidarities and in the historic struggle forindependence from the colonizing motherland. The white part of colonial society was itselfdifferentiated in multiple ways and culturally far from homogenous. Nevertheless the colonialsystem was based on inequality, and distributed chances and opportunities along a stablehierarchical pattern along the lines of race and property. The social "game" of success andsuppression followed rigid rules without ever predetermining the fate of the individual in anabsolute manner. The systemic imbalance of power between the strata of a colonial societybecomes most apparent in the access to the field of written knowledge. As far as research isdependent on written sources, it is inevitably in danger of replicating this imbalance, which ismirrored in the structure of the available documents. We have always to consider that the typicalcolonial observer was unconsciously tied to a socially sanctioned top-down scale of relevance.Because of this, "Afro-centric" attempts to systematically invert the dominant perspective canhardly be discredited even if they might fill gaps of proven knowledge with speculations.

Unwritten knowledge is the last frontier for the writing of colonial history. This is all themore true for the history of music which additionally suffers for the most part from the lack ofany reliable sound recordings. But if--as Mintz and Price are claiming--an anthropologicalapproach is useless without history, there is no easy alternative available to the hypotheticalreconstruction of the colonial context, since it grounds not only ethnographic results but alsoreflections on globalization and neo- or post-colonial conditions. This allows the readjustment ofthe basic dichotomy of Western versus non-Western: on an epistemological level it transformsinto the difference between a hegemonic metropolitan worldview centered on European traditionand an unquestioned belief in Western modernity, and the critical consciousness of acontradictory reality that reveals itself to the observer in a very uneven and ideologicallydistorted way. On a sociological level it signifies the cleavage between a habitual top-down viewpositively identifying with colonial attitudes and hierarchies on one side, and the "doubleconsciousness" of the colonial subject which defends its dignity while facing a complex systemof structural devaluation and exclusion, on the other. The idea of a superior Western-ness was


certainly a prerequisite for the colonial project; but at the same time, the colonial enterprise hasdetached the geography of Western-ness itself from notions of space and implemented it into aglobalized cultural regime that determinates access to power and historic visibility. As aconsequence, also the methodical problem of comparability shifts from one of seeminglyincompatible cultures to one of opposed worldviews within an ideological framework created bycolonialism.

So far, we have summarized a scientific approach that unites anthropology with history andinterprets the local in its relation to a global system of exploitation and exchange, enforcedmigration, cultural hegemony, and the formation of ambiguous identities. Now we have todetermine in a non-reductionist way the place of music in this context, which has left amultiplicity of music histories. Music isn't just like any part of culture because it can be seen asworking like a system of communication without fixed referent. This variability of meaningsmust be taken into consideration to define the possible options of musical practice available in acolonial system. At the same time music's immateriality is a factor that determines its mobility inthe global context. Music doesn't have to become a commodity to be spread, and the transmissionof musical knowledge is not restricted to institutions of formal instruction. Indeed, its role in aworld of global exchange and communication is mediated by capitalist interests and educationalprograms, but it goes beyond that. Music can be seen as part of a system of mobilities: spatialmobilities of people, of commodities, and of ideas; social mobilities that can be achieved throughmusic; and the cultural mobility to learn new repertoires or to selectively borrow from them. Thissystem is best understood as driven by an economy of hopes, desires and pleasures that act asmobilizing forces and possibly counteract the rigidity of ethnic traditions and social hierarchies.Starting from this background even the issue of identity can be addressed anew: now detachedfrom notions of authenticity, assertions of identity can appear as options among other options thatmay include strategies of appropriation, masquerade, parody, or intentional border crossing.

Music doesn't remain the same in this process of general mobilization also namedmodernity. The question arises, on which level music can be considered as an objective entity. Itwould be shortsighted to take musical notation as a marker of objectivity. In the colonial contextthe notated text of music gives no information about its intentions concerning the above-mentioned options. Revealing is the problem advanced by Geoff Baker apropos the revival ofLatin American Baroque music. He argues that a performance practice that is only historicallycorrect, can be insufficient in consideration of a potentially tendentious use of folk material.More than that, an interpretation would be completely misleading that takes allusions toindigenous or "negro" music as a kind of world music in advance of the term. He dismisses anynaive positivism with respect to these sources and calls for their critical reading: a historicallyinformed performance of colonial Baroque music has to take into account that "[a]dhesion to éliteEuropean cultural norms, whether directly or through the mockery of alternatives , was aninstrument of power, distinction and identity formation, a self-defense mechanism in the hands ofa colonial élite which sought to reinforce the social hierarchy" (443-444). In this way colonialelite music either tries to literally copy European music or it makes use of non-European music ina way that is able to prove the pattern of European superiority.34 The secondhand status of thelatter within the written sources has to be unmasked with all its ideological implications, whichare not simply neutralized by the dignity of the composition as a work of art. Bakers suggestion isto perform colonial Baroque music "as a post-colonial act" by giving it what Edward Said hascalled a "contrapuntal reading" (Baker 446).

This ethical and epistemological problem is inherent to every interpretation of colonialmusic, be it from the elite or from the subaltern strata of society. The documents always give an


incomplete picture of the unbalanced context that produced them--be it written sources, soundrecordings or ethnographic accounts. My own research on Cuban rumba, a music, which's originscan be located historically around the colonial-postcolonial watershed, was an ambiguousexperience that revealed the potential as well as the limitations of an historical approach. Itshowed that the musical environment of rumba offers a vast field for fruitful comparisons thatallow the formulation of plausible hypotheses on the cross-fertilization of musical traditions andgenres. Nevertheless, the usual hermeneutic circle of mutual elucidation of text and context wasdisturbed by the intervention of several biases that played on all levels and rendered the adequateassessment of sources and information rather difficult. Concerning rumba itself, these biases canbe reduced to a row of key discourses--a row of shocking incoherence--that deal with Africanlasciviousness, national integration, and colonial subalternity. What rumba means through thelenses of these discourses is alternatively depicted as an archaic dance of fertility, a creolizedfolklore of the young Cuban nation, or an informal entertainment of the lowest strata of society.Their historical order follows roughly the consecutive paradigms of colonial exotism,postcolonial nation building, and socialist culture politics "from below." But in the Cuban contextthese discourses mingle in an unsystematic way, and it is even hard to believe that they all referto the same thing (indeed, what rumba "really" is, is an equally complicated question35).

This makes it hard to determine in what way power relations are involved. They can befound encrypted in contradictions between practices of exclusion and ideologies of inclusion,between purposeful misrepresentation and corporate self-stylization, or between paternalisticfolklorism and highly advanced artistic practices. Cuban rumba itself contains elements ofclandestine resistance to colonial power as well as of social advancement through appropriationof European values; it is charged as a symbol of unity but at the same time culturally remote fromthe mainstream, since it follows a rigorous esthetic of African polyrhythm, too complex to beeasily co-opted by commercial popular music. The peculiar position rumba maintains within thefield of musical expressions of colonial/postcolonial Cuba becomes clear with contrast to thediscourses that are missing here. An ethnomusicologist coming from abroad may expect forexample discourses of White cultural disdain, of Afro-centric identity, global success or ofartistic value, all of them topics that appeared regularly in discussions on North American jazz.But, interestingly enough, none of these topics played a major role for the discussion of rumba inCuba. To the contrary, rumba was ignored or clandestinely admired by white elites, it was basedon trans-ethnic openness, never cared about the global success of its commercial namesake"rhumba," and its breathtaking rhythmic artistry was apparently never acknowledged by musiccritics as a new art form.

The comparison brings forward significant differences between two musical phenomenawith amazing historical parallels within the wider postcolonial field. They point to ratherdifferent colonial backgrounds and racial regimes as well as to distinct histories of emancipationand neocolonial dependence. In the Cuban case rumba was finally absorbed by anti-capitalistculture politics that referred positively to a pluralistic idea of the "people" and refusedpolarization along racial lines. Nevertheless a postcolonial reading of rumba can reveal its placewithin a crypto-colonial context of fluid class formation and cultural exchange; it can locate itwithin a partial public sphere of subaltern self-consciousness that escaped the ruling culturalhierarchies and was subject to its silencing by the general public of colonial society. The myth ofa domestic folklore of exotic sensuality that surrounded rumba may be seen as the compensatoryflipside of a profound irritation with the colonial self-image. Even the postcolonial intellectualsthat appreciated rumba for its Cuban-ness referred to it on a symbolic level that was closer to its(benevolent) parodies in colonial theatre performances than it was to the esoteric rules of rumba


as a kind of multi-ethnic backyard artistry. So its implicit African esthetic was ideologicallyneutralized by a normative concept of creolization. At the same time rumba was categoricallyexcluded from any association with the concept of "art"--an exclusion that seems ratherquestionable in the light of postmodern esthetics--and instead stylized as its "spontaneous"opposite emerging from the cultural depths of a creolizing folk.

So the place of Cuban rumba within discourses of difference remains ambiguous. On theone hand its uniqueness as an Afro-European hybrid is symbolically integrated into an emergingmodel of a postcolonial identity of nation. On the other hand the real difference of rumba is keptout of sight and left untouched and unexplained in the foggy realms of lower class culture. Whatcan be presumed beyond as a potentially objective reality is a complex musical practice withouttheory that implicitly articulates an un-verbalized ethos of cultural openness and counter-culturaldignity. Rumba may be seen as a musical art that is based on an attitude of proud understatement;an art determined by a minimalist use of instruments, that made it apt for vagrancy and immuneto persecution; an art that cultivates a style of advanced rhythmic sophistication and virtuositythat is hardly accessible to the musical capacities of members of European middle and upperclass; an art that celebrates its autonomy by imposing its own rules and conventions that grant thetacit power to exclude and to include. In that way difference is here the absolute and purposefuldifference of a secret language. But at the same time, difference is denied demonstratively by amusical technique of collage that brings together material from the most diverse traditions in away that converts diversity creatively into charming esthetic tensions. The distance with respectto musical values of European origin is an intentional but a controlled one: not as a sign ofseparatism but as a means to develop mastery in rumba as a field of silent superiority of thesubaltern. Moreover, rumba's latent appeal to the exotisticist and erotic curiosity of whiteaudiences is part of the equation of power in which the practitioners of rumba were defendingtheir dignity.

This sketchy interpretation of Cuban rumba as seen from a radical postcolonial perspectiveshows that the usual opposition of integration versus resistance is not sufficient as a scale ofmeasurement. To give rumba a "contrapuntal reading" means here to decipher its cumulativehistory of specialization and borrowing as a catalogue of creative adaptations to a mobilizedsocial environment--a history that had started with the re-creation of communal dances in theslave barracks of colonial society. It includes the establishing of regulating stylistic conventionsas a platform for individual competition, the strategic appropriation of certain vocal techniques ofEuropean origin, and the selective exploitation of the available techniques and traditions ofAfrican music. In a contrapuntal reading, white ignorance of a largely unintelligible artisticpractice of low social status is confronted with an attitude of stoic wisdom and self-control thatbalances on the edge between submission and revolt; the attributed image of a mild compromiseformula is confronted with the reality of a radically idiosyncratic practice.

The historical "message" of rumba seems to be concentrated in this special attitude, anattitude that was articulated in face of a colonial context. This context was not only responsiblefor the social distribution of possibilities for musical activity; at the same time it provided anenvironment of acoustic transparency that allowed some passive knowledge of the music to passover between different groups of society. We can assume that the historic founders and promotersof rumba were well aware of a wide range of styles and genres of Spanish colonial music as wellas of African traditions that were locally conserved. They profited from cultural movements forBlack advancement and from African based family networks of musicians--institutions that werecharacteristic of Cuban colonial/postcolonial society. Beyond this, it is not certain if they werenot aware of musical phenomena on a global scale like North American jazz or the multi-ethnic


folklore groups that were established by many postcolonial states. We have to mistrust thesuggestions of ignorance, naivety and spontaneous creation that were associated with the imageof the illiterate and black musician. A historically informed understanding of Cuban rumba has todismiss its one-dimensional comparison with good-natured folk music or archaic tribal music;instead, it has to take into consideration the existence of actors who, albeit mostly illiterate, werecapable of articulating themselves through cultural alliances and a self-conscious policy ofdifference.

6. Contextualizing music theory

So far the impression might arise that I want to replace ethnomusicology with postcolonial musicstudies. But this would be a short circuit. Rather, I wanted to show that a historical perspective inethnomusicology leads straight to postcolonial theory, a theory that on its part is bringing backthe global view. The postulate of an disconnectedness of separate cultures has to be differentiatedinto its role as an epistemological model and its empirical content, which can appear in the formof exclusion, ethnicity or style. Such border drawing attitudes--or their contrary--refer to a set ofhistorical, cultural and political knowledge that must be hypothetically assumed for each actor.The colonial context has inscribed vast discrepancies and inequalities in the structure of thisknowledge, dependent on the respective position within the hierarchy of power. The task of ascience worthy of the heritage of comparative musicology is not only to reconstruct thisknowledge, but also to make sense of it within a broader horizon of understanding. The questionmay legitimately be asked if there is a general concept of music available that is valid for LatinAmerican Baroque as well as for Cuban rumba.

The project of postcolonial critique as put forward by Said, Chakrabarty and others was notintended as a new specialization but as a method for the revision of Eurocentric narratives. So notonly ethnomusicology but also musicology is concerned by the invitation to de-center or"provincialize" Europe (Chakrabarty). What this means has still largely to be explored. In anycase it seems not as easy as in the social sciences to establish critical counter discourses.European music is not just an instrument of domination, neither is it an ideology that simplyneeds to be enlightened. Its composers were far from being concerned with questions ofEuropean superiority, but rather involved in the historically unique development of an art thatstands apart from practical necessity and interests, and creates its own realm of expression andmeaning. European music was historically developed out of a theory of harmony, not one of race,although it remains an interesting point to reflect about structural analogies of both.36 TheEuropean achievements of counterpoint and elaborate formal structuring are hard to deny, andeven the existence of a colonial music of European origin proves little, since its role in the proper"history of music" is only marginal (Carpentier 1980: 102).

The relationship between European dominance in an imperial sense and the dominance ofEuropean music is not a causal one, nor one of direct mirroring. On the European side it ismediated by scientific, technological and political dominance, while music itself is justified bytheoretical, historical and esthetic discourses. Nevertheless, on the part of the colonial subjectEuropean dominance is experienced in a holistic way: in the form of institutions, prohibitions,coercion, education, moral admonition and racist disdain. The colonial subject encountersEuropean music as a practice detached from its discursive founding and integrated in thestructure of power through the institutions of military and church and the exclusion from spacesof culture and entertainment of the elite. On the other hand the music of powerless European


emigrants might escape connotations with European dominance and can become the startingpoint for processes of creolization or "transculturation."

So the object of postcolonial critique is a double-faceted and composite one. If theperceptions of difference seen from both sides appear as incompatible, this hardla follows a lawof music. It is the combination of sociological and ideological factors, of social biases andesthetic sensibilities, of institutional power structures and narratives of identity, that formtogether what in the end reads as claim for the superiority of European music. It is commonpractice to criticize social inequalities and discriminating concepts of man; but the potentialhubris implicit in the cultural complex of Western music is not easy to detect. Faced with amassive bulk of musicological literature yet untouched by any postcolonial temptations, the firsttask of a critical approach will be to deconstruct this cultural complex into its parts: to decartelizethe interwoven discourses of musical practice, history, esthetics, psychology, and music theory,that ground the legitimation of European music.

European musicology is itself part of a European culture of music--a fact that is innocent ina moral, but crucial in an epistemological sense. It cannot easily be detached from its specialplace within this culture, which is located between science and art, or between sound andlanguage. But ultimately it doesn't escape the expectation to produce statements of scientificvalidity. Therefore, the call to qualify the existing pretensions of validity within a cosmopolitanframe is not only a political matter of satisfying the claims of postcolonial intellectuals and"ethnic minorities." The project of a global history of music seen through a postcolonial lens--which is our main topic here--is taking place in the footsteps of a respective revision of history,and struggles with practical problems that will be discussed subsequently in this article.Concerning the esthetics of music, the de-centering is prepared by ethnomusicology, which hasproduced valuable results that are waiting for further theorizing. If we try now to put history andesthetics aside for a moment, there remain two major fields suspicious of a questionable validityin the global range: music psychology, and music theory. Are there psychological laws for theperception of music that work for any kind of music and independently of the cultural andeducational background? Is there a potential music theory that can be applied to all musics of theworld?

The topic of an intercultural psychology of music seems to be rather precarious, especiallyin the United States. Regarding some of the latest results of a music psychology claiming to bescientific and yet is still fixed on Mozart as the most representative example of music forexperimental use, one might wonder if there has ever been any contact with departments forethnomusicology or multicultural music education. But this is an issue that should be directedback to intense debate.37 Instead, I want to take up the question of music theory, a point that camerecently under discussion in the field of music education. Ironically, matters of theory areappearing here as urgent in a field intimately tied to practice. This provokes arguments on apragmatic level, which are oriented towards a best practice model of an appropriate balance ofdisciplines. The attempt to unite Western-based music theory with a global perspective on musicmay result here in a dilemma between a pluralism of music theories that continues the "othering"of discrete musical cultures, and a synthetic approach that focuses on similarities in order tomatch the requirements of a musically globalized world. A practice-oriented theory of globalmusic was put forward for example by Bonnie C. Wade (2004); it follows an elementaryapproach based on the key role of musical instruments and the parameters of time, pitch, andstructure, that can serve as a useful framework for the acquisition of a basic understanding ofmusic that is largely independent from a specific cultural bias. Since the circular logic ofhermeneutics concerns both, the practical and the scientific attempts to understand music, this can


be in any case a prerequisite for the development of a cosmopolitan perspective on music. Butnevertheless, the issue of music theory merits treatment on a strictly scientific level as well.

Mark Hijleh recently pointed to the right direction when he noted that the kind of "musictheory, as traditionally taught in most undergraduate curricula today, does not even match thecurrent state of music in the West. . . " (99). It is not only the practice of composed music in theEuropean strain during the twentieth century that has time and again provocatively contradictedall the rules and doctrines of established music theory--not to speak of improvised or sub-culturalmusic. We should remember the last chapters of Carl Dahlhaus's encyclopedic history of musictheory in which he unmistakably follows the constructivist turn in musicology initiated byHermann von Helmholtz (252-261). According to Helmholtz it is an error to believe thatEuropean music theory is the expression of natural laws; instead it results from esthetic principlesof historically limited validity. The use of the methods of natural science for musicology is not tolegitimate music theory but rather to show where the effect of natural laws ends to give way tohuman creativity. With this enlightening statement Helmholtz not only broke with an oldtradition of thinking but also provoked rigorous reactions of contemporaries like Hugo Riemann.Dahlhaus takes up Helmholtz's arguments to clarify the scientific status of music theory. He callsit a dogmatics and compares it to the juridical sciences, which are justified primarily by theirconsistency and applicability, not by any reference to nature (256). The dogmatics usually calledmusic theory, are a historical phenomenon restricted to the period from the 17th to the 19thcentury. So, the concept of music theory, understood as a coherent system of style principles,becomes subject to relativism and virtual pluralization into a multiplicity of possible musictheories.

In this way Dahlhaus has put the problem of music theory into the right context. Europeanmusic theory is not an imperialist theory but a theory based on an incorrect self-image, whichactually joined the drift to imperialism. It was the explicit or tacit assumption that music theoryfollows eternal laws that can be proven by natural sciences, that had for a long time grounded thebearing of Western music towards the world. The consequences of this insight can be drawn intwo directions: in the direction of history there arises the question how the suggestion of musictheory's plausibility can be explained. It will be a task for the historical cultural studies of musicto deconstruct the myth of music theory's self-evidence that evolved out of the antique traditionof Pythagorean thinking; to show how the Enlightenment resulted in a kind of creative mis-enlightening of this myth; and to explain how the factual success of European music theory inmusical practice and education has stabilized the suggestion of plausibility by conceptualizing itin analogy to the general success of technologies that are based on natural sciences. The otherdirection that has to be explored concerns the secondary effects of that suggestion. It can be askedhow the inherent contradiction of a supposed "universal dogmatics" has distorted the Europeanencounter with non-European music, as well as the encounter of non-Europeans with Europeanmusic. In this way the general imbalance of power significant for the colonial context willbecome discernible from the specific self-righteous attitude of European music being just a"fortunate" result of theoretical misbelief.

What remains is the question, of how far music can be investigated by means of thesciences of nature. The discipline of acoustics has gradually revealed a lot of hard facts thatmeanwhile have become implemented into the latest computerized sound technology. On thislevel there seem to be few secrets left to be uncovered. With the increase of electronictechnologies for the manipulation of the ear the parameter of sound has become an objectifiableentity; at the same time the processes by which sound is translated by the human brain into musichas become a concrete miracle. The human capacity for the esthetic appreciation of sounding


phenomena seems to be potentially unlimited--an observation not easily operationalized into ascientific methodology. In a similar way the apparent contingency involved in the differingmusical evolutions that happened in the world remains opaque to scientific explanation. So, the"human interface" becomes a scientific challenge for a psychology of cognition as well as for ahistory of style; since the reference of an absolute music theory is missing, a scientific approachhas to manage with an interplay of psychological and cultural variables, because every possibletest person is pre-formed by musical knowledge. Yet Helmholtz referred to a "nature of things"concerning music as a vast field of possibilities that become concrete only through theintervention of principles of style which have to be seen as historically unique inventions ofhuman creativity. They follow their own logic without ever being reducible to a law of necessaryevolution (Ibid. 254). It was Helmholtz's achievement to show the historic conditionality ofEuropean music in a way that matched equally a future perspective of global pluralism.

But, of course, the idea of a plurality of music theories is only a makeshift. The associationof musical practice with music theory is no more a universal rule than music theory itself. Thetransitory existence of more or less closed musical cultures guided by a consistent theory is ahistorical fact that can be admired but hardly be justified as superior without reference toprecisely that theory. There is no higher reason for the disqualification of a music that follows itsproper but un-verbalized esthetics without the pretension and support of theoretical dogmatics.Inversely, it could even be argued that a theoretical obligation of musical cultures might be a cul-de-sac, since it results in one-sided specialization and inhibits intercultural cross-fertilization. Thedevelopment of European music itself during the 20th century could be cited as an example forthe struggle against these limitations. So once more the idea of isolated musical cultures becomesquestionable and traceable to its historical context of a temporary symbiosis of theory andpractice in European history. Apart from this, the undisputed auxiliary function of music theoryhas granted the global diffusion of selected items extracted from the Western dogmatics that areused on a habitual basis.

So far European music theory has been identified as an ideal construction unjustifiable bythe standards of modern natural science. Now it is possible to rethink the right order of thedifferent claims for scientific validity. The physics of vibration and auditory perception clearlyrepresent the hard side of knowledge, while the writing of history must acquire its scientific valuethrough critical reflection of the social forces that might shape it. The psychology of music canalso produce scientifically valid results, but hardly in the inter-cultural range since there is noempirical method that could abstract from the cultural context. Music theory, to the contrary, hasfinally lost its historically evolved status as a hard science and approached musical esthetics in afield where scientific knowledge mingles with cultural invention. It is scientific only in atechnical sense and actually belongs to the proper world of artistic creation. As a consequence ofthis, its appropriate place must be within a virtually imaginable historical theory of musicalcreativity.

Surely, such a theory seems utopian since there is neither a discipline occupied with it norare the sources easily available that would be necessary to support such an undertaking. It crossesall the borders that dissect the world of music into creations of art and authentic traditions, intonarratives of avant-garde and myths of cultural resistance, or into a stable sphere of canonicalworks and an ever-changing sphere of ephemeral innovation called popular music. Nevertheless,in order to advance the project of Europe's de-centering, it seems extremely fruitful to imaginesuch an historical theory of musical creativity. It would suspend the established association ofcreation with a European concept of art and would be able to understand every history of musicin terms of order and change; it could offer an conceptual bypass to enclosed discourses of


identity and difference; and finally it could break up the "double bind of high culture," thatalternatively quotes values of tradition and innovation, and thereby uses a contradictory discoursespecific to European modernism as a rhetorical trick for the maintenance of cultural hierarchies.If we try to consider music as a result of theoretical as well as a practical creation within specifichistorical contexts, and the relationship of theory and practice as a mutual and ambiguous onethat differs fundamentally from the relation of natural science and technology, we might be ableto develop a conceptual framework that carries on the claim for objectivity into a historicalscience of music as culture. This will also restore the concept of music itself as non-exclusive andmake it unnecessary to elude into badly fitting terms of "sound"38 or "(sub-)culture" for anymusic not corresponding to academic Western music theory.

7. Music of the subaltern and the epistemology of uncertainty

To write a history of musical creativity--or, better, creativities--is far from being an attractive job.Apparently the issue of creativity has never been a serious topic beyond the borders of Westernart music. It is not easy to escape the tradition of mainstream thinking that divides the realm ofmusic into works that were created by composers and musical artifacts that allegedly emergedfrom an anonymous folk or an ethnic tradition of a people "without history." The idea of artisticcreation that evolved in Europe since the Renaissance is as much historically shaped, as themodern concept of ethnicity, that has accompanied the colonial search for familiar politicalstructures suitable for the implementation of indirect rule. So the discourses concerning musicwere caught up in a scheme of thinking which associated creation exclusively with Western--or atleast Westernized--artists. It is part of the paradoxical merits of "world music" to have discoveredthe existence of non-European creators and artists other than of the Westernized type. Theseemingly sudden emergence of this phenomenon reflects the previous exclusion of non-Europeans from the concept of creation, even if the label world music "artist" was introduced bythe music industry only for the end of better promotion. A consequence that can be drawn fromthis, is to transpose this new pattern of perception into the past and look for a hidden history ofcreators--a task only yet sporadically begun.

The specific kind of exclusion of the non-European musical artist within the wider colonialcontext can rather adequately be correlated to the concept of subalternity. "Subalternity is acondition of silence. . . . For this very reason, the silenced subaltern needs a representative.However, from the moment in which he submits himself to being represented by a mediator, hebecomes an object in the hands of this spokesperson to be traded in economic and power circuits.Self-definition is no longer under his control. . . . Paradoxically, the subaltern's legitimacy isconferred upon him only by his spokesperson, who then usurps his place in the publicimagination and reduces him to a generic other."39 The concept of subalternity that wasdeveloped first within the context of South Asian anti-/post-colonial thinking has been taken upuntil now only peripherally in ethnomusicological discourses. This may be due to theprofessional entanglement of ethnomusicologists themselves with the role of spokespersonswhich is a double one: not only the subaltern "can't speak" (Spivak), also their music "can'tspeak" as a medium since it needs interpretation in the language of words (Kramer). It is thestructural need for Ethnomusicologists to defend the music of the subaltern in the Westernacademia that creates their uncomfortable position as interpreters suspect of paternalism.

But scientific reason should not let itself be bullied by the legitimate critique of this relationof representation. There are good reasons to appreciate the concept of subalternity for it catches


the sociological and the epistemological aspect of this relation. For Ethnomusicology it clarifiesthat there is a silence that goes beyond the non-verbality of music. There is the structuralsilencing of a music that can't be adequately described by the concepts of a discipline that callsitself musicology. There is the silence of the subaltern musician who has learned to compensatehis inferiority in the verbal field by expressing himself through music. There is the silence of thewritten sources, which have systematically ignored subaltern culture and may reveal its tracesonly through an "inverted" reading of prohibitions and persecutions documented in writing; andthere is possibly the conspirative silence of the subaltern, which once acquired in defense,becomes permanently internalized as a habit.

The idea to let the subalterns speak for themselves seems obvious as a spontaneous reactionto this dilemma; but especially for musicians this often means to force them unhappily into thewrong medium of expression. It is music that fills the gap between his condensed experience ofsubalternity and a remote academic audience that is moved by philanthropic curiosity. So themusician who has been refused any vocabulary for defending his music in the rhetorical arena ofhegemonic culture in a literary sense "can't speak." Furthermore the subaltern subject lives afragmented existence that is alienated from the models of identity propagated by the elites. Hisexperience of time may be incongruent with the concepts of time of a narrative of history that isnot his own. The subaltern subject of a globalizing world is not the untouched child of natureaccessible through ethnographic immediacy. Confronted with the ethnographer as his hegemonicother (s)he is constantly in danger of simply reproducing the pattern of subordination andspeechlessness.

On the other hand a historical approach has to abandon all naivety concerning thecredibility of its sources. It must develop some fantasia in order to imagine in what wayssubaltern reality might have left traces on the surface of documented history, and must formulateconcrete hypotheses about the perceptions and intentions of the respective authors. The historianwill encounter situations where a single testimony contradicts profoundly the bulk of writtenreferences--and might be right. The difficulties met by a historiography of subaltern cultureresemble in many ways the problems that were stirred up by feminist historians. Feministhistoriography can be seen in a pioneering role for the methodological maneuver of uncoveringsilenced history. It has the slight advantage that the statistical symmetry of sexes empiricallycontradicts their unbalanced representation in such an evident way that it proves that there issomething to be uncovered. In contrast the writing of the history of subaltern culture haspermanently to ward off the constraint to justify the existence of its object of study, and has toovercome a skepticism that argues it might invent problems that do not exist. For the academicmainstream in the field of history the need for research into subaltern culture seems to be still farfrom obvious. It is only in a "specialized" domain like the study of European folk culture of earlymodern times, where similar problems arise. In this context Peter Burke has, already in theSeventies, articulated important reflections on the methodological problems of research into these"dark clouds" of historical matter.40

I have encountered these problems during a recent study (2010) on the dynamics of urbanculture of the period around 1900. As one example I had chosen New Orleans as the allegedbirthplace of early jazz, not being aware at fisrst of the methodological delicacy of this issue.There is a vast literature on the topic, which gives the superficial impression of completeness.But, fortunately, there is also a new generation currently working to rewrite jazz historyaccording to contemporary standards in postcolonial studies, the study of Afro-modernity, andcritical approaches in history. It is an enlightening experience to study the difference between theold and the new "school" in its contrast of position, method and genre. The stock of older


literature, which was written against the massive background of conservative anti-jazz polemics,had the tendency to follow a model of holistic narration that was by the time gradually dressed upwith elements of oral history. Its authors identied with a role that was described by Carvalho asspokespersons in representation of the silenced subaltern; mostly they became conscious of thisdilemma and began to evoke the unmediated voice of the "other"--a pattern typical for theattitude of Western intellectuals on behalf the colonial "other" that has been criticized in detail byGayatri Spivak (2008). The "new school" of writing in jazz history that is spearheaded in the caseof New Orleans by the work of Charles Hersch (2007), has given up this tutelizing stance and isconcerned with the reconstruction of concrete historical contexts. It is based on the criticaldeconstruction of racialized discourses on music put forward by Ronald Radano, Guthrie P.Ramsey and others, and uses a constructivistically reflected terminology. It is sensitive tophenomena of double meaning and to the semiotic complexities induced by colonial and racialpower structures.

On the whole there is an undeniable progress to be acknowledged concerning theindependence from distorting biases that established colonial exclusion of the silenced subalternor, to the contrary, in a well-intended mis-inclusion, which resulted in a properly canonical jazzhistory written by sympathetic representatives. In all it can only be welcomed that an old "culturewar" that had accompanied jazz from its beginning has become negotiable and given way to amore realistic picture of history and its dialectics. Apart from this, several errors of historicaldetail could be corrected against the "power of repetition" of a largely incestuous literature ofjazz enthusiasts. But this scientific upgrade is, from a strictly epistemological point of view, notwithout ambiguity. For an scholar not himself deeply involved in the matter it may seem dubiousto see well established lines of traditions disappear into oblivion, while others suddenly appear onthe scene that apparently escaped the attention of all observers who have left written traces. It ishard to imagine the amount of silencing to which subaltern music was subjected without slightfeelings of paranoia. The narrow frame of perception that was set by white jazz enthusiasts forwhat they thought relevant to be presented to the general American public as authentic Afro-American art apparently was paired with an empirical blindness for all the seemingly peripheralmusics that today would be highly appreciated as missing links of a history of African-Americanmusic.41 Also we shouldn't forget that in the context of the US-American South the evolution ofjazz was historically paralleled by a racist backlash that echoed the humiliation of the AmericanCivil War. This created a climate certainly not favorable for a balanced perception of blacksubaltern culture. There was hardly a social standpoint thinkable that allowed it to picture jazz ina positive way without a distancing from some sort of "inferior" culture that could put blacks in abad light. So the epistemology of African-American music has been--and still is--also a politicalone shaped by the dialectics of post-emancipation history.

The recent flourishing of Afro-centric counter-discourses suspecting undreamed resourcesof black tradition and creativity that were silenced by white historiography is not without reason.But the legitimate enthusiasm for the discovering of suppressed cultural expressions sometimesraises the question of how a line of demarcation towards "invention of tradition" can be definedon one side, and fictional literature on the other. Of course, in the United States this is also apolitical question. Furthermore there is no reason to disqualify a fictional literature, which isassociated with many outstanding examples for the pioneering transgression of ruling regimes ofsocial perception.42 However, it seems not unproblematic to mingle an approach that tries torestore musicology's claim for objectivity by means of correct historical contextualizations withpurposeful counter-narratives that don't feel obliged to define their position towards speculation.

The idea of subaltern history as a history of the silenced subaltern seems to be an attractive


method for the countering of neo-colonial hegemony in the field of written knowledge. But thisnot only politicizes epistemology in a potentially unnecessary way. It also complicates theepistemological setup since the category of subalternity itself can easily slip away under thepressure of a silencing regime. In a recent study on the macro-sociology of jazz in the twentiesAnnette Kulp has worked with the conceptual framework of subalternity. She uses the conceptsof subaltern versus dominant culture to describe the process of re-valuation that jazz musicunderwent during the twenties. She convincingly shows how jazz as a means of black self-assertion met with certain changing cultural desires within American society to provoke thecrossover of this music into mainstream mass culture. Nevertheless one could argue that herrestricted frame of time implicitly devalues the concept of subalternity. The kind of jazz thatsucceeded getting broader recognition was no longer silenced, but now competing in the field ofAmerican culture and has become a well-documented part of jazz history. Probably we have toassume different degrees of invisibility that are shifting through time and space. The silence of amusic that is habitually zapped away in the radio by a majority of "decent citizens" is not thesame as the silence of a music that sounds open in the streets but is never recorded or evenofficially registered, and is not the same as the silence of a music that flourishes in clandestinecircles and avoids any confrontation with dominant culture. Furthermore the question arises howjazz could actually fall back into subalternity after ragtime as its historic forerunner had acquireda certain respectability. Perhaps we should better consider a general duality of a socially visibleand a silenced part of African-American music, which makes this appear to us only throughrestricted epistemological "windows" depending on the social and historical standpoint.Apparently, there remains a need to adjust the operationalization of the concept of subalternculture with respect to the vector of historical time.

So why should ethnomusicology adopt the approach of subaltern history if it offers onlyuncertain knowledge and hardly fixable concepts? Doesn't it lead back to the speculativeimponderables of comparative musicology and away from the empirical reliability ofethnography and musical analysis? We have to abandon the positivistic idea of objectiveknowledge that is usually attributed to the natural sciences--in ignorance of the fact that even inthose fields this idea has become questionable under the influence of science studies postulatingthat all knowledge is more or less socially and culturally shaped. But this doesn't mean that thereis no valid knowledge possible. For a historically oriented cultural science it means to return tothe critical attitude that once had inspired Friedrich Engels to look beyond the pretty facades ofthe boulevards of Manchester to discover hidden behind them the miserable huts of the workingclass. The truth of such a science can't be measured from the accuracy of single results or fromthe completeness of the representations of knowledge it produces. It can't be blamed fordiscovering contradictions if these are contradictions of history. In order to see what Engels sawit is sufficient to be a realist. Scientific responsibility demands an inquiry into where and whydominant narratives become false in a wider sense and to question any discoursive exclusion. Wecan't evade the "task of measuring silences," as Gayatri Spivak has put it (286, quoting PierreMacherey), if cultural science shall serve the goals of enlightenment but not of culturalhegemony, even if the data brought to light by such an enterprise may appear formally "weak" incomparison to the results of naive empirism.

So the category of subalternity must be integrated theoretically into our understanding ofculture and history simply for reasons of scientific veracity. The discovering of subalternhistories might be born out of a political impulse within a colonial or neo-colonial context; buttheir scientific relevance lies in their role as a necessary complement to a history that, stripped ofall national biases, wants to understand the interconnectedness of a globalized world. The


political counter-discourses of subaltern (mis-)representation and identity are the midwives of acorrection of scientific horizons. A history of music that is not only conscious of global streamsof information and commodities but also of mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion, ofvoluntary ignorance and defensive camouflage working on a global range is not engaged forparticular interests but for historical justice. Against a consumerist cult of oblivion that followsthe spirit of neo-liberal globalization as well as against a self-righteous refusal of a cosmopolitanconsciousness I plea for a understanding of music that is not only historically informed but ableto restore the meaning and value of music that is grounded in its historical circumstances and inits complex relationship within the antagonistic history of European domination. This includesthe project of writing an inverted duplicate of the history of Western music: written from theperipheral angle of view it describes Western music as experienced within the frame of theimperialist expansion of Western modernity. This will not only further the self-understanding of aEuropean music in latent crisis of identity; it can also restore the artistic dignity of so-calledworld-music by giving it back its unwritten history.

Notes

1 For the plural in musics in contrast to die Musik see Bohlman 25-26.2 My somehow impressionistic diagnosis is not only based on personal observation, but follows StevenFeld's diagnosis of increasing "sonic virtuality" (159-160) and tries to estimate the possible consequencesof a phenomenon labeled "postmusics" by Jody Berland (2008) for the reception of potential "worldmusic." It is aimed here as a counterweight to the prevailing discourses on music and place, and theprevailing criticism of the globalization of music in terms of economics, power, culture imperialism andexoticism, and certainly needs further elaboration.3 If the concept of authenticity is today generally considered as problematic (see Stauth), this also reflectschanged patterns of cultural consumptions associated with post-modernity. Here it is used as metaphor forthe particular attitude of postcolonial music in contrast to its commercial-minded imitations. For adiscussion of different views on "authenticity" in music see Schippers 41-60.4 To a certain extent his may be seen simply as a result of commodification. My argument is that in thedigital realm due to the lack of material packing, the easy handling of big amounts of data, and theexistence of freely accessible repertoires the de-contextualization of music has taken a step further. Thecorresponding consumer attitude might be called "post-exotism."5 Corresponding to a practice of "historically informed performance"; see Baker 442.6 I am polarizing here a differentiation elaborated in detail by Cooper in order to distance myself from thenormative implications. See also Friedman.7 Feld claims, that the term was introduced by academics as early as the 1960s (190).8 I am including here arguments of a more recent critique of world music by Taylor, and Krims 94-103.9 See the corresponding contributions in Ziff et al., Palumbo-Luo et al., Featherstone et al. (1999).10 On pre-Internet strategies of flexible specialization see Shapiro et al.11 In so far as comparative musicology/ethnomusicology is occupied with recorded music, it can also beseen as responsible for mediating the historical understanding accessible through these sources, and forpropagating the cultural values inherent in the recorded history of musics.12 This task has already been taken up; see Radano et al., Born et al., Scott, Taylor.13 In the Americas the term "decolonial" is preferred and refers there to a deeper historical range.14 Wendl et al. (2006) give a rich documentation of artistic movements but this is unfortunately not relatedto postcolonial discourses from the Anglophonic world.15 "Tropicalismo was to incorporate two contradictory attitudes: one, our approval of the version of theWestern enterprise offered by American pop and mass culture, including our recognition, that even the


most naïve attraction to that version is a healthy impulse; and, two, our rejection of capitulation to thenarrow interests of dominant groups, whether at home or internationally. It was also the attempt to face upto the apparent coincidence, in this tropical country, of a countercultural wave emerging at the same timeas the vogue in authoritarian regimes." (Veloso 7).16 During the 1960s Rolling Stone magazine covered various styles that later would be labeled worldmusic, but it changed its policy some years later to become a straight rock/pop magazine.17 See the contributions of Biddle and Knights, and John O'Flynn in Biddle et al.18 Edward Said's Orientalism had a deep impact on the de-essentializing of concepts of culture, race,religion etc. and prepared the shift to a kind of a dynamic "border thinking" within world-historicalapproaches (Samman 279-281).19 Agawu 124. The power of linguistically fixed categories was demonstrated exemplarily by DavidBrackett with respect to African-American popular music.20 "[T]he musics involved in a widely-defined black Atlantic history and the disenchanted political culturethat accompanies it; can be appreciated in a variety of ways: not just for their creativity, emotional forceand artistic and technical innovations but politically and philosophically. Above all , they can be valuatedfor their conspicuous power with which they have repeatedly articulated the possibility of better worldsagainst the existing miseries, raciological terrors and routine wrongs of capitalist exploitation." (Gilroy2003: 59)21 See publications by Nicholas M. Evans, W.T. Lhamon Jr., Ingrid Monson, Ronald Radano, Bruce BoydRaeburn, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., John Szwed, Alexander G. Weheliye and others.22 see also Scherzinger, Kidula.23 In Germany the first programmatic suggestions were made by Martin Greve (1998: 226-229).24 This is the subject of project in preparation.25 In Great Britain the history of early ethnomusicological discourses was somewhat different (see Zon).26 Recently ethnomusicology's preoccupation with the "social context" was criticized by MartinScherzinger in favor of a higher consideration of a formal analysis of music (10-20).27 Appreciation of cultural diversity as a goal of a multicultural education through music was theoreticallyelaborated by Schippers (15-40).28 An overview of approaches to diasporic musics was given by Slobin.29 Featherstone et al. (1995), Bonacker et al., Conrad et al. (2007).30 An outstanding--albeit controversial--attempt was undertaken by Peter van der Merve yet in 1989 totrace the Afro-European origins of the musical material fusing into twentieth-century popular music in itsfull historical depth.31 In Cuba this approach was followed also by the "novelas testimonio" of Miguel Barnet. In the context ofSouth Asian subaltern studies it was even suggested that the historian should turn into a 'creative writer'(Chaudhuri).32(1976); it was re-issued in 1992 under the title "The Birth of African-American Culture--AnAnthropological Perspective."33 For a discussion of that critique see Price.34 For Latin America compare Carpentier (1980): 95-104.35 Historically there are plenty of uses of the term that apparently do not refer to the contemporaryunderstanding. It is hard to distinguish whether these are based on appropriation, misunderstanding,parody, or simply an unspecified or ignorant use of the name rumba.36 This idea was put forward tentatively by Christopher Height (2003).37 The issue of a "cultural turn" for music psychology is discussed in Allesch and Krakauer.38 In the media and in the art world "sound" is--at least in Germany--often (mis-)used for designatingpostcolonial music, in order to avoid confrontation with the hegemonic academic concept of "Music."39 José Jorge de Carvalho, "O olhar etnográfico e a voc subalterna," Série Antropologia 167: 1-30, quotedin Lima and Anya 84.


40 Burke treats these problems within the context of restricted literacy and discusses methods for thehistorian to draw indirect conclusions from his sources.41 It is hard to explain why New Orleans' Black Indians were never mentioned in literature on Afro-American music, even though they claim their origins from the 19th century; see Kroier (2010) 27.42 In the past it was typically fictional writers coming from a remote social background who were the onlyones to describe phenomena of subaltern culture that were systematically overlooked by local authors.Furthermore literary studies had, due to their openness concerning content, temporarily acquired apioneering role for the study of African-American culture in the USA.

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Music, Global History, And Postcoloniality