Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Eastman Studies in Music)

Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles on Music in Nineteenth-Century England and on World Music

Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies Edited by Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann The Gamelan Digul and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It: An Australian Link with the Indonesian Revolution (includes CD) Margaret J. Kartomi “The Music of American Folk Song” and Selected Other Writings on American Folk Music Ruth Crawford Seeger, edited by Larry Polansky and Judith Tick Musical Creativity in TwentiethCentury China: Abing, His Music, and Its Changing Meanings (includes CD) Jonathan P. J. Stock Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair Annegret Fauser

The Musical Madhouse (Les Grotesques de la musique) Hector Berlioz Translated and edited by Alastair Bruce Introduction by Hugh Macdonald Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy Jeremy Day-O’Connell Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music Edited by Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras Scott Messing Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 2: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Scott Messing “Wanderjahre of a Revolutionist” and Other Essays on American Music Arthur Farwell, edited by Thomas Stoner

A complete list of titles in the Eastman studies in Music Series, in order of publication, may be found at the end of this book.

Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain BENNETT ZON

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Bennett Zon All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2007 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978–1–58046–259–4 ISBN-10: 1–58046–259–6 ISSN: 1071–9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zon, Bennett. Representing non-Western music in nineteenth-century Britain / Bennett Zon. p. cm. — (Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071-9989 ; v. 48) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-259-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58046-259-6 1. Ethnomusicology—Great Britain—History. 2. Music and anthropology. I. Title. ML3798.Z66 2007 781.6⬘9094109034—dc22 2007017498 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

For Clare, Challoner, and Gabriel

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments Introduction: Humanizing the Musical Savage: Orientalism and Racism in the History of British Ethnomusicology

xvii 1

Part 1: Early Anthropological Influences 1 Cultural Anthropology from the Late Eighteenth Century to the 1850s

17

2 The Interplay of Anthropology and Music: Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature

25

3 Music in the Literature of Anthropology from the 1780s to the 1860s

48

Part 2: Musicology in Transition to Evolution 4 Cultural Anthropology after Darwin

71

5 From Travel Literature to Academic Writing: Anthropology in the Musical Press from the 1830s to the 1930s

78

6 Non-Western Music in General Music Histories: Progression toward Evolution

95

7 Histories of National Music (1): Henry Chorley and the Anthropological Background

114

8 Histories of National Music (2): Carl Engel and the Influence of Tylor

129

9 Overcoming Spencer: Late-Century Theories of the Origin of Music

145

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Part 3: Individualism and the Influence of Evolution: Charles Samuel Myers and the Role of Psychology Charles Samuel Myers and the General Movement toward Individualism

159

11

From Individualism to Individual Differences

177

12

The Psychological Writings and the Place of Evolution and Individual Differences

196

Myers’s Ethnomusicological Writings

218

10

13

Part 4: Retaining Cultural Identity: A. H. Fox Strangways and the Problems of Transcription 14

Transcription and the Problems of Translating Musical Culture

249

15

A. H. Fox Strangways and Attitudes Toward Song Translation

261

16

Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan

277

Epilogue: The “Ethnomusicology” in Long Nineteenth-Century Representations of Non-Western Music

291

Works Cited

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Index

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Illustrations Figures 2.1 Javanese musical instruments 2.2 The ’Ood 2.3 The Rabáb esh-Shá’er 2.4 Girl playing on the nose-flute 2.5 Drums and musical instruments 3.1 Burman musical instruments [the indoor band] 6.1 Stafford’s developmental projection 6.2 Stafford and Hogarth compared 6.3 Rowbotham’s musical dualism 6.4 The three stages of instruments 6.5 The three stages of instruments, with their ethnological correspondence 8.1 Correlation between degrees of civilization and instrumental and vocal development in Engel, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864) 12.1 Myers’s evolutionary binarisms 12.2 Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for psychology 12.3 Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for industry 12.4 Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for human improvability 12.5 Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for hearing 12.6 Evolution of differentiation in synesthesia 13.1 The lineage of Group B songs, from Group A, with implications for Group C. Myers, “Music,” in Seligmann and Seligmann, The Veddas (1911) Musical Examples 2.1 Song from Tonga-Tabboo, New Zealand, from Forster, A Voyage Round the World (1777) 2.2 Song from Tolega Bay, New Zealand, from Forster, A Voyage Round the World (1777)

32 39 40 45 46 60 100 102 105 106 106

132 200 201 202 204 208 211

244

26 27

x ❧ list of illustrations

3.1

3.2

3.3

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5

13.6 13.7

14.1

15.1 15.2 16.1 16.2

“An Old Indian Air” from Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (1784, enlarged 1792), in Tagore, Hindu Music (1882/1994) Siamese air. “Music,” in “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1837) Burman air. “Music,” in “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1837) Malu song 1. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1912) Keber song 1. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1912) Secular song 5. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1912) Sarawak Malay Tawak beat divisions. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” British Journal of Psychology (1905) Sarawak Malay Tawak beat divisions, in European Notation. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” British Journal of Psychology (1905) Song “No. 2. Dú-mo—A Girl’s Song,” from Myers, “Music,” in Routledge and Routledge, With a Prehistoric People (1910) Song “No. 3. Mu-goí-i-o—A Warrior’s Song,” from Myers, “Music,” in Routledge and Routledge, With a Prehistoric People (1910) Jones’s “An Old Indian Air,” in Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891/1996) Schubert original. Fox Strangways, “Song-Translation,” Music and Letters (1921) Schubert translation. Fox Strangways, “Song-Translation,” Music and Letters (1921) Madras melody. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan (1914) Raipur flute melody. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan (1914)

54

62

63 229 230 231 234

234 240

241

258 267 268 281 281

Preface This book first came to mind from a session with ethnomusicologists Gerry Farrell and Martin Clayton at the eleventh International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, held at Royal Holloway University of London in July 2000, titled “Ethnomusicology in the Nineteenth Century.” Papers included “Charles Samuel Myers: A Forgotten Pioneer of Ethnomusicology” (Clayton), “Colonialism and Music Education in Nineteenth-Century India: The Case of S. W. Fallon” (Farrell), and my own “Savage Time/Civilized Time: Progress in Early British Ethnomusicology.” Also in the audience was the ethnomusicologist Henry Stobart, who was an active participant in post-paper discussions. Apart from the sheer delight of hearing reproductions of Myers’s 1898 recordings from the Torres Strait (the earliest British recordings of non-Western music), and Farrell’s humane interpretation of Fallon’s career as a schools inspector in India, what struck me most about that session was the fact that there was such disagreement about the use of the term “ethnomusicology.” Despite being titled “Ethnomusicology in the Nineteenth Century,” the session ended on a critical note of concern to preserve the integrity of the term in its modern usage. That usage was, of course, highly debated by the likes of Clayton, Farrell, myself, and Stobart, and in a sense gave rise to this current project. It was in my attempt to situate the figures discussed in that session within ethnomusicology that this book was born. In doing so, I was drawn ineluctably toward the intellectual and musical literature that had so clearly influenced them, and from there backward in time to the even earlier periods of the later part of the eighteenth century, when the study of non-Western music was in its infancy both in the UK and elsewhere. From that chronological starting point, my research began to take shape, and evolved into the full-scale examination represented here. Since the conference, Martin Clayton and I have continued to discuss nineteenth-century British ethnomusicology, and have more recently collaborated on a set of commissioned essays entitled Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780–1940 (2007). That volume, like this one, explores ethnomusicology within the history of intellectual and musical culture, and attempts, if only implicitly, to broaden our definition of ethnomusicology. Of course, in some ways the terminology—though essential— is the least important and least telling aspect of this kind of research. It is the

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figures that are important, the people and the ideas that influenced them, and the ways in which the intellectual climate informed their work and through it the work of future scholars. Only by understanding these things can we come to a greater understanding of ethnomusicology today, and the interpretation it gives to its own representation of non-Western music in nineteenth-century Britain.

The Purpose and Structure of the Book In Propaganda and Empire (1984), J. M. MacKenzie speaks of British culture as driven by “an ideological cluster,” including militarism, monarchism, heroworship, racialism, and social Darwinism: “Together these constituted a new type of patriotism which derived special significance from Britain’s unique imperial mission.”1 That same cluster, as Jeffrey Richards points out, “informs the music of Empire just as much as it did other cultural forms.”2 When Richards speaks of “music of Empire,” however, he actually means Western-style music, originating in British culture and performed in the UK or its imperial holdings, as, for example, concert-hall music written by British composers or popular music performed in music halls, theaters and outdoor events. These types of music are dealt with in his Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (2001); Nalini Gwynne’s “India in the English musical imagination, 1890–1940 (Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Amy Woodforde-Finden)” (2003); Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton’s Europe, Empire and Spectacle (2006); and Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon’s Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780–1940 (2007). More broadly these studies also involve issues of exoticism and Orientalism in musical style, and have been discussed at length in Ralph Locke, “Exoticism” (accessed January 2005), and Ralph Locke, “Orientalism” (accessed January 2005); Derek Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style” (1998); Ralph Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila” (1991) and “Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater” (1993–94); Jonathan Bellman, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (1993) and Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (1998); and Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (2000). Where these works look closely at Western musical styles influenced by nonWestern musical cultures, they tend, however, to look less closely at the nonWestern music itself. Indeed, because their emphasis is generally on Western music, the ways in which composers, or the musical populace, perceived non-Western music are sometimes taken for granted. Representing Non-Western Music in NineteenthCentury Britain is intended to fill this lacuna, by situating the representation of

1. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 2. 2. Richards, Imperialism and Music, 16.

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non-Western music within the expansive intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain. It does this by tracing the influence of important anthropological theories on the perception of non-Western music in the wider framework of academic anthropology, travel literature, musicology, psychology, and practical theories of musical transcription. In this context it tries to emulate the type of fieldwork Philip Bohlman applies to ethnomusicology, namely, the idea that “various ways of remembering the past produce many different histories. . . . In entering the past from the present, ethnomusicology must reckon with a wide range of differences, but it must also welcome that range to some degree. Fieldwork, particularly if we do not force it to become a set of methods, opens up modalities of interpretation that allow ethnomusicology to recognize these differences.”3 This book is divided into four main parts, each containing a brief introductory chapter and several more detailed explorations of related topics. An introduction provides a historical and conceptual overview of the book, and an epilogue, some thoughts on the term “ethnomusicology” and its relevance for this book and future studies. Part 1 of the book takes the reader through early anthropological influences from the 1780s to the 1860s, introducing a wide range of principal theories, among them noble simplicity, monogenism and polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, and developmentalism, and investigating their relationship to travel literature and academic anthropological writing. Part 2 looks at later anthropological thought with specific reference to the rise of evolutionism and its effect on musicological discourse. An overview of non-Western music in the musical press provides general background, and subsequent chapters look more particularly at the progression toward evolutionism in the two genres of general music history and the history of national music. The latter is divided into two, between the music critic Henry Chorley and musicologist and organologist Carl Engel. As a set they encapsulate development from earlier anthropological ideas (Chorley) to more advanced evolutionary thinking (Engel). The section ends with a look at the stronghold of Spencerian theories of the origin of music, and the effect it had on developing notions of individualism and universalism. Part 3 takes the reader into the realm of psychology and the formative work of Charles Samuel Myers, arguably, Britain’s first modern ethnomusicologist. Myers, also an eminent psychologist, was the first Briton to record non-Western music in the field, and developed a theory of “individual differences” that would consistently inform his ethnomusicological writing. This section opens with a brief biography of Myers, and then background on his anthropological and musicological influences. A further chapter provides background on theories of individual differences, and outlines Myers’s relation to them. These lead on to studies of Myers’s psychological and ethnomusicological work, and the influence of

3. Bohlman, “Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past,” 147.

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individual differences and evolutionism. Part 4 examines the practical application of individualism in the area of transcription, discussing its role as a form of cultural inscription in the writings of the ethnomusicologist A. H. Fox Strangways. Like Myers, Fox Strangways was deeply concerned for the individuality represented in the music of foreign cultures, and sought to retain that individuality in his transcriptions. In “foreignizing,” rather than “domesticating,” his transcriptions—by highlighting foreign elements rather than adapting them to Western musical style—he also drew upon contemporary theories of translation. It is the relationship of these theories to his transcriptions that occupy much of this section, covering Fox Strangways’s relation to translation and its effect on his magnum opus, The Music of Hindostan (1914).

Some Limitations (1) Issues of Nomenclature: The Terms “Ethnomusicology,” “Comparative Musicology,” “Musicology,” and “Anthropology” “Ethnomusicology” is a problematical term, and as the epilogue of this book makes clear, there is no general agreement on its use and, arguably, even less agreement on the use of its predecessor, “comparative musicology.” In the interest of simplicity and consistency, I have therefore chosen to speak generally of historical writers on non-Western music as either figures in the history of ethnomusicology or as ethnomusicologists, leaving the complexities of comparative musicology to fuller discussion in the epilogue. More specifically, although the term “ethnomusicology” derives from Jaap Kunst’s Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethnomusicology, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities (1950), for the purposes of this book it is used in relation to turn-of-the-century work of Charles Samuel Myers, A. H. Fox Strangways, and writers following in their particular methodologies. Myers and Fox Strangways, it is argued, are, plausibly, the first figures in the history of British ethnomusicology to conform to Kunstian definitions of the field. The term “musicology” is possibly less problematical. It was clearly in circulation in England at the turn of the century, as evident in Maurice S. Logan’s Musicology: A Textbook for Schools and for General Use (1909), and was used at that time to indicate the study of music in the broadest possible sense. It appears in Guido Adler’s Methode der Musikgeschichte (1919), which was itself a slight recasting of a paper printed in the first issue of Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1885). In this book I use it in the same way as I did in Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (2000), to connote any writing about some aspect of music, so it could include the writings of a critic, analyst, or philosopher. In the main I focus on musicology in the nineteenth century, but earlier figures, like the musical encyclopedists Charles Burney and John Hawkins, could also fall under that umbrella definition. What distinguishes “musicology” from

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“ethnomusicology,” even if musicology is concerned with representations of non-Western music, is the emphasis on deriving information from a combination of work in the field (as with Myers and Fox Strangways) and a clearly articulated methodology to support this. Thus, Carl Engel could not be considered an ethnomusicologist, as there seems to be no evidence—despite his seminal methodological instructions in the anthropological handbook Notes and Queries (1874)—that he, himself, engaged in fieldwork. My use of the term “anthropology” is similar to my use of the word “musicology,” in the timespan it covers and in its broad conceptual application. A survey of histories of anthropology from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveals wideranging inconsistencies in the use of the term “anthropology.” George Stocking, for example, refers to the eminent nineteenth-century thinker James Prichard as an “ethnologist,”4 but Annemarie de Waal Malefijt discusses him specifically as an anthropologist under the heading of “Anthropology and the Concept of Race.”5 T. K. Penniman, Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Head of the Department of Ethnology and Prehistory at Oxford from 1939 to 1963, describes anthropology as an all-embracing term of reference equally applicable to all historical studies of man, yet sees anthropology coalescing in the period from the 1830s.6 More recently, John Monaghan and Peter Just dispute the existence of anthropology before the nineteenth century, claiming that the first anthropologists appeared only from the middle to later part of that century. For Monaghan and Just “Anthropology grew out of the intersection of European discovery, colonialism, and natural science.”7 For the purposes of this book, I have generally used the word “anthropology” in its widest possible meaning, although where relevant more detailed examination of the terminological differences between it and branches of anthropology, such as “ethnology” or “ethnography,” is provided.

(2) Indigenous Folk Music Because the subject of this book is non-Western music, indigenous British folk music has been touched upon only where relevant to issues concerning non-Western music and its context. British folk music, and its link to ethnomusicology, has been studied extensively, to the point of eclipsing research on the history of British ethnomusicology that concerns the study of non-Western music. This is typified in the unequal weighting of research given to indigenous folk music and non-Western music in Helen Myers’s important study of Great Britain in Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (1993),8 and more recently in the

4. 5. 6. 7.

Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 48. Malefijt, Images of Man. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology, 49. Monaghan and Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology, 1.

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relative proportioning of British folk music studies and British historical studies of non-Western music in Grove Music Online.9

(3) Non-Western Scholars of non-Western Music This book does not look at the work in the history of ethnomusicology that was carried out by scholars native to non-Western countries and its influence within an Anglo-American and Anglo-European context, but figures such as Bhavánráv A. Pingle, Krishnaji Ballal Deval, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Lakshmidas Aditram Vyas, and Sourindro Mohun Tagore, require much more attention of the kind initiated by Gerry Farrell in his seminal Indian Music and the West (1997). When, for example, in 1993 Charles Capwell describes Tagore as a figure marginalized by the Western (and implicitly British) musicological community, he may as well be describing numerous other worthy and important contributors to the intellectual history of ethnomusicology in the British Empire.10

(4) Continental Influences Discussion of Continental influences is included in more concentrated depth where such influences are relevant, as in the case of Rousseauian thought in chapter 2; Myers’s relationship to Continental and American ethnomusicology in chapter 10; or Fox Strangways’s relationship to some of Walther Benjamin’s ideas on translation in chapter 15. Elsewhere non-British influences are dealt with on an ongoing basis as necessary.

(5) Biographies Generally, biographical information is provided in proportion to the amount of text devoted to the individual within this book. Hence, Myers and Fox Strangways are given separate extended biographies, whereas figures like Willard and Day are provided with shorter footnoted biographical précis. In instances where biographical information is considered less essential for the purposes of analyzing a particular work, biographical information is provided, but supplemented by more generous contextual information, as is the case with William Jones.

8. Helen Myers, “Great Britain,” 129–48. 9. See Helen Myers, “Ethnomusicology” / “Britain” (II/2/iv), in relation to Ian Russell, “England” / “Traditional Music” (II/1–6). 10. See Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta,” 228–43.

Acknowledgments There are many people who have been a great help in the preparation of this book. First and foremost is my wife Clare, who has been a constant source of encouragement and support. I would also like to thank Ralph Locke, Suzanne Guiod, and the University of Rochester Press team for their invaluable expertise and enthusiasm, as well as library staff at SOAS, London University; Wendy Brown at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; Alison Ohta of the Royal Asiatic Society; and Paul Sullivan, university photographer at Durham University, for their help with photographic reproductions. I also acknowledge with thanks the staff at the Wellcome Library for their assistance with bibliographic material. I am grateful to have benefited from a wide array of expertise from the following people: Joep Bor, Philip Bohlman, Geoff Bunn, Alan Costall, Martin Clayton, Simon Coleman, Mike Franklin, James Good, Anita Herle, Howard Irving, Greg Kucich, Yopie Prins, Graham Richards, Derek Scott, Sally Shuttleworth, Henry Stobart, George Stocking, Elizabeth Valentine, Godfrey Waller, and Lawrence Venuti. My thanks are also due to Mrs. Joan Rumens, daughter of Charles S. Myers, who graciously offered her assistance to me during my research. Permission was kindly granted to reproduce material from the following publications: Bennett Zon, “From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’ to ‘Curiously Misinterpreted’: William Jones’s ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos’ (1792) and its Reception in Later Treatises on Indian Music,” in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Mike Franklin (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 197–219; Bennett Zon, “From ‘Incompresensibility’ to ‘Meaning’: Transcription and Representation of Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology and Ethnomusicology,” in Europe, Empire and Spectacle in NineteenthCentury British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot, UK: Asghate, 2006), 185–99; and Bennett Zon, “Disorienting Race: Humanizing the Musical Savage and the Rise of British Ethnomusicology,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 3/1 (June 2006): 25–43. I am also grateful to Pradeep Mittal at Low Price Publications, Delhi, for permission to quote extracts from, Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Hindu Music (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1882/1994). The cover image is courtesy of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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Finally, I am indebted to Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) for their partial funding of this project through the award of a Research Leave Scheme grant, and to the Institute of Advanced Study, the School of Music, and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Committee at Durham University, for their continued financial support of my work.

Introduction

Humanizing the Musical Savage Orientalism and Racism in the History of British Ethnomusicology At its territorial peak, just after the end of World War I, the British Empire consisted of “naval stations and military bases extending from Gibraltar to Hong Kong, the four great dominions of settlement [Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa], the Indian empire that occupied an entire subcontinent, the crown colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and the League of Nations Mandates, especially in the Middle East.”1 This included “self-governing colonies with predominantly white populations, Crown Colonies and Protectorates with non-European subjects, and the British Raj in India as an Empire in its own right.”2 Inevitably, as British expansion increased, as a seemingly ineluctable force, into remote areas of the world, the impact of its foreign acquisitions would impact on the way it saw itself and the way it saw others. David Cannadine argues that “as with all such transoceanic realms, the British Empire was not only a geopolitical entity: it was also a culturally created and imaginatively constructed artifact.”3 Edward Said argues the point more broadly: “So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future.”4 Part of this intertwining is bound up, inevitably, with what John MacKenzie refers to as the “debate about the relationship between metropolitan cultures and empire,” in other words issues concerning the influence that imperial

1. 2. 3. 4.

Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 3. See also Morris, Pax Britannica. Louis, “Foreword,” viii. Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 3. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 72.

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introduction

holdings had on high literary and artistic culture as it filtered down to more British popular entertainments.5 Within this he refers to art, music, theater, dance, and literature (both popular and academic), showing how “they both reflected and sometimes actively shaped the instruments”6 of domestic inheritances of empire. From the standpoint of music, as the work of Jeffrey Richards, among many others, shows, this could not be more certain: “In view of the ubiquity of imperialism in fiction, painting, poetry and theatre, it would seem intrinsically likely that it has left its traces in music.”7 Of course, as has already been suggested in the preface, the type of music with which Jeffrey Richards, and MacKenzie for that matter, are principally concerned is Western music, in which there are flavors of non-Western musical cultures. The same could also be said of Said’s famous treatment of Verdi’s Aida in Culture and Imperialism. As Ralph Locke’s penetrating analysis of Said’s interpretation of Aida shows, the relationship of empire, music, and culture operates within “multiple agendas” that must go beyond more limited readings of iconic compositions in the study of imperialism, exoticism or Orientalism in Western music.8 To understand the multiple agendas one must look at the cultural horizon of the time, the political and social hierarchies, the aesthetics, and the prevailing philosophical outlooks, and to understand these one must look at the way in which empire impacted on interpretations of cultural and national identity. As regards Britain, Peter Marshall writes that “Empire enforced a hierarchical view of the world, in which the British occupied a pre-eminent place among the colonial powers, while those subject to colonial rule were ranged below them, in varying degrees of supposed inferiority.”9 Empire also created a literature entirely consistent with this mindset, a literature based largely on the racial inferiority of non-Western (European) peoples, but one equally well adapted to denigrate all peoples, domestic or foreign, perceived to be lower placed in the sliding scale of geographical or social ranking. Brian Niro calls this literature, particularly in its earliest forms in the period of the Enlightenment, a “fabrication of race.”10 It is in understanding this kind of empire, in its fabrication of race and its broader implications for Orientalism, that we can begin to understand how these features of ideological concern were woven into the music of that time, and more specifically into the representation of non-Western music in nineteenth-century Britain. In this book, racism and Orientalism are not dealt with specifically as overarching discourses but, because of their significance within contemporary

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

MacKenzie, “Empire and Metropolitan Cultures,” 270. Ibid., 272. Richards, Imperialism and Music, 3. Locke, “Aida and Nine Readings of Empire,” 45–72. Marshall, “Imperial Britain,” 385. Niro, Race, 54.

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3

ideology, they form a powerful undercurrent throughout its many chapters. Indeed, if this book is about anything, it is about the ways different disciplines embraced and responded to these two interrelated and “Othering” discourses, and the ways in which they were eventually debunked, at least in principle. This introduction attempts to explain how this happened, by looking at the interrelationship of racism and Orientalism and the effect it had on representations of non-Western music over the long nineteenth century from the time of Sir William Jones to A. H. Fox Strangways. This serves, doubly, as an overview of the book, giving a clear sense of its historical concerns and conceptual direction.

Orientalism and Racism Although Orientalism and racism can be, and have been, considered separate discourses in nineteenth-century Britain, their interrelationship was particularly acute in regard to the representation of non-Western cultures, giving the impression of an arguably more singular, yet multifarious, strain of intellectual discussion. Tony Ballantyne, in his recent Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, describes their relationship in terms of mutuality,11 and Ziauddin Sardar, in Orientalism, describes them as “circles within circles.”12 Edward Said deals with their relationship exhaustively in Orientalism, and describes them as inextricably linked. Writing of the nineteenth century, he suggests that “Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality.”13 This same recognition appears in what Joep Bor calls the “intellectual history of ethnomusicology.”14 As he shows in his article “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” the “Oriental Renaissance,” from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century, right through to the middle part of the twentieth century, was intimately bound up with countering attitudes toward race, which were translated into Orientalist critiques of non-Western music. Thus it was, in contrast to many other writers on non-Western music, that the earliest significant figure in the history of British ethnomusicology, the vastly talented philologist William Jones, could remark that Indian music is “a happy and beautiful contrivance.”15 Like Bor, Anthony Seeger comments on early figures in the history of ethnomusicology, saying that

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 14. Sardar, Orientalism, 49. Said, Orientalism, 206. Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 51. Sir William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 131.

4

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they recognize, and also epitomize, the need to disaggregate questions of race from the study of non-Western musical cultures. Far from entrenching Orientalism, as Said might have us believe, early writers in the history of ethnomusicology attempt to dismantle Orientalism altogether. They remove Orientalism from the Orient, or “disorient.” Later writers, from the late nineteenth century, do much the same with racism. Through the rise of theories of cultural adaptationism and individual differences, they seek to remove racism from ethnological studies of race. So by the beginning of the twentieth century, one might say that ethnomusicology had effectively disentangled musicologically institutionalized Orientalism and racism, and had reduced Orientalist racism within its own prevailing theoretical praxis. Indeed, by disorientalizing early in its history, and deracializing in its later history, ethnomusicology was finally able to “disorient race,” and ultimately fulfill its self-imposed obligation to humanize the musical savage.

Disorienting the Orient As Frank Harrison shows in Time, Place and Music, an anthology of writings in the history of ethnomusicology, prejudice toward non-Western music is recorded as early as the seventeenth century. Writing about this in 1973, just before Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Harrison, like so many theorists of the period, admonishes ethnomusicologists to define their own objectivity, for this “may not always be complemented by the degree of positive intellectual engagement and penetration that is necessary for unbiased understanding and non-assumptive exposition. . . . Bias may be involved not only through social, intellectual and technical pre-suppositions, for example, irrelevant concepts of ‘purity’ or ‘progress,’ but also in project-stereotypes.”16 This bias—or the lack of functional objectivity—finds its cultural–theoretical analogue in the Orientalism of Edward Said, among others. Said, in “Shattered Myths,” an important pre-Orientalism article, defines Orientalism in terms of a Barthian trap, in which the idea of the Oriental and the Orientalist—or the written about and the writer—coalesce into a self-perpetuating mythology. As he says, “The Oriental is given as fixed, stable, in need of investigation, and in need even of knowledge about himself. . . . There is a source of information (the Oriental) and a source of knowledge (the Orientalist): in short, a writer and subject matter otherwise inert.”17 Although highly debated in more recent writings on Orientalism, this level of fixity in the discourse of Orientalism is something that one recognizes throughout

16. Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 1–2. 17. Said, “Shattered Myths,” 92–93.

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Harrison’s book, and it is certainly an easily identifiable component in early British writings on non-Western music. Burney and Hawkins are prime examples. Burney talks of non-Western music as “noise and jargon,”18 while Hawkins describes it as “hideous and astonishing sounds.”19 Even William Stafford, author of A History of Music (1830), and one of the first historians purported to redress the racism of Burney and Hawkins, remains “fixed,” to use Said’s term, in an Orientalist inertia, suggesting that Captain Cook’s travels confirmed the primitiveness of the music of the Pacific islanders.20 Strangely, this fixity begins to loosen at roughly the same time as it was being further entrenched by Burney and Hawkins in the late eighteenth century. In this case, however, it is not through conventional encyclopedic musicology, but through the aegis of philology and the work of Sir William Jones, founder and president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Jones’s treatise, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (1784), is generally recognized among those who study the history of ethnomusicology as the first treatise to emblemize a shift in conventional Orientalist prejudice toward non-Western music evidenced in Burney, Hawkins, and later Stafford. Gerry Farrell, in Indian Music and the West (1997) cites Jones’s ability to translate key musical texts, and to use them in conjunction with the transcription of music, however Westernized.21 In some ways, despite this, Farrell is rather critical of Jones, claiming that he focused on textual history to the exclusion of current practice, and thereby denied unrecorded Indian musical history almost 160 years of influence up to his time.22 As a result, Jones’s findings skew unwittingly toward much the same Orientalist preconceptions he will have tried to eschew in his peers. In Saidian terms, he is in the Orient/Orientalist trap—that intrinsic conceptual mantle in which all cultural theoreticians are clothed. Nevertheless, Jones is significant, precisely because he is recognized as the first scholar of non-Western music, and as such the earliest to have set Western and non-Western music on a level playing field. Writing of the relationship of poetry and music, for example, he claims that “the Hindoo poets never fail to change the metre, which is their mode, according to the change of subject or sentiment in the same piece; and I could produce instances of poetical modulation (if such a phrase may be used) at least equal to the most affecting modulations of our greatest composers: now the musician must naturally have emulated the poet, as every translator endeavours to resemble his original.”23 Here, as elsewhere,

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 703. Hawkins, “Preface,” in A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. Stafford, A History of Music, 6. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 10. Ibid., 25. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 157.

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however, Jones utilizes East/West comparison to evoke a sense of aesthetic parity, and in so doing manifestly fails to conform to conventional Saidian terms of Orientalism. He resists hierarchical and cultural predispositions, and seeks to relate and differentiate, to compare and contrast, or, in the words of Philip Bohlman, to represent and present.24 In post-Saidian terms, he escapes the Orient/Orientalist trap. He disorients Orientalism.

Deracializing Race For Jones it is effectively the relationship of the ethnic and the musical that ought to realign Western misperceptions of the value of Indian music. Underlying this is his conviction that Indian music is not the expression of a racially enfeebled people, but the result of a glorious, but misunderstood, historical and cultural evolutionary process. Unlike many of his time, for whom the Enlightenment paradigm of developmental progress, from savage to barbaric, and barbaric to civilized, seemed to exclude whole swathes of non-Western peoples, Jones appears to have resisted these categorizations, especially in relation to India. As a result, Jones’s work on Indian music is largely bereft of the racial fallout that conventional developmentalist thinking inevitably engenders. This manifests itself not only in his general attitudes toward Indians and their history but also in some of the characteristics he suggests are inherent within Indian music. One facet of the developmentalist racism with which Jones would have contended is the view that savages are inherently more imitative of, or steeped in, nature than more developed peoples. Musicologically this finds codification in the 1860s and 1870s, in the writings of the music critic Henry Chorley, who talks of the “imitative powers of the negro” in a way which conforms to racist anthropological tropes of savageness, including childhood, animality, naturalness, ignorance, innocence, helplessness, and imitativeness.25 Imitativeness, here, and certainly in the late eighteenth century, conjures up images of purposeful fakery or deceit, a characteristic commonly associated with blacks. As Douglas Lorimer shows, although the Victorian perceived the negro as multifarious, certain characteristics remained more or less constant, such as physical attributes. Psychological characteristics and social qualities, however, changed subject to context: “The Negro” was depicted as both “the obedient, humble servant, and the lazy, profligate, worthless worker,”26 among other things. Imitativeness in

24. Bohlman, “Representation and Cultural Critique in the History of Ethnomusicology,” 139. 25. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 9–10. 26. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture,” 19. See also Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians.

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music, according to Chorley, was no doubt considered a function of any one of these qualities, and his comment was probably greeted with some approval. In the eighteenth century, the same attitudes were evinced. William Godwin, for example, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), filters this idea by suggesting that early developmental stages are more sensuous and “natural” than later, more evolved, periods in a people’s history. Indeed, early peoples are more imitative of their natural origins in the sensuous. He summarizes these high-Enlightenment presentiments with this characteristic late eighteenth-century formulation, suggesting that the apex of civilization is a culturally unified society.27 Here, the emphasis on cultural similarity as the summation of progress has very clear implications for notions of race and imitativeness, and what would later become—after Darwin—a core “problematic” of anthropology. George Stocking identifies this type of Enlightenment thinking with what he calls “a quasi-racial aspect”28 in which temperamental and environmental influences, as well as notions linking ancient and modern peoples (the Great Chain of Being) stimulated an atmosphere of racism. According to Roxann Wheeler, similarly, Europeans believed in a qualitative racial spectrum.29 Thus, in some forms of racism, the extent to which a people was not imitative of, and removed from, nature expressed the degree to which civilization had been reached. From the standpoint of music, Jones turns this anthropological presumption on its head. In his second essay from Poems, consisting chiefly of translation from the Asiatik Languages, with two Essays on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations and on the Arts called Imitative (1772), Jones writes that if a Sapphic ode is expressed in music, it would be “pure and original music . . . not an imitation of nature but the voice of nature herself.”30 Here Jones suggests that under certain conditions music can be pure and original and not an imitation of nature. In other words, there are two types of music: an inferior one in which music is an imitation of nature (hence lacking in purity and originality), and a superior one in which music is not an imitation of nature (hence pure and original). The word “original” here is more than an epithet to connote quality, because it is when music loses its imitativeness that it can be original. By calling music the voice of nature itself Jones creates implicitly the impression that Indian music is not an imitation, but a preternatural reality of it. In other words, on some level, Indian music cannot be reduced to levels of imitativeness, and in anthropological terms, neither can the

27. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, cited in Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 275. 28. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 18. 29. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 10. 30. Sir William Jones, “On the Arts, Commonly called Imitative,” 143.

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Indian who performs it. They both exist in their own terms, and in terms of a more universal kind. They are, in a certain way both the voice of nature herself.

Musicological Racism For Jones, the purpose of deconstructing developmentalism from its roots in natural imitativeness is bound up with overturning the racist Orientalist critique. One might even call Jones “disorienting,” in the sense in which Linda Colley uses it in Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850.31 One of the principal criticisms of Said, outlined for example in Michael Richardson’s famous article “Enough Said” (1990), is the fact that Said’s work does not allow for reciprocity between subject and object.32 Yet this same reciprocity, if only nascently, forms the basis of Jones’s “disorienting” methodology—if it can be put that way—and indeed appears increasingly in nineteenth-century British scholarship of non-Western music. Thus, where Jones could be said to be too wholly immersed in Western scholarly traditions to be sufficiently self-reflective, N. Augustus Willard, for example, in A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan (1834), attempts to offer a more satisfactory alternative by studying the works in their original form, and consulting living performers.33 As soon, however, as Orientalism began to be dismantled in the representation of non-Western music, larger questions of race surfaced in musicology, as if to compensate for a general loss of prejudice. Indeed, as early writers in the history of ethnomusicology actively set out to dismantle Orientalism, musicologists, deprived of an openly Orientalist bias, struggled in a precipitate of racial incomprehension. John Hullah, for example, in The History of Modern Music (1862), speaks of Oriental music as charmless, unintelligible, and meaningless.34 Hullah’s comments, though written in the 1860s, could apply equally well to any period from the 1780s to the 1920s. Indeed when surveying the musicological literature of this period, one invariably finds that non-Western music is denigrated, racially abused, or simply ignored. In George Hogarth’s Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (1835), Oriental music is dispatched in the preface and first few pages of chapter 1. In later works it is seldom covered even to this extent, as music histories usually begin with the Greco-Roman or JudeoChristian roots of Western music, brief contemplations on the origins of music, or both. William S. Rockstro’s A General History of Music from the Infancy of the Greek

31. 32. 33. 34.

Colley, Captives, 99. Richardson, “Enough Said,” in Macfie, Orientalism, 208–16. Willard, A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, reprinted in Tagore, Hindu Music, 21. Hullah, The History of Modern Music, 6–7.

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Drama to the Present Period (1886) is characteristic in disregarding music out of a Western context, as is H. G. Bonavia Hunt’s A Concise History of Music from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time (1878), produced under the aegis of the Cambridge School and College Text Books series. Later writers continue this trend. Charles Villiers Stanford and Cecil Forsyth’s A History of Music (1916) opens with a first chapter that covers Oriental music under the title “The Origins of Music,” but this is separated out from what is the opening part of the book (“Part 1, The Ancient Period to 900 A.D.”), actually beginning with chapter 2. Interestingly, despite their interest in Oriental music, Stanford and Forsyth still resist locating Oriental music within the development of a Western chronological framework, and prefer, as in most cases, to situate it as part of ancient or early history, rather than part of living and evolved musical traditions. One early exception to this institutionalized disregard is William Stafford’s A History of Music (1830), the earliest British nineteenth-century history of music to include reference to a musical Orient—and intriguingly, written around the time Willard had written his treatise. As Joep Bor points out, Stafford’s book is remarkable in devoting almost a third to ancient and non-Western music, including Egypt, India, China, Persia, and Turkey, the Arab world, the Hebrews, the Burmese, Siamese, and Singalese, Africa, America, and Greece.35 The remainder explores Continental and English music, with English music covering about as much space as his work on Oriental music. In relation to the rest of British musicological literature of the nineteenth century this rather equal coverage of Oriental and English music is unusual. However, where one might expect Stafford to exhibit sympathy for non-Western music, instead readers are introduced to Western racist abuse and deeply entrenched developmentalist anthropology. As so often happens in anthropological literature of the time, inclusiveness was often accompanied by racist discourse, and, clearly impacted on Stafford’s history of music. So where Jones sought to elevate non-Western music to civilization by depriving it of its natural imitativeness, Stafford reduces it to its expected position of savagery within a developmentalist anthropological projection. This is abundantly clear even from the title of his first chapter, “The Origin of Music Traced to Natural Causes—The Music of Savage Nations.” Somewhat later in the century, in the 1890s, this same view is enshrined in the writing of C. Hubert H. Parry. Despite the influence of evolutionism—or perhaps because of it—Parry couches his considerations of non-Western music in unrepentant and pointedly racial developmentalist terms. Attempting to replace the discourse of Orientalism for that of evolution, he nonetheless writes that the study of folk music is not so much a study of savage music, but a study of its evolutionary fulfillment in Western music. Savages, and their music, represent, after

35. Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 60.

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all, the very earliest steps in human development toward a European cultural hegemony.36 Parry’s insistence that savage music finds relevance only in relation to Western music is part and parcel of his appropriation of evolution for a Western agenda. For in permitting evolution to dominate his historiographical discourse he also champions a style of racism that deems the savage incapable of progressing, yet contradictorily influencing the course of Western musical evolution. It is scientific racism translated into a musicological environment. It is what Waltraud Ernst describes as a typically fossilized post-Enlightenment attitude toward scientific discourse. According to Ernst, “the Eurocentrism inherent in the Western scientific enterprise has aided both the development of racial hierarchies and the creation of the long-enduring myth of science as an impartial, pure and value-free endeavour.”37

Deracializing Musicology: Carl Engel and the Influence of E. B. Tylor Whether it is fair to impugn Parry for scientific racism in a period in which it was rife is not of consequence. Rather, it is the fact that, unlike more openedminded writers of the time, such as John Frederick Rowbotham or Richard Wallaschek, he dissimulates racism under the guise of evolution, and as such presents non-Western music—and, more important, non-Western musicians—in what are unreconstructed hereditary terms. Indeed, the animality of musical savages has a long and deeply rooted position in the history of musicological racism. As Parry’s work indicates, the metaphor survived in common parlance well into the 1880s and 1890s. This is evident in O. H. H.’s article in the Musical Times of September 1, 1887, “Music in Embryo,” which uses terms like “germs” and “natural growth” to describe pathways of development.38 Even as early as the 1860s and 1870s, however, institutionalized musicological racism was ebbing, through an advancing engagement with cultural anthropology and the foundational thinking of E. B. Tylor. This is obvious in the writing of Carl Engel, author of An Introduction to the Study of National Music; Comprising Researches into Popular Songs, Traditions, and Customs (1866) and contributor to the formative anthropological pamphlet, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, first published in 1874. Engel’s connection to Tylorian thought has significance for the anthropological study of music, especially in relation to the 1874 Notes and

36. Parry, The Art of Music, 52. 37. Ernst, “Introduction,” 3. 38. O. H. H., “Music in Embryo,” 533.

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Queries (which Tylor spearheaded), because in it he sets out one of the earliest methodological templates for the study of non-Western music.39 Engel’s methodology, coming in the form of 111 questions, could not be simpler. First, transcribe the music, retaining in notation as much of the original as possible; second, try to procure music with words; and third, provide information on instruments and their performance. Needless to say, Engel’s anthropological survey has affinities with the methodological framework of Tylor’s groundbreaking Primitive Culture (1871), which Urry suggests, dominated British anthropology for the next thirty years.40 From a basic methodological standpoint Tylor ensures that the classification of material precedes conceptualization, writing, for example, that “A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to classify these in their proper groups.”41 Tylor provides a methodological framework cutting across geographical locations, and this is mirrored in Engel’s completely delocalized methodological prescription. Tylor divides his book into chapters on “The Science of Culture,” “The Development of Culture,” “Survival in Culture” (two chapters), “Emotional and Imitative Language” (two chapters), “The Art of Counting,” “Mythology” (three chapters), and “Animism,” and Engel catalogues responses into “cultivation” and “tradition.” These sections evince a particularly Tylorian methodological template, dependent for its conceptual foundation upon verifiable material taken in the field. Speaking of “survival in culture,” Tylor highlights the importance of permanence, indicating that “When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world, disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in its bed will flow on for ages.”42 This idea is framed in Engel’s first question under “traditions” when he asks if there are popular traditions respecting the origin of music.43 A function of this is also understood in the context of local mythologies, which both Engel and Tylor use to explore patterns of human development.44 Further similarities occur where Tylor engages with musical concepts. He takes a view of vowels, for instance, as “emotional tone,” drawing broadly on Spencer’s notion of music as emotionalized speech.45

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Engel, “Music,” in Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 110. Urry, Before Social Anthropology, 21. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 7. Ibid., 70. Engel, “Music,” 114. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 274, and Engel, “Music,” 114. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 167–68.

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Individual Differences and Race Tylor refers to language as “linguistic music,”46 and it is to musical analogy that he resorts when trying to describe linguistic accent or emphasis, which represents an early development in linguistic evolution. In fact, he suggests that music be studied philologically precisely to identify this stage in its advance from vocal communication to music itself. Musically, of course, this is more or less what Engel seeks to do, and it is possibly this that separates him from slightly later figures like John Frederick Rowbotham, or Richard Wallaschek who, despite their own musical interpretation of Darwinian evolution, prefer fundamentally developmentalist conceptions of anthropological progress. Where racism lingers, arguably, in Rowbotham and Wallaschek, Engel effectively deracializes music through methodologies steeped in Tylorian cultural anthropology. In fact, it was not until the end of the century, with the work of the eminent ethnomusicologist and psychologist Charles Samuel Myers—himself a contributor to the 1912 edition of Notes and Queries47—that Tylorian notions of progress would themselves be superseded. Myers’s writings on music span the period 1902 to 1933 and are characteristically broad in coverage, including ethnomusicological fieldwork, experimental music psychology, and work on synesthesia. Unifying these seemingly disparate strands of research is an evolutionary conception of individual differences (known as differential psychology), and it is through this that one of the earliest modern templates in the history of ethnomusicology was founded in Britain. Individual differences looks at how and why people are different, and how difference can be measured.48 Myers’s conception of individual differences emerged early in his career, in a 1901 review of James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism, when he denied the dichotomy between subject and object (in much the same way Richardson criticizes Said) in our individual experience of life and suggested that both perspectives ultimately give rise to the self, or what he called the unitary “I.”49 Myers soon turned this idea into an ethnomusicological concept, beginning with his music-psychological contributions to the Reports of the 1898 Torres Strait expedition, eventually published in 1912. Because of insufficient experimental grounds upon which to conclude the sensory (musical) superiority of savage, the Reports led Myers and his team to evolve a theory of “cultural adaptationism,” the view that the level of measurable human sensory acuities (whether primitive or civilized) are culturally adapted rather than innate. This

46. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 168. 47. Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in Notes and Queries on Anthropology, ed. Freire-Marreco and Myres, 214–24. 48. Cooper, Individual Differences, ix. 49. Charles S. Myers, “Naturalism and Idealism,” 476.

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contradicted the Spencerian hypothesis, or the belief that “primitives” surpassed “civilized” people in psychophysical performance because they retained more energy for rudimentary functions. Cultural adaptationism went further than undermining the hereditary component in perceptions of race. It effectively removed race as a conceptual underlay in the anthropological methodology of its day, and introduced into ethnomusicology—and ultimately musicology—a scientific template untarnished by questions of race. Bolstered by musical findings that confirmed his belief in differential psychology, Myers was able to banish racism and humanize the musical savage. As he suggests in “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation” (1932), the appreciation and enjoyment of music “differ in different individuals.”50

Individualism, Universalism, and Cultural Inscription Myers’s work, and the role of individual differences, represented the last step among psychologists, anthropologists, and early figures in the history of ethnomusicology, in disentangling institutionalized Orientalism from issues of race, and ultimately in situating non-Western musics within a more modern cultural hermeneutic. As Richards says, “The contrast between experimental performance (showing little ‘racial’ difference) and real-life performance (conforming to the ‘savage superiority’ stereotype) led . . . Myers to conclude that these latter signified learned adaptation to the demands of ‘primitive’ life.”51 This conclusion had the immediate effect of undermining Orientalist conceptions of non-Western inferiority, by its association with the racist discourse of the Spencerian hypothesis, a fact borne out in Myers’s slightly later paper, “On the Permanence of Mental Racial Differences” (1911). From a musicological standpoint, it enabled Myers to conceive of the musical “savage” as more human than racial, and as more universal than ethnic. In Myers’s terms, this banished the question of race entirely. Not long after this, A. H. Fox Strangways, founder of Music and Letters and author of the magisterial work The Music of Hindostan (1914), harmonizes individualism and universalism in a linguistic framework, by treating transcription like translation. By transcribing in a “foreignizing” way—a way that intentionally inscribes the “foreignness” of the original music without Westernizing it—Fox Strangways attempts to retain its cultural identity when translated into a different cultural context. In fact, he is especially praised in literature on the history of ethnomusicology as one of the first ethnomusicologists to debunk Western Orientalist concepts of the linguistic universalism of music that deprive non-Western

50. Myers, “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation,” 61. 51. Richards, “Getting a Result,” 148.

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musical cultures of their individual identity.52 Indeed, at the same time that Fox Strangways accepts the fact that music is a universal language, he objects to the idea that it is in any way uniform: “Music has been called a universal language, and no doubt, in the deepest sense, it is. But just as no one language can be really common to all peoples because it will be pronounced differently in different mouths, so the very same notes will be sung by different throats in such a way as to be unrecognizable to us.”53

Conclusion This fundamental consciousness and acceptance of difference, typified in Fox Strangways’s as well as Myers’s ethnomusicology, is something upon which Philip Bohlman comments when describing the strata of ethnomusicological investigation today. Accordingly, we begin with scientific observation, and move to experimentation, fieldwork, and last, to the acknowledgment of ourselves in the Other and the Other in ourselves.54 This last point, of critical self-reflexivity, is a crucial point of departure in the historical movement away from Orientalism and racism. It is by achieving parity of cultural identity that Western Orientalist presumptions of non-Western inferiority could, by the end of the nineteenth century, be subsumed into increasingly equalizing racial discourses. In this sense, Philip Bohlman is the inheritor of a well-established tradition in the history of ethnomusicology. Where Fox Strangways and Myers codify the idea of universalism within the culturally distinct, Bohlman embraces the culturally distinct as a medium for establishing universal ethnomusicological truths. Thus, rather than focusing on what the ethnomusicologist studies, Bohlman, like many others, looks at “how they represented it.”55 This approach, of how rather than what, or what Bohlman calls representation rather than presentation, is in many ways the modern realization of “cultural adaptationism,” and in Britain as elsewhere, this represented the last step among psychologists, anthropologists, and early figures in the history of ethnomusicology in disentangling institutionalized Orientalism from issues of race, and ultimately in situating non-Western musics within a more modern—and ultimately more humane—cultural hermeneutic. And it is the progress toward this hermeneutic that forms the basis of this book, explored through anthropological theories of developmentalism, evolutionism, individualism, and cultural identity.

52. 53. 54. 55.

Seeger, “Styles of Musical Ethnography,” 351. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 181. Bohlman, “Representation and Cultural Critique,” 139. Ibid., 138.

Part One

Early Anthropological Influences

Chapter One

Cultural Anthropology from the Late Eighteenth Century to the 1850s From the late eighteenth century into the 1850s anthropology remained a somewhat unalloyed and disparate set of anthropological studies, including, among other things, nascent research in physical and linguistic anthropology, the ethnology of sexuality, and juridical and economic ethnography.1 From the 1850s to 1890s, however, anthropology began to be professionalized—principally through the hegemony of evolutionary theory—and the field defined itself in increasingly unified disciplinary, yet more theoretically problematizing, terms. The earlier stage of anthropology is generally described as developmentalist. This revolves around Enlightenment concepts of cultural and human progression that are fundamentally rigid in their application across all peoples. Thus universal concepts of human growth, both personal and corporate or societal, were applied to non-Western cultures without any flexibility whatsoever. What applies to one culture applies uniformly to another, and it is only the circumstance of each culture that dictates their relative degree of human progression. According to Honigmann, the anthropologist Adam Ferguson, for example, “looked for pattern, law, or direction operating behind the particular events of history”2 through a three-stage approach—savagery, barbarism, and civil society—which he also used to relate contemporary primitive society to early mankind, a theory otherwise known as comparative anthropology. Ferguson’s approach, needless to say, provides very little for individual or cultural difference, and can—and does—provide for an entirely circular argument about the relationship of man and culture. Condorcet, likewise, maintains that people are “inspired and restricted in discovery and invention by traits already present in culture.”3 Stocking talks of the developmentalist hegemony as de rigueur, “with similar themes, elaborated in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antoine-Yves

1. Magli, Cultural Anthropology, 48. 2. Honigmann, The Development of Anthropological Ideas, 86. 3. Ibid., 89.

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Goguet, Charles de Brosses, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, Cornelius de Pauw, Abbé Reynal, John Millar, Jean-Nicolas Demeunier, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and others—down through the culmination of the tradition in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind in 1795.4 The early history of anthropological developmentalism centers on the theoretically ubiquitous threefold historiographical division of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, in combination with a comparative method in which modern primitives are used to explain historical development in man. Although in A History of Ethnology (1975), Voget, for example, diminishes the significance of developmentalism from the 1840s, Honigmann describes it as persisting through evolutionary paradigms well into the late nineteenth century,5 and indeed from a purely musical standpoint the evidence for this is rather abundant, as in John Fredrick Rowbotham’s Comtean, and comparative, A History of Music (1885), to be dealt with later. Stocking describes developmentalism in these terms as well, and allows for a considerably more fluid interpretation of the term. Indeed, even “classical evolutionism may best be interpreted not as a ‘paradigm’ but as a synthesis of elements from various pre-existing intellectual orientations,” including “the tradition of progressivist cultural developmentalism.”6 As Stocking suggests, the survival of developmentalism within an evolutionary framework begs questions of the relationship of Victorian anthropology to its own eighteenth-century Enlightenment inheritance. Stephen Horigan, as Stocking, suggests that the taxonomy of developmentalism is nothing more than unilinearism persisting under the species of evolution.7 While the Enlightenment paradigm of developmental progress, from savage to barbaric and barbaric to civilized, remained entrenched under numerous banners throughout later periods of anthropological history, underlying concerns were present from the beginning, among them issues of race. William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), summarizes high-Enlightenment views with this characteristic late eighteenth-century formulation: Savage races may become civilized, for this has already occurred—the most cultivated nations of modern times are the descendents of savages. . . . They must no doubt at first pass through the same dangers and corruptions of a merely sensual civilization, by which the civilized nations are still oppressed, but they will thereby be brought into union with the great whole of humanity, and be made capable of taking part in its further progress. . . . It is the vocation of our race to unite itself into one single body, all

4. 5. 6. 7.

Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 15. Honigmann, The Development of Anthropological Ideas, 114. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 183. Horigan, Nature and Culture in Western Discourse, 9–10.

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parts of which shall be thoroughly known to each other, and all possessed of a similar culture.8

Here, the emphasis on cultural similarity as the summation of progress has very clear implications for notions of race, and what would later become—after Darwin—the core “problematic” for anthropology. As Stocking says, in this time, “various widespread ideas about human difference also gave it [anthropology] a quasi-racial aspect: traditional humoral and environmental notions of the formation of human character and physical type; the idea of the Chain of Being, in which the Huron and the Hottentot were links between the European and the orangutan. . . . Such ideas have stimulated scholarship on the ‘racism’ of the Enlightenment.”9 According to Roxann Wheeler, “Europeans believed that all groups of people shared equally in a set of defining physical and cultural features—some of which were perceived to be distinctly more favourable than others.”10 This grounding of developmentalism in a fundamentally “racist” paradigm is partly accepted among scholars as the theoretical fallout of consensual disagreement within anthropology itself. Before defining culture, anthropology had to define itself. Was it about language, physical attributes, culture, man? And was it even a science? If we could agree that anthropology was the science of man, the proper methods of anthropologists, however, aroused considerable disagreement. Both cultural characteristics, such as language, and physical features were used to classify the different divisions of man. Ultimately the two became confused, so that something called “race” came to be seen as the prime determinant of all the important traits of body and soul, character and personality, of human beings and nations. In other words, race became far more than a biological concept: race and culture were dangerously linked.11

As a result of this conflation, before the end of the eighteenth century, racial theory was arguably “relatively simple,”12 and bound up principally with the problem of human origins. To some extent this is borne out in the common practice of the time. According to Jahoda, theories of human origins divide into three main types: monogenesis, polygenesis, and “The Great Chain of Being,” referred to above by Stocking. Monogenesis is essentially Biblical Creationism, through which man derives from Adam and Eve. Polygenesis refers to the idea

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 275. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 18. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 10. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, 9. Ibid.

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of multiple creations and diverse biological origins, and “The Great Chain of Being” to theories linking man and apes, and ultimately apes and blacks.13 While some forms of polygenesis and “The Great Chain of Being” would be embraced by evolutionary theory, monogenesis resisted even the most compelling Darwinian evidence. Monogenesis, in fact, often provided a negation of Enlightenment concepts of human progress, and through it arose one of the principal loci of racism in the early history of anthropology: degeneration. Whereas Enlightenment philosophy was predicated on a teleological projection of all human culture—be it savage or barbaric, Christian or not—toward civilization, monogenesis, by necessity, had to account for the presence of people seemingly omitted from Biblical descent, that is, non-Christians, heathen, savages, and the like. “Degeneration” arose to account for just such peoples. Stocking, in fact, suggests that it is the dichotomy between, and interlocking assumptions of, developmentalism and degenerationism that theoretically typify the racism in the period of anthropology before Darwin. He writes that “The qualitative distinction between man and animal reinforced the rejection of a plurality of human origins. . . . Correspondingly, degeneration, conceived in physical and cultural terms, provided an alternative explanation for the manifest human diversity that increasingly forced itself on anthropological thoughts, just as aggressive ethnocentrism and Christian humanitarianism coexisted in the general cultural attitude toward non-Western peoples.”14 Among the most prominent early anthropologists to take a monogenetic standpoint was James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848). Well placed to draw upon work across a wide range of anthropological subdisciplines, like physiology, anatomy, mythology, archaeology, and linguistics, Prichard adopted a theory of race based less on rigid monogenesis than on heredity.15 Indeed, the “comparison between animal domestication and human civilization led him to assume that the civilized state was conducive to the accidental eruption of new variations in the human kind. . . . [H]e believed that all mankind had originally been black and that differentiation was a result of civilization.”16 Prichard, unlike many of his more entrenched monogenetic counterparts, struggled to translate his knowledge into a workable anthropological template, and although he attempted to describe human diffusion, he eventually resisted anything that might imply an evolutionary ideology. For this reason, Stocking suggests Prichard as a transitional figure: “From the beginning, however, the central concern of Prichard’s historical inquiry was not development but derivation, not

13. 14. 15. 16.

Jahoda, Images of Savages, 25. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 44. Augstein, Race, xxiv. Ibid.

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progress but origin—conceived in terms of sources rather than causal process.”17 Nevertheless, even as a transitional figure, Prichard is important for attempting to deracialize anthropology amid a sea of racist cultural theories. Banton, for example, argues that Prichard is slightly misunderstood by historians of anthropology, because he is viewed in terms of racial theory, rather than less morally charged taxonomies of type.18 Prichard is, of course, not alone in this, and certainly from the 1800s there was a general movement—albeit one grounded in monogenism—to explain apparent cultural degeneration in broadly “Christian” (i.e., morally acceptable) terms. In 1803, for example, Thomas Winterbottom, like Prichard, attributes the “cultural inferiority of the American Negro to his cultural conditions, notably slavery.”19 Where monogenism of the Prichardian kind could produce a morally benign anthropology, as we have seen, monogenist degeneration undermined whatever moral good might come out of it. No less controversial—and possibly just as damaging in racial terms—is polygenism, which allowed anthropologists to postulate a diversity of original races, and with it the possibility of inborn inequities. With it also came the possibility of advocating slavery.20 Polygenism, though in many ways more suitably poised to be embraced by evolutionary theory, was, nonetheless, in the early history of anthropology, another means of establishing racial borders. Whereas monogenism was arguably more philosophical than religious, it believed that environmental factors cause differences in physical appearance. Polygenism “denies [that] environment has the power to cause difference in physical appearance, and argues that only differential descent from a different ancestor can account for the bodily differences that come to be called racial difference.”21 As a result, there is what Graham Richards calls “the subhumanity question,” namely, the racist attitude that denegrates nonwhites (in particular blacks), and the degree to which polygenism is to account for it. Certainly, Richards says, technically, “this question translates into assessing the degree of acceptance of ‘polygenism.’ ”22 The extremes of polygenism—and monogenism for that matter—also account for entrenchment of scientific racism through the evolutionary period in anthropology, and, as discussed later, it was not until the 1870s that the debate among anthropologists lost currency.23 Evidence of the continuation of these paradigms remained embedded in British cultural practice well into the 1850s, and perhaps no better example of

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 51. Banton, “The Racializing of the World,” 34–35. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, 30. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 63. Saakwa-Mante, “Western Medicine and Racial Constitutions,” 30. Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology, 7. Ibid.

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this is the Crystal Palace: “Much of the Crystal Palace encouraged speculation of a more specific sort; the overall system of classification, which forced jurors to compare the same functional objection in a variety of national forms; the character of the different national exhibits, which led one along a line of progress from the Tasmanian savage through the ‘barbaric’ civilizations of the East, northwest across the European continent toward an apex in Great Britain.”24 Intellectual culture, needless to say, remained similarly rooted in the monogenist/polygenist debate and patterns of ineluctable cultural progression, although the terminology was beginning to change. “Ethnology” was the catchall for the general study of “linguistic, physical, and cultural characteristics of dark-skinned, non-European, ‘uncivilized’ peoples.”25 In Britain the discipline was propelled by a type of comparative philology expressed in highly racialized terms borrowed in part from the Oxford (yet German-born) philologist Max Müller. Müller indicates that Aryan linguistic qualities evince manifest superiority while inferior civilizations, such as the Chinese or Semitic, were marked by an inability to assimilate or acculturate.26 Where Müller speaks of the Aryans, one might easily substitute for them the culturally superior British, or depending upon the particular argument, the “self-reliant and self-controlled”27 AngloSaxon or the wild and perhaps less predictable, and more primitive, Celt.28 Alongside this development in ethnology, notions of heredity were being developed that were used to underpin a pervasive culture of anthropological racism. As Robert Knox writes in The Races of Men (1850), “Race is everything: literature, science, art—in a word, civilization depends upon it.”29 The idea that no race “could overcome the limits of its hereditary makeup”30 remained an ideological commonplace, and was a particular force among British travelers abroad. Intriguingly, just after Darwin completed his travels on the HMS Beagle, Sir George Grey hired the same vessel to sail to Australia, and in Australia explored its land and peoples, publishing in 1841 a two-volume Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in Northwest and Western Australia during the Years 1837, 38, and 39. Grey, who would go on to publish works of considerable interest musically (to be discussed), expressed his racism in a form of light Christian degenerationism tinged by incipient notions of heredity. He refused, for example, to admit that Australians were originally civilized and degenerated, but rather that God willed them to remain as such, owing partly to the strong familial

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 5. Ibid., 47. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 71. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 62. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History. Knox, The Races of Men, v. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 64.

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(i.e., hereditary) condition of their social complex. Of course, Grey was not alone in viewing indigenous peoples this way, and indeed travelers, and more particularly missionaries, often expressed racism in direct proportion to their religious zeal, with the express intention of converting savages. This is more than a function of relatively passive monogenist ideology, as shown by the missioner Thomas Williams, author of Fiji and the Fijians (1859). Williams, also of some musical interest, went on the well-established Wesleyan mission to Fiji in 1840. There he, like many other missioners, found himself in extremely hostile circumstances, as formative to his ethnology of “savagism” as to his Christian selfdetermination.31 Williams, like Grey, looked at familial bonds as markers of heredity, but in contrast, finding polygamy rife, considered the Fijians morally bereft and effectively degenerate. Other travelers of the pre-Darwinian period may well have shared in these views of savagery, if not for very different reasons. Among these is Francis Galton, Darwin’s younger cousin, who went on, in the 1860s, to develop widely influential theories of heredity. Galton traveled extensively in the 1840s and 1850s, and while he retained conventional notions of savagery in relation to civilization, at the same time he developed a much more systematic conception of racial heredity than had previously been the case. This was based on an assessment of numerous ethnological components, such as physical attributes, linguistics, behavior, and belief, and was published disparately in the 1850s in books on travel. As Stocking points out, despite their lack of conceptual cohesion, they were sufficiently influential to be included as a reference in the Crystal Palace guidebook, and were then cited subsequently in R. G. Latham’s Descriptive Ethnology (1859).32 Although Galton’s pre-Darwinian work claimed to be based on verifiable scientific process, the results seemed to reconfirm many of the racial prejudices of the time. Moreover, the use of science in itself became the subject of considerable debate, particularly after Galton’s work had grown formally into the study of eugenics. Galton coined the term in 188333 to define “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.”34 As Nancy Stepan indicates, what later became eugenics is not to be confused with “race hygiene” or what is now called ethnic cleansing,35 but the similarity is alarming. This later development aside, the elevation of heredity within a pre-Darwinian scientific discourse on race was not something Galton perceived as morally questionable,

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid., 90. Ibid., 94. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 17. Galton, “Eugenics,” 82. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, 111.

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despite its obvious implications for racial prejudice. Indeed, Galton’s objectifying style of racial science left open the question of ethics at a time that only acted to feed notions of racial difference. Not all scientists felt this way, however. While Galton was busy developing racial science into eugenics, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the evolutionary principle, was traveling in the Amazon collecting material that would ultimately be published in A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853). Wallace’s account (which contains limited reference to music) provides an altogether less racist approach. Despite retaining typical “Anglo-Saxon attitudes,”36 his progressivist anthropology of the region was dictated in less racially egregious terms. Indeed, not all savages—or their music—were below consideration, and, as will be shown in the following chapters, civilized man could well learn something from them.37

36. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 99. 37. Ibid., 100.

Chapter Two

The Interplay of Anthropology and Music Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature There is documentation in English of the music and musical activities of nonWestern peoples from as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. Although most pre-nineteenth-century material is recorded by expatriates, travelers, and explorers, rather than by professional musicians, it nonetheless provides an extremely rich and historically important record of non-Western music.1 From the seventeenth century there are numerous examples of musical commentaries translated into English, as well as those written originally in English, such as Lionel Wafer’s A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699). Eighteenth-century descriptions are plentiful in both English and English translations, and by the end of that century, as a result of expanding Anglo-imperial interests, musical references became increasingly common in expatriate journals, and travel and explorational literature across the non-Western world. As we have seen in previous chapters, Indian music was a particularly prominent feature in late-century documentation, but the geographical range was expansive and covered almost all areas of the globe. Early descriptions, from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tend to be articulated in very brief, often disparate, commentaries, sometimes alongside music, as in Amédée Frézier’s A Voyage to the South-Sea, and along the Coasts of Chili and Peru (1717), Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese-Tartary (1738–41), J. F. G. De La Pérouse’s A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788 (1799), and John Barrow’s Travels in China (1806). Later documentation

1. See Harrison, Time, Place and Music.

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is often fuller and more generous, both in descriptive and notational content, and occasionally music is singled out for more special expansive investigation, as in T. Edward Bowdich’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (1819). Popular literature of this type continued to provide “raw” music-anthropological material well into the early part of the twentieth century. As anthropology emerged from the armchair, however, into a field-active, independent, and more fully evolved scientific discipline, the reliability of such descriptions was inevitably questioned institutionally, and the genre ceased to be the natural resource it had been over the previous decade.

Savage Simplicity Typically, late eighteenth-century references to music are brief and unprepossessing, as in Georg Forster’s travels with Captain James Cook (1772 to 1775), A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution (1777): We were no sooner seated in the house, surrounded by a considerable number of natives, not less than a hundred, than two or three of the women welcomed us with a song, which, though exceedingly simple, had a very pleasing effect, and was highly musical when compared to the Taheitian songs. They beat time to it by snapping the second finger and thumb, and holding the three remaining fingers upright. Their voices were very sweet and mellow, and they sung in parts. When they had done they were relieved by others, who sung they [sic] same tune, and at last they joined together in chorus. A very ingenious gentleman, who was on this voyage with us, has favoured

Example 2.1. Song from Tonga-Tabboo, New Zealand, from George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5, 2 vols. (London: B. White, and J. Robson, 1777), vol. 1, 429.

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me with one of the tunes which he heard in this island, which may serve as a specimen to the musical part of my readers.

Generally speaking, Forster’s comments—like others of the period—are rather cursory and insubstantial in anthropological import. Occasionally he rises to a more contextually generous description, and it is in these that his views are illuminated more clearly: The same gentleman likewise took notice of a kind of dirge-like melancholy song, relating to the death of Tupaya. This song was chiefly practised by the inhabitants round Tolaga Bay, on the northern island, where the people seem to have had a high regard for that Taheitian. There is an extreme simplicity in the words, though they seem to be metrically arranged, in such a manner, as to express the feelings of the mourners, by their slow movement. –aghe–e, ma –tte˘ a˘wha–y Tu–pa–ya˘! Departed, dead, alas! Tupaya! The first effusions of grief are not loquacious; the only idea to which we can give utterances is that of our loss, which takes the form of a complaint. Whether the simplicity of the tune is equally agreeable, or well judged, is a question which I cannot pretend to determine. The connoisseurs in music must acquit or condemn the New Zeelanders. They descend at the close from c to the octave below in a fall, resembling the sliding of a finger along the fingerboard on the violin. I shall now dismiss this subject with the following observation, that the taste for music of the New Zeelanders, and their superiority in this respect to other nations in the South Seas, are to me stronger proofs, in favour of their heart, than all the idle eloquence of philosophers in their cabinets can invalidate. They have violent passions; but it would be absurd to assert that these only lead them to inhuman excess.

Example 2.2. Song from Tolega Bay, New Zealand, from George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5, 2 vols. (London: B. White, and J. Robson, 1777), vol. 2, 477–78. Three issues come to mind when considering these passages. First, while they describe the music in generally positive aesthetic terms, they do so despite its

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simplicity: in the earlier passage the music was “exceedingly simple,” and in the later “there was an extreme simplicity of words . . . [and] simplicity of the tune.” Simplicity, here, is essentially a term of critical reserve, with potential to undermine the quality of musical appreciation. It is an expression of acknowledged underdevelopment, and by implication suggests that Tahitian musical standards remain comparatively rudimentary. As he says, “though exceedingly simple, [the music] had a very pleasing effect.” Second, as a concomitant to simplicity, the music is emotionally restrained or suppressed: the “first effusions of grief are not loquacious.” And third, as an expression of these attributes, the music comes from the heart, rather than the mind: “in favour of their heart,” rather than philosophy. In themselves Forster’s terms do not appear to be derogatory, but underlying these is a set of social mores that contend with his otherwise democratic, aesthetic values. Simplicity is not only a cipher for non-Western musical underdevelopment. It corresponds directly to the underdevelopment of savages themselves, in conventional tropes of the period taking the form of childhood, animality, naturalness, ignorance, innocence, helplessness, and imitativeness.2 Translated into an anthropological code, these characteristics consign to savages qualities that represent a diametric culture opposition to the civilized people of Europe. Where Europeans have therefore evolved into a complex civilization, savages remain hopelessly contained within a simplistic primitive society. Despite his appreciation of the music, therefore, Forster retains the culturally dichotomizing language of race, especially when describing his native amanuensis, Peeterré: It is scarce doubted that he felt the superiority of our knowledge, of our arts, manufactures, and mode of living, in some degree, especially as he was always remarkably in good spirits when amongst us; but notwithstanding all this, he never once expressed a desire of going with us; and when we proposed it to him, he declined it, preferring the wretched precarious life of his countrymen, to all the advantages of which he saw us possessed . . . this way of thinking is common to all savages; and I might have added, that it is not entirely obliterated among polished nations. The force of habit no where appears more strikingly than in such instances, where it seems alone to counterbalance the comforts of civilized life.3

While deprecating the savage for his manifest lack of ambition, Forster also suggests that civilization is as much a geographical reality as it is a moral or social achievement, and consequently represents an arguably more progressive

2. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 9–10. 3. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, vol. 2, 476.

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ideology than was perhaps common in eighteenth-century anthropological thought. Generally speaking, at this time civilization was largely a geographical locus, rather than a conceptual framework, and Enlightenment philosophies did not perpetuate a differentiated idea of culture as we know it today.4 Forster, in his account, provides a projection not entirely dependent on place, but on unexplained factors of developmental difference. Indeed, by indicating that the retrogressive tendencies of savages had not been fully expunged from civilized society, he also suggests that civilization is not absolute either geographically or anthropologically. Traces of savage simplicity remain within civilization, despite what Rousseau might have us believe, namely, that civilized people have “destroyed their original simplicity for ever.”5 That having been said, Forster’s language is not unlike Rousseau’s, particularly in his suggestion that music is an important representation of anthropological advancement. As Ellingson says, “In anthropology, as in his approach to other sciences, Rousseau’s characteristic emphasis is on the construction of a critique of theories formulated in terms of a critique of representations.”6 Certainly, in broader terms, Forster’s formulation bears similarity to much of Rousseau’s Discourse, and also his Dictionnaire, as in the following: “Most of these opinions are founded on the persuasion which we have of the excellence of our music. . . . One will find in all these pieces a certain conformity of modulation with our music, which might arouse admiration in some for the goodness and universality of our laws, and in others might render suspect the intelligence or the accuracy of those who have transmitted these airs to us.”7 One of Rousseau’s main tenets was “the primacy of observation of written authority,”8 and in this respect musical travel literature that followed him and Forster represented just that. De la Pérouse provides a similar, if perhaps less anthropologically telling example: “he [the chief] played a pantomime, which was expressive either of combats, surprises, or death. The air which preceded this dance was agreeable, and tolerably harmonious.”9 By the early part of the nineteenth century, the vocabulary of musical description in travel and explorational literature had begun to expand considerably. With it came a greater concentration of interest in music, and consequently more detailed studies of it, as in G. H. von Langsdorff’s travels from 1803 to 1807, published in English as

4. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 18–19. 5. Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, 153–54, cited in Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, 83. 6. Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, 86. 7. Rousseau, Dictionaire de Musique, cited in ibid. 8. Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, 87. 9. Pérouse’s, A Voyage Round the World, 150.

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Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World (1813). Von Langsdorff’s study of the music of the cannibals of Washington’s Islands provides detailed descriptions of the physical characteristics of instruments, as well as some analysis of the music. Of particular interest to him is the limited ambitus and intervallic content of the music, dominated by the minor third e to g, and the frequency of quarter tones used within it (expressed in notation by a diagonal line). Although he refrains from analogizing the tonal and structural limitations of the music as an expression of moral primitiveness, he does suggest that the cannibals “have no feeling of compassion,”10 only the satisfaction of having eaten their enemies. This, to some extent, continues to accord with Forster’s supposition of hostility, or violence, as a precondition of savagery, although neither Forster nor von Langsdorff make this association directly. Von Langsdorff, nevertheless, implies that intervallic simplicity and restriction is concomitant to a state of savagery: “It is very remarkable . . . that almost all the songs of uncultivated people, and even the music of European nations not very far advanced in civilization, is composed chiefly of semitones.”11

Monogenism and Polygenism The correlation between intervallic content and savage simplicity of feeling, intellect, morality, and so on, partially evident in von Langsdorff, occurs with regularity at this time, and to some extent represents a musical parallel with monogenesis. In the same way that man evolved from a single Biblical stock (monogenism), music emerged from a single iconic, original semitone. As mentioned earlier, however, monogenetic development was frequently subject to degeneration, as in von Langsdorff’s Nukahiwa, whose music, unlike Russian music for instance, remains doggedly regressive and ceremonially uniform: “it serves for deaths, marriages, war songs, drinking, &c. and is sung on all occasions.”12 T. Edward Bowdich’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (1819), perhaps the first travel writing to explore music as a separate anthropological taxonomy within travel literature, shares in von Langsdorff’s musical monogenesism, and even extends it. The minor third, which is a common characteristic of Ashantee (Ashanti) music, “is the most natural interval; the addition of fifths, at the same time, is rare.”13 In addition, “The singing is almost all recitative. . . . The songs of the Canoe men are peculiar to themselves, and very much resemble the

10. 11. 12. 13.

Von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, 165. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 162. Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, 361.

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chants used in cathedrals.”14 So not only is Ashantee (Ashanti) music “original” in its intervallic content, it also resembles the earliest music of the church, implying, through degenerationism, that it too could have advanced, had it been given a similarly civilizing history. As a function of this, Bowdich also takes a seemingly Prichardian angle on musical taxonomy by suggesting that taxonomically Ashantee (Ashanti) music represents “varieties” stemming from a core intervallic content. Prichard asks “Are the physical diversities observed in man sufficient to constitute specific differences, or are they [rightly] to be considered merely as varieties?”15 As Stocking says, Prichard’s concern was “not development but derivation, not progress but origin—conceived in terms of sources rather than causal process.”16 The same could be said musically of Bowdich. The same could not be said of Bowdich’s contemporary, the influential anthropologist John Crawfurd (1783–1868), author of History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), among other important anthropological material.17 Unlike Bowdich, Crawfurd goes to some length to show development and progress, and what might be called the differential descent of polygenism. For Crawfurd, the music of the Indian archipelago (now Indonesia) is fundamentally diverse, and progress is not geographically uniform: “Each tribe has its distinct national airs, but it is among the Javanese alone that music assumes the semblance of an art. These people have, indeed, carried it to a state of improvement, not only beyond their own progress in other arts, but much beyond, I think, that of all other people in so rude a state of society.”18 This becomes apparent in Crawfurd’s explanation of Javanese instruments, some purely native, and others imported. The suling (pictured among other Javanese instruments in figure 2.1) and serdam are flutes or fifes used among Malay tribes and are the only native wind instruments then known to the Indian islanders, while the Angklung, for example, “the rudest and earliest”19 of the wind instruments, “is confined to the mountaineers of Java, particularly the western end of the island.”20 Other instruments, like the rabab, come from the Persians; the gong, possibly from the Chinese; the fife from the Hindus; trumpets from the Persians and Europeans, stringed instruments from Malaysia and Persia, and percussion from Arabia, Europe and China. Underlying this organology is the polygenist idea that Javanese music, particularly in relation to the gamelan, represents a high point in the evolution of

14. Ibid., 364–65. 15. [James Cowles Prichard], Researches into the Physical History of Man, 127. 16. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 51. 17. For a compact, but definitive, examination of Crawfurd, see Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, 263–70. 18. Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. 1, 332–33. 19. Ibid., 333. 20. Ibid.

Figure 2.1. Javanese musical instruments. John Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, containing an Account of the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions, and Commerce of its Inhabitants, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1820), vol. 1, plate 9.

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musics of the Indian Archipelago, and though in origin geographically disparate they coalesce into a distinctly Javanese type of music. Interestingly, to prove this point, Crawfurd enlisted the help of William Crotch, who on his behalf examined Sir Stamford Raffles’s collection of Javanese instruments, held at the house of the Duke of Somerset, and provided helpful descriptions. Crawfurd dutifully cites Crotch’s response, as in the following extract when writing on the “style and character of Javanese music:”21 The instruments . . . are all in the same kind of scale as that produced by the black keys of the piano-forte; in which scale so many of the Scots and Irish, all the Chinese, and some of the East Indian and North American airs of the greatest antiquity were composed. The result of my examination is a pretty strong conviction that all the real native music of Java, notwithstanding some difficulties which it is unnecessary to particularize, is composed in a common enharmonic scale. The tunes which I have selected are all in simple common time. Some of the cadences remind us of Scots music for the bagpipe; others in the minor key, have the flat seventh instead of the leading note or sharp seventh,—one of the indications of antiquity. In many of the airs the recurrence of the same passages is artful and ingenious. The irregularity of the rhythm or measure, and the reiteration of the same sound, are characteristic of oriental music. The melodies are in general wild, plaintive, and interesting.22

Here Crotch raises some points that complement Crawfurd’s polygenist approach. First, the Scots, Irish, Chinese, East Indians, and North Americans are musically similar, but representative of an anthropological diversity woven into a geographically localized music. Second, despite the music of the Javanese deriving from “a common enharmonic scale,” it represents a separate and distinct musical entity from those with which it bears more obvious similarities. And third, and perhaps most important, there is a correlation between primitive music and antiquity. For Crotch this last point is significant because it raises questions impinging upon the teeming ancient and modern debate, to which, in his day, Crotch was one of the most significant contributors.23 For Crotch, and others, this hinges on distinguishing between “antiquity,” a historical period of the more distant past, and “ancient,” an aesthetic term of description. “Antiquity,” moreover, does not have strict chronological meaning. Thus, more recent music, sixteenth-century polyphony, for example, can be ancient, but not part of antiquity, and certain types of Gregorian chant can derive from antiquity, but not be ancient. The distinction is important because it is not in the age of a particular type of music

21. Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. 1, 339. 22. William Crotch, letter to Crawfurd, cited in ibid., 339–40. 23. For the most recent and complete work on Crotch, see Irving, Ancients and Moderns.

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(its antiquity), but in the quality of its ancientness—or what Crotch calls its sublimity—that music is most fully evolved. For Crotch “The rust of antiquity will never constitute sublimity.”24 Thus, while the putative antiquity of Javanese music may well be significant historically, it is in its ancientness that it can achieve sublimity and aesthetic recognition.

The Comparative Method This confusion over antiquity and ancientness is crucial because it has parallels in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anthropology. As Stocking says, the “ ‘battle of the ancients and the moderns’ opened a new phase of speculation” on the notion of human progress.25 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this led to what is known as the “comparative method,” in which modern primitives were used to understand and interpret historical peoples, and vice versa, and by the middle part of the nineteenth century the comparative method became codified in what Adam Kuper calls “the invention of primitive society.”26 Earlier in the nineteenth century, in the absence of historical data, the comparative method offered a counterfoil to monogenism of the Prichardian type, and allowed anthropologists, such as Crawfurd—and perhaps musicians like Crotch—to use antiquity and modernity as a vehicle for interpreting primitive cultures and their music. In anthropological terms the comparative method is described as a conflation of ethnography and archaeology, which “allowed nineteenth-century anthropologists to construct cultural evolutionary schemes in which descriptions of prehistoric artifacts were ‘fleshed out’ with descriptions of present-day ‘primitive’ peoples whose artifacts looked similar.”27 A good example of this, from Crawfurd’s time, is John Bigland’s An Historical Display of the Effects of Physical and Moral Causes on the Character and Circumstances of Nations Including a Comparison of the Ancients and Moderns in Regard to Their Intellectual and Social State (1816). The comparative method continued to find advocates for some time afterward, as in James Davies’s contribution to Sir George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology, and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (1855). Unlike Crotch, whose approach to non-Western music is at best unsupported scientifically, Davies is masterful in his detailed methodological and technical attention. Unlike most travel or explorational literature,

24. 25. 26. 27.

Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music, 71. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 11. See Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society. Erickson and Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory, 44–45.

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Grey’s Polynesian Mythology includes an in-depth musical appendix, and its title alone indicates its methodology: “On the Native Songs of New Zealand, and a comparison of the intervals discernible in them with the intervals stated to have been performed by the ancient Greeks in some of their divisions of the musical scale, called gšnoj enarmonikÒn, or by others armon…a.”28 As Davies says: My point is, to prove that the ancients did possess and practise a modulation which contained much less intervals than ours, and that such, or an approach to such, modulation (though probably but imperfect) is still retained among some people, and that the principles on which the Greeks founded their enharmonic genus, still survive in natural song, though I will not be bold enough to assert that sometimes these songs may not change into one of the chromatic crÒai, which, for want of practice, I might not be able to decide.29

One of the key words in this quotation is “natural.” When opening the appendix, Davies accepts that the emotive elevation of the voice, whether for reasons of pleasure or pain, produces a “modification of the voice we may call, in a wide sense, natural music.”30 This natural music was taken to its apogee by the Greeks, who systematized it into scales of different intervallic content. They took care “not to transgress those [laws] of nature, but judiciously to adopt, and as nearly as possible to define with mathematical exactness, those intervals which the uncultured only approach by the irregular modulation of natural impulses.”31 The Greeks harnessed nature, and made art its direct extension, and by virtue of this process secured within music a link to a more distant and even mythic past. The New Zealanders, on the other hand, “have been left to the impulses of a ‘nature-taught’ song,”32 and have not been “cramped by the trammels of a conventional system—the result of education and civilization.”33 Thus, there is not only an ontological bifurcation between the cultured civilized Greeks and the uncultured natural New Zealanders, but there is also an obvious, and essential, chronological dichotomy in which Greeks are effectively modern and New Zealanders almost preternatural. This is what Jahoda describes as “similarities in institutions and artefacts separated in space and time.”34 In Davies’s case, however, connection is made not simply from the Greeks to the New Zealanders, but also to the Chinese and Arabs. Of course, in doing so Davies illuminates many methodological flaws in the comparative method of its

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Davies, “Appendix,” 313. Ibid., 322. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 314. Ibid. Ibid. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 134.

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time. First, as he implies, it is possible for a society, now in a state of nature (“socalled uncivilised and savage nations”),35 to have degenerated from a point of civilization. Thus, technically, their music cannot be said to be natural, though they, as a society, are. Second, the abundance of musical diversity among modern “natural” peoples, such as the Chinese and Arabs, mitigates against comparison with a single historical locus like the Greeks, particularly if it cannot be proven that the civilization of the Greeks represented an influential musical hegemony. Third, there are often disparities arising from incomplete organological knowledge. And last, the problems of transcription mitigate against a clear interpretation of intervallic, and frequently rhythmic, content. From an anthropological standpoint, Davies’s comparative method also fits into a progressivist social evolutionism, which became increasingly prominent from the 1850s and 1860s. In some instances “Swiss lake habitations were [deemed] similar to those of 19th-century Maoris, and were taken to show [that] the same evolutionary track had been followed by both peoples, though the Maoris were well behind.”36 This type of anthropology, later codified by Spencer and Tylor, inevitably portrayed the savage as immature, unevolved, simple, and natural, and their music as similarly embryonic. Intriguingly Davies’s opening lines concerning the origin of music bear an enormous similarity to Spencer’s groundbreaking and much contested essay “The Origin and Function of Music,” written just a couple of years after Grey’s Polynesian Mythology. Spencer’s premise is that there is a “physiological relation between feeling and vocal sounds; that all the modifications of voice expressive of feeling are the direct results of this physiological relationship.”37 Compare this with Davies’s comment that “each [emotion] in its turn has prompted or suggested some modification of sound beyond the ordinary range of mere tame every-day discourse.”38 Spencer, for his part, regarded savage music as barely music at all, no doubt because of its rudimentary evolutionary position: “That music is a product of civilization is manifest: for though some of the lowest savages have their dance-chants, these are of a kind scarcely to be signified by the title music: at most they supply but the vaguest rudiment of music properly so called.”39 Davies looks to savage music more optimistically, though fundamentally no less deprecatingly. While Spencer denigrates savage music ipso facto, Davies is much more nuanced, especially in his suggestion that the music of some savage peoples may represent cultural degeneration rather than innate racial inferiority.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Davies, “Appendix,” 316. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 134. Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” 49. Davies, “Appendix,” 313. Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” 68.

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Degenerationism Although further study may well prove differently, from the 1820s to the 1840s attention given to music in published travel and explorational literature appears to be rather limited, apart from Edward Lane’s The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Examples from the 1840s are cursory and minimally informative. John Beecham’s Ashantee and the Gold Coast (1841) is, from a musical standpoint, a considerable disappointment in relation to Bowdich. Beecham provides only a very brief description of instruments, but does mention the fact that the natives of Cape-Coast Castle can play admirably, “by the ear, several of the most popular English tunes.”40 Frank S. Marryat’s Borneo and the Indian Archipelago (1848) and Alfred Wallace’s A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853) are further examples. Important anthropologically, they shed very little light on music. Marryat writes simply of a ceremonial parade, with “two musicians, one playing the drum, and the other a flageolet of rude construction.”41 Wallace, for all his renown and importance, offers little more, apart from one or two experiences of hearing “a great bassoon-looking instrument,”42 which women, on pain of death, must avoid hearing or seeing. Of the aborigines of the Amazon, Wallace notes their musical instruments as comprising a small drum, eight larger trumpets, numerous fifes and reed flutes, deer-bone fifes, a deer-skull whistle, and vibrating instruments made of tortoise and turtle shells.43 An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is entirely different in its approach. Lane is particularly concerned to situate music within the cultural life of modern Egyptians, and to that end typically discusses the relationship of music within the social fabric of their lives: “They [the professional musicians] are people of very dissolute habits; and are regarded as scarcely less disreputable characters than the public dancers. They are, however, hired at most grand entertainments to amuse the company.”44 Rana Kabbani describes Lane as “a selfappointed expert on the Orient,” and someone who “could not help falling victim to the common distortion of selectivity—of choosing to stress mainly what would interest a Western reader,”45 and to a great extent this is true in regard to music. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is Lane’s attempt to portray the cultural context of music as much as the music itself, something that those before him do only piecemeal, if at all. In doing so he offers one

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 169. Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, 132. Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, 348. Ibid., 504. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, vol. 2, 59. Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 38.

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of the period’s richest organological descriptions alongside social and cultural context, and supports this with extensive illustrations of a wide variety of instruments. Accordingly, from a taxonomic standpoint, Lane organizes instruments by social settings, rather than physical traits. Instruments are, therefore, grouped and described by: weddings, processions, harems, begging, pilgrimages, and so on, as in the listing of instruments suitable for “private concerts”: “The Egyptians have a great variety of musical instruments. Those which are generally used at private concerts are the ‘kemengeh,’ ‘kánoon,’ ‘ood,’ and ‘náy.’ ”46 As an extension of this approach, Lane goes to great lengths to ensure accuracy of depiction, whether by providing engraved illustrations or written description. He is particularly satisfied at having used a “camera-lucida” (perhaps the first to do so),47 for example, to make accurate pictures of instruments and musicians, and when engraved illustrations occur they include multiple-angle shots and images of instruments being played by natively dressed Egyptian men. Lane describes these instruments as beautifully crafted, and exquisite in their physical makeup. Of the “ ’ood” (pictured in figure 2.2) he writes: “The ‘ood’ is a lute, which is played with a plectrum. This has been for many centuries the instrument most commonly used by the best Arab musicians, and is celebrated by numerous poets. . . . The body of it is composed of fine deal, with edges, &c., of ebony: the neck, of ebony, faced with box and an ebony edge.”48 Although when discussing instruments Lane’s system of grouping by social context, rather than physical attributes, suggests a pretense to objectivity, in fact it is social class that dictates the relative merits of a particular instrument. When discussing the rabáb (pictured in figure 2.3), for instance, he depicts a much lowlier instrument, both in physical characteristics and social context: “A curious kind of viol, called ‘rabáb,’ is much used by poor singers, as an accompaniment to the voice.”49 Strangely, this sociological—and often socially hierarchical—arrangement of musical instruments is not paralleled in his musical examples, which, instead he divides by social function, such as “chiefly popular songs,” as well as “the call to prayer” and “the chanting of the Kur-a⬘n,” notated without “any of the embellishments which are added to them.”50 To the popular songs he adds texts that are not original, often replacing words “abounding with indecent metaphors, or

46. Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. 2, 60–61. 47. The camera lucida is “An instrument in which rays of light are reflected by a prism to produce an image on a sheet of paper, from which a drawing can be made,” Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 249. 48. Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. 2, 66–67. 49. Ibid., 70. 50. Ibid., 74.

Figure 2.2. The ’Ood. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 5th ed. 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1904), vol. 2, 67.

Figure 2.3. The Rabáb esh-Shá’er. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 5th ed. 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1904), vol. 2, 71.

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with plain ribaldry.”51 It is here that Lane’s Orientalism, or what Kabbani calls his “common distortion of selectivity,” becomes more apparent in a musical context. Nevertheless, where Lane’s descriptions of instruments are rather restrained, his choice of songs appears frequently prurient and arbitrarily lascivious, as in his very first choice of song: “Tread! O my joy! O my joy! (three times) Ardent desire of my beloved hath involved me in trouble.”52 Texts like these no doubt contribute to Lane’s reputation as a male fantasist of harem life,53 who promulgated some of Europe’s most popular and enduring Orientalist mythologies.54 Lewis writes of Lane as propounding a “hegemonic Orientalism,”55 and from a musical standpoint this characterization seems entirely plausible, insofar as the concentration of salacious music creates the illusion of normative musical practice. In anthropological terms, this simply underscores the morally degenerated, and hence hierarchically or developmentally lower, position in which Lane places Egypt within the context of East/West development. As he says, “science was cherished by the Arabs when all the nations of Europe were involved in the grossest ignorance.”56 Implicit within this is a European cultural supremacy predicated on advances over man’s sexual nature. From the 1830s, as Stocking suggests, civilization was defined in terms of things that reflected recent British experience: “the factory system and free trade; representative government and liberally political institutions; a middle-class standard of material comfort and the middle-class ethic of self-discipline and sexual restraint.”57 Translated into anthropological ideology, the sexualization of Egyptian music provided Lane—and his readers—with a means of expressing rational and manifest cultural hegemony. Lane’s Egypt is a degenerated Egypt along the lines of other great civilizations of the past, and the sexuality of its music, among many other things, is an expression of its then current state of degeneration. As descendants of an ancient and historically bona fide civilization, however, modern Egyptians—and their music—are largely remitted from the deprecating racializing discourse that marks so much anthropology of the period. Instead they are treated as fallen equals, of which sexual incontinence is but one example. Writing of their “industry,” for example, Lane muses that “It is melancholy to contrast the present poverty of Egypt with its prosperity in ancient times, when the variety, elegance, and exquisite finish displayed in its manufactures attracted the admiration of surrounding nations.”58

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. 2, 76. Ibid., 77. Macleod, “Cross-cultural Cross-dressing,” 64. Sardar, Orientalism, 44–46. Lewis, “Women and Orientalism,” 181. Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. 2, 57. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 35. Lane, Manners and Customs, vol. 2, 1.

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Sexualization In relation to similarly “esteemed” historical civilizations, Lane’s adaptation of Orientalist sexualization seems to be unusual in travel literature of the period. More often than not, in fact, music remains totally unsexualized—or rather, uneroticized—despite the obviousness of its social context. Sir John Bowring, for example, writes dispassionately that “the highest ambition of the fair sex in Siam is to possess the faculty of performing the graceful evolutions and charming tunes of the Lakhon pu ying, or dancing girls.”59 Other and later examples of less historically esteemed peoples dwell pruriently on the transmuted sexual exhilaration of dance music. In The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country (1857), for example, the Rev. Joseph Shooter reports on someone starting a fracas at a wedding: “He belonged to the bride’s party, who were engaged in dancing, when the bridegroom entered the isi-baya and careered before them in truly savage style. This was thought disrespectful to the dancers, and the giant stepped forward as their champion. He was very violent, flourished his assagai, and created no small disturbance. The bridegroom was equally excited.”60 Descriptions linking nakedness and music are also commonplace. Richard Burton’s hostile and sexualized account of East Africans in The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration (1860) is one example: “it is a truly offensive spectacle—these uncouth figures, running at a ‘gymnastic pace,’ half clothed except with grease, with pendent bosoms shaking in the air, and cries that resemble the howls of beasts more than any effort of human articulation.”61 Burton’s sexualization of music does not stop there, however. In fact, savage sexuality and musical impotence appear to go hand in hand. Writing again of East Africans, he claims that “In intellect the East African is sterile and incult [sic], apparently unprogressive and unfit for change. . . . Devotedly fond of music, his love of tune has invented nothing but whistling and the whistle.”62 Burton continues along these lines with painful regularity. The East African is sentient, yet ineffectually musical: “He delights in singing, yet he has no metrical songs: he contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rhyme, and repeats them till they nauseate.”63 While it is true that the sexualization of savagery was an integral part of racist anthropological discourse of the time,64 particularly in relation to black Africans, the treatment of music is occasionally purposefully desexualized. Thus, in ethically based travel literature nakedness is dealt with rather matter-of-factly when considered

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam, vol. 1, 150. Shooter, The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country, 235. Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, vol. 2, 337. Ibid. Ibid., 338. Miles and Brown, Racism, 37.

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in the context of music, especially in relation to dances. Gilbert Sproat, in his comparatively restrained description, tries to denude the dance of its inherent sexuality: “The seal-dance is a common one. The men strip naked, though it may be a frosty night, and go into the water, from which they soon appear, dragging their bodies along the sand like seals. They enter the houses, and crawl about round the fires.”65 The descriptive terminology of James Bonwick, author of Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians (1870), is also indicative of this approach, but where Sproat eschews any overt musical sexualization, Bonwick uses musical sexuality as a tool of morality, proof of the possibility of savage sexual restraint, and conversely, as proof of unrestrained degenerate sexual indulgence. In the first instance, Bonwick emphasizes the chasteness and moral relativizing of Tasmanian dancing, suggesting that the Tasmanians might even be shocked at the European practice of male/ female dancing: During this pleasing exercise, the performers were unencumbered with heavy drapery, preferring the Eden robe of simplicity, if not of innocence. While Asiatic peoples prefer the dancing executed by hirelings, and only women, for their amusement, and wonder at the European impropriety of respectable persons engaging in such play, and especially of the two sexes together, most savages, like Australians, Indians, &c. keep the monopoly for the masculine feet. The Tasmanian women were, however, permitted now and then to exhibit their charms and agility before their lords; and such movements were not more remarkable for their chastity of expression than those of more civilized races in ancient and modern times. But while some see in the Spanish fandango the most suggestive and obscene attitudes, others cannot find fault with the easy virtue dances of the Polynesians. . . . The morals of dancing may be, therefore, but a matter of taste.66

Later, however, Bonwick describes his savages as sexually bestial, in terms not dissimilar to those used by his contemporary, James Greenwood. Ellingson describes the animalizing language of Greenwood’s Curiosities of Savage Life (1863) as overwhelmingly negative and “intensified by racial invective and similes of bestiality,”67 and to some extent one could accuse Bonwick of similar tendencies. Notice, for example, how Bonwick elides naked dancing women with sexualized and ritualized displays of animality: As the Tasmanian belles were the musicians for the men, when they danced themselves they had to beat their own time, which was done by the flapping of their pendulous breasts. Their dances were often imitations of animal movements. . . . A lot of men laid hold of each other’s loins, moving round in a circle at a gallop, one holding

65. Sproat, Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, 66. 66. Bonwick, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, 35–36. 67. Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, 213.

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back as if reining-in the others, while a young women applied a whip lustily upon the backs of the horses, to hurry the creatures on.68

While reports of sexually contradictory mores are not uncommon for his time, in Bonwick savage sexuality becomes a powerful symbol for choice between virtue and vice, and music is simply part of that process. So where Captain T. H. Lewin can describe the Indian Chukmas as uniformly virtuous, in that they “allow no songs to be sung in or near their villages save those of religious character; love songs, they say, demoralize the young girls,”69 Bonwick is less absolute. In fact, Stocking views the whole of Bonwick’s work on Tasmania as fundamentally contradictory, and to a great extent one can observe this in microcosm in his attitudes towards music and sexuality. Insofar as Tasmanians could use music to cleanse rather than corrupt, Bonwick contradicts prevailing attitudes of aboriginal “weakness.”70 Drawing on Tylor, who considered Tasmanians living representatives of the Stone Age, Stocking describes Bonwick as a “latter-date Rousseauist, contrasting aboriginal ‘freedom of movement in the Bush’ with ‘the grooves of modern civilization.’ ”71

Instruments as Cultural Signifiers If Bonwick is unusual in portraying Tasmanians as more progressed than previously thought, he is also unusual in disregarding their musical instruments. Indeed, the discussion of musical instruments is an integral part of late nineteenth-century travel literature. Characteristically, instruments are organized in four different ways. First, they can be divided into winds, strings, and percussion, as in John Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), John Bowring’s The Kingdom and People of Siam (1857), Richard Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), or S. Wells Williams’s The Middle Kingdom (1883). Second, as in the case of Wallace’s A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853), instruments are divided into these basic types and then subdivided by material of construction. Third, instruments are presented ad hoc, along the lines of Thomas Williams in Fiji and the Fijians (1858). He writes, for example, that “Although most of the Fijians are fond of music, yet their own attempts in that direction are very rude. Their musical instruments, [shown in figures 2.4 and 2.5], are the conch-shell, the noseflute, the Pandean pipes, a Jew’s harp made of a strip of bamboo, a long stick,

68. 69. 70. 71.

Bonwick, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, 36. Lewin, Wild Races of South-Eastern India, 188. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, 20. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 283.

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Figure 2.4. Girl playing on the nose-flute. Thomas Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. 1. The Islands and their Inhabitants (London: Alexander Heylin, 1858), 163.

large and small drums, made of a log hollowed like a trough, and having cross pieces left near the ends, and bamboos used for the same purpose.”72 And fourth, and perhaps most frequently, instruments are not presented systematically, but form part of an ongoing narrative, as in John Anderson’s Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875 (1876) or Albert S. Bickmore’s Travels in the East Indian Archipelago (1868): “During the dance they sang a low, plaintive song, which was accompanied by a tifa and a number of small gongs, suspended by means of a cord in a framework of gaba-gaba, the dried midribs of palm-leaves.”73 Those who predicate their organology along the lines of the first and second categories often do so to make a point (explicit or implicit) about the importance of music within the higher development of a people, whereas those whose descriptions appear ad hoc

72. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. 1, 163–64. 73. Bickmore, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago, 190.

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Figure 2.5. Drums and musical instruments. Thomas Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. 1. The Islands and their Inhabitants (London: Alexander Heylin, 1858), 164.

(and usually briefly) tend to diminish its value to the detriment of any larger cultural development. Williams, for example, details musical instruments extensively in The Middle Kingdom (1883), and for him “no nation gives to this art a higher place.”74 On the other hand, Anderson, in Mandalay to Momien, describes the “strain” of orchestral music at a marriage feast ending “in great drunkenness, disorder, and often in a fight.”75 From an anthropological perspective, the emphasis on organological system, and its elevation or deprecation of musical instruments, is significant because it becomes a barometer for the developmental progress of a race toward civilization. And, as is later shown, it also serves as an expression of disciplinary progress in Victorian anthropology. When, in 1874, A. Lane Fox places musical instruments within the category of “miscellaneous

74. Williams, The Middle Kingdom, vol. 2, 94. 75. Anderson, Mandalay to Momien, 142.

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arts of modern savages” in the anthropological collection at the Bethnal Green Museum, he not only fixes their developmental position along a mix of Spencerian and Tylorian lines (to be discussed later)—effectively stranding them in time—he also materializes a long-standing, yet fiercely debated, stream of anthropological discourse: “The resemblance between the arts of modern savages and those of primeval man may be compared to that existing between recent and extinct species of animals . . . amongst the arts of existing people in all stages of civilisation, we are able to trace a succession of ideas from the simple to the complex, but not the true order of development by which those more complex arrangements have been brought about.”76 This view, fed by a host of travel literature and armchair anthropology, was soon to be overturned, and music was to play its part in this progression.

76. Pitt Rivers, “On the Principles of Classification Adopted in the Arrangement of His Anthropological Collection,” 307–8.

Chapter Three

Music in the Literature of Anthropology from the 1780s to the 1860s Among the earliest learned societies, both in Britain and abroad, there is evidence of an anthropological interest in music of non-Western cultures from the 1780s. William Jones, renowned scholar of Indian languages, literature, and philosophy, supreme court judge in Bengal from 1783 and founder of The Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, published Francis Fowke’s “On the Vina or Indian Lyre” in the first issue of the society’s Asiatick Researches in 1788. Not long afterward, he published his own work, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” in the third issue of the same journal in 1792. Gerry Farrell, in his reading of Kejariwal’s important study of the society,1 suggests that Jones effectively saved Indian music from oblivion,2 and that part of this salvage process was enabled by the professionalization that his society had begun to undergo. As Richard Drayton writes, “by the 1780s British India began to sustain its own centres of intellectual life. William Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1784, to encourage enquiry into ‘the History, Civil, and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia.’ ”3 From a musical standpoint, this is recognized as representing the very first steps in the history of British ethnomusicology. Bor, for example, writes of Fowke’s treatise as “highly accurate,”4 and Harold Powers describes Jones’s essay as bringing Indian music “to the attention of scholars.”5 Indeed from the time of Jones’s Asiatick Researches, non-Western music entered the increasingly professionalized world of academic anthropological scholarship. Inevitably this

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

See Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 4. Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” 243. Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 55. Powers, “Indian Music and the English Language,” 1.

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process was aided by a proliferation in domestic learned societies with anthropological interests, such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783), the Linnaean Society of London (1788), the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1799), the Geological Society of London (1807), the Royal Asiatic Society (1823), and the Royal Geographical Society (1830). From the 1840s anthropological societies emerged as independent entities, beginning with the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and the Ethnological Society of London (both 1843), and later the Anthropological Society of London (1865). In each case, societies published scholarly journals, which from the mid-1830s included musical references showing a noticeable level of interest. From that time music became an increasingly standard feature in anthropological literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jones’s work continued to be reviewed throughout this expanse of time, in periodicals like the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and the Asiatic Review6 as well as in generalist magazines like the Athenaeum7 and musicological writings with an anthropological interest, as in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review8 and books about the history of ancient or national music (to be discussed in later chapters).9 Although Jones was himself very clearly interested in music, and saw some early publications forwarded into the pages of Asiatick Researches, neither Bor nor Farrell suggest that this pattern continued into the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the impression given, particularly by Farrell, is of a geographically localized intellectual interest that did not translate beyond the few eighteenth-century articles already mentioned. Instead, the continuing interest in Indian music filtered into the realm of popular Hindostannie airs, leaving the more academic work to later figures such as N. Augustus Willard, author of A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan: Comprising a Detail of the Ancient Theory and Modern Practice (1834). Although one could construe the real-time transcription of “Hindostannie airs” and their counterparts in published travel literature as forerunners to fieldwork, in fact the Hindostannie airs remained part of the increasingly commercialized practice of Westernizing non-Western music. Unlike music appearing incidentally

6. See, for example, Dauney, “Observations with a View to an Inquiry into the Music of the East,” 3; and Howsin, “The Music of India,” 99. 7. See “The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan,” 807. 8. See, for example, F. W. H., “To the Editor. F. W. H., ‘Oriental Music Considered, in Three Essays,’ 456–57; ‘Oriental Music Considered. Essay the First,’ 457–63; ‘Oriental Music.’ Continuation of Essay the First,” 18–27; “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the Second,” 190–98; “Oriental Music Considered. Continuation of Essay the Second,” 417–21; “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the Third,” 27–36. 9. See, for example, Stafford, “Oriental Music.—The Music of Hindostan, or India,” 34–44; Engel, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, 151; Weber, A Popular History of Music from the Earliest Times, 71, 87; and Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 18.

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in travel literature, Hindostannie airs were collections of Indian songs that “were obviously in fashion at the time as picturesque mementos of the orient, but they also represented a popular genre of European song that would have resonances in the nineteenth century and beyond.”10 Woodfield calls the fascination with the airs an “intense fashion.”11 In contrast, the music notated down in travel literature was not destined, generally speaking, for wider commercial publication, apart from its own market in anthropological literature. Indeed, although the musical elements in travel literature might have circuitously entered a wider and more commercial musical market, the element of music in travel literature remained largely confined within anthropological interests of that kind. In other words, music in anthropological literature, and music in commercial publications, fed largely different markets. This is not to suggest, in terms of anthropological literature, that music failed to excite more academic or theoretical interest, but it would seem that it was not until the 1830s that music was given any level of real prominence, and even then discussions of music only appear as late as the first series of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Although Indian music had been a source of some curiosity among the British since the early seventeenth century,12 it was not until later in the eighteenth century that interest in it was manifest in published music or theoretical treatises. The earliest published transcriptions of Indian music, of a more popular Westernizing type, the “Hindostannie” airs, include W. H. Bird, The Oriental Miscellany (1789; [c.1805]); T. Williamson, Twelve Original Hindoostanee Airs: Compiled and Harmonized by T. G. Williamson [c.1800]; E. Jones, Lyric Airs: Consisting of Specimens of Greek, Albanian, Walachian, Turkish, Arabian, Persian, Chinese, and Moorish National Songs and Melodies (1804); W. Crotch, Specimens of Various Styles of Music ([1807]–15); C. Horn, Indian Melodies: Arranged for Voice and Piano-Forte as Songs, Duettos and Glees by C. E. Horn (1813); and E. Biggs, Twelve Hindoo Airs: With English Words Adapted to Them by Mr. Opie, and Harmonized for One, Two or Three Voices [1805].13 These were first published as separate collections and later sifted for publication into larger national compilations. As Farrell points out, they are significant not only because they comprise the first published transcriptions of Indian music into musical notation suitable for performance on Western instruments, but also because they “initiated another level of interplay

10. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 31. 11. Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 149. 12. Ibid., 8. Woodfield also writes: “In the early seventeenth century, the sheer novelty of the experience seized the imagination, and interesting descriptions were written by such as the much-travelled Cornish sea captain Peter Mundy.” (See Woodfield, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration, 276.) 13. Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 255–56.

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between Western and Indian music.”14 Not unrelated to these are details of various personal correspondence and diary entries of the time, such as that of Margaret Fowke (sister of Francis and daughter of Joseph), concerning her work in the area of musical transcription.15 The Fowke family was influential in the musical culture of Calcutta at the time, and as Farrell comments, “Their letters reveal not only their interest in collecting Hindustani Airs, but also their general role in the musical life of Calcutta at the time.”16 Another important figure is Sophia Plowden, friend of Margaret Fowke, and “who was responsible for the collection of the largest unpublished source of songs when she was at the court of Lucknow in 1786.”17 This comprises seventy-seven songs collected by Plowden and written out by John Braganza, among which is the source for some published music, such as “Saki a faslah” in William Crotch’s Specimens of Various Styles.18

Sir William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (1792) As mentioned above, the earliest scholarly writings on Indian music include Francis Fowke’s “On the Vina or Indian Lyre,” published in Asiatick Researches (1788),19 and the Orientalist Sir William Jones’s “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” published in Calcutta in 1792, but written originally in a shorter version in 1784.20 Like their counterparts in Hindostannie airs, the works of Fowke and Jones rely upon music taken from firsthand experience of Indian music in the field, but where Hindostannie airs provide overtly Orientalized arrangements for popular musical consumption, Fowke’s and Jones’s work is unreservedly

14. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 31. 15. Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 159–62. Margaret is known to have corresponded with William Jones for linguistic assistance with the texts to her Hindostannie airs (ibid., 13). 16. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 31. 17. Ibid., 32. 18. Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 164. 19. Ibid., 256. Fowke’s essay was also reprinted as “An Extract of a Letter On the Vina From Francis Fowke, Esq., To the President Asiatic Society of Bengal,” in Tagore, Hindu Music, 191–97, and appears in Franklin, Representing India, Vol. 7, 295–99. 20. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” in Tagore, Hindu Music, 125–60. Farrell calls this “the first major English-language treatise on the music of India” (Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 23). For more information on Jones and Indian music see Woodfield, Music of the Raj, passim; Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air,’ ” 189–211; Woodfield, “Collecting Indian Songs in Late 18th-Century Lucknow,” 73–88; Platt and Woodfield, “Jones, Sir William (ii),” in Grove Music Online; and Farrell, “Sir William Jones and C. R. Day,” 13–30.

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academic in form, content, and methodology. Fowke, for example, uses the harpsichord to gauge the tuning of the vina, writing to Jones that “You may absolutely depend upon the accuracy of all that I have said respecting the construction and scale of this instrument: it has been done by measurements: and with regard to the intervals I would not depend upon my ear, but had the Been tuned to the harpsichord, and compared the instruments carefully note by note more than once.”21 Jones clearly approved of Fowke’s approach, and although arguably less is known about the methodology underlying Jones’s musical scholarship,22 he, like Fowke, is known to have conducted research of a comparative kind: I tried in vain to discover any difference in practice between the Indian scale and that of our own; but, knowing my ear to be very insufficiently exercised, I requested a German professor of music to accompany with his violin a Hindoo lutanist, who sung [sic] by note some popular airs on the loves of CRISHNA and RHADA; he assured me that the scales were the same; and Mr. SHORE afterwards informed me, that, when the voice of a native singer was in tune with the harpsicord [sic] he found the Hindu series of seven notes to ascend, like ours, by a sharp third.23

In addition, Jones was also able to bring the full weight of his linguistic skills to bear on his exploration of Hindu music, and indeed his treatise reveals an unprecedented range and breadth of erudition. So exacting, in fact, was Jones’s critical approach that he purposefully limits his research of Hindu music to Sanskrit, rather than Persian, texts: “that a man, who knows the Hindoos only from Persian books, does not know the Hindoos; and that an European, who follows the muddy rivulets of Mussalman writers on India, instead of drinking from the pure fountain of Hindoo learning, will be in perpetual danger of misleading himself and others.”24 The text Jones consulted –tha’s early seventeenth-century music treatise Ra–gavibodha25 principally is Somana (which the Swiss Orientalist Colonel Anthony Polier “preserved from destruction”),26 and elements of the thirteenth-century Sangi¯taratna–kara of S´ –arngadeva27 cross-referenced within it. S´ –arngadeva’s treatise was written in the first half of the thirteenth century, becoming the standard reference point for later

21. Fowke, “An Extract of a Letter on the Vina,” 193–94. 22. Farrell writes that “It would be intriguing to know more about Jones’s ‘fieldwork’ approach to Indian music” (Indian Music and the West, 26). 23. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 141–42. 24. Ibid., 136. 25. See Nijenhuis, The Ra–gas of Somana–tha. 26. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 137. For further reference to Polier see Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 150, 152, and 162. 27. See Sangi¯taratna–kara of S´ a–rngadeva, trans. R. K. Shringy.

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authorities on music,28 and as Jones notes of Somana–tha, his work “is more than once mentioned in it.”29 For all his interest in Somana–tha and other Sanskrit authors, Jones nevertheless produces a treatise, curiously, with very little music, and in fact his treatise includes only one example (see example 3.1), “An Old Indian Air” taken from Ra–gavibodha.30 This is placed at the end of the treatise, with the following prefatory remarks: I have noted Sóma’s air in the major mode of A, or sa, which, from its gaiety and brilliancy, well expresses the general hilarity of the song; but the sentiment, often under pain, even in a season of delights, from the remembrance of pleasures no longer attainable, would require in our music a change to the minor mode; and the air might be disposed in the form of a rondeau ending with the second line, or even with the third, where the sense is equally full, if it should be thought proper to express by another modulation that imitative melody, which the poet has manifestly attempted: the measure is very rapid, and the air should be gay, or even quick, in exact proportion to it.31

What emerges from this description, and descriptions elsewhere in Jones’s treatise, is not only a concern over music’s ability to express the sentiment of poetry, but the implication of music’s inferior position in relation to it. As he says in “An Essay on the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative” (1772): “What has been said of poetry, may with equal force be applied to musick, which is poetry, dressed to advantage.”32 Unsurprisingly, this attitude often reappears in his musical treatise, not least in its opening paragraph: music only becomes a fine art when it is “allied nearly to verse, painting, and rhetoric; but subordinate in its functions to pathetic poetry, and inferior in its power to genuine eloquence.”33 This hierarchical view, that music is inferior to poetry, is indicative not simply of a concern over music’s ability to express the sentiment of poetry. It encapsulates traditional views out of which Jones would develop and situate his own more progressive and proto-Romantic philosophy, namely, that while individually music and poetry were capable of imitating nature to varying degrees, united they rose to unprecedented levels of emotional expression. This same view is presaged in 1744 in the writing of James Harris, who says that while individually music and poetry subsist “in the mere raising of the affections,” the “two arts can never be so powerful singly as when they are properly united.”34 John Brown develops this

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Nijenhuis, Musicological Literature, 12. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 137. See Nijenhuis, The Ra–gas of Somana–tha, vol. 1, 95–96 and vol. 2, 73–74. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 159. Jones, “An Essay on the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative,” 344. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 125. Harris, Three Treatises, 39.

Example 3.1. “An Old Indian Air” from Sir William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos: Written in 1784, and since much enlarged [1792], By the President [of the Asiatic Society of Bengal],” in Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Hindu Music (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1882/1994), 159.

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in A Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music (1763),35 suggesting that as music and poetry were nascently conjoined, yet historically separated, their reunion would inveigh music with a heightened emotional content. Jones echoes this, claiming that “if the first language of man was not both poetical and musical, it is certain, at least that in countries where no kind of imitation seems to be much admired, there are poets and musicians both by nature and by art.”36 These ideas are set in particular relief when gauging Jones’s essay on imitation in relation to his other writings on music, confirming for Abrams and Wellek the essay’s status as a “locus for pre-Romantic literary criticism,”37 and for Michael Franklin as a rearrangement “of the aesthetic premises of neo-classicism into the poetics of Romanticism.”38 Jones encapsulates this in his intention “to prove, that, though poetry and musick have, certainly, a power of imitating the manners of men, and several objects in nature, yet, that their greatest effect is not produced by imitation, but by a very different principle; which must be sought for in the deepest recesses of the human mind.”39 What one finds in these deepest recesses are passions: as he says, “it will appear, that the finest parts of poetry, musick, and painting, are expressive of the passions, and operate on our minds by sympathy.”40 Echoing Harris and Brown, among others, Jones suggests that music is not expressive of the passions in and of itself, however, but expressive only when it is conjoined to poetry: “we may define original and native poetry to be the language of the violent passions, expressed in exact measure, with strong accents and significant words; and true musick to be no more than poetry, delivered in a succession of harmonious sounds, so disposed as to please the ear.”41 In Jones’s later “A Hymn to Sereswaty” (1785), this conception of musical and poetical union is allegorized in the character of Saraswati, consort of Brahma the Creator, and Hindu Goddess of music and rhetoric:

35. Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power. 36. Jones, “An Essay on the Arts,” 338. 37. Franklin, Sir William Jones, 337. See Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, and Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950. 38. Franklin, Sir William Jones, 337. 39. Jones, “An Essay on the Arts,” 337. 40. Ibid., 346. 41. Ibid., 342. Inevitably, Jones’s theories of imitation and expression, and his hierarchical conception of poetry and music, bear similarities to other contemporary writings, such as Charles Avison’s An Essay on Musical Expression (1752) and Daniel Webb’s Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (1769). According to Lippman, however, it was Jones who first contradicted “the widespread identification of imitation and expression,” conceiving them as strategic opposites (Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 106).

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In this character she is addressed in the following ode, and particularly as the Goddess of Harmony; since the Indians usually paint her with a musical instrument in her hand: the seven notes, an artful combination of which constitutes Musick and variously affects the passions, are feigned to be her earliest production; and the greatest part of the Hymn exhibits a correct delineation of the Rágmálá, or Necklace of Musical Modes, which may be considered as the most pleasing invention of the ancient Hindus, and the most beautiful union of Painting with poetical Mythology and the genuine theory of Musick.42

As Franklin points out, the hymn is as much a paean to Saraswati, as it is a testimony to Jones’s widely erudite musical and literary knowledge. Using the extramusical associations of the Hindu modes (ra–gas), such as color, emotion, season, and deity, Jones uses the modes as allegorical expressions of the union of the arts and senses, and attempts “to reproduce faithfully the graphic representation of the modes which he had examined in the ancient paintings of the Ra–gma–la–s.”43 This is evident from the opening stanza, when he describes the origin of the modes in a flurry of associative (what Franklin calls “synaesthetic”) ideas: Sweet grace of BREHMA’s bed! Thou, when thy glorious lord Bade airy nothing breathe and bless his pow’r, Satst with illumin’d head, And, in sublime accord, Sev’n sprightly notes, to hail th’auspicious hour, Ledst from their secret bow’r: They drank the air; they came With many a sparkling glance, And knit the mazy dance, Like yon bright orbs, that gird the solar flame, Now parted, now combin’d, Clear as thy speech and various as thy mind.44 This integrated association of ideas, which in the hymn Jones envisions as an extension of Saraswati’s power over music and poetry, forms a central feature of his proto-Romantic aesthetics of expression. But where in the essay and hymn Jones explores these ideas conceptually, in his musical treatise he actually –tha’s “air,” and in attempts to treat them practically, by the inclusion of Somana doing so, Jones speaks in the language of translation. He does this not to denote

42. Jones, “The Argument,” 114. 43. Ibid. 44. Jones, “The Hymn,” 116.

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music’s traditionally inferior position in relation to poetry, but to reunify music with its original sister art: When such aids as a perfect theatre would afford are not accessible, the power of music must in proportion be less; but it will ever be considerable, if the words of the song be fine in themselves, and not only well translated into the language of melody, with a complete union of musical and rhetorical accents, but clearly pronounced by an accomplished singer, who feels what he sings, and fully understood by a hearer, who has passion to be moved; especially if the composer has availed himself in his translation (for such may composition very justly be called) of all those advantages with which nature, ever sedulous to promote our innocent gratifications, abundantly supplies him.45

Here, and elsewhere, Jones writes of music specifically as an act of poetic translation—one that has the power to translate poetry “into the language of melody” and thus speak to the passions in a listener. When speaking of the music of the ancient Greeks, for example, he writes somewhat wistfully that “this delightful art [music] was long in the hands of poets.”46 Indeed, for Jones, music, when translated from poetry, succeeds in overcoming its lower imitativeness of nature, and becomes the greater Romantic force of heightened emotional expression. Batteux intimates this when he remarks that the artist should “make a choice among the fairest parts of Nature and build up from these an exquisite whole which shall be more perfect than Nature herself, without, however, ceasing to be natural,”47 a comment that Lippman sees as taking Batteux from the principle of the “imitation of nature” to the “imitation of beautiful nature”48—effectively from imitation to expression. Abrams, similarly, describes this progression in English contemporaries of Batteux as one from “real nature” to “nature improved,” or “heightened,” or “refined,” or in the French phrase, “la belle nature.”49 Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, Jones refers to Batteux at the opening of his essay on imitation and later seems to paraphrase him when writing of the Sapphic ode. Indeed, according to Jones, if the Sapphic ode with all its natural accents, were expressed in a musical voice (that is, in sounds accompanied with their Harmonicks), if it were sung in due time and measure, in a simple and pleasing tune, that added force to the words without stifling them, it would then be pure and original musick . . . not an imitation of nature but the voice of nature herself.50

45. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 130. 46. Ibid., 132. 47. Batteux, Les Beaux Arts Reduits à un Même Principe, cited in Fubini, A History of Music Aesthetics, 186. (Fubini incorrectly cites the work as having first been published in 1747.) 48. Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 88. 49. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 35. 50. Jones, “An Essay on the Arts,” 341.

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As stated previously, what is important here is not the fact that music can aspire to being “the voice of nature herself,” but the fact that conjoined to poetry music can only be pure and original and not an imitation of nature. There are two types of music: an inferior one, in which music is an imitation of nature, and hence lacking in purity and originality; and, superior one, in which music is not an imitation of nature, and hence pure and original. The word “original” here is significant, because only when music loses imitativeness can it be expressive of its original passion, as Brown suggests. Accordingly, for Jones, music loses its imitativeness, and gains its expressivity, only to the extent that it has been successfully translated from poetry. Only then does it become what could be called a Romantic paradigm—“the voice of nature herself.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jones’s translations are in themselves significant as denominators of quality, for unlike Renaissance translators who use inkhorn (pedantic) terms, Jones relies on Asian, Persian, and Sanskrit transliterations in his translations for the purposes of establishing authenticity or verisimilitude. As Cannon suggests, it was precisely this feature that gave Jones centrality in this history of Orientalism: “When the Romantics whom he inspired began to use such words and borrowed other words on their own, he further became a prime mover in the ‘Orientalizing’ of Europe and America.”51 In musical terms it was this same attitude that gave Jones his centrality, for while in linguistic translation Jones sought authenticity by heightening its resemblance to the original (through the use of transliterated terms), in musical transcription Jones sought authenticity by heightening its resemblance to poetry. This is particularly evident in the introductory remarks to his musical transcription in “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” in which Jones conflates terms of a poetical and musical kind into the likes of “poetical modulation.” He even italicizes this alongside the words “metre” and “mode,” just to reinforce the conjunction: the Hindoo poets never fail to change the metre, which is their mode, according to the change of subject or sentiment in the same piece; and I could produce instances of poetical modulation (if such a phrase may be used) at least equal to the most affecting modulations of our greatest composers: now the musician must naturally have emulated the poet, as every translator endeavours to resemble his original.52

In such a description it is clear that Jones intends to retain poetry within music in the same way a translator retains the original within his translation. And despite his own misgivings about the transcription and his acknowledgment of its imperfections, Jones’s larger philosophical intentions are clear. By introducing his readers to Hindu music in a way that they could comprehend—through

51. Cannon, “Oriental Jones,” 41. 52. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 157.

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conventional Western notation, and by means however flawed—he translated an otherwise closed musical world into something eminently comprehensible.

Early to Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writings and Problems of Methodology The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1823 by the Sanskrit scholar Henry Colebrooke, as a British counterpart to Jones’s Asiatic Society. Its journal was published from 1824 as Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and from 1834 as the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. The earliest substantive reference to music is as an excerpt from “Captain Low’s History of Tennaserim,”53 which provides an extensive amount of notated music as well as illustrations of musical instruments. Low divides his relatively brief, but important, article into a very short introduction, musical instruments, the concert band, or “auyen,” and songs, and follows a relatively conventional pattern of travel literature of the time. Unusually, however, musical instruments are categorized by their ceremonial function, rather than physical characteristics (although these are detailed), according to whether they form an outdoor or indoor band. The outdoor band, “used on occasions of ceremony, and in processions,”54 comprises numerous drums, gongs, trumpets, mouth-reeds and flutes; the indoor band (pictured in figure 3.1), a harp (saun), various stringed instruments (magyaun; thró), a flute (pillúí), trumpet (hné or hní), cymbals (ye-gwin), and drums (ozí; segé). Low’s songs comprise numerous examples from Siam and Malaysia, and one from Burma, the first two being noted down by “Che Draman, a [presumably native] inhabitant of Penang,” and the Burmese song by a Lieutenant Sherman of the Madras Infantry. Sherman, in fact, not only supplied the Burmese music, but appears to have revised it and the Siamese and Malayan music as well. Intriguingly, however, the Siamese and Malayan songs, noted originally by a native, are transcribed in largely conventional Western notation tonally, metrically, and rhythmically, whereas the Burmese song, provided by Lieut. Sherman, is more attentive to non-Western detail. For the “Burman Air,” Low provides a nota bene to the effect that in playing the air “great attention must be paid to the dotted notes and slurs, to give them their natural effect. They, if played on a third flute [flageolet], sound precisely like that of the Burmese, and will agree with any

53. Lt. Col. James Low, of the 46th Madras Native Infantry, was in civil charge of Province Wellesley, inland of Penang on the Malay peninsula, and appears to have never finished his history. See Pollock, “The Library of the Royal Asiatic Society and Its Collections Relating to Southeast Asia,” 313. 54. “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” 48.

Figure 3.1. Burman musical instruments [the indoor band]. [Lt. Col. James Low], “Music,” in “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 4 (1837): 49.

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of their instruments.”55 Not only does Sherman attempt to incorporate subtle distinctions of rhythm (dotted notes and slurs), but he incorporates into the Burmese song subtleties of pitch, by including G
and Gs. The following compares the notation of an excerpt from the first Siamese Air (see example 3.2) with that of the “Burman Air” (see example 3.3), and shows how Sherman sought to preserve the integrity of the original air, in some contradistinction to common practice for equivalent music of the Hindostannie airs. From an anthropological standpoint, Low’s article is difficult to place, because the music and the ideas are somewhat at odds. Sherman’s more uncompromising approach to musical detail lends Low’s work an air of anthropological authority that does not occur with more popularizing Hindostannie airs. On the other hand, this is slightly undermined by the fact that Low compares the Burmese mouth-reed to the Scottish “Pipe of the North,”56 and in so doing aligns himself with Crotch’s normative views on Javanese music as retold in Crawfurd’s debatable, polygenist, History of the Indian Archipelago (1820). This type of inconsistency, arising out of a slight disparity between musical transcription and anthropological discourse, is arguably unusual for its time, although it does highlight problems of methodological consistency. Among the first to deal specifically with issues of methodology is William Dauney, author of “Observations with a View to an Inquiry into the Music of the East” (1841). Dauney, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and compiler of Ancient Scottish Melodies (1838), inaugurates a comparative musicological methodology by suggesting that although the modern European system may possibly be the best which can be adopted . . . this can only be known for certain by an extensive comparison with other systems. The furtherance of such inquiries, therefore, may lead to a direct improvement in the cultivation of music, while there can be no doubt that the resources of that art would be immensely enriched by a more complete knowledge of the different styles of melody which prevail in foreign countries, and copious and authentic collections of the airs themselves.57

As Dauney goes on to say, up to the time of writing his article most writing about non-Western music—particularly scales and melodies—had been confined to travel literature, a fact more or less proven by evidence to date. As such it was written by people with only limited musical capabilities, or by people with ideologies (especially racial) that mitigated against an unbiased examination of the musical object they studied. Dauney takes umbrage at Bowdich’s article on

55. “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” 55. 56. Ibid., 48. 57. Dauney, “Observations with a View to an Inquiry into the Music of the East,” 1.

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Example 3.2. Siamese air. [Lt. Col. James Low], “Music,” in “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 4 (1837): 51–52.

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Example 3.3. Burman air. [Lt. Col. James Low], “Music,” in “Captain Low’s History of Tennasserim,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 4 (1837): 55.

Ashantee music, for example, because of Bowdich’s seemingly irrelevant comments on hearing a savage sing the Hallelujah chorus in the African wilds. More substantially, he faults Bowdich, among others, for his inability to translate musical difference into a medium of notation comprehensible to the Western reader. As he says, “The public, generally, have no idea of the difficulty of putting into correct notation airs that are sung or played by people of various countries, who not only use musical instruments different from ours, but musical intervals to which we are not accustomed.”58 Accordingly, the first step is to procure the help

58. Ibid., 1–2.

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of persons with native knowledge and the capability of notating melodic and intervallic complexities in European notation. Because, furthermore, Eastern music is not intended to be used harmonically or contrapuntally—these being European inventions—it is considered to be entirely melodic. As such it must be treated with reference to its capabilities for melody only; and this is the more necessary to be kept in view, as many excellent practical musicians are apt to suppose (although there cannot be a greater mistake) that where a foreign melody will not yield to the application of modern European harmony, it must be defective—that there must be something wrong in the manner in which it is performed, and for this reason intractable airs of this kind are often thrown into a modern shape, in order to be adapted to our major and minor scales, with their diatonic and chromatic intervals.59

Dauney continues with a fascinatingly modern desiderata, and one that would not be met in anthropological terms until the publication of the first issue of Notes and Queries on Anthropology in 1874, when Carl Engel would outline and codify protomodern ethnomusicological practice. He writes that “the minds of the persons employed be divested of all such preconceived notions, and that they be instructed to take down the music with the strictest fidelity.”60 Dauney not only sets his mind against aesthetic preconceptions filtering down into transcription, he also takes a swipe at the practice, outlined precisely in the relation of Sherman and Low, in which Eastern music is arranged, that is, effectively Westernized, along the lines of Hindostannie airs. This is especially egregious when the principal travel writer (in the above case Low) defers his music to the shallow distortions of a biased musician (Sherman). Dauney comments on this in reference to examples of Indian music in the next issue of the Journal of the Asiatic Society, in which he notices some resemblance to various Scottish tunes. Interestingly, however, he resists analogical temptation, which Low does not, and claims that his “belief in their fidelity is somewhat shaken by a note of the Editor, in which he speaks of their having been set to music by one person, and arranged by another.”61 This is arguably, the earliest methodological rejection of the practice of Hindostannie airs, because Dauney singularly rejects any process of hegemonic Westernization either in musical realization or in methodological framework. The second step in studying Eastern music is an examination of modern Eastern instruments, both in terms of their scales, intervals, and melody, and their place within art and literature. Thus, disparities between modern practice and ancient art can be used to assess the relative progress or decline of a particular musical culture, as with India or Persia. The harp is a case in point, because

59. Dauney, “Observations with a View to an Inquiry into the Music of the East,” 3. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid.

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it is often subject to the most unsubstantiated and “fanciful”62 theories, such as in John Gunn’s An Historical Inquiry into the Performance of the Harp in the Highlands of Scotland, from the Earliest Times until it was Discontinued, about the Year 1734 (1807). Gunn suggests that the Caledonian harp derives from ancient Egypt, and in principle this process is theoretically sound. But what Gunn and others like him lack are facts that substantiate theory, and only through the wellinformed study of ancient manuscripts including music notation can theory be substantiated by fact. Taking this delimitation into account, Dauney’s chronologically comparative methodology could be said to owe something to an entrenched social evolutionism of the kind Adam Smith, and others, promulgated in mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh lectures.63 More likely, however, is the possibility that Dauney is translating a broad Prichardian comparative methodology into a musical sphere, by distinguishing between “development and derivation, not progress but origin.”64 Dauney is not interested in showing development, hence separating himself from Scottish Enlightenment figures, but in establishing strata of historical fact that can be used in the comparative study of any given Eastern or Western musical object. In this sense, one could consider him a rank-and-file diffusionist, which according to Herzfeld is anyone interested in the ideas, practices, and artifacts spreading “through social contacts across the surface of the earth according to quite diverse logics, accumulating very different histories.”65 Certainly, Dauney talks of the “analogous system of the Greek modes,”66 for instance, rather than clearly demarked influences, and writing of the supposed influence of Roman Catholic ritual music in Scotland, he claims that recent comparisons between Scottish vocal music and plainchant were unfounded, not because similarities do not exist, but because “one has been composed as nearly as possible in conformity with the laws by which the other is regulated. . . . [I]f such an argument were to be admitted, it might naturally be asked, why the same results have not taken place in Italy, Spain, France, and other countries.”67 As it so happens, in defining folk music, Dauney is perhaps at his most Prichardian, situating himself within growing trends of ethnology in which comparative reference to history was increasingly privileged as a methodological tool. This approach is reflected in Prichard’s 1847 Presidential Anniversary address to the Ethnological Society of London: “Ethnology refers to the past. It traces the history of human families

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Ibid., 4. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 14. Ibid., 51. Herzfeld, Anthropology, 141. Dauney, “Observations,” 7. Ibid.

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from the most remote times that are within the reach of investigation, inquires into their mutual relations, and endeavours to arrive at conclusions, either probable or certain, as to the question of their affinity or diversity of origin.”68 An anonymous review of Prichard’s The Natural History of Man (1842) brings his approach into greater focus, suggesting that “ethnology likewise obtains resources for pursuing the investigation of the history of nations and of mankind from many other quarters. It derives information from the works of ancient historians, and still more extensively from the history of languages and their affiliations.”69 Dauney translates this effortlessly into a Prichardian ethnological methodology, writing that national music . . . is amongst the oldest and the most lasting of their [a people’s] relics. Carried down from father to son, like an heir-loom in a family. . . . It bears a pretium affectionis, and is prized more because it is our own, and associated with ties of kindred and home, than from any intrinsic excellence in the music itself. It is probably, therefore, that it was original destination, rather than choice, which assigned to this and other countries their particular style of national music.70

Incorporating Prichardian language into his own methodology, Dauney concludes that what affinities exist between different nations “among whom the same description of music was found to prevail, would depend upon the nature of the coincidences, which upon a careful analysis might be found to exist, whether they were systematic and regular, or whether they were merely occasional and fortuitous.”71 As a function of this, he also questions the absence of music in serious anthropological research: The history of music and of musical instruments has been too often regarded as little better than a topic of idle amusement, unbefitting the gravity of the philosopher and the historian; and yet, from their universality throughout the world, the relation in which they stand to the other arts and sciences, and their immediate connexion with the poetry, literature, manners and customs of nations, it may safely be affirmed that there are no researches which are capable of eliciting a larger body of facts and observations, which may be turned to account in the illustration of periods of history, even the most remote and obscure; and the more so, as they embrace a field which has been comparatively neglected.72

Needless to say Dauney is circumspect in the success he projects for his ideas. But it is precisely these types of ideas that would inform later ethnomusicological

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Prichard, “On the Relations of Ethnology to Other Branches of Knowledge,” 214. “The Natural History of Man By James Cowles Prichard, M.D. London. 1842,” 216. Dauney, “Observations,” 7–8. Ibid., 8. Ibid.

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methodology, even for later anthropologists like Tylor and Myers. It would seem that Dauney was in fact very much a man before his time, because there appears to be little evidence to suggest that the situation had changed substantially in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, despite the founding of various ethnological and anthropological societies and institutions from that time. Occasionally items appear in their journals, of course, often in methodologies not dissimilar to Dauney. Thomas Traill, for instance, writes from this methodological standpoint in his “Dissertation on a Peruvian Musical Instrument like the Syrinx of the Ancients,” read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1850. As with Dauney, the theoretical template is entirely ethnological—obvious from the title alone. Like Dauney, Traill’s interest is not motivated simply by historical ethnological interest, but also by a more immediate interest in objects of national (in Dauney’s case, Scottish) relevance. He writes: “The Peruvian antiquity in question is, in form and principle, similar to the Syrinx of the Greeks and Romans, or Pan’s Pipe, well known in England by the somewhat barbarous name of Pandean Pipes; and in the Italo-Helvetian cantons by the appropriate denomination of Organetto, a diminutive of Organo, of which it is most probably the prototype.”73 Traill describes the instrument in minute detail, and then proceeds to a comparison with historical pipes and organs from ancient Greece, the Old Testament, and early Christian history. These are, in less detail, compared to modern instruments of Arabia, Japan, and various West European countries, and the Peruvian instrument is lastly examined for its scale. The scale is of particular interest, as it “is founded on a system of tetrachords, as was that of a more refined people,—the ancient Greeks.”74 Traill’s comment, however, about “a more refined people,” hints at a developmentalist attitude that is entirely absent in Dauney, and there is a comparative quality about his work that embraces more than Dauney’s perhaps more normative ethnological methodology. Interestingly, Traill ends by praising William Jones for having linked literature and the arts in Ethiopia, Egypt, and India, and more recently, “Humboldt, Aglio, and several American travellers”75 for having linked Peru, Mexico, and other Central American countries with Asia. The link to Jones and especially Alexander von Humboldt is more than casual, as it places Traill’s interests within a comparative linguistic context. Humboldt is especially interested in language for its ability to demark racial descent and diffusion, and Traill even quotes Humboldt in saying much the same: “If language supply but feeble evidence of communication between the two worlds, this communication

73. Traill, “Dissertation on a Peruvian Musical Instrument like the Syrinx of the Ancients,” 124. 74. Ibid., 129. 75. Ibid., 130.

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is fully proved by the cosmogonies, the monuments, the hieroglyphics, and institutions of the people of America and Asia.”76 For Humboldt, languages emerged from a common original source, and “linked together physical and mental powers and dispositions in a thousand varied forms.”77 For Traill this presumably included music, as his article attests. Where Humboldt speaks of language, Traill speaks of music. Music, like language, has the capacity to illuminate commonalities of origin and channels of dispersion. It is of some interest, therefore, that in his fundamentally ethnological methodology Traill focuses on scales as comparative linguistic tools. As such the Peruvian instrument provides real proof of tetrachordal scalar construction, with presumed subdivisions into major and minor modes, and these can be used to identify relationships with other musical cultures evincing similar constructions. Within the context of this musical anthropology, Traill’s use of Humboldtian linguistics represents a high point of methodological application. Incorporating much of Dauney’s vision for musical anthropology, Traill, like Humboldt, manages to address issues of comparison without reference to the aesthetically delimiting discourse of racism. Traill’s advance does not, however, appear to have been taken up by the anthropological communities with any alacrity, and indeed it was not until the 1860s that music formed a point of methodological discussion as it had in Dauney’s paper. The Ethnological Society, for example, continued to produce musical material mainly of the travel literature type. Oldfield’s work on “The Aborigines of Australia” is an example of this, in providing a brief and rather unrevealing narrative of his musical experiences. Of particular interest to him—and of greater anthropological relevance—is his description of the proliferation of songs: “New fashions in songs and dances travel very far, being passed on from tribe to tribe, so that it happens that they get among people who understand neither the origin of the dances nor the language of the songs; so that those seeking information on either are very liable to be deceived.”78 Although this linguistic note, en passant, would certainly have interested ethnologists at this time, it nonetheless seems to prove Stocking’s belief that ethnology—rather than anthropology—of the time was “pursued far afield by men who had at best tenuous ties to the world of British science, archaeology and physical anthropology.”79 Stocking’s point has relevance in relation to music, but only up to the 1860s, because, as previously mentioned, musical references continued to lack methodological framing.

76. 77. 78. 79.

Alexander von Humboldt, cited in ibid., 121–22. Hannaford, Race, 263. Oldfield, “The Aborigines of Australia,” 258. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 262.

Part Two

Musicology in Transition to Evolution

Chapter Four

Cultural Anthropology after Darwin Without question, anthropology was irrevocably changed by Darwin. Where previously anthropology remained disparate both in its theoretical and professional constructions, after Darwin it emerged as a unified intellectual discipline. This is not to suggest that evolutionary theory was uniformly accepted, nor that it provided an immediately unifying methodological framework for understanding anthropology. What it did do, however, was to focus anthropological minds on a single idea that spanned the full conceptual horizon. As Harris says, Darwin “put together an argument for the evolution of species that was unprecedented in detail, accuracy, and scope.”1 At the same time, it completely undermined previous systems of thought. According to Stephen Jay Gould: No scientific revolution can match Darwin’s discovery in degree of upset to our previous comforts and certainties. . . . The difficulties lie not in this simple mechanism [evolution] but in the far-reaching and radical philosophical consequences—as Darwin himself well understood—of postulating a causal theory stripped of such conventional comforts as a guarantee of progress, a principle of natural harmony, or any notion of an inherent goal or purpose. Darwin’s mechanism can only generate local adaptation to environments that change in a directionless way through time, thus imparting no goal or progressive vector to life’s history.2

Darwin’s impact, to use Oldroyd’s term,3 situated evolution at the vanguard of anthropological thinking, and located it at the intersection of science, ideology, and world view.4 For anthropology, this meant, among other things, an increasingly reformulated consideration of human origins and progress. Unsurprisingly, however, though Darwin would ultimately form the benchmark against which all

1. 2. 3. 4.

Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 116. Gould, “Introduction,” xi–xiii. See Oldroyd, Darwinian Impacts, passim. See Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View.

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evolutionary theories were measured, types of evolutionary theory had existed previously, and many continued to exist afterward alongside Darwin’s own. Variations of Darwin’s own views are considered under the conventional rubric of Darwinism or Darwinianism. Hence, Michael Ruse can write of the “Darwinian paradigm,”5 or conversely Peter Bowler, the “non-Darwinian revolution.”6 Stocking, in fact, suggests that we should even distinguish between “ ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Darwinistic.’ ”7 Such differences illuminate a diversity at the heart of a unity, for although Darwin’s theory was never superseded, other evolutionary theories threatened its hegemony at every stage in its own development. Where Stocking suggests that the period before Darwin was one of equipoise—dominated by largely developmentalist views of anthropological progress—perhaps the period after Darwin could be said to be one of contrapoise—against Darwin’s singular conception of evolution. While Darwin’s exponent, Thomas Huxley, viewed Darwin’s theory of evolution as “reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools,”8 his views only encouraged, in some circles, a confirmation of polygenist ideologies in which races stemmed from different species.9 Indeed, Darwin’s conception of evolution, bound up fundamentally with natural selection and sexual selection, positively radiates implications for neopolygenist constructs of evolutionary theory. Be that as it may, his key points, namely, the existence of natural and sexual selection as the principal forces for human evolution, were not universally accepted, though they were universally debated. Natural selection is essentially a process favoring the survival of organisms best suited to their environmental circumstances: First, all organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive; second, all organisms within a species vary; third, some of the variants “by good fortune” are better adapted to their environment; and last, “Since these offspring will inherit the favourable variations of their parents, organisms of the next generation will, on average, become better adapted to local conditions.”10 The implications of this mechanism are abundant for theories of cultural progress, for Darwin’s “cold bath,” as Gould puts it, provided for no teleological convictions whatsoever. In one fell swoop Darwin was able to eradicate conventional suppositions about human progression, by suggesting that evolution was based on the struggle for survival, not predetermined and universal laws of human progress. Thus questions of progression

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

See Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm. See Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 146. Huxley, “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,” 321. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 93. Gould, “Introduction,” xii.

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from savage to barbarian, and barbarian to civilized, lost their philosophical momentum. Suddenly “an adaptation is seen to be a product, not of direct creative intervention, but of a straightforward success in the struggle.”11 From this point, natural selection as a concept then became subject to its own evolutionary laws, with some anthropologists accepting it willy-nilly, and others rejecting it by varying degrees. In this culture of evolutionism, numerous figures have relevance, especially in terms of importance to musical debate of the time. Arguably principal among them is Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s conception of evolution, perhaps more than any other, highlights the extent to which evolutionary theories were perhaps compromised by ideologically contorted notions of race. Stocking, intriguingly, refers to Spencer as marginal in relation to British anthropology,12 yet it was Spencer who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” and Spencer whose theories of evolution resonated more immediately with further implications for culture. Where these implications surface in intellectual literature is in critiques of Spencerian conventions of cultural evolution, such as that outlined in Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894), Henry Drummond’s The Ascent of Man (1894), and the even later J. B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress (1924). Kidd, for example, suggests that the evolutionary component in Spencer’s series, A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860–77), is “a stupendous attempt not only at the unification of knowledge, but at the explanation in terms of evolutionary science of the development which human society is undergoing.”13 At the same time, Spencer sheds “so little practical light” on the matter “that his investigations and conclusions are . . . held to lead up to the opinions of the two diametrically opposite camps of individualists and collectivists into which society is slowly becoming organized.”14 Similarly, Drummond praises Spencer for creating the “first great map of the field” of sociology,15 yet criticizes him for leaving posterity without the ability to interpret it. Some three decades later, however, criticism of Spencerian sociology evolved, in some circles, into praise for the anticipatory nature of his work, particularly as it became increasingly interpreted under the aegis of progress rather than social evolution. Bury writes that “He [Spencer] extended the principle of evolution to sociology and ethics, and was the most conspicuous interpreter of it in an optimistic sense. He had been an evolutionist long before Darwin’s decisive intervention, and in 1851 he had published his Social

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm, 148. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 128. Kidd, Social Evolution, 2. Ibid. Drummond, The Ascent of Man, 57.

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Statics. . . . Progress here appears as the basis of a theory of ethics.”16 Bury refers to Spencer as an optimist. Nesbit writes that “Without question, Herbert Spencer is the supreme embodiment in the late nineteenth century of both liberal individualism and the idea of progress. No one before or since so effectively united the two philosophies of freedom and of progress, or so completely anchored the former in the latter.”17 It is of considerable interest that, individually, sociologists and anthropologists often carry mutually exclusive views on Spencer, even from the latter part of the nineteenth century. For as well as articulating some of the earliest modern notions of anthropological evolution, Spencer simultaneously propounded a view of man replete with (what today would be branded) the worst kind of scientific racism. Many writers, like Stocking, put this down to a fallout within an evolutionary system that portrayed race as a “kind of summation of historically accumulated moral differences sustained and slowly modified from generation to generation.”18 But, needless to say, there are also many scholars of race history who, as we have seen, take a much dimmer view of Spencer as a result. It is, of course, not always easy to see how Spencer’s concept of evolution led ineluctably to racism. Kuklick, like most historians of racism, suggests that it stems from the fact that Spencer represents a departure from the institutionalized teleological convictions of pre-Darwinian social evolutionists.19 Hannaford takes a similar view, suggesting that Spencer’s comments in Social Statics (1851) confirm his belief in the fixity of inheritance, and hence the immutable nature of human instinct. As Spencer says, “There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.”20 According to Curtis Hinsley, Jr., Spencer’s fundamental lapse into racism resulted implicitly not from a belief in man’s fundamentally inherited, and therefore unchangeable, character, but in a belief in man’s inability to influence the immutable laws of nature that act upon this.21 For Hinsley this is especially characterized in the form of Spencer’s “Unknowable,” a metaphysical reality that was the ultimate cause of the universal evolution. For critics of Spencer, however, the “Unknowable” represented a limitation of the human mind to evolve, and from it could be easily extrapolated denigrating views of the mental capacity of man. In the case of the savage, the “Unknowable” exerted a particularly strong effect. As all of his critics suggest, Spencer’s social evolutionary platform was magisterial, if nothing else. The universe “was in constant change, leading at any one time in one of two directions: towards integration of matter (evolution) or 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Bury, The Idea of Progress, 336–37. Nesbit, History of the Idea of Progress, 229. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 138. Kuklick, The Savage Within, 81. Spencer, Social Statics, 273. Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 126–27.

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disintegration of matter (dissolution). Evolution involved not only the integration of matter but, equally important, increasing heterogeneity and differentiation of parts and functions.”22 But this inexorable tidal flow toward advanced differentiation, combined with a concept of the “survival of the fittest,” led Spencer to embrace views that delimited power and precluded progress. This is enshrined in his essay “A Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility” (1852): “those prematurely carried off must, in the average of cases, be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the least. It unavoidably follows, that those left behind to continue the race are those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest—the select of their generation.”23 The racist precipitate of Spencer’s social evolution was eventually worked out of anthropology by the teens of the twentieth century, but not without a fight. Where many questioned the mental limitations implicit in Spencer’s “Unknowable,” his concept of survival of the fittest and the idea of an evolution/dissolution polarity, the potential for these to be analogized into a racial context was nonetheless enormous. Spencer himself extends these ideas in numerous essays. Stocking cites this in relation to the essays “Primitive Man— Emotional” and “Primitive Man—Intellectual” (1876):24 What Spencer offered under the former heading was in fact a picture of the moral character of primitive man—abstracted, as he suggested, from the variations to be found among existing “inferior races” as the result of their contrasting habitats, unlike modes of life, and differing forms of social discipline. The predominating trait was “impulsiveness”—the “sudden, or approximately-reflex, passing of a single passion into the conduct it prompts.” . . . Unable to conceive the future, thoughtlessly absorbed in the present, uncivilized man—like the “improvident Irishman”—was full of “childish mirthfulness.”25

Adherents to evolution, like Spencer, often held mutually contradictory views of the progress of savages, more for reasons of methodological consistency than ethical or moral criticism. Thus, the scientist and anthropologist John Lubbock translated Spencer’s racist ideology into an antidegenerationist critique of modern savages: “the true savage is neither free nor noble; he is a slave to his own wants, his own passions; imperfectly protected from the weather, he suffers from the cold by night and the heat of sun by day; ignorant of agriculture, living by

22. Ibid., 126. 23. Spencer, “A Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” 130. 24. Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 6. 25. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 225.

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the chase, and improvident in success, hunger always stares him in the face, and often drives him to the dreadful alternative of cannibalism or death.”26 Despite this, Lubbock, like numerous contemporaries, advanced to a more openly evolutionary standpoint as the ineluctable force of Darwinism acquired greater authority in anthropological thinking. While in 1865 the savage of Prehistoric Times struggles to progress beyond the most rudimentary form of life, by 1870, with the publication of Origin of Civilisation, the savage had developed previously unknown potential for human evolution. Lubbock’s change in approach is reflected elsewhere in anthropological writing of the time, and perhaps no better than in the work of E. B. Tylor (1832–1917). Joan Leopold describes Tylor as “one of the major figures in the English-speaking world in the development of anthropology as an independent, comprehensive ‘science’ in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Tylor’s two major works, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871) “are among those usually taken to mark the apogee of English, Darwinian and positivist influence in cultural anthropology.”27 As Leopold points out, the titles themselves illustrate the extent to which certain terminology had begun to be superseded—the term “civilization” for “culture,” and “primitive” for “early.”28 Tylor attempts to explain some of the differences at the outset of Primitive Culture: Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future. To the investigation of these two great principles in several departments of ethnography, with especial consideration of the civilization of the lower tribes as related to the civilization of the higher nations, the present volumes are devoted.29

According to De Waal Malefijt, the key word in the first sentence of this quotation is “acquired,” because it indicates “that culture was the product of social learning rather than of biological heredity, and that the differences in cultural development were not the result of degeneration, but of progress in cultural

26. 27. 28. 29.

Lubbock, Pre-historic Times, 153. Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective, 9. Ibid., 13. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1.

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knowledge.”30 In terms of defining culture this is significant because it suggests that all facets of life, as part of the socially acquired framework of man, are of cultural importance, no matter how apparently unimportant. Unfortunately, while attempting to equalize, or universalize, man’s condition and evolutionary potential, Tylor also follows Lubbock and Spencer, among others, in his culturally degraded notion of primitive or savage life. Writing of the metaphor of childhood, for example, he proposes that We may, I think, apply the often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their moral as to their intellectual condition. The better savage social life seems in but unstable equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch of distress, temptation, or violence, and then it becomes the worse savage life, which we know by so many dismal and hideous examples. Altogether it may be admitted that some rude tribes lead a life to be envied by some barbarous races, and even by the outcasts of higher nations. But that any known savage tribe would not be improved by judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist would dare to make; while the general tenour [sic] of the evidence goes far to justify the view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wise and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier, and that the barbarian stands between.31

From 1871 the Tylorian concept of culture “endured essentially unchallenged for thirty years.”32 Thus Tylor not only engendered a way of thinking about culture, but established a disciplinary methodology that would not change substantively in England until the turn of the century, when the work of the Torres Strait was beginning to impinge on previous anthropological truths. Tylor’s concept of culture was embedded in his various contributions to the 1874 Notes and Queries (to be described in chapter 8),33 to which Engel contributed a section on music, and it is clear from this and later versions that the Tylorian methodologies represented a disciplinary hegemony even into the teens of the twentieth century.

30. 31. 32. 33.

Malefijt, Images of Man, 139. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 31. Monaghan and Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology, 35. Urry, Before Social Anthropology, 19–22.

Chapter Five

From Travel Literature to Academic Writing Anthropology in the Musical Press from the 1830s to the 1930s Non-Western music appears relatively often in the nineteenth-century musical press. Early nineteenth-century citations derive principally from travel literature, in both English and translation, reflecting the frequently Prichardian and degenerationist landscape of that genre. While these ideologies are embraced in the Harmonicon and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review in the early years of the nineteenth century, the Musical World, in contrast, encapsulates the often conflicted ideological complexities of mid-century as it begins to question the merits of comparative anthropology. The Musical Times sees academic writing achieve hegemony over travel literature, and with it the development of evolutionary paradigms critiqued in reviews of Richard Wallaschek’s work. By the 1890s, writing in the Proceedings of the Musical Association embeds these paradigms in the academic literature of musicology, and develops them into concepts of universalism.

Prichardian Influence and the Degenerationist Backlash Against Jones: The Harmonicon (from 1823) and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (from 1825) The first issue of the Harmonicon includes “On the Chorusses of the Persian Dervishes. (From the German.),” an article gleaned from the writings of von Hussard, who held an administrative post in Persia. Interestingly, the author (or editor) of the article castigates Sir J. Malcolm for omitting reference to music in his history of Persia, as he says, “The specimens of Persian music that have hitherto

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been given to the public, are too scanty to enable us to form a decisive opinion on the subject.”1 The article mainly comprises musical transcriptions, each similar to the modal-like harmonizations of Hindostannie Airs, with the author noting, by and by, that some of the keys “agree with those of the primitive ecclesiastical chants; others are strictly the same as those now in use.”2 This implicitly Prichardian methodology appears the following year in an extract from Bowdich, “On the Music of the Ashantees and Fantees,” extracted from his previously discussed Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, published originally in 1819. Bowdich, however, provides a more telling, and openly monogenist, glimpse of early nineteenth-century attitudes toward non-Western music than the somewhat opaque von Hussard. Indeed, as we have seen, his work is representative of the conflicted tone of Prichardian early travel literature: “The wild music of these people, the Fantees, is scarcely to be brought within the regular rules of harmony, yet their airs have a sweetness and animation beyond any barbarous compositions I ever heard.”3 In the same way that Prichard in Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) explains moral difference as derivative of common origins, Bowdich portrays the interval of the third as original and generative, describing it as “the most natural interval.”4 Similarly, the singing he describes as “almost all recitative,”5 and the songs of the canoe men “are peculiar to themselves, and very much resemble the chants used in cathedrals.”6 Unsurprisingly, the assignment of melodic limitation has a counterpart in conflicting forms of denunciation and approval, as Bowdich’s comment suggests. The music is at once wild, yet sweet. In “Musical Gleanings in Africa. From Major Laing’s Travels in Western Africa,” this mutual opposition is taken to a greater extreme as Laing alternates between complete disgust, and unreserved, trance-like admiration: The lamentable howling of the mourners was continued all night, and at daylight was superseded by music, which lasted with little interruption during the whole of the day and succeeding night; some of the instruments were skilfully handled, and sent forth melodious sounds; and the vocal performers who I learned were jellé-men from Sangara, far surpassed the uncouth squalling of any of the attempts I had hitherto heard on the part of an African. The deep tones of a large ballafoo resounded through the still morning air in a manner truly solemn; I awoke early, and lay listening for upwards of an hour with pleasure to the music which rung on my ears like magic, and I might have been thus entranced much longer, had it not been for the unpleasant

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

“On the Chorusses of the Persian Dervishes,” 185. Ibid., 186. [Bowdich], “On the Music of the Ashantees and Fantees,” 195. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 197. Ibid.

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sensations of a parched skin, headach [sic], and chilliness, too faithful harbingers of the approach of fever, with which I was attacked.7

The conflicted character of Laing’s description, in which some African music is seen to have magical properties, also serves to excite a sense of mystery and awe, and overwhelm the listener’s consciousness by an experience of what might be deemed the savage sublime.8 Intriguingly, “F. W. H.,” in “Oriental Music Considered” (1825), refers to this same phenomenon in relation to William Jones’s suggestion “that the principles of Hindu and Persian music are superior to ours.”9 Jones, according to F. W. H., considers Hindu and Persian music superior because primitive music brings us closer to our emotions than refined Western music. Thus Hindu and Persian music brings us to the edge, or brink, of an emotional reality unattainable with Western music, and we experience what is effectively the savage sublime. F. W. H. describes this by reference to Burke, and in the process claims that Jones misreads the idea: Burke, in his often-quoted work on the Sublime, has a passage which will best explain what Sir W. intended: “The most powerful effects of poetry and music have been displayed and perhaps are still displayed, where these arts are but in in [sic] a low and imperfect state. The rude hearer is affected by the principles which operate in these arts, even in their rudest condition, and he is not skilful enough to perceive the defects.”10

Accordingly, F. W. H. inverts Jones’s idea so that we reinterpret it more correctly: Jones “might with more justice have said—‘their music was capable of producing greater effects upon that people than our own could possibly do upon practised and highly cultivated Europeans,’ which will readily be admitted by those who know any thing of the emotions of an uncultivated mind—upon hearing sounds rudely descriptive of the passions he feels every day.”11 Here, F. W. H. implies that uncultivated non-Europeans are more prey to their emotions than their European counterparts. As such they are dangerous, and can ensnare unvigilant Europeans into an almost mesmeric unconsciousness. So for the

7. “Musical Gleanings in Africa,” 52–53. 8. For a parallel literary study of the savage sublime, see Stafford, The Sublime Savage, passim. 9. Jones, cited in F. W. H., “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the First,” 457. This probably refers to a passage in Jones’s “Second Anniversary Discourse” (1785), Asiatick Researches 1 (1788): 410, subsequently republished as Asiatic Researches 1 (1799): 410, “but the Hindu system of musick has, I believe, been formed on truer principles than our own. . . . Nearly the same may be truly asserted of the Arabian or Persian system.” 10. F. W. H., “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the First,” 458. 11. Ibid.

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European, just as in the experience of the Westernized picturesque sublime, the savage sublime takes on a pleasing sense of danger and menace without any real threat. Even Jones may have succumbed to this indulgence, according to F. W. H., in his unbounded, uncritical, praise of Hindu music. As he says, “will any one, even of those who have resided in that country [India], pronounce upon that superiority of these airs in respect to the principles upon which they are written, over the compositions that have been produced in Europe or on the continent? I should conceive not.”12 F. W. H.’s point, that Jones was effectively deceiving himself because of his almost preternatural attraction to the music, is bound up with musically degenerationist notions that had been promulgated from the middle part of the eighteenth century. Indeed, F. W. H. himself refers to John Brown, whose A Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power of Poetry and Music (1763) he quotes with considerable aplomb: “In the first rude essays towards an expressive melody in barbarous countries, certain imperfect modes of sound must of course be applied, as being expressive of certain subjects or passions. Hence these modes of melody, though imperfect in expression, being impressed on infant minds with all the force of an early application, must acquire a power over those which unaccustomed minds can never feel.”13 Brown, particularly in his section “Of the natural consequences of a supposed civilisation,” provides a monogenist fantasy history of progress from abject savagery to “supposed” civilization, showing, like Rousseau, how easily music can degenerate into corruption where poetry and music are not unified by a moral society.14 By extension, it is impossible, according to Brown, for nonliterary societies to achieve musical cultivation. Hence, “While these free and warlike savages continue in their present unlettered state of ignorance and simplicity, no material improvements in their song-feasts can arise.”15 In F. W. H.’s estimation, therefore, Brown effectively debunks Jones because Hindus lack literality. This view is exactly what Jones sets out to debunk in his Essays on the Poetry on Eastern Nations and on the Arts called Imitative (1772),16 and precisely the view that F. W. H. conveniently ignores in “Oriental Music Considered.” For F. W. H., Jones has succumbed to, and has been lured into, the siren savage sublime, where Brown has resisted. F. W. H. does not, however, wish to deprecate Hindu music. Rather, he wants to denude it of its sublimity, and hence its corruptive danger to European listeners. So whereas Jones determines that Hindu music can attain sublimity, F. W. H. determines that it is only of

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Ibid., 459. Brown, A Dissertation, 460. See Rousseau Essai sur l’Origine des Langues, 89–91. Brown, A Dissertation, 82. See Jones, Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages.

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“a distinct originality of character,”17 and that it exhibits “a wild but pleasing tenderness.” In this regard, F. W. H. may well concur with William Crotch, who writes: “Let the poetry cease altogether, or be in an unknown tongue, and then see whether music can build the walls of a city or civilise a savage race.”18 The principle of “Oriental Music Considered” is to debate Jones’s premise of non-Western musical sublimity, and to the end its author relents not once. For him there is no one who “will be disposed to give the uncultivated Hindu credit for a more superior system of music than can be found in civilized Europe.”19 As stated above, however, this view was not universally shared at the time; where the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review tends toward a rather hostile opinion of non-Western music, the Harmonicon is more moderate, if at times no less disparaging. Articles like “Music of the Siamese,” taken from George Finlayson’s The Mission to Siam, and Hué, the Capital of Cochin China, in the Years 1821–2, are typical of the Harmonicon’s in reserved admiration: “The Siamese are naturally very fond of music, and even persons of rank think it no disparagement to acquire a proficiency in the art. This music is for the most part extremely lively, and more pleasing to the ear of an European, than the want of proficiency in the more useful arts of civilized life would lead him to expect of such a nation.”20 Similarly, in “Burmese Musical Instruments,” an account by a Colonel Symes of an embassy to the kingdom of Ava, Symes tells us that “Music is a science . . . which is held in considerable estimation throughout the Birman empire; and the royal library of its capital is said to contain many valuable treatises on the art. By which, however, we ought to understand, that these are much esteemed by the natives; not that they would be regarded in Europe as any thing more then oriental curiosities.”21 The same vaguely degenerationist Orientalism can be observed throughout the travel literature excerpted in the Harmonicon, as “Musical Gleanings in Africa”;22 “Dramatic Music in China”;23 “Power of Music (From Sir John Malcolm’s History of Persia, vol. II. p. 443, 2nd Edition)”;24 and “Music in Mekka (From John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia.).”25 Its nontravel literature extends this by providing material of an expository or didactic kind, such as Francis Fowke’s treatise on the Vina26 or James Satchell’s six Hindostannie airs.27

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

F. W. H., “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the First,” 459. Crotch, “Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music,” 435–36. F. W. H., “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the First,” 461. “Music of the Siamese,” 5. “Burmese Musical Instruments,” 11. “Musical Gleanings in Africa,” 93. “Dramatic Music in China,” 33. “Power of Music,” 58. “Music in Mekka,” 300. Fowke, “The Indian Vina, or Guitar,” 128. Satchell, “Music of the Hindoos,” 468–72.

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As this shows, antipathy towards non-Western music lay mainly in the pages of the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, where “Oriental Music Considered” appears. That article, along with its continuations in the series, also gives the magazine a decidedly professionalized character absent in the more travel-based writings in the Harmonicon. F. W. H. reflects this, in citing not only travel literature reported in recent issues of Monthly Review, but work of a more expository kind from the Asiatic Journal and Asiatic Researches. When arguing about Indian musical inferiority on the basis of an attrited musical culture, F. W. H. draws on the degenerationist comparative methodology of Asiatic Researches (vol. 7), finding that “Music appears to have been formerly cultivated in Ceylon, and reduced in principles. . . . It is in all probability the same as that of the Indians of the Continent.”28 Similarly, in “On the Music of the Persians,” he describes the Persians and their civilization as “primeval” and a “once mighty kingdom.”29 Music is “our art [which] was once held among them.”30 As a paradigmatic degenerationist, F. W. H. conceives of musical ownership migrating historically from imperial non-Western nations to modern European powers. As a concomitant, modern non-Western music is as utterly debased as its historical music is praised, and every praiseworthy facet of antiquity is balanced by reference to barbaric modern practices. When describing the Persians he writes that “whatever difficulties they may formerly have had to encounter by barbarous customs and Gothic restrictions, there are equally destructive enemies, ready at the present day to prevent the progress of any art of science.”31 Similarly, of the Chinese, he writes somewhat later, “To a people so evidently well versed in poetry, in theatrical exhibitions, and possessing, as I observed before, so many musical instruments of different capacities and forms, it is not easy to deny a knowledge of music superior to that of any other of the Eastern nations, although it has certainly declined in the present day.”32 Intriguingly, this same disapprobation is absent from his description of Arabian music, which is to the West what Celtic music is to England. Here, as a result, there is a tendency to embrace Arabian music as an important transitional phase in music’s passage from East to West. From the title of the article alone it is obvious that counterpoint—perhaps the most important marker of modern musical civilization, and something perceived as being almost entirely missing in other non-Western music—was known before the Norman Conquest, and he describes an “Arabian Air,” for example, as comparing favorably to “the rudest Scotch or Welsh melodies.”33 He provides

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Joinville, “On the Religion and Manners of the People of Ceylon,” 20–21. F. W. H., “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the Second,” 190. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 193. F. W. H., “Oriental Music Considered. Essay the Third,” 35. F. W. H., “Oriental Music. On the Music of the Arabians,” 310.

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illustrations from British Library manuscripts, dated 1060, of Arabian music with “a slight glimmering of rude counterpoint.”34 Even so, “the constant succession of naked 4ths will not give much delight to the modern student.”35 As he says, “as I believe no other writer on the music of the ancients has yet brought proofs of the existence of counterpoint in any uncivilized nation so early as the year 1060, I may take the credit of the discovery, which will I trust set the minds of the learned at rest respecting this long agitated question.”36

A Departure from Comparative Methodology: The Musical World from the 1830s Just like the Harmonicon and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, the Musical World (from 1836) published diverse essays and travel excerpts pertaining to non-Western music from very early in its production. In the Musical World these often take the form of slightly shorter extracts from lectures or travel communiqués, and frequently with less tendentious tone than one finds in earlier music journals like the Harmonicon and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review. The first substantial reference to non-Western music of the 1830s is in a report from Dresden covering a concert given by Karl Kloss. The concert included Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, various Italian, French, and German music, and then a lecture/recital of “the music of the earliest nations, especially upon the old Egyptian music.”37 Here the simplicity of the music is compared rather romantically, but in degenerational terms, with the “barrenness of the Arabian deserts.”38 Herr Kloss also “clothed some of the Arabian songs, which consist of very few notes (one elegy contained only two) in a clever, harmonious, and rhythmical guise,”39 presumably in a manner not dissimilar to that of the Hindostannie Airs. Closer to home, at the Islington Institution, another lecture was given, this time by a Mr. C. H. Purday, on the national music of Persia and India, and then other national musics of the world.40 Elsewhere, music is morally contextualized. In the salvific monogenism of “Effect of Music in the Conversion of Savages,” Nolreg, a Jesuit working in Portugal, is seen using music to convert the savages. Indeed, like Laing succumbing to the savage sublime, Nolreg’s savages succumb to the Christian sublime.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

F. W. H., “Oriental Music. On the Music of the Arabians,” 311. Ibid. Ibid., 313. Review of concert given by Karl Kloss, 104. Ibid. Ibid. Report of course of lectures on vocal music given by Mr. C. H. Purday, 60.

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This Jesuit usually took with him four or five of these little choristers on his preaching expeditions; when they approached an inhabited place, one carried the crucifix before them, and they began singing the Litany. The savages, like snakes, were won by the voice of the charmer; they received him joyfully, and when he departed with the same ceremony, the children followed the music. He set the catechism creed, and ordinary prayers, to sol-fa; and the pleasure of learning to sing was such a temptation, that the little Tupis sometimes ran away from their parent to put themselves under the care of the Jesuit.41

In other articles it is the savages themselves who fall prey to the music: The jaina, which appears to be a more modern invention, is an exceedingly simple kind of clarionet, made out of a large red reed. The tone is thrillingly sad, unlike that of any other known instrument, and of almost marvellous effect. The wildest horde of Indians, in the uproar of debauchery or in the fiercest broil, grow still, as if by enchantment, if suddenly they hear the notes of the jaina, and, mute and motionless as statues, they hang in wrapt attention on the magic melody. A tear will steal into the Indian’s hard eye, that before, perhaps, was never moistened but by intoxication; and the sobs of the women are the only sounds that disturb the almost unearthly music. The said strains of the jaina awaken a nameless, vague yearning, and leave behind them for days a painful void; and yet the magic tones are always heard again with unabated eagerness.42

(Similarly, in “Power of Music,” for example, taken from John Malcolm’s travel writing, he suggests that whole armies can be swayed by national music.)43 From the 1840s, journal material becomes largely expository, conceptually disinterested, and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage, including reference to Persia, Egypt, American Indians, Arabia, China, India, and Alaska. The 1840s is dominated by somewhat insubstantial references to non-Western music, and occasionally translations of music or text, as in “On the Laws of the Harmony,”44 taken from original Persian, and “Specimen of Ancient Egyptian Music, Found in the Ruins of Memphis.”45 While articles like these, and others drawn from travel literature (such as “The Influence of National Melodies”46 and “Power of Music”),47 project a rather benign anthropology, there are glaring exceptions, such as the following description of an exhibition of “The Earthmen”:

41. “Effect of Music in the Conversion of Savages,” Musical World 13: 265; and “Effect of Music in the Conversion of Savages,” Musical World 14: 13. 42. “Effects of Music on the Peruvian Indians,” 630. 43. “The Influence of National Melodies,” 157–58. 44. “On the Laws of Harmony,” 210–12. 45. “Specimen of Ancient Egyptian Music,” 2. 46. “The Influence of National Melodies,” 157–58. 47. “Power of Music,” 604.

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A novel and highly interesting exhibition may now be seen in Regent Street, near Waterloo Place; consisting of two curious specimens of the human race called “Earthman,” from the great Orange River in South Africa. The one is a male and the other a female, of the respective ages of fourteen and sixteen; and their height does not exceed three feet four inches. They are the only specimens ever seen in Europe, and they possess peculiarities of habits, features, and growth, quite distinct from all other inhabitants of the globe. Judging from their manners, it may be inferred that the “Earthmen” might be moulded to almost any form of mind, and placed on a par with the more enlightened European; for they are exceedingly quick and intelligent, and possess a certain inquisitiveness that shows a laudable desire to be informed on various matters. They are unclad, save a short tunic round the waist; and their movements are light and graceful. They dance, play, and sing with seeming pleasure, and are ready to oblige when asked to do anything. . . . A good pamphlet, descriptive of their habits and peculiarities, may be obtained at the Exhibition Rooms.48

This type of article, whatever its racist anthropological context, is an anomaly in journals of the time. In fact, from the 1850s, the Musical World tended to produce more and more material of a purely academic nature, leaving behind travel literature associations and more colorful yet inaccurate depictions of nonWestern music. This is typified in its departure from the Prichardian comparative methodology represented by Tomlinson’s Oriental music lectures. Indeed, Tomlinson’s lectures reflect what Stocking calls “the crisis in Prichardian ethnology.”49 The crisis resulted from a shift in “the historical argument for human unity”50 to a biological paradigm predicated on locating historically recurrent patterns and variations. Whereas, therefore, music historians and Prichardian-influenced comparative methodologists struggled to disaggregate antiquity and modernity in relation to non-Western music, Tomlinson insists on separating them out methodologically. Articles such as “On the Ancient Music of the Persians” and “On the Style of Music Used by the Persians,” or “On the Ancient Melodies of the Hindoos” and “On the Modern Hindoo Music, &c.,” purposefully separate history from modern practice in an attempt to interpret non-Western music without aesthetic or cultural prejudice. In “On the Antiquity of Indian Music,” for example, he writes that It may perhaps be said that in endeavouring to trace the state of the art of music up to a remote period, in such a country as India, it is wandering uselessly in a field of conjecture, without any clue to guide us to a competent knowledge, where so little assistance is derived from history, and where, in fact, oral tradition, mixed up with a great portion of fabulous matter, seems the only existing and most fallacious mode of tracing it.51

48. 49. 50. 51.

“The ‘Earthmen,’ ” 374. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 74. Ibid., 75. Tomlinson, “On the Antiquity of Indian Music,” 332.

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The disaggregation comes at a degenerationist price, however, for Tomlinson often portrays the non-Western past as especially civilized, and the non-Western present as utterly debased. In “On the Ancient Music of the Persians,” Tomlinson writes that “in the very outset our inquiries are presented with an insurmountable obstacle, and will prevent me producing observations up to a remote period, by the destruction of all their books upon the sciences by order of Omar; though there is great reason to think that music was more generally cultivated, and brought to a much higher state of perfection before the conquest of that country by the Mahometans, in the seventh century, than it has been since that era.”52 Likewise, in “Invention of Hindoo Music,” he suggests that the ancient Hindu system of music is preserved in sacred books, but “these have not been translated, nor if they were would it repay the time and trouble required for such a task.”53 In his work on modern practice, Tomlinson’s degenerationism is apparent. In “On the Style of Music Used by the Persians,” he writes that “The Persians deem music a science, but do not appear to have made much progress in it,”54 and he proceeds to supply an ample amount of travel literature to support this view. The same could be said of “On the Style of Music Used by the Persian Dervishes,” in which he describes the Persians as having ceased to be a warlike people; they are fast losing even their love of poetry, and the slight insight they had obtained into the sciences. Music will therefore most probably continue in its present uncultivated state among them, or gradually become less and less thought of, until it ceases to exist in any other way than as the confused noise of “sounding brass” and “tinkling cymbal.”55

This sentiment is more or less repeated across Tomlinson’s lectures involving modern practice when he is not writing in a purely expository way on matters of an organological kind, as in “On the Trigonum, or Ancient Egyptian Traiangular Harp,”56 “On Arabian Music,”57 or “On the Origin of Chinese Music.”58 Whether devised originally as continuous, or intentionally separated by his editors according to their ancient or modern focus, Tomlinson’s lectures partition non-Western music into clear taxonomic groupings by country, ancient or modern. The validity of this approach is thrown into disarray, however, not

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Tomlinson, “On the Ancient Music of the Persians,” 356. Tomlinson, “Invention of Hindoo Music,” 342. Tomlinson, “On the Style of Music Used by the Persians,” 436. Tomlinson, “On the Style of Music Used by the Persian Dervishes,” 470. Tomlinson, “On the Trigonum, or Ancient Egyptian Traiangular Harp,” 825. Tomlinson, “On Arabian Music,” 818–19. Tomlinson, “On the Origin of Chinese Music,” 631–32.

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simply by the degenerationism explicit in his attitude toward modern nonWestern cultures but also by the extent of organological uniformity he ascribes to the Esquimaux, Mexicans, and North and South American Indians in “An Account of the Music of Savage Nations,”59 in a unique reversion to Prichardian comparative methodology.

The Persistence of Comparative Methodology and the First Glimmerings of Evolutionism: The Musical Times from the 1880s Like the Musical World, non-Western music is portrayed in the Musical Times through diverse forms of communication, in brief lectures, more substantial articles, communiqués and miscellaneous correspondence, and reviews. Unlike the Musical World, the Musical Times provides no principal correspondent on the matter, apart perhaps from Carl Engel, whose work on the national music of the world does appear occasionally as extracted from other works (to be discussed later). One of the genres least utilized in the Musical Times is travel literature. It appears occasionally embedded in longer articles, but generally by the 1860s writers on non-Western music eschewed this as unreliable. A reference to Esquimaux music is made in 1887, and to Indian music in 1899. In both instances the style is straightforward and empirical. The 1887 correspondent writes of having been on a whaler with a Captain Adams, and having noted down a tune from one of the natives, asks the editor for more information on it. Intriguingly, the editor refers the correspondent to Rowbotham, saying that “this air, both in rhythm and melodic character, would seem to belong to the division of tunes based upon the chant or story as opposed to that founded on the dance.”60 A slightly fuller description of musical travel experience is given in “A Musical Examiner’s Experiences in India. A Talk with Dr. Creser.” Creser was obviously attached to several private schools in India, and this rather chatty dispassionate piece reflects upon his musical experiences, which involve having the good fortune to meet Tagore (to be discussed in the next chapter).61 Lectures, and advertisements for them, occur with similar frequency. Occasionally a lecture will be given a review in which the principal points are recapitulated briefly. Southgate’s lecture on ancient Egyptian art, which includes reference to music, is summarized briefly in 1891,62 as is a paper given by Mr. A. T. Cringon on

59. 60. 61. 62.

Tomlinson, “An Account of the Music of Savage Nations,” 481–82. Report of letter from a correspondent in Lerwick, 405. “A Musical Examiner’s Experiences in India,” 818. “ ‘A Phase of Ancient Egyptian Art,’ ” 294.

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“Traditional Songs of the Iroquois Indians.”63 The latter is perhaps more indicative of the treatment that lectures receive in the journal—there are some musical examples, conventionally notated, and a summary of the discussion at the close of the lecture. Intriguingly, Fuller Maitland compares them to Lydian church modes, and suggests “that the primitive element was not prominent in the songs that had been sung, there being a notable absence of that monotonous rhythm which is so marked a feature of the earliest folk-tunes.”64 More elaborate lecture summaries are found, though, again, only infrequently. The ninth Congress of Orientalists held in London in 1891 was discussed at some length, owing to the inclusion of lectures on music. F. T. Piggott, then legal adviser to the Japanese Prime Minister, offered a paper on Japanese music. This is entirely empirical in its explication of material objects and comparative in its methodology, covering scales, instruments, tunings, and suchlike in Japanese and European cultures alike. He says, for instance: “The ratios of the intervals of the scale used in classical music differed slightly from those of the European scale, but a Japanese melody could be harmonised according to European principles without destroying its character to a native ear. Their idea of key was similar to our own.”65 The same methodology occurs in C. R. Day’s lecture on Indian music described in the same article. Day, author of The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891), is presented as providing his audience with a means of comparison by reference to European practice, in terms of scales, notation, harmony, and instruments. The comparisons cited provide only the leanest descriptions, but indicate, as does Piggott’s paper, the extent to which comparative methodology persisted as late as the 1890s, despite the advanced hegemony of Tylorian conceptions of culture. Day’s comment that “There was no system of harmony in the European sense of the word,” is indicative.66 Jacques’s set of lectures, “The Music of India and the East,” delivered on May 20 and 27, and June 3, 1899, is treated with similar brevity, and in content shows similar European contextualization. Its main interest, as a review of the lectures, is in its sheer diversity. Lecture 1, “The Music of India and the East, and its influence on the Music of Europe,” is characteristic, to the point that other figures, like Rowbotham, seem to filter through it. Jacques describes music of China, Japan, Java, Siam, and portions of Eastern Asia as “sensuous,”67 and the music of India, Persia, Arabia, and Asia Minor as “emotional.”68 In the second lecture, Jacques

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

“ ‘Traditional Songs of the Iroquois Indians,’ ” 114. Ibid. “Congress of Orientalists,” 600. Ibid. [Jacques], “The Music of India and the East,” 475. Ibid.

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evidently procured three Broadwood pianos, each tuned to different Eastern tonalities, including those of Siam, Java, Arabia, and India, and used to show similarities between Greek and Japanese music. The third lecture brought the East into the West very pointedly, by illuminating exemplars of Greek and early Christian music and their relationship to music of the East. This program of comparison continues to be evinced in book reviews, and indeed, though limited in range, they represent a sizable portion of the overall attention given to non-Western music in its pages. Some of the principal books on non-Western music were reviewed, including Piggott’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan (1893) and Day’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891). Piggott’s review is rather telling of the different status accorded music within Eastern material culture: The decorative arts of the East—of India, China, Japan—have rarely failed to charm and captivate the Western mind; and those of Japan in particular have, during the past thirty years, so successfully established themselves in our homes that we no longer think of them as exotics. . . . With this appreciation compare our attitude towards Eastern music—what a contrast!69

And again: In India, for instance—there are two hundred and fifty-seven million souls—who, in Europe, knows or cares a straw about their music? Until two years ago, when Captain Day published his wonderful book, we were without even an intelligible account of its mysteries; and now that we can understand them, who, apart from a few specialists, troubles to do so? . . . It is clear that whilst our eyes welcome the Entirely Strange, our ears do not.70

Piggott’s book redresses this by situating Japanese music within terms understandable to a Western reader, proving, for example, that “Like Western nations, the Japanese have classical, ancient, and modern music.”71 The earliest article of methodological import is, “Nationalities of Music,”72 a summary from Escudier, clearly derived from travel literature, and covering very briefly music of Turkey, Russia, China, Central Africa, the Hottentots, Savages (Esquimaux), Mexicans, and South Sea Islanders, as well as later articles, conceptually of a more limited kind, such as “The Recent Discovery of Egyptian Flutes, and Their Significance,”73 “The Egyptian Flutes,”74 and “Oriental Aeolian

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

“The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan. By F. T. Piggott.” 319. Ibid. Ibid. “Nationalities of Music,” 55–56. “The Recent Discovery of Egyptian Flutes,” 585–87. “The Egyptian Flutes,” 713–16.

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Music.”75 There are two, somewhat informal expository articles following this on Hindu and Indian music,76 and then two rather more telling articles, “Music in Embryo” and “Savage Music and Its Lessons.” The first of these latter sets music not so much in any identifiable evolutionary framework, but rather in a simplistic teleological arrangement in which East moves to West, and savage moves to civilized, provided innate and environmental circumstances are suitable: The expansion of music into its civilised form from first germs . . . differs, however, from many analogous processes of growth, by one very marked peculiarity. It is not uniformly progressive, advancing imperceptibly like the growth of a plant. . . . If we may take a parallel from natural growth, it might be found in the crab, the frog, and other animals whose embryonic type is distinguished by essential features from that of maturity. In regarding music as a science, this requires clear recognition; and an acquaintance with almost any of the crudescent music of uncivilised races brings out the point with striking distinctness.77

O. H. H., in this way, defines civilized music as “the expression of human emotion and the employment of a numerical or mathematical scale by which it is governed,”78 in terms reminiscent of Tylor’s Spencerian concept of “emotional tone,”79 to be discussed later. In uncivilized music, the emotions control the scale; in civilized music, the scale controls the emotions, and only when the scale is evolved and embraced does music progress from savage to civilized, from amorphous grunting to language. As Tylor says, “When therefore the cultivated man has presented to his more backward fellow this conventional foot-rule [the scale] for expression in music, he has merely given him a grammar which moulds his tone-utterances into a language. Without the grammar his music is a Babel—but still music.”80 O. H. H.’s suggestion, however, that music without a Western scale is savage, is an astonishing throwback to earlier nineteenth-century views, not at all in keeping with more recent trends evinced, as well shall see, in Rowbotham, and just a few years later in Wallaschek and Parry. “Music in Embryo,” in this respect, represents the last of a genre, of a deprecating East–West teleology, a world culturally dichotomized between savages and civilized peoples, and a program compromised by ethnological prejudice. Some six years later “Savage Music and Its Lessons” reverses—or corrects—this to a large degree. Mainly a review of Wallaschek’s Primitive Music (to be discussed later), “Savage Music and Its Lessons,” situates evolution as a corrective methodological template. The author speaks of how Brown’s “History and Rise of Progress

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

“Oriental Aeolian Music,” 435–36. “Hindu Music,” 111–13, and “Indian Music,” 519–21. O. H. H., “Music in Embryo,” 533. Ibid. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 167. Ibid.

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of Poetry” is wrongly interpreted to belong to evolutionary thinking—along the lines of “Music in Embryo”—and how this has now been superseded by a more accurate evolutionary modus operandi in Wallaschek. Citing numerous difficulties attending the study on non-Western musics, such as the availability of material, the complications of transcription, the travel-literature methodologies, and the disciplinary position of the study of non-Western music, the reviewer claims that all peoples evolve, whether evincing development or not, and that it is not the scale that is a marker of civilization, but its centrality within a given culture. Wallaschek’s magisterial work ushers in a new period in the study of ethnic and primitive musics: the existence of such a work has been made possible only within the present generation, and even had this been otherwise the equipment for its production would have been obstacle enough. Scientific men, as a rule, know little of music; musicians seldom trouble to acquire those scientific habits of thought without which such enquiries are productive but of words that darken counsel. Helmholtz, Gevaert, and Carl Engel belong to a class so poor in numbers that Mr. Wallaschek, as the latest accession to it, cannot but be welcome.81

Although not uncritical, the reviewer—as many of his generation—considers Wallaschek to be a turning point, and one that predicates its methodology on a broadly evolutionary, rather than teleological, template: From this mass of material the author deduces theories and conclusions on various points of interest to the musician, the historian, and the psychologist, such as: the basis of our musical system, the physical and psychical influence of music, the nature of the most ancient succession of tones (i.e., scale), the impulses to which are due the “origin” of music, the use of harmony, the nature of the musical gift, and so on, and so on. In the course of the enquiries Mr. Wallaschek necessarily discusses the views of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Wallace, Weismann, Galton, and others, but does so with a tolerance and fairness quite remarkable considering that his own views often differ from theirs. In this respect the book deserves to be quoted as a model.82

The Movement Toward Universalism: The Proceedings of the Musical Association from the 1890s to the 1930s The study of non-Western music in the Proceedings of the Musical Association remained a rather marginal subject from the journal’s beginnings in 1874 up to the 1890s. Among the earliest articles are those comprising ancient organology or paleontology, as in Southgate’s “On a Pair of Ancient Egyptian Double-Flutes” (1890) and “Communications on the Ancient Egyptian Scale” (1891); Blaikley’s

81. “Savage Music and Its Lessons,” 651. 82. Ibid.

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“Afridi Fiddle” (1899); Galpin’s “The Whistles and Reed Instruments of the American Indians of the North-West Coast” (1903); and Rose’s “Primitive African Instruments” (1904). Others of a more generally expository nature include Piggott’s “The Music of Japan” (1891–92); Day’s “Notes on Indian Music” (1894); and Mann’s “Some Indian Conceptions of Music” (1912). From the 1920s there are articles on Arabic and Egyptian topics, with Pulver’s “The Music of Ancient Egypt” (1921) and Farmer’s “The Influence of Music: From Arabic Sources” (1926); on Africa and Indonesia, with Kirby’s “Musical Origins in the Light of the Musical Practices of Bushmen, Hottentot and Bantu” (1932) and “Saint Cecilia goes South. (A Contribution to the History of Music in South Africa)” (1937), and Kunst’s “A Musicological Argument for Cultural Relationship between Indonesia—probably the Isle of Java—and Central Africa” (1936); and India, with Bake’s “Indian Folk-Music” (1937). The work on India is perhaps the most useful and cohesive historical summary charting the rise of more modern attitudes from the 1890s to the 1930s. Among the most substantial early pieces is Day’s “Notes on Indian Music,” which is clearly derived from his then recent and well-known publication (to be discussed later), The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891). Day’s work holds out a new prospect for the reception of modern Indian music, as it tries to reinforce the idea of acceptable difference: Of all the Indian arts one of the most popular is that of music, and perhaps of them all the least known to Europeans. Almost every one who has been in India knows that native music exists, but there are comparatively few who recognise the deep hold that it possesses over Indian minds. Europeans, as a rule, leave India with the idea that the national music of the country consists only of noise and incessant drumming, varied, perhaps, by nasal drawling—equally repulsive as unmusical. That here is a real musical art—with an employment of various scales, abounding in rhythmical beauty and full of passionate expression, seems to many almost incredible. And yet this is so.83

Day, in this and his book, premised his research on distinguishing teleology from broadly evolutionary thinking, in an attempt to popularize Indian music among a recalcitrant English populace. His comments on scales are characteristic of this: “in the absence of evidence conclusary of direct musical communication between ancient India and Greece, all this tends to point to a musical system of some old-world civilization, unknown to us, from which both the Indian and Greek scales (and consequently the European) have independently been developed.”84 This tendency, to elicit similarities between Eastern and Western music, is in fact a prominent feature of the increasingly universalizing tendency in the Proceedings. Mann discusses Indian music in similar terms:

83. Day, “Notes on Indian Music,” 45. 84. Ibid., 48.

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The bulk of Indian music, both art and folk, has been orally transmitted for ages. It is thought over here that only folk-music can thus be handed down, traditional oral transmission, applied to music, generally meaning with us that it is not distinctively “art.” But it is otherwise in the East. Difference of race, difference of temperament, the peculiar exigencies of Eastern music itself, make its complete record in notation a fruitless task, excepting for occasionally purposes of study and analysis. . . . Only real sympathy will unlock the barriers between the musicians of the West and the East.85

Identifying difference is, of course, essential to this, and Mann, like so many others of her time—Fox Strangways among them (to be dealt with later)—situates Indian music within a context easily comprehended by a Western audience. When writing on râga and tâla she suggests that they represent an ineffable power: Râga and tâla do not express ideas-about-things, as do our classics; nor extraneous things-in-themselves, as our Strausses and Debussys seek to do; but rather musical things-in-themselves: they are not the musical embodiments of pistol shots, and ticking clocks, and bleating sheep, and so forth, but of nature-spirits, fairies, elves, entities, some of whose habitations are, according to Indian theory and vital belief, the various forms of music.86

Discussion of Mann’s paper makes special reference to the notion of acceptable difference, and this, in discussion, is something of a turning point as well. The chairman, W. H. Cummings, thanks Mrs. Mann and proceeds to speak in comparative, yet increasingly universalizing terms: one feels from what we have heard how disastrous it would be if our Indian brethren were to try adopt our English Anglican, our European music. It is very desirable indeed that music in India should remain in its purity, that it should be conserved as much as possible. It suits the people, the climate, the place. It is music from heaven just as much as is our own; and therefore it is very desirable that they should cultivate it to the fullest extent, preserve it in its integrity; and we ourselves think we have perfection in music in the diatonic scale, which we use so thoroughly and so well. . . . Music is universal; but it has many dialects.87

This affirmation of universalism is a relatively new phenomenon at this time, having been nurtured from the 1880s by Rowbotham, Day, Wallaschek, and others. In the Indian writings for the Proceedings of the Musical Association this trait can observed as a regular component from the time of Day, culminating in the Indian research of Bake.

85. Mann, “Some Indian Conceptions of Music,” 43–45. 86. Ibid., 48–49. 87. Ibid., 64.

Chapter Six

Non-Western Music in General Music Histories Progression toward Evolution The same methodological features one observes in anthropological literature about music is found in work of a strictly musicological kind, principally because the same material is being used in both types of literature at roughly the same time. Unsurprisingly, early general histories of the period from the 1820s rely heavily on travel literature, and as such, evince all the characteristic ideologies of the genre. Among the earliest nineteenth-century histories of music to include reference to non-Western music is William Stafford’s A History of Music (1830). As Joep Bor says, Stafford’s book is remarkable in devoting almost a third “to the music of the ancients and non-Western nations: Egypt, India, China, Persia and Turkey, the Arab world, the Hebrews, the Burmese, Siamese and Singalese, Africa, America and Greece.”1 The remainder explores Continental and English music in roughly equal amounts, a feature peculiar to Stafford’s book. Generally speaking, however, non-Western music registers very little in broad histories of music even up to the 1920s, making Stafford’s book therefore doubly unusual. In Hogarth’s Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (1835), the issue is dispatched in the Preface and first several pages of chapter 1. In later works it is seldom covered even to this extent, as music histories usually begin with reference to the Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian roots of Western music, brief contemplations on the origins of music, or both. Rockstro’s A General History of Music from the Infancy of the Greek Drama to the Present Period (1886) is typical in disregarding music out of a Western context, and the same could be said of H. G. Bonavia Hunt’s A Concise History of Music from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time (1878), produced under the aegis of the Cambridge

1. Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 60.

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School and College Text Books series. Later writers continue this trend. Stanford and Forsyth’s A History of Music (1916) opens with a first chapter covering non-Western music under the title “The Origins of Music,” but this is separated out from the actual opening part of the book (“Part 1, The Ancient Period To 900 A.D.”), which begins with chapter 2. Interestingly, despite their interest in Oriental music, which is covered in greater depth in chapter 2, Stanford and Forsyth still resist locating Oriental music within the development of a Western chronological framework, and prefer, as in most cases, to situate it as part of ancient or early history, rather than part of living and evolved musical traditions.

The Contradictions of Monogenist Developmentalism: Stafford’s A History of Music (1830) and Hogarth’s Musical History (1835) As Bor purports, Stafford’s A History of Music is the first general history to negate the racism and prejudice generally identifiable in late eighteenth-century music histories, such as in Burney and Hawkins. Bor writes that “Although his information on non-Western music was limited to what he had found in the accounts of travellers, missionaries and colonial settlers, he presented to his readers a sympathetic picture, radically different from that of his famous British predecessors, who had bluntly referred to the music of non-Western “barbarians” as mere “noise and jargon” (Burney 1789: 703) or “hideous and astonishing sounds” (Hawkins 1776: Preface).”2 Whether Stafford is indeed “radically different” in regard to the denegratory language of his age is a matter of some contention. From the outset his work could be read as a compendium of racist developmentalism, as is evident in his first chapter, titled “The Origin of Music Traced to Natural Causes—The Music of the Savages”: “What we know of the state of music in all barbarous and savage nations, tends to shew not only that their early efforts in the art were, as might be expected, extremely rude, but that wind instruments, and those of percussion, were the first used.”3 Again, he writes that “What we learn of the natives of the islands of the Pacific, when they were discovered by Captain Cook, equally proves the rudeness and simplicity of the music of savage tribes,”4 and later still: “The music of the Friendly Islanders is as uncouth and barbarous now as when they were visited by Captain Cook.”5 It is

2. 3. 4. 5.

Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 60. Stafford, A History of Music, 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7.

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not, however, in Stafford’s descriptive terminology that he is radically different, but in his inclusion of non-Western music within a Western musical framework. The form that this takes is a type of soft monogenist developmentalism, in itself subject to numerous contradictions. On the one hand, Stafford believes in the natural origin of music, but on the other, he subscribes to an openly biblical interpretation. As Allen says, “Stafford finds a place for natural causes, without entirely abandoning Biblical authority. . . . The author’s piety and reverence for Scripture lead him to approve with critical reservations the [Padre] Martini theory of origins,”6 namely, that music began with its divine conferment upon Adam. As a function of this, savage non-Western music is seen to emblemize its origin in nature, and civilized Western music its origin in the Bible. Therefore, as the title of the first chapter, “The Origin of Music Traced to Natural Causes— The Music of Savage Nations” shows, music proceeded from its savage natural origins to man, when speech was elevated to song and song was combined with instruments, as in the Esquimaux, who achieved a kind of musical stasis: “The Esquimaux, who were, when visited by Captain Parry, as nearly in a state of barbarism as possible, though fond of music, had no instruments except a species of drum and tambarine. They had songs, but there was neither variety, compass, nor melody, in their vocal effusions.”7 This attitude continues more generally in Stafford’s descriptions of African instruments showing just how impervious to development their music really is: Drums and flutes of the rude species already described, were found, by their first discoverers, amongst the more isolated natives of Africa; and instances might be multiplied ad infinitum, to shew, that, in all uncultivated and barbarous nations, their music has been of similar description. Wind and pulsatile instruments have invariably been found; stringed ones, much more rarely; and all their airs and melodies, if, indeed, they deserve the name, are of the rudest kind.8

Writing in “Oriental Music” (chapter 3), Stafford sets out the problem: In Asia men first settled after the deluge; and there is no doubt but all learning and science came originally from the east. The Greeks derived their knowledge of music and other sciences from Phoenicia, Egypt, and Chaldea; and both the Chaldean and Egyptian philosophers are frequently mentioned with respect, and highly eulogized, by Greek and Roman writers. In this quarter of the globe, the empires of Assyria and of Babylon, the Medes and Persians, the Indians and the Chinese, were established, and flourished and decayed, whilst Europe was in a state of comparative barbarity: and amongst a rich and voluptuous people, addicted to pleasure and luxury, it is no wonder

6. Allen, Philosophies of Music History, 52. 7. Stafford, A History of Music, 3–4. 8. Ibid., 10.

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if music, which, as M. Rollin observes, gives zest to such enjoyments, was in high esteem, and cultivated with great application. To trace the progress of this art amongst these nations in a regular gradation, and strictly chronological series, would be impossible.9

A further complication in Stafford’s conception of non-Western music emerges in questions of historical comparison: is non-Western music ancient or modern? This difficulty in ascribing progressive temporality to non-Western music is apparent in his description of “Hindoo music,” drawn in part from William Ouseley’s Oriental Collections (1797). Here, unable to find adequate terms of description himself, Stafford relies upon Ouseley, who adopts a comparative approach in much the manner of Crotch: What we have hitherto said, must be considered as referring chiefly to the ancient music of Hindostan. Of modern Hindoo music, and the sensations it excites, as Sir William Ouseley remarks, we can speak with greater accuracy. It is of the diatonic genera; and “many of the Hindoo melodies possess the plaintive simplicity of the Scotch and Irish; and others a wild originality, pleasing beyond description.”10

In referring to Burney’s reference to Careri’s sojourn to China in 1696, Stafford does much the same: “The Chinese have made little improvement in music, since the time when Father Semedo and Dr. Careri wrote. Their gamut is certainly the diatonic scale of the Greeks; it consists of five whole notes, and (contrary to Dr. Burney’s opinion) two semi-tones; and their melodies very much resemble those of Scotland.”11 Because non-Western music is like Scottish and Irish music, one might therefore expect Stafford to begin his study of British (or English) music with just this topic. This is in fact what he does, but interestingly he exhibits the same difficulty in relating Scottish, Irish, and English music that he does in relating nonWestern and Western music. Stafford begins his history of music in England by looking to its early inhabitants, but unlike the savages, who barely register in any musical sense, early Britons are cultured and civilized: There are few countries in the world, in which music is more extensively cultivated, or more generally admired, than in England; nor is this passion for the art one of late date in our island. The aboriginal inhabitants, the ancient Britons, were passionately fond of both vocal and instrumental music; and their bards, who united in one person the characters of poet and musician, were held in the highest estimation.12

9. 10. 11. 12.

Stafford, A History of Music, 29. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 283.

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The Britons were subsequently invaded by the Saxons, who drove them to the Welsh mountains where they continued their Celtic musical traditions. Stafford accepts Crotch’s view that the Welsh thus became the inheritors of ancient British music, and when the Saxons overran England they introduced musical traditions sharply different from those of the Celts. The Celts, on the other hand, influenced Welsh, Scottish, and Irish music, though, as Stafford says, this is hotly debated among scholars. In fact it is in these relationships that Stafford makes his views clear: “The Scotch music is derived from a Celtic source: and as the language, as well as origin, of the Celts may be traced to the East, so to the same Oriental spring Dr. Macculloch refers for that species of music, deficient in the fourth and seventh in the mode, which ‘the Highlanders and the Irish, at least now among the most perfect existing remains of that far-spread nation, have preserved.’ ”13 Thus, for Stafford there is a very clear correlation between Celtic music (be it “Scotch,” Irish, or Welsh) and music of the Orient. Interestingly, the same qualities that characterize Oriental music, and distinguish it from Western music, characterize Celtic music and distinguish it from Saxon (later English) music. He writes: The Saxons brought their bards and their music with them to England; and the character of their national airs, as well as of all the other Teutonic nations, is strongly contrasted with that of the Celts. The former is marked by a good humoured heartiness, a manly simplicity and strength, which give it the stamp of sincerity, and causes it, at once, to find the way to the heart and the affections. The music of the Celts, on the contrary, like the national character, is sensitive, impetuous, ardent, and, at times, imbued with a wild melancholy, and deep pathos, which never fail to affect the hearer with feelings of sadness and of sorrow.14

Celtic music, unlike its perhaps more moderate Saxon counterpart, is “impetuous,” “ardent,” “wild,” and “deep.” As Stafford notes: “There is a great deal of softness, playful sweetness, and simplicity in the Siamese music; it differs from that of most barbarous nations, in being played in a minor key; and many of their melodies are said, by Mr. Crawfurd, to resemble the Scotch and Irish music.”15 Thus, as figure 6.1 suggests, as part of his developmentalist projection Stafford erects a rather elaborate set of metaphors that privileges the English over the Celts, and Western music over non-Western music. This is clearly rooted in the increasingly racializing early nineteenth-century discourse of AngloSaxonism, “with emphasis less on Saxon resistance to the Norman yoke than on the common Teutonic origin that separated all Englishmen from their Celtic

13. Ibid., 287. 14. Ibid., 285. 15. Ibid., 93.

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Chronological projection Non-Western Music

Western Music

Origins in nature

Origins in the Bible

Static

Evolving

Ancient (though also modern)

Modern (though also ancient)

Heathen

Christian

Celtic (Irish, Scotch, Welsh)

Saxon (English)

Figure 6.1. Stafford’s developmental projection.

neighbors.”16 For Stafford, as many others, this became the perfect foil for analogizing non-Western into a state of developmental inferiority. Prichard, for example, compares the Irish to the Africans, to the detriment of both.17 Many of the same issues arising in Stafford’s book appear throughout the literature of general music histories. Hogarth’s Musical History is a case in point. Although he does not deal nearly as extensively with non-Western music as Stafford, he nonetheless manages to echo the salient features of monogenist developmentalism. He sees the origin of music in nature, and insofar as nature is a creation of God, in God as well: “Music, though now a very complex and difficult art, is, in truth, a gift of the Author of Nature to the whole human race. Its existence and influence are to be traced in the records of every people from the earliest ages, and are perceptible, at the present time, in every quarter of the globe.”18 Hogarth, like Stafford also sees a very clear relationship between the music of the Celtic fringe (and elsewhere) as bearing a relationship to Western music: Without reference to historical details of any sort, it may be concluded, from the existence of music in every state of society, at the present day, that it also existed in the earliest ages of the world. We find that the music of uncultivated tribes, and the music

16. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 62. 17. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, vol. 3, 175, 178–79, 342. See also Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, and Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland. 18. Hogarth, Musical History, Biography, and Criticism, 1.

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which, in civilized nations, has descended from their rude ancestors, though presenting many varieties, arising from the character of the people, the genius of their language, and other causes, has yet a strong general resemblance. By analysing the simple melodies found among the common people of Scotland, Ireland, France, and other parts of Europe, and in Hindostan, Persia, the Islands of the Indian Ocean, Africa, and even China, it is discovered that these melodies are formed upon a certain scale, or series of sounds, which, therefore, is dictated and rendered agreeable to our ears by an original law of nature; and this scale, too, is substantially the same as that on which the most artificial music of the present day is founded, the latter being only rendered more extensive and complete.19

This raises some of the same questions as Stafford does: what is the chronological relationship of non-Western and Western music; is non-Western music as practiced today ancient or modern; what type of Western music descends from non-Western music—is it art music, or “national music” (folk song), or both; and what can we learn about Western music by studying non-Western music? Unlike Stafford, however, Hogarth treats history from an entirely chronological perspective and intermingles countries in any given time period. So for Hogarth, who places non-Western music at the outset of his book, there is no question of its ab initio position in the history of music. Hogarth, like Stafford, also ends his book on English music as a progression from Celt to Saxon and East to West. But in addition, he compounds the metaphoric parallelisms by the implicit comparison of the East and West to the poor and rich. Like Friedrick Engels and Henry Mayhew, Hogarth speaks of the English working classes in terms previously used to describe primitive peoples, as shown in figure 6.2. Engels describes the working classes of London as a “race apart”20 and Mayhew, a “nomad race.”21 Writing of the need to develop a taste for music, Hogarth claims that “The cultivation of a musical taste furnishes to the rich a refined and intellectual pursuit, which excludes the indulgence of frivolous and vicious amusements, and to the poor, a ‘laborum dulce lenimen,’ a relaxation from toil, more attractive than the haunts of intemperance.”22 These terms are not dissimilar to those used earlier, when speaking of “the music of uncultivated tribes, and the music which, in civilized nations, has descended from their rude ancestors,” and again when he writes more specifically of

19. Ibid., 3–4. 20. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, cited in Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 213. 21. Mayhew and Cruikshank, 1851, Or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys, cited in Stocking, 213. 22. Hogarth, Musical History, Biography, and Criticism, 430.

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musicology in transition to evolution Historical projection

Stafford and Hogarth

Stafford

Non-Western Music (inc. Oriental)

Western Music

Origins in nature

Origins in the Bible

Static

Evolving

Ancient (though also modern)

Modern (though also ancient)

Heathen

Christian

Celtic (Irish, Scotch, Welsh)

Saxon (English)

Uncultivated

Civilized

Poor

Rich

Hogarth

Figure 6.2. Stafford and Hogarth compared.

the densely peopled manufacturing districts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Derbyshire, [where] music is cultivated among the working classes to an extent unparalleled in any other part of the kingdom. . . . The people, in their manners and usages, retain much of the simplicity of “the olden time;” the spirit of industrious independence maintains its ground among them, and they preserve much of their religious feelings and domestic affections, in spite of the demoralizing effects of a crowded population, fluctuating employment, and pauperism.23

Movement Toward Evolutionism: Musical Dualism and Comtean Developmentalism in Rowbotham’s A History of Music (1885) By the middle part of the century, these racial and cultural analogues begin to erode amid criticisms of Prichard and monogenism more generally. Some music historians resisted change, of course. Even as late as the 1850s, the Very

23. Hogarth, Musical History, Biography, and Criticism, 430–31.

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Rev. F. Renehan, for example, could write in his History of Music (1858) that music originated in nature “which it pleased his Creator to assign to Man”24 in the form of Adam, from whom vocal music originated. From Adam it was dispersed throughout the world: The infant and the savage feel its influence. Traversing the globe from pole to pole, no tribe of the desert can now be discovered, nor was any known to the ancients, so savage, so despoiled of humanity, as to be insensible to music, or strangers to its enjoyment. Common therefore to persons of every age and clime and cast and colour, it must spring from that nature, which is the only present bond of community between them, and have descended to them from the common parent of all the nations of the earth.25

Unsurprisingly, Renehan also reiterates the link between the East and the Celtic fringe, and by implication, the Celtic fringe and the West: The empires of Hindostan, Burnah [sic], Siam, and other kingdoms of the extreme East all glory in the musical celebrity of their distant progenitors; they still retain an ardent passion, and many of them, especially the Siamese, a delicate and ingenious taste for music; their melodies are formed into different modes according to the different passions which they purpose to excite; and they bear a striking resemblance to the Erse and Irish airs.26

Other music historians of the time seem to reject this view out of hand, such as John Hullah, writing in The History of Modern Music (1862): Moreover, the history of modern music is altogether European. Not that the Orientals have, or have had, no music of their own; but that, as at present practised, their music has no charm, nor indeed meaning, for us. How is this? How can there be music acceptable to one comparatively civilized people and altogether unacceptable—unintelligible even—to another? The answer is to be found in the different nature of their musical system—a word which, as applied to music, I must define.27

For Hullah the systems of the East and West appear to bear no resemblance, and to explain this he refers to an anecdote of Fétis in which an Arab music master and his French student attempt to comprehend each other’s systems of intonation. Both eventually realize, after some dispute, that they each sing correctly according to their own system of tuning. Ultimately the problem for Hullah is systemic, not geographical. Oriental music is arguably unintelligible:

24. 25. 26. 27.

Renehan, History of Music, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 12. Hullah, The History of Modern Music, 6–7.

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I shall have occasion, in another lecture, to allude to the various modes or forms of scale which, however modified, certainly prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is difficult enough for an ear trained in the nineteenth century, to reconcile itself to some of these. But to reconcile one’s ear to another system seems not so much difficult as impossible.28

While from the 1860s non-Western music continued to be incomprehensible in general music histories, there are some notable exceptions toward the end of the century, such as John Frederick Rowbotham’s A History of Music (1885). In some ways Rowbotham’s three-volume history is to the later part of the century what Stafford’s volume is to the earlier. Rowbotham, like Stafford, devotes an enormous amount of attention to primitive music (it forms all of the first volume), and like Stafford he bases this entirely on second-hand information gleaned from travel writing, anthropological essays, and diverse prose. Rowbotham also situates primitive music within the chronological context of ancient, or in his case, “prehistoric music,” and like Stafford, struggles to situate this methodologically within a Western historical continuum. In fact it is not until his work on the Hindus, at the opening of the second volume, that he identifies a real starting point for Eastern influence on the West. Be that as it may, there are some very substantial differences, not only with Stafford, but with the rest of music history of the day. Rowbotham is unique among British musicologists in framing his work consciously within a clearly defined philosophical template. There are two parts to this. First, there is what Rowbotham calls a dualism within music, and second, music history develops invariably in a tripartition of distinct stages: the drum, the pipe and the lyre. Rowbotham defines music as follows: Music is a Dualism. It is formed of the conjunction of two elements—the one purely musical, the other poetical—the one sensuous, the other spiritual or intellectual—the one owing its origin and development to Instruments, and based on the mere animal delight in Sound; the other owing its origin and development to Language, and based on the fusion of the Emotional and Intellectual sides of man’s nature. The object which the historian of Music must set before him is to trace the goings on of these two elements, at first far apart and moving in separate orbits—to show how their paths gradually approached each other—how a mutual attraction was set up, till at last they were necessarily drawn into the same plane of revolution. Here is the geniture of a New Music.29

As can be seen in figure 6.3, for Rowbotham, the historian is obligated to show how these separate spheres unite into one cohesive form of music, and “how these two elements of Music answer to the two grand ultimate divisions of the human mind.”30

28. Hullah, The History of Modern Music, 9. 29. Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 1, xi. 30. Ibid., vol. 1, xii.

Purely musical Sensuous Instruments Animal delight in sound

music

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Poetical Spiritual/intellectual Language/Voice Emotional and intellectual sides of man

Figure 6.3. Rowbotham’s musical dualism.

Rowbotham takes this dualism and then divides it further, along lines drawn directly from philosophy and archaeology: I think these hints, conjoined with the bearing of the facts mentioned before, will go to confirm our original positions as to the order of the 3 Stages in the development of Prehistoric Music, the Drum Stage, the Pipe Stage, and the Lyre Stage, which, it seems to me, are to the Musician what the Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive Stages are to the Comtist, or the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages to the archaeologist.31

Musical instruments are thus divided into three types: the drum, the pipe, and the lyre, as shown in figure 6.4: Under the first head fall drums, rattles, gongs, triangles, tam-tams, castanets, tambourines, cymbals—in a word, all instruments of Percussion. Under the second head fall flutes, hautboys, clarionets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, bugles—all Wind Instruments. And under the third head fall all Stringed Instruments, comprising the harp, lyre, lute, guitar, the violin (with all its varieties), the mandolin, dulcimers, pianos, &c., &c.32

These stages are fixed developmentally, immutable and cumulative, as Rowbotham says, “savages sometimes have the Drum alone, but never the Pipe alone, or the Lyre alone; for if they have the Pipe, they always have the Drum tool; and if they have the Lyre, they always have both Pipe and Drum.”33 As shown in figure 6.5, these correspond to various nations and peoples (given in the order in which they appear in the text), and in each instance Rowbotham provides anthropological evidence in the form of travel writing and ethnological work relevant to it.

31. Ibid., vol. 1, xx. 32. Ibid., vol. 1, xii. 33. Ibid., vol. 1, xiii.

Purely musical Sensuous Instruments Animal delight in sound

Lyre Pipe Drum

Figure 6.4. The three stages of instruments.

Purely musical Sensuous Instruments Animal delight in sound

Lyre Pipe Drum

No Instruments

Drum

Veddah Australians Mincopies of the Andamans Esquimaux Inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego Behring’s Nations Samoyedes Siberian tribes Laplanders

Pipe

Lyre

Dyaks of Borneo Polynesian Malays Khonds of Khondistan Papuans Finns South American Indians Tartars Upper Amazon tribes Cossacks Indians of the Rio Negro Turcomans Uaupés Hindus Tupís Omaguas, neighboring tribes Nations of History Artaneses Yucunas Itatines Brazilian tribes Aborigines of Guiana Aymara Indians of Bolivia and Peru Huacho Indians of Peru Abipones of Paraguay Patagonians

Figure 6.5. The three stages of instruments, with their ethnological correspondence.

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Of particular interest is the fact that he places “nations of History” at the very end of his list. His footnote to this is revealing: “If the reader care to [sic] pursue the inquiry among those semi-civilised nations which meet us on the threshold of History, such as the Celts for instance, it will only be to find what is true of others is likewise true of them.”34 Here, although Rowbotham does not elaborate, the Celts (the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish) have been placed on the cusp of modernity, and have moved from a savage to a semi-civilized condition, echoing Stafford’s metaphor of the developmentally transitional position of the Celts. From the standpoint of general music histories, this is a considerable advance because it seeks to prove that all music falls under a universal pattern of development, irrespective of its own chronological timeframe. This is implicit in his introductory remarks, on the cumulative development of the orchestra in the burgeoning number of strings in Beethoven’s time. In the sixteenth century, it comprises percussion (drum), twelve winds (pipe) and two strings (lyre); in the seventeenth-century, percussion, twenty-five winds and nineteen strings; and by the time of Beethoven, percussion, fourteen winds, and forty-seven strings. Of course, the problem here is that Rowbotham, like Stafford and Hogarth, retains a linear, teleological conception of time that automatically involves progress toward a superior and fuller stage of musical history. So while Rowbotham can discuss the evolution of the orchestra in the same terms as the music of the Hindus, it remains the fact that music that is “of History” (i.e., Western) is invariably more evolved, and hence lyre-like. Non-Western music, despite being in its own terms in a lyre stage is, in Western terms, in a drum stage. Intriguingly, however, Rowbotham does not prosecute this through the entirety of his history, and instead he continues the lyre races only to “the music of the elder civilisations and of the Greeks.”35 The way in which Rowbotham manages to apply his three stages to all musics is to conflate or confuse the idea of “stage” and “race.” Thus, he is able to locate the Patagonians at the lyre stage in their music, while the Greeks actually are the lyre race. In this way, in Rowbotham’s estimation it is possible for a people to embody a stage so fully that they can be elevated to the status of race. Writing of the various migrations of the lyre in the “Lyre Stage,” for example, Rowbotham contends “that not all members of one racial family are equally fitted to rise to the Lyre Stage; and much less all the members of the human race at large.”36 This same conflation between what one might refer to as the “form” of stage and the “content” of race is also found in Rowbotham’s dualism between the Sensuous and the Intellectual/Emotional. As he says at the opening of his book, it is a question of harmonizing these two to bring about a truly balanced music.

34. Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 1, xv n1. 35. Ibid., vol. 2, 1. 36. Ibid., vol. 1, 153.

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In the same way, therefore, stage and race must be harmonized to find their fullest possible elevation within music history. The Sensuous, like a Stage, and the Intellectual/Emotional, like a Race, must unify if harmony is to be achieved, as occurs with the Egyptians: Passing now from the fastness of the barbarian to the lawns and enclosures of civilised man . . . bidding adieu to brawny warriors, rushing song-intoxicated into battle, whiterobed priests, harp in hand, leading the ways, steppes and forests, mud cabins and leaf huts, cromlechs, maraudings, and all the belongings of barbarous man, let us enter the land of the Pyramids.37

Progression from the Sensual to the Intellectual, and indeed from drum to lyre, does not, however, conform to Rowbotham’s purely instrumental form of musical developmentalism. In discussing the place of the voice in musical history, Rowbotham interrupts the sequence of drum, pipe, and lyre by situating the voice between the latter two. He suggests, moreover, that it is only after the introduction of the voice into the increasingly complex fabric of instrumental music that the lyre stage can be attained. The voice, in other words, carries the potential for the achievement of the lyre stage, and it is the voice that prepares a people for its reception of a heightened status as a lyre race. As such, the voice emerges from emotionalized vocal utterances, in conformity with Spencerian, rather than Darwinian, conceptions of musical origins. (Spencer believed that speech came before song, and Darwin vice versa.)38 Rowbotham describes the crucial turning point as follows: “The break between Impassioned Speech and Song is as cleanly made with savages as it is with us; and if Song is the child of Speech it has been begotten in some far more primitive state than what we find the savages in of to-day.”39 The Voice, and the history of vocal music, nevertheless follows the same pattern of accumulation as drum, pipe, and lyre, but extending over great intervallic distances of pitch, from one to two pitches, and then to three, five, and seven. Rowbotham refers to the Fuegians as in a “One Note Period,” African slaves in Rio or the Samoans in a “Period of Two Notes,” the Amhara Nubians being in a “Three Note Period,” and so on to seven.40

37. Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 1, 193–94. 38. Rowbotham’s objection to Darwinian evolution is laid out in the appendices to book 1 (vol. 1, 188–89). Here he describes Darwin’s theory of the origin of instrumental and vocal music as found in the Descent of Man. Darwin, according to Rowbotham, saw the origin of these in “the Love call,” or sexual selection. For general information on Darwin and Spencer’s evolutionary theories on the origin of music, see Zon, Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology, 107–14, 122–35, 142, 145–74, 216, and 219. 39. Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 1, 79. 40. Ibid., vol. 1, 91–96.

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Eventually this accumulation is considered a prerequisite for progression to the lyre stage and race, where various forms of vocal-instrumental music are classified: “with the Lyre there go the Chant, the Voice; and with the Pipe there go the Dance, [and with] the Drum, the Instrument.”41 The Voice is, however, also subject to the same dualism that exists within music itself (the sensuous and intellectual), and while it is a prerequisite to the attainment of the lyre stage, not all peoples value it equally, owing to the extent of their sensuous or intellectual (or comparable) characteristics. Thus, when Rowbotham compares the “Mediterranean Races—Semites, Hamites, and Indo-Europeans . . . and the Mongoloid races—the Chinese, Malays, and Mongols,”42 he considers the possibility that evolutionary laws can be purposefully impeded by degenerational national characteristics: For the Lyre is par excellence the instrument of the former—so much so that speaking within the limits of history we may say there was never a time with them when the Lyre was not. While the Pipe is equally the instrument of the latter, for while we have an historical account of the first introduction of the Lyre into China, the majority of the Malays and all the Northern Mongols are ignorant of its existence even yet, and are still in the Pipe Stage. . . . [However] The conception of Music by these two races has always been something entirely different. With the Mediterranean races, Music has been the handmaid of Poetry, and kept in subordination to Language. With the Mongoloid races, Music was divorced from Poetry; and instruments . . . allowed to run into what excesses they pleased.43

Although Rowbotham never actually concedes a specifically evolutionary approach, it is clear from his dualist tripartition, to say nothing of his Spencerian interpretation, that this is what drives his developmentalist agenda. At the beginning of “The Lyre Races,” he implies this, but at the same time compares himself to the generality of music historians of the time: Now I will pursue the fortunes of Music among our Aryan ancestors, and here will be the beginning of a consecutive narrative that will reach to our own times. For hitherto we have been unable to trace the story of a regular development by the light of actual history, but since we left the half-fledged art on the verge of Prehistoric times, we have done little more than pass from nation to nation, and set down the condition of music in the most flourishing periods of those nations, or with the most pronounced peculiarities which the national characters of each people impressed upon it; in so doing, taking the path which seemed easiest and most obvious, and better still, following the traditional method of treatment which great musical historians of the past have all agreed to pursue for they have passed freely from one to the other of those ancient

41. Ibid., vol. 1, 145. 42. Ibid., vol. 1, 146. 43. Ibid.

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nations, without endeavouring to gather up the threads of any regular tale of development, and this likewise the method which has been pursued in the last History of Music that has appeared—that of A. Ambros. But they have all also put off this tale of development to a comparatively recent period, not beginning to find traces of the embryology of the Modern Art of Music, which we practice at present, until at the earliest the close of the Dark Ages of Europe, or the beginning of the Middle Ages.44

Spencerian Evolutionism and Scientific Racism in Parry’s The Art of Music (1893) The same can easily be said of C. Hubert H. Parry’s The Art of Music ([1893], later known as The Evolution of the Art of Music), arguably the first general history to embrace fully non-Western music as a direct evolutionary antecedent to Western music. It is also, unlike Rowbotham’s, the first general music history to examine music history chronologically through forms rather than through chronology alone. Dibble describes The Art of Music, and other works of Parry, as codifying within a musicological context much of the evolutionary and anthropological thought of the time: “The Art of Music of 1893, published in a revised edition three years later as The Evolution of the Art of Music (to clarify its ‘scientific’ intention) formed, as vol. 80, part of Kegan Paul’s strongly Darwinian International Scientific Series, rubbing shoulders with works by Huxley, Tylor, Spencer and Walter Bagehot.”45 Yet, as Dibble points out, it is principally Spencer in whom Parry sought a theoretical framework for this work. Where Rowbotham is driven unabashedly by the threefold Comtean model of teleological developmentalism toward a lyre race, Parry insists, as did Spencer, that evolution need not proceed inexorably toward a heightened point of civilization. Just as Spencer concludes that the universe is and was constantly at odds between integration (evolution) and disintegration (dissolution), yet progressing toward heterogeneity and differentiation, Parry argues that music evolves toward complexity amid a history of thwarted savage beginnings: The examination of the music of savages shows that they hardly ever succeed in making orderly and well-balanced tunes, but either express themselves in a kind of vague wail or howl, which is on the borderland between music and informal expression of feeling, or else contrive little fragmentary figures of two or three notes which they reiterate incessantly over and over again. . . . Through such crude attempts at music scales began to grow; but they developed extremely slowly, and it was not till mankind had arrived at an advanced state of intellectuality that men began to take note of the relations of notes to one another at all, or notice that such abstractions could exist apart from the music.46

44. Rowbotham, A History of Music, vol. 2, 1–2. 45. Dibble, “Parry as Historiographer,” 46. 46. Parry, The Art of Music, 6–7.

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Scales, for example, are a microcosm of this attitude, and as such they become metaphors for Western evolutionary potential: It is advisable to guard at the outset against the familiar misconception that scales are made first and music afterwards. Scales are made in the process of endeavouring to make music, and continue to be altered and modified, generation after generation, even till the art has arrived at a high degree of maturity. The scale of modern harmonic music, which European peoples use, only arrived at its present condition in the last century, after having been under a gradual process of modification from an accepted nucleus for nearly a thousand years. Primal savages were even worse off than mediaeval Europeans. They did not know that they wanted a scale; and if they had known it they would have had neither acoustical theory or practical experience to guide them, nor even examples to show them how things ought not to be done.47

Parry considers the drive toward scales as inexorable in man, and yet the drive toward the Western scale is considered historically arbitrary: “Our modern harmonic system is an elaborately artificial product which has so far inverted the aspect of things that in order to get back to the understanding of ancient and barbarous systems we have almost to set our usual preconceptions upside down.”48 This quality of arbitrariness is not, however, something that is used to demote or criticize Western music. In fact it is precisely this arbitrariness that Parry uses to illustrate how evolution can elevate a particular music. As he says, “The modern European system is the only one in which harmony distinctly plays a vital part in the scheme of artistic design. . . . All other schemes in the world are purely melodic.”49 Here Parry begins to distinguish between a melodic and harmonic musical culture: the one “ancient and barbarous,” the other modern and civilized. A corollary to this is that melodic systems are vocal, and harmonic ones are instrumental: “In melodic systems the influence of vocal music is infinitely paramount; in modern European art the instrumental element is strongest.”50 This, of course, runs contrary to Rowbotham, for whom primitive music is imbued with an almost entirely instrumental overlay. For Parry the origins of music lie in vocal roots. It is vocal music that is melodic, and as savage music is principally melodic, vocal music is essentially savage—unless evolved under the auspices of an instrumental consciousness. For Rowbotham this instrumental consciousness pervades music history, but for Parry it is part of an evolutionary process of adaptation: The instincts of human creatures for thousands of years have, as it were, sifted it and tested it till they have got a thing which is most subtly adapted to the purposes of artistic

47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 19. Ibid. Ibid.

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expression. It has afforded Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, and Brahms ample opportunities to produce works which in their respective lines are as wonderful as it is conceivable for any artistic works to be. . . . It will probably be a good many centuries before any new system is justified by such a mass of great artistic works as the one which the instincts of our ancestors have gradually evolved for our advantage.51

Parry views music as having evolved “for our advantage.” We are the passive beneficiaries of an active evolutionary process that has elevated Western music above its non-Western roots, from savage to civilized, melodic to harmonic, and vocal to instrumental, and as in most histories savage music remains static and unaffected by evolution, to the point that certain musical cultures act as living fossils of our own musical origins. So when Parry writes on “Folk-Music,” he makes it clear that the study of savage music is not a study of savage music, but a study of Western music: The basis of all music and the very first steps in the long story of musical development are to be found in the musical utterances of the most undeveloped and unconscious types of humanity, such as unadulterated savages and inhabitants of lonely isolated districts well removed from any of the influences of education and culture. Such savages are in the same position in relation to music as the remote ancestors of the race before the story of the artistic development of music began; and through study of the ways in which they contrive their primitive fragments of tune and rhythm, and of the way they string these together, the first steps of musical development may be traced.52

Parry’s insistence that savage music finds relevance only in relation to Western music is part and parcel of his appropriation of evolution for a Eurocentric Western agenda. In permitting evolution to dominate his historiographical discourse he also champions a style of racism that deems the savage incapable of progressing, yet contradictorily influential in the course of Western musical evolution. Parry’s is effectively a scientific racism translated into a musicological environment. This is not to suggest, however, that Parry is without sympathy toward certain types of non-Western music, and indeed, at times he shows enormous magnanimity toward it, especially where it has relevance to the imperial or historical context of Britain at the time. Of Pacific nations, for example, he is often coruscating in abuse, but where India or Greece is concerned he is often gratuitously lionizing. That he distinguishes the two geographies is also important in relation to scales. He writes: “The scales of China, Japan, Java, and the Pacific Islands are all pentatonic in their recognised structure. . . . The rest of the most notable scales of the world are structurally heptatonic. . . . Such are the scales of India, Persia,

51. Parry, The Art of Music, 51. 52. Ibid., 52.

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Arabia, probably Egypt, certainly ancient Greece and modern Europe.”53 This distinction, and relative disregard of Oriental cultures in manifest favor of Anglo-colonial holdings, is more than casual, because it signifies the extent to which Parry reflects imperial context through his manipulation of evolutionary discourse. Parry simply disregards music that does not live up to its own future. Of Chinese music, for instance, he writes that “With genuine Orientals the love of unmeaning decorative ornamentation is excessive in every department of mental activity, whether literature, art, or music.”54 Throughout the early parts of The Art of Music Parry continues this trend, and deprecates evolutionary strands that are politically and racially uncomfortable. At the same, time he retains a strong feeling in racial differences, which he claims “imply different degrees of emotionalism and imaginativeness, and different degrees of the power of self-control in relation to exciting influences.”55 Whether this is something he absorbed from his reading of Spencer cannot be known, but what can be known is the fact that Parry’s book represents a high point of scientific racism in music, and it remains a testimony to an age conflicted with itself, as shown in greater detail in chapter 9.

53. Ibid., 22–23. 54. Ibid., 63. 55. Ibid.

Chapter Seven

Histories of National Music (1) Henry Chorley and the Anthropological Background Many of the issues that characterize general music histories are also found in general histories of national music: the “ancient or modern” confusion; the aesthetically deprecating tone; the inability to conceptualize systemic relationships with Western music; and most important, perhaps, the use of racist language as a vehicle for establishing ontological superiority. In this genre, as in general music histories, non-Western music continues to be used as a metaphor for aesthetic and moral inferiority, with Western music lurking in the Western imperial background as the gold standard for all national music. Two figures immediately come to mind in this genre, Henry Chorley (1808–72), dealt with here, and Carl Engel (1818–82), dealt with in the next chapter.

Chorley and the Anthropological Background Apart from Dauney’s rather advanced proposals, and other earlier papers already discussed, it was not until the late 1860s, in fact, that music was elevated to a topic of discussion within academic anthropological literature. It was with Chorley’s very brief article “Music in Race” (1869) in the Anthropological Review, as well as his slightly later and expanded companion piece (untitled) in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1870–71), that this occurred. Surprisingly, perhaps, Chorley’s earlier article does not discuss race in relation to non-Western peoples, but in relation to Wagner’s anti-Semitic tract, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (1850, rev. 1869), and some works written about it, the later article being more generally expansive in its coverage. Chorley begins “Music in Race” by highlighting the theoretical centrality of race within British anthropology, and suggesting that the fierce debate that Wagner’s book has engendered in Germany demands attention overseas. Needless to say, the attention Chorley

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gives Wagner’s tract is entirely negative, not simply because of its overt racism, but because Wagner simply refuses to substantiate his views: There may be some important truth underlying a theory which, unless confined to proper limits, appears to be in contradiction to daily observed facts; this is but of too frequent occurrence with writers who do not proceed systematically with their subjects, and certainly the absence of all scientific method and scientific spirit in the essay of Wagner and in the replies it has called forth is sincerely to be regretted.1

As Chorley says, “Wagner hardly ever condescends to particulars,”2 and herein lie Chorley’s most substantive criticisms. Wagner may or may not be right in his views, but his methodology, from an anthropological standpoint, is all wrong, and that in itself invalidates it. Chorley’s insistence on methodological (“scientific”) veracity gives “Music in Race” a veneer of philosophical objectivity, or detachment, not found in his subsequent article, or indeed in his other works. What one finds in its place is an articulate, yet more personal, rendering of the topic of race in music. In this instance, Chorley refers more particularly to the East, and it is because of this, and discussions before and after his paper, that the paper has significance as a barometer of anthropological methodology of its day. Of considerable importance as well is the introduction by the Anthrapologic Society’s vice president, the well-known German botanist and traveler Berthold Seemann, which, if taken as representative of the discipline at large, is a serious indictment of anthropological ignorance of music. Opening the session, Seemann indicates that although music is a universal language, it nonetheless remains “an open question whether it is a universal language, understood by all mankind alike.”3 Seemann, taking an apparently diffusionist view of musical progression, clearly doubts that music is universal, and suggests that the diversity and diffusion of Eastern music—and even music within the West—precludes universality. Music may be universal to all peoples, but as a linguistic tool of communication it is geographically localized: By travelling eastwards we find that there is certainly a different language of music. Songs of joy, and even dance-accompaniments, are no longer, as with us, in the major keys, but always in the minor. Proceed still further eastwards, to the Indies, and have to endure, in listening to the people’s music, a monotony almost unbearable to European modes of thought. Continue your journey amongst the great Mongolian races, and the bulk of what you have to listen to is positively painful to your ear; and your greatest

1. Chorley, “Music in Race,” 309. 2. Ibid. 3. Seemann, introducing Henry Chorley, [“Race in Music”], clv.

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puzzle is how what is so painful to you should give positive pleasure to them. Again, cross over to America, and you find the aborigines uttering musical sounds, no doubt full of meaning to them, but altogether unintelligible to us, and to our habits of thinking without any ending.4

In some respects, Seemann’s introduction summarizes prevailing anthropological attitudes of the day. There is an implicit European cultural hegemony, yet the “East” is geographically nonspecific and musically incomprehensible. Whether Seemann’s comments on the universality of music represent in any way a manifestation of institutional differences between ethnology and anthropology remains to be seen. Certainly there existed fundamental differences between the Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, and the Anthropological Society of London, founded in 1863. Generally speaking, these center around the acceptance or rejection of Darwinism. By the 1860s the Ethnological Society had been largely overtaken by Darwinists, and James Hunt, a “racialist” in the mould of Robert Knox,5 and a member from 1856, left the society to found the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. Hunt, needless to say, created the organization to redefine the field in his own image. Thus whereas ethnology had been merely “the history or science of races,” anthropology was deemed “the science of the whole nature of man.”6 In terms of the universality of musical language, the divide may have relevance, even as late as 1870, when Seemann introduces Chorley. Anthropologists, like Hunt—and perhaps Seemann—may well have considered Darwinism “as a disguised reassertion of the Prichardian doctrine of human unity,”7 and as such regarded the supposed universality of musical language with similar suspicion. Where an ethnologist, like Traill for example, could translate Humboldtian concepts of the common source of linguistic plurality, Seemann presumably, as a card-carrying anthropological polygenist, could not. Instead, he proposes that the very idea of musical universality is mitigated by evidence of the plurality of non-Western—and even Western—musical discourses. Seemann’s seemingly institutionalized anthropological resistance to the linguistic universality of music may also have had its source in more personal issues. In a letter of February 25, 1868, to his publisher John Murray, Darwin suggests that hostile reviews in the Athenaeum were the work of Seemann, to whom Darwin had previously refused a testimonial,8 and this is corroborated in a subsequent letter of February 28, 1868, from Darwin to the botanist J. D. Hooker.9

4. Seemann, introducing Henry Chorley, [“Race in Music”], clv–clvi. 5. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 247. 6. Hunt, “Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropology,” 2, cited in ibid., 247–48. 7. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 250. 8. The Darwin Correspondence Online Database, ref. 5931. 9. Ibid., ref. 5951.

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Be that as it may, Seemann’s introduction to Chorley creates the assumption that Chorley, speaking again on “Race in Music,” will follow along similar anthropological, as opposed to ethnological, lines. In this sense he is not disappointed, as Chorley’s paper falls clearly within an anthropological remit. For instance, he dismantles the ethnological practice of comparative historiography, in which modern objects are examined in light of ancient records. He says: “Has it not been too largely taken for granted that the pictures in eastern, or southern, or northern tombs and temples are to be relied on as technically exact representations? The strings of pictured harps have been counted; and theories as to their scale and compass consequently stated, as if the above pictures were so many daguerrotypes.”10 Chorley refers to the historical unreliability engendered by the “idealising recorders”11 of ancient artifacts, and denigrates implicitly those scholars whose work is founded on comparisons with them. Music is similarly problematical for a number of reasons. First, irrespective of its antiquity, music, like all art, is representative rather than real. Second, music notation, moreover, especially when taken down on spec in the field by amateurs, is subject to the “vagaries and changes of the moment.”12 And third, it is impossible to prove that non-Western music heard today is historically pure. When “the band of the Pasha of Egypt exhibited itself at the International Exhibition in London”13 their music revealed phrases and fragments of French and English music, “with barbarous condiments . . . sufficient to deceive all save those listening for a purpose.”14 In this same context, Chorley also talks of the “imitative powers of the negro,” which, as we have already seen, conforms to racist anthropological tropes of savageness, including childhood, animality, naturalness, ignorance, innocence, helplessness, and, of importance here, imitativeness.15 Imitativeness, here, conjures up images of purposeful fakery or deceit, a characteristic commonly associated with blacks. As Douglas Lorimer shows, although the Victorian perceived the Negro as multifarious, certain characteristics remained more or less constant, such as physical attributes. Psychological characteristics and social qualities, however, changed subject to context: “The ‘Negro’ was depicted as both ‘the obedient, humble servant, and the lazy, profligate, worthless worker,’ ”16 among other things. Imitativeness in music, according to Chorley, was no doubt considered a function of any one of these qualities, and his comment was probably greeted with some approval. Hunt, for example, invested the

10. Chorley, [“Race in Music”], clvii. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., clviii. 13. Ibid., clviii–clix. 14. Ibid., clix. 15. Jahoda, Images of Savages, 9–10. 16. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture,” 19. See also Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians.

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Anthropological Society with an overtly racist view of Negroes, and even Galton, who in 1863 replaced Hunt as secretary of the Ethnological Society, held views that could easily be construed as racist.17 Chorley continues with an equally gloomy picture of national music of the non-Western world, which remains vulgar and incomprehensible in the face of a Western musical ascendancy: The primitive melodies of the far North, and of our own three kingdoms, many of which appear to be of great antiquity, will last as long as music shall last; whereas the ear turns away with repugnance from most of the music which delights the Orientals. Where they show any sense for Music, it is confined to rhythm, and seldom includes beauty of sound or symmetry of form.18

This kind of ascendancy would, presumably, have appealed to his audience considerably, as its Northern hegemony is achieved, in part, by a rejection of the comparative method, with Chorley arguing against the veracity of historical documentation. On the other hand, as shown in later in this chapter, Chorley tends to treat the points of the compass as geographical families, in much the way the comparative methodologist Henry Maine compartmentalizes peoples by virtue of their patrilineal descent. As Kuper suggests, for Maine the “Indo-European peoples formed a family, but some members of the family had done very much better than others. The poor relations still lived in the way we had once lived ourselves.”19 Thus, although Chorley questions the unverifiable nature of the comparative method, he retains conceptually some of its framework. Referring to Hebrew chants, for example, he suggests that, although they represent implicitly an antecedent to Christian chant, they nonetheless “are in the most irregular form of recitative, getting little beyond the wildest of wild cries, which, I have ventured to think, owe their existence to accident.”20 Chorley’s use of the word accident is no accident, as it were, because Maine, unlike later anthropologists, such as John McLennan, allows for the presence of historical accident in his developmental schema.21 In Chorley’s terms, synagogal music is an almost familial accident in the history of Western religious music. (Interestingly, he does not make this point in his earlier article “Music in Race,” in which he presumably saw no relationship between ancient Jewish music and the music of modern Jewish composers.) Partly this is due to the seemingly chaotic rhythmic content of synagogal music,

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 251–52. Chorley, [“Race in Music”], clxii. Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, 32. Chorley, [“Race in Music”], clx. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 168.

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which Chorley deprecates in possibly anti-Semitic racist terminology. But equally, it may have something to do with Chorley’s belief in a relationship between rhythm and physiognomy: “It may be observed that the sense of musical rhythm seems as distinctly distributed among different nations as varieties of physiognomy.”22 This comment has a particular resonance with Hunt, among many others, whose racist paper “On the Negro’s Place in Nature” (1863) was based on comparative cranial physiognomy, “proving” the European to be infinitely superior in intelligence to the Negro. Needless to say this same attitude applied commonly to the Jews. Francis Galton, for instance, groups them all together: “The Mongolians, Jews, Negroes, Gipsies, and American Indians; severally propagate their kinds; and each kind differs in character and intellect, as well as in colour and shape, from the other four.”23 Whether or not Chorley’s analogy of rhythm and physiognomy supports a putative anti-Semitism, or a more general racism, the fact remains that Chorley’s conception of race in music is determined by currents prevailing with the anthropological community in his day. What is lacking in Chorley, however, is not evidence of methodological influence, but methodological guidance. In this respect, Chorley does little more for anthropological methodology than travel writers before him. In fact, despite the significance of Chorley’s presence within the pages of the Anthropological Review, as a point of disciplinary engagement, it was not until the founding in 1871 of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland that music began to play a more obvious role.

Chorley’s The National Music of the World (1880) Chorley’s The National Music of the World is arguably one of the earliest collections of writings on national music published in England, although it was not until 1880 that the 1862 lectures upon which it is based would be published in book form by Henry G. Hewlett. Chorley delivered the lectures at the Royal Institution, and later in Manchester and Birmingham, and Hewlett ensured faithful transcription of his original texts.24 He begins by describing what he sees as the erroneous perception of national music as “raw material”: It may be asserted that National Music, with its origin, its features, its uses, has been too much neglected as a subject by scientific teachers and historians, who have seemingly agreed to consider it in the light of raw material, the examination of which could only interest minute analysts or else practical manufacturers. This is a mistake. National

22. Chorley, [“Race in Music”], clxv. 23. Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” 59–60. 24. Hewlett, “Preface,” xiii.

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music is not raw material, inasmuch as every natural production, from the moment when man has tended and shaped it, however rudely, has been thenceforth, once for all separated from the condition of the brute ore in the mountain.25

This perceived misconception, that national music is “natural” music, and hence taxonomically different from art music, remained deeply embedded in the fabric of British musicology for most of the nineteenth century. In a somewhat later discussion of the origins of music in Britain, for example, Frederick Crowest portrays the origins of national music as emerging directly from nature: first there appeared “the carollings of birds, the monotone of bees, the fluttering of the leaves,”26 and so on, and from this “there rose the human voice of gifted savages, vehement with the emotions of the giant frames which emitted it. . . . Like all primitive beings, they would clap with the hands, shout and wail, whistle with hands and mouth, imitate the sounds of beasts and birds.”27 What is important here, and in Chorley, is not the fact that music has mimetic qualities with nature, which would have been an aesthetic commonplace in the nineteenth century, but that man has mimetic qualities with music. In other words, the music that derives from nature is implicitly neutral—it is raw material, but the music that derives from man is, as Chorley says, “not raw material” at all. National music is therefore a reflection of human identity, not natural mimesis. So in Chorley, Crowest, and other writers on national music, the element of “rawness,” “rudeness,” or “bruteness” is transferred from music to man, thereby exempting music from criticisms normally associated with it. This transference of mimetic associations from music to man was, of course, very much a topic of philosophical discussion of the time. Joseph Goddard, for example, in The Philosophy of Music (1862), suggests that the discourse of music history is bifurcated chronologically between the earlier period that derives art from nature, and the later that derives it from the imagination of man.28 The same could be said of H. C. Banister’s article “Music as a Language” (1886), in which he argues that music is more than innately imitative of nature. By virtue of its linguistic nature, it is so inextricably bound to man that its natural mimetic characteristics become entirely human rather than musical. Music is “self originating . . . [and] allied with an originating musical mind and heart.”29 For Chorley national music is not mimetically adjoined to nature, despite music being inextricably bound to it. And so his reduction of music to the four points of the compass involves a parallel taxonomy according a corresponding range of generic human sentiments to each direction. He begins with the East,

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Chorley, National Music, 1. Crowest, The Story of British Music, 3. Ibid., 3–4. See Goddard, The Philosophy of Music, 142–43. Banister, “Music as a Language,” 111.

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and, by way of the South and North, ends with the West. In regard to the East— the cradle of civilization—he divides music in a way that encapsulates his notions of an overall development from East to West. Thus, music of the East is divided into the earlier Hebrew-East and later Christian-East. The music of the HebrewEast is more characteristically “raw” than the music of the Christian-East, which is “not raw.” The Hebrew-East is, in essence, more innately “natural” because it is chronologically antecedent and socially nascent whereas the Christian-East is more “human” and inherently political. The music of the Hebrew-East is therefore less “national” than the music of the Christian-East. In describing the transition Chorley writes: “I have spoken first about what may be called the ruder music of the East designedly, yet without reference to chronology. For had dates guided me, it would have been needful to begin with the music of that strange and noble people [the Hebrews] who, now having a country of their own no more, are still the earliest of those owning an oriental origin of whom distinct and consecutive record is made.”30 The “ruder” music also includes Hindu, Indian, Chinese, and Turkish music in the main, all placed under the banner of “Oriental” (of which Hebrew music is a part). Chorley is absolutely decimating in his descriptions of Oriental music: “The almost universal monotony and coarseness of the singing voices, if so they may be called, of the orientals, seems accompanied by inability on their part to appreciate beauty of vocal tone in others. This has been again and again curiously manifested during the visits which Eastern personages of opulence and cultivation have paid to Europe.”31 Writing of Chinese music he says: “What we know of Chinese melody and music, with very small exception, is in every respect more rude and more shapeless than that of far more savage people.”32 Of course, it is a premise of Chorley that the music of the Christian-East supersede in dignity and creative potential the music of the Hebrew-East, and despite any feigned suggestion of aesthetic democracy, he almost unilaterally portrays Hebrew-East music as inferior. When describing Engel’s work on China in The Music of the Most Ancient Nations he cites “The Ancient Hymn in honour of the Ancestors,” but describes it as “a tune in the midst of chaotic handfuls of notes, as stately well ordered, and susceptible of musical treatment as any Lutheran psalm, or any of those Romish hymns which replaced the crude and over-prized Ambrosian and Gregorian chants.”33 Chorley’s backhanded compliment is consistent with his dichotomized view of the overall music of the East. He first complains that Chinese music is “chaotic.” But no sooner has he conceded its “stately” quality than he suggests that the

30. 31. 32. 33.

Chorley, National Music, 38. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 32–33. Ibid., 33.

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music of the Hebrew-East is incomplete without the musical treatment of the Christian-East. This same attitude is not evinced in music of the Christian-East. Despite its being the direct ancestor of Western national music, Chorley sees in it remnants of (Hebrew) nature that restrain its progress. He writes that notwithstanding the extent of biblical evidence “Many of what may be called Hebrew melodies (as distinguished from chants) bear no trace of time or place.”34 They retain, in other words, a mythic or perhaps even “natural” origin. They are possibly more Hebrew-East than Christian-East—they are “raw,” yet “not raw.” Intriguingly he describes them as a nation (“not raw”) without a nation (“raw”): The remarkable attitude which the homeless Hebrews have maintained and retained since the birth, progress and enlargement of Christianity even unto these days;—the supremacy they have asserted in the face of the persecution, bigotry, scandal (not without some warrant to be found among the national characteristics of these people without a nation), could not fail to be accompanied by a certain injustice which, as it is the habit of injustice to do, has only fixed attention more permanently upon those who have been its object.35

This has implications for his view of the Hebrews in terms of national music, for although the music of the Hebrews represents a development toward Christian music—a type of “sacred bridge”—in itself it continues to remain undeveloped. When commenting on the transcription of a certain Hebrew tune, he claims that the “manner in which this chant shifts about, opening in one tone and closing in another, is worthy of observation. I cannot but suggest, that the irregularity may be referable to imperfect transmission, caused by the intonation on the part of the singer.”36 While Chorley’s apology for the tune suggests some kind of embarrassment, it also suggests that “flaws” within the tune be explained away by bad performance. Rather than admitting of the tune’s innate features, Chorley responds by condemning features that do not accord with subsequent (Christian-East) musical practice, that is, asymmetrical tonal arrangements and so on. This is, indeed, the “raw” that prevents the “not raw” to emerge in national music. Hebrew music of his day, as a consequence, suffers the same prejudice that he confers upon the music of antiquity, of the Hebrew-East, such as Chinese or Hindu music. He even says that Hebrew music, unlike church-related music, does not find itself in the concert halls, either in adapted form or in its original form—again a characteristic of music abandoned by the more evolved East–West. Despite these underlying sentiments, Chorley goes to some length to

34. Chorley, National Music, 42. 35. Ibid., 39. 36. Ibid., 42.

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rebut any hint of anti-Semitism. He cites “German critics” who look to Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer as characteristically Hebrew, and complains that the attribution of Jewish characteristics in their music is absurd. More pointedly, one is a good composer (Mendelssohn) and the other is a bad composer (Meyerbeer). Nevertheless, Chorley concedes that although they are “an opulent and refined and musical people,”37 they are “a people, withal, without a country.”38 Without a country, they remain a people without a truly national music, and yet, despite this their music bears all the hallmarks of national music. Intriguingly, Chorley compares them with the Gypsies, another race of wanderers, but owing to their historically degraded status, their music—unlike that of the Hebrews—“is of very limited value.”39 Nevertheless, the music of the Gypsies is inexplicably popular among certain modern composers—Schubert and Liszt, for example. Chorley’s brand of Hebrew difference does not represent an antiSemitic stance. Indeed, he is rather fulsome in his praise of Jewish composers and Jewish music. But underlying this is an appreciation that struggles to confirm the status of “national music” upon any nation without a country, like the Gypsies or the Hebrews. Thus, in an effort to compensate for this, he elevates Hebrew music to the status of Christian music by denuding it of its Oriental precondition. At the same time, however, he turns it into a kind of historical dependency by making its significance dependent upon its relation to the West. In other words, he does not deal with Hebrew music in its own terms, but rather in relation to Christian and other Western music. Hebrew music is Eastern music that became Western. The idea of national music being legitimated by the success of its future has especial resonance for Chorley’s own brand of musical nationalism. Whereas music of the East represents the alternately primitive and potentiated cradle of civilization; the music of the South, full-bodied emotion (Italy) and heightened intellect (France); and the music of the North, fantasy, the music of the West represents home. And indeed, for Chorley the music of the West is English. So in the same way that Christian music realizes the potential of Hebrew music (or makes it “not raw”), English music makes the national music of the world “not raw.” The East, South, and North are, in other words, preliminaries to the fully realized English West. Of course, the same points of the compass that affect music internationally also affect England nationally, as it were, in microcosm. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the same political and aesthetic tensions that underlie the music of other nations appear in England without any less strength of feeling:

37. Ibid., 49. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 51.

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It is to be noted, however, as a characteristic, that when we touch upon this country of ours—to wit, Great Britain, including the Principality, North Britain, and Ireland—we enter a region of anything rather than brotherly love or concord, as regards music; a region of hot controversy over our rich treasures of national melody; treasures more vast and peculiar, considering the area within which they are found, than distinguish any of the districts glanced at in my former sketches.40

Here Chorley divides Britain up between “the Principality” (England and Wales), “North Britain” (Scotland), and Ireland, but in his chapter on “Music from the West” the same divisions are not apparent. Instead, Chorley arranges his chapter upon a notional compass like the rest of his book. He first discusses the music of Wales (East), and then Ireland (South), Scotland (North), and finally England (West). These four points of the national compass equate, as before, with geographical sentiments that characterize the region. What is different, of course, is that the animosities that mark his attitude toward nonWestern national music do not appear so vehement. In describing Welsh music, for instance, he writes that “no tunes have been so little tinctured by strange influences.”41 And he continues in a manner not dissimilar in treatment to that he gives the Hebrews in “Music from the East”: The solitary condition which the Welsh have preferred—their high pride of ancestry— their resolution to protract the existence of a separate language—their defensive habits in point of litigation—the somewhat remote beauty of their district, which has features and attractions of its own—these things have all conspired to retain in the music of the Principality a certain primitive character.42

There are a number of points that are relevant in this quotation. The parallel between the Welsh and Hebrews is clear. Where the Welsh are solitary, proud of their ancestry, defensive, and linguistically different, the Hebrews are a “a people without a nation,” their tunes are “of remote antiquity,” they are “a strange and noble people,” and their language has “dignity.”43 Of course, what is missing in this parallelism is the fact that the Welsh do have a country, unlike the Hebrews. But even as independent as Wales is as a nation, Chorley makes clear that it remains part of the Principality that is Great Britain and to this extent an ancillary member of it. Chorley even comments that, as the English are everywhere adopting nonEnglish British tunes as their own, Wales should be no exception: “This is a tune which may have got into your country [Wales], but which is our tune [England].”44

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Chorley, National Music, 185–86. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 38–40. Ibid., 188.

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In this case although Wales has nominal nationhood as part of the Principality, it is its framing as English that seems to give it genuine meaning. The parallelism with the Hebrews is therefore not as inexact as it may seem. Like the Hebrews, the Welsh have positive national characteristics, but lack geographical independence and identity. And like the Hebrews, they also achieve retroactive recognition by virtue of anticipating successful foreign adoption. The English are to the Welsh what the Christians are to the Hebrews. They are the “not raw” successors to the “raw.” This implication is also evident in the very nature of Chorley’s suggestion of a British Principality including only England and Wales. Wales represents the East, and England the West. It is the “away” and England the “home.” Wales is the anticipatory East, and England the realized West. As such, and despite his affection for Welsh tunes, Chorley finds it difficult to refrain from criticism. As in his criticism of the Hebrews, he suggests that their lack of national realization is rooted in the negative side of otherwise positive national characteristics. So where the Welsh and Hebrews are defensive, they are also obstinate, and where they are proud they are also self-important. He more or less states this when he says “One cause of such an oversight [of the Welsh] may be found in the persevering (why not say, obstinate?) insulation within which our neighbour-subjects, by way of asserting pedigree, have coffered up, and clamped and chained their nationality.”45 Chorley’s comments hinge on the phrase “neighbour-subjects,” which suggests hierarchical as much as geographical proximity and subjugation. The Welsh are neighbor-subjects geographically to the English, as the Hebrews are neighbor-subjects to the Christians religiously. Judeo-Christianity is the Welsh–English Principality. Chorley’s last remarks on Wales contain language that bears on this to a large extent: “Gower, Chaucer’s predecessor, a Welshman, our first poet, wrote in English. If his countrymen do not discard him as an apostate, is there not here pedigree, precedent, example to every real lover of national Welsh art?”46 This same parallelism between Judeo-Christianity and the Welsh–English Principality does not apply as strongly to the music of Ireland and Scotland— notionally the music of the South and North. Ireland is described as A wild world, I repeat, but one as lovely as wild; full of every gracious natural produce— a world which knew the fairy charms of harp and pipe and symphony from an early period—a world full of tune, full of genius, full of capacity; less full, we critical English may say, of the cementing common sense which brings all these charming elements together in music.47

In addition to these wonderfully positive features, however, the Irish have a music predicated in its melodic vocabulary on instrumental characteristics—particularly

45. Ibid., 196. 46. Ibid., 197. 47. Ibid., 197–98.

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the harp. And as lovingly as Chorley describes the Irish harp and its music, he also talks of it as having a “real deficiency of certain intervals, which mark a large section of the tunes of Ireland, probably the most ancient ones.”48 He writes later that “This form of tune then grew out of instrument inequality.”49 Whether this is a type of insult or an attempt at objectivity is a matter of some speculation, because Chorley does not generally deprecate the Irish with backhanded compliments. What is intriguing about his comment is not so much its implication for the Irish as a nation, but for the antiquity of their music. The more deficient the instrument, the more primitive it is; and the more primitive, the more ancient the music played upon it. So because of the unchanging nature of the Irish harp, Irish music retains an antiquity of unique importance. It reveals the deepest wild of the past: on arriving in the world of Irish music, we find ourselves in a wild world in every sense of the word. The antiquaries, the claimants—authorities who profess to understand Phoenician, or to date their ancestry from Spain, so beset the inquirer after nationality, that he has to keep a calm head, and a keen pair of eyes in the same, if he looks into the matter.50

Where Ireland is deep and wild, Scotland is more defined. But like an Eastern progression toward Westernness, Ireland progresses seamlessly into Scotland, all the while shedding its Irishness. When describing the nature of Scottish tunes, Chorley clearly sees them evolving from the Irish: And though, as has been said, the presence of Irish harpers may have been occasional, if not frequent, in Scotland, I do not find many traces of the harp-spirit in the tunes of Scotland, beyond that similarity in the omission of certain intervals which has reference to one common origin, and which may have caused many of the fierce national contests, undertaken with the vague hope of settling the birthplace of melodies which probably belong to neither one country nor the other, but to both.51

This notional progression from Ireland to Scotland, from South to North, follows a notional parallel in chronology. The music of Scotland is perceived as more evolved than that of Ireland. It contains fewer awkward intervals, and is often more tender and melodious. When Chorley finally makes it back home to England, he begins by suggesting that English national music is not remotely like Welsh, Irish, or Scottish music: “but I find among the English tunes nothing in the least equivalent to Welsh or Irish or Scotch melodies, as regards freshness

48. 49. 50. 51.

Chorley, National Music, 201. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 216–17.

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or strangeness, or the character which distinguishes the little woman in the red cloak and hat from the Highlander in his kilt.”52 In fact Chorley, surprisingly, continues to define the English in terms of what they are not: Let us see, if we can, if there be originating causes for this. A nation of shopkeepers, as we have been contemptuously called, we are still a nation of travellers, gentle and simple; and travellers who, while curious as to things abroad, are wondrously constant to our home notions. With all our good faith, there may be some pertinacity in us; some inaptitude to digest impressions alien to those of nature and education.53

Looking at Chappell’s collection of The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, Chorley cites the eclectic nature of the compilation, saying that it reveals how cosmopolitan in origins many of England’s tunes actually are. They are so cosmopolitan, in fact, that they could be said to belong to nobody: “There are many English tunes which may belong to nobody or to everybody.”54 This suggestion of universalism has, of course, implications for notions of national ownership. But it is precisely these same qualities of ownership that Chorley dismisses as irrelevant when discussing English music. English music simply does not reveal the same characteristics that mark other national musics: “that nationality in music does not lie in either borrowing or in adaptation, but in some inborn qualities to be ascribed either to the influences of Nature or of manners, or of peculiar instruments, originated by rude people. There is small trace of anything of the kind in English music.”55 For Chorley the character of English national music lies in its ascendancy over national boundaries. The same applies to his views on European, as British, music. He describes the catch, for example, in the following terms: “There is yet another form of English music which I think no Scotch moss-trooper can inter-meddle with—no Irish reaper can deprive us of—no Welsh antiquary carry away into the fastness of the Principality: the catch.”56 Despite this, Chorley also describes the catch as a typically English hybrid, and purports it to emblemize England’s characteristically dichotomized national identity. As he says, “our honesty, our wealth, our welcome—and now our great and widely diffused musical culture—we may fail for a while—not for the future, I earnestly believe—betwixt eclecticism and exclusiveness, in having a music of our own.”57 So for Chorley, the catch, like the English, is defined by what it is not. In some sense the English are also neither “raw” nor “not raw,”

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Ibid., 225. Ibid. Ibid., 226. Ibid. Ibid., 231–32. Ibid., 234.

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despite being the Western point of the compass both notionally and geographically. The English are above the menial points of the compass, and their national music reflects their innate characteristics: “As a people who can read at sight, we are without superiors or equals. Our voices are beautiful, and I think almost more equally distributed as respects the register than the voices of any other country.”58

58. Chorley, National Music, 232.

Chapter Eight

Histories of National Music (2) Carl Engel and the Influence of Tylor Comparative Methodologies and Engel’s Histories of National Music Carl Engel represents an altogether different view of national music. Unlike Chorley, who wrote from a more openly journalistic and populist standpoint, Engel was an organologist and musicologist, and considerably less tendentious. Perhaps the most significant scholar of non-Western organology and music of his age,1 he compiled an extensive musical instrument collection, most of which eventually went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. An exhibition of instruments was given in 1872 for which he compiled a catalogue, and two years later he produced the Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (1874). In addition to his research on musical instruments, he also published extensively on the topic of ancient and national music. The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864) was followed soon thereafter by An Introduction to the Study of National Music (1866) and the later compilation of Musical Times articles, The Literature of National Music (1879). As he makes clear throughout his literature on national music, Engel does not subscribe to the prejudices that mark much of the musicological writings of the time. Indeed, Engel is unique in espousing a view of ancient and national music not largely preconditioned by Western aesthetic bias. For Engel the music of ancient civilizations and uncivilized modern nations provides a necessary window into the Western musical past: For years I have taken every opportunity of ascertaining the distinctive characteristics of the music not only of civilized but also of uncivilized nations. I soon saw that the latter is capable of yielding important suggestions for the science and

1. Bate, “Engel, Carl,” 166. See also Bate and Musgrave, “Engel, Carl (i).”

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history of music, just as the languages of savage nations are useful in philological and ethnological inquiries. As I proceeded, I became more and more convinced that, in order to understand clearly the music of the various modern nations, it was necessary to extend my researches to the music of ancient nations.2

In The Music of the Most Ancient Nations Engel sets out to describe Assyrian, Egyptian, and Hebrew music and musical instruments. But, unlike mainstream comparative methodologists who used the present to reconstruct the past, here Engel suggests that one uses the past to interpret the present, in a reversal of classic comparative methodology. Indeed, he does in a systematic empirically driven methodology based on archaeological artifacts, paleological sources, and instruments. He, like many of the so-called classic evolutionists such as Lubbock and Tylor,3 purposefully omits reference to mythological sources concerning the origin of music, and insists on using extant materials rather than sources drawn from secondhand information, like Burney or Hawkins. His object “is to submit a few observations which are not to be found in those books.”4 For this purpose Engel relies heavily on musical instruments and their portrayal in recently discovered ancient sculpture and art. At the same time, he turns to the national music of modern nations—also recently discovered—and in so doing reveals his divergence from prevailing opinion: Hitherto it [the study of national music] has been almost entirely disregarded by musical savants. Sir John Hawkins, in the preface to his “History of Music,” says: “The best music of barbarians is said to be hideous and astonishing sounds. Of what importance then can it be to inquire into a practice that has not its foundation in science or system, or to know what are the sounds that most delight a Hottentot, a wild American, or even a more refined Chinese?” I have transcribed Hawkins’s own words, because he precisely expresses the prevailing opinion, not only of his own day, but also of the present time. I think, however, a few moments’ reflection will convince the reader of its fallacy.5

For Engel the study of national music “enlarges his [the musician’s] musical conception, and secures him from one-sidedness and an unwarranted predilection for any peculiar style or any particular composer.”6 Where, moreover, resemblances are found among two different nations, “the ethnologist may perhaps find therein hints, either affording him additional evidence in substantiating

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Engel, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, v. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 172. Engel, Music of the Most Ancient Nations, 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid.

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a preconceived theory, or perhaps even suggesting some entirely new investigation.”7 This modern-sounding objective goes hand in hand with a belief that national music has the power to emblemize national characteristics: “it exhibits the true character of the nation.”8 Engel’s comparative methodology is not altogether consistent, however. In order to understand the music of the present, we must look to “the music of contemporary nations in different stages of civilization,”9 but at the same time, we must adopt a comparative approach of examining nations in similar stages of development, taking into account variations in climate, the occupations of people, and various other environmental or social circumstances. Thus, “in order to ascertain how music reveals itself in its earliest infancy, we ought to observe it not only among the natives of the Fuegian Archipelago, or the Esquimaux, but also among the natives of Australia, of New Guinea, and others in a similarly low state of civilisation.”10 For Engel, therefore, it is essential that the comparative framework maintain flexibility if it is to produce valid results. As he says: If we were to consider it [Assyrian music] from the level of our own highly cultivated music, starting with the assumption that the musical system of the Assyrians must have been similar to our own, though less perfect—that they possessed scales and rhythmical constructions similar to ours, though probably much more incomplete—that their musical compositions must have been the less good the less they resembled the compositions of Mozart and Beethoven—if we were to commence with our inquiries from this one sided point of view, we should be led to partial and unsatisfactory conclusions.11

Engel’s comparative approach is implicitly twofold, for not only do his investigations involve identifying synchronic national comparisons, they also involve comparisons of a diachronic nature, and as such diverge from the more restrictive Lubbockian model of comparative methodology outlined in Prehistoric Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (1895). Thus, where Rowbotham identifies organalogical development through three Comtean-based categories of drum, pipe, and lyre, Engel suggests that the pipe stage is followed not by the lyre stage, but by one in which wooden instruments are made sonorous (i.e., pitched percussion). This stage is then followed by one in which pipes acquired holes, and is only occasionally preceded by the appearance of a stringed instrument comprising a bent stick and a single string, like a bow—the ancestor of the harp, lyre, and other similar instruments.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid.

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The same schema, which is arguably more tempered in his later largely descriptive Catalogue of musical instruments, applies to all nations, even taking into consideration individual circumstances that influence development. An example of this is the introduction of civilized contact with uncivilized nations, in which case accelerated development occurs, as in Dutch contact with the Hottentots in South Africa. This largely diachronic schema has, expectedly, parallelisms in vocal music. Engel suggests that vocal music is closely linked to instrumental music, and as such retains characteristics of that association, such as peculiar intervallic successions or unusual modulations. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the same pattern of expansive progression that marks the ineluctable development of instruments is found in vocal music. Songs, for example, are historically rooted in the interval of the fifth, gradually expanding from the unison and fifth, to the third, second, sixth, octave, fourth, and seventh (even though issues of intonation are admittedly problematical), and often they include a high level of phrase repetition and use of alternating voices. As shown in figure 8.1, there is, in other words, an implicit correlation between degrees of civilization and the diachronic range of instruments (drum, pipe, expanded drum, [string], expanded pipe, expanded string projection) and the range of vocal intervals and melodic complexity (unison and fifth, third, second, sixth, octave, fourth, and seventh). The correlation is not intended to suggest a relationship accurately aligning instrumental and vocal development at any one time in history (such as between the “drum” stage and the third), but to show broadly how individually instrumental and vocal development correlate to degrees of civilization:

Progress

Uncivilized

Instrumental

[“nations almost entirely unacquainted with instrumental music”]

drum

pipe

expanded drum

string

expanded pipe

expanded string

unison/fifth

third

second

sixth

octave

fourth

seventh

Vocal

Civilized

Figure 8.1. Correlation between degrees of civilization and instrumental and vocal development in Carl Engel, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, Particularly of the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Hebrews; with Special Reference to Recent Discoveries in Western Asia and in Egypt (London: John Murray, 1864).

What is perhaps unique here is not the fact that Engel provides a template of organological and vocal expansion running roughly parallel to the progress of

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civilization, but that his conception of civilization is not entirely couched in terms of Western superiority. Writing of melody, for instance, he suggests that “The power of creating an expressive melody is an innate gift which the most primitive savage may possess as fully as the most highly civilized man. Susceptibility for music is, in a greater or less degree, natural to all men, and is not dependent on the state of civilization which has been attained.”12 Moreover, while all nations are subject to the same type of projection, some do attain higher levels of musical cultivation than others—frequently ancient and/or current non-Western nations. As he says, “Such combinations of [certain] intervals have actually been found in use in several uncivilized nations when Europeans first came in contact with them,—nations whose degree of musical cultivation was far below that to which the Assyrians had evidently attained.”13 Engel’s rejection of ipso facto European superiority is also evident in the last section of his book, titled the “Eastern Origin of Our Own Music.” Here he situates European music as having a direct ancestor in Asian music, through the Semitic grouping of Assyria, Egypt, and the Hebrews, and then Greece, through Asia Minor and Egypt. An Introduction to the Study of National Music; Comprising Researches into Popular Songs, Traditions, and Customs (1866) follows this same pattern of thought, although the principal concern here is the retention of vanishing musical cultures. Engel defines national music as that “which, appertaining to a nation or tribe, whose individual emotions and passions it expresses, exhibits certain peculiarities more or less characteristic, which distinguish it from the music of any other nation or tribe.”14 These characteristics effectively separate it from high art music, and consequently occupy the attention of “the working classes, the artisans, the field labourers, and the country people in general.”15 As such, national music not only illustrates the individual characteristics of a people and its stages of progress within a nation, it also unifies disparate nations by virtue of laying down shared characteristics, in much the way Tylor describes the fundamental unity of national cultures: “There is found to be such regularity in the composition of societies of men, that we can drop individual differences out of sight, and thus can generalize on the arts and opinions of whole nations, just as when looking down upon an army from a hill, we forget the individual soldier, whom, in fact we can scarce distinguish in the mass.”16

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Engel, Music of the Most Ancient Nations, 21. Ibid., 121. Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National Music, 1. Ibid., 3. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 11.

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European scales form the rudimentary material for this observation, bearing traces of diatonicism found in “Esquimaux” music, or the music of New South Wales, Australia. Similarly, the division of intervals into small subunits, which Engel recognizes as indicative of more primitive stages of development, is retained in modern practice in uncivilized tribes, such as the quartertone music of the cannibal Maoris and Marquesas Islanders, where quartertones and various ornaments, such as a glide, appear in abundance. These cultures, like all of the cultures that Engel explores, are framed in a historiographical template almost identical to the one that he uses in The Music of the Most Ancient Nations. But whereas the comparative element of The Music of the Most Ancient Nations is usually diachronic, frequently comparing ancient and modern musics across a wide geographical range, The Study of National Music situates comparison within a largely synchronic framework, comparing national musics of the present. Emphasis is placed on more conceptually formulated ideas, and even more potentially divisive issues, such as the relative degree of musical progress, are eschewed, in the interest of maintaining a largely Tylorian cultural framework. Thus, he includes chapters of a technical, and rudimentarily analytic, nature, such as “On the Musical Scales of Different Nations,” “On the Construction of National Tunes,” and “Melody and Harmony,” and at the same time delves into more aesthetic or philosophical issues in “The Psychological Character of National Music” and “Music and Poetry Combined,” and of a more anthropological or ethnological orientation, with “On National Dances,” “The Difference Occasions on Which Music is Employed,” and “Affinity Between the Music of Certain Nations.” In chapter 3, for instance, “On the Construction of National Tunes,” Engel delineates universal features of time (common and triple) and he compiles disinterested statistical information according to country. Similarly, when discussing recitative he cites Jewish cantillation, Christian chant, and Moslem recitation alongside perhaps more “primitive” music, such as that of the New Hebrides. He speaks of the motive across music of all cultures, as well as periods or cadence formulae, repetition, alternatim, the refrain, ranges, ornamentation, modulation, and so on. Each of these analytical chapters gives the decided impression of a largely positivistic approach to his material, and this is indeed sustained even in the more potentially controversial “The Psychological Character of National Music,” perhaps the most telling—and prescient—of Engel’s resistance to aesthetic hierarchies between Western and non-Western music. He begins this with a characteristically universalizing, yet individualizing attitude: “Although the feelings of the human heart, which music expresses, are, in the main, the same in every nation; yet they are, in individual instances, considerably modified by different influences.”17 This idea, of unity within diversity—what would later

17. Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National Music, 167.

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become differential psychology (see chapter 12)—is constantly maintained as the gold standard of Engel’s comparative research. In practice, however, this is almost impossible to maintain. He writes that the tunes are in some cases so totally different from those of our own country, that they are, on first acquaintance, almost as incomprehensible as poems in a language but slightly known to us. Indeed, the common adage that music is a universal language, is but half true. There are, at all events, many dialects in this language which require to be studied before they can be understood.18

One difficulty is the absence of written notation in national tunes: “national tunes are usually transmitted by tradition only, and as the songs and dances of a country are best preserved in those districts and places which are most secluded, and therefore least accessible to visitors, we can readily explain the difficulty of obtaining a considerable number of genuine specimens.”19 Adjunct to this are the divisive problems of transcribing musics across dissimilar cultures, as well as the culturally loaded Western terminology used in conjunction with them, such as “harmony” or “melody.” Engel is among the first to criticize transcriptions that manifestly fail in notation and description to achieve a faithful reproduction, citing among others T. E. Bowdich’s transcription of “A Vocal Performance of a Negro in Upper Guinea,” which appears in entirely conventional Western notation.20 Similarly, he deprecates tourist literature for its frequent lack of sympathy and objectivity, and also various scholarly writers whose authority has remained unchecked, such as William Jones. Jones is perceived as “irrefragable,” for example, though he himself admits being an amateur. The reasons for Engel’s disapproval are obvious: “in order to ascertain the real character of the music of a nation, a careful comparison of the different attainable accounts communicated to us in books of travels, and through similar channels, is a preliminary step quite as indispensable as that of rejecting any specimens of music whose authenticity appears in the least doubtful.”21 Comparison alone provides the means of assuring authority and illustrating the model of unity within diversity, as worked out in his chapter on the “Affinity Between the Music of Certain Nations.” As he says, “although almost every nation possesses its distinctive characteristics, there are, nevertheless, not unfrequently some remarkable similarities in the music of nations which have little or no intercourse with each other.”22

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Ibid., 167–68. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 317.

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Engel’s methodological point is borne out in the largely developmentalist anthropological literature of music, as we have seen, and it also illuminates a confusion at the root of the Western understanding of non-Western music. Engel, unlike most historians, is very clear to distinguish between what is essentially folk (national) music and art music. Hence classical music is often held to be more valuable than national music, and Western music is more valuable than non-Western music. From Engel’s standpoint, however, this represents a type of musicological “classism” that blinds historians to the unificatory benefits of comparative work. Indeed, like Tylor, who writes of “survival in culture”23 in “Affinity Between the Music of Certain Nations,” Engel, arguably, suggests that the distinctions that comparisons reveal illuminate the very essence of unity within diversity, even on the generic level of national song: a National song [the text] seldom retains its popularity longer than a century. Even during this period it generally undergoes considerable alterations. . . . This remark, however, does not apply to the peculiar character of the music, or in other words, to its construction and mode of performances, its psychological character, the construction and form of the musical instruments, the peculiar combination of the music with poetry and dancing, and the particular occasions on which it is usually employed. These, there is every reason to conclude, have been in most nations preserved nearly unaltered from the most remote times. Uncivilized nations do not make any visible progress in music in the course of many centuries. . . . In music employed in sacred rites and ceremonies, or in old and cherished popular usages of a secular character, innovations are generally considered inadmissible.24

Engel’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology As mentioned previously, the Anthropological Institute was founded by the joining up of the Ethnological Society of London and the Anthropological Society of London, two organizations that had, of course, originally formed one ethnological society. Although frequently opposed in their separate incarnations, their reunification, or rapprochement, enabled the Institute to professionalize in a way it had not previously, and this is certainly evident from a musicological standpoint. Bolt portrays the emergence of the Institute as the first influential force in giving anthropology disciplinary definition,25 but it is clear that change was already on its way, and that other societies were influencing the field and the Institute. Among the first changes that ceded into the work of the Institute was

23. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 7. 24. Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National Music, 330–31. 25. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, 1–3.

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a shift in attitude toward travel literature and its paucity of methodological control. This is echoed in countless documents of the period. Lubbock, for example, writes that “Travellers naturally find it easier to describe the houses, boats, food, dress, weapons, and implements of savages, than to understand their thoughts and feelings.”26 Indeed, anthropological investigation relies “at least as much on the character of the writer as on that of the people”27 under observation. Even as late as 1906, Pitt Rivers (before his peerage in 1880, Augustus Henry Lane Fox), later president of the Institute, still descried travelers for writing “for a circulating library, and for the unthinking portion of mankind, who will not be bothered with detail.”28 A practical solution to this problem was found just after the inauguration of the Institute, although not directly related to its early work. This was the publication of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, beginning in 1874 and with editions continuing into the 1950s. As part of the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), Pitt Rivers, then Lane Fox, suggested in 1872 that a committee be founded to draw up methodological regulations for travelers. The committee tended to be those from the Ethnological Society, like E. B. Tylor (who essentially spearheaded the project), Lubbock, John Evans, and Galton,29 and consequently Notes and Queries inevitably reflects their values and conceptual frameworks. Earlier versions did exist, particularly as an outcome of the Ethnological Society work. In 1839 the BAAS set up a committee, including Prichard, to produce a questionnaire, and in 1841 produced Queries Respecting the Human Race to be Addressed to Travellers and Others (1841), partly drawn from Instruction Génerale Adressée aux Voyageurs published by the Ethnological Society of Paris in 1840. A second edition was published in 1852 with the explicit foregrounding of the word ethnological, under the title A Manual of Ethnological Enquiry: A Series of Questions Concerning the Human Race. The 1874 edition, produced under the same institutional aegis, was now devoid of its ethnological terminology, though it nonetheless retained much of its ethnological character, as the introduction reveals: “The object of the work is to promote accurate anthropological observation on the part of travellers, and to enable those who are not anthropologists themselves to supply the information which is wanted for the scientific study of anthropology at home.”30 Despite reference to anthropological observation, the ethnological bias becomes clear very quickly,

26. Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, 3, in Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, 2. 27. Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation, 259–60, in Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, 2. 28. Fox (Pitt Rivers), The Evolution of Culture and Other Essays, 188. 29. Urry, Before Social Anthropology, 19. 30. Notes and Queries on Anthropology, iv.

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especially in reference to the anthropological uses of history. History “has confined itself chiefly to the achievements of special races; but the anthropologist regards all races as equally worthy of a place in the records of human development.”31 The questionnaire not only seeks to redefine the position of history within anthropology, but hopes to capture vital cultural information soon to be lost to it, and to do so in the most methodologically sound way. Indeed, there is an urgency in the introduction borne of experience: The more remote and unknown the race or tribe, the more valuable the evidence afforded of the study of its institutions, from the probability of their being less mixed with those of European origin. Travellers have usually recorded only those customs of modern savages which they have chanced to observe; and, as a rule, they have observed chiefly those which their experience of civilized institutions has led them to look for. Nor are there wanting instances in which the information thus obtained has been lamentably distorted in order to render it in harmony with preconceived ideas; owing to this and other causes, the imperfections of the anthropological record surpass those of other sciences, and false theories are often built upon imperfect bases of induction. In attempting to trace the distribution of cognate arts and customs, the anthropologist is perpetually thwarted by the difficulty of distinguishing between positive and negative evidence, i.e. between non-existence and non-recorded existence; so that, to use the words of Mr. E. B. Tylor, it is “playing against the bank for a student to set up a claim to isolation for any art of custom, not knowing what evidence there may be against him buried in the ground or hidden in remote tribes.” The rapid extermination of savages at the present time, and the rapidity with which they are being reduced to the standard of European manners, renders it of urgent importance to correct these sources of error as soon as possible.32

This methodological manifesto has considerable importance for the anthropological study of music, for listed under those who are anthropologists, “but not being members of the Committee, have also contributed sections,” is the name of Carl Engel. Engel’s work in Notes and Queries (1874) appears in the second of its three parts, its parts being divided as follows: (1) “Constitution of Man”; (2) “Culture”; and (3) “Miscellaneous.” Part 1 includes, among other things, measuring instruments, form and size, anatomy, heredity, reproduction, and psychology; part 2, history, archaeology, food, morals, religion, trade, hunting, relationship, painting, clothing, language, poetry, writing, drawing, ornamentation, and music; and part 3, miscellaneous. The anthropology of music, in Engel’s hands, is divided into six parts: vocal music, instruments, compositions,

31. Notes and Queries on Anthropology, iv. 32. Ibid., iv–v.

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performances, cultivation, and traditions, the bulk of the questions pertaining to instruments and performances. Engel precedes his questions with the following methodological gloss: The music of every nation has certain characteristics of its own. The progression of intervals, the modulations, embellishments, rhythmical effects, &c. occurring in the music of extra-European nations are not unfrequently too peculiar to be accurately indicated by means of our musical notation. Some additional explanation is therefore required with the notation. In writing down the popular tunes of foreign countries on hearing them sung or played by the natives, no attempt should be made to rectify any thing which may appear incorrect to the European ear. The more faithfully the apparent defects are preserved, the more valuable is the notation. Collections of popular tunes (with the words of the airs) are very desirable. Likewise drawings of musical instruments, with explanations respecting the constructions, dimensions, capabilities, and employment of the instruments represented.33

Engel’s instructions could not be simpler. First, transcribe the music, retaining in notation as much of the original as possible; second, try to procure music with words; and third, provide information on instruments and their performance. Taken on its own, this condensed methodology does not, in fact, reveal the sheer diversity and breadth of Engel’s 111 questions. Under vocal music, for instance, Engel ranges over 14 questions, from “Are the people fond of music?”34 to “Describe the different kinds of songs which they have (such as sacred songs, war songs, love songs, nursery songs, &c.)”35 He asks questions concerning musical ability, ability to discern small intervals, intonation, vocal flexibility, vocal quality and characteristics, vocal range, accompaniment, male/female performance, unison and harmonic singing, solo/chorus music, and the categories of repertoire. Questions about instruments are divided by physical type: (1) drums and sticks; (2) winds, including trumpets, flutes, nose-flutes, Pandean pipe, vibrating reeds (single/double), bagpipe, and signal instruments; (3) strings (fingered/ plucked/bowed); and miscellaneous or peculiar. Tunings on all instruments are requested, as is physical construction and its ornamentation. Performance context, strangely, does not appear in this context of musical instruments. Under “Compositions,” Engel asks for information on intervallic content; major/minor/pentatonic scales; the sharp/flat seventh; scalar intervals larger than a whole tone or smaller than a semitone; melodic formulae and progressions; repetition as a result of text; the age of compositions; their emotional content (happy or sad); and form. Performances cover a multitude of things,

33. Engel, “Music,” 110. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid.

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including the constitution and instrumentation of bands or orchestras; commonly used instruments; unison or harmonic music; vocal/instrumental combinations; tempi; loudness; ceremonial or other social functions; extemporization; sacred music; and war dances. Whereas these sections are, in most respects, rather technical, the remaining two, “cultivation” and “tradition” ask broader social questions, perhaps of more immediate anthropological pertinence. These are questions concerning innate ability and musicality—issues that beg questions of relative sensory acuity: “Do the people easily learn a melody by ear? . . . Have they a good musical memory? . . . Any performers who evince much talent?”36 and so on. Other issues include whether children are taught music, and by whom; the presence/status of professional musicians; composers; the interconnection between religion and music; notation; musical treatises; musical institutions; and music appreciation. Last, “traditions” asks about musical origins; musical deities and myths, musical legends, and fairy tales; favorite instruments; historical records; music and medicine; its taming qualities in animals; and popular tunes imitative of birds. These items, and indeed Engel’s entire anthropological survey, have some obvious roots in the largely Tylorian methodological framework of Primitive Culture (1871), which Urry suggests, arguably, dominated British anthropology for the next thirty years.37 On a very basic methodological level Tylor is deeply concerned to ensure that the classification of material precedes conceptualization, writing, for example, that “A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to classify these in their proper groups.”38 Engel does this by setting out a rigorous series of questions of musical particulars in advance of his broader cultural and sociological questions. Tylor also provides a general methodological framework that cuts across geographical location, and that is mirrored in Engel’s completely delocalized methodological prescription. Where Tylor divides his book into chapters on “The Science of Culture,” “The Development of Culture,” “Survival in Culture” (two chapters), “Emotional and Imitative Language” (two chapters), “The Art of Counting,” “Mythology” (three chapters), and “Animism,” Engel catalogues responses into “cultivation” and “tradition.” Of course, these two sections, in particular, evince a very Tylorian methodological template, dependent for its conceptual foundation upon verifiable material taken in a field locality. Speaking of “survival in culture” Tylor highlights the importance of permanence, indicating that “When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world, disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its course from generation to generation, as

36. Engel, “Music,” 113. 37. Urry, Before Social Anthropology, 21. 38. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 7.

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a stream once settled in its bed will flow on for ages.”39 This conviction is embedded in Engel’s first questions under “traditions”: “Are there popular traditions respecting the origin of music?”40 A function of this is also understood in the context of local mythologies, which Tylor suggests “is perhaps no better subjectmatter through which to study the processes of the imagination . . . ranging as they do through every known period of civilization, and through all the physically varied tribes of mankind.”41 Engel follows this line of thinking, asking if there are “Any myths about a musical deity or some superhuman musician? . . . Any legends or fairy tales in which allusion to music is made? if so, what are they?”42 Similarly Engel is concerned, as Tylor, for the presence of any historical data, asking if there is “Any tradition or historical record respecting the antiquity of stringed instruments played with a bow?”43 These points of contact between Engel and Tylor may of course be circumstantial or incidental, because it can only be presumed that Engel would have read Tylor’s work. Of course, the influence could well have been in reverse, as no doubt Tylor was aware of Engel’s extensive work on national music and the organology of non-Western instruments. Even if in Primitive Music Tylor eschewed the type of comparative historical methodology with which Engel was engaged in works like The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864), there is no doubt that Engel’s views would have resonated with him nonetheless. Certainly, his basic analogy with language would have appealed: For years I have taken every opportunity of ascertaining the distinctive characteristics of the music not only of civilized but also of uncivilized nations. I soon saw that the latter is capable of yielding important suggestions for the science and history of music, just as the languages of savage nations are useful in philological and ethnological inquiries.44

In his slightly later An Introduction to the Study of National Music; comprising Researches into Popular Songs, Traditions, and Customs (1866), Engel lays out a methodology that could be said to have found anthropological codification in Tylor’s Primitive Culture: The similarities [between music of separate nations] are often of such a nature that they cannot possibly be explained as accidental coincidences, but must either have originated in a former connexion between the nations, or must have been derived

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Ibid., 70. Engel, “Music,” 114. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 274. Engel, “Music,” 114. Ibid. Engel, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, v.

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from a common source which perhaps no longer exists. However this may be, there is reason to surmise that the ethnologist acquainted with national music would meet with some similarity or other—be it in the construction of the music, in its psychological character, in the peculiar modes of its performance, in the musical instruments, in the combination of the music with poetry and dancing, or in the occasions on which it is especially employed—which might be of assistance to him, either by providing him with additional proof in confirmation of some particular theory, or perhaps even by suggesting some new investigation.45

The emphasis on establishing cultural connections, by delving into questions of common sources, similarities of art, psychology, material culture, poetry, dances—these are fully extended in Tylor’s book. These relationships come into stronger focus when looking more closely at Primitive Culture, where Tylor engages with musical concepts. Writing of vowels, for example, he takes a Helmholtzian view that “They are compound musical tones, such as, in the vox humana stop of the organ, are sounded by reeds (vibrating tongues) fitted to organ-pipes of particular construction.”46 Tylor extends this into a concept of music evolution, with decidedly Spencerian overtones (also found in Engel), writing that “As to musical theory, emotional tone and vowel-tone are connected. In fact, an emotional tone may be defined as a vowel, whose particular musical quality is that produced by the human vocal organs, when adjusted to a particular state of feeling.”47 Intriguingly, Engel defines national music as that “which, appertaining to a nation or tribe, whose individual emotions and passions it expresses, exhibits certain peculiarities more or less characteristic, which distinguish it from the music of any other nation or tribe.”48 Tylor continues his line of thinking by suggesting that whereas the modulation of musical pitch gives emphasis in European languages, in Southeast Asian languages, for instance, the modulation actually gives different meaning, thus affecting the setting of poetry to music. As he says, “the system of setting poetry to music becomes radically different from ours.”49 Ultimately, Tylor calls language “linguistic music,” which is “theoretically interesting, as showing that man does not servilely follow an intuitive or inherited scheme of language, but works out in various ways the resources of sounds as a means of expression.”50 And it is to musical analogy that he resorts when trying to describe linguistic accent or emphasis, which represents an early development in linguistic evolution. In fact he suggests that music be studied

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National Music, 317. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 167–68. Ibid., 168. Engel, An Introduction to the Study of National Music, 1. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 169. Ibid.

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philologically precisely to identify this stage in its advance from vocal communication to music itself. Musically, of course, this is what Engel seeks to do. From Tylor’s standpoint, music “has been more fully developed and even systematized under exact rules of melody, and we thus have on the one hand ecclesiastical intoning and the less conventional half-singing so often to be heard in religious meetings, and on the other the ancient and modern theatrical recitative.”51 Tylor’s presumed sympathy with Engel, and his seemingly close link to Spencerian conceptions of musical evolution, implies, from a musical standpoint, a developmental approach to evolution in some way inconsistent with prevailing Darwinian thinking. Of course, for all his influence, Tylor is frequently questioned for his lack of enthusiasm for Darwinian evolution,52 and this is evident, in a musical context, in his take-up of a rather Spencerian notion of musical evolution. Even the names of musical instruments are correlated to this type of developmentalist approach, through their often onomatopoeic constructions, such as the shee-shee-quoi, the “mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicineman,”53 the drum called the ganga in Haussa or gong in the East, or the Peruvian shell-trumpet called the pututu. Eventually, the Peruvian pututu, like many of these others, transmuted over time into European language, in the case of the pututu becoming the English word pipe. This has a direct correlation not only in Engel’s general concerns about the development of musical instruments but also in his question about the imitativeness of dance: “Any dances in which they imitate the peculiar movements and habits of certain animals, &c.?”54 In fact, in the same way that Tylor invests imitation with developmental implications for language, Engel allows the element of imitation to function as a developmental marker for music. He is interested to know whether phrases or tunes occur frequently; whether these repetitions result from poetry; and whether there are frequent progressions in certain intervals. In themselves, of course, these and Engel’s other questions in Notes and Queries are as much a generalized product of their age as is Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Tylor, for his part, retains a similar interest in music throughout his work, some of which appears in Richard Wallaschek’s appositely titled Primitive Music (1893). Tylor’s work also includes musical references in Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881); “The Study of Customs” in Macmillan’s Magazine (1882), and “The Bow as Origin of Stringed Instruments” in Nature (1891/2), among others. It is of some interest that Tylor maintained a developmentalist approach to anthropology as late the 1890s, owing to the force of Darwinian influence at the

51. 52. 53. 54.

Ibid., 175. Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective, 27. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 208. Engel, “Music,” 113.

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time. After Pitt Rivers’s Society of Arts 1891 lecture on museum classification, Tylor spoke up on behalf of Pitt Rivers’s developmentalist system: It often happened, he said, that a series might be made purely theoretical, by putting in their order a number of specimens which referred to one another more or less distinctly, thus showing where the curve of development had probably passed; but yet important links were often wanting. . . . Only a few weeks ago they [the museum] thus acquired a much-desired link in the history of stringed instruments, whether pianoforte, violin, or guitar. This view was proved to be correct when the instruments were arranged in a series, beginning with a string bow . . . capable of being used both for hunting and twanging. . . . Three or four weeks ago Miss Lloyd, who had spent some time in South Africa, sent them one of these bows, and it now stood at the head of the series of string instruments.55

This kind of developmentalism, which persisted into the 1890s and well into the twentieth century was gradually eroded, and in musical terms this begins to be evident from the 1870s, around the time of Notes and Queries. It is more than relevant, for example, that while Engel’s questionnaire was used for the third edition of Notes and Queries (1899), it occurs with rather little change from the 1874 edition. The introduction is largely unchanged and the questions are almost entirely intact. In the fourth edition of 1912, however, the entry and its authorship are entirely different, being largely the work of Charles Samuel Myers, although introduced with very brief glosses by Cecil Sharp (“Music, Written Records”) and John Linton Myres, then Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford (“Musical Instruments”).

55. Report of lecture on typological museums, 185.

Chapter Nine

Overcoming Spencer Late-Century Theories of the Origin of Music While Carl Engel sought to explain non-Western music within the context of comparative East–West research, underwritten by Tylorian concepts of cultural unity, he does not, like his predecessors, project a teleological historiography leading ineluctably from the primitive East to the civilized West. Nevertheless, conventional developmental teleologies remained fixed in musicological consciousness, and were subsumed into the increasingly popular debates about the origin and evolution of music. The well-recorded debates about the origins of music leave little doubt that non-Western music was considered a living fossil, and that modern European music was its direct and more developmentally evolved descendant. Indeed, evolution effectively became a scientifically approbated substitute for broad conceptions of East–West or savage–civilized historical teleology, as evident in Herbert Spencer’s controversial article “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857): “That music is a product of civilization is manifest: for though some of the lowest savages have their dance-chants, these are of a kind scarcely to be signified by the title musical: at most they supply but the vaguest rudiment of music properly so called.”1 Although he was apt to change various aspects of his argument to suit the criticisms, Spencer retained a dogged belief in the progression from primitive to civilized, from East to West, and from savage to evolved: In music progressive integration is displayed in more numerous ways. The simple cadence embracing but a few notes, which in the chants of savages is monotonously repeated, becomes, among civilized races, a long series of different musical phrases combined into one whole; and so complete is the integration that the melody cannot be broken off in the middle nor shorn of its final note, without giving us a painful sense of incompleteness. When to the air, a bass, a tenor, and an alto are added; and when to

1. Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” 68.

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the different voice-parts there is joined an accompaniment; we see integration of another order which grows naturally more elaborate. And the process is carried a stage higher when these complex solos, concerted pieces, choruses, and orchestral effects are combined into the vast ensemble of an oratorio or a musical drama.2

This view is at its most exposed and extended in “Developed Music” (1902), which represents a response to some of the most vituperative criticisms Spencer had received. In commenting on Parry’s The Art of Music (1893), for example, he reiterates his belief in the incompleteness of savage music, and acknowledges only the most nascent musical characteristics in it: In those examples with which Sir Hubert Parry commences his chapter on “FolkMusic,” we have vocal utterances little above the howls and groans in which inarticulate feeling expresses itself. There is but an imperfect differentiation of the tones into notes properly so called. So that we see well exemplified that indefiniteness which characterizes incipient evolution in general; and already we have seen that indefiniteness continues to characterize the partially-differentiated tones of savage chants and songs.3

Spencer frequently uses the deprecatory terms “incipient,” “savage,” “indefiniteness,” and “partially differentiated” to define non-Western music as it was then perceived to be, in much the way he speaks of man in the broadly racist “Primitive Man—Emotional” and “Primitive Man—Intellectual.” At the same time, though he often counterpoints these with lionizing European terminology, he does not intend to use them to portray savage music as uniformly debased or rudimentary, but rather to illuminate its evolutionary position. As he says in “The Origin of Music” (1902), in his critical response to disagreements over “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857): “With the established doctrine that from simple vocal signs of ideas language has been developed, there must obviously go the doctrine that from similarly rude beginnings there has been a development of music; and if so there must be faced the question—What rude beginnings?”4 Spencer’s general response to this question is to group nonWestern music within the category of rude musical beginnings, irrespective of its own relative development. This is particularly acute in “The Origin of Music,” where he seizes upon Darwinists like Edmund Gurney, Richard Wallaschek, and Ernst Newman, to say nothing of the largely Spencerian Parry and Darwin himself. Here, however, Spencer argues with characteristic vehemence that critics confuse the idea of cause and effect, and as a result misconstrue his ideas on non-Western music. In referring to Newman, for example, he complains that

2. Spencer, First Principles, §114, 324f., cited in Offer, “An Examination of Spencer’s Sociology of Music,” 44. 3. Spencer, “Developed Music,” 50. 4. Spencer, “The Origin of Music,” 44.

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there is a “confusion between the origin of a thing [the cause] and the thing which originates from it [the effect].”5 In fact this problem typifies the argumentation surrounding the controversies of musical origins. Newman, for example, takes Spencer to task for supposing that there is a genuine and provable link in the development from emotionalized vocal utterances to speech, and then from speech to song. Citing the work of Richard Wallaschek, he claims that Spencer’s criticisms of Darwin and Darwinist musicologists can only be rhetorical because they have no foundation in science. Wallaschek, according to Newman, argues that music and speech are governed by different parts of the brain, and therefore cannot be assumed to have evolved contiguously. The effect of this is to negate the developmental nature inherent in Spencer’s conception of the origins of music. As Newman says: “We do not expect that from a theory of the origin of music among primitive men one should be able to forecast all the later forms into which music has branched; but we do expect that, since evolution is a continuous process, the theory of the earlier music should not be at variance with all the main psychological features of the later music.”6 From the standpoint of non-Western music, the implications of this could not be clearer. Whereas Spencer holds concretely that music evolves from speech, to recitative, and then song, Newman—and other anti-Spencerian musicologists like Edmund Gurney and Richard Wallaschek—is suggesting that this pattern of development automatically denigrates the non-Western primitive, irrespective of his relative position within the evolution of music at large: To us, there is a great psychological and aesthetic gulf fixed between excited speech and song—not only between the speech and the song of to-day, but between the ruder speech and ruder song of primitive man. . . . Allowing for all the differences between our music and that of the savage who blows his reed and thumps his tam-tam, and for all the differences of general mental structure between him and us, we can still see that the same causes which incite us to music incited him.7

This viewpoint, for all its prejudice, does something that Spencer’s theory does not. It situates primitive music on an equal physiological and psychological footing. As he says, it is indisputable “that men, whether civilised or savage—that many animals, indeed—are susceptible to tone purely as tone; and a further fact is that the primitive organism takes pleasure in the relations between tones. . . . There is surely no need to insist upon the point that both tones and the relations between tones in themselves interest and charm, in a minor degree, the

5. Ibid., 40. 6. Newman, “Herbert Spencer and the Origin of Music,” 196–97. 7. Ibid., 197–98.

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savage as they do for us.”8 Newman’s point is well made, because Spencer’s theory is fundamentally teleology dressed in evolutionary clothing, and underlying it is a framework of racism that diminishes the savage within the general progress of man. As Newman implies, Spencer’s savage, non-Western theory of the origin of music is little more than an extension of his own racist social philosophy. When, for example, Newman suggests that “The music of savage tribes is . . . the last stronghold of Spencer,”9 he means it quite literally. It is in relation to savage music that Spencer’s theory ultimately fails, and it is this aspect of Spencer that is theoretically self-destructive. Newman, in fact, sets Parry against Spencer, by citing The Art of Music and various passages that show continuous development among savages. As part of this program, Newman summarily debunks Spencer’s view that harmony is largely unknown among “Orientals and savages.”10 As Parry says, “the actual practice of combining several tunes together is by no means uncommon. Several savage and semi-civilised races adopt the practice, as, for instance, the Bushmen at the lower end of the human scale, and the Javese [sic], Siamese, Burmese, and the Moors about the middle.”11 Newman reiterates this, claiming that “as low down in the human scale as our investigations will carry us, man tries to make harmony because it pleases his musical sense. How far he succeeds depends upon other things than his mere desire . . . an analysis of primitive music shows us that in the rudest savage we have, in embryo, every element that goes to make the most complicated music of modern times—some of these elements, indeed, appearing even in animals.”12 This view is, to some extent, adumbrated in Gurney, but unlike Newman, Gurney criticizes only Spencer’s methodology. The core of Spencer’s ideas toward non-Western music are therefore retained, despite being reframed in aesthetically more sympathetic prose. In describing the diversity of non-Western scales, for instance, he insists that they proliferate at the expense of easily discernible melodic shapes: It is natural that people habituated to different scale-systems, especially if the diversity extends to the actual intervals employed, and not merely to their arrangement in the scale, should find each other’s melodies perfectly unintelligible. The merit of our system is that, while taking a sufficient number of sufficiently varied intervals to admit of the production of endless forms from the notes of a single scale, it has rejected the minuter steps of subdivision; and by confining the notes comprised within the octave to twelve . . . has opened out all the extraordinary possibilities of modulation.13

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Newman, “Herbert Spencer and the Origin of Music,” 201. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 217. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music, cited in Newman, “Herbert Spencer,” 216. Newman, “Herbert Spencer,” 217. Gurney, The Power of Sound, 144–45.

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As is clear from this statement, Gurney’s conception of scales openly deprecates non-Western music, and at the same time his anti-Spencerian system of aesthetics does not provide a means of establishing any greater understanding of it. When writing against Spencer in “The Speech Theory,” he promulgates a view that tends to reflect typically dyed-in-the-wool Western incomprehension. In Gurney’s case, however, he does this by objecting to Spencer’s notional link between speech and song. Indeed, Gurney deplores the idea that “the speech of primitive man had a special relation to Music; [and] that his direct and normal expression of his intuitions and feelings contained the essential germs of Music, or was actually ‘a sort of music.’ ”14 Gurney’s reluctance to accept this principle derives, in part, from his belief in the essential objectivity of music. As he says of his book, “The central conception itself, I need hardly say, is that the primary and essential function of Music is to create beautiful objective forms.”15 This would seem to preclude non-Western music because the savage is too inextricably linked to nature to establish aesthetic objectivity. In other words, he remains too much a part of nature to evolve beyond it, and his music therefore “presents the distinctively musical element in undiluted purity.”16 For Gurney, however, unlike Spencer, the preternatural purity of the savage does not theoretically represent an impediment to evolution because objectivity is in itself subjective: “we cannot judge music with the savage ear till we can remake ourselves into savages.”17 For Gurney, moreover, non-Western music is capable of evolution precisely because it is not related to speech—because it is innate as music, and has from “rude melodic forms, developed gradually in obedience to the musical instinct.”18 Non-Western music is therefore music, not evolved speech, and despite its relatively undeveloped nature, it presents within it all of the features in potentia that characterize more fully evolved Western music. Indeed some of these characteristics even feature, implicitly, in Beethoven and Schubert, as Gurney reminds us in his initial response to Spencer in “On Some Disputed Points in Music” (1876). Here Gurney takes umbrage with Spencer for thinking that the progression from speech to song was marked by increasing intervallic content. He looks to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Schubert’s “Addio” as examples of simple rhythmic and pitch repetitions in the context of highly advanced musical composition.19 Where Gurney is willing to admit, however reluctantly, of the possibility that savage music is music, his own views on the topic are entirely theoretical. Indeed,

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Ibid., 490. Ibid. Ibid., 492. Ibid. Ibid. Gurney, “On Some Disputed Points in Music,” 109.

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from the time of Stafford, and well into the twentieth century, musicology is generally underlain by an essentially theoretical framework in regard to nonWestern music. This reaches its apogee in the nineteenth century with the publication of Richard Wallaschek’s Primitive Music (1893), the last book written on the subject before Charles Samuel Myers would, only some six years later, revolutionize the study of non-Western music by working directly in the field. Wallaschek was, in this sense—but arguably only in this sense—like Parry, who published The Art of Music in exactly the same year. They represent the end of an era, and in many ways their work typifies the nature and substance of late nineteenth-century attitudes toward the origins of music and the position of non-Western music within it. Where, however, Parry summarizes many of the musicological prejudices of his predecessors, Wallaschek projects toward the more open-minded Myers, and a much more anthropologically informed view of non-Western music. What remains in Wallaschek, however, is his reliance on secondhand information of somewhat questionable origin, and like Rowbotham, an investigation framed in a roughly adapted evolutionary template. In the case of Wallaschek, though, the secondhand information is sieved through an appreciable amount of up-to-date ethnological and anthropological research largely wanting in Rowbotham. Wallaschek’s book also makes no claim to discuss anything other than primitive music, and it even resists a comparative methodology of the music of ancient civilizations. As to the importance of ethnology for the science of art I need hardly say many words, it being a generally accepted fact. In the present work it has been my aim to deal with the music of savage races only, while the music of ancient civilisation has merely been glanced at whenever it was necessary to indicate the connecting links between the most primitive and the comparatively advanced culture.20

This in itself represents a plausible and penultimate moment of departure in the evolution of British ethnomusicology, as it attempts to separate out notions of antiquity and primitiveness, and clarify the relationship of time and history in regard to non-Western music. Wallaschek does this by embedding his theoretical considerations within a largely positivist reading of anthropological and travel literatures. The book comprises ten chapters, including (1) “General Character of the Music of Primitive People”; (2) “Singers and Composers in Primitive Times”; (3) “Instruments”; (4) “The Basis of Our Musical System”; (5) “Physical and Psychical Influence and Music”; (6) “Text and Music”; (7) “Dance and Music”; (8) “Primitive Drama and Pantomime”; (9) “Origin of Music”; and (10) “Heredity and Development.” It is only chapters 4, 9, and 10 that deal with notions of the origin of music to any great extent. In chapter 4, Wallaschek

20. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, v.

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again provides data to prove the extent of harmony as practiced among primitive tribes and races, as he says: “Thus neither harmony nor the germs of counterpoint are entirely unknown to primitive nations, and it would seem from all the examples I was able to collect that the principle of tonality is in most cases unmistakable.”21 But here, although Wallaschek is posturing toward musical universalism, he concludes that the existence of harmony is not so much historical as it is racial: “Now we have seen that even uncivilised races know how to accompany a simple song by ear, while some of the more civilised ones, as the Chinese and other oriental people, do not understand our harmony, although they have every opportunity of hearing our music. Thus the difference between people with and without harmonic music is not a historical but a racial one.”22 This frank admission of racial difference runs as a disappointing current in Wallaschek’s book, especially given his initially promising, and culturally equalizing, comments on the universality of music and language. Nevertheless, there is a general movement toward illuminating musical, if not anthropological or ethnological, commonality: Is it not significant that nations without any feeling for harmony would not have developed their music, nor even their melody to the same degree as we have done, and that their airs would have remained melancholic and monotonous unless they had been taken up by European composers, who harmonised them and worked them out to accomplished works of art? On the other hand, the most primitive germ of harmony and counterpoint is the continuation of the key-note throughout the piece; the same method, but intended only instead of actually sung, gives the principle of tonality: the essence of melody. This shows their common origin.23

Wallaschek puts great store in commonality within difference, not only across synchronically related European and primitive races but also across diachronic periods as well. He looks back, as he mentions in his preface, to antiquity where it might specifically shed light on current practice among primitive races. In regard to the evolution of scales, for example, he looks to recent finds in the archaeology of musical instruments, and on this basis refuses to accept evolutionary theories that insist that non-Western scales represent less-developed stages of evolution. Similarly, when discussing the origin of music, Wallaschek dispenses debate about music’s origin in speech, or indeed its preternatural existence from the dawning of time. In fact Wallaschek considers the origin of music to lie in what he calls “a rhythmical impulse in man.”24

21. 22. 23. 24.

Ibid., 142–43. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 230.

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Rhythm, in relation to melody, is portrayed by Wallaschek as the evolutionary equivalent of the savage in relation to the civilized. Rhythm is an “impulse” whereas melody represents a higher order of musical evolution—it is a “principle.”25 That having been said, because melody and rhythm are inextricably linked, they, like savages and civilized peoples, must show “their common origin.” Intriguingly, rhythm, unlike harmony, is not expressive of a racial difference, precisely because of this—because of its universality within music. Even the animals, as Wallaschek says, have rhythm. But just what Wallaschek means by rhythm is a matter of some speculation, suggesting that rhythm cannot exist purely. It must invariably connect to sonic pitch at some level of aural discrimination. Drums, for example, with differently tightened heads, give different intervals. Likewise, even percussively repeated recitation tones flex within certain intervallic ranges. Rhythm, accordingly, is the initiative force which leads us on to any arrangement of notes whatever, although it must not be forgotten that the specific form assumed in any such arrangement depends a good deal upon our contingent ideas and feelings. The power exerted over us by any rhythmical movement lies in its being adjusted to the form in which ideas and feelings succeed each other in our mind.26

Wallaschek’s point about rhythm initiating “ideas and feelings” would seem to have considerable resonance with Spencer, in his conception of music evolving from the experience of some kind of emotion heightened into vocal utterance. As Spencer says, it is “a principle underlying all vocal phenomena . . . that variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling.”27 But this would be a considerable misrepresentation of Wallaschek, for he disputes Spencer’s conception of musical origins specifically on this point writing that “to adduce speech and its modulations is not only unnecessary, but absolutely untenable. Men do not come to music by way of tones, but they come to tones and tunes by way of the rhythmical impulse.”28 This not only separates Wallaschek from Spencer, it also tends to isolate him from other writers with whom one might expect more commonality. Rowbotham, for example, initiates musical development with the drum stage. From Wallaschek’s standpoint, however, this could be said to be more a convenience of organological taxonomy than anything anthropologically or ethnologically verifiable. Rowbotham sees musical development as sequentially teleological, whereas Wallaschek considers music to have a different type of developmental profile altogether. In his criticisms

25. 26. 27. 28.

Wallaschek, Primitive Music, v. Ibid., 234. Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” 49. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 235.

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of Spencer, which might apply equally to Rowbotham, he writes that “Primitive human utterance, using sound-metaphors and onomatopoeia [as discussed in Tylor’s Primitive Culture] in order to make itself intelligible, may resemble primitive musical tones; nevertheless an early separation of distinct tones and indistinct sounds seems to have taken place, not as a transition from the one as prior to the other as succeeding, but as a divergence from a primitive state which is, strictly speaking, neither of the two.”29 In this same line of criticism, Wallaschek attacks numerous other writers on musical origins, among them Gurney, Darwin, Crotti, and Donovan. Of particular interest are his criticisms of Donovan. Admitting that he “found a good explanation of the importance of rhythm in music in Donovan’s book,”30 he nevertheless could not agree with Donovan’s conclusions, namely, that “Pitch relationship was from the first step in tune formation the chief formative principle in the grouping of rhythms.”31 Wallaschek, in fact, reverses Donovan’s point, which is to say that “rhythm is the formative principle in the relationship of pitch, the natural tie which unites the sounds into one group, and is the cause of a certain pitch being maintained throughout the whole group, thus facilitating our perceiving it as one whole.”32 Wallaschek’s point is very clear: the rhythmical impulse lay at the root of musical origins. As he says, “In my opinion the simple beating of a drum contains more ‘music’ than all the sounds uttered by birds, and we owe our musical faculty to the time-sense rather than to our sense of hearing.”33 Wallaschek’s arguably ineffectual reversal of Donovan is not only symptomatic of a generally didactic tone, it also suggests just how theories of musical origins lack empirical credibility, as Donovan himself points out.34 As such, Wallaschek and Donovan bear more similarities than are immediately obvious. In fact the two are often indistinguishable. Of the rhythmical impulse Donovan claims that “First we have the rhythmic excitement causing man to drift into the simulation of actions,”35 and on the topic of race, “The Greeks and Hindus, and in a less degree the Chinese, developed music . . . until the racial memories rose above their primitive protector and supporter, musical impression, as a mature fruit above the protective sheath from which it burst forth.”36 There is, however, one genuine difference between the two, and this revolves not around their theoretical terminology, but around the discipline out of which it emerges. In

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., 254. Ibid., 236. Donovan, From Lyre to Muse, 98, cited in Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 236. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 236. Ibid., 245. Donovan, From Lyre to Muse, 12. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 206.

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citing Donovan, Wallaschek omits a rather significant clause that situates Donovan disciplinarily. Wallaschek quotes Donovan as saying: “Pitch relationship was from the first step in tune formation the chief formative principle in the grouping of rhythms,”37 whereas Donovan actually writes: “Pitch-relationship, under the conditions which made it musically interesting to the human mind, was from the first step in tune-formation the chief formative principle in the grouping of rhythms.”38 The crucial omission, “under the conditions which made it musically interesting to the human mind,” situates Donovan within a framework of psychological aesthetics that Wallaschek ultimately wishes to eschew in favor of a more grounded ethnological or anthropological template. In fact Donovan is quite clear about his approach: “The thoughts of Darwin, Spencer, Hanslick, Helmholtz, and E. Gurney were the chief aids in my effort to reduce the problem of the origin of music to a single question of psychology.”39 In contrast to Wallaschek, Donovan, like so many late nineteenth-century music psychologists (Gurney especially), tends to abstract his interpretation of non-Western music. In the case of the Vedas, for example, he writes: “In the Indian Vedas the thoughts about the origin of the word from the tone find the first approach to a rational meaning in considering the effect of mental absorption by tones.”40 This is exactly the kind of prose that Wallaschek railed against in Primitive Music, because it does not have any basis in perceived empirical reality. It is principally psychology, philosophy of mind and not to be upheld as a means of supporting methodologically sound investigation. Musicological debates about the origins of music continued, however, and many of the issues covered in Wallaschek, Donovan, and other writers remained a feature of music histories well into the twentieth century. Of particular interest is the work of Margaret H. Glyn, author of a number of books on music evolution, and one of the first writers to situate non-Western music within an analytical context. The Rhythmic Conception of Music reads very much like Wallaschek and Donovan insofar as rhythm is portrayed hegemonically within the history of music. In her slightly later Analysis of the Evolution of Musical Form (1909), this view is extended, and provided with a more generous theoretical overview of musical evolution. What is especially interesting about Glyn’s book is the fact that non-Western music enters into her concerns to such an extent. Where it does, it is often used in an attempt to express similarity, not difference, as in her description of “Asiatic tonality”:

37. 38. 39. 40.

Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 236. Donovan, From Lyre to Muse, 98. Ibid., vii. Ibid., 203.

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It has been thought well to complete the definition of the Western key before entering upon the difficult question of Eastern tonality. It is difficult, because it involves to the European a contradiction of his normal mode of musical utterance, a process which may be likened to the endeavour to stand mentally upon one’s head. Yet the attitude of the Asiatic towards tonality can be shown to issue logically and inevitably out of his microtonal instinct. The general principle which selects on tones as a centre about which other tones will circle is as universal as the impulse to keep strict time. The difference between Eastern and Western tonality lies in the manner of the application of this principle to the scale. All that has been done hitherto with Asiatic music is the reading into it of the Western application.41

For all her equanimity, however, Glyn’s description of Asiatic tonality, as so many of the figures explored in this book, is suffused with terminological barriers to higher evolutionary progress. The word “instinct” though not in itself deprecatory, is loaded with Spencerian resonance when set in relation to non-Western music because it expresses a type of collective memory long abandoned by the more musically advanced West. Spencer, writing in the Principles of Psychology (2d ed., 1855), suggests that instinct is “a kind of organized memory; [while] on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of incipient instinct.”42 Glyn hints at this when she says that “This is a thing that lies entirely outside of the normal European experience.”43 As microtonal instinct, rather than memory, non-Western music expresses a much earlier evolutionary stage in musical development, a stage in Spencerian terms associated with the transition from emotional utterance to song. Notice, therefore, how Glyn progresses from instinct to emotion, from a supposedly disinterested discussion of the microtonal instinct to the inextricably linked emotional content of Hindu music: All music of advanced modal character is conditioned by this development of the moveable tonic, which means the further differentiation of relative pitch as opposed to the development on the lines of absolute pitch. It is the normal evolution of a purely melodic art, owing its charm to delicate and subtle inflections of pitch, to which those possessed of the microtonal instinct are naturally susceptible. The Hindu is nothing if not emotional, and this necessity of music has here assisted in its technical evolution.44

41. Glyn, Analysis of the Evolution of Musical Form, 95. 42. Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, cited in Taylor and Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, 158. 43. Glyn, Analysis of the Evolution of Musical Form, 98. 44. Ibid.

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Similar meanings appear in relation to the word “intuition,” making instinct and intuition effectively interchangeable: “But seeing that the Oriental, lacking the consonant intuition, has his attention absorbed by mode-variation, and that this prevents recognition of differing scale-tones, is it likely that he should be anxious to confine his tonic to what is practically a single tone?”45 Here, although the word intuition is used, the meaning is the same: in relation to Western music, nonWestern music represents a transitional period of evolution, between emotional utterance and song, and between intuition or instinct and memory. Even when memory is harnessed in Glyn’s depiction of Asiatic tonality, it remains nascent and unformed. Writing about Hindu music, for instance, Glyn emphasizes its aural transmission, citing the impossibilities of notation and subsequent reliance on memory. This inevitably leads to a predominant ethos of extemporization, and a kind of halfway house between strict memory and creative instinct. Combining this with the innately emotional content of Hindu music, it comes as no surprise that Glyn eventually defines non-Western music in racial terms: “the greater part of Eastern music is extemporisation. From this point of view the value of the raga can be appreciated, since it supplies the singer with the essentials of his pitchoutline, certain notes to be made prominent, and certain sequences of notes to be used, varying in ascent and descent; all this is based, not upon calculation, but is the result of centuries of intuitive utterance in music, natural to the race and natural to the singer.”46 Here, perhaps unsurprisingly, Glyn elides several concepts with almost Spencerian import (intuitive and utterance; natural, racial, and musical), and indeed non-Western music remains in a state of permanent transition, or evolutionary suspension. When writing about the “discant” she claims that “there seems no doubt that early Western church-music was an importation of the Asiatic form of the art bereft of its especially microtonal character, but otherwise differing but little from what is now, and doubtless was then, in use in the East.”47 Despite that what underlies this seems like a largely Spencerian conception of musical origins, ultimately Glyn’s aim is to diminish difference between East and West, as she says: “We have noted the underlying unity of East and West, and compared and contrasted the diverse development of each.”48 Unlike Myers, however, who would accomplish this by reference to psychological experimentation on individual differences, Glyn’s work remains doggedly situated within the entirely theoretical framework of analysis, and as her analysis shows, the traces of Spencerian racism persist, despite her determination to equalize East and West. Indeed, incomprehension persists, even in the burgeoning field of music analysis.

45. 46. 47. 48.

Glyn, Analysis of the Evolution of Musical Form, 97–98. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 267–68.

Part Three

Individualism and the Influence of Evolution: Charles Samuel Myers and the Role of Psychology

Chapter Ten

Charles Samuel Myers and the General Movement toward Individualism Despite its prevalence toward the end of the century the type of universalism developing in Wallasheck and Glyn was not consensual among anthropologists or musicologists, and would not become consensual until it was harmonized with theories of individualism in the seminal work of the psychologist and forerunner of British ethnomusicology, Charles Samuel Myers. Through what became his theory of individual differences (known as differential psychology), Myers resists the assumption of universal human characteristics, and adopts a theory of human psychology predicated on identifying and celebrating human characteristics that give rise to personal identity and difference. At the same time, Myers retains an indomitable belief in the idea of universal human improvement, using it to combat scientific racism and the depersonalization of non-Western peoples. These ideas of universal human improvement and individual differences are not uncommon in psychological or anthropological literature of the time, as is revealed below, but their application and development in relation to music was groundbreaking. In order to understand the groundbreaking nature of Myers’s work in nonWestern music, it is necessary to appreciate the wide-ranging multidisciplinary provenance of his ideas. To aid this appreciation the following four chapters trace Myers’s antecedents from the rise of individualism in late nineteenthcentury anthropological writings on music to psychological (and evolutionary) notions of the musical faculty, and then on to theories of individual differences and their application in Myers’s psychological, musical, and ethnomusicological writings. This chapter begins with a brief biography of Myers, and then proceeds to background information on individualism in anthropology, with specific reference to work relating to the geographical area of Australia—of particular relevance to Myers’s work in the Torres Strait.

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Charles Samuel Myers: Brief Biography Most biographical information on Myers derives principally from various obituaries1 and Myers’s own brief autobiographical entry in Murchison’s A History of Psychology in Autobiography (1961).2 Although clearly deemed important in Hearnshaw,3 his work in psychology has not elicited any considerable amount of critical attention, apart from some rudimentary historical and intellectual work4 and research contextualizing the centrally important Torres Strait expedition and some later anthropological work.5 From the standpoint of the history of ethnomusicology, attention to Myers is meager to say the least, and comprises a small portion of a large article, and one unpublished, yet formative, paper.6 As Martin Clayton writes: “Charles Samuel Myers has been allotted little more than a footnote in the written history of ethnomusicology”;7 despite his significance, the same could be said, sadly, of all his work. Myers was born in London in 1873 into a wealthy Jewish family. He excelled at school (he entered the City of London School aged eleven), and evinced an early interest in both chemistry and literature. He won numerous prizes at school and proceeded to Cambridge to read natural science at Gonville and Caius College in 1891, with the intention of obtaining a medical degree. At Cambridge he studied chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, and physiology, and later specialized in physiology and human anatomy. Also at Cambridge, he continued to manifest a considerable musical talent. He took an active role in chamber music, as a violinist, and was president of the University Musical Club. Soon after leaving Cambridge in 1895 Myers was asked by the distinguished Cambridge

1. See, for example, Pear, “Charles S. Myers,” 1–5; and Bartlett, “Charles Samuel Myers 1873–1946,” 761–77. 2. Myers, “Charles Samuel Myers,” in Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 215–30. 3. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940. For reference to Myers see 81–316 passim. 4. See, for example, Crampton, “The Cambridge School”; Costall, “From the ‘Pure’ to the ‘Applied,’ ” 143–63; Bakewell, “Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library,” 197–201; and Bunn, “ ‘A Flair for Organization,’ ” 1–13. 5. See Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, and Herle and Philp, Torres Strait Islanders. For reference to race see, for example, Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology, 40–62 and 187–220; and Kuklick, The Savage Within, 135–77, 208, and 312. Martin Clayton, in “Charles Samuel Myers,” refers to correspondence (unreferenced) concerning projects in 1898–1914 that link Myers and numerous figures in anthropology. 6. Clayton, “Ethnographic Wax Cylinders at the British Library Sound Archive,” 67–92; and Clayton, “Charles Samuel Myers.” 7. Clayton, “Charles Samuel Myers,” 1.

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anthropologist A. C. Haddon if he would accompany him and others on an expedition to the Torres Strait (New Guinea) and Sarawak (Borneo). Haddon suggested a starting date of March 1898, in which time Myers was able to complete his medical training. In that year he proceeded to the Torres Strait, where he first undertook ethnomusicological research, and afterward in 1899 returned to England to take up a post as House Physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. In 1900 Myers traveled, for reasons of health, to Egypt, and in 1901 prepared his MD thesis on myasthenia gravis. In 1902 Myers returned to Cambridge where he remained for the next twenty years. He was made University Demonstrator in Experimental Psychology in 1904, while also teaching parttime at King’s College London, and was closely involved in the founding of the British Journal of Psychology (editing it, 1911–24). In the same year, he was married to Edith Seligman. He was made professor at King’s in 1906, a post he retained until 1909, the year of the publication of his popular Text-Book of Experimental Psychology. In 1909 Myers was made Cambridge University Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, and in 1912 founded, and partially self-funded, the first purposebuilt experimental psychology laboratory at that university. From 1915 Myers was commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, and the following year was made Consultant Psychologist to the British Expeditionary Force. It was in this context that he began to delve into what later became known as “shell shock,” a term that he is reputed to have coined. After the war, Myers returned to Cambridge but in 1918 took leave to begin work on founding the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP). He was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1919, as well as fellow of his college (later honorary fellow, in 1935). From 1919 Myers worked toward the restructuring of the constitution of the British Psychological Society, which was subsequently divided into general, medical, educational, industrial, and aesthetic sections, the first three of which published their own journals. This came to fruition in 1921. In 1922 Myers resigned what had evolved in the previous year into a Readership in Experimental Psychology, and devoted his time to NIIP. At roughly the same time (1922–23) Myers organized the first International Congress in Psychology, in Oxford, after the war, and was president of the Congress in 1923. He was twice president of the psychology section of the British Association (1922 and 1931). He spoke at Columbia in 1924 on the topic of industrial psychology, and from that time gave lectures widely, among them at Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, and London. He continued to head the NIIP until his resignation in 1938, and from that point to the end of his life devoted himself to further publishing and public lecturing. He died in 1946 after a brief illness. Myers received numerous awards throughout his life, including the CBE and honorary degrees from the University of Manchester in 1927 and later Calcutta and Pennsylvania. He is described by friends as eminently sociable, a good friend and mentor, and hugely gifted in areas of organization, though as we have seen, even some of his

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closest colleagues, like Bartlett, express reservations about the lasting value of his work. Bunn describes Bartlett’s reservations as emblematic of a general feeling among psychologists that the administration of NIIP had ultimately distracted Myers from his true forte.8 In addition, times had changed by Myers’s death, and the type of applied psychology Myers had practiced with the NIIP had come under full-scale revision with Bartlett’s laboratory-based research at the Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge (founded 1944): “To Bartlett, the abandonment of controlled conditions [as with Myers] was an unacceptable way of undertaking applied psychology.”9

Individualism in Anthropological Literature From the last quarter of the century the type of universalism that Wallaschek and Glyn espoused was often debunked in favor of developing notions of individualism. Typifying this is an attack by Joseph Kaines, of the Anthropological Society of London, on Chorley’s piece on race. Kaines takes offense at Chorley’s presumption that the most ancient service music was that of the synagogue; that Hebrew chants were wild and primitive; and more important, that it is the music of the North that forms the apogee of music across the world. Like many before him, Kaines takes issue with the concept of music as a universal language: “Music is said to be a universal language. Is it so? Has it different dialects? And do the people of one dialect understand (or sympathise with) those who speak another? Does Spanish or Italian music find responsive echoes in the hearts of Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, or Russians, or vice versa?”10 Kaines’s point is not an especially racial one, insofar as he deals mainly with nationalities and geographical locales, but underlying his question about “race” (he seldom uses the word), are issues of “psychical characteristics of the nations of the north-west of Europe,”11 which give rise to musical effect of one sort or another. This in itself, although laid out in an enormously discursive way by Kaines, does suggest a shift in thinking, because it looks to matters like historical development or the climatic environment to answer questions of progress, rather than matters of innate racial characteristics as they affect these things, such as one could be said to find in Chorley and many anthropologists like him of the period. Of further interest is the fact that Kaines’s article, disparate, personal, and unsystematic as it is, finds itself in the first issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, to some extent foregrounding music as an anthropological concern.

8. 9. 10. 11.

Bunn, “ ‘A Flair for Organization,’ ” 11. Ibid. Kaines, “On Some of the Racial Aspects of Music,” xxix. Ibid., xxxv.

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From the 1880s this kind of wholesale critique of musical universalism appears to have waned, and was supplanted by a more nuanced concern for individualism. Thus, in the discussion after Rowbotham’s previously discussed paper, “Certain Reasons for Believing that the Art of Music in Prehistoric Times Passed Through Three Distinct Stages of Development” (1881), the principle of an invariable tripartition comes under rather serious assault by the president of the Institute, Pitt Rivers. Pitt Rivers takes umbrage at the apparent lack of evidence in Rowbotham’s schemata: He thought exception might be taken as to the way the absence of an instrument was argued on, so as to prove a case either way. On the one hand the absence of pipe and lyre in a tribe having drums was construed to mean that the tribe had never got beyond the drum. But, on the other hand, with a more civilised people having the lyre and no pipe, it was argued that they had had the pipe, but given it up.12

Despite the fact that Pitt Rivers’s sequencing of objects of material culture is inherently developmentalist and historically comparativist, he was eager to view human sociocultural development in Darwinian terms,13 and this inevitably led him to respond critically to Rowbotham’s Comtean type of musical preconditioning. Writing about heredity and individual differences in a Galtonian context, for example, he eschews a rigid historiographical classification, suggesting that, because of the lack of real evidence, the stream of progress cannot be proven to move in such direct lines. Indeed, we cannot account for this innate difference in the capacity of individuals, unless by supposing it to be proportioned to the length of time during which, or the degree of intensity with which, the ancestors of the individuals have had their minds occupied in the particular branch of culture for which capacity is shown. Unfortunately the difficulty of tracing the channel of hereditary transmission stands in the way of obtaining any certainty on this point.14

In terms of material culture, Pitt Rivers is perfectly happy to concede the existence of Rowbotham’s components of tripartition, but disputes the provability of their sequence. In fact, the Darwinian sympathy is obvious in his resistance to the anthropological backdrop to Rowbotham’s ideas. He writes that “Every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity or affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every word in the science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of development or phonetic decay.”15 Rowbotham’s

12. Rowbotham, “Discussion,” 388. 13. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 181. 14. Fox, “On the Principles of Classification Adopted in the Arrangement of His Anthropological Collection,” 298. 15. Ibid., 302–33.

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ideas are in fact vaguely museological in their methodology, and in some ways very much like Pitt Rivers’s, and this is where Pitt Rivers takes umbrage. His criticism suggests a lack of evidence, and as he says: “If, therefore, we can obtain a sufficient number of objects to represent the succession of ideas, it will be found that they are capable of being arranged in museums upon a similar plan.”16

Growing Individualism in Australian Anthropology Myers’s seminal work in the music of the Torres Strait is part of a mid- to late nineteenth-century fascination with Australia and the geographical areas in close proximity. From a musical standpoint, the earliest anthropological articles of substance appear from 1887, with a particular interest in the aborigines of Australia and the Pacific islands to its northeast, including A. W. Howitt’s “Notes on Songs and Songmakers of Some Australian Tribes” (1887); G. W. Torrance’s “Music of the Australian Aboriginals” (1887); R. Etheridge, Jr.’s “An Australian Aboriginal Musical Instrument” (1894); Alfred C. Haddon’s “The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits” (1890); Boyle T. Somerville and Sidney H. Ray’s “Songs and Specimens of the Language of New Georgia, Solomon Islands” (1897); and Somerville’s “Ethnographical Notes in New Georgia, Solomon Islands” (1897). The concentration on Australia and its outlying areas was a constant source of interest anthropologically, owing to the perception of the aborigines of those areas being among the most primitive of all savages. Tylor writes that “Few would dispute that the following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:— Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian. By treating the development of civilization on this plain ethnographic basis, many difficulties may be avoided which have embarrassed its discussion.”17 All aspects of Australian aboriginal culture were put under scrutiny, from kinship systems to diverse aspects of material culture,18 and music was very much a part of this process. As Kuper remarks, It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the Australian ethnographers on the idea of primitive society, especially after the publication of Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai in 1880; but it is essential to be clear about the nature of that impact. Even before there were any detailed ethnographic descriptions, Australia had already been identified as the crucial anthropological laboratory. . . . The Australian aborigines were naked, black hunters and gatherers . . . they were as close as could be to the Victorian image of primitive man.19

16. Fox, “On the Principles of Classification Adopted in the Arrangement of His Anthropological Collection,” 307. 17. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 27. 18. Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology, 20. 19. Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, 92.

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Before Fison and Howitt, examples of anthropological racism are abundant, and by the 1870s had obtained a sufficient level of institutional approbation to be included in the first issue of the Institute’s journal. C. Staniland Wake’s “The Mental Characteristics of Primitive Man, as exemplified by the Australian Aborigines” (1872), divides mental characteristics into those of an intellectual and those of a moral nature, the Australian Aborigines being bereft on both counts. On their intellectual character Wake provides the following summary: To speak, however, of intellectual phenomena in relation to the Australian aborigines is somewhat of a misnomer. This race presents, in fact, hardly any of what are usually understood as the phenomena of intellect. Nor could it be otherwise with savages who, almost without clothing or ornaments, with few implements or manufactures, and with very inferior habitation and means of water-locomotion, have no aim in life but the continuance of their existence and the gratification of their passion, with the least possible trouble to themselves.20

Wake is equally deprecating in his summary of the Aboriginal moral character. Relying upon numerous other writers before him, he suggests that the Aborigines exhibit a “want of the idea of personal purity”21 and are “in all questions of morality, and in all matters connected with the emotional nature, mere children.”22 Fison and Howitt produced work of significance in relation to kinship studies, particularly with reference to exogamy (marrying out of a clan) and endogamy (marrying within a clan), and like Wake, their purpose was to explore the Australian Aborigines as barometers of early human development. As Fison says, “The Australian classes [of kinship] are especially valuable . . . because they give us what seem to be the earliest stages of development.”23 In light of this view, and the kinship studies undertaken through Fison and Howitt’s collaboration, it is of interest that Howitt produced one of the earliest articles focused specifically on Australian tribal music. Howitt had first-hand experience of the Aborigines, as an experienced bushranger, magistrate of the interior and amateur geologist, and had begun to read literature on evolution in the 1860s.24 These experiences coalesce in his kinship work with Fison, and one could therefore argue that it is his interpretation of kinship that impacts on his treatment of tribal songs and songmakers. On a basic level, where Fison divides tribal society into “classes,” Howitt speaks in the terminology of “class” differentiation: “Connected with this class

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Wake, “The Mental Characteristics of Primitive Man,” 74. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 79. Fison, “Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,” 23. Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, 93.

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[magic-songs] are songs which are used at the Initiations,”25 and again “The song [sacred poetic song] is a good instance of this class of compositions.”26 More important is the way in which Howitt uses this concept of class to establish relationships of exogamous or endogamous musical kinship among tribes. Songs are created by tribal poets who are held in very high esteem. Their songs are “carried from tribe to tribe, until the very meaning of the words is lost as well as the original source of the song.”27 In one subclass it is simply the music that is passed on. In another subclass “pantomimic gestures or rhythmical movements”28 are transmitted in addition, and in yet a third subclass, songs are accompanied by a stick. Each subclass, in itself from a primary class, is transmuted through exogamous tribal communication. Besides the bardic exogamous hegemony there is another class of lesser poets that produces magic songs, more akin to chants. These poets could be said to produce music of an endogamous type, remaining strictly within the bounds of the tribe itself, and to that end remaining more limited in expression. As Howitt says, “Such chaunts can scarcely be called songs.”29 Both the exogamous and endogamous traditions are explored very briefly by G. W. Torrance, whose “Music of the Australian Aboriginals” is appended to Howitt’s article. Torrance describes the music rather generally and provides musical examples that relate to Howitt’s article. Presumably in an effort to rationalize the bardic hegemony, Torrance becomes particularly interested in ascertaining basic musicality, and describes and illustrates with musical notation how the poetic bard was able to successfully match pitch and melodic sequence. His findings reveal the bard to be “an intelligent representative of his race. His voice is a baritone of average compass and not unpleasing quality. His ear also is fairly quick and accurate, though occasionally he would pause long as if trying to recall the test sounds before repeating them; and his patience, good temper, and evident pleasure at seeing his songs committed to paper, were very remarkable.”30 This kind of appreciation, uncharacteristic some ten to twenty years earlier, is notable for its estimation of a single bard. Indeed, implicitly, the bard, both as representative of group and individual within that group, suggests a type of social and political hierarchy resembling what Fison considers to typify the Australian Aboriginal class system, namely, “what appears to be a steady progress towards the individualizing of the individual.”31

25. Howitt, “Notes on Songs and Songmakers of Some Australian Tribes,” 328. 26. Ibid., 330. 27. Ibid., 329. 28. Ibid., 330. 29. Ibid., 333. 30. Torrance, “Music of the Australian Aboriginals,” 336. 31. Fison, “Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,” in Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 128, cited in Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology, 35.

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The idea of progress toward individuality, arising out of an exogamous impulse, is a concept that also could be said to mark research on Australian music, particularly from an organological standpoint. Thus, according to R. Etheridge, Jr., numerous prototypical instruments appear in Australia, only to occur in variation throughout it and its nearby islands. They subsequently embed in disparate geographical locations where they achieve cultural codification and organological individuality as a particular instrument. Describing a drum stick used in combination with an opossum cloak, for instance, Etheridge Jr. indicates that it appears in a rudimentary form about 100 miles inland from Port Douglas, near Cairns, on the northeast coast of Queensland. Quoting F. L. Mitchell, however, he writes that “their universal and highly original dance . . . may be said to use the tympanum in its rudest form.”32 This instrument then spreads in different forms to other localities, from the Maranoa River in Queensland, where earth is rolled up inside the skins, to Western Victoria, where the rugs sometimes contain shells, and the Herbert River, in Central Queensland, where “the female musicians beat ‘their open hands against their laps (or more probably, their buttocks) thus producing a loud hollow sound.’ ”33 The progression toward individuality, be it compositional or organological, represents a form of dissemination that would ultimately find ethnomusicological voice in the music-psychological theories of individual differences outlined in the experimental work of Charles Samuel Myers and his research for the 1898 Torres Strait expedition, discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters. And although it was Myers who would embed an individualizing template within the realm of musicology and ethnomusicology, the methodological precedents set by figures like Fison were significant in preparing the academic field. Later researchers, especially those who would be associated with the 1898 Torres Strait expedition, took a particular interest in the “individualizing” process of dissemination within the tribes of Australia and its neighboring islands. In 1888 Alfred C. Haddon, then professor of zoology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, and later founder of the Torres Strait expedition (to which he invited Myers to serve as music specialist), explored the Torres Strait for the structure and fauna of the coral reefs of that area. In addition to this he gathered a wide array of cultural information, including some on music. The musical portion of Haddon’s article, “The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits” (1890), revolves around very clear descriptions of the physical characteristics of musical instruments and their performance, as well as illustrations. The instruments are not discussed in any greater detail from a sociological standpoint. It is obvious, however, that Haddon had hoped to identify prototypical forms and the variations that mark them out, thus giving singular cultural identity, or

32. Mitchell, “ ‘Three Expeditions into the Interior of East Australia,’ ” 321. 33. Lumholtz, “Lumholtz, ‘Amongst Cannibals,’ ” 236.

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individuality, to disparately related tribal communities. When referring to the bull-roarer, for example, Haddon mentions that it was “only in Muralug that the bull-roarer (wane
s) had a sacred significance,”34 and in Mer he had found evidence of the rattle (pa
da
trong), about which he had, previously, only been able to acquire secondhand information. Not only does this conform to Urry’s description of Haddon as “eager to establish a clear picture of the relationships between the numerous cultures in the area [of Melanesia, and other Oceanic cultures] in terms of their particular adaptations, traditions and historical connections,”35 but it also indicates a progression from the Tylorian concept of culture, which has been criticized as developmentally stilted, considering culture singularly as a stage of human progress rather than as a manifestation of individual diversifications, that is, “cultural” or “cultures.”36 This same characteristic can be observed in B. T. Somerville and Sidney H. Ray’s “Songs and Specimens of the Language of New Georgia, Solomon Islands” (1897). Ray, also a member of the 1898 Torres Strait expedition (responsible for areas of linguistics), worked with Somerville on a linguistic system of song classification. This interested him because many of the songs contained words that were only partially intelligible to the tribes that sang them, thus obscuring traces of their origins. The tune that Haddon gives in his article is among them. Ray writes that the “words and tune of a song from Muralug or Prince of Wales’ Island in Torres Straits have been given by Professor Haddon in his account. . . . The words of this differ a good deal from the common speech, and are difficult to translate.”37 In fact, Ray is the perfect linguistic counterpart to Haddon, for their systems of comparative classification are not dissimilar, as was their belief in salvage anthropology, namely, the belief that the cultural substance of tribal peoples was being lost due to the incursion of European man. From the standpoint of the “individualizing” process of linguistic evolution, Ray sought to explain the diffusion of distinct languages through delineated familial groupings, and was able to prove the disparate origins of two Torres Strait languages, in much the way that Haddon had more generally in his early ethnography of the Torres Strait. This, in turn, also enabled him to provide Charles Samuel Myers with much needed song translations, through which the individualizing evolution of music eventually found its fullest and richest voice, in the psychological language of individual differences.

34. Haddon, “The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits,” 375. 35. Urry, Before Social Anthropology, 48. 36. Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective, 67. 37. Somerville and Ray, “Songs and Specimens of the Language of New Georgia, Solomon Islands,” 444.

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Myers and Individualizing Tendencies in International Influences Carole Pegg describes the history of ethnomusicology as including the input of “ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists, comparative musicologists, folklorists, psychologists, physicists, missionaries, clerics, explorers, civil servants and enthusiasts, forming multiple influences both inside and outside the academy that affected contemporary thinking. This melting pot includes distinctive figures who have been simultaneously co-opted into the lineages of different disciplines.”38 Among these, in addition to Myers, are figures associated with the Berlin School (Hornbostel and Stumpf). The Berlin School was founded around 1900, and included Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and Otto Abraham, Stumpf’s assistant and a physician interested in absolute pitch and other aspects of music psychology.39 Hornbostel, for instance, places comparative musicology “at the point of intersection of three disciplines—ethnology, musicology and psychology,”40 and this interdisciplinarity is abundantly clear in his, Stumpf’s, and Abraham’s published work within the School. Works such as Stumpf’s Tonpsychologie (1883–90), Hornbostel’s “Über vergleichende akustische und musikpsychologische Untersuchungen” [1910], or Stumpf and Hornbostel’s “Über die Bedeutung ethnologisher Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst” (1910 [1911]) openly betray the interdisciplinarity at the root of their work, as do many publications following on from them. Schneider describes the School of comparative musicology as having been taken over “from linguistics where especially in Indo-European studies comparison has been employed to detect and trace genetic relationships which were always interpreted also as historic relationships. In this, linguistic methodology is equivalent to that of genetic classification in biology.”41 This, of course, equally describes the evolutionist templates that dominated British cultural anthropology from the time of Darwin and Spencer, evidenced, in various forms, in works from Wallaschek’s Primitive Music (1893) to the later writings of Myers. As did Stumpf in his Anfänge der Musik (1911), Wallaschek and numerous others wrote on the origins of music, seeking to relate, in comparative anthropological terms, primitive music with “original” music. Needless to say, despite relying upon ethnographic parallelisms, it was partly the confusions over the temporal and chronological aspect of this work—like so much of the comparative method in anthropology discussed in this book—that ensured its ultimate theoretical failure.42

38. Pegg, “Ethnomusicology.” 39. Schneider, “Germany and Austria,” 83. See Abraham, “Das absolute Tonbewusstein: psychologisch-musikalische Studie,” 1–86, and “Tonmetrische Untersuchungen an einem deutschen Volkslied,” 1. 40. Schneider, “Germany and Austria,” 82. 41. Ibid., 80. 42. Ibid., 82.

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Apart from Wallaschek, the direct influence of the Berlin School in Britain is difficult to assess until the time of Charles Samuel Myers, who footnoted his work with numerous references to German and Austrian scholarship, among other sources. Similarities between Britain and Austro-German scholarship are inevitable, however, as Schneider points out. Writing on the influence of psychological theory within the ethnography of comparative musicology, he identifies Myers as one of its most obvious exponents, citing Myers’s “The Ethnological Study of Music” (1907) as its centerpiece.43 The relation of Stumpf to Myers is very strong indeed. Stumpf, like Myers, researched the effects of tone sensation on the listener, and both developed theories of apprehension and tone relations. Stumpf also developed notions of comparison, exploring issues of tone similarity, likeness, dissimilarity, diversity, and so on, and distance comparisons (Distanz-Vergleichungen),44 which Myers appropriates in numerous articles on various aspects of psychology and music. Stumpf and Hornbostel are also deeply influenced in their appropriation of psychological theory into an evolutionary template. As Stumpf says, it is “an intellectual development . . . whose consecutive stages and inner properties no one has yet demonstrated for us in a psychologically credible way.”45 This manifests itself in numerous articles, and more particularly in Stumpf’s book on the origins of music. Stumpf, as occasionally Myers, proposes melodic development in three distinct stages, from a nascent stage of small steps with no tonal bearing, to a stage of “distance scales” [Distanzleitern] of fixed intervallic distances, and then a final stage of “fusion” and consonance (or tonal relationship).46 This is, arguably, echoed in Myers’s work on the Veddas, based on thirty-four phonograph recordings obtained by C. G. Seligman and his wife. Myers describes these songs as “probably simpler in structure than any other native songs hitherto studied,”47 and categorizes them into three groups, roughly echoing Stumpf: Nine of the tunes are composed of only two notes. In three others the tune consists also of two notes, but with the addition of one or more unimportant gracenotes. These twelve songs may be conveniently classed as belonging to Group A. Twelve other songs consist of three notes only. These we shall class under Group B. Nine songs contain four notes, and one consists of five notes. These we shall consider as Group C. Of the songs in Group A, in no case is the range sensibly greater than our whole-tone interval. With the exception of two anomalous songs, no song in

43. Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” 293. 44. Ibid. 45. Stumpf “Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer,” cited in Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” 299. 46. Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” 300. 47. Myers, “Music,” in Seligmann and Seligmann, The Veddas, 341.

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Group B has a range sensibly greater than our minor third. With one exception, no song in Group C has a range greater than a fourth.48

Clearly, as his footnoting confirms, Myers had read and used Stumpf’s article “Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer” (1886), as well as Karl Hagen’s dissertation, “Über die Musik einiger Naturvölker” (1892) and Abraham and Hornbostel’s “Phonographirte Indianer Melodien aus British Columbia” in the Boas Memorial Volume (1906), to mention but a few. And there are, of course, further similarities, particularly with Myers’s work on the Veddas. Where Abraham and Hornbostel developed a theory of primitive musical development from Helligkeit (tonal brightness, generally assigned to a single tone) to Tönigkeit (chroma, generally associated with an interval), Myers developed a theory of evolutionary accrescence that appears to argue for progression from pre-intervallic (Helligkeit) and intervallic (Tönigkeit) as roughly the same thing: the intervals of the Veddas appear to have been developed . . . not by taking a harmonious interval and dividing it into smaller intervals, but by starting with small (and uncertain) intervals and adding further intervals to them. It is only in the more advanced songs (and these are very few in number) that relatively large intervals are sung. And here we appear first to meet with the influence of harmony in fixing the size of such consonant intervals. Despite the fact that to our ears tonality is so well-marked throughout the Vedda songs, the approximate consonance of intervals is only reached when the two tones immediately succeed one another.49

But although Myers would presumably have agreed with Abraham and Hornbostel’s suggestion that “only at somewhat higher stages of development musical intervals having a distinct quality (that is fourths and fifths) can be observed,”50 he may well have sought to refute the fixity or stasis implicit within Hornbostel’s suggestion that “Primitive music is to a large degree distancemusic, and during an extensive period of development distance maintains predominance over tonal relationships or consonance.”51 Myers, in fact, speaks out against this kind of stasis in much of his writing, eventually suggesting that all music—irrespective of its relative stage of observable progress—conforms to a universal, yet individually differentiated, template. Accordingly, music, whether Western or non-Western, follows this pattern: (1) discrimination between noises and tones; (2) awareness of differences in loudness, pitch, duration, character,

48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 365. 50. Abraham and Hornbostel, “Zur Psychologie der Tondistanz,” 233–49, cited in Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” 300. 51. Hornbostel, “Geburt und erste Kindheit der Musik,” 9–17, cited in Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” 301.

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and quality; (3) awareness of absolute pitch; (4) appreciation and use of (small) approximately equal tone-distances; (5) appreciation and use of (larger) consonant intervals and the development of small intervals in relation thereto; (6) melodic phrasing; (7) rhythmic phrasing; and (8) musical meaning.52 Other influences on Myers include, inevitably, that of Hermann von Helmholtz and his translator, Alexander Ellis. Helmholtz afforded British musicology with a considerable locus of scientific criticism, especially after Ellis’s translation of 1875, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physical Basis for the Theory of Music (1875), based on the third edition of Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863). The second, 1885, edition of Ellis’s translation was approved by Helmholtz, and importantly, includes an appendix containing a summary of Ellis’s own papers on musical scales, theory of harmony, temperament, and pitch.53 In addition to providing advancing scientific disciplines fodder for critical aesthetic debate, Helmholtz also found his way into purely historiographical schema. William Chappell, for instance, debates the validity of Helmholtz’s science in the first (and only) published volume of his four-volume set, The History of Music (1874): I cannot admit that Helmholtz’s deductions from the Tonempfindungen are such as will lay a true “physiological groundwork for the theory of music,” as designed by the learned author. Not only are there reasons for differing with him as to the due employment of the scale of natural sounds, but also as to his theory of harmonics; as to his supposed causes of consonance and dissonance; as to his imaginary causes of difference in the tone of musical instruments; and as to the true nature of “resultant tones,” to which he has assigned the new name of “difference tones.” I might add to this list of objections; but, since physiology is defined as “the doctrine of the constitution of the laws of nature,” such examples as the above are essentially within it, and may suffice.54

Chappell takes umbrage at the defects in Helmholtz within the context of Greek music, which he sees as providing modern music with its immutable acoustic basis. As he says, “The discussion of ancient and modern science must, in a measure, go hand in hand; for, as our present scale is Greek, so whatever applies to ancient times is equally applicable to the present. No science has more fixed and clearly established fundamental laws than music.”55 Although Chappell’s, and many others’, criticism of Helmholtz arises out of true scientific disagreement, there is another dimension to his disapproval. Helmholtz, for example, suggests that while hearing is largely governed by human physiological mechanisms, scales

52. Myers, “The Beginnings of Music,” 196. 53. Thomas and Rhodes, “Ellis [Sharpe], Alexander John,” in Macy, Grove Music Online. 54. Chappell, The History of Music, xxix. 55. Ibid., 186.

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“are dependent on human invention and, in fact, show a high degree of diversity when understood from historical and cultural perspectives.”56 This kind of physiological individualizing not only contradicts Chappell’s conception of acoustical immutability, it also threatens the very basis of his implicit historiographical comparison of Greece and modern civilization (presumably England). Indeed, despite conceding that ancient and modern scales are invariably distortions of natural acoustics, Chappell insists that both nonetheless form separate, but historically related, musical foundations in the progress toward musical civilization. While the influence of Helmholtz is frequently bound up with his translator, Alexander Ellis, Ellis’s own work is divergent in some respects. Ellis is largely renowned for the development of the “cent” system of pitch measurement in 1885. The cent system divides the octave into 1,200 equal units, and thus the equal-tempered semitone into 100 units. This, in conjunction with the recently invented Edison cylinder recordings, made possible “the objective study of nonWestern musical systems.”57 As Helen Myers points out, these innovations, in conjunction with the hugely accumulating recordings held in Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe, contributed directly to the development of comparative musicology.58 Ellis’s methodological influence upon European science is well known. Ringer describes his influence as having from 1885 “laid the solid empirical foundations of comparative musicology as practiced by generations thereafter. The fact that the legitimate father of comparative musicology had focused on musical systems rather than musical artifacts left its inevitable imprint on many a subsequent investigation, in striking contrast to the stress on music as a cultural phenomenon which became the hallmark of ethnomusicology with its strong anthropological bias.”59 Ellis’s famous article “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations” is a centerpiece of comparative musicology, “because it was first to show that a great variety of pitch systems evolved throughout the world including equal-tempered five- and seven-note scales.”60 Ellis concludes that “the Musical Scale is not one, not ‘natural,’ nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious.”61 Other writings of Ellis are “obligatory writing,”62 such as “On the History of Musical Pitch” (1880), which encapsulates, among other articles, Ellis’s view, borrowed partly from Helmholtz, of the empirical supremacy of mechanical experimentation.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” 296. Myers, Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies, 138. Ibid. Ringer, “One World or None?” 187. Schneider, “Pitch, §II: Non-Western and traditional concepts. 2. Pitch systems.” Ellis, “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” 526. Thomas and Rhodes, “Ellis [Sharpe], Alexander John.”

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Ellis’s renown, as Helmholtz’s, is clearly visible elsewhere in the world, particularly in America, where ethnomusicology follows similar patterns to that of the United Kingdom. Indeed the observable interchange between American, European, and British ethnomusicology is abundant, especially in the works of Myers, who was a keen observer of American ethnomusicological activities. As in Britain, American ethnological and anthropological research intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century, epitomized by the founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. Interest in American Indian music was registered in Germany in Theodore Baker’s doctoral dissertation, “Über die Musik der Nordamerikanischen Wilden” (1882), often recognized as the first critical examination of its kind. The earliest American study to include the use of the phonograph in the field was Jesse Walter Fewkes, who recorded Passamaquoddy Indian songs and narratives in Maine in February and March 1890.63 In other research Fewkes recorded Suni and Hopi sacred and secular music and forwarded the cylinders to Benjamin Ives Gilman for transcription and analysis. Gilman’s indebtedness to Ellis is apparent, not only in his active engagement with Ellis’s research but also in his resistance to Westernizing, domesticating, transcriptional practice. Writing in “The Science of Exotic Music” (1909), he cites seven principal differences between European and non-European music, including (1) the absence of harmony; (2) scales divided by uncommon intervals; (3) heterophony, or playing neither in unison nor in parts; (4) neotonality, which does not give principality to a single pitch; (5) rhythmic complication; (6) the melody type; and (7) the hegemony of scale over song. These combine to afford a more sympathetic view of nonWestern music: “Hitherto Europeans have believed all this alien music to be rude, primitive and nugatory—an assumption of which the present inquiries amply show the naïveté.”64 The debt to cross-European influences, including Ellis, Stumpf, and Hornbostel, among others, is abundantly apparent in Gilman’s work. Other American scholars exhibit less conceptual or methodological indebtedness to these, such as John Comfort Fillmore, who distrusted the phonograph and “used the universality of diatonic harmony”65 to transcribe his music. Despite this, Fillmore worked with many significant figures within the growing field of ethnomusicology, and indeed held fashionable, yet controversial, evolutionary ideas, developing “a theory of musical analysis that assumed a common harmonic foundation for all music.”66 In various Spencerian and Darwinian incarnations this viewpoint held great sway across the nascent

63. Lee, “Native America,” 21. 64. Gilman, “The Science of Exotic Music,” 532–35, in Shelemay, History, Definitions, and Scope of Ethnomusicology, 4. 65. Lee, “Native America,” 21. 66. Ibid., 23

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literature of trans-European ethnomusicology, forming, ultimately, one of the substantive critical backdrops of Myers’s proto-ethnomusicological work in “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music” (1905). Among Fillmore’s close colleagues is Alice Cunningham Fletcher, considered one of America’s founding ethnomusicologists, and inevitably a source of reference for British ethnomusicology. Fletcher was affiliated with the Bureau of American Ethnology, and published extensively on music and Plains Indians. It was Fillmore who provided transcriptions for Fletcher’s well-known A Study of Omaha Indian Music (1893),67 which Myers had clearly read for his study of rhythm in primitive music. The difference between them, however, could not be more apparent, in some ways. Fletcher, for example, conceded the inadequacy of transcription, suggesting “that it is impossible for me to exemplify . . . the [American] Indian scale.”68 Fillmore’s ambivalent attitude toward technology was eventually superseded at a time when, in addition to American Indian music, American ethnomusicology was embracing other North American cultures, such as the Caribbean, AfricanAmerican, and South American, typified in the diverse writings of the Germanborn and educated American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Franz Boas. Boas produced early work on the Inuit, and then from 1900 developed an interest in linguistics and “the closely linked oral arts and their accompanying forms (tale and myth, poetry, music and dance), emphasizing the interrelationship of different aspects of culture within the whole cultural frame.”69 Boas adopted an individualizing anthropology, not dissimilar to that, ultimately, of Ruth Benedict, encapsulated in Patterns of Culture (1935), or indeed in Myers’s conception of individual differences. According to Boas, “Culture embraces all the manifestations of social behaviour of a community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the product of human activities as determined by these habits.”70 As with Myers and others, this attitude is premised on technological changes affording more empirically justifiable conclusions. The movement toward this is also represented in Boas’s contemporaries, as in the American Indian research of Natalie Curtis and Frances Densmore, among others. Curtis, unlike Fillmore or Gilman, resisted domesticating transcription in The Indian’s Book (1907), and took transcriptions directly from musicians in the field, like Myers and later Fox Strangways. Densmore exploited technological advancements, experimenting with graphic representations and phonophotography.71 Densmore’s “The Study of Indian

67. Ibid. 68. Fletcher, A Study of Omaha Indian Music, cited in ibid. 69. Vale, “Boas, Franz.” 70. Boas, The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians, cited in Monaghan and Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology, 37. 71. Lee, “Native America,” 27.

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Music in the Nineteenth Century” (1927) gives a clear picture of the development of ethnomusicology at the time, and the degree to which it was shaped by European and other American thinking, including, characteristically, Stumpf, Baker, Boas, Fewkes, Fletcher, and Gilman, to name but a few. In a sense, Densmore, like Myers, speaks for all people advancing the discipline of ethnomusicology when she debunks Fillmore’s superannuated methodologies as racist and impracticable. Indeed, the substance of Densmore’s criticisms are echoed throughout modern British ethnomusicology, and more particularly in Myers.72

72. Densmore, “The Study of Indian Music in the Nineteenth Century,” 13.

Chapter Eleven

From Individualism to Individual Differences The growth of individualism found in anthropological literature is a microcosm of a larger intellectual tendency situating the individual within broader scientific methodologies. As Pitt Rivers’s previously cited criticisms of Rowbotham imply (see chapter 10), in anthropology individualism was increasingly subsumed into a Darwinian discourse. The same process occurs in psychology, and in the case of music it is typified by the emergence of the idea of a musical faculty. In the musical faculty, individualism and evolutionism coalesce into theories of the origin of music—of especial concern for Myers, in his efforts to define the beginnings of non-Western music. Indeed, in Myers’s terms the musical faculty is an essential evolutionary feature of human musicality, and without it music of any kind could not be fully understood.

Individualism, Evolution, and the Emergence of a Musical Faculty The idea of a musical faculty is common in British literature on music from the period of the 1880s, and is typified in the work of the psychologist and writer on music Edmund Gurney (1847–88).1 Although Myers eventually rejected Gurney as anachronistic, he would have read his work with considerable and vigorous interest. Gurney’s magisterial book, The Power of Sound (1880), must have been an engrossing read, and although it may well have been a book Myers loved to hate, there are some similarities that are worth noting. Both Gurney and Myers situate their arguments against the Spencerian notion of evolution, albeit

1. For more information on Gurney, particularly in references to aspects of evolution, see Zon, Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology, 13–17, 125–35, 138–39, and 171. For information on his analytical orientation, see Dale, Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, passim.

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perhaps for rather different reasons. For Myers the Spencerian argument of song emerging from speech cannot be valid. As we shall see later in greater detail, Myers takes a view of the origins of music not unlike his view on accrescence recapitulated in his article “Principles of Development” in A Psychologist’s Point of View (1933). In “The Ethnological Study of Music” (1907), for example, he writes initially with an idea that sounds promisingly Spencerian: “We may regard musical and verbal language as derived from a common source, namely from the tendency to give vent to feelings by vocal expression.”2 He soon retracts this, however, by indicating that other theories have to be considered: “There are, however other theories as to the origin of music which lay stress on more special factors. One of the objects of the ethnological study of music should be the determination of the importance of these factors.”3 Myers recapitulates prevailing theories of music arising from birdsong, sexual attraction, work- and dance-related activities, and details his views on the language of music. In this context he does not mention Spencer per se, but it is clear that these remarks are intended as a direct criticism of the principal tenets of his argument. Gurney’s view on Spencer is less cohesively critical, and in any case, revolves less around developing notions of the language of music than undercutting the verifiable nature of Spencer’s remarks. In his famous retort to Spencer in the Fortnightly Review (1876) Gurney promulgates a view that Spencer’s theories are either conceptually incomplete or unsubstantiated: “Even if we take the residue of tones expressing pleasing emotions and having increased resonance of an agreeable kind, and if we accept Mr. Spencer’s view of such emotional speech as being prior to music, the fact remains that agreeable sounds are only the material of music.”4 For Gurney—but definitely not for Myers—music is also, at least in part, self-automated rather than necessarily responsive to some form of sensory stimulation: “Music is peculiar in that, just as it is manifested through the individual organism in independence of external phenomena, so are its ideas (not indefinite or subjective but) isolated and independent.”5 Gurney’s attitude toward the eminent scientist and acoustician, Hermann von Helmholtz, is not unlike Myers’s, though perhaps more diffuse. Writing of Helmholtz in The Power of Sound, Gurney takes umbrage at the thought that “Every motion is an expression of the power which produces it, and we instinctively measure the motive force by the amount of motion which it produces.”6 As he says, “The degree of truth in these remarks makes them the more misleading

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Myers, “The Ethnological Study of Music,” 237. Ibid. Gurney, “On Some Disputed Points in Music,” 107. Ibid., 106. Gurney, The Power of Sound, 168.

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if they are taken as the whole truth. For they ignore the differentia of melodic form, the unique proportions which are as remote from anything suggested by movements in space as from anything suggested by forms in space, and which cannot be in the remotest way penetrated by the finest appreciation of mere physical motion, or of the external aspects of the motion present in Music.”7 Gurney even refutes Helmholtz’s view that beauty “is subject to laws and rules dependent on the nature of the human intelligence.”8 Gurney, it would seem, is hostile to Helmholtz for much the same lack of verification he finds in Spencer. His article, “Relations of Reason to Beauty” (1879) is a relentless and concerted attack on Helmholtzian thought: So prominent in music, as in architecture, are the elements of order and regularity, while in these arts there is often no radical objective distinction between subsidiary organisms and larger combinations, that in respect of them one cannot wonder at a view like that of Helmholtz, which tries to follow the “order” right down from the general arrangement of the work to where it is lost to view, and divines a “plan” pervading the domain which we have seen to belong to free form. . . . His [Helmholtz’s] difficulty, we saw, was the supposed existence in a work of art of a reasonable plan, which nevertheless eluded observation: he considers that this difficulty is relieved by the fact that in the subordinate sphere of musical tones and harmony the enigma is actually solved. The relationship of consecutive tones has been found to depend on their possession of some common harmonic or harmonics, not consciously perceived as such except by careful scrutiny and practice.9

The same fate befalls the German psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt, though not so exhaustively, in “The Passage from Stimulus to Sensation” (1882), which manages to refute both Wundt and Helmholtz in a single blow.10 It is not just a lack of verifiability that Gurney criticizes in Helmholtz, but the ostensible absence of a locus of musical consciousness, a musical faculty. Gurney defines this in a response to James Sully’s critique of The Power of Sound: Quite apart from abstruse psychological problems, and simply taking “musical faculty” as I have defined it, to denote the ability to construe and enjoy a number of successive tones as a unity or singly and recognisable bit of melodic form, it is merely a name for a particular power which two persons, alike in all other respects of taste and temperament, may differ by the whole extent of possessing in perfection and not possessing at all.11

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Ibid., 169. Ibid., 178. Gurney, “Relations of Reason to Beauty,” 495. Gurney, “The Passage from Stimulus to Sensation,” 295–98. Gurney, “The Psychology of Music,” 89.

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As this quotation indicates, Gurney insists on the existence of a “musical faculty” as a kind of sensory agent through which an individual interprets the general and individual qualities of music. Myers, in one of his earliest pieces of ethnomusicology, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music” (1904–5), talks about the musical faculty of the Malays of Sarawak in similar terms: it is clear that the Malays of Sarawak are able to regard many successively different intervals of time as a coordinated whole which they recognize when repeated in the course of the performance. This faculty they carry to a degree which lies so far beyond the powers of civilized musicians, that the latter may reasonably be sceptical as to the possibility of its occurrence among less advanced peoples.12

What is intriguing here, among other things, is the fact that Myers accepts implicitly Gurney’s idea of a musical faculty while also accepting Sully’s objections to it. Sully rejects “the unique and independent character”13 of a musical faculty, because musical appreciation invariably depends upon more than one system of apprehension: Speaking generally, one may say that there have been two ways of explaining the delight afforded by music, that of the formalists who find the secret of its beauty in certain laws of structure, and that of the idealists or associationists who refer it to the peculiar suggestions of the art. Mr. Gurney is, broadly speaking, a formalist and not an idealist; that is to say, he thinks suggestion is no essential ingredient in music.14

Sully also thinks that Gurney’s notion of a musical faculty is something of an “unnecessary deus ex machina”15 brought in to give unity to a thesis that even its author understands to be multiplicitous. Sully continues to discuss Gurney even in work that is not directly related to him. In a review of the first volume of Stumpf’s Tonpsychologie Sully takes umbrage at the fact that Stumpf fails to mention him, even to the point of suggesting that the work is strangely incomplete because of this: “The most complete treatment of the psychological base of music is the work of Mr. E. Gurney, which seems oddly enough to be unknown to Dr. Stumpf.”16 Sully’s praise of Gurney’s book, in the context of a review of Stumpf, is significant for two reasons. First, it sheds light on the centrality that the book was perceived to have in relation to the psychology of music in Britain at the time. Second, as emblematic of that centrality, it illuminates those features that were considered to be

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” 398. Gurney, “The Psychology of Music,” 89. Sully, “The Power of Sound” (review), 273. Ibid., 277. Sully, “Tonpsychologie” (review), 593.

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centrally important to psychologists interested in music. Sully, for example, while praising Gurney for the comprehensiveness of his research, criticizes him indirectly by lauding the breadth of Stumpf’s vision. Gurney simply “does not go into certain departments of the psychology of tone,”17 whereas Stumpf provides two volumes contributing to “the pure science of psychology.”18 Intriguingly, Sully is almost prescient (in relation to Myers) in his comments about the state of music psychology of his time: “On reading a work like this one naturally asks: When will such special psychological work be needed and encouraged in this country? The science must take a much higher place both in academic and in popular estimation if we are to emulate the Germans in work of this kind and keep our old place in the van of the psychological army.”19 What is significant here is not just the fact that Sully praises the increasingly specialized nature of German science, but that the success of advancement in Britain depends upon creating research that appeals equally to “academic” and “popular” readerships. Both Helmholtz and Stumpf are clearly specialized in Sully’s estimation, but Gurney is less so. Instead, he melds the general and specific into one seamless whole, and the idea that perhaps characterizes this more than anything in his work is the notion of the musical faculty. Indeed, Sully rejects Gurney’s idea of a musical faculty as simplistic and gratuitous, precisely because of its more generalized and empirically unproven (and unprovable) nature. This is certainly what comes across in Sully’s report of Stumpf’s criticisms of Gurney in his review of “Musikpsychologie in England” (1885). According to Sully, though Stumpf sees Gurney as a “fachmann” (expert), he has severe reservations: “Yet with the outcome of Mr. Gurney’s reasonings he is wholly at variance. To pronounce musical impressions to be unanalysable and to fall back on the hypothesis of a unique musical faculty appears to our author to be to abandon the musical problem altogether.”20 In allowing Stumpf to speak for him in criticizing Gurney on the musical faculty, Sully situates himself within what he perceives as the vanguard of scientific music psychological thought. Nevertheless, despite his and others’ various academic assaults, the idea of a musical faculty retained currency in more popular nonexperimental psychology well into the teens of the following century. The most obvious—if extreme—legacy of Gurney’s idea is The Musical Faculty: Its Origins and

17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 594. Bartlett, in particular, sees Myers as bringing together a host of information in his Text-Book (1909), in a way not dissimilar to Sully’s description of Stumpf: “As he [Stumpf] has done students of the science a valuable service in bringing together from inaccessible treatises and journals the most important results of recent investigation” (ibid.). 20. Sully, “Musikpsychologie in England” (review), 583.

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Processes (1914), by the composer and writer William Wallace,21 and his earlier book, The Threshold of Music: An Inquiry into the Development of the Musical Sense (1908). Wallace is rather dismissive of Gurney in both books. In The Threshold of Music he rather circumscribes him as outmoded in his views on modern music,22 and in The Musical Faculty Gurney is said to “discourage the student.”23 In fact, in The Musical Faculty Wallace groups Helmholtz, Stumpf, and Gurney together as essentially unreadable to the layman: “A glance at Helmholtz, Stumpf, or Gurney, to mention only three formidable treatises may well discourage the student. But in a question of this kind, experience, whether individual in its nature or proved in the case of others, may, with all its mistakes and misconceptions, be of more avail than reams of theory.”24 What really binds these three together in Wallace’s comments—and what is axiomatic of popular music psychology of the time—is the word “experience.” For Wallace, as for so many other popular music psychologists of the day, it is practical experience, either through performance or through composition, rather than theory, which informs the basic methodological framework. Wallace is adamant about this, and even goes so far as to question the validity of psychology as a theoretically delimited subject. It is precisely its theoretical orientation that has led it astray from its roots in practice: It cannot be denied that the word “Psychology” is somewhat out of favour, for although at its birth it conveyed a definite meaning and had a limited application, it has come to be the pass-word for a great many crude ideas. . . . Possibly we must wait for the coming of some psychologist who will devote his attention, less to a study of the purely elementary sensory and motor functions which he himself can perform, than to the investigation of the mental construction of the man who creates a work of art. From the meagre amount of space devoted to Music in works specially dealing with Psychology, we gather that their writers leave the subject alone because they are not able to draw upon their own experience in discussing it.25

Wallace exhibits a similar hostility in The Threshold of Music, which, like The Musical Faculty, seems, on the surface, conceptually at odds with its aims: I propose to trace the development of the Art of Music, and to show its direct bearing upon the evolution of a human faculty. The musical sense has not been the subject of

21. For information on Wallace’s historiographical considerations, see Zon, Music and Metaphor, 15–16, 66–69, 125, and 164–74. 22. Wallace, The Threshold of Music, 9–10. 23. Wallace, The Musical Faculty, 9. 24. Ibid. Wallace refers respectively to Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music; Stumpf, Tonpsychologie; and Gurney, The Power of Sound. 25. Wallace, The Musical Faculty, 2–4.

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research to any great extent. . . . All scientific men are not musicians, nor are many musicians versed in science, and while the former have thought it sufficient for their purpose to touch diffidently on music, so as to give their general inquiry an air of completeness, those in the latter category who have dealt with the expansion of the art have been content to accept theories partly because of their authoritative source, partly also because they themselves are not qualified to discuss the purely biological or psychological aspects of the subject. . . . To speak frankly, the attitude of the scientific man is somewhat complacent: he is satisfied with his own conclusions regarding the probable origin of some faculty: he is content to rely upon his hypothesis without regard to those influences which from century to century may have affected man’s intellectual progress.26

What is so odd about these comments is not the antiscientific barbs, but the fact that Wallace’s book is actually founded on evolutionary principles. Bowler refers to this type of antiscientific evolutionism when he writes that “the story of nineteenth-century evolutionism centers not on Darwinism (as it is recognized today) but on the emergence of what might be called the ‘developmental’ model of evolution.”27 This stresses “the orderly, goal-directed, and usually progressive character of evolution, often through a comparison with individual growth.”28 Of course, Wallace’s books are premised on the equation of individual growth and the larger evolutionary musical faculty insofar as both books stress the biographical importance of musical individuals and their effect on wider evolutionary progressions. As he says, we must wait for the time when psychologists devote time to “the mental construction of the man who creates a work of art.”29 Wallace takes up his own charge in his capacity as a critic of scientific musical psychology. His chapter on “Individual Development” is indicative of this, when he positions individual development within the wider concerns of evolution: “As Music has progressed from stage to stage, and as the horizon of the creative [musical] faculty has widened, the receptive faculty has also moved forward. The law of supply and demand has been reversed: it is the supply that causes, or rather brings about, the mental condition which feels the necessity for the demand.”30 Strangely, however, in the same way that Wallace borrows an evolutionary “attitude” yet rejects Darwin and Spencer, he also adopts the idea of musical faculty yet rejects Gurney. Wallace, like Gurney, is more than capable of associating evolution with a loss of individuality, and is therefore apt to demote forms of it that he perceives as impinging negatively upon the development of the individual. Wallace, unlike

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Wallace, The Threshold of Music, 1–2. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 5. Ibid. Wallace, The Musical Faculty, 4. Ibid., 47.

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Gurney however, inveighs the musical faculty with an evolutionary quality of its own: “The musical faculty is ever undergoing changes, and those who create and those who listen to Music are conscious that they too are changing, bringing to birth or appreciating sounds which at one time would have been detestable to them. We cannot account for these changes unless we assume that the musical faculty, unlike those involved in other arts, is in a state of evolution.”31 Edward Cone, in his prefatory essay in the 1966 reprinting of The Power of Sound, talks of Gurney “taking refuge” in the musical faculty,32 a sentiment not dissimilar to Sully’s comments of it being a deus ex machina. But despite this, Wallace, somewhat naively, tries to co-opt Sully into his paradigm of the musical faculty. He does this by ignoring his theoretical views and focusing instead on personal, individual, experience, citing his volte-face on Wagner after years of disapproval.33 For Wallace, this is not simply a matter of using Sully to express the evolutionary freedom operating at the root of the musical faculty. It also proves to what length Wallace would go to show just how much personal experience can contradict psychological theory, even in the greatest of minds. This same attitude, it must be said, is not universal among writers of popular music psychology, and certainly by the 1920s the idea of a musical faculty was evanescing as a serious consideration.

Background to Individual Differences While the idea of a musical faculty remained a prominent feature of the early to middle part of Myers’s career, it was its underlying conception of the individual—and its evolutionary implications for music—that continued to spark Myers’s interest, eventually developing into a progressive theory of individual differences. In fact, when gauged against more recent psychology, Myers’s work in this area looks surprisingly modern, despite the presence of expected postracist and sexist features of his time. Geoffrey M. White, for example, in his article “Ethnopsychology,” discusses issues that curiously echo some of Myers’s most basic psychological precepts concerning the individual and the self. Speaking of the emergence of the term “ethnopsychology” in the 1950s, White suggests, along with A. I. Hallowell, that it grew as a resistance to more generalized concepts of personhood. Eventually it became an intensive examination “of indigenous modes of constituted persons, selves and experience.” Where previously “pan-cultural constructs might include reference to concepts of ‘soul,’ ” rarely did they mention “reflexive elements of experience, of the ‘self.’ ”34

31. 32. 33. 34.

Wallace, The Musical Faculty, 14–15. Cone, “The Power of The Power of Sound,” xv. See Sully, Sensation and Intuition, 242. White, “Ethnopsychology,” 21.

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Individual differences, or differential psychology, is defined by the psychologist Colin Cooper as “the branch of psychology that considers how (and equally importantly why) people are psychologically very different from one another. It also considers how such individual differences may be measured by use of psychological tests and other techniques.”35 Myers, similarly, directs his theoretical underlay specifically toward the “self,” particularly, and obviously, in essays such as the “The Absurdity of any Mind–Body Relation.” In trying to define what is effectively a conscious and meaningful life, he suggests that this can only be achieved by a recognition of the manifold contribution of the self. It alone can “express itself in terms of striving, directing, and aiming, whereas conscious experience consists not only in such conative activities of the self, not only (a) in acts and processes of the self, but also (b) in modifications of the self—what we term affects—and (c) in presentations to the self—what we term sensations, percepts, and ideas, i.e., the cognitive contents of consciousness.”36 Even much earlier in Myers’s career, the same sentiments can be seen to be evolving. In “Naturalism and Idealism” (1901), which is largely a critique of James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899), Myers decries Ward’s ideas for suggesting that there can be a dichotomy between subject and object in our individual experience of life. On the contrary, although the universe may be seen from either perspective, as a starting point, both perspectives ultimately give rise to the self, or what he calls the “I”: The universe may be ever viewed from two distinct standpoints. I may start from myself—my subjective individual feeling of the Inside, with its attributes of activity, will, purpose, and so forth,—and I shall arrive ultimately at the teleological aspect of this, the “why,” only because subjectively I have no knowledge of the “how.” Or I may start from my not-self,—my objective universal feeling of the Outside, with its attributes of passivity, order, uniformity, and the like,—and I shall, with equal certainty, deduce the mechanical aspects of things,—the “how” only, because objectively I have no knowledge of the “why.” From either standpoint the world is viewed in language by an “I.” This “I” is the unity of experience, whereof subject and object are the duality.37

This insistence that the preeminent focus of psychology be on the individual is also found in groundwork definitions of modern ethnopsychology. For White, these definitions turn on our understanding of personality: “Concepts of personality inevitably refer to individual thought and behaviour, looking within the individual to find distillations of experience that underlie observable patterns of

35. Cooper, Individual Differences, ix. 36. Myers, “The Absurdity of any Mind–Body Relation,” 206. 37. Myers, “Naturalism and Idealism,” 476.

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belief and action. The notion of personality conjoins individual differences with inner, psychological processes presumed to underlie those differences.”38 In Psychological Anthropology (1979), Erika Bourguignon rather naively traces the significance of individual differences back only as far as Edward Sapir, to his “Why Cultural Anthropology Needs the Psychiatrist” (1938),39 and of course, even then, the orientation is psychiatric rather than psychological. This same limitation is found in Douglas Hollan’s historical recapitulation of person-centered ethnography, “Developments in Person-Centred Ethnography,” in which Sapir is presented as the first to consider the implications of individual differences for anthropology. Sapir’s comments are in themselves worthwhile, although they do not, it seems to me, represent a critical starting point, but rather a point of collation or codification. Sapir does, however, set out a model of anthropology with obvious resonances with Myers: “The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions”;40 and somewhat later, “What tends to be forgotten is that the functioning of such a system [of anthropology], if it can be said to have any function at all, is due to the specific functioning and interplays of the idea and action systems which have actually grown up in the minds of given individuals.”41 Linda Garro does something similar, not in relation to Sapir, but implicitly in relation to F. C. Bartlett (1886–1969), Myers and W. H. R. Rivers’s (a participant in the Torres Strait expedition, referred to later) protégé (and Myers’s posthumous critic). Referring to Bartlett’s Remembering: A Study of Experimental and Social Psychology (1932), she claims that Bartlett foreshadows “cognitive anthropological concerns with how cultural schemas (schemas which are generally shared in a particular setting) come to be constitutive of individual-level schemas.”42 This is to ignore Myers’s and Rivers’s contribution to Bartlett’s thinking,43 and also to

38. White, “Ethnopsychology,” 30–31. 39. Bourguignon, Psychological Anthropology, 18. 40. Sapir, “Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry,” 229–42, cited in Hollan, “Developments in Person-Centred Ethnography,” 50. 41. Sapir, “The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures,” 408–15, cited in Hollan, “Developments in Person-Centered Ethnography,” 50. 42. Garro, “The Remembered Past in a Culturally Meaningful Life,” 114. 43. See Kuklick, The Savage Within, 55. Kuklick describes Bartlett and his students as casting their work in Riversian terms, not dissimilar to those of Myers: “They argued that every ‘individual possessed in common with all other human beings’ a ‘group of instinctive tendencies’ that had ‘their unique arrangement in every person’ [Bartlett, ‘The Psychology of Culture Contact,’ 770]. Then, each individual was distinguished by ‘differences of temperament or constitution’ [Rivers, The Influence of

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delimit the reflexive influence that Myers’s work in acoustics and ethnomusicology could be said to have had on mainstream psychological discourse of his time. More recently, the advance of individual differences as a psychological tool has been situated in what is called “cultural interpretivism,” to name but one of many psychocultural schools. Clifford Geertz is among those cited as paradigmatic of this position. For Geertz, the place of the individual, and individual differences, is clearly a function of the Western intellectual consciousness. As John M. Ingham says of Geertz and his school, “Scholars who agree with Geertz cite ethnographic examples to show that local cultures make different assumptions about the person. They argue that the self is socially constructed and, therefore, different from one historical or cultural setting to another. And they assert that the notion of the autonomous self reflects western individualism.”44 Criticizing Geertz’s school, however, Ingham suggests that “Generalizations about crosscultural differences in personality are risky, however. They tend to gloss over individual differences and cultural complexities. North Americans, for example, are individualistic in some context but communal in others, and they vary widely with respect to autonomy, psychological integration, moral integrity, and emotional dynamics.”45 These points, particularly those of Ingham, are poignant in their comparison with Myers’s notion of psychical distance. Where Myers insists upon achieving balances in life, between self and world, subject and object, mind and body, domestic and foreign, and so on, Ingham describes these relationships in terms of dialogue. In describing his idea of the “self,” for example, he uses language that could have been taken from Myers himself: “The self is constructed and reconstructed to some extent in dialogic interaction.”46 “Dialogic interaction” is a good term to parallel with Myers, because it implies a form of progress in the perpetual definition of the self, and for Myers this process of definition is as much akin to the self as it is to ethnic music. For Myers the process of defining ethnic music is defining the self, because through ethnomusicology, the self and the world in which it lives is changed for the better.

Alcohol and other Drugs on Fatigue, 121]. Though persons of every quality of intellect and personality were found everywhere, the frequency distribution of individual types varied from population to population, and the character of each group was derived from the individuals comprising it.” In an interesting slant on Myers’s humanizing psychology, Bartlett says that Myers “put a social and ethnological stamp upon Cambridge psychology and this has perhaps done more than anything else to make Cambridge psychologists human as well as scientific” (Bartlett, “Frederic Charles Bartlett,” 41). 44. Ingham, Psychological Anthropology Reconsidered, 112. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 113.

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So rather than having us live in a world where establishing psychical distance between the familiar and unfamiliar, or the domestic and foreign, is merely an ideal, Myers attempts to provide us with a practicable way of achieving this. As we have seen—and as we shall see below in more detail—he does this principally by asserting the importance of individual differences across a range of disciplines. He also does this by engaging psychology in its own debate about itself, and forcing it to recognize the importance of music. In some ways, this makes Myers not simply a forgotten pioneer of psychology and ethnomusicology, but, as we shall learn, one of the first experimental music psychologists in Britain.

Myers’s Relation to the Psychology of Individual Differences The psychology of Myers’s youth occurred at a period of considerable transition, when psychology progressed from its beginnings in the philosophy of mind to the rise of “new experimentalism.” Hearnshaw writes that It was just over a century ago [1850s and 1860s] that the first stirrings began which led eventually to the separation of psychology from the parent stem of philosophy. To understand and to evaluate properly the work that psychologists are doing today one must understand the main outlines of the developments which have transformed a largely abstract philosophical study pursued by a small number of individuals into an independent, if rudimentary, science, with many practical applications and the beginnings of a professional organization.47

Rick Rylance largely accepts this interpretation, but situates the “fundamental reorientation of psychology’s method and outlook”48 at a slightly later date, in the 1880s and 1890s. Accordingly, Rylance cites the American psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture as indicative of the new breed of psychologists. As he says, Scripture’s The New Psychology (1897) is utterly damning of earlier “unscientific” methodologies and predicated on eradicating any trace of psychology’s unscientific past: Scripture severs psychology from its origins in the philosophy of mind, and pictures “the new psychology” as instead a product of sciences such as astronomy and physics . . . alongside German physiology, French cerebral anatomy, and the analysis of clinical data gathered across Europe . . . Disciplinary professionalism, new experimental techniques, dedicated laboratory facilities, and above all a “scientific” outlook, based upon detailed measurement, have, according to Scripture, released psychology’s potential from its “disappointing” history.49

47. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940, v. 48. Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880, 5. 49. Ibid., 6.

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Myers was no bystander in this debate, as his A Text-Book of Experimental Psychology (1909) attests. Writing of this in “The Relation of Experimental to General Psychology” in chapter 1, he refuses to accept hard-line experimentalism: Experimental psychology has sometimes been styled the “new” or “scientific” psychology. It has been spoken of as if it were quite distinct from, and independent of, the older or “general” psychology, in which experiment finds no place. Now these are manifest errors. For experiment in psychology is at least as old as Aristotle. And scientific work is possible (e.g. in astronomy, geology, and natural history) under conditions which preclude experiment. We must regard experimental psychology as but one mode of studying psychological problems, not all of which, however, can be approached from the side of experiment. Far from being independent, experimental psychology has arisen as a refinement, of general psychology. Familiarity with the latter is essential to success in the former.50

This more conservative stance belies a fundamental belief in the strength of the new experimentation, as shown in An Introduction to Experimental Psychology (1911): “It is only by experimenting with simple material that we can hope to progress towards the understanding of the complex conditions of everyday life.”51 More particularly, when writing of aesthetics, Myers considers that “Much of the modern work in the field of Aesthetics lies clearly within the scope of Experimental Psychology.”52 As an adjunct to this, Myers was particularly vociferous in his denunciation of the old-style psychology of Spencer, whose views on evolution remain unproven and theoretical. As Myers sees it, Spencer maintains that evolution consists “essentially in the addition of matter to matter, i.e., in increasing integration and diversity,”53 whereas “integration is not the primary aspect of evolution. What is primary is the ‘carving’ of new parts out of the old. The old may grow in the process; it may and does by accrescence add new material to itself. It also combines into larger units by union with others.”54 “Accrescence” is actually a good term to apply generally to Myers’s attitude toward progress in psychology, because he clearly sees himself, and psychology, in an evolutionary flow from the old to the new, and the general to the scientific. Indeed, it was this concept that was to motivate his own progression to human improvability and the psychology of individual differences. This is abundantly clear in Myers’s “Individual Differences in Listening to Music” (1922), in which he encapsulates his belief in “the importance of distance,” an idea drawn from the aesthetician and psychologist Edmund Bullough:

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Myers, A Text-Book of Experimental Psychology, 1. Myers, An Introduction to Experimental Psychology, 68. Ibid., 62. Myers, “Principles of Development,” 25. Ibid., 26.

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The listener must view the music . . . from a certain psychical “distance.” If that distance be excessive, as occurs in listening to exotic music or to other unfamiliar styles of music, the subject feels too remote to get, as it were, to grips with the art material. It is overdistanced. On the other hand, it is underdistanced, when he surrenders himself wholly to the influence in such a way that he is a more or less passive instrument, played upon by the music, in his sensations, images, emotions or impulses, solely in so far as they have immediately personal and “practical” import.55

It is precisely the idea of gauging distance—or identifying that perfect balance between experimenting subject and experimental object—that underlies not only Myers’s work, but many contemporary and modern debates about the position of psychology in relation to other disciplines, such as ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. As Myers rose to fame within the juncture of these disciplines, it is fitting to situate his work within the wider intellectual framework of his time, especially if we are to understand his view of “psychical distance” and one of its principal offshoots, the concept of individual differences. One difficulty, however, in fixing Myers’s notion of psychical distance as a hermeneutical lens is the sheer plurality of his methods and interests, or some might say his absence of theoretical unity. Crampton, writing in 1978, calls Myers’s work “atheoretical.”56 Hearnshaw, in 1962, describes it rather more circumspectly as “never over-theoretical,”57 and T. H. Pear in 1947 writes somewhat elliptically of Myers as never bowing “to any god of brass and glass.”58 As Geoff Bunn points out, even some of his obituaries are “thinly-veiled attacks.”59 “The very qualities which made him successful in many fields robbed him of the most complete and final personal success in any.”60 More recently, Graham Richards has tried to dispel criticism by positioning Myers as, initially, a semi-resistant—and then fully fledged—cultural adaptationist.61 But even this designation, as Richards implies,

55. Myers, “Individual Differences in Listening to Music,” 70–71. 56. Crampton, “The Cambridge School,” 2. 57. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, 174. 58. Pear, “Charles S. Myers,” 3. 59. Bunn, “ ‘A Flair for Organization,’ ” 10. 60. Bartlett, “Charles Samuel Myers 1873–1946,” 774. 61. Richards, “Getting a Result: the Expedition’s Psychological Research 1898–1913,” 148. Richards defines cultural adaptationism as a theory that seeks to undermine the myth of heightened sensory acuity in primitive peoples. It suggests that, where experimentation appears to illuminate disparities in the levels of acuity between primitive and nonprimitive peoples, these result from adaptation to environment, not innate differences (148–49). Myers consolidates his views on this matter in “On the Permanence of Racial Mental Differences,” 73–79. Myers concludes that “no fundamental difference in powers of sensory acuity, nor, indeed, in sensory discrimination, exists between primitive and civilised communities” (74).

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speaks only to the Myers of a certain period. As he says, after 1910, Myers, like many of his British contemporaries, almost completely ceased being interested in race issues.62 More up-to-date literature on Myers has tended to reverse detractions and commend his attention to individual differences as an anticipation of modern trends in interdisciplinary thinking. Alan Costall sees this quality in Myers as a lynchpin in psychology’s historical progression from its “pure” theoretical beginnings to a more practical and commercially “applied” framework.63 The same picture emerges implicitly in Sarah Bakewell’s brief article on the various movements of Myers’s material relating to the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, which he and the businessman Henry J. Welch cofounded in 1921.64 Myers, for his part, was not remotely affected by criticisms such as these, and rejoiced, rather, in his own diversity: “My tendency to supervise younger people’s research work rather than to engage in it myself arose doubtless from my wide interests in various subjects and in my fellowmen, my love of novelty, and my consequent difficulties in concentrating attention on any one small sphere of work.”65 Despite this, and certain well-documented commercial setbacks, Myers enjoyed enormous success within his profession. Indeed, far from curtailing his wide-ranging interests, he positively embraced the multidisciplinary zeitgeist. His interpretation of psychical distance is indicative of this quality, not simply in its reliance on the visual aesthetics of Bullough, but also in its overtly humane intention to give meaning to the unfamiliar. Myers clearly sees psychical distance, and psychology as a whole, as a means of translating difference into something fundamentally apprehendable to the individual, and much of his work is premised on just this rudimentary point: namely, that of achieving the right “distance,” or balance, between what he sees as naturally bifurcated philosophical entities such as subject and object, general and specific, mental and physical, and perhaps most important, between the individual and the society in which he lives. His ground-breaking Text-Book of Experimental Psychology (1909) is testimony to this mindset. Within it he confirms his belief that valid psychological generalizations cannot be achieved humanely without due consideration of individual differences: It is urged that a given individual varies at different times, and that individuals differ among themselves so greatly as to preclude the possibility of generalisation. But experimental psychology is not engaged merely with general problems, e.g. studying thresholds, determining the scope of attention, or fixing the limits of memory. It has also, as

62. 63. 64. 65.

Richards, “Getting a Result,” 149. Costall, “From the ‘Pure’ to the ‘Applied,’ ” passim 143–63. Bakewell, “Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library,” passim 197–200. Myers, “Charles Samuel Myers,” 230.

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we shall see later, to determine how such “properties” of the mind are affected in any given individual by different conditions, and how far and for what reason they are different in different individuals.66

For Myers, individual differences is at the very foundation of methodological “distance” or balance, because ultimately it roots experimental psychology in a purposefully humanizing aim. In later essays, for example, Myers refuses to define musical meaning solely within the context of what he calls sensory experience, and despite categorizing terms of musical appreciation he resists using any terminology that dehumanizes the individual within the experience of listening to music: “I propose to employ ‘musical meaning’ to the exclusion of any extreme possible uses of the term. I shall not apply it to sensory experience, common to and innate in all men, as the meaning of certain external vibrations in the air.”67 Even when music is enjoyed, where its meaning is manifestly unintelligible, Myers refuses to be judgmental: “as a Papuan once remarked to me when I asked him how he could appreciate a certain song, the music and words of which had been introduced to his island from another island, he understood nothing—‘It is not the words, but the music that counts.’ ”68 Again, for Myers, it is not the innate value of the response, but the individuality of the response itself that capacitates psychological data to retain its meaning when expressing terms of a more general nature. It is, in other words, through a consciousness and acceptance of individual differences that the psychologist can achieve proper distance from his subject, or form deductively reasonable generalizations about people as a group. This is evident throughout Myers’s writings. In “The Absurdity of any Mind–Body Relation” (1932), for example, Myers integrates individuality within the external world to such an extent that he claims there is no distinction between any living substance and the conscious mind of the individual: I . . . am attempting to show that conscious mind is living substance in our immediate personal experience, and that all substance, whether living or lifeless, merely becomes revealed to us as the interaction of (a) the highest “levels” of the directive activity of our own living substance (i.e., of our conscious or self-activity) with (b) the activities that lie in lower “levels” . . . or outside us.69

Similarly, he esteems the individual as more than the sum of his parts: the total “life” consists both of the “lives of its several parts [neurologically] and of the

66. 67. 68. 69.

Myers, A Text-Book, 10. Myers, “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation,” 78. Ibid., 79. Myers, “The Absurdity of any Mind–Body Relation,” 206.

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‘life’ of the unitary ‘individual,’ which is more than the sum of the life of its several parts.”70 When writing about music, Myers applies these principles almost universally, and, interestingly, it is this feature of Myers’s work, perhaps more than any other, that is discussed in recent research. In The Savage Within (1991), Henrika Kuklick describes Myers as unusually progressive precisely because of his attention to the individuality of his subjects. European psychologists of the time “were usually ignorant of the array of personal and cultural factors that affected test responses.”71 On the other hand, Myers’s work, particularly his musical experiments for the Torres Strait (to be discussed later), “permitted disaggregation of aptitudes and achievements, between individuals’ sensory capacities and the level to which they had developed their natural talents,”72 and therefore “demonstrated the unreliability of laboratory research conducted in ignorance of subjects’ social situations.”73 Kuklick, like Richards, situates Myers’s individualoriented progressivism in terms of an antidote to widespread racist psychological discourse. Richards draws a picture of Myers as, initially, a somewhat reluctant nonracist. Describing his experiments in pitch-discrimination in the Torres Strait, Richards claims that not only were his conclusions “so highly hedged that all the questions [about the supposed sensory superiority of primitive peoples] really remained open,”74 but “the kind of ‘primitive superiority’ which travellers’ lore predicted was most definitely not in evidence.”75 For Myers, even in the absence of positive data, his conclusions were effectively one of the first steps in overturning years of British psychological racism. His conclusions also situated the individual in a much higher theoretical position, alongside that of other psychologists of the time, both in England and Europe (and America as well). George Stocking indicates this when he speaks of Myers in the same breath as the “supra-individual psychologizing among French and German writers (Le Bon’s crowd psychology, Durkheim’s conscience collective, Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie),”76 as opposed to those even within his own set of British academic colleagues, like W. H. R. Rivers and William McDougall.

70. Ibid., 202. 71. Kuklick, The Savage Within, 143. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology, 50. 75. Ibid. 76. Stocking, After Tylor, 202. Where there are some genuine comparisons that could be made between Wundt and Myers, especially in the areas of mind–body relations, the conceptual elision with Durkheim is more tenuous (see, for example, Wertheimer, “Psychic Causality and Creative Synthesis,” 65). As Gustav Jahoda points out, for example, “for Durkeim the nature of individual psychological processes as

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The emergence of Myers as a nonracist, beginning in the context of musical research in the Torres Strait, is significant for two reasons. First, from a broadly historical point of view, it signals an important and fundamental shift in the British scientific attitude toward race. Second, and perhaps more important from a musicological standpoint, it enabled Myers to engage with the particular materials of his research in a much more meaningful way. Whereas Torres Strait psychologists like Rivers and McDougall apparently struggled to disengage from racist scientific discourse, Myers—however reluctantly, and perhaps slowly— drew strength, ultimately, from his belief in the importance of individual differences. And it is this same belief in individual differences in people that he applies increasingly to his work on non-Western (as it were, individually different) music, and eventually his research in acoustics. Earlier on in his career Myers does this by describing non-Western music in terms of the absence of Western features and characteristics. In 1904, for example, he writes that “While the later advances in choral singing in Europe required a more regular and a more frequent accent than was necessary in earlier stages of European culture, primitive music, unhampered by the demands of harmony and polyphony, has evolved complications of successions rather than of simultaneity,—complications of measure rather than of tone.”77 Not long afterward, however, he begins to assess the music, rather than judge it, and he does so with increasing regard for the inner terms of the music: Thus it comes about that many examples of primitive music are incomprehensible to us, just because they are not so readily assimilated as those which are more nearly related to our previous experiences. Our attention is continuously distracted, now by the strange features of rhythm, now by the extraordinary colouring of strange instruments, not by the unwonted progression and character of intervals. Consequently much familiarity is needed before we can regard such music from a standpoint that will allow of faithful description. We have first to disregard our well-trained feelings towards consonances and dissonances. We have next to banish to the margins of our field of consciousness certain aspects of music, which, were it our own music, would occupy the very focus of attention. Thus incomprehensibility will gradually give place to meaning, and dislike to some interesting emotion.78

From the standpoint of Myers’s views on individual differences, it would be wrong to assume that his views toward race kept pace with similar advances in

such is irrelevant to the study of social behaviour” (Psychology and Anthropology, 21). The link to Le Bon is even more questionable, if for no other reason than Le Bon’s clearly articulated psychological racism (see Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology, 25–27). 77. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” 406. 78. Myers, “The Ethnological Study of Music,” 249.

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his views on music. Whereas musically he was very forward-thinking, his views on race, though progressing, lagged behind considerably. Likewise his views on women. In fact his rather embarrassing article “On the Permanence of Racial Mental Differences” (1911) shows just how far his views on women lagged behind his progress toward antiracism. The article is, in fact, a frightening and uncomfortable mix of scientifically validated nonracism, and at the same time a sexism that borders upon extreme misogyny. While concluding that there is “no fundamental difference in powers of sensory acuity”79 between primitive and civilized people, he is also able to suggest that “there is not an instance of first-class musical genius, by which, of course, I mean originality in musical composition, among European women, despite centuries of opportunity.”80 This type of transference of racial to sexual prejudice begs the question as to how a belief in individual differences can embrace sexism so casually. Be that as it may, Myers’s work on music appears remarkably unaffected by it, and even critics as harsh as F. C. Bartlett thought it his best and most reasoned work.

79. Myers, “On the Permanence of Racial Mental Differences,” 74. 80. Ibid., 76. Graham Richards takes Myers to task for a comment made at the very end of the article: “[Myers] asserts that Negro–white differences may be reversed ‘if the environments to which they are respectively exposed be gradually, in the course of many hundreds of thousands of years, reversed’ (78, my italics). Probably this should have read ‘hundred or thousands,’ but even so an unexpected gulf suddenly opens up between us and Myers here regarding the time-scale in which he is operating, at the end of what has hitherto read as a perfectly sounds anti-racist statement” (Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology, 54) Interestingly, while Richards does pick up on the duplicity of Myers’s last comment, he does not draw attention to his patently unreconstructed sexism.

Chapter Twelve

The Psychological Writings and the Place of Evolution and Individual Differences Myers’s Psychological Writings Bartlett, with an air of palpable disappointment, writes that Myers’s scientific writing was largely completed by the time he was forty—roughly halfway through his career. He divides what he calls Myers’s “scientific” writings into three clear categories: (1) expository; (2) ethnological with an experimental bias; and (3) strictly experimental. Although he does not provide copious examples of each category, it is clear that he perceives certain works as falling within these three categories quite distinctly. A Text-Book of Experimental Psychology is an example of expository writing; the musicological and anthropological work from 1896 to 1913 is ethnological; and Myers’s work on the direction of sound falls into the strictly experimental category. Bartlett suggests that Myers did his best work early in his career and, generally speaking, in the realm of expository writing. He hails the Text-Book, for instance, but describes the ethnomusicological writings as “fugitive pieces, full of interest, full of promise, but never fully developed.”1 Myers’s experimental work is given similar treatment. It is “elegant” and “well controlled, and beautifully described,” yet almost certainly wrong in its theoretical interpretation.2 Of course, as useful as Bartlett’s categories are, they do not present Myers’s work without transparent prejudice, and neither do they take into account the multidisciplinary nature of Myers’s thinking. They also exclude the considerable arena of popular psychology, in which Myers clearly spoke with ease and accessibility, and confine the sizable body of ethnomusicological writings to an ethnological category without any reference to their historiographical

1. Bartlett, “Charles Samuel Myers 1873–1946,” 772. 2. Ibid., 773.

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or aesthetic import. In fact, although it is true that certain types of Myers’s writings more or less stopped around his middle age, he continued to develop and expand his ideas right up to the time of his death. So far from being effectively superannuated at forty, as Bartlett would have us believe, Myers’s work leavened over time into something of which Bartlett simply disapproved. The wholesale dismissal of Myers’s later writings attests to this, and it distorts the truly contributive nature of his output. Myers’s earliest publications, from 1896, fall generally into the area of anthropology, but no sooner had he begun work in this field than his interest was diverted to the publication of material associated with the Torres Strait expedition and other ethnomusicological research. His first published paper is “An Account of some Skulls Discovered at Brandon, Suffolk,” in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1896), and this was followed soon thereafter by articles and reviews of a more philosophical type in a wide range of professional journals. From 1902 he expanded into the area of ethnomusicology with “A Study of Papuan Hearing” in Archives of Otology and “On the Pitch of Galton Whistles” in the Journal of Physiology, and continued publishing in the areas of anthropometry, taste-names in primitive peoples, and visual and other sensory acuities. This early work was consolidated and contextualized in A Text-Book of Experimental Psychology (1909), and its practical and more popularly oriented An Introduction to Experimental Psychology (1911). From 1915 he began work on shell shock, in a series of articles for the Lancet,3 and in 1918 undertook his first collected set of popular essays with Present-Day Applications of Psychology. It is from this point onward that Myers began to evince a shift toward applied psychology. This is evident not simply in the orientation of his work toward industrial psychology, but also in his determination to explain to a wider popular readership the value of psychology as a tool for social improvement. Items of this kind appear back-to-back, as for instance “The Independence of Psychology” (1920) in Discovery, and “Industrial Overstrain and Unrest,” in Lectures on Industrial Administration (1920). No sooner had these appeared did he produce Mind and Work (1921), another set of popular-oriented essays applying psychology to the workplace. Myers continued along these lines more or less

3. Myers, “A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock: Being an Account of Three Cases of Loss of Memory, Vision, Smell and Taste,” 316–20; “Contributions to the Study of Shell Shock: Being an Account of Certain Cases Treated by Hypnosis,” 65–69; “Contributions to the Study of Shell Shock: Being an Account of Certain Disorders of Cutaneous Sensibility,” 608–13; “Contributions to the Study of Shell Shock: Being an Account of Certain Disorders of Speech,” 461–68; “A Final Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock: Being a Consideration of Unsettled Points needing Investigation,” 51–54.

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until the end of his life, concentrating on industrial psychology, aspects of vocational training and guidance, industrial accidents and fatigue, and at the same time underpinning these with popular and perhaps more philosophically oriented work. His collected essays are an indication of this ongoing concern, including Industrial Psychology in Great Britain (1925); Business Rationalization: Its Dangers and Advantages Considered from the Psychological and Social Standpoint (1932); Ten Years of Industrial Psychology (with H. J. Welch, 1932); A Psychologist’s Point of View (1933); In the Realm of Mind (1937); and last, Shell Shock in France (1940). Myers’s articles published in the last two decades of his life also reflect this trend of marrying popular, applied, psychology with more abstract and theoretical considerations. And indeed, a number of the collected essays include material published elsewhere, as in A Psychologist’s Point of View (1933), which contains seven out of twelve original essays, and In the Realm of Mind (1937), which is derived solely from previously printed work.

Evolution and Individual Differences in the Psychological Writings Even though, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Myers abandons a Spencerian model of racial difference in 1911, he retains a roughly evolutionary template when progressing to notions of individual differences, and, as will be shown in chapter 13, it is this synthesis that he brings to his study of nonWestern music. It is therefore crucial to understand the relationship between evolution and individual differences if we are to understand the relationship of these ideas to his writing on music. In “Instinct and Intelligence” (1910) Myers creates a sliding scale of evolution from consciousness to instinct and instinct to intelligence, and he begins by rejecting views that equate instinct with unconsciousness and fixity, and intelligence with consciousness and plasticity: It is universally admitted that intelligence and instinct are distinguished from each other by two principal characters. One of these consists in consciousness or unconsciousness of end, the other in plasticity or fixity of reaction. The common assumptions are (1) that in typically instinctive behaviour the organism is wholly unaware of the end thereby to be attained, and (2) that such behaviour is unalterable and from the very outset perfect.4

Myers argues that instinct involves, even if dimly, some element of consciousness, and that this consciousness derives from past rudimentary experience. When a chick pecks for the first time, for example, it has already acquired

4. Myers, “Instinct and Intelligence,” 210.

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“a vague awareness of the result of its first peck, before it has actually performed the action.”5 It has a consciousness that is “the embryonic representative of meaning.”6 It is his belief in the existence of this consciousness that causes him to debunk the idea that instinct is perfect from the outset. Myers suggests that if that were the case it would be more akin to “reflex,” like a moth flying toward a lamp, but even then, as he says, “Instincts are almost always modifiable and perfected by later experience.”7 As a result, as instincts contain within them some consciousness of the action to be achieved, they automatically contain intelligence as well, or what he calls “intelligence throughout instinct.”8 As the organism is complicated by mutually incompatible choices of outcome, instinct recedes and intelligence emerges. Accordingly, man, as an intelligent being, is incapable of conceiving at what point in personal human experience instinct becomes intelligence and intelligence instinct. From an evolutionary perspective, Myers situates this template within a modified Darwinian model. Although he sees the Darwinian view as attributing “psychic evolution to variations in the germ plasm which are preserved by natural selection,”9 he also sees it as mechanistic and aimless.10 And as such it requires some element of what Myers calls “finalism” to complement its fundamentally ateleological construction. This is supplied by balancing Darwinian mechanism with finalism, and effectively equating mechanism with instinct, and finalism with intelligence. By extension, the mechanistic instinct is objective, and the finalistic intelligence subjective: With the dawn of life, ends begin to form within individual living organisms. With the dawn of instinct and intelligence, awareness of these ends within individual experience develops . . . and ultimately, with increasing mental complexity, there is not merely this awareness of ends, but finally also distinct awareness that they are ends, and an increasing power to modify and frame fresh ends. This is the subjective, finalistic, intelligent factor which is inseparable from its objective mechanistic analogue, instinct, and develops it.11

5. Ibid., 211. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 212. 8. Ibid., 214. 9. Ibid., 216. 10. It seems likely that Myers’s notion of “germ plasm” and the mechanistic quality of Darwinian evolution derives from readings of August Weismann. Bowler describes Wiesmann as follows: “Unlike the later geneticists, Weismann shared Darwin’s interest in biogeography and the problem of speciation. More significant, though is his continued reliance on the link between evolution and growth. Weismann’s concept of the “germ plasm” . . . formalized the notion of hard heredity as it is now understood by modern Darwinians” (Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 115). See Weismann, Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems and The Germ Plasm. 11. Myers, “Instinct and Intelligence,” 218.

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Myers’s conception of evolution, based on the drive from mechanism to finalism, is, as we shall see, articulated throughout his writing on ethnomusicology, and supported by his experimental work in the psychological aspects of music. But it is also found in his middle-period writings on industrial psychology, and in later philosophical writing clearly informed by it. It is epitomized in his notion of the inseparability of mind and body in “The Absurdity of any Mind–Body Relation” (1932)—the mind acting as intelligence and subjective finality, and the body as instinct and objective mechanism—and is easily locatable in analogous binarisms in the more applied writing, such as “Industrial Psychology and Public Health” (1933). It even has some relevance to Myers’s rather particularized musings on the unconscious, in “Instinct and the Unconscious” (1919). Here he grants the unconscious an implicit intelligence in supposing that instincts emerge from the unconscious by germinating “in accord with Mendelian conceptions,” and from these the seeds of intelligence are born.12 In this respect the unconscious effectively becomes the instinct by analogy, and the conscious the intelligence. The unconscious is, if you will, the psychic body (the objective mechanism) operating upon the psychic mind (the subjective finalism).13 These teleological projections, or evolutionary binarisms, can be seen portrayed below in figure 12.1.

Teleological projection

Body

Mind

Objective

Subjective

Mechanism

Finalism

Instinct

Intelligence

Unconsciousness

Consciousness

Figure 12.1. Myers’s evolutionary binarisms.

12. Myers, “Instinct and the Unconscious,” 4. 13. It must be said that Myers was principally in disagreement with Freud. In “Freudian Psychology,” in Myers, A Psychologist’s Point of View, 116–17, Myers seems to backtrack from this idea, saying that Freud makes the mistake of defining unconsciousness in terms of consciousness. To all intents and purposes this negates the inseparability of the two.

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In “Industrial Psychology and Public Health” Myers elevates this evolutionary paradigm to yet another level, by using it to explore the relationship between industry and psychology, and what is ultimately the relationship of pure to applied psychology. He does this, rather ingeniously, by establishing an evolutionary pathway for psychology itself, and then situating it within the teleological projections already mentioned. In establishing a link between industry and psychology Myers first recognizes the professional status that the unified discipline of industrial psychology has acquired in recent years. He then examines the nature of its constituent parts, in an effort to define the broader characteristics that each part comprises: It must be realised at the outset that industrial psychology is neither concerned merely with industry nor merely with psychology. The word “industry” here means any occupation whatever; moreover, it relates not only to the occupation itself, but also to preparation for the occupation—covering, e.g., pre-vocational education, vocational guidance, vocational selection and vocational training. By vocational guidance is meant advising a person as to the most suitable occupation for him; by vocational selection is meant choosing the most suitable of applicants for a given vacancy in any occupation. And the word “psychology” includes relevant “physiology”—the higher embracing the lower, just as physiology includes relevant chemistry and physics; for living body and mind are so closely and inextricably related that their separate study in the intact organism is quite impossible.14

Myers’s analogy of the body and the mind—the higher embracing the lower—is equally applicable to both psychology and industry. In regard to psychology it can be portrayed in the following binarisms, shown in figure 12.2.

Teleological projection

Lower

Higher

Body

Mind

Physiology

Psychology

Chemistry/Physics

Physiology

Figure 12.2. Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for psychology.

14. Myers, “Industrial Psychology and Public Health,” 134–35.

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Teleological projection

Lower

Higher

Body

Mind

Occupation(s)

Industry

Vocational guidance(s)

Occupation(s)

Figure 12.3. Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for industry.

In terms of industry, Myers’s evolutionary projection works as shown in figure 12.3. These binarisms continue to play a part methodologically in Myers’s work, and in many respects typify his notions of the importance of distance, or balance. Later articles prosecute what could be called a “balanced” evolutionary template, in which man is ultimately enabled toward a higher goal by the humanity inherent within the complex of binarisms. This same applies as much to the individual as to the society in which the individual lives. This evolutionary model has ramifications for Myers’s notions of individual differences. These are to a large extent realized in the first two essays of A Psychologist’s Point of View, “Human Improvability” and “Principles of Development.” In “Human Improvability” Myers distinguishes between progress and improvement: Every step in evolution, i.e., every change making for increased differentiation of function, increased co-ordination of parts and increased integration of previously independent units, may be accepted as progress. But improvement implies something more—namely, “betterment.” Unlike progress, improvement is bereft of any scientific, objective criterion. We have to judge of improvement by subjective, ethical criteria.15

Myers establishes numerous binarisms within the confines of this definition, and indeed they are useful in assessing the means by which he contextualizes his views on human improvement. In the first instance, Myers suggests that there is an evolution from progress (which is objective and scientific), to improvement (which is subjective and ethical). In order to explain these in real terms, he

15. Myers, “Human Improvability,” 1–2.

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revisits his early anthropological work in the Torres Strait. He recapitulates his disregard of racial difference, and restates his basic belief in cultural adaptationism: Over thirty years ago I took part in an anthropological expedition to the islands of the Torres Strait, lying north of Australia between it and New Guinea, and to Sarawak in Borneo, where we made a study inter alia of the mental powers of the peoples. The differences we found between them and civilised peoples as regards intelligence did not impress us as being appreciable. In those days intelligence tests were not available. But even if they had been in vogue they would have proved useless, for the results of intelligence tests can only be compared when they have been applied to individuals who have been born into and have grown up in the same social environment. . . . Such results may make us at first sight, at least wonder whether savage peoples would not reach the mental levels of more civilised people if only they were born in the latter’s civilisation.16

Myers goes on to ask whether human improvability is innate, and whether there are races, such as “negros in the States, or South and East Africans,”17 which, as Galton suggests, have inherited characteristics that prevent their own individual and corporate improvability. To this question he answers a resounding “no,” though at the same time indicating that heredity must be considered on some, perhaps broader cultural, level. As he says: For my part, I cannot but believe that there are profound racial mental differences which have thus produced, and been maintained by, cultural differences, and that these racial differences will persist long after attempts have been made, as modern civilisation is not attempting, to bring all races under the same social environment. And I believe that these differences between white and coloured peoples constitute generally an improvement in the former, in so far (according to our original definition) as they relate to a higher culture and to a higher moral.18

What is important in these comments is not Myers’s belief in the existence of racial mental differences, which could easily be misconstrued as racist, but his conviction of difference as a function of the individual and the cultural environment in which the individual exists. There is no question of Myers being a racist. As Richards points out, in 1933 “His sympathies were clearly with the leftof-centre anti-racist camp.”19 This is explicit in some of the opening points of his 1911 paper: “That the relation between the organism and its environment (considered in its broadest sense) is the ultimate cause of variation, bodily and

16. 17. 18. 19.

Ibid., 5–7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 10 Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology, 196.

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mental . . . [and] [t]hat this being admitted, the possibility of the progressive development of all primitive peoples must be conceded, if only the environment can be appropriately changed.”20 In “Human Improvability” these ideas emerge again in his summary, when he proffers the following conclusions: (a) That in many respects we are improving. (b) That in many respects, perhaps in all respects within a particular race or people, these improvements do not arise broadly and directly from the fact that most members of that race or people are innately improving, but rather from the fact that the social heritage, the civilisation into which they are born is improving. (c) That the causes of improvement in the social heritage are ultimately due to improvements in a few “leading” individuals, for which their physical environment is, in part, responsible.21

In relation to previously constructed evolutionary binarisms—which express Myers’s notion of the importance of distance, or balance—human improvability can then be construed as shown in figure 12.4.

Human improvability

Basic evolutionary model

Teleological projection

Body

Mind

Objective

Subjective

Mechanism

Finalism

Instinct

Intelligence

Unconsciousness

Consciousness

Progress

Improvement

Science

Ethics

Genetics (nature)

Environment (nurture)

Figure 12.4. Myers’s evolutionary binarisms, for human improvability.

20. Myers, “On the Permanence of Racial Mental Differences,” 73. 21. Myers, “Human Improvability,” 16.

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For Myers it is clear not only that improvement in environment provides general human improvement, but also that improvement in environment is a direct function of natural individual improvement. His comment to the effect that “leading” individuals—and their culture—are aided by environmental improvement points to this implicitly. But even in unexceptional individuals the force of improvement is great where society has provided stimulus that leads to greater cultural awareness. Writing of the advent of mass production, for instance, Myers concludes that some of you will insist, that mass production and mass education destroy individuality and reduce us all to a common standard of uniform inferiority. . . . So it is, I hold, with the mass production of music by gramophone records or by wireless. The concert halls have not thereby suffered: that is generally admitted. . . . Not long ago I heard a young barman at a small remote country inn singing an air from one of Saint-Saëns’s operas. And when I asked him how he had come to learn it, he told me that he possessed a gramophone record of it. So it is too, I believe, with the cinema films; they offer an inducement to those of the working classes who are endowed with the best taste to exchange mechanised for living artistic productions and to visit good plays at the theatre.22

For Myers, the individual is the principal element in the formation of culture, and the idea of individual differences lies at the root of his conception of it. It is the individual that gives society meaning, and the individual that promises improvability. Ultimately, it is in the individual that the seeds of improvement emerge from a more mechanistic type of progress, and it is, eventually, psychology that reveals this process toward a finalistic ethical end. Of course, psychology also reveals and explores the multiplicity of social factors that give rise to improvement, such as industry, science, and art, and there can be no doubt that from the standpoint of art, it is principally ethnomusicology that provides Myers, and Myers’s own society, with improvement. For Myers, a connection to music and the arts is manifest at his highest levels of intellectual construction, and it is because of this that his writings in the psychology of music must now be contextualized.

Myers’s Psychological Writings on Music Myers’s psychological writings on music span the period 1902 to 1933 and can be divided into two broad categories: (1) experimental work on acoustics, hearing, sound, or music, including “On the Pitch of Galton Whistles” (1902); “On the

22. Ibid., 11–12.

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Perception of the Direction of Sound” (with H. A. Wilson, 1908); “The Influence of Binaural Phase-Differences on the Localisation of Sounds” (1908); and “The Influence of Timbre and Loudness on the Localisation of Sounds” (1914); and (2) experimental work involving hearing, sound, or music, and colour, including Myers’s work on synesthesia, comprising “A Case of Synaesthesia” (1911) and “Two cases of Synaesthesia” (1914), “A Study of Individual Differences in Attitude Towards Tones” (with C. W. Valentine, 1914), and “Individual Differences in Listening to Music” (1922), along with related articles exploring color theory, such as “Some Observations on the Development of the Colour Sense” (1908).

(1) Experimental Work on Acoustics, Hearing, Sound, or Music Myers’s early experiments in sound and hearing outside of an anthropological context begin with the brief “On the Pitch of Galton Whistles,” which explores the various types of acoustical whistle, including the Hawksley version and the Edelmann–Galton type. This rather preliminary set of experiments is designed “to determine the pitch of the tones emitted at different lengths, and the changes in pitch produced by changes in the force of the air-blast employed.”23 It contains little theoretical import, and its significance lies in its relation to further work in which it is contextualized, as in the chapter on hearing in the 1903 volume of Reports of the Torres Strait expedition. Later articles, such as “On the Perception of the Direction of Sound” (1908) and “The Influence of Binaural Phase Differences on the Localisation of Sounds” (1908), are much broader in their experimental and theoretical vision. They are also significant in evincing parallels with some of Myers’s own developing thinking on evolution and individual differences. They were designed to determine whether differences of phase between vibrations reaching the ears have any influence upon the apparent direction of sound.24 An apparatus was created with two tubes, each tube connected to an ear. The open end of each tube was attached to either end of a single hollow movable rod. This rod provided an opening to admit sound and measure its location in relation to the listener. A tuning fork or other sound-generating item was placed centrally in front of the listener, for example, and the position of the rod moved to identify changes in hearing difficulty. The outcome of the experiment, which confirms Rayleigh’s views,25 indicates that binaural phases differences “are describable

23. Myers, “On the Pitch of Galton-Whistles,” 418. 24. Myers and Wilson, “On the Perception of the Direction of Sound,” 260–67; Wilson and Myers, “The Influence of Binaural Phase Differences,” 364. 25. Myers’s work on binaural phase differences is, as mentioned previously, clearly an extension of some of the research being carried out by Rayleigh at the same time (Wilson and Myers, “The Influence of Binaural Phase Differences,” 363).

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in terms of binaural intensity differences.”26 Moreover, where sounds of almost identical pitch are placed in front of each ear “beats are heard in that ear which receives the stronger tone stimulus,”27 and “the sound is localised in that ear in which the phase is more advanced.”28 Put simply, the quality of aural perception (in normally functioning sensory acuity) is dependent upon a matrix of three things: (1) the quality of the sound; (2) the quality of the mechanism in which the sound is received; and (3) its proximity to the source of sound. Intensity is the measure given to individual variations in response to identical stimuli, and it is this measurement that Myers refers to as “individual differences in the “subjective field” of hearing.”29 This framework is significant not only in providing a system that measures individual differences, but also in the subjectivity it ascribes to the act of hearing. Hearing, in other words, might be at a more advanced stage of perception, in which sound stimulates the ear to perceive and the brain advances the perception to a state of hearing. One could say, therefore, that if hearing is subjective, perception is objective, and consequently perception is mechanistic, whereas hearing is finalistic. By extension one can situate hearing as an evolutionary binarism, as is shown in figure 12.5.

(2) Experimental Work Involving Hearing, Sound, Music, and Colour Although in these articles Myers premised his work upon exploring the interrelationships of individual differences within a universal human biology, he was manifestly not concerned with situating scientific proofs within an aesthetic framework. This is, however, precisely what is at root in his work on music and color: in his two articles on synesthesia; his and C. W. Valentine’s “A Study of the Individual Differences in Attitude Towards Tone” (1914); and his later “Individual Differences in Listening to Music” (1922). Myers’s interest in vision goes back to his Torres Strait material, when he published “The Visual Acuity of the Natives of Sarawak” in the Journal of Physiology (1902), and later “Some Observations on the Development of the Colour Sense” in the British Journal of Psychology (1908). His earliest articles to encompass music and color include “A Case of Synaesthesia” (1911) and “Two Cases of Synaesthesia” (1914), both for the British Journal of Psychology. Synesthesia, according to Cytowic, is “an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense.”30 Thus a sound may catalyze a taste or color. Dann

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., 384. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 370 Cytowic, Synesthesia, cited in Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen, 5.

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Hearing

Human improvability

Basic evolutionary model

Teleological projection Body

Mind

Objective

Subjective

Mechanism

Finalism

Instinct

Intelligence

Unconsciousness

Consciousness

Progress

Improvement

Science

Ethics

Genetics (nature)

Environment (nurture)

Perception

Hearing

Figure 12.5. Myers’s evolutionary binarism, for hearing.

writes that there are seven major criteria for synesthesia. Roughly speaking they are (1) it is involuntary and unsuppressible; (2) images are perceived as projected externally, not from within the body; (3) the percepts are stable over an individual’s lifetime, and they remain a particular hue of color or geometry, or in the case of gustatory percepts, salty or sweet; (4) percepts are memorable; (5) synesthesia is emotion, particularly pleasure or displeasure; (6) it is nonlinguistic; and (7) it occurs in people with normal, uninjured, nondiseased brains.31 For Myers—as for many others—synesthesia is significant because it represents an evolutionary throwback, a living fossil of primitive life, in which the senses were effectively undifferentiated and unindividuated. And so the progression from this stage in development, where sensory acuities were mixed and crossreferential, to a modern stage, can be gauged scientifically. These sentiments are not unusual for their time, and in fact Myers was following in a tradition within psychology that goes back to the middle part of the nineteenth century, if not

31. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen, 5–8.

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earlier. In Problems of Life and Mind (1879) George Henry Lewes describes what was called chromaesthesia as double sensations, and in Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) Francis Galton explores similarities between eideticism (the vivid recall of visual memory) and synesthesia. Color hearing, according to Dann, entered English-language medical literature in 1881, when the London Medical Record published a brief report replacing older terminology (chromesthésie, pseudochromesthésie, and hyperchromatopsie) with “color hearing,” but it was not until 1892 in Jules Millet’s thesis on “audition colorée” “that the term synesthesia entered the scientific vernacular.”32 Continental psychologists also pursued research in this vein. Fechner deals with sound–color relationships in Vorschule der Aesthetik (1876) and Bleuler and Lehmann in Zwangsmässige Lichtempfindungen durch Schall und verwandte Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiete der andern Sinnesempfindungen (1881). By the time of Myers’s articles on synesthesia, the topic was of widespread international interest, as shown in the bibliographies in Otto Ortmann’s article “Theories of Synaesthesia in the Light of a Case of Color-Hearing”33 or in Adrian Bernard Klein’s Coloured Light: An Art Medium,34 to mention but a few. Myers’s erudition on the topic is equally international, if not decidedly French in orientation, as shown in the cross-references of “A Case of Synaesthesia” (1911).35 Myers’s first article on synesthesia involves playing various single and paired tones to one person (A). Different types of sound mechanisms are used, such as tuning forks, a tone variator, a Tonmesser, whistle, and a range of orchestral instruments, and these are varied in their range, sequence, volume, and duration, among other things. Reponses are gauged and recorded, particularly for their linguistic content. When describing a tuning fork at aⴖ b, A concludes that this sound “Gives me the idea of a bell. It is of a light-blue colour. I get the idea of a fairy, then of a fairy bell. I have no visual image. It is a pleasant sound.”36 For eⵯ b he complains that “This is not so pleasant. It suggests a high note of the

32. Ibid., 21. 33. Ortmann, “Theories of Synesthesia in the Light of a Case of Color-Hearing,” 159–211. 34. Klein, Coloured Light. 35. Myers, “A Case of Synaesthesia,” passim 228–38. Myers cites Henri Laures, Les Synesthésies (Paris, 1908); R. Lach, “Ueber einen interessaaten Spezialfall von Audition Colorée,” Sammelbande der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 4 (1902); Théodore Flournoy, Des Phénomènes de Synopsie (Paris, 1893); Alfred Binet, “La Problème de l’Audition Colorée,” Revue des Deux Mondes 113 (1894); P. Sokolov, “L’Individuation Colorée,” Revue Philosophique 51 (1910); and W. O. Krohn, “PseudoChromaesthesia, or the Association of Colors with Words, Letters, and Sounds,” American Journal of Psychology 5 (1892). 36. Myers, “A Case of Synaesthesia,” 228.

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fiddle. It is whiter,—a silvery grey. It is too thin. I have no image of colour.”37 For Myers there are two points of interest in this experiment. First, A’s synesthesia is limited to color, which is very rare, as “colour synaesthesiae more usually occur in connexion with vowels, words, person, days of the week, months of the year, hours of the day, or languages.”38 Second, A does not perceive any visual imagery in combination with his experience of color. These points are extremely important, precisely because they represent a departure from the synesthesic norm. Indeed, the absence of image (abstraction) leads Myers to suggest that this type of synesthesia represents an even deeper, and more primitive, link to the mind than more common (concrete) types: In many cases of synaesthesia the imagery is certainly most vivid. . . . But psychology has passed beyond the stage when imagery was considered an essential element in conceptual experience. No one now questions the occurrence and the importance of imageless thought nor, among some individuals, the even complete absence of sensory imagery. We are coming to regard imagery no longer as the master, but as the servant, the bearer, of thought or meaning,—essential no doubt for mental development and persistent concrete types of mind, but gradually becoming discarded as experience is centred more and more in the abstract. . . . The physiological and psychological bases for this sympathy are quite unknown to us; but, inasmuch as synaesthesiae seem to be commoner among children than among adults, and to arise generally (though, it appears, by no means invariably) during childhood their origin may perhaps be ascribed to the persistence of a primitive stage in differentiation and elaboration of sensations and in the development of their functional inter-relation.39

What is significant here is not only the fact that Myers describes synaesthesia broadly as an atavistic occurrence, but that synesthesia contains an evolutionary range, in this case from the abstract to the concrete, or from the less differentiated to the more differentiated. Also, in his remark equating children and synesthesia, Myers implies a not-uncommon belief that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (individual evolution recapitulates species evolution). As such, the abstract provides more meaningful information of an earlier state of being—it is the master or vox historiae, whereas the concrete is merely its servant. Hence, because Myers equates synesthesia metaphorically with childhood, because of their undifferentiated primitiveness, he does not see it as static. Instead, he sees it very clearly as evolving along the lines of his basic evolutionary template, and as we shall see later, it is this same idea that lies at the very core of Myers’s ethnomusicological work. So even within the confines of something primitive, such as synesthesia, there is evolution, as shown in figure 12.6.

37. Myers, “A Case of Synaesthesia,” 229. 38. Ibid., 233. 39. Ibid., 235–36.

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Non-image (A)

Image

Abstract

Concrete

Figure 12.6. Evolution of differentiation in synesthesia.

Myers’s later article, “Two Cases of Synaesthesia” (1914), is in fact much briefer than the 1911 article, and it lacks any theoretical conclusions. But what it loses in size it gains in stature, because it is principally through this article that Scriabin was identified formally as a synesthesic. That having been said, Dann denounces Scriabin, convincingly, as a fraud, and suggests that Myers simply got it wrong: There is actually no evidence that Scriabin was a synaesthete, and considerable evidence to the contrary. Scriabin’s equivalences of color and tones rather too nearly follow a circle of fifths, that is, his “colors” proceed in intervals of a fifth (rather than stepwise diatonically) up the scale as they increase in wave length. Thus, red ⫽ C, orange ⫽ G, yellows ⫽ D, green ⫽ A, blue ⫽ E, indigo ⫽ B, and violet ⫽ F. No true chromaesthete has such a systematic arrangement of color–tone equivalences.40

What is important in both these articles is not Myers’s belief in a primitive unity of the senses—Hornbostel clearly maintained this view, for example, as did a large number of psychologists of his time41—or indeed that he held the idea implicitly that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. What separates Myers out from many others is his belief that although synesthesia does not evolve within the individual, it does evolve within the species, as his evidence suggests. It is ontogenically static, but phylogenically active. Myers’s later writings incorporating cross-sensory work only partially contextualize his work on synesthesia. Their principal role is to categorize responses to tonal stimuli and music. The first article of this type is “A Study of Individual Differences in Attitude Towards Tones” (1914). For the purposes of the article,

40. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen, 71. Dann’s book is excellent for situating synesthesia in its historical context. For more information on the psychology of synesthesia and further bibliographical reference points, see Cytowic, Synesthesia. See also the earlier, though still important, works of Lawrence E. Marks, including The Unity of the Senses; “On Colored-Hearing Synesthesia,” 313; and “Synaesthesia,” 28–40. (In fact, Marks gets Scriabin’s synesthesia wrong, though he may not have been aware of Myers’s experiments. See “On Colored-Hearing Synesthesia,” 313.) 41. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen, passim 77–97.

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Myers solicited the help of C. W. Valentine, whose work was principally in the area of experimental psychology and aesthetics. The 1914 article is predicated on describing “the individual mental differences underlying man’s attitude towards music.”42 Valentine’s aesthetics fall nicely within this design, especially insofar as he interests himself in the “ordinary everyday working of the mind,”43 as he says in his later An Introduction to The Experimental Psychology of Beauty (1913). Valentine’s model, at least in its relation to Myers, is based to some extent on the writings of Edmund Bullough, and it is more precisely in relation to Bullough that Myers establishes his notion of individual differences in tones, and music. It is from Bullough, more specifically, that Myers derived his psychological template for “the importance of distance,” or the idea of “psychical distance.” Bullough had been a contemporary of Myers at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and published, as elsewhere, a number of writings in the British Journal of Psychology. His first articles for the journal appear in 1908, with “The ‘Perceptive Problem’ in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Single Colours,” which follows on conceptually soon after Wilson and Myers’s “The Influence of Binaural Phase Differences on the Localisation of Sounds.” To some extent, Bullough’s article offers an aesthetic resolution to the more pointedly scientific and aesthetically uncontextualized findings of Myers and Wilson in “On the Perception of the Direction of Sound” (1908). In any event, the significance of Bullough’s early article, particularly in relation to Myers, lies in his development of “perceptive types” of aesthetic evaluation, which Myers then appropriates in his work on individual difference in tones and music. Bullough arrives at four different categories, with increasing quality of appreciation: (1) the objective: “It is a theoretical more than a practical attitude and shows its abstractness in the absence of personal sympathy with the thing it appreciates”;44 (2) the purely physiological type, which remains at this level and does not evolve to any higher appreciation: “To subjects of this pure ‘physiological’ type colours are, in fact, merely ‘agreeable,’ but not ‘beautiful,’ ”;45 (3) the associative, which associates colors with real objects in the world. It is more inherently subjective and personal than the previous categories; and last (4) the character-type, which tends to treat colors as living objects, perhaps even emotionally anthropomorphized entities. It represents the apex of aesthetic perception. Bullough describes it thus: “This perfect unification and centralisation is to be found in the character type. The very fact that the temperament or characters,

42. Myers and Valentine, “A Study of the Individual Differences,” 69. 43. Valentine, An Introduction to The Experimental Psychology of Beauty, 10. Valentine also summarizes his work with Myers, see 33–34. 44. Bullough, “The ‘Perceptive Problem,’ ” 462. 45. Ibid., 461.

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as the interpretation of originally purely subjective affections, is exteriorised and objectivated in the colour, and is thus, together with all its original emotional efficacy, severed from its connexion with the individual, represents the case of the most complete fusion of character and colour, together with the maximum of emotional potency.”46 The second aspect of Bullough’s aesthetics that Myers drew upon derives from his article “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle” (1912). “Psychical distance” is something that distances us from the pain of an original experience, like fog at sea: “The working of Distance is, accordingly, not simple, but highly complex. It has a negative, inhibitory aspect—the cutting-out of the practical sides of things and of our practical attitude to them—and a positive side—the elaboration of the experience on the new basis created by the inhibitory action of Distance.”47 What is the most desirable, therefore, “is the utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance,”48 what he calls the antinomy of distance, and its presupposition, the variability of distance. Bullough situates these ideas in a variety of contexts, but intriguingly he groups music and architecture together: Music and architecture have a curious position. These two most abstract of all arts show a remarkable fluctuation in their Distances. Certain kinds of music, especially “pure” music, or “classical” or “heavy” music, appear for many people over-distanced; light, “catchy” tunes, on the contrary, easily reach that degree of decreasing Distance below which they cease to be Art and become a pure amusement. In spite of its strange abstractness which to many philosophers has made it comparable to architecture and mathematics, music possesses a sensuous, frequently sensual, character: the undoubted physiological and muscular stimulus of its melodies and harmonies, not less than its rhythmic aspects, would seem to account for the occasional disappearance of Distance. To this might be added its strong tendency, especially in unmusical people, to stimulate trains of thought quite disconnected with itself, following channels of subjective inclinations,—day-dreams of a more or less directly personal character.49

The attraction of these templates for Myers goes possibly beyond the graduated taxonomies it represents. In a later article, “The Relation of Aesthetics to Psychology” (1919), Bullough writes of the rise of “sociological aesthetics,” from the period of the 1890s, in which the aesthetic became socially contextualized. This is significant not simply because of the progression from the individual to the sociological, but also because its rise is supposedly corroborated by anthropological evidence: “Art became a social expression, the reflexion of an age, the produce of a society. This view appeared to derive strong support from

46. 47. 48. 49.

Ibid. Bullough, “ ‘Psychical Distance,’ ” 89. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 98.

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anthropological research which seemed to find convincing proof of it in the Art of primitive and pre-historic peoples.”50 Although Bullough himself does not necessarily concur with this view, he suggests that psychology does have a place in identifying what he calls “the whole inner history of that branch of human civilisation which we call Art,”51 or what he later calls “the morphology of the aesthetic consciousness.”52 To some extent, this idea—the morphology of the aesthetic consciousness—is akin to Myers’s work on individual differences, and very possibly his ethnomusicology as well. In “A Study of the Individual Differences in Attitude Towards Tones” (1914), Myers makes clear from the outset his intention to use Bullough, with minor modifications: Of these terms [which follow] the three last have been already employed by Bullough in his similar experiments with colours, and here used in a sense similar to that in which they were employed by him. That is to say, the objective aspect of sound consists in the relation of the sound to the subject’s standard of purity, pitch, etc., which a satisfactory sound should attain; the character aspect arises from the subject’s tendency to personify tones, i.e. to endow them with human attributes and to regard them as distinct living entities; the associative aspect yields the various ideas (with or without concrete or verbal imagery) which a given sound may suggest. But in this paper the connotation of Bullough’s objective aspect has been extended to include any attitude which induces a passive regard of the sound as having meaning or use as an independent object. Moreover, Bullough’s remaining aspect, the physiological aspect, has been here extended to include not merely the sensory effects and the changes in feeling (emotion, mood or feeling attitude2) [2 Equivalent to the German Bewusstseinslage] but also the experiences of self-activity which the sounds may produce in the subject; in consequence, the word “intra-subjective” will be substituted for this aspect and Bullough’s term “physiological” will be limited to the first three of its five sub-aspects.53

Myers’s adaptation of Bullough not only incorporates a change of the physiological aspect to that of the “intra-subjective,” it also changes the graduated order in which Bullough places them. So where, for example, Bullough progresses from objective, physiological, and associative to character, Myers begins with the intrasubjective, and then moves to the objective, character, and associative. In other words, where Bullough inveighs his taxonomy with a teleological projection toward character, Myers does not, and reorders the categories to fit within his own, perhaps ontological, projection. This is evident in his explanations of each category as much as it is in his positioning of synesthesia within

50. 51. 52. 53.

Bullough, “The Relation of Aesthetics to Psychology,” 45. Ibid., 49. Ibid. Myers and Valentine, “A Study of the Individual Differences,” 72.

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the associative category. Under the associative aspect Myers proffers four types, including suggestions of an instrument (gong, organ, etc.), real music, surroundings in which the instrument or music sound, or symbolic suggestions (veil, mist prism, etc.). These, to Myers, represent the most fully integrated, and at the same time primitive or undifferentiated of all types of attitudes toward tones. Intriguingly, Myers also mentions that within the associative synesthesic type there is a tendency for associations to awaken memories of childhood, again situating synesthesia at an ontological beginning, as opposed to Bullough’s teleological projection of aesthetic advancement. Myers also concludes that the associative aspect, of which synesthesia is a part, “occurs most frequently among less musical subjects,”54 suggesting that powers of aesthetic discrimination advance at the expense of the primordial undifferentiation that typifies synesthesic responses. In other words, synesthesia is such an advanced form of aesthetic consciousness that it is an almost primitive reflex, not an aesthetic judgment. This is made clearer when Myers notes that “Preference judgments reduce the frequency of the associative aspect and yield a much higher frequency of the objective aspect and intra-subjective aspect.”55 This is significant because it effectively polarizes the position of synesthesia with the earliest forms of aesthetic consciousness. So where Myers places synesthesia at the climax of aesthetic consciousness in the associative aspect, at the same time, he suggests that aesthetic judgment is polarized by it. Synesthesia is both a living fossil of a primitive undifferentiated capability and the most extreme form of heightened and advanced aesthetic consciousness. In his later article on individual differences, which tests music rather than tones, this same feature emerges. Myers postulates that there is a correlation between an appreciation of the complexity of modern art, and the primitive experience of synesthesic responses to stimuli: It seems probable that the experience of beauty is rooted in man’s remote past when it could be evoked by such simple material as one or two tones or splashes of colour, i.e. by the most primitive forms conceivable of art material, just as to-day it is evoked by more complex forms. As Bullough well remarks, the more abstract material evokes an aesthetic experience in miniature.56

For Myers it is precisely equivalence in the level of abstraction in primitive and modern art that heightens the aesthetic experience, and it is this that leads to the preeminent position of the associative type. Unlike Stout, however, who sees the concreteness of mental associative images diminish as man progresses from

54. Ibid., 110. 55. Ibid. 56. Myers, “Individual Differences in Listening to Music,” 56.

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savage to civilized, Myers sees this concreteness undiminished to this day in the form of synesthesia. In fact, it is essential in the appreciation of modern art: [Stout says] “The cataract or the whirlpool appears a living thing to the poet in his poetic moods: for in these moods he ignores the fact that the water is behaving in accordance with certain abstract laws under certain given conditions. This fact is not ignored by the savage: it has never been realised by him. Hence what may be called a transient play of the imagination in the civilised mind is the permanent and serious attitude of the savage mind.” If Stout had at his own disposal a more strongly developed character aspect, he would realise that it is the persistence of this so-called mark of the savage that leads to the aesthetic personalization of colours, tones and music.57

For Myers, the synesthesic response is perhaps even more than a living fossil, as its type of reflex is an essential component of modern aesthetic response. So again, Myers views the synesthesic as a bridge to the past, but at the same time a living entity with powers of aesthetic determination. And it is an acknowledgment of the primitive within modern man and its continued exertion within our aesthetic being that allows individuality to be best gauged aesthetically in relation to music. For it is the extent to which this primitive force remains undisturbed—and indeed is developed—that enables modern man to achieve greater heights of aesthetic appreciation. This backward projection toward the primitive nature of man, and simultaneous forward projection toward the developed ascent of man—this polarity—is summarized in the very structure of Myers’s article. Myers begins with issues of the associative type, and works through his article to the intrasubjective, moving backward in aesthetic development, but forward in human evolution. When he reaches the section “The Aesthetic Value of Meaning in Music,” Myers concludes that the best aesthetic appreciation of music results from a complete absorption into the organism of music, as if our consciousness acts as an impediment to the associative achievements of our inner primordial self. In other words, to return to nature as part of the music—undifferentiated and primitive—that is the way to achieve a sense of beauty: “The thing of beauty must be regarded not as a satisfying piece of man-made mechanism, but as a living organic whole, without direct reference to our own value and use of it.”58 It is this idea that then leads to Myers’s interpretation of Bullough’s notion of the “importance of distance,” because in it Myers finds an aesthetic analogue to his latticework of teleological binarisms. Effectively one must be immersed within the art and at the same time distant from it in order to achieve a sense of beauty, and it is only in the individual experience that this can happen. It is only in the individual response that it can gauged and in the individual judgment that it can

57. Myers, “Individual Differences in Listening to Music,” 64. 58. Ibid., 69.

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be assessed. One must achieve, as an individual, a “psychical” distance—that delicate balancing of subject and object—in an artistic experience in order to progress to a heightened and advanced stage of aesthetic awareness. So to go backward into the total immersion of the primitive almost synesthesic experience is to go forward into the modern, into the realm of developed man. Myers goes even further than this—into the realm of the mystical. To return to the primitive is ultimately to gain spiritual ingress. The importance of distance leads to the importance of what Myers calls “the mystic feeling.” Here Myers postulates three types of human activity: play, fantasy, and mysticism. Play is the “most primitive” and “consists in giving a fictitious value to our motor behaviour.” Fantasy is essentially the mind at play, and mysticism is the loss of “the normal awareness of our own individuality and of its relation to our surroundings.”59 This is an intriguing prospect, because Myers’s entire oeuvre is predicated on the significance of the individual and individual differences. But here he suggests we go beyond this in order to experience something even greater than the individual—the mystical world, and the union of ourselves as individuals with this world of the abandoned self. We are individuals only in the realm of humanity. Beyond this we become part of the organic whole. Myers is wary of allowing us to surrender ourselves through music to an experience that abnegates our individuality, and, ultimately, he is cautious. Ultimately, the individual must find the right psychical—and the right spiritual—distance: Nowhere in art or nature as in music do we more keenly feel this “uplifting of the soul” as we term it, or as we may come to term it, this “uplifting of the unconscious.” But the mystical or ecstatic feeling must not be allowed to go too far; otherwise we are carried away beyond our ability to experience beauty. On the other hand, unless we do, in however small degree, surrender our practical every-day attitude that defines the relation of ourselves to our environment, unless we feel ourselves in that mysterious poetical atmosphere, I do not believe that beauty can be experienced, whether in music, painting, sculpture, architecture or dancing, whether in imagination, in a mathematical problem, or in a purely sensory or emotional experience.60

59. Ibid, 71. 60. Ibid.

Chapter Thirteen

Myers’s Ethnomusicological Writings As suggested earlier, Myers’s concentration on intervallic content in his ethnomusicological findings is a particularly noticeable feature of his work, because it is in the rhythmic content of the music that he suggests one finds a heightened complexity parallel to that of the harmonic (and ultimately polyphonic) content of European music. Nevertheless, it is from harmonic analysis that Myers is able to extrapolate theoretical underpinnings that explain the evolution of primitive music. The emphasis on intervallic analysis is also important in light of Myers’s theoretical and methodological conviction in individual differences. For the intervals, and their own individual differences, by cent (100 cents equals one equally tempered semitone) and succession within a tune, are significant, and in fact lead to a full-scale historiographical framework. In other words, by differentiating taxonomically the cent composition and successive position of intervals, Myers is able to situate primitive music in a historiographical projection in its own terms, and one ostensibly unrelated to parallel processes in European music. There is, for example, an equanimity in his evaluation of intervallic strength in primitive and European music. He identifies the pure fourth—or the naturally consonant interval—as the probable cause of a harmonic tendency, implicitly, in European music, but in primitive music it is not, because of the superaddition of intervals—or the accrescent model of evolution. So the development of primitive music and European music follow different evolutionary projections. This recognition is not dissimilar to Edward Bullough’s notion of “the morphology of the aesthetic consciousness,”1 upon which Myers is known to have based his understanding of individual differences in listening to tones and music. In fact, one could make a good case for Bullough’s taxonomy being transcribed into Myers’s intervallic analysis of primitive music, if one takes it, broadly speaking, as a metaphor for accrescent evolution, even in Myers’s adaptation of it. The importance of distance could, in this sense, take on a more concrete meaning than even Bullough could have imagined, in the sense that the importance of distance is intervallic as much as it is methodological. The

1. Bullough, “The Relation of Aesthetics to Psychology,” 45.

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importance of distance lies in establishing the strength of individual intervallic content, and its import in the accrescent rise of individual primitive musics. It is a case of establishing the relative importance—or balance—between notes, in the same way that Myers does in experimental psychology, and Bullough does in aesthetics. Of course, where evolutionary binarisms drive Myers’s teleological interpretation of many aspects of psychology, acoustics, synesthesia, and other areas of experimental science, it is an accrescent evolution that marks his attitude toward primitive music. And it is this that allows Myers a real conceptual understanding, or psychical distance, in relation to primitive music. It is in its conceptual difference from his evolutionary teleologies that Myers can establish sufficient distance from his own musical tradition to investigate primitive music without prejudice or preconception.

Myers’s Early Ethnomusicological Writings Myers’s work in ethnomusicology begins with “A Study of Papuan hearing”(1902) and continues with “Hearing” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1903), “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music” (1905), “The Ethnological Study of Music” (1907), “Traces of African Melody in Jamaica” (1907), “Music” in Routledge and Routledge’s With a Prehistoric People (1910), “Music,” in Seligmann and Seligmann’s The Veddas (1911), “Music” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1912), “The Study of Primitive Music” (1912), and “A Study of Sarawak Music” (1913). Various items from Myers’s ethnomusicological works are also summarized in the popular essay “The Beginnings of Music” (1913), which appears later in A Psychologist’s Point of View (1933), and items from each of the three categories appear in the Joule lecture “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation” (1933), published in the Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society as well as in In the Realm of Mind (1937). Myers’s ethnomusicological writing is premised on establishing the same principles of individual differences in primitive music as he had found evident in his work on sound, synesthesia, and musical acuities in general. Indeed, the basis of his ethnomusicology remains the scientific measurement and statistical evaluation of individual responses in sensory acuities. This is borne out in his opening comments on music in Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1912), which, though devoted almost entirely to teaching the use of field-recording technology (the phonograph, rhythmograph,2 pitch-pipes, and tuning-forks), highlight the significance of individual differences within his ethnomusicological method:

2. Myers describes the rhythmograph as “an instrument for recording and subsequently analysing the complex rhythms which are in use in many parts of the world.

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The music of every people, whether vocal of instrumental, has its own characteristics, which depend in part upon differences in interval, modulation and rhythm, and can only be estimated rightly on the evidence supplied by accurate records. General impressions—even those of a trained European musician— are of little value unless the sounds and phrases which they describe can be reproduced. Music may be recorded either in writing, or by means of the phonograph. Both methods should be employed, to check and to interpret each other; but written records of music, or of the impression produced by it, are not of scientific value unless they are made at the actual performance.3

In addition to his more technological considerations, Myers was, by this time, becoming increasingly focused on an evolutionary template, and he uses this to explore principles of historiographical development and musical appreciation in primitive peoples. As with his views on synesthesia Myers considers primitive music a living fossil, and although broadly representative of a period of evolutionary undifferentiation, it appears in diverse forms and is subject to its own evolutionary projection. In its most primitive and undifferentiated form it is essentially a part of the natural organic world in which man lives, and in its relatively undisturbed vestigial state in modern man it represents a greater presence of the past than any form of more developed and differentiated sensory acuity. Because of its theoretically unverifiable nature, however, Myers does not specifically develop this point in his ethnomusicology, and prefers to speak of “beginnings” rather than “origins.” Nevertheless, he obviously muses on the topic in his expedition journal, in one instance identifying a type of chant with the wind: [June 5, 1898] “At Las, a village on the other side of the island, the limits of the compound are marked by a paling of cut bamboo poles. The wind, whistling through these, produces almost exactly the same . . . falling and rising of cadence which characterises the native lamentations over death.”4 Later in his journal Myers writes of a monkey-dance, implying that tribesmen produce zoomorphic dances and music well because of their inherently closer relationship to nature.5 For Myers, the “beginnings” of music follow a strict and universal evolutionary progression prerequisite to

In place of the drum, stick, or rattle usually employed by the native, a special drum is provided and the beats made upon it by the performer are communicated to a lever which marks on a rotating smoked surface” (Myers, “Music,” in Freire-Marreco and Myres, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 221). 3. Ibid., 214. 4. Myers, “C. S. Myers” Journal (1898–99), “The Torres Straits Anthropological Expedition,” 68. 5. Ibid., 156.

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advanced musical appreciation. This is outlined in his article “The Beginnings of Music” (1913): Thus the beginnings of music may be said to depend on the following eight factors:— (i.) (ii.) (iii.) (iv.) (v.)

Discrimination between noises and tones. Awareness of differences in loudness, pitch, duration, character and quality. Awareness of absolute pitch. Appreciation and use of (small) approximately equal tone-distances. Appreciation and use of (larger) consonant intervals and the development of small intervals in relation thereto. (vi.) Melodic phrasing. (vii.) Rhythmic phrasing. (viii.) Musical meaning.6

According to Myers, this template can be found as much in Western as in primitive music, and he speaks of instances in which musical meaning is not achieved individually in relation to Western art music (Wagner),7 where it is in regard to primitive music. What seems to be missing, of course, from this template—from a Western standpoint—is the element of harmony, which in fact Myers subsumes under the aegis of musical meaning. Musical meaning, however, is not dependent upon tonal simultaneities, as in Western music, but can occur with equal responsiveness by the employment of consecutive tones. For Myers, in other words, the absence of harmony does not diminish musical meaning, and neither is it a prerequisite for advanced musical meaning in a Western sense. What is important is the fact that music carries meaning within its own terms—within the individual differences that it represents as a genre of all historical musics. In itself, this view is significant because it allows primitive music its own evolutionary terms—its individual differences—and does not discriminate against its historical development as something stunted or racially (and hence aesthetically) inferior, as we have seen throughout previous chapters. In fact, for Myers an appreciation of primitive music enhances understanding of Western music, if for no other reason than it acts as a gateway to a preharmonic non-European musical time. It is, again, a type of living fossil, but a living fossil that bears within it the marks of its own evolution, and it is this process that Myers undertakes to explore. These ideas permeate Myers’s writing implicitly, but are explicit in relation to primitive music only in “The Ethnological Study of Music” (1907). In it he decries the neglect toward the study of ethnic music, but praises the use of the

6. Myers, “The Beginnings of Music,” 196. 7. Ibid., 196–97.

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phonograph as a means of redressing this.8 Western contamination of Eastern music is bemoaned, but musical and linguistic borrowing of a natural anthropological sort is considered valuable for ethnology. As in “The Beginnings of Music,” Myers suggests here that the expressive functions of music are dependent upon cultural context for their meaning and interpretation, and as a result it is impossible to impose a Western historiographical template upon the development of a primitive music with which Western musical culture has made no (or limited) contact. In other words, although all musical cultures can attain musical meaning (at the apex of musical evolution), meaning is dependent upon individual cultural and personal difference: “Music can awaken in us feelings of joy, excitement, sadness, resignation, courage, uncertainty and the like, but it cannot communicate to us the ideas which are the cause of such feelings. These ideas are the product of each hearer’s fancy. That is to say, the language of music is devoid of acknowledged signs for cognitive expression.”9 This same evolutionary projection toward meaning in music, as well as a fundamental belief in the generic individuality of primitive music, is exemplified in the structure of Myers’s comparative examination of progress in Western and primitive music. He begins by examining the origin of music, rhythm and melody, rhythm and harmony, fusion and polyphony, and then proceeds to harmony in primitive music, styles and social function of music, scales and various issues concerning tunings, tonality, and pitch (these three latter issues ultimately give music its meaning). The origins of music may, as stated later in “The Beginnings of Music,” be strictly conjectural, but the beginnings of music are more realizable. Rhythm in primitive music can often appear dissociated from melody and/or harmony, and whereas European music evolved a sense of consonance and dissonance to accommodate rhythmic complexity, primitive music simply did not. Even polyphony—evident in some primitive music—is actually more heterophonic than it is polyphonic. Again, Myers is at pains to show through comparison that there are no fundamental distinctions between Western and primitive peoples: We must bear in mind that the disorderly use of simultaneous tones in primitive orchestra or chorus does not necessarily imply an inability to distinguish between harmony and discord. One may be quite able to discriminate between two experiences, although in practice one may totally neglect the differences between them; we may, for example,

8. Myers, “The Ethnological Study of Music,” 235–53. As well as citing the importance of the phonograph in his introductory remarks (235), Myers gives an extensive technical appendix in which he discusses “The manipulation of the phonograph” and “Graphic record.” 9. Ibid., 236.

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give the same name to two really distinguishable objects. To argue that primitive man cannot distinguish blue from green (or salt from sweet) because he designates them by the same name would be absurd.10

This absence of distinction is also enshrined in Myers’s social anthropology, where it emerges in his discussion of the styles and social function of music. He writes with equanimity, for example, that “Nearly every people, however primitive, preserves what we term classical music,”11 and it is this sentiment—the view that, within their own terms, all cultures produce enduring works of high art (i.e., “classical”)—that carries him through the entirety of his ethnomusicological work. In writing about “Our attitude towards strange music,”12 Myers encapsulates this viewpoint in suggesting that listeners must dispense with their European ears if they will understand the meaning in primitive music. As elsewhere, Myers relates primitive and “advanced” music in an effort to show how universal music is, whether primitive or modern. And he suggests how even the European individual can evolve meaning in previously incomprehensible music. Thus, individual differences can effect ontogeny, with implications for the development of emotional responses—and perhaps ultimately for human phylogeny as well. Primitive music is therefore a kind of evolutionary tool for the teleological projection toward advanced musical meaning. It is also something that requires the adaptation toward a new and different type of “psychical distance”—one that, as seen already in the previous chapter, surrenders European aesthetic mores, and one that eventually brings with it an even greater general musical appreciation: It is easy to see how a regard for regular rhythm, harmony and tonality, and the principle of equal temperament are responsible for the attitude of European civilization towards music generally. No sooner do we hear a piece of primitive or advanced music than we endeavour to interpret it in terms with which custom has long familiarized us. Absolutely without reflection we read into the music regular accents, we arrange it in bars, we declare it to be in such and such a key, and to be in the major or in the minor scale, we identify its intervals with those of our own to which they most nearly correspond. We forget that the complexities of rhythm may far exceed what we are accustomed to, and that primitive music knows little of tonality, and nothing of major or minor scale. Thus it comes about that many examples of primitive music are incomprehensible to us, just because they are not so readily assimilated as those which are more nearly related to our previous experiences. Our attention is continuously distracted, now by the colouring of strange instruments, now by the unwonted

10. Ibid., 239. 11. Ibid., 240. 12. Ibid., 248.

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progression and character of intervals. Consequently much familiarity is needed before we can regard such music from a standpoint that will allow of faithful description. We have first to disregard our well-trained feelings towards consonances and dissonances. We have next to banish to the margins of our field of consciousness certain aspects of music, which, were it our own music, would occupy the very focus of attention. Thus incomprehensibility will gradually give place to meaning, and dislike to some interesting emotion.13

Torres Strait Expedition: The Anthropological Context Most of Myers’s early anthropological—and a large portion of his ethnomusicological—writing derive in material and method from fieldwork undertaken in the Torres Strait. What eventually became known in print as “The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits”14 was initiated by the anthropologist A. C. Haddon, and began officially in 1898. The expedition comprised a team of hand-picked specialists conforming precisely to Haddon’s multidisciplinary agenda: Led by a distinguished natural scientist and ethnologist, Alfred Court Haddon, the Expedition included scholars in the fields of psychology, medicine and linguistics. . . . W. H. R. Rivers, originally trained as a physician, specialised in experimental psychology and physiology; he had been lecturing on the physiology of the sense organs at Cambridge since 1893. William McDougall and Charles Myers, both former students of Haddon and Rivers, were physicians. McDougall was based at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, and Myers had just completed his medical studies at Cambridge. Charles Seligman was house physician and specialist in tropical diseases at St Thomas’s Hospital. Sidney Ray, the Expedition’s linguist, was an elementary school teacher in east London noted for his self-taught expertise on Oceanic languages. Anthony Wilkin, a student of Haddon who had done archaeological work in Egypt, was taken on as Expedition photographer.15

As Herle and Rouse continue, Haddon designed the expedition “as a multidisciplinary project encompassing anthropology in its broadest sense, including ethnology, physical anthropology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropogeography. Haddon was particularly insistent on including psychological research, and it was indicative of his vision that he chose the new experimental psychology.”16 Kuklick reiterates the importance of the

13. Myers, “The Ethnological Study of Music,” 249. 14. “Torres Straits” was used at the time of the expedition. This volume uses the current spelling “Torres Strait,” except in quoted matter. 15. Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, 1. 16. Ibid., 1–2.

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multidisciplinary character in her summation of the expedition, and describes it as a watershed in anthropological and psychological history: The Torres Straits Expedition was intended to realize this new scientific attitude by fulfilling Haddon’s “long felt” expectation “that psychological investigations must be undertaken before any real advance could be made in ethnology.” If exotic peoples were studied with the methods of the psychological laboratory, generalizations about their modes of thought would at last have a scientific basis; and psychological evidence about such peoples would provide common ground for the disciplines of psychology and anthropology, drawing them closer together and enlarging the comparative dimension of each.17

The expedition spent roughly seven months in the Torres Strait, from April to October 1898, and though generally concentrating its fieldwork on Mer, allowed for considerable movement to other islands in the Strait. Myers, for example, was stationed on Mer, but traveled to Borneo in August and remained there until November. Fieldwork was undertaken as relevant to individual specialisms: Haddon took physical measurements of Islanders, recorded local customs and studied decorative art. Rivers, in charge of experimental psychology, focused on vision, and, once in the field, developed a method of recording local genealogies. McDougall studied tactile sensation while Myers, a skilful musician, concentrated on hearing and music. Ray worked on linguistics, compiling word lists, constructing grammars and assisting with translation. While Seligman’s main task was to research native medicine and local pathology, he also spent considerable time in Cape York and Southern Papua, where he compiled comparative ethnographic data. The youngest member of the group, Wilkin, was the official photographer, working under Haddon’s direction. Wilkin also investigated house construction and land tenure.18

The research that emerged from the expedition comprises a set of six volumes published from 1901 to 1935, titled The Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. Volume 1, published last, under the title General Ethnography (1935), provides basic introductory information such as a historical sketch; geography and geology; ethnography of various islands and neighboring areas; and more particularized work on the ethnography of the Torres Strait, including sections on physical characteristics, psychology and behavior, languages, folktales, material culture, domestic life, social contacts, rites and rituals, religion, heroes, and cultural history. Volume 2, Physiology and Psychology (1901 and 1903), includes work mainly on the senses, including Myers’s work on hearing. Volume 3, Language (1907), deals with the Torres Strait, Cape York,

17. Kuklick, The Savage Within, 137. 18. Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, 3.

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New Guinea, and the linguistic position of the Torres Strait, Australia, and British New Guinea. Volume 4, Arts and Crafts (1912), comprises work on decoration, ornamentation, clothing, textiles, houses, domestic implements, food, drugs, weapons, science, music and musical instruments (Myers), dance, and games. Volume 5, Sociology, Magic and Religion of the Western Islanders (1904), includes items such as folktales, genealogies, kinship, totemism, birth, childhood, puberty, initiation, courtship and marriage, funeral ceremonies, morals, personal names, trade, war, magic, and religion. Volume 6, Sociology, Magic and Religion of the Eastern Islanders (1908), more or less matches the topics of Volume 5, but pertains to the Eastern Islanders. The influence of this set of volumes is, as Herle and Rouse suggest, rather dubious from an academic standpoint: “it might appear that the Expedition’s results failed notably to mark subsequent work in the fields of psychology and anthropology. Its conclusions were rarely incorporated into these disciplines, students were infrequently exposed to its results in any detail, and its role in theory-building was minimal.”19 Herle and Rouse put this down to the expedition’s inherently multidisciplinary framework. As they say, in 1898, “British anthropology was in search of self-definition. Situated precariously between the arts and the natural sciences, it was struggling for legitimacy in the academy while lacking both recognisable boundaries and a unifying paradigm.”20 Graham Richards would not disagree with this, but puts it down more specifically to the expedition’s broad findings on issues of race: in the Reports we can identify two pairs of competing imperatives: defence of the validity and value of the findings versus diligently honest scientific reporting of the problems attending their acquisition; salvaging the Spencer hypothesis (although not by name) versus refuting exaggerated travellers’ tales of animal-like “savage” sensory virtuosity. Their presence renders it difficult to assess how seriously the methodological shortcomings were taken. While critics like Titchener identified more, enough flaws were described to discredit the face validity of much of the research. The team members were, in truth, in rather a fix. They could hardly tell their sponsors that the whole exercise had been a débâcle from which little could be positively concluded, nor would nascent British psychology’s cause have benefited. At best the results showed that the very difficulties of testing Spencer’s hypothesis implied that it was inadequate—were that straightforward tale correct, even these methods should have confirmed it. Yet their heroic pursuit of psychological knowledge under such difficulties psychologically reinforced, rather than reduced, the ostensible value of the data. The Reports contained denials of firm conclusions being possible, positive statements that race differences are minimal and equally positive ones to the opposite effect, but no general conclusion as to which interpretation prevailed. The Reports thus became a virtuoso exercise in the art of writing up unsatisfactory research as positively as possible short of outright dissembling.21

19. Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, 19. 20. Ibid., 1. 21. Richards, “Getting a Result,” 144–45.

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The Spencerian hypothesis, as Richards explains, is the belief “that ‘primitives’ surpassed ‘civilised’ people in psychophysical performance because more energy remained devoted to this level in the former instead of being diverted to ‘higher functions,’ a central tenet of late Victorian ‘scientific racism’ although Spencer is not explicitly cited.”22 As he goes on to say, this hypothesis was sufficiently discounted by the research of the 1904 volume that genuine race differences could not be promulgated with any confidence, and eventually Myers, and Rivers, like many of their peers both here and in America, assumed a position of cultural adaptationism. According to Richards, Myers and Rivers did not initially set out to arrive at this conclusion, but were driven to reassess their work in light of new theories (particularly American) that had overtaken less modern views of race. From Myers’s standpoint, as we have already seen in relation to his paper “On the Permanence of Mental Racial Differences” (1911), racial difference simply could not exist. As Richards says, “The contrast between experimental performance (showing little ‘racial’ difference) and real-life performance (conforming to the ‘savage superiority’ stereotype) led Rivers and Myers to conclude that these latter signified learned adaptation to the demands of ‘primitive’ life, but the Reports only drew this conclusion on a piecemeal basis.”23 For Myers and for British psychology generally, according to Richards, the race issue more or less ended in and around 1911. Myers became an exponent of what Richards calls the “New Psychology,” which he sees as a direct response to his work on the expedition: “The sundry problems attending his Expedition research excited and challenged Myers, who responded by concentrating on research methodology thereafter. It would be difficult, however, to identify specific innovations originating in that experience in either Cambridge or the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP). Although undertaken in the field there was little new, in principle, about the methodology. Both procedures and equipment were as conventional as circumstances permitted—the aim was doggedly to recreate laboratory conditions as far as possible in the field.”24 Despite these comments, there is no question about the innovative nature of Myers’s ethnomusicological work. And although Myers acceded to the New Psychology—or the new experimentalism, to use Rylance’s term—the issue that Richards sees as dead in the water in 1911 did not actually end at that point. Instead it was transformed into notions of individual differences, and it was this idea that was to propel the conceptual underlay of Myers’s ethnomusicological and psychological work. Intriguingly, even though he does not develop the relationship, Richards brings these two together: “Opposing ethnocentrism, Myers acquired a lifelong side

22. Ibid., 137. 23. Ibid., 148. 24. Ibid., 152.

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interest in ethnomusicology.”25 What is important here is not just the parallel that Richards draws, but the fact that he identifies Myers as opposing ethnocentrism, because herein lie some of the roots of Myers’s notions of individual differences, and to a large extent the humanity that marks his writing from the very beginning of his career.

Torres Strait: The Ethnomusicology This same pattern, of an evolutionary projection toward musical meaning couched in terms of individual differences, is apparent in every one of Myers’s ethnomusicological writings, and particularly his Torres Strait fieldwork, published considerably later as volume 4 of the Torres Strait Reports. In his examination of the music of Murray Island, the Western Islands, and Saibai, Myers identifies the relative age of music by virtue of a combination of rhythmic and “harmonic” (i.e., consecutive intervallic) complexity. The more complex rhythmically and harmonically, the more evolved and inherently “meaningful”: “The songs of the Miriam or Murray Islanders, which form the subject of this section, are of considerable interest from the standpoint of musical history and development. For they differ among one another not only in complexity of structure but also in date of composition and place of origin. They thus afford an opportunity of tracing the changes in musical expression which may occur in course of time within a primitive community.”26 In addition, Myers suggests that, even in relation to music of primitive peoples, the music of the Torres Strait is extremely old, owing to the relative paucity of instrumental accompaniments to its vocal music. The drum, for instance, “is probably the sole native instrument the islanders possess; at all events the drum is the only instrument ever used as an accompaniment to their tunes, and the only in ceremonial and dance music.”27 Other instruments, such as the flute, panpipe, and Jew’s harp are used occasionally, but the latter two are “never used in orchestral combination or musical festivals: they have evidently exerted little or no influence on Miriam music.”28 Myers examined twenty of the many Torres Strait songs (only sung by men) he recorded. His assessment was done partly on examination of the music and partly in conjunction with linguistic analyses carried out by Sidney Herbert Ray. As a result, Myers determines that the music can be divided into three classes of

25. Richards, “Getting a Result,” 149. 26. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, 238. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid.

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music, modern, old, and older still. These appear in a useful digest form in “The Beginnings of Music”: The Malu music of Murray Island (situated in the eastern part of the Torres Straits) affords perhaps the most interesting examples of very primitive music which have yet come to light. Among the Murray Islanders it is easy to recognise three classes of music, each with a style distinctly its own: (a) modern secular tunes, sung usually to foreign words in the language of the western islands of the Torres Straits, and in great part introduced from these islands to Murray Island; (b) older tunes, belonging to the now obsolete Keber ceremonies, also introduced from the western islands and sung to words in that tongue; and (c) the music of the still older Malu ceremonies. This Malu music was sung to words of the Murray Island language; but the words are now so old that they are archaic, and their meaning is in many cases lost and irrecoverable.29

Myers’s taxonomy, here, is based on an analytical method involving phonographic recordings, a metronome, and an Appun’s Tonmesser device for identifying pitch. Songs are first written down in European notation from the phonograph recording, and this is used as a basic template for reinterpretation via the metronome and Tonmesser. Intervals are determined in cents, based on Ellis’s third edition of Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone (1895), and various signs are given to denote minor adjustments to conventional staff notation. A plus (⫹) or minus (⫺) indicates slightly raising or lowering pitch; a V, a breath; an *, drum beat (several, rapid repetitions); and two parallel slurs, a glissando. Example 13.1 shows the first of the Malu songs, which incorporates some of these features. What Myers notes here is the fact that the song descends through a succession of intervals until the lowest possible point in the singer’s range, at which point it jumps an octave and begins the process again. The point at which the octave

Example 13.1. Malu song 1. Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. 4: Arts and Crafts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 244.

29. Myers, “The Beginnings of Music,” 177–78.

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Example 13.2. Keber song 1. Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. 4: Arts and Crafts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 245.

leap occurs depends upon the range of the singer. There is what Myers refers to as a “principal tone,” though he queries whether this is a true “tonic.” In the second Malu song the same characteristic descent and octave leap occurs, and Myers is quick to point this out. In the third and fourth in the set this pattern seems more attenuated, though remnants of it can be found. The songs are not examined rigorously for their rhythmic content, although mention is made of the placement (regular or irregular) of the drum beats in relation to sung words. The Keber songs are treated similarly, with emphasis being given to their intervallic composition. The same patterns found in the Malu songs occur, but with generally diminished intervallic content. Whereas the Malu songs retain the octave as their only sizable leap—otherwise tones moving effectively by step—the Keber songs are dominated by the leap of the fifth or thereabouts. This is evident in the first of this set, as seen in example 13.2. In other examples from this set it is the fourth that is significant, and, generally speaking, rhythm is seldom explored. In the last set, the modern secular songs, Myers deduces yet further intervallic complexity, by suggesting an advancing pentatonicism, as in the last of the set. Here the music is set in the same pentatonic scale as occurs elsewhere, but it is much more expansive and generously used in terms of leaping intervals. It also has a clear tonic, which is a word Myers reserves essentially for this set alone (see example 13.3). In his deductions from the analyses Myers identifies the overall ranges of each group.30 Group 1 is “ill-defined”;31 group 2, which he calls medieval, averages a

30. Myers adds a footnote to the effect that Fox Strangways reviewed the proofs: “I wish to express my indebtedness to Mr. A. H. Fox Strangways, who has very carefully read the proofsheets, for various criticisms, many of which I have gladly availed myself of” (Myers, “Music,” in Reports, 255). It would be of great interest to see Fox Strangways’s comments on Myers’s work, and what criticism Myers specifically omitted from his redrafting, though no documentation has come to light in this regard. 31. Ibid.

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Example 13.3. Secular song 5 (last in set). Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. 4: Arts and Crafts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 247.

sixth to seventh; and group three, the modern songs, averages a ninth. Group 1, he concedes, does exhibit a tonic, “shewing a very primitive effort in the direction of tonality.”32 Between groups 2 and 3 there is “a distinct tendency in the more modern or ‘secular’ music to increase the number of intervals in each song, and perhaps to increase the relative frequency of ascending intervals, although in both groups of songs the descending intervals preponderate—a feature that is, of course, still more marked in the five Malu songs.”33 In addition, “a tendency of the modern or ‘secular’ music in Murray Island is to discard the use of fifths and greatly to favour the use of thirds, whereas it eschews intervals approximating a semitone.”34 Scales are seen as increasingly oriented toward a major, rather than minor, framework, with Malu songs being effectively minor, and secular songs major, despite their pentatonic construction. This is assumed on the basis of the frequency of major and minor intervals above the fundamental, or tonic, note. Ultimately, Myers concludes that there is a proportionality between the frequency and size of the interval, and hence their relative age: If . . . we wish to determine the frequency of the various intervals actually sung in these fourteen songs, information on this point . . . [t]he order is as follows: major seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths and sixths, octaves. In other words, the frequency with which the various intervals occur varies directly with their size. The striking exceptions to this rule are the minor seconds, which rank in order of frequency after the fourths.35

Myers also suggests that, at least in terms of the Murray Islanders, it is generally the fourth that precedes the fifth in usage, and that as a single note achieved tonicity, it was the fifth that began to appear more frequently. This he considers

32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid. Ibid., 256. Ibid. Ibid., 259.

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a function of a deepening sense of “harmony”: “That they use the note a fifth above, more frequently than they use the note a fourth above, the tonic, can only be due to an incipient sensibility to the dictates of harmony.”36 In his summary of all the songs Myers indicates that they are “very primitive.” There is a simplicity of interval and rhythm; tempos are usually slow and recitative, and only in the secular songs do these features appear more regular and advanced. The second, and considerably briefer, section of Myers’s Reports concern the music of Mabuiag, Yam, and Saibai. Myers himself did not visit the islands, and depended upon Ray for phonograph recordings of their music. Unsurprisingly, Myers notes numerous similarities with the Murray Island songs, but finds in them “greater diffuseness, restlessness and irregularity of rhythm,”37 and “less feeling for tonality.”38 He situates Saibai music with that of Malu, and Mabuiag and Yam music with secular music. But in order to accommodate differences between Mabuiag and Yam music, and Murray Island secular music, he divides the secular category into two: the Murray Island secular music, which is more tuneful and tonal, and the Mabuiag and Yam music, which is more diffuse and tonically restless. Myers adds linguistic analysis to this summary.39 He indicates that Malu music contains words so archaic they have lost their meaning, and that they clearly originate in the language of the eastern islands. The Keber songs appear in Murray Island at a later date, as corroborated by ceremonial mythology and the fact that they retain words of the Western, as opposed to Eastern, language of the islands. The secular music also comes from the Western Islands, as the Murray Islanders are shown to have invented new songs in the old Western language.

The Sarawak Malays of Borneo and the Universalizing Qualities of Individual Differences Where contributions to the Reports very seldom investigate systematically the rhythmic importance of the music, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music” (1905) does, although here Myers does not explore the music of the Torres Strait,

36. Ibid., 260. 37. Ibid., 264. 38. Ibid. 39. According to Anna Shnukal, there are two Torres Strait linguistic groupings: “The easterners spoke Meriam Mir, the westerners Mabuiag (now Kala Lagaw Ya). The latter had probably four dialects, again corresponding to ethnological divisions. Despite shared vocabulary, there was uncertainty about the relationship between the two languages. The extent of the shared vocabulary was unknown [at the time to the expedition] but there seemed to be too much of it to admit of the possibility of chance resemblance” (Shnukal, “At the Australian–Papuan Linguistic Boundary,” 186).

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but the Sarawak Malays of Borneo. Myers describes an orchestra of gongs and drums comprising kranang, or small gong; chanang, large gong; tawak or tetáwak, larger gong; and gendang, small drum: “The gongs of the kranang are rapidly sounded, about six per second. The chanang emits a high note and regularly accentuates the first of every four sounds of the kranang. The two gendang are called ‘mother’ and ‘child.’ When one of them is silent, the other is beaten; together, their rhythm supports that of the kranang, the accented beat coinciding with that of the chanang.”40 The tawak is played in a rhythm seemingly independent of the other instruments, “as far as can be appreciated by the European ear. The accented beats appear to recur with incomprehensible irregularity.”41 Myers even comments that expertise on the instrument requires it being played ostensibly in arrhythmic patterns: “I remember that on one occasion the player of the tawak becoming tired, he passed on the instrument to another Malay who proceeded to beat it just as a European would do, keeping strict time with the orchestra. He was laughed at by his audience and very soon retired covered with ridicule.”42 Myers was told that there are four methods of playing the tawak, and in his paper he discusses these systematically. He was able to establish the number of tenths of seconds between successive beats of the tawak, by means of a Morse key and electronic recording machine that laid down the signals on the surface of a smoked drum.43 The first group is presented graphically in example 13.4. Myers groups those figures between the asterisks into two groups (see example 13.5), one of two or three beats equating to 7.5 tenths of seconds, and another of two beats equating to 5 tenths of seconds. The first group is divided into four types (a–d), and these are set in conventional notation, with the quaver being the basic unit (the metronome is the minim ⫽ 150). Myers continues this pattern of examination over the four different groupings, and then summarizes his findings. Again, his language diminishes European musical faculties as incapable and disempowered in relation to those of their primitive counterparts: From a study of these records it is clear that the Malays of Sarawak are able to regard many successively different intervals of times as a coordinated whole which they recognize when repeated in the course of the performance. This faculty they carry to a degree which lies so far beyond the powers of civilized musicians, that the latter may reasonably be sceptical as to the possibility of its occurrence among less advanced peoples.44

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” 397. Ibid., 398. Ibid. See fn. 2. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” 402.

Example 13.4. Sarawak Malay Tawak beat divisions. Charles S. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” British Journal of Psychology 1/4 (Oct. 1905): 399.

Example 13.5. Sarawak Malay Tawak beat divisions, in European Notation. Charles S. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” British Journal of Psychology 1/4 (Oct. 1905): 400.

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Myers compares the complexity of these rhythms to tâlas found in Day’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, the rhythms of Ancient Greece and that of Arabian music, as identified in Kiesewetter’s Music der Araber (1842). Similarly, Ambros, in his Geschichte der Musik (1880) identifies Greek paeonic and hemiolic rhythms with divisions per foot of 15:10, precisely that of 7.5:5 of the tawak, and Headlam is cited as having defined Greek lyric meter in terms of overlapping rhythms, which Myers interprets as resembling counterpoint in music.45 Further similarities are drawn between the tawak groupings and John Comfort Fillmore’s work on the Omaha Indians, and Franz Boas’s transcriptions of Kwakiutl Indians, and afterward Dittrich on the Japanese, Stumpf on the Siamese, Land on the Javanese, and Abraham and Hornbostel on the music of Turkey and India.46 In each instance Myers interprets the overlay of beat pattern as effectively a type of rhythmic counterpoint, and even in song rhythms themselves—independent of accompaniment—he observes such a strong component of syncopation that the rhythms have something like an implicit internal counterpoint. Myers divides up the rhythmic characters of tawak music into three groups: (1) a delight in change; (2) an opposition of rhythms; and (3) a “demand that relatively long periods filled with measures of diverse length be apprehended as an organic whole or ‘phrase.’ ”47 Again, he suggests that these distinctions are so subtle and complex that the European cannot comprehend them. Instead European music has advanced from harmony rather than from rhythm: “But just as the complexities of European harmony have developed from a basis of simple relation between the vibration-frequencies of simultaneously occurring tones, so those of primitive rhythm have developed from a basis of simple relation between the duration of successively occurring periods. The development of harmony and of rhythm alike invoke the psychological acts of analysis, synthesis and fusion.”48 As in his work in the Torres Strait Reports, Myers suggests that whereas European music evolved complications of simultaneity in harmony and polyphony, primitive music has evolved complications of succession in rhythm, which he calls “complications of measure rather than of tone.”49 Eventually, this has implications for modern European art music. Myers cites early medieval music and existing folk songs, which are replete with rhythmic complexities, and indeed mentions modern composers having used such rhythms in their work. But whether “they will ever adopt such complex rhythms as are in use among certain primitive peoples, must depend on the gradual

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” 403. Ibid., 404–5. Ibid., 405. Ibid., 405–6. Ibid., 406.

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education of their audience and on the limiting value of the strain of attention which is compatible with aesthetic pleasure.”50 There are two points that emerge from this article in relation to Myers’s other work. First, his continued suggestion that the European ear is aesthetically incapable when confronted with the complexities of primitive rhythm is more than a question of redressing scientific racism or simple racial prejudice. And second, whereas in regard to psychology or hearing (and the classification of songs in the Torres Strait Reports) Myers openly projects an end-oriented depiction of musical progress, here he does not. In contrast, Myers’s work on rhythm, at least in his research on the tawak, eschews any hint of evolutionary template, or teleological projection. What is substituted for this, however, is what can be called a counterpoint of musical cultures. Myers, for example, decries European inadequacy in comprehending primitive rhythm, yet he praises modern composition that attempts to do so. He is essentially attempting to equalize (through the universalizing qualities of individual differences) the value of European and primitive musical cultures, by making them appear related yet independent. He is imposing one voice upon another, and creating a counterpoint of the primitive upon the European. At the same time he is allowing for totally independent terms of reference. Primitive music stands for rhythm, and European music for harmony, and in the end it is the contrapuntal union of these two forms—in their furthest progressed stage, irrespective of their own individual evolutions— that will give way to the highest point of aesthetic appreciation to all peoples. There is a questionable agenda here, because Myers’s aesthetic universalism is inevitably based on a European, rather than primitive, notion of universality. But again, the absence of an evolutionary interpretation of rhythm is significant because it forces comparisons between European and primitive music that do not rely on the value-laden qualities of evolutionary thinking. In other words, by eschewing an evolutionary template in regard to the rhythm of the tawak, Myers shows how primitive music can represent an independent contrapuntal voice in the fabric of European art music. It could be suggested that Myers simply wishes primitive music to reunite itself with the “proper” (i.e., Western) evolution of music, but there is nothing in Myers’s writing to confirm this view specifically. Instead what one finds is a clear sense of equanimity between primitive and European music in which respective evolutions are not compared and judged, but counterpointed. So despite the strength of his evolutionary outlook in regard to psychology, hearing, and synesthesia—and from a purely musical standpoint, melody—the relation of primitive and European music cannot be situated as an evolutionary binarism with a teleological projection. Rather, it represents a layering of one type upon the other. So where Myers suggests a

50. Myers, “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music.”

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temporally linear projection from body to mind, objective to subjective, mechanism to finalism, instinct to intelligence, or unconsciousness to consciousness, it is not plausible to orient rhythm and harmony, or primitive music and European music, within a similar type of binarism and linearly teleological projection. Rather, one can layer the two contrapuntally. In this way one could say that Myers is postulating a type of evolutionary progression—at least for European music, in its absorption of primitive influences—that is not conventionally linear, but horizontally expansive. In some ways this corresponds to the mind/body dialectic that Myers proffers in “The Absurdity of any Mind–Body Relation,” insofar as the mind and the body are considered essentially “identical.” But where Myers goes on, in that essay, to avow a clearly evolutionary template, in “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” he simply allows the binarism to remain unframed by evolutionary considerations. If there are implications in this, it is in the fact that European art music does admittedly follow an evolutionary progression in which the influence of primitive music could be said to play a part in the modern realization of this progression. Myers’s other work on Sarawak music, “A Study of Sarawak Music” (1913), is oriented toward melodic construction, and it also refrains from situating the music within an evolutionary framework. If anything, it is even more taxonomic in what it presents than Myers’s work on rhythm. Here Myers describes the music of thirteen songs recorded in the Baram district of Sarawak, Borneo. He reports on the types of musical instruments and the occasions for the use of individual songs. The rhythmic component of the songs is omitted entirely and the reader is referred to his earlier article. The analysis of the songs is replete with language such as key and tonic, and at the same time no attempt is made to relate any praxis to European reference points, either musically or conceptually. Myers examines the songs for intervallic content, much like the Torres Strait Reports, but does not hypothesize as to a correlation between intervallic content and the relative age of the music. Neither is there any attempt to relate this article to the previous one on Sarawak rhythm. What this article does, as a companion piece to “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music,” is to provide an analytical examination of Sarawak melody. As such, it prepares the analytical groundwork for what Myers later, in “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation” (1932), calls “the intellectual act of synthesis.”51 Myers suggests that synthesis and analysis go hand in hand the way harmony and rhythm do, where the aim is a full appreciation of music: The effects of melody are different from those of rhythm, for melody and rhythm, as we have seen, serve different purposes, and the appreciation and enjoyment of each

51. Myers, “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation,” 61.

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differ in different individuals. But the complex developments which they have undergone are essentially similar. Just as the enjoyment of melody has been enhanced by the simultaneous combination of different melodies or other accompaniments, or by variations in the melody, especially as practised in advanced European music, so too the enjoyment of rhythm has been enhanced by the simultaneous opposition of different rhythms or by complex changes in rhythm, especially as developed (to an amazing degree) among certain primitive peoples. Alike in the higher development of harmony and of rhythm, and for the full comprehension of musical thought, the intellectual acts of synthesis and analysis are required.52

On the surface, this paradigm seems in opposition to Myers’s numerous evolutionary binarisms, and, of course, one could complain that Myers is simply using primitive music to leaven the evolutionary process that European music undergoes. But in fact, there is in Myers’s ethnomusicology a fundamental dissonance between his evolutionary outlook and the related nature of his teleological binarisms. In other words, there is a tension between his strictly evolutionary template and the posture of cultural adaptationism that he assumes in his article on the permanence of mental racial differences. This tension seems at its most profound in Myers’s mind/body dialectic, in which the mind and body are essentially identical yet differentiated. In Myers’s taxonomic ethnomusicology of the type found in relation to Sarawak (and other) music, although there is an analytical exposition, there is also a marked resistance to synthesize into the evolutionary framework that one finds elsewhere in Myers’s work. That is, there is a decided tendency to provide analysis without synthesis. Myers does, very infrequently, compare songs for relative age, for example, in the Iban song as against other Sarawak music. But then, this song “is of a far more primitive type, descending at first through a regular series of tones from a prolonged high note to a fifth below. . . . There is, of course, no well-defined tonality. . . . But such a comparison is of little or no value.”53 Here, again, Myers seems to be purposefully neglecting the synthetic process in favor of a purely analytic one. One clue for this resistance may be in the fourth point made at the opening of “On the Permanence of Racial Mental Differences” (1911): “the possibility of the progressive development of all primitive peoples must be conceded, if only the environment can be appropriately changed.” Here Myers shifts the evolutionary framework from primitive people to their environment, and by effectively depersonalizing evolution he has also dissociated the synthetic from the analytic. What remains of the article, for all its good intentions, is a muddle of cultural adaptationism and vestigial evolutionary racism. In musical terms, it may well be this same confusion that accounts for the absence of any more openly evolutionary language in the work on the music of Sarawak.

52. Myers, “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation,” 60–61. 53. Myers, “A Study of Sarawak Music,” 296.

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African Connections This same taxonomic (i.e., analytical) approach that characterizes Myers’s work on Sarawak music is encountered in his remaining ethnomusicological work. “Traces of African Melody in Jamaica,” which is the appendix to Walter Jekyll’s Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes (1907), is one such work. Evidently, Myers was asked to ascertain whether Jamaican songs retained any vestige of their African origins. He did not have at his disposal phonograph recordings, but relied on transcriptions in European notation. The limitations of this approach were obvious from the outset, but Myers drew from as wide a range of available travel literature as possible, and in the process managed to come to some fairly acceptable general conclusions. He cites, for example, works notated in Hans Sloane’s A Voyage to Jamaica (1707–25), which include in their titles references to African locations. He is most concerned with the influence of the Arabs and the Portuguese as a mitigating force in the retention of original musical traditions. But even then, Myers suggests that communities would exercise judgment in their choice of influences, and he talks of the “gradual changes in taste which take place [and] are the result of such selective adoption of foreign music.”54 An example of this is not simply the deliberate choice made in favor of some foreign music, but also the adaptation that follows adoption: “adoption always involves adaptation,”55 Myers says. Myers cites a song in which “a typical non-European modification”56 occurs, in the addition of an extra (fifth) bar so that the phrase is an irregular nine bars long. Rhythmic alterations appear frequently: “Such features are precisely what we should expect to meet with among a primitive people who more than two centuries ago doubtless possessed in a still higher degree that delight in complication of rhythm which according to Mr. Jekyll . . . persists among their descendants of to-day.”57 Myers’s notion that adoption always involves adaptation is significant, because it resonates with other work we have already seen. In particular, it is Myers’s notion of accrescence seen earlier in regard to his dispute with Spencer. Spencer, according to Myers, argues that evolution consists “essentially in the addition of matter to matter, i.e., in increasing integration and diversity,”58 whereas he holds that “integration is not the primary aspect of evolution. What is primary is the ‘carving’ of new parts out of the old. The old may grow in the process; it may and does by accrescence add new material to itself. It also combines

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Myers, “Traces of African Melody in Jamaica,” 284. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 284–85. Myers, “Principles of Development,” 25.

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into larger units by union with others.”59 An alternative definition of “accrescence” could therefore be the process of “adoption always involving adaptation.” Accrescence could apply equally to the Myers’s remarks on the use of primitive music among modern European composers. Here composers are adopting and adapting primitive music to suit their needs, and the same applies to various Jamaican songs. So the process of accrescence is seen to be working upon equally evolved—equally individuated—types of music. In Myers’s other work with an African connection, a small contribution to Routledge and Routledge’s With a Prehistoric People: The Akikúyu of British East Africa (1910), he seems to resort to his purely analytical taxonomic considerations, not unlike that on Sarawak melody, or to some extent his work on the music of the Torres Strait.60 Here he identifies some rhythmic complexities, but the main discussion revolves around intervallic content, and to some extent its historiographical implications. Myers writes that “The songs show a considerable development of musical form. The alternation of chorus with solo, the alternation of one phrase with another, the rise and fall of the melody, are evidence of this.”61 Myers sets out to illustrate how intervallic content could give rise to the identification of scale patterns, although it is never entirely clear that this could be the case here (unlike in his work on the music of the Torres Strait). Writing about “Dú-mo—A Girl’s Song,” for example, he speculates that if F be the tonic, the scale comprises F, G, A, C. But then this does not take into account the lower D, which is clearly significant (see example 13.6).

Example 13.6. Song “No. 2. Dú-mo—A Girl’s Song,” from Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in W. Scoresby Routledge and Katherine Routledge, With a Prehistoric People: The Akikúyu of British East Africa, Being Some Account of the Method of Life and Mode of Thought Found Existent amongst a Nation on its First Contact with European Civilisation (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 115.

59. Myers, “Principles of Development,” 26. 60. Myers’s contribution to this book is in the form of a letter excerpted by the authors. It is possible, therefore, that not all of Myers’s letter was included. 61. Myers, “Music,” in Routledge and Routledge, With a Prehistoric People, 114.

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Example 13.7. Song “No. 3. Mu-goí-i-o—A Warrior’s Song,” from Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in W. Scoresby Routledge and Katherine Routledge, With a Prehistoric People: The Akikúyu of British East Africa, Being Some Account of the Method of Life and Mode of Thought Found Existent amongst a Nation on its First Contact with European Civilisation (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 115.

Other examples are treated similarly, and in some instances considerable transpositions are made to affect the construction of a scale pattern. Myers does not consider the role of transposition, however, and insists that tonicity is a movable feature of the music. “Dú-mo—A Girl’s Song,” therefore, equates in scalar construction with example 13.7.

The Veddas Although Myers’s scalar constructions here seem perhaps somewhat arbitrary— whereas in the Torres Straits material they are much more convincing—they both reveal an intention to create the semblance of an accrescent historiographical framework for the music. In his later ethnomusicological research, this intention remains a prominent feature. In Seligmann and Seligmann’s The Veddas (1911), for example, Myers goes into great analytical detail in order to arrive at a convincing historiographical conception—or synthesis—of the music he studies. His work on the Veddas is based on thirty-four phonograph recordings obtained by C. G. Seligman and his wife. As he says, “These songs are probably simpler in structure than any other native songs hitherto studied.”62 Myers categorizes them into three groups: Nine of the tunes are composed of only two notes. In three others the tune consists also of two notes, but with the addition of one or more unimportant gracenotes. These twelve songs may be conveniently classed as belonging to Group A. Twelve other songs consist of three notes only. These we shall class under Group B. Nine songs contain four notes, and one consists of five notes. These we shall consider as Group C. Of the songs in Group A, in no case is the range sensibly greater than our whole-tone interval. With the exception of two anomalous songs, no song in

62. Myers, “Music,” in Seligmann and Seligmann, The Veddas, 341.

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Group B has a range sensibly greater than our minor third. With one exception, no song in Group C has a range greater than a fourth.63

As with the Torres Strait material, Myers coordinates linguistic, anthropological, and musical analysis. He uses the same simple intervallic taxonomy to establish relative age, and this is largely corroborated by C. G. Seligman’s extrapolations from ceremonial and linguistic use. Myers adds: “Not only is Vedda music primitive because the notes of each song are so few and the range so small, but also because the natives are ignorant of any other than vocal music.”64 Myers uses a method of analysis identical to that of the Torres Strait material. He divides his analysis according to group. Group A contains one type of interval, but within it there are three different ranges per interval, the rough equivalent of a welltempered whole tone, five-eighths, and roughly half of the same interval. So even within the single interval, there is diversity. The intervallic content of Group B is divided along similar lines, although the outer range of a minor third is divided between what are essentially two types of tone and semitone combination, or in some fewer instances an equally bisected minor third. Group C songs comprise four notes, and they also fall into four categories of intervallic content. The first contains a maximal range of what Myers calls a “neutral” third (bisected); a “just” fourth (normally divided into three intervals, but occasionally trisected); an “acute diminished fifth” (with intervals comprising an “almost pure fourth, a slightly exaggerated major third, and other intervals common to other songs of the group”).65 (Myers does not actually mention a second division for Group C, but this can be assumed to comprise the various types of seconds, as previously expressed in relation to Groups A and B.) From this intervallic work, Myers proceeds to the analysis of rhythm, although his point is essentially that the majority of the songs are regular in meter, but irregular in accent. There is no taxonomic breakdown of the material. Myers next classifies the songs by their general character. He describes them as having “an exceedingly plain character,”66 and being “devoid of the ornamentation with which we meet in many examples of primitive music.”67 There are no glissandi (which are characteristic of primitive music), and songs are almost invariably solo (hence there are no simultaneous harmonies). The most significant feature of the music, however, is its “apparent feeling for tonality.”68 In Groups A and B the tunes gravitate from the highest note and progress to the tonic, which is the lowest. And from this one can also identify

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Myers, “Music,” in Seligmann and Seligmann, The Veddas, 341. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 356. Ibid., 359. Ibid. Ibid.

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features of Group A in Group B. Figure 13.1 shows Myers’s original notation, and his tracing of these into Group B. Myers also establishes other links between Groups A and B on the basis of further intervallic comparison. In his conclusions Myers suggests that “In the Vedda music we seem to meet with the very beginnings of melody-building. . . . There are no other people in whose music the gradual construction of melody on these simple lines can de discerned.”69 Myers contrasts these tunes with Australian tunes examined by Hagen, American Indian tunes analyzed by Abraham and Hornbostel, Baker and Stumpf, and of course his own work on New Guinea, Borneo, and Africa, which is “decidedly more complex than that of the Veddas.”70 Likewise Indian music from Gujar, Malabar, and Tanjore barely resemble the level of simplicity in Vedda music. Myers describes in terms of accrescence the evolution of Vedda music through “the successive addition of small intervals to those previously used.”71 And he continues to explain that the absence of instruments makes intervals increasingly unfixed in proportion to the number of intervals in a song: “In dealing with the songs of Group A, we were able to range without difficulty the intervals under three heads. But with the songs of Groups B and C such classification became increasingly difficult and more uncertain.”72 In terms of accrescent evolution, Myers postulates that the intervals of the Veddas appear to have been developed . . . not by taking a harmonious interval and dividing it into smaller intervals, but by starting with small (and uncertain) intervals and adding further intervals to them. It is only in the more advanced songs (and these are very few in number) that relatively large intervals are sung. And here we appear first to meet with the influence of harmony in fixing the size of such consonant intervals. Despite the fact that to our ears tonality is so well-marked throughout the Vedda songs, the approximate consonance of intervals is only reached when the two tones immediately succeed one another.73

So rather than assuming that intervallic complexity emerges as a result of the subdivision of more natural consonances, as in the pure fourth, Myers proffers the idea that intervallic complexity is done on the basis of superaddition of smaller and inherently less consonant intervals. The fixing of the fourth, for example, in Group C songs is indicative of this feature. The same accrescent pattern of evolution is found in Myers’s most overarching article on ethnomusicology, “The Study of Primitive Music” (1912), in which he sets out a broad comparative analysis, beginning with the music of the Murray

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Ibid., 363. Ibid. Ibid., 364. Ibid. Ibid., 365.

Group B

Group A

Two representative songs from Group A

Synthesis of the principal components of each distillation

Myers’s distillation of songs 11(2) and 42

A separate influence in Group A: foreshadowing of the leading note

Figure 13.1. The lineage of Group B songs, from Group A, with implications for Group C. Charles S. Myers, “Music,” in C. G. Seligmann and Brenda Z. Seligmann, The Veddas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911): 344 (no. 11/2); 344 (no. 38); 346 (no. 42); 347 (no. 31A); 350 (no. 44); and 360 (Myers’s lineage table).

Group C

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Islanders. This is the only article, apparently, that Myers published for the British musical readership—all his other work was published in science-oriented journals or monographs. Here Myers compares the music of the Torres Strait and that of the Veddas, and sets out a methodological blueprint of his work as a whole, drawing upon previously published material, distilling it in the following form: (1) the fourth, as sung in Group C of Veddas music, and the modern Murray Island songs, is almost always pure and ascending; (2) the fifth occurs less often than the fourth; and (3) the fact that intervals develop by superaddition of small intervals, again indicating an accrescent evolutionary process. He also emphasizes the importance of the phonograph, techniques of acquiring music in the field, and means of reestablishing accurate pitch and rhythm. The phonograph, to Myers—and later to Fox Strangways—is the indispensable tool of the trade. As he says: “Even highly musical persons are prone to make mistakes if they trust only to transcriptions taken down at the moment the song is being sung by the natives. It must repeatedly happen that important features are overlooked. The most accomplished European musician is only human. We are apt to be guided by our own previous experiences, and to interpret what we hear in the light of them.”74

74. Myers, “The Study of Primitive Music,” 123.

Part Four

Retaining Cultural Identity: A. H. Fox Strangways and the Problems of Transcription

Chapter Fourteen

Transcription and the Problems of Translating Musical Culture The universalizing, yet individualizing, tendencies that evolved out of Myers’s synthesis of evolutionism and individual differences culminate in the work of A. H. Fox Strangways, and in particular his magnum opus The Music of Hindostan (1914). Indeed, there is evidence that the two exchanged ideas and offered one another advice.1 Where Myers, however, derived his sense of individualizing universalism principally from the intellectual landscape of anthropology and psychology, Fox Strangways drew upon the fertile and largely unploughed field of translation. Where this is most evident is in Fox Strangways’s approach to transcription. When Martin Clayton discusses Fox Strangways’s The Music of Hindostan he shows considerable disquiet over the transcriptions for which there are phonograph recordings.2 The source of disagreement is at times somewhat technical, concerning incorrect placement of beats and barlines, wrongly situated pitches, and so forth. At other times the criticisms are more broadly systemic. On the one hand, he refers to problems that are essentially objective—manifestly wrong notes, rhythms, and the like—and on the other hand, he cites interpretational problems that clearly exceed this kind of consideration. More important, however, Clayton delves into the notion of subjectivity where it is found to impinge on the technical (or perhaps more objective) data of transcription. Fox Strangways’s illustration of a “Panjabi ghazal” is a case in point, in which the transcription derives “from the

1. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 42 (July–December 1912), 542: “Dr. C. S. Myers read a paper on ‘The Study of Primitive Music,’ illustrated by lantern slides and phonographic records. The paper was discussed by Messrs. S. H. Ray, Fox-Strangways, and the Chairman [A. P. Maudslay],” and Charles S. Myers, “A Study of Sarawak Music,” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musik-Gesellscaft (1913–14), 297: “I wish also to express my thanks to Mr. A. H. Fox Strangways for many valuable suggestions during the preparation of this paper.” 2. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 86–118.

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subjectivity of transcription as well as the problems resulting from insufficiently intensive fieldwork.”3 Clayton does not stop at illuminating difference between the actuality that period phonograph recordings present and the transcriptions that Fox Strangways provides in conjunction with them. He also debates the origin of what he sees as his frequently subjective interpretations, and here proposes a number of reasons for the form of Fox Strangways’s transcriptions. In instances where Fox Strangways could not identify meter, for example, as in a particular lullaby, he imposes meter nonetheless—albeit compromised by expression indications such as fermatas or rallentando signs—because, in his typical Edwardian way, he could not imagine song without meter, or felt his readership could not. Clayton suggests that this may be due to the possibility that “the invention of metre was a strategy for assigning higher status to a piece.”4 Another reason Clayton gives is that Fox Strangways’s book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is “essentially educative,”5 and as a result aims at making the piece familiar, which he calls “an instance of the ‘Other’ being recreated in ‘our’ image.”6 The following three chapters debate this issue, and revisit the work of Fox Strangways to reassess the nature and significance of his transcriptions, and to situate his universalizing ideas within the context of translation and cultural inscription.

Background Issues in Transcription Behind Clayton’s interpretation of Fox Strangways lie some of the basic questions of music transcription—perhaps the most obvious being the problem of subjectivity. As Alan Merriam says: “Ethnomusicologists are agreed that the ultimate aim of translation to paper is to obtain an accurate picture of a song. . . . How this can best be done, however, and to what extent the details of sound must be faithfully recorded, is open to question.”7 Charles Seeger’s answer is to view transcription as inherently flawed and also—perhaps as a consequence— unsystematically practiced: First, we single out what appear to us to be structures in the other music that resemble structures familiar to us in the notation of the Occidental art and write these down, ignoring everything else for which we have no symbols. Second, we expect the resulting notation to be read by people who do not carry the tradition of the other music.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 103. Ibid., 109. Ibid. Ibid. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 57.

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The result, as read, can only be a conglomeration of structures part European, part non-European, connected by a movement 100% European. To such a riot of subjectivity it is presumptuous indeed to ascribe the designation “scientific.”8

Seeger’s view that transcription is scientifically compromised by its totally subjective nature is echoed countlessly in ethnomusicological writing. Nicholas England, writing on Hukwe song, puts it this way: No system of transcription, mechanical or otherwise, can preserve all of a musical example accurately and it is up to the transcriber to select or emphasize pertinent parts of the entire configuration. The standard western notation system tends to reinforce those aspects of the sound pattern which are compatible with our notation traditions and in varying degrees to distort or omit others.9

Jairazbhoy, in his article on “The ‘Objective’ and Subjective View in Music Transcription,” reiterates this basic concern, that underlying the process of transcription there is invariably a resistant embrace of notational subjectivity. Jairazbhoy is principally interested in developments in sound technology as an aid to transcription, but the same concerns about transcriptional subjectivity permeate his writing, whether writing about old-style musical transcription, or more modern electronically assisted approaches. As he says: Some of the basic premises underlying the development and use of automatic transcribers appear to have been inadequately explored. Hood refers to the objective display produced by automatic notation devices,10 while Bartók comments, “The only true notations are the sound tracks on the record itself.”11 The terms “objective” and “true” surely need qualification. How true to the original was the sound that Bartók heard on the records of his period. Even with perfect electronic recording and play-back equipment, we would still need to question the validity of the above terms, since the precise content of the sounds of an individual instrument or an orchestra depends on the number of factors, such as the location of the listener or microphone(s), the acoustics of the room, etc.12

Jairazbhoy’s references to Bartók and Hood are further examples of a philosophical uncertainty at the root of the transcriptional process, no matter how technologically advanced. Even advances that would seem to have aided objectivity

8. Seeger, “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing,” 184–95, in Shelemay, Musical Transcription, 28–29. 9. England, “Symposium on Transcription and Analysis,” 223–77, in Shelemay, Musical Transcription, 61. 10. See Hood, The Ethnomusicologist, 21. 11. See Bartók and Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, 3. 12. Jairazbhoy, “The ‘Objective’ and Subjective View in Music Transcription,” 263–74, in Shelemay, Musical Transcription, 168.

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do not necessarily superannuate or supersede the need for old-style transcription. In fact, as Jairazbhoy later suggests, it is possible that objectivity can be gained by the use of a subjective system: automatic transcription should not be thought of as a replacement for aural transcription. They perform different but equally justifiable functions. The primary value of automatic transcriptions would be to throw light on what we do not “hear,” what we change in the process of “hearing,” or what we take for granted. . . . However, when the subject of study is concerned with the psychological or communicational aspects of music within a culture, aural transcriptions by a trained ethnomusicologist who has steeped himself in that culture may well be far more meaningful.13

Just what makes an openly subjective transcription meaningful, particularly in relation to an ostensibly more objective kind, is a matter of some speculation, but underlying this basic question remains the fact of the transcriber’s subjectivity. Somehow the transcriber must negotiate expression between two cultures without sacrificing the integrity of either. As Bruno Nettl puts it, he must somehow differentiate between the essential and the nonessential, and yet remain accountable to both cultures: Transcribing music by hand and ear, as it were, is hindered by the situation in which the transcriber is a native of one musical culture trying to write down the music of another culture, a transcriber using a notation system devised for one culture and foreign to the styles in others. Thus, a concept such as the note, which forms the basis of Western musical thinking, might be erroneously applied to another musical culture in which the glides between notes are the essential feature. . . . The slight fluctuations in pitch which occur when a singer performs one tone—the vibrato; the tones he moves through when gliding from one note to the next; the slight differences in length among notes of approximately the same value; all of these should be perceived by the transcriber. Whether they should be written down or not depends on the possibility of distinguishing, in a musical style, between the essential and the nonessential phenomena.14

A Few Nineteenth-Century Antecedents in Indian Music (a) N. Augustus Willard, A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan (1834) As shown above, distinguishing between essential and nonessential phenomena has always been a feature of transcription, whether designed to reflect accurately

13. Jairazbhoy, “The ‘Objective’ and Subjective View,” 270, in Shelemay, Musical Transcription, 174. 14. Nettl, Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology, 102–4.

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its performance within its culture of origin, or adapted to the tastes of another culture. William Jones, as we have seen, struggles to navigate this problem, overlaying his “Hindostannie air” type of transcription with post-Enlightenment and early Romantic aesthetic considerations. As we have seen, by the middle of the nineteenth century these tensions begin to resolve into a more practicable empirical methodology for transcription, epitomized by the considerations of William Dauney, among others. For Dauney, as for those discussed below, “the minds of the person employed [should] be divested of all such preconceived notions . . . they [should] be instructed to take down the music with the strictest fidelity.”15 This same fidelity marks the work of N. Augustus Willard, in his A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan (1834).16 Willard’s treatise is recognized as being important for its reliance on procuring information from performing musicians, rather than from written works on the subject—something for which Willard in fact criticizes Jones.17 As he says: “The only way by which perfection in this can be attained is by studying the original works, and consulting the best living performers, both vocal and instrumental.”18 Willard also criticizes Jones, implicitly, by suggesting that his “observations are very acute and plausible; they appear quite philosophical.”19 Willard can actually be quite harsh on Jones. In the preface he comments that when from the theory of music, a defection took place of its practice, and men of learning confined themselves exclusively to the former, while the latter branch was abandoned to the illiterate, all attempts to elucidate music from rules laid down in books, a science incapable of explanation by mere words, become idle. This is the reason why even so able and eminent an Orientalist as Sir William Jones has failed. Books alone are insufficient to the purpose—we must endeavour to procure solutions from living professors, of whom there are several, although grossly illiterate.20

15. Dauney, “Observations with a View to an Inquiry into the Music of the East,” 3. 16. Willard, A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, 1–122. According to Bor, “little is known about Captain Willard’s private life, except that he commanded in the service of the Nawab of Banda (now in U.P.). Reading his dedication to Lady Bentinck (wife of the reforming governor-general, William Bentinck), in which he refers to ‘my countrymen’ and ‘of one of a community who he [W.B.] has laid under such important obligations,’ one gets the impression that Willard was a Eurasian, a ‘halfcaste.’ This may explain why his name does not appear in the India Office Records. Was he perhaps the son of the musician A. Willard who died in 1825 in Oudh and whose name does appear in the India Office Records?” (Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 51–73, 59). 17. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 50. 18. Willard, A Treatise, 21. 19. Ibid. 20. Willard, A Treatise, 3. Another example of Willard’s disapprobation refers to Jones’s notion that “the nature of the several Rags and Raginees are such as to be really improved by the difference of temperature naturally incident to the varieties

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What is telling here is Willard’s view that theory without reference to practice is effectively meaningless, and that a book about music, but without any music in it, is meaningless as well. His own treatise, as he says, will not allow itself to be subject to this type of criticism: “Should the public consider this work as at all conducive to the end to which it achieves to aspire, it is the intention of the author to lay before them specimens of original Rags and Raginees, set to music, accompanied with short notices, which will serve to elucidate the facts advanced in this volume.”21 (In fact it is not clear that Willard did complete this task.)22 Willard’s point is clear, however: there must be a means of bridging theory and practice, and within the confines of a book itself the only way of doing this is by amplifying theoretical considerations with musical examples. How one does this is another matter, for at the same time as being inaccurate in conveying musical nuance, conventional (i.e., Western) notation developed long after the music itself was composed: It is impossible to convey an accurate idea of music by words or written language; that is, the various degrees of acuteness or gravity of sounds, together with the precise quantity of the duration of each, cannot be expressed by common language, so as to be of any use to performers, and as the musical characters now in use, which alone can express music in the manner that could be desired, is a modern invention, of course all attempts to define music anterior to the invention of this elegant and concise method must have necessarily proved abortive.23

Despite these caveats, Willard maintains that the dynamics of theory bridged to practice by notation go beyond the simple framework of musical transcription, because his intentions are also designed to expand the readers’ sense of beauty. He talks frequently of Indian music “possessing intrinsic claim to beauty in melody,”24 but wonders at the Europeans’ inability to perceive it. At the same time, Willard’s principal concern remains the secure foundation of theoretical knowledge and its implementation in practice, and in this regard he sets out a comprehensive program of explication that mirrors Jones’s, albeit in a much more expanded, and possibly more epistemologically accurate, way. Where Jones wishes to convey poetry into music—thus preserving its originality and purity and making it the voice of nature itself—Willard wishes to convey theory into practice, thus preserving the original philosophical import of Indian musical heritage:

of seasons, even without making allowance for accidental variations, which constantly take place every year” (Willard, A Treatise, 68). 21. Ibid., 3. 22. The Tagore reprint (1882/1994) of Willard does not include musical examples. 23. Willard, A Treatise, 1–2. 24. Ibid., 9.

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During the earlier ages of Hindoostan, music was cultivated by philosophers and men eminent for polite literature, for whom such general directions and rules for composition sufficed, after a course of musical education acquired from living tutors; indeed, the abhorrence of innovation, and veneration for the established national music, which was firmly believed to be of divine origin, precluded the necessity of any other.25

For all of its flaws, Willard’s treatise does attempt to initiate a scholarly program of reclamation, in which scholarship on Indian music (originating in the West or the East) sought imprimatur by reference to original theoretical sources, or what Farrell calls “the imagined purity of its Sanskrit sources”26—a tendency found increasingly as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressed.27

(b) C. R. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891) Of perhaps greater importance, in terms of the number and size of reviews and citations, is The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, by C. R. Day.28 Day’s work was extensively reviewed throughout the press, and advertisements for it appear festooned with increasingly spectacular reviews from The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily News, St. James Gazette, Pall Mall Gazette, Daily Graphic, Globe, Daily Chronicle, Saturday Review, and Manchester Guardian. That Day’s book should garner so much praise is unsurprising, given its breadth of scholarship, but for one reviewer its greatness also lay in the fact that Day wrote his book in situ. As he says: “It would be well if many who represent England’s sword in India followed

25. Ibid., 2. 26. Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 51. 27. Ibid. 28. The fullest biographical information on Day can be found in his obituary by A. J. Hipkins, “Major C. R. Day,” 245–46. Major Charles Russell Day (1860–1900) was educated at Cheam and then Eton. He joined the third Lancashire Militia in 1880, and was gazetted (appointed) to the first Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry in 1882. He left soon after for service in India, where he remained for five years, during which time he gathered material for The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan. Having subsequently returned home due to injury, he was variously promoted, and continued his ethnomusicological work. In 1890 he organized a display of instruments for the Musical Division of the Military Exhibition at Chelsea, and published an extensive catalogue for it. He gave papers for various musical associations and served as a consultant in the British Section of the great Musical Exhibition at Vienna in 1892, among other exhibitions. He was gazetted Major in 1899, and died in South Africa from a war wound. Day produced spin offs from his work (see “Notes on Indian Music,” 45–66), and his book was reviewed exhaustively (for representative reviews see “The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan” [review], Musical Times [December 1, 1891]: 741–42).

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the example set in the forthcoming book on the ‘Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan,’ by Captain Day, and devoted the intervals of military duties to research such as can only be carried on upon the spot. In that case the English nation would know more than now of its great dependency.”29 The same attitude, broadly speaking, reappears in the first Musical Times review in December 1891: “The author of this fascinating work, which should be welcomed by the entire English-speaking world, reminds us that while music is, of all Indian arts, the least known to Europeans, it is also the one which British influence has least encouraged. Let us hope that the publication of this volume will lead to the removal of a reproach which should never have been incurred.”30 Another characteristic that registers in all of the reviews of Day’s book is the extent to which he portrays Indian music as an antecedent to European music. As the reviewer says, Rowbotham devotes only 15 of 630 pages to Hindu music, Chappell only one line.31 Day, on the other hand, cites similarities between Hindu music and that of Turkey and Hungary, and even Scotland. In describing the evolution of music in India, he suggests that the modern theory of music “differs widely from that described in the ancient Sanskrit treatises . . . and, in fact the whole system has undergone a complete change, and gradual refinement, until between the ancient and modern music there exists a difference as clearly marked and perceivable, even to the most casual observer, as between the modern Anglican chant and then ancient Gregorian tones.”32 This quality, of contextualizing by comparative reference, is highlighted in reviews, as is the evolutionary character of Day’s writing. One reviewer writes that the book is of very great value “to the scientific historian of the evolution of music,”33 and another “No future explorer of Eastern song, and no historian investigating the origin of Greek and Hebrew music, can afford to ignore Captain Day’s researches, which throw considerable light on the problems suggested by the scales and modes employed among primitive peoples, and are a precious contribution to the paleology of instrumental music.”34 The portrayal of Day in evolutionist language shows the extent to which that particular template rose in prominence as a means of rationalizing the conventional teleological projection of music, from the earliest days in the East to the

29. Musical Times (April 1, 1891): 207. 30. “The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan” (review), 741. 31. Ibid., 742. See Chappell, The History of Music. Chappell intended four volumes, but fire destroyed material for the second, and no evidence is extant referring to subsequent volumes. See Allen, Philosophies of Music History, 350. 32. Day, cited in “The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan” (review), 742. 33. “The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan by C. R. Day” (advertisement), 285. 34. Ibid.

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advanced civilizations of the West. Whether Day could be said to inveigh his book with evolutionary ideologies is not altogether clear. A. J. Hipkins, author of Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare and Unique (1888), certainly plays on this to some degree in the introduction,35 though the matter could only be said to be implicit in Day’s book. Of critical importance in Day’s work is his relationship to previous scholarship in the field, more particularly to Willard’s A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan and Jones’s “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos.” Day notes, for example, that, despite Willard’s manifest achievements, his descriptions are apt to be vague and questionable in their didactic efficacy.36 Nevertheless, in setting out his own intentions he delineates the pedigree of his own scholarship by highlighting the importance of Jones and Willard: Sir William Jones, at the end of the last century, endeavoured to dispel ideas of this nature [that Indian music did not merit scholarly attention], and his learned essay upon The Musical Modes of the Hindus has formed the basis of almost all Indian musical research. Some forty years later Captain Augustus Willard . . . published an interesting little Treatise upon the Music of Hindustan. . . . Notwithstanding the real interest of both these works they are, unfortunately, of comparatively small practical use to the ordinary music enquirer, unless, indeed, he is fortunate enough to possess a considerable previous knowledge of the subject.37

Day’s not uncritical deference for Jones is obvious more or less from the outset. He reinterprets, for example, the very same transcription that Jones gives and heads it “Translation of the Above,” referring to (and reproducing) Jones’s rendering of the song in its original Eastern notation38 (see example 14.1).

35. According to Cyril Ehrlich, Mantle Hood identifies Hipkins’s preface as “a landmark in ethnomusicology” (The Ethnomusicologist, 90ff.). See Ehrlich, “Hipkins, Alfred (James),” 590. In fact, Hood confused the authorship of the introduction, written by Hipkins, with the preface, written by C. R. Day himself. 36. Day expresses considerable doubt concerning the validity of Willard’s treatise, which seems to typify attitudes toward his work. Day writes, for example: “The actual size of the work, notwithstanding this lengthy table of contents, is but small. The book is very interesting, and affords much valuable information upon Northern Indian music. The descriptions are, however, incomplete in many cases, and the author’s meaning is in places rather vague, and apt to by misleading to those who have not studied the subject” (Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, 160). For more information on Day as researcher on music see Farrell, “Sir William Jones and C. R. Day,” 13–30. 37. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, xv. 38. Ibid., 29.

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Example 14.1. Sir William Jones’s “An Old Indian Air,” in C. R. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, London and New York, 1891; repr. (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1996), 29.

In itself this is perhaps unremarkable, but in fact Day does not transcribe the music as it appears in Jones’s treatise. Instead, he omits the text that Jones very carefully situates beneath the music, and omits—possibly as inappropriate—the title, “An Old Indian Air.” He also criticizes Jones for adopting the key of A major, as opposed to C major, claiming that it would seem “to have been the most natural [key] that would have suggested itself.”39 In a footnote to the “translation,” moreover, Day writes that “This translation must, of course, be more or less hypothetical; and as it is so entirely different in character and style to all modern Indian music, and airs heard now in India which are said to be very ancient, its correctness appears to be very doubtful.”40 More generally, Day’s comments on notation only reinforce his sense of their inadequacy. He admits that there is great difficulty in expressing such music correctly by means of ordinary notation. The peculiarity of the scales or modes employed in Hindu music often raises a difficulty in determining the real tonality of many of the melodies, the Hindu Sa, taken by native musicians as the “Khuruj” or keynote of their scale, not necessarily corresponding to what is the real tonic of the scale.41

Day does not, ostensibly, present a philosophical backdrop to his treatise, as Jones or Willard had done, and neither does he seem to engage in a particularly analytical way with the complexities of transcribing Indian music into Western

39. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, 28. 40. Ibid., 29. 41. Ibid., 62.

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notation. Rather, he treats his topic as a manual of instruction designed to promote a practical outcome in advancing knowledge among Westerners (with the possible indirect bonus of increasing performance), and generally leaves unquestioned the weaknesses of Western notation used in this context. Nonetheless, there is a parallelism that can be drawn between Day’s admitted difficulty in conveying Indian music in Western notation and the greater problems associated with “translating” Indian music into the larger cultural aesthetic of the West. There is, in effect, a systemic complication that, though not unique to Day, nevertheless affects his work from the beginning.42 In his preface, for example, Day starts by referring to the importance of Indian music as part of a larger, presumably home (English), interest in national music, but no sooner has he expressed this point than he claims that Europeans view Indian music as theoretically (i.e., scientifically) wanting: Of late years so many works of importance, dealing with the subject of National music, have appeared that for the publication of this book the author feels that some apology is necessary. The subject of Indian music, presenting, as it does, ideas so fresh and a musical system so distinct from what we in Europe are accustomed to, necessarily, offers an everwidening field for research and study. It is curious to note that while so many works upon the arts or industries of India have, in recent times, appeared, the subject of Indian music has been generally thought devoid of all science and unworthy, therefore, for any serious consideration.43

Day feels compelled to elucidate the science of Indian music as a means of European aesthetic ingress, as if to suggest that European opinion has been impeded by an ingrained lack of theoretical understanding. Thus, at the same time as evincing a broadening cultural interest in “National music,”44 Europeans perceive Indian music as alien both culturally (in terms of national music), and as it were, scientifically (in terms of making sense of its theoretical system). In this

42. This complication, resulting in part from the fundamental problem of transcription, is commented on by Farrell, who gives particular attention to the topic of notation as discussed by late nineteenth-century Indian musicologists writing on Indian music (Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 65–76). In fact Day’s treatise, as Farrell points out, is a direct result of the cooperation between Western and Eastern scholars (73). 43. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, xv. 44. The issue of advancing knowledge of national musics is something that, expectedly, permeates British musicology of the nineteenth century. For a sampling of historiographical material relating specifically to Britain see Zon, Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology, 179–93.

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regard, what Day hopes to achieve is something that attempts to translate music into science and science into knowledge. He does this precisely by underplaying the difference in notational systems—as notation is the lynchpin to this process— and providing material with only a limited reference to transcriptional complications. When listing scales, for example, he claims that the only difference between the original and his transcription is “that European notation has been substituted for the Indian.”45 Of course, because scales are rhythmically disembodied, this approach is somewhat understandable in Day’s terms (although the accuracy of pitch notation is considerably more complicated than Day perhaps allows).46 But as soon as he progresses to the issue of time, the system will not allow for mere substitution, as in scales. In fact, in relation to rhythm, Day is forced to concede that the complications are so great as to necessitate oral, rather than literary, instruction: “Time, by which is implied the relative values of a succession of notes, cannot be expressed with any degree of accuracy without indeed so complicated an arrangement of signs as to be almost unintelligible.”47 Interestingly, however, when presenting scales, Day uses the word “substitution” when referring to their transcription into Western notation, and in this respect he is at variance with his reference to Jones’s “translation” of music from the Ra–gavibodha, the early seventeenth–tha (Sóma). In fact, Day prefaces his own copy of Jones’s century treatise of Somana transcription by referring to it as “rendered into the European notation”48 by Jones. In other words, Day perceives Jones as translating from Sóma but rendering it in modern notation. In this sense, one could argue that, for Day, translation is a form of conveyance from something, whereas rendering is a form of conveyance to something, with substitution occupying that exact middle point which is neither translation nor rendering. It is this fundamental dynamic of translation and its implications for transcription that are is examined in the following chapters.

45. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, 32. 46. Day does consider this issue, and claims that pitch on the piano and Indian instruments is the same: “From my experiments I am led to believe that a wrong idea as to the temperament of the Indian scale—as practically employed—has hitherto been held. I played over all the various scales shown later upon a pianoforte—tuned to equal temperament—in the presence of several well-known Hindustani and Karnâtik musicians, all of whom assured me that they corresponded exactly to those of the vina. Upon comparing the two instruments this was found to be the case—as far as could be judged by the ear alone—in every instance. Native airs are played by the private band of H. H. the Maharajah of Mysore; and as far as melody is concerned they are acknowledged to be perfectly in tune, according to Indian ideas, by all. Native airs are also played by the band of H. H. the Gaeckwar of Baroda, the chief musician at whose court—‘Professor’ Maula Bux—a man of considerable attainments, took pains to explain to me that the tempering of the modern Indian scales differed in no whit from the European” (ibid., 32). 47. Ibid., 36. 48. Ibid., 28.

Chapter Fifteen

A. H. Fox Strangways and Attitudes Toward Song Translation Implicit in Day’s conception of transcription is an aim to universalize music, and it is this type of universalism that Fox Strangways seems to imbibe. Hipkins, for example, suggests that Day does more than situate Indian music within the framework of Western national music scholarship. He universalizes music by equalizing the Western perception of previously marginalized Eastern musics: He [Day] shows us the existence of a really intimate expressive melodic music, capable of greatest refinement of treatment, and altogether outside the experience of the Western musician. What we learn from such inquiries is that the debated opinions of musical theorists, the cherished beliefs of those who devote themselves to the practice of the art, the deductions we evolve from historic studies—all have to be submitted to larger conceptions, based upon a recognition of humanity as evolved from the teachings of ethnology. We must forget what is merely European, national, or conventional, and submit the whole of the phenomena to a philosophical as well as sympathetic consideration.1

In much the same manner, as is shown below, A. H. Fox Strangways universalizes yet culturally individuates music, but rather than basing his ideas on transcription, as Day does, on issues of a more overtly practical kind (music as practice), he grounds his methodology in the context of linguistic translation (music as translation). Thus, in the context of song translation Fox Strangways speaks of that “strange familiarity,” arguing for the use of a “foreignizing,” as opposed to domesticating, type of language. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti divides translation into two types: a “foreignizing” translation that incorporates foreign elements from the original, and a “domesticating” one that does not. Because of its illusory fluency within its translated (as opposed to original) language, the “domesticating” translation is seen to be morally inferior to the “foreignizing” one. The “domesticating” translation makes the translator, as well as the original creation, invisible, as if the

1. Hipkins, “Introduction,” xii.

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translation were the “original,” rather than the original itself—as if the translator were the author, rather than simply the translator. Fox Strangways’s views on translation reflect a similar mindset, and, more important, so do his views on transcription. Where Venuti argues for “abusive fidelity” to the original text, forcing readers to engage with the foreign elements carried over from the original, Fox Strangways suggests that people ought to listen to folk song “all the time with other ears than ours.”2 Venuti ponders how translation can negotiate “the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences, basically domestic,”3 and Fox Strangways, similarly, remarks that “It is but little, in any case, of language, whether spoken or chanted, that symbols can recreate for us.”4 It is his foreignizing attitude that confirms Fox Strangways’s importance as a pioneer in the history of British ethnomusicology. Where, for example, Venuti claims of many historical and modern translators that “Foreignizing the translation in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations,”5 Fox Strangways recognizes that “Cosmopolitan as the music of Europe is, we still feel the distinction of nationality.”6 Indeed, it is the “distinction of nationality” that compromises translation and transcription, and yet it is this same characteristic that, when resisted, affords a culturally individualized methodological template. It is, in fact, in this resistance to national distinction that one finds the glimmerings of a modern and universalizing British ethnomusicology.

Brief Biographical Background According to H. C. Colles and Frank Howes, Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (1859–1948) was an “English musicologist, critic and editor,”7 and to this description Fox Strangways’s frequent musical collaborator, Steuart Wilson, adds schoolmaster.8 Fox Strangways was educated at Wellington College and Balliol

2. Fox Strangways, “Unconscious Music,” 341. 3. Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” 468. 4. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 17–18. 5. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 20. See also Venuti, “The American Tradition,” 305–15. 6. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 2. 7. Colles and Howes, “Fox Strangways, A(rthur) H(enry).” 8. Wilson, “Strangways, Arthur Henry Fox 1859–1948.” For more biographical information on Fox Strangways, see Maine, “A. H. Fox Strangways,” 1–7; Blom et al., “A. H. F. S. Aet LXXX,” 343–51; Blom et al., “A. H. Fox Strangways (1859–1948),” 229–37; Howes, “A. H. Fox Strangways,” 9–14; Rothenstein and Tagore, Imperfect Encounter; and Campbell, Dolmetsch.

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College, Oxford (MA, 1882), and studied subsequently at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. He returned from Berlin to take up a post as schoolmaster at Dulwich College (1884–86), and then as form master at Wellington (1887–1910). He retired from Wellington in 1910, and visited India twice, for reasons of health. Returning to Britain in 1911, he began a career as a music critic for The Times. In 1920, he founded Music and Letters where he remained as sole proprietor and editor until 1936. From 1925 to 1939, he worked as a music critic for the Observer, and from the 1920s he published translations, with Steuart Wilson, of various songs. As a critic he wrote on a wide array of musical topics, as Steuart Wilson’s compilation of his Observer articles attest.9 Today he is generally remembered—in ethnomusicological circles—for his early magnum opus, The Music of Hindostan (1914), his 1933 biography with Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp (Fox Strangways was a member of the Folk Song Society from 1908), and to a much lesser extent his occasional writings on Eastern music and various editions of music.10 As Martin Clayton points out, The Music of Hindostan was still

9. See Fox Strangways (The Selection made by Steuart Wilson), Music Observed. 10. It is not possible, here, to cover in depth Fox Strangways’s huge output, although a thorough examination of his musical editions and writings would be worthwhile to musicology. Fox Strangways produced several music editions, among them songs by J. S. Bach, Brahms, Durante, Kodály, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Wolf (see listings in International Bibliography of Printed Music, Music Manuscripts and Recordings). Various manuscript documentation, dating from 1938 to 1944, concerning song translations/editions can be found in British Library Add. 56236 ff. 52–57 and 87–90; Add. 59670 f. 4; Music. Misc. Hirsch 2758 ff. i–v; and Hirsch 3543. Steuart Wilson, in his DNB article, also refers to typescripts of the translation of all the songs of Brahms, Wolf, Richard Strauss, and most of those of Liszt being submitted to the BBC in 1947 (this has yet to be corroborated). In relation to this work, Fox Strangways also published two volumes with Steuart Wilson, Schubert’s Songs Translated (1924; school edition, 1925); Schumann’s Songs Translated (1929); and according to Wilson “a small album of Brahms” (“Strangways, Arthur Henry Fox 1859–1948”), the last of which has not yet been located. Fox Strangways’s work on The Times and the Observer has not to my knowledge been examined, apart from Music Observed, which is principally a compilation rather than analysis, and neither have his more numerous more scholarly articles received attention. Fox Strangways, however, published in numerous journals, including principally Music and Letters, and also Adelphi, British Musician, Canon, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Listener, Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century and After, Proceedings of the Musical Association, Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, Sackbut, and Zeitschrift für vergelichende Musikwissenschaft (see PCI online under “Fox Strangways, A. H.”). Fox Strangways also published in a number of collected essays and dictionaries, including “Words and Music in Song,” 30–56; “Folk-Song,” 164–83; “Music,” 305–27; “Indian Music” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 241–42; and “Indian Music” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 703–7.

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hailed as a masterpiece even in the latter half of the twentieth century by the likes of Jaap Kunst, Anthony Seeger, and Helen Myers,11 and the work was so highly thought of that Oxford University Press reprinted it in 1965. Not all ethnomusicologists agree with this appraisal, as Clayton’s article indicates. William Malm, in writing a review of the reprint, questions many of Fox Strangways’s ideas, and in fact Clayton’s article is premised on responding to Malm’s plea “to separate the truth from the error.”12 One aspect of Fox Strangways’s career that is usually mentioned in secondary sources, but generally left unexplored, is his work in the area of translation. This facet of his work is referenced in Wilson’s Dictionary of National Biography article, and also in the Colles/Howes entry in Grove, but it is really only Martin Clayton who investigates this aspect of his work in any detail. Nevertheless, it is clear from the multitude of Fox Strangways’s publications that one of his principal interests was that of translation, and in particular German translation. With J. Y. Pearson, for example, he published An Elementary German Grammar for the Use of Wellington College (3d ed., 1901), and as Wilson points out, “In the earlier years of the journal [Music and Letters] Fox Strangways had interested himself in printing translations into English of German lieder, most of which were his own versions.”13 This particular interest led ultimately to the publication of two translation volumes, Schubert’s Songs Translated (1924) and Schumann’s Songs Translated (1929), as well as the compilation of a host of unpublished translation materials.14 This interest is, according to Clayton, also evident in The Music of Hindostan (1914), to the extent that Fox Strangways produces certain musical examples in English translation without the original,15 as is the case with his Schubert and Schumann volumes.16 Clayton describes this characteristic as Fox Strangways’s means of establishing “clarity and understanding,”17 and of advancing the meaning of the text for a readership otherwise incapable of grasping it.

11. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 87. Clayton refers to the following: Kunst, Ethnomusicology, 20; Seeger, “Ethnography of Music,” 99; and Helen Myers “Great Britain,” 142. 12. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 93. See also Malm, “The Music of Hindostan by A. H. Fox Strangways (1914/1965)” (review), 726. 13. Wilson, “Strangways, Arthur Henry Fox 1859–1948.” 14. See fn. 10 above. 15. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 110. 16. It is not clear that Fox Strangways himself translated the foreign texts in The Music of Hindostan, as he makes no prefatory comment in this regard. Occasionally he cites unnamed individuals as having provided a translation, but the translations remain almost entirely unascribed. 17. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 111.

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Attitudes Toward Translation These views are in accord with Fox Strangways’s own from early in his career, and are enshrined in an article for Music and Letters, “Song-Translation” (1921): The object of this paper is to draw attention to the neglected art of song-translation. Translation has, like any other art, a technique and an ideal. The ideal is to put into an English mouth singable words which do not falsify the original, and which succeed in making singer and listener forget that there is such a thing. The technique is that of a poet, as opposed to a versifier, with an exceptionally musical ear, and all technique is thrown away without patience, self-effacement and a conscience. Translation is a neglected art for two or three reasons. Not many people realise that it is art, and so it is usually of inferior quality; few have any idea of the gift and, failing that, the effort required to make a good one; singers will not, or do not, use translations good or bad.18

There are three important features of this quotation. First, like so many translators and translation theorists,19 Fox Strangways elevates translation to the level of an art, and a neglected one at that.20 Second, as an art, translation has both a

18. Fox Strangways, “Song-Translation,” 211. 19. See, for example, Wechsler, Performing Without a Stage. Wechsler calls translation an “odd art” for reasons of translation’s ostensible derivativeness: “Yet literary translation is an odd art. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing fiction or poetry that has already been written, that has someone else’s name on it. . . . Yet literary translation is an art. What makes it so odd an art is that physically a translator does exactly the same thing as a writer” (7). Likewise, see, for example, Venuti, “The Art of Literary Translation,” 16–26; Radice and Reynolds, The Translator’s Art; Warren, The Art of Translation; and Grenoble and Kopper, Essays in the Art and Theory of Translation. 20. The translator’s neglect is a highly controversial issue among translators and theorists. For example, the translator of Italian, William Weaver, goes so far as to say that when “a reviewer neglects to mention the translator at all, the translator should take this omission as a compliment: it means that the reviewer simply wasn’t aware that the book had been written originally in another language. For a translator, this kind of anonymity can be a real achievement” (Venuti, “The Art of Literary Translation,” 26, cited in Venuti, Rethinking Translation, 4.) Lawrence Venuti appears to premise his work on the opposite view, namely, that of obviating the translation, in part to avoid the neglect of the translator. His introduction to Rethinking Translation spells this out: “It [the neglect of the translation] is a situation that looms over any effort to address translation today, rarely getting the scrutiny it so urgently demands. The present anthology proposes an intervention designed to challenge it: to make translation visible by developing a theoretical discourse to study the conditions of the translator’s work, the discursive strategies and institutional structures which determine the production, circulation, and reception of translated texts” (6).

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technique and an ideal. In technique, translation is effectively poetic, aspiring to language’s innately higher musical qualities. As an ideal, it is not merely part of a song’s accoutrement, but an essential ingredient in the conveyance of the song’s art to an audience unfamiliar with its original language: it must succeed “in making singer and listener forget that there is such a thing.”21 Translation is, in other words, a type of cultural decoder that attempts to convey the song without any loss of aesthetic purpose, from its original language into another. It seems to aim—at least on the surface—at an attitude that Lawrence Venuti in fact contemns as “fluency,” insofar as Fox Strangways appears to be obliterating awareness of the original. Third, the translator must have a conscience. Fox Strangways spells this out where he talks of song as a “personal thing.”22 What he means by this is that a song is deeply expressive of the personal nature of its composer. The translator is therefore morally obligated to preserve its originality intact if he is going to oblige the composer morally and adequately portray his song’s personality. To do this, the translation must, of course, be genuine to the original spirit of the song, to the point of appearing as if it were the original. Some of Fox Strangways’s views would appear to be encouraging fluency by sweeping away all memory of an original text. It must be remembered, however, that when Fox Strangways refers to translation he does so in the context of “songtranslation.” He is concerned with translation undertaken specifically for the purposes of musical performance, and as such his views on translation are almost invariably tempered by their usefulness within the context of a song as sung. Nevertheless, his views on literary translation can be separated out, and are at times extremely revealing. When writing of a Heine translation, for example, he seems to advocate an almost shockingly domesticating form of “fluency”: In this old country [England], with its exact scholarship, we shall properly insist on the words being truthfully rendered. But there are various kinds of truth; and, of them, truth to the spirit is the highest. Mr. Alexander Gray is abundantly right in translating Heine’s Und hold mir auch zwölf Riesen, Dir müssen noch starker sein, Als wie der heil’ge Christoph Im Dom zu Köln am Rhein. by And bring me twal’ great giants, A’ men o’ muckle worth— As strang as William Wallace That looks across the Forth23

21. Fox Strangways: “Song-Translation,” 211. 22. Ibid., 219. 23. Ibid., 221.

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Judging from Fox Strangways’s hardy approval of Gray’s translation, it might be assumed that he is advocating a type of fluency. But, significantly, the translation is fluent to excess—it is overly idiomaticized and archaized. Venuti, it could be argued, might place this translation in the same context as he places Francis Newman’s translations of The Odes of Horace (1853), in which Newman purposefully refracts expectation and “foreignizes” the text: Newman’s translations could only be foreignizing in a culturally specific sense, in relation to concepts of “domestic” and “foreign” that distinguished English literary culture in the Victorian period. Thus he saw nothing inconsistent in faulting the modernizing tendencies of previous Horace translators while he himself expurgated the Latin text, inscribing it with an English sense of moral propriety. . . . What is foreignizing about Newman’s translations was not their morality, but their literary discourse, the strangeness of the archaism. This too was homegrown, a rich stew drawn from various periods of English, but it deviated from current usage and cut across various literary discourses.24

So where it would seem that Fox Strangways is approving of “fluent” translation, in which the original is effectively absent, in fact he presents as an ideal a type of translation that to some extent confronts, rather than acquiesces to, the original. The same, it must be said, applies to his notions of song translation, in which his overriding principle is the preservation of melodic fluidity or fluency, but often at the expense of “accurate” translation or the retention of original features in melodic configurations. It is of considerable interest, for example, that he follows his remarks on Gray’s rendition of Heine with the following remarks on Schubert translation (see examples 15.1 and 15.2): But it does not occur to some people (and others would not agree) that a similar truth to the spirit is required with the music. When Schubert writes the essential thing is to get the emphatic words where Armen, Kind, and tot are; and it is quite unimportant whether the intervening notes are similarly detached or even are all there.

Example 15.1. Schubert original. A. H. Fox Strangways, “Song-Translation,” Music and Letters 2 (July 1921): 222.

24. Ibid., 123.

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Consequently, “The boy he held in his arms was dead,” which preserves the note values intact, but puts “held” in the important place instead of “boy,” may not be as good as

Example 15.2. Schubert translation. A. H. Fox Strangways, “Song-Translation,” Music and Letters 2 (July 1921): 222.

Which leaves out one note, slurs two others which had been detached, and, for the reader (but not for the singer) truncates the metre.25

Here again, Fox Strangways goes some way toward disguising the fact that the music is not original. But at the same time he is not advocating a type of fluency that wishes to erase the original, but rather draws the listener and singer into the personal spirit of the composition. This is, plausibly, the element of conscience in his approach: he is not fooling his audience into believing the translation to be the original, but allowing the song to be domestically inscribed with the spirit or personality of the “home” composition. Far from alienating his listener from the original, he is using the translation pragmatically as a means of establishing metaphysical contact, in much the same way that Venuti describes inscription as creating “a domestic community of interest around the translated text, an audience to whom it is intelligible.”26 This is also translation as technique, through domestic inscription, and ideal, through what Venuti calls “the utopian dimension in translation.”27 This same approach is evident in other of Fox Strangways’s articles on words and song. In the roughly contemporary essay, “Words and Music in Song” (1921), he sets out a similar agenda, particularly in regard to the significance of the singer in bringing across the essence of a song: as he says, “words and tones together form the language of personality; for the singer, if he is not a ‘person’ is nothing.”28 “Words and Music in Song” is also far more considered in its historiographical implications than “Song-Translation,” or indeed most of his other Music and Letters

25. 26. 27. 28.

Fox Strangways: “Song-Translation,” 222. Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 477. Ibid., 484. Fox Strangways, “Words and Music in Song,” 30.

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(and other) articles pertaining to translation. For example, he begins by writing that “When, in history, he [man] begins to sing, he rates the words highest. Presently, he hardly knows whether the words or the tune count the most.”29 For Fox Strangways, this conviction is extremely important because it places the words—not the tune—at the advent of musical communication, and he goes on to bemoan the decline in the value of words through history. He, furthermore, finds parallelisms between this decline and the historical progression from “mode” to “key” to “emancipation,” and what he sees as the center of gravity being “gradually shifted from the voice-part to the accompaniment.”30 At the same time he identifies a progression in literature from epic to religious narrative through drama, to “the detached, close-packed, specialized lyric.”31 But underlying these historiographical considerations, Fox Strangways’s views are grounded in his belief in the centrality of the singer’s personality, and hence the quintessential importance in providing convincing translations that effect the most positive results for him: What are we to think of songs where the words are inaudible, or in a foreign language? Should we translate this language? What about the liturgical use of song? What, if we could have them, would make the best subjects for song? Of all these problems there is hardly one over which the singer’s personality will not, in the last resort, triumph.32

Interestingly, Fox Strangways mentions both Herbert Spencer and Darwin, and ponders whether both their theories might not be equally right in relation to the origin of song (Spencer thought music arose from speech; Darwin, vice versa). This rather philosophical angle points to an even more basic question, which is whether words and music are as separable as Spencer and Darwin maintain. For Fox Strangways, it is precisely their inseparability—indeed their cooperation— that gives song its universality, and ultimately its essence as personality: Yet, for the purpose of song, it is best when tones and words do not usurp each other’s characteristics but rely each on their own—when the voice-part forgoes the extreme precision of sound as it is in Nature, and the word-text renounces the highest flights of poetry—when words only borrow the universality of tones and tones the particularity of words.33

To prove his point, Fox Strangways cites incidences of song being so coveted in more remote geographical locations that words and music combine to become “an effluence from a ‘person.’ ”34 They become someone’s personal property,

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid.

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and are so intimately bound together in that person that they define who he is— a medicine man, for example. The words and music are, furthermore, so inextricably linked that one cannot be recalled without the other, as in folk song. But this admittedly primitive situation is not one that Fox Strangways sees as existing in his time, and everywhere there are efforts to undermine it. When he describes the progress of harmony in music, for example, he is unrepentantly backward looking, and even wistful at the loss of word’s “original” relation to music. Clearly he sees a proportional advance in harmony and decline in the value of words as music evolves: The harmony is at all times dictating the form the melody shall take; a Chinese tune, which is unharmonized, is structurally very different from a Gregorian tune, which is unharmonized, and that from a Handelian melody and from a twentieth-century theme. An accompaniment is not, therefore, an adjunct to a song . . . but tends more and more to carry the emotion, and to make the voice the mere vehicle of the words.35

This diachronic attitude toward musical value is particularly illuminating because it identifies Fox Strangways as someone for whom song has been increasingly dislocated from its spiritual basis. It is, at best, merely a shadow of its former glory. To return to the “original” conjunction of music and words, however, is to make song more innately human and universal. It is to return to song as epic, to use Fox Strangways’s literary analogy. Of course, to do this one must by necessity recreate the spiritual qualities in the broadest possible sense. Fox Strangways does this by suggesting that in the best of songs words and music are inextricably complementary: “But at any given moment language is comparatively stationary, like a glacier, whereas tones are at all times in flow, like a river. Words are frozen tones and tones are thawed words.”36 These analogies are more than poetics, because they represent elemental and primitive forces that are bound together by nature. They are preternaturally epic, and they reveal the strength of Fox Strangways’s conviction. Of course, there are composers who do understand this, such as Schubert and Wolf. They seem to comprehend the balance between words and music, but even they are historical and indicative of Fox Strangways’s orientation toward the past. One of the important questions for Fox Strangways is what happens when the words of a song are unintelligible?—“in an unfamiliar foreign language, or inaudible.”37 The answer he gives is that our pleasure in songs is “inferential,” meaning that even if the words cannot be understood, the song, as an overall effect, can “speak” to an audience in some way. In song, however, the level of

35. Fox Strangways, “Words and Music in Song,” 38. 36. Ibid., 44. 37. Ibid., 49.

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inference is dependent upon the type of song, namely, one that is “conscious” (composed art music) or one that is not (folk song). For Fox Strangways, the inference from “conscious” art song can, however, be as emotionally genuine as it is aesthetically afflicted, whereas the inference from “unconscious” folk song is uniformly positive. This is because language is often poorly mediated, as with an “Englishman who cannot speak German singing Schumann, or a Russian who cannot speak English singing Purcell.”38 Another factor in this is of course translation. Fox Strangways says that “Most of us feel that translation is at best a compromise, at worst a desecration.” He takes, for example, Brahms’s use of Hermann Allmers in Feldeinsamkeit, and then its translation by Paul England. In describing England’s translation he says that we seem to find the knapsacked German emerging from the stuffy woods about Todtnau into the free breezes of the hohe Feld of the Schwarzwald satisfactorily replaced by the Englishman in holiday mood toiling up from Steyning and flinging himself upon the short turf of the South Downs.39

He even goes on to say that in some places the music is served better in English than in the original German. Nevertheless, at times a foreign language can throw “a convenient veil over some evitable or inevitable defects.”40 Furthermore, the objection to translation “comes mainly from those who know the original well. . . . There is no solution that would please everybody, but for the Englishman who was brave enough to sing English41 the best thing would be

38. Ibid., 50. 39. Ibid., 51. 40. Ibid., 53. 41. Ibid. The issue of whether it was appropriate to sing in translation is something that must have dogged Fox Strangways and others in pursuit of the same end. Edward Dent, in his small tribute essay to Fox Strangways, in Blom et al., “A. H. Fox Strangways,” 344–47, rather tellingly writes: “he [Fox Strangways] is interested in educating musicians, in trying to make them more conscious of a culture outside the narrow limits of music itself. It was for that reason that he devoted himself to the translation of Schubert’s songs. Our singers are still shy of English translations: it is not considered quite good form to sing Schubert in English” (346). Dent intersperses his reflections on Fox Strangways with comments of his own on translation. These are not uninteresting, and in some ways a departure from Fox Strangways’s own views: “Originality of style is not wanted in a translation: lyrical translation (as Walter Headlam pointed out long ago) depends mainly on finding the right English model to imitate. The translation of single lyrics is infinitely harder than the translation of opera, because first, the poem must be translated as near literally as possible, and secondly a far higher poetical standard has to be maintained. What gives the translations by Fox Strangways their peculiar distinction is the wide range of English literature that is stored up in his own brain” (346–47).

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to print the original, or an English prose epitome of it, and sing any good translation he could find.”42 The presence of Fox Strangways’s italics is not insignificant, for it shows how the consciousness of the original must not be entirely lost, despite the efforts of translation to suspend awareness of it. It may also explain still further Fox Strangways’s perhaps rarefied usage of the hyphen in “SongTranslation,” as if song and its translation are more intimately bound together than two separate words might suggest. In any event, Fox Strangways’s remarks are entirely consistent, because it is only when the original is not lost that the personality of the singer is able to portray and genuinely reflect the spirit of the original. It is the singer who gives life to the music; after all, a “song as it is actually sung looks a poor thing on paper. . . . But the translator’s business is not for the eye. He has above all things to hear the song as sung, and at all times to come to the singer’s support.”43 Coming to the singer’s support, for Fox Strangways, is creating a translation that time-travels to an “epic” period when words and music were conjoined inextricably—when “consciousness” did not exist and when inference was unnecessary. The translation must echo these qualities if it is to be any good at all. As Walter Benjamin says, “The task of the translator consists of finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.”44 This is fundamentally what Fox Strangways aims to do—to produce a translation that constitutes a presence of the original foreignness. This is also Lawrence Venuti’s take on Walter Benjamin’s article on translation. In introducing Benjamin’s essay in The Translation Studies Reader, Venuti remarks: A key assumption in this development [in the rise of translation studies] is the autonomy of translation, its status as a text in its own right, derivative but nonetheless independent as a work of signification. In Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay . . . a translation participates in the “afterlife” (Überleben) of the foreign text, enacting an interpretation that is informed by a history of reception (“the age of its fame”). This interpretation does more than transmit messages; it recreates the values that accrued to the foreign text over time.45

Venuti goes on to reveal Benjamin’s almost musical terminology: “For Benjamin, translation offered a utopian vision of linguistic ‘harmony.’ ”46 And indeed Benjamin’s ideas would potentially have great resonance with Fox Strangways: “Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter,” writes Benjamin, “come into being when in the course of its survival a work has

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Fox Strangways, “Words and Music in Song,” 53. Fox Strangways, “Song-Translation,” 221. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 77. Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 11. Ibid.

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reached the age of its fame. . . . The life of the originals attains in them to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.”47 Even Derrida, as Venuti is careful to point out, also adopts a view not unlike Benjamin’s, of translation being “a moment in the growth of the original.”48 Another feature of Benjamin’s essay that would also resonate with Fox Strangways is the idea that “Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as a mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.”49 Here Benjamin uses the word “mode” in a way that connotes not only a term of technique but also a philosophical ideal, and to this extent would seem to parallel Fox Strangways’s basic definition of translation as being divided between both of these same terms. In connoting the term as an ideal, Benjamin also uses the word “mode” in a way that parallels Fox Strangways’s use of it in relation to the very earliest historiographical period in music, before “key” or “emancipation.” This period signifies that apex of conjoinedness between languages, between words and music, when “consciousness” had not yet dawned and music was noninferential. It is this same period that the good song-translator ought to consider as his ideal, and which his conscience should lead him toward, because there was a “kinship” between words and music that subsequently declined. Benjamin also talks of translation revealing “the kinship of languages.”50 He refers to it as effecting, in the best cases, a consciousness of the universality and, at some level, the original interrelatedness of different languages: “As for the posited central kinship of languages, it is marked by a distinctive convergence. Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.”51 For Fox Strangways, this same universality, conjoinedness— or kinship—is also at root in the relationship of words and music in good

47. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” cited in Venuti, Rethinking Translation, 7. Venuti goes on to say that “A translation canonizes the foreign text, validating its fame by enabling its survival” (7). But no sooner does he suggest this, in accordance with Benjamin’s thoughts, he introduces Paul de Man’s notion that the presence of a translation cancels out the originality of the original: “Yet the afterlife made possible by translation simultaneously cancels the originality of the foreign text by revealing its dependence on a derivative form” (7). This is not something that necessarily holds for music, at least in Fox Strangways’s terms, as the canonicity of foreign art songs in their native language is generally uncontested; hence Fox Strangways’s (and others’) difficulties in the popular acceptance of foreign songs sung in English translation. 48. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” 188, cited in Venuti, Rethinking Translation, 7. 49. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 16. 50. Ibid., 17. 51. Ibid.

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song-translation, but is mediated by the practical needs imposed by translation for song. As he says, “the language of words is familiar to all; the language of tones is habitual to a few.”52 Nevertheless, the basic principle—from a practical standpoint—remains that the best translations for songs are those that establish an almost primordial “kinship” with the original. Only then can the personality of the singer bring the song across successfully. A further aspect of Benjamin that seems to coincide with Fox Strangways is his belief that translation—however much it must echo the original—is not meant to be its equivalent. He writes that “If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translations, this is not accomplished through a vague alikeness between adaptation and original. It stands to reason that kinship does not necessarily involve likeness.”53 Fox Strangways would presumably agree with this, as so much of his translation is purposefully unlike the original in the transference of exact linguistic components. Fox Strangways, as we have seen, prefers at times an almost impressionist rewrite. As he says in “The Translation of Words for Music” (The Nineteenth Century and After, 1925), “The world wavers in its taste between a translation and an adaptation, and the art of translation for music stands in the debatable ground between them, and constitutes a ‘version’ which can at any moment be either.”54 What lies behind this pragmatism is Fox Strangways’s conviction that the translator considers what the composer originally found in the poem, and how he can enable the singer to best portray this: “Its [the translation’s] final allegiance is due not to the poem, but to the music, and the best way of giving that allegiance is to think what it was that the composer found in the poem and what it is that the singer can put there; and these will not necessarily be the same things as moved the poet to write it, or to write it in that way.”55 This not only confirms Fox Strangways’s attitude toward translation—that equivalency is impossible and unwanted—but also shows how far he is willing to distance the text to get nearer to it. He is not searching for equivalence, but kinship, and a type of translation that speaks from the root of all languages. It is what George Steiner identifies in Benjamin as the drive toward “die reine Sprache,” a “pure language” that “makes speech meaningful but which is contained in no single spoken idiom.”56 In “The Translation of Words for Music” this feature is perhaps

52. Fox Strangways, “Words and Music in Song,” 32. 53. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 18. 54. Fox Strangways, “The Translation of Words for Music,” 307. 55. Ibid. 56. Steiner, After Babel, 67. It is of some interest that Steiner is one of the few translation theorists, to my knowledge, to discuss music in any depth. He does in fact mention Fox Strangways, not in the context of Benjamin, but in his section “Topologies of Culture 1” (436–46), in which he says that “A. H. Fox Strangways’s ‘SongTranslation’ (Music and Letters, II, 1921) remains the most sensible advocacy yet of

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more apparent than elsewhere, because ultimately Fox Strangways’s aim is not to make foreign songs English, but to make them intelligible to the English: Difficult as the simplest things always are to do, we have abundant examples in our folksongs, and plenty of people who enjoy these, and plenty, too, of people who, though they would blush to call themselves poets, could impregnate themselves with the unconscious spirit of those songs and use it for the practical purpose of domesticating the songs of other nations.57

The term “domesticating” is rather troublesome, because it suggests the erasure of original foreignness. And, at the same time, Fox Strangways uses the term “unconscious spirit,” as if the process of domestication in some way represents a long-overdue redemption of goods lost before consciousness. In fact he shows great concern for retaining both the foreign and domestic in translation. In a brief article, “Unconscious Music” (1923), Fox Strangways refers to Irish folk song or Indian music and suggests that people who listen to folk song or Indian song listen “all the time with other ears than ours.”58 They listen with foreign ears, but look with domestic eyes. Their experience of the music is domesticated, rather than domestic. As Fox Strangways says: There was nothing in common, often enough, between them [folk song collectors] and the people they got them from, but the love of music; and then, there was everything; both got suddenly down to the things that matter. Can a man forget this if he has ever gone through it, and can “conscious” music ever mean quite the same thing to him as this?59

But this is precisely Fox Strangways’s point in translation—that the translation should domesticate without being domestic if it is to foreignize without being foreign. What this means is that Fox Strangways’s song-translations seek to illuminate a text’s foreignness within a universalizing framework, and therefore adopt the meaning of the original without necessarily paying homage to its image. This approach is, it must be said, enormously similar, at least in ethos, to Lawrence Venuti’s idea of a community presence within translation: “The interests that bind the community through a translation are not simply focused on the foreign

the translation of foreign lyrics into English” (440, fn. 1). Steiner also mentions Herbert F. Peyser’s “Some Observations on Translation,” which represents a counterargument to Fox Strangways’s views. Steiner paraphrases him, saying that “ ‘the peculiar clang-tint’ of each individual language, particularly when set to music, makes all but exceptional virtuosities of translation futile” (440). 57. Fox Strangways, “The Translation of Words for Music,” 318. 58. Fox Strangways, “Unconscious Music,” 341. 59. Ibid., 342.

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text, but reflected in the domestic values, beliefs, and representations that the translator inscribes in it.”60 No doubt, Fox Strangways would agree with this in principle, because at root he sees translation as a force that universalizes. There are, after all, “as many languages as man makes things.”61

60. Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 477. 61. Fox Strangways, “Language,” 33.

Chapter Sixteen

Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan As Martin Clayton suggests, the putative relationship between translation and transcription in Fox Strangways is problematical: It is tempting, moreover, to see Fox Strangways’s whole project in terms of his passions for translation. Musical sound is, of course, untranslatable: a musical transcription is essentially a graphic representation of a temporal, sonic form, whereas a text transcription, however unsatisfactory, attains the status of a linguistic text in its own right. It is often argued, of course, that much literature is also “untranslatable” and can in fact only be transformed into essentially new literary products. The difficulties of literary translation are, however, of a different order from those of musical translation: since musical meaning is so ephemeral and, largely, non-referential, it is surely impossible to conceive of expressing the meaning of one piece of music in another musical language.1

As Clayton partially concedes slightly later on, however, it is possible to view transcription as translation, not simply because of their range of metaphoric similarities, discussed below, but also because of the very subjective nature of the two and the way in which that subjectivity is resisted. Interestingly, he does remark that Fox Strangways’s transcription could be seen as quasi-translation: the original unwritten music is committed to the written page and assigned a fictional metre, so that (like a translation perhaps) it becomes more familiar, while also becoming something different in kind from the source document. One can imagine a musically literate Western reader humming some version of the tune, derived from and yet quite different from the original. The transcription is, in a sense, an authentic cultural document of a particular kind—a product of the interaction between individuals of different cultural backgrounds within a particular (colonial,

1. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 110. Clayton suggests this parallelism on the basis of Fox Strangways’s translations in The Music of Hindostan, as well as work on German lieder texts.

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Edwardian . . .) context. Its relationship to the music may be tenuous, but it could be argued that as long as we see it for what it is, it remains a valuable document.2

Clayton’s argument against transcription as translation is based on the idea that musical meaning is nontransferable across different musical languages. Once transferred, accordingly, music can only really achieve the status of quasi-translation, in the sense of establishing merely a residue of its original meaning in its original musical language. In that way one could say that the musical invariant is lost, refracted, or subsumed in conveyance, and that this is reflected in the inevitable subjectivity of the transcriber’s art. Clayton also perceives in Fox Strangways a colonial complicity in which resistance to transcriptional subjectivity is forfeited to general readability, public approbation, and descriptive communication. On the contrary, it could be suggested that although Fox Strangways is accepting of the wider concerns of anyone producing a book for a particular market, the nature of his transcriptions—despite their obvious technical limitations— exhibits qualities of foreignization.

Transcription as Translation: The Music of Hindostan Each of Fox Strangways’s predecessors—Jones, Willard, and Day—it could be argued, are committed to some kind of universalizing yet individualizing process, or at the very least a process of cultural exchange through translation in the broadest sense. For Jones, it is essentially a case of translating poetry into music; for Willard, translating theory into practice; and for Day, translating music into science and ultimately knowledge. For Jones, Indian music is ultimately composition; for Willard, it is performance; and for Day, cultural knowledge and understanding. Of all of these models, it is Day’s that bears the most relevance for certain future scholars. It is the one that most attempts to situate Indian music within a larger, rather than culturally self-contained, intellectual framework—what Hipkins calls “philosophical as well as sympathetic consideration”—and it is, consequently, the only one to carry any real weight of ethnological import, despite the fact that Willard and Jones are frequent sources of information for later early twentieth-century Western and Indian musicologists. Fox Strangways refers to Day on the very first page of the preface to The Music of Hindostan (1914),3 and proceeds—like Day—to place his study in the context of the study of national musics: The study of Indian music is of interest to all who care for song, and of special interest to those who have studied the early stages of song in mediaeval Europe or ancient

2. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 111. 3. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, v.

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Greece. For here is the living language of which in those we have only dead examples. It is hardly possible in the case of modern European Folk-song to study melody pure and simple, for we have no large body of such song of which we can certainly say that it was not influenced at all by the current conception of harmony. But here is melody absolutely untouched by harmony, which has developed through many centuries tendencies which have the force of laws; and the examination of these enables us to some extent to separate the respective contributions of melody and harmony to the final effect in our own music.4

Fox Strangways’s view—that the music of Hindostan represents a living fossil that Europeans can, gratifyingly, use to reflect on their own musical history—is a concept pervasive throughout his book. Not unlike Day, Willard, or Jones, it is the development of European music into harmony that he perceives as the crucial historical turning point.5 Whereas Europe progressed into harmony, India remained unaffected, and its legacy of musical isolation (i.e., Western ignorance) owes its origin mainly to this historical phenomenon. This separation of harmony and melody, as emblematic of cultural barrier, is something that Fox Strangways wants to explain and, to all intents and purposes, reverse, so that Europeans can reflect on Eastern music without aesthetic prejudice or bias. His means of doing so are—like Day’s—to minimize, at least initially, the significance of transcription as an emblem of difference and at the same time to place the harmony/melody problem in a framework that speaks to English readers from the heart—in other words, through reference to English folk song.

4. Ibid. 5. Day writes, for example, that “The only harmony, if it can be called so, is a continuation as a pedal of the tonic or dominant, as was done in old ‘pastorals,’ and which is still found in Scotch or Irish bagpipe music” (Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, 12). Willard writes that “Harmony, in the present acceptation of the word, is a plant whose native soil is Europe, when it has been transplanted to some other countries; but all the native culture of music has not been able to make it grow spontaneously in any other part of the world as in its indigenous soil and climate. Wherever else it is found, it is exotic. The only harmony which Hindoostanee music generally admits of, and indeed requires, if it can be called harmony is a continuation of its key note, in which respect it resembles very much the Scotch pastorals, or the instrument accompanies the voice in unison, as was the practice in Europe, until towards the end of St Lewis’s reign in the thirteenth century” (Willard, A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, in Tagore, Hindu Music, 54); and Jones writes that “the Hindoos . . . seem ignorant of our complicated harmony” (Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” in Tagore, Hindu Music, 130), and goes on to compare Hindu modes to the modes of Plain Song: “we must not confound them [Hindus] with our modern modes, which result from the system of accords [harmony] now established in Europe; they may rather be compared with those of the Roman Church, where some valuable remnants of old Grecian music are preserved in the sweet, majestic, simple, and affecting strains of the Plain Song” (ibid., 130–31).

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After a few introductory words Fox Strangways indicates that notation (Indian) is not to be dealt with in The Music of Hindostan: “About the latter [notation] there is very little to say except that it is a Tonic Sol-fa notation of which the various local scripts and special signs are easily mastered.”6 Nevertheless, notation, in its European form, comprises an extremely important part of his book: “There are almost 500 music examples in The Music of Hindostan and, apart from a few quotations from Western pieces which serve as comparisons, most are of Indian music. Most of these appear to be transcriptions made in the field or transnotations from Indian sources.”7 Fox Strangways’s thoughts on transcription are found at the opening of his first chapter, where he describes his tour of India (1910–11) and then gives an indication of his field methodology: It must be understood that though many of these melodies were in queer scales, no attempt has been made, beyond an occasional superscript , , or
where the effect was characteristic, to represent niceties of intonation. Where such signs are not appended it does not necessarily mean that the songs were in the normal scale; perhaps the singers were finding their voice and the initial vagaries were not worth recording, or the tune only came once or twice—though generally it came a great many times—or perhaps I was not attending. It would have been good to have been able to note the exact pitch in each case; but the absence of the proper means made this, except in a few instances, impossible. A phonograph cannot be carried on the person or unlimbered and brought into action in half a minute, like a camera; there are also conditions, such as distance of the sound, or movement of the producer (e.g. in dancing) with attendant dust, which preclude its employment altogether. Secondly, as it is impossible for the European reader to reproduce the local colour which is imparted by curiosities of grace-note or of intonation, it is unnecessary to trouble him with them at this stage. And, lastly in attacking a new subject, as for Europeans, in spite of Captain Day’s excellent book, this must be called, it is better to treat intonation by itself. . . . It is but little, in any case, of language, whether spoken or chanted, that symbols can recreate for us; and when, as here, the choice lies between symbols which falsify but are understood and symbols which tell the truth but are not readily intelligible, there is no doubt which must be adopted to convey a first general impression.8

What is apparent by the end of this methodological précis is the fact that, although he does work towards a utilitarian solution, Fox Strangways considers the problem of transcription insoluble, owing to the inherent compromise which it represents. Transcription is unable to portray minutiae of intonation, or reproduce local colour by ornamentation, for example, and more importantly it

6. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, vi. 7. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 89–90. Clayton’s article, in fact, revolves around the early recordings, found in the International Music Collection of the British Library National Sound Archive, of thirteen notated sources from The Music of Hindostan (ibid., 90). 8. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 17–18.

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Example 16.1. Madras melody. A. H. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 21.

Example 16.2. Raipur flute melody. A. H. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 30–31.

is dogged by the absence of universal musical signs. These imperfections are acknowledged frequently in Fox Strangways’s transcriptions, by his often detailed prefatory remarks to most tunes. Commenting on one melody, seen in example 16.1, he writes “The C was slightly sharp; the intervals C–B and B–A seemed to be about equal.”9

9. Ibid., 21.

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In another instance, seen in example 16.2, of flute playing: “Assuming the C to be in tune the higher notes were all a little flat, the F most so, and the lower one a little sharp; the C itself sharpened a good deal under the overblowing of the crescendo.”10 These remarks, which characteristically dot his book, are principally underlain by doubts about the translatability of musical signs across aesthetically opposed cultures, and they confirm the method behind Fox Strangways’s basic approach to transcription. In order to translate faithfully an Eastern musical reality (music as performed in the field) into an unbiased Western appreciation, the notation must, in practice, be supplemented by textual explanation, and this in the same way that a modern tune can, or indeed must, be supplemented by harmony. In other words, for Fox Strangways, one must think Indian but somehow speak English, and must make a virtue of it because authenticity speaks to an Englishman more than words or music combined. This is especially telling when Fox Strangways refers to song-translation: Cosmopolitan as the music of Europe is, we still feel the distinction of nationality. In a song by a foreign composer, whether the words are translations from his language or are originals in our own, we are conscious of passages in the music itself which to us, do not seem, to be quite the natural expression of the sentiment of the song. A German hardly seems to get at the conciseness nor a Frenchman at the dignity of what we feel. And it is a true instinct which leads singers to employ the language of the foreign composer rather than a translation, even when it is by Paul England at his best, or than the original English, even when the words are by Scott or Burns.11

What Fox Strangways identifies here is not something that he applies or advocates in his book, or elsewhere in his translation work, because if the translation of foreignness comes at the complete loss of authenticity—and authenticity is the ultimate aim—no translation (or transcription) could be considered a faithful rendering of an original musical source. As Fox Strangways’s book is ultimately pragmatic (rather than idealistic), insofar as it does transcribe music, it is premised on the possibility that transcription, however faulty, can still convey musical meaning to the reader. On a practical musical level, Fox Strangways portrays this difficulty by glossing his transcriptions with textual comments. But on a more theoretical level, he does this by exploring parallelisms between folk song and Indian music (among other things), and in particular by highlighting

10. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 30. 11. Ibid., 2. Interestingly, in a later article Fox Strangways seems to be even more convinced that one can only hear foreign music in situ. He comments that “If you think you would like to hear Indian music, you must, I am afraid, go to India; we can gather little from what comes here, because we have no points de repère” (A. H. Fox Strangways, “Indian Music,” Sackbut, 154).

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that point in history at which melody progressed to harmony. In other words, he elevates the historical juncture of separation that compromises the nature of the musical transcription to the level of cultural phenomenon. He does this by first playing on the idea of familiarity, in this case in relation to how we (Britons) today contemplate medieval polyphonic music: They [melodies] appeal by their freshness and strangeness, but still more by an intimate familiarity. . . . Here the different convention helps rather than hinders him [the listener]; just as his deepest intimations of those thoughts which are beyond words are conveyed to him more easily in Elizabethan language and in Hebrew phraseology than in any other form. It is this strange familiarity, which we are conscious of in Indian melody, that makes us sure that “though our language is different and our habits are dissimilar, at the bottom our hearts are one.”12

Here Fox Strangways suggests that it is difference that can in fact aid a sense of familiarity, and through it direct the listener to a more meaningful appreciation of what might seem historically foreign but culturally native. Somewhat later, he extends this seeming contradiction to the issue of folk song, asking again whether difference—in this case the sound of folk song melody without harmony—can ultimately benefit or undermine appreciation. The problem, as he describes it, “is a difficult one, for if harmonized folk-song, like a restored cathedral, is a persistent lie, yet a folk-song without harmony seems, at any rate for most of us, to fall to pieces, like a picture without perspective.”13 This same issue is complicated by the fact that once harmony exists it is almost impossible to perceive a melody without considering its harmonic implications, and vice versa. Folk song is a supreme example of this problem, as Fox Strangways shows, because its harmony is so ingrained historically—despite being originally a purely melodic form—that today it is almost impossible to separate melody from harmony without sacrificing appreciation. In fact folk song, in these terms, is exactly to historical genre what translation is to literature and transcription is to music. It is the principal metaphor through which Fox Strangways can convey Indian music to the West—or, in essence, culturally transcribe it—and it is through reference to English folk song that difference is also at its most familiar.14

12. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 3. 13. Ibid. 14. This is not to suggest that Fox Strangways considered all Indian music is in some way folk song. This is made clear in, among other places, his article “Indian Folksong,” in which he delineates certain Cingalese folk songs from art music of the area (Fox Strangways [The Selection made by Steuart Wilson], Music Observed, 13). Interestingly, in The Music of Hindostan, reference to folk song is indexed under “European” (Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 355, 356).

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The Case of Sóma’s Air As indicated previously, one of the first things Fox Strangways mentions in The Music of Hindostan is C. R. Day’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan. Although it could be argued that Fox Strangways is merely identifying an empirical relationship to Day’s work, it is also the case that Fox Strangways is in some sense allying himself to Day on a more philosophical and methodological basis. Day has already been seen in relation to earlier Orientalists—particularly William Jones—as reconstituting transcription in a more accurate, and in his own terms, more plausible rendering. He revises Jones’s transcription of “An Old Indian Air” (Sóma’s Air), and writes specifically that “This translation must, of course, be more or less hypothetical; and as it is entirely different in character and style to all modern Indian music, and airs heard now in India which are said to be very ancient, its correctness appears to be very doubtful.”15 Day also expresses concern over how one can translate music correctly “by means of ordinary notation”16 and goes on to argue, implicitly, that this problem may have something to do with the perception of Indian music as somehow faulty, or scientifically wanting. In fact, Day proposes that not the music itself is wanting, but that the way in which the music is transcribed is the problem. Day’s response to this is, initially, to underplay the significance of notational difference, and thereby express difference through similarity with Western notational systems. But having done this, he recants and argues that Western notation must be supplemented by oral instruction if it is to be understood at all, particularly in relation to time values.17 This is indicative in his reference to Jones’s transcription of music from Sóma where he describes it as “rendered into the European notation,” rather than translated, as Jones himself describes it. Day’s hesitancy in using the term “translate” is not coincidental, because it suggests a resistance to what he perceives as the subjectivity of Jones’s copy. Day, in his own terms, is unsatisfied that Jones has sufficiently maintained difference, and at the same time he reckons that Jones has not achieved a bridge between what is “translated from” and what is “rendered into.” In other words, there is, in Day’s estimation, a gap between the meaning of the invariant as it is, and the meaning of the invariant as it is portrayed. For Day this gap represents the gap of practice and science, and eventually science and broader cultural appreciation of the foreign within the domestic. It also signifies Day’s fundamental awareness that the signs of notation are in themselves insufficient for the purposes of transcription because they do not express difference in an intelligible way. Day’s solution—or compromise—is to

15. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, xv. 16. Ibid., 62. 17. Ibid., 36.

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suggest that conventional notation be considered alongside verbal instruction. In this rather commonsense prescription he would appear to acknowledge, if nothing else, at least the need for some resistance to the domestic, and conversely some approval for the foreign. He is, in essence, a soft foreignizer who—rather than the more aggressive foreignizer of Venuti—would signify difference of the foreign text by disrupting the cultural codes of the domestic.18 As Hipkins perhaps rather curiously says in his introduction, Day “shows us the existence of really intimate expressive melodic music, capable of the greatest refinement of treatment, and altogether outside the experience of the Western musician.”19 Day does not really do this, because the manner in which he frames the music—his transcription of it—is in Western notation, and hence within the experience of the Western musician. What is not, however, is the full range of the musical meaning behind the latticework of notation—the musical invariant—which Day admits is an irreconcilable effect of communicating the foreign within the domestic. Indeed, without reference to the living foreign, the transcribed foreign is, for Day, untranslatable. This same view, that textual transcription relies upon oral (practical) as well as written (theoretical) instruction, is encountered in Willard’s A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, as even Day himself recognizes. As Willard says: “The only way by which perfection in this can be attained is by studying the original works, and consulting the best living performances, both vocal and instrumental.”20 For Willard the resistance of the subjective is the resistance of the domestic, insofar as reference to living performers is required to complete the act of transcription. And Willard, like Day, is hostile to what he sees as Jones’s failure to remove the domestic from the foreign, or, it might be said, the poetic from the musical. For Willard, Jones fails precisely because he has retained the domestic (the poetic) in the foreign (the music) without resistance. He has in fact allowed the music to embrace the poetic to the point of transparency, or fluency. He has made the transcriber culturally invisible. Day’s criticism of Willard, and indeed Willard’s of Jones, represents the inability of successive generations of Orientalists to come to terms with the manifold problems of transcription. In this respect Fox Strangways is no different, and on a certain level one could say that his manner of transcription does not differ from that of his predecessors. What is different, as intimated before, is the fact that Fox Strangways situates Indian music within the larger context of national music, and by doing so views transcription as something that can be used to express difference within similarity, foreignness within domesticness, Indian music within the universal love of national music. So on a conceptual level, Fox Strangways’s book is pred-

18. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 20. 19. Hipkins, “Introduction,” in Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, xii. 20. Willard, A Treatise, 21.

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icated on the idea that cultural juxtaposition can communicate the meaning of a musical text if the foreignness is, as it were, domestically inscribed, or as Lydia Liu says, productively distorted.21 In writing on folk song, for example, in the introductory volume of the Oxford History of Music, Fox Strangways actually takes the reader through what is perhaps an unexpected journey. Rather than opening with the domestic and English national folk song he begins by providing a completely abstract definition of folk song, strangely lacking in any sense of nationness whatsoever. He also defines folk song in a manner that seems inherently problematizing: “A folksong (1) originates with the voice, not with an instrument; (2) its rhythm is affected by the words; (3) it is not written down; (4) it is conceived as a melody without harmony.”22 What is especially problematizing here is the fact that a folk song is, by definition, not written down, and it has no harmony. These are issues alluded to in The Music of Hindostan, but here they appear, abstracted from the very cultural context—the domestic context—that might give even greater meaning to their foreignness. Fox Strangways examines each of these four points in brief before a much longer explanation of each point over the course of the article. Interestingly, over the full length of the article the focus shifts from Eastern folk song in reference to points (1) and (2), to Western folk song in points (2), (3), and (4), and the article ends with a number of analogies that attempt to place folk song in some kind of domesticating context. One goes as follows: If there are any who doubt that charm, it is probably because they have not heard folksong in its native haunts. Being itself a perfectly sincere thing, its charm does not survive publicity, nor the treatment of the song as something quaint, still less as something to be exploited. Folk-song is like a hedgerow flower, which, when plucked, withers more quickly than one from a garden.23

The analogy is rather interesting, because it supposes that folk song, as a species of music, begins from a point of cultural deficit and that it is consequently more delicate, and possibly more precious. Fox Strangways also refers to folk song being heard in its native haunts, and in this sense it is not dissimilar to his view of the propriety of songs being sung in their own original language, rather than in translation. Folk song is also a perfectly sincere, and one might even say innocent, musical form—genuine in what it represents, and somehow accepting of its own difference and musical status. It is, after all, just “a hedgerow flower.” As a compliant medium, folk song is, therefore, the perfect weapon for undermining domestic sensibilities about music, namely, that there is a medium in which music does not have harmony and should not be notated. There is, moreover, something dissident about the idea of not simply expressing this notion, but then having to

21. Liu, Translingual Practice, Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, 103. 22. Fox Strangways, “Folk-song,” 164. 23. Ibid., 181.

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contravene one’s own definition in order to explain it. There is, in this sense, in every folk song transcription an act of generic dissension, an act against the domestically defined nature of it, and an act of hostility to the literary context in which the folk song is transcribed. There is, on some level, an act—by necessity—of abusive fidelity, a foreignization, in which the source music is conveyed into the target notation. When Fox Strangways describes folk song as not suffering publicity well, he nonetheless publicizes it, and by virtue of this subjects it to a process of some degree of foreignization that militates against the subjectivity of domestication. As Venuti points out, some theorists, both historical and modern, regard the notion of abusive fidelity “as a strategic choice, at least partly within the translator’s control.”24 But here is a case in which transcription necessitates this type of fidelity, because the musical genre (folk song) does not, by definition, allow for transcription. Any transcription that fell into this category (and it is not the intention here to suggest that Fox Strangways considers all foreign music folk song) could therefore be an act of aggression against the genre, as defined by a domesticating culture. So whereas it would appear that Fox Strangways’s transcriptions of this type are, according to Clayton, sometimes flawed and expressive of a domesticating mindset, intent on fluid and fluent transcription, Fox Strangways is actually presenting material that is in itself culturally foreign, even if nationally domestic. In addition—and perhaps more important—although Fox Strangways transcribes in a way that obviously tries to communicate in the fullness and richness of Western notation, he nonetheless frequently provides annotations in considerable detail (as shown in examples 16.1 and 16.2), and in so doing seems to compromise the integrity of the notational system itself. Despite being transcribed in a way that obviously tries to communicate to those conversant with Western notation, Fox Strangways’s transcriptions are acts of domestic inscription, situating transcription (of folk song) as a form of ethical translation in which the foreignness of the foreign text is aimed at being preserved, again as a form of domestic transcription, if you will. Drawing on historical translation praxis, Venuti describes this in utopian terms: Seen as domestic inscription, never quite cross-cultural communication, translation has moved theorists towards an ethical reflection wherein remedies are formulated to restore or preserve the foreignness of the foreign text. . . . Yet an ethics that counters the domesticating effects of the inscription can only be formulated and practiced primarily in domestic terms, in domestic dialects, registers, discourses, and styles.25

Venuti’s acceptance of the domestic within a fundamentally foreignizing praxis is something with a number of parallels in Fox Strangways’s approach to transcription

24. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 182. Venuti is referring to Philip E. Lewis’s “The Measure of Translation Effects.” 25. Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” 469.

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generally. One of these is the fact that Venuti feels that, ultimately, translation is a utopian act, and that the very act of translation—or transcription—creates a sense of anticipation that a community will form around that translation, and that they will gain culturally by the presence of the foreign within the domestic.26 Fox Strangways puts it this way: “Another difficulty in hearing music consists not in the departure from the old-established methods so much as in the substitution of new and strange conventions and associations. Cosmopolitan as the music of Europe is, we still feel the distinction of nationality.”27 A number of things are relevant here. First, Fox Strangways implies that although Western readers are more advanced aesthetically—more cosmopolitan—they are, nonetheless, still driven by issues of nationality that weaken what one might characterize as their perceived superior cosmopolitanness. In this sense there is an expectation of a more aesthetically advanced audience being created around the introduction of Indian music and through transcription, which is the medium of introduction. Second, Fox Strangways uses the word “substitution” in relation to the transfer from old to new, and although this may seem like a small point, the significance of it cannot be underestimated, for when he does this he signifies an objection to the idea that one can ever hear new music with old ears—in other words that an original source can be translated through old conventions and maintain its originality in any sense. In order to retain originality one must use new methods for new music and create an exact form of copy. One must retain the foreign within the original and somehow transfer that over without distortion. This would seem to suggest that originality is merely illusory, because while the old methods must not be dismissed, they must be suppressed in favor of the new. Again, in translating an aural experience of foreignness into domestic understanding, it is the foreignness that must be maintained, as in Fox Strangways’s view of foreign songs retaining foreign texts, or foreign music retaining foreignizing notational meaning in whatever way possible. Venuti describes a similar situation in his work on the Newman/Arnold debate over translation, when he remarks that “The principles Newman opposed belonged to the fluent, domesticating method that dominated English translation since the seventeenth century.”28 Quoting Newman, Venuti writes: “One of these is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading. Of course a necessary inference from such a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour is undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in English. From such a notion I cannot too strongly express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite;—to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able,

26. Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” 485. 27. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 2. 28. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 121.

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with the greater care, the more foreign it may happen to be,—whether it be a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals . . . the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native composition.”29

According to Venuti, “For Newman, the ‘illusion’ of originality that confused the translation with the foreign text was domesticating, assimilating what was foreign ‘to something already familiar in English.’ ”30 In Fox Strangways’s terms, the illusion of originality lies in the fact that an original foreign source can be perceived as original only when old methods of appreciation are suspended and the new (the foreign) is substituted for them. This gives rise to what he calls “this strange familiarity, which we are conscious of in Indian melody.”31 This “strange familiarity” is precisely what Fox Strangways is hoping to achieve: it is the preservation of the strange within the familiar; the foreign within the domestic, without, as Newman says obliterating “all the characteristics of the original.” This is what Fox Strangways does as a philosophical background to his notions of transcription. So where some would suggest that Fox Strangways is obliterating the foreignness in his transcriptions, by allowing notation that clearly accepts the “old-established methods,” it could be suggested that although it is clear that he has not departed from the “old-established methods” of notation, he is essentially proposing to do the opposite: he is substituting the “new and the strange.” He is, in this way, doing what Venuti sees Newman doing: as he says, what was foreignizing about Newman’s translations was their literary discourse and strangeness.32 Fox Strangways is more than advocating difference within familiarity. He is not only a conscious foreignizer, by virtue of his extensive transcriptional annotations that indicate variation from conventional notation practice, but he is also aiming with them to subvert the transcriber’s invisibility. In recognizing their domestically subversive qualities Fox Strangways is investing his transcriptions with the foreignness of the original, and supplying his readers with that strangeness that marks the foreign. Even when he provides readers with comparisons of Indian and European music—even then—the aim is not to sustain the European mode of thinking, but to suspend it in favor of the new and the strange. Fox Strangways is effectively resisting the old in favor of the new; he is resisting the domestic in favor of the foreign. This idea, of strangeness through resistance, is something operating in Fox Strangways, despite the fact that his transcriptions

29. Newman, introduction to Homer, xv–xvi, cited in Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 121. 30. Ibid., 121. 31. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindostan, 3. 32. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 123.

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appear to be domesticating. Irrespective of their technical veracity, they are good transcriptions in terms similar to good translation according to Venuti’s historically based model. They represent a high point of cultural resistance, and far from simply remaining “a valuable document”33 they represent a much stronger foreignizing tendency than has been previously thought. At the end of The Translator’s Invisibility, Venuti calls on translators to challenge domesticating translation: “Knowledge of the source-language culture, however expert, is insufficient to produce a translation that is both readable and resistant to a reductive domestication; translators must also possess a commanding knowledge of the diverse cultural discourses in the target language, past and present. And they must be able to write them.”34 The same could be said of Fox Strangways.

33. Clayton, “A. H. Fox Strangways and The Music of Hindostan,” 111. 34. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 309.

Epilogue

The “Ethnomusicology” in Long Nineteenth-Century Representations of Non-Western Music As this book attempts to show, the representation of non-Western music in nineteenthcentury Britain was influenced by a wide array of contemporary discourses and ideologies, including theories of noble simplicity, monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, developmentalism, evolutionism, individualism, and universalism. While among historians of ethnomusicology it is generally recognized that these methods of interpreting non-Western musical cultures informed modes of representation in travel literature and more academic literature of the period, it is not generally acknowledged that the figures discussed in this book—especially Myers and Fox Strangways—were more than mere antecedents in a progression toward modern ethnomusicology. As is strongly suggested in this book, however, Myers and Fox Strangways do appear to conform to a more modern definition of ethnomusicology than is generally considered permissible, especially given the fact that the term “ethnomusicology” derived from Jaap Kunst’s Musicologica: a Study of the Nature of Ethno-musicology, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities (1950). As this epilogue shows, the use of the term “ethnomusicology” in relation to work carried out before the 1950s is not uniformly agreed upon, despite its putative relevance as a term of description, and many of the figures and ideas explored in this book could, consequently, be said to anticipate later ethnomusicological discourse. The reason for this is, on a certain level, rather simple. Many of the issues that animate the imaginations behind nineteenth-century representations of non-Western music are, arguably, more or less the same as those of the 1950s and later. Indeed, the now heavily “problematizing” discourse of ethnomusicology and the cultural study of music is nothing new. This epilogue is intended to examine more discipline-specific studies that form the basis of this book by exploring these problematizing issues through the history of ethnomusicology and its historical forebears, by taking the reader back

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through time from today’s largely interdisciplinary study of ethnomusicology and the cultural study of music through the early founding of ethnomusicology and its predecessor in comparative musicology.

Issues in Modern Ethnomusicology and the Cultural Study of Music According to Helen Myers, the roots of ethnomusicology in Great Britain can be traced to three distinct developments: the first, inward-looking and nationalistic, was the collection and study of indigenous folk song, which has a history in Britain nearly as long as that of printing; the second, exploratory and wide-ranging, was the investigation of non-Western music (particularly of colonial holdings), dating from the writings of 18th- and 19th-century civil servants and travelers such as Francis Taylor Piggott on Japan (1893), William Jones on Hindustan (1792) and Charles Russell Day on southern India and the Deccan (1891); and the third, scientific and systematic, was the acoustical analysis of folk and nonWestern music, dating from the 1880s and the seminar work of Alexander J. Ellis on musical pitch, tunings and scales.1

Although Myers portrays these developments as “distinct,” they are in fact deeply interconnected, as her work on British ethnomusicology shows. As she later says, “it is the growth and interaction of these three movements that have determined the orientation of modern ethnomusicology in the British Isles.”2 It is, in fact, more than the interaction of these three movements that gave rise to modern British ethnomusicology, it is the growth and interaction of the intellectual disciplines upon which it is based. Indeed, it is the interdisciplinary foundation of anthropology, musicology, linguistics, and psychology that informed the shape of nineteenth-century British ethnomusicology, and it is this same interdisciplinarity that characterizes its modern twentieth- and twenty-first century counterparts. While these disciplines are recognized to have evolved into distinct academic disciplines by the end of the nineteenth century, they nonetheless retain traits of their shared genetic inheritance. Clifford Geertz refers to them as “blurred genres,”3 and Marcus and Fischer describe them as overlapping disciplinary patterns evolving as a force in the cultural discourse of a time.4 As such, they remain discrete disciplines, yet evoke similarities with “the most general

1. 2. 3. 4.

Helen Myers, “Great Britain,” 129–30. Ibid., 130. See Geertz, “Blurred Genres,” 165–79. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 7.

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ideas, or patterns of ideas, which inform the thought of an age.”5 Richard Middleton, like many ethnomusicologists and cultural theorists, calls these patterns “continuities,” running across discourses predicated on defining cultural meanings.6 Middleton also views the “continuities” of interdisciplinarity as one of ethnomusicology’s principal historical problematics, especially when it impinges upon definitions of the relationship of culture to music. Writing in The Cultural Study of Music, he argues that “To look across the full range of disciplinary perspectives is important. Indeed, the parallelism of the different histories of engagement with ‘musics and cultures’ research, together with their varied dialogues, seems to be integral to its problematic.”7 Middleton, like many before him, argues that the study of music is effectively the interdisciplinary study of music within culture: “the new approaches all stand for the proposition that culture matters, and that therefore any attempts to study music without situating it culturally are illegitimate (and probably self-interested).”8 The fact that culture matters is, of course, nothing new, as he points out, citing references as far back as Merriam’s ground-breaking The Anthropology of Music (1964), and it is of some relevance that Middleton refers to the relation of culture to music as a “problematic.” Indeed, the relationship of music to culture—whether we study music within culture, music in culture, music as culture, or music of culture—is, and has been, a source of endless semantic fascination among ethnomusicological and musicological theorists for some time—even as far back as the late eighteenth century, during the time of Sir William Jones (though this is rarely admitted). Bruno Nettl finds the origins of the problematic partly in the follower mentality of ethnomusicology in relation to anthropology: “Anthropology oriented ethnomusicologists,”9 he writes. Musicologists faired no better historically, because “to them music is primary and culture a less specific concept.”10 This long-held criticism of musicology, as anthropologically and culturally uncontextualizing, and therefore singular in its disciplinary outlook, is repeated frequently in recent literature. Nicholas Cook takes a swipe at musicology, claiming that it is culturally pessimistic: “If both music and musicology are ways of creating meaning rather than just representing it, then we can see music as a means of gaining precisely the kind of insight into the cultural or historical other that a pessimistic musicology . . . proclaims to be impossible . . . if we use music as a

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View, 10. Middleton, “Music Studies and the Idea of Culture,” 4. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology, 133. Ibid.

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means of insight into other cultures, then equally we can see it as a means of negotiating cultural identity.”11 As Middleton says, however, the problematic is also integral to the study of it, and the same criticisms that Cook levies against pessimistic musicology can be, and are, also levied against optimistic musicology of the type in which Cook seeks to engage. Dibben and Windsor’s critique of Cook’s critique is a prime example of this: “In Cook’s eyes, musicology fails to grasp something fundamental about the way in which musical meaning both constructs and is constructed by our socio-cultural milieu.”12 Inevitably, for Dibben and Windsor, Cook, like many musicologists, remains systemically locked in a pessimistic musicology, too hopelessly immersed within the singular disciplinary culture of musicology to objectify his own relation to it. Julian Johnson echoes this criticism, suggesting that the pessimism of musicology correlates directly to the loss of self innate to the broad inherently interdisciplinary study of music and culture: “Culture is not about what the work means to me; it is about the meaning the work has beyond my immediate response and how I position my response in relation to that larger meaning.”13 Whatever the criticisms and self-criticisms of musicology and ethnomusicology, the fact remains that the study of music and culture is and represents a problematic, both currently and historically. Thus, as Philip Bohlman says, we ought to be concerned not only with what scholars study but also with how they represent it.14 But whereas ethnomusicology and musicology have only more recently grappled with this problematic, anthropology has contended with analogous theoretical problems from its very beginnings. Indeed, the centrality of culture to the study of anthropology has been debated from the very outset of the discipline, and to some extent it is the concept “culture”—the problematic—that forms anthropology into a recognized academic and professional discipline. According to Ida Magli, “Either anthropology is cultural, or it does not exist.”15 Similarly, one might talk of anthropology as “cultural critique”—as “not the mindless collection of the exotic, but the use of cultural richness for self-reflection and self-growth.”16 Michael Herzfeld talks, perhaps rhetorically, of anthropology as “intervention as cultural practice.”17 Needless to say, variations of these definitions occur frequently within the theoretical framework of anthropology.

11. Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction, 125–26. 12. Dibben and Windsor, “Constructivism in Nicholas Cook’s Introduction to Music,” 43–44. 13. Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? 80. 14. Bohlman, “Representation and Cultural Critique in the History of Ethnomusicology,” 138. 15. Magli, Cultural Anthropology, 1. 16. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, ix–x. 17. Herzfeld, Anthropology, 152.

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Indeed, from the very beginning of the discipline of anthropology, theories “have been constructed about features of social life universally present in society and culture, present in only certain types of society and culture (or at certain levels of development), and present in particular societies that have been ethnographically studied.”18 Considering the diversity of these and many other definitions, Clifford Geertz, in his landmark work, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973/1975), suggests that an understanding of cultural anthropology requires methodologically “thick description,” a term borrowed from Gilbert Ryle, and one designed to allow for the “piled-up structures of inference and implication”19 inherent within anthropological praxis. For Geertz, however, the concept “culture” and the discipline “anthropology” are too inherently multiplicitous to be described with any real clarity in the more recent phrase “cultural anthropology,” and the very act of distinguishing them diminishes their import as individual terms of reference: The interminable, because unterminable, debate within anthropology as to whether culture is “subjective” or “objective,” together with the mutual exchange of intellectual insults (“idealist!”—“materialist!”; “mentalist!”—“behaviorist!”; “impressionist!”—“positivist!”) which accompanies it, is wholly misconceived. Once human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic action—action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or resonance in music, signifies—the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense.20

One could argue, similarly, that in the same way that Geertz problematizes cultural anthropology, Jones problematizes, or “thickens” the study of non-Western music. As he says, Hindu music cannot be understood outside its historical, literary, and, most important, cultural contexts. It requires not only information given by performers, “but even by Mussalmans and Hindoos of eminent rank and learning.”21 In this sense, one could argue that the ideas of Jones represent an optimistic ethnomusicology rather than a pessimistic musicology.

18. Honigmann, The Development of Anthropological Ideas. 19. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 6–7. 20. Ibid., 10. 21. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” in Tagore, Hindu Music, 133. There is some confusion over the publication history and title of this text. Jones’s original paper “On the Musical Modes of the Hindus” was written in 1784, and then published in a longer version in Asiatick Researches 3 in 1792. This journal was republished in 1799 under the differently spelled journal title Asiatic Researches 3, and was finally reprinted in Tagore (1st ed.) in 1875 and (2nd ed.) in 1882 with the spelling “Hindoos.”

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Issues in Comparative Musicology As Joe Moran says, “the contemporary field of ‘cultural studies’ could be said to be synonymous with interdisciplinarity, given that it draws variously on sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, philosophy, textual criticism, visual culture, the philosophy of science, geography, politics, economics and psychology, among other areas.”22 This same could be said of musicology, in the way it mirrors, as a discipline, the rise of cultural studies, and certainly of ethnomusicology from a very early stage in its history, as this book aims to show. When Richard Johnson writes that “A codification of methods or knowledges . . . runs against some main features of cultural studies as a tradition,”23 the same could easily be said of figures in the history of ethnomusicology and recent attitudes toward it. Indeed, Bohlman echoes Johnson’s ideas implicitly: “I do not base this consideration of the history of ethnomusicology on historiographic models that insist that the field has been engaged in the ongoing attempt to define its object more accurately or to understand another music ‘in terms of itself.’ Such models presume that the refinement of analytical techniques will someday reveal an objective and unassailable reality, the ‘true’ understanding of nonWestern music.”24 Charles Samuel Myers, one of the fathers of modern British ethnomusicology, anticipates this, when he speaks of the fullest and highest appreciation of music occurring “when the whole of its varied and complex influences . . . are in the most perfect harmony,”25 and similarly, A. H. Fox Strangways, also one of the founding pioneers of British ethnomusicology, suggests that the study of music is incomplete without situating it as “an element in a given civilization.”26 These comments resonate particularly strongly when set within definitions of comparative musicology, long held to be the starting point or forerunner of modern ethnomusicology. As Martin Clayton suggests when discussing various conceptions of comparative musicology, the relationship of the discourse and the music is a “complex” relationship, cross-influencing both aspects of any musical experience: “I call this relationship ‘complex’ because musicological discourse does not only comment on practice and experience. . . . Verbal and graphical discourse can describe, interpret, or otherwise account for musical experience; at the same time, the music we make or choose to listen to is inevitably

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 51. Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” 100. Bohlman, “Representation and Cultural Critique,” 132–36. Myers, “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation,” 81. Fox Strangways, “Ancient Greece,” 8.

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influenced by this paramusical activity; thus, each feeds off the other.”27 Inevitably, this relationship finds parallelisms with the interdisciplinarity lying at the root of historical comparative musicology, as Erich M. von Hornbostel, one of its greatest exponents, defines it in his paper “The Problems of Comparative Musicology” (1905): Systematization and theory depend on comparison. In this sense all learning is comparative, and comparison is a general and not a special method. Yet one speaks of comparative anatomy, comparative linguistics, etc. This surely infers the applications of a particular approach . . . comparative anatomy presents cross-sections, so to speak, of the entire complex: it traces the individual organs through the entire realm of living beings. . . . The knowledge thus yields new principles of classification and at the same time stimulates new and specialized investigations.28

As Clayton says, while the form of Hornbostel’s comparative vision is not always clear, he is straightforward in suggesting that comparative musicology “would look for deep similarities and differences among types (repertoires, music cultures?), and would not be concerned with the detail of individual instances (performances?).”29 This, accordingly, comes with a “grand” theoretical superstructure (often evolutionism) that, unfortunately, generally mitigates against understanding localized musical cultures. It effectively Westernizes non-Western music by leaving unaccounted and unexplained various facets of cultural individual differences that do not conform to type or instance. Clayton remarks, however, that “comparison is inevitable in musicology . . . [it] is problematic as long as we confuse experience with discourse, as long as we do not recognize the contingency of musical ‘structure.’ ”30 Indeed, the idea of contingency is at the very root of defining not only musicology or comparative musicology but also ethnomusicology. How one defines ethnomusicology, in light of prevailing definitions of historical comparative musicology, is also problematic, because the nature of the contingency at the “core” of ethnomusicology is hotly debated. Jeff Todd Titon describes comparative musicology as a forerunner of ethnomusicology . . . [and] the first academic discipline to undertake a systematic cultural study of music. The founders asked grand questions: How did music originate, and how did it spread among the world’s peoples? How could musical affinities among varied human groups reveal the paths of migrations and diffusions? What did the variety of musical instruments found throughout the world signify, and how could they be classified and compared? The comparative musicologists of the early

27. 28. 29. 30.

Clayton, “Comparing Music, Comparing Musicology,” 59. Hornbostel, “The Problems of Comparative Musicology,” 250. Clayton, “Comparing Music, Comparing Musicology,” 65. Ibid., 66.

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twentieth century borrowed scientific methods from linguistics and evolutionary biology but failed to achieve the success of their colleagues in those disciplines.31

Titon goes on to define the more recent cultural study of music, of which modern ethnomusicology is presumably (in Titon’s terms) a facet, as a discipline that “asks different questions, ones that bear on the relation of music to region, race, class, gender, politics, ethnicity, belief, identity, money, power, and the production of knowledge.”32 Thus neither an insular musicology (which is only concerned with Western music), nor an ideologically limited comparative musicology (which is concerned with non-Western music insofar as it completes a worldview of music) can stand up to the methodologies of more recent ethnomusicological or cultural studies of music. Judging from historical sources, however, the problem is that while musicology may be relatively easy to define in relation to its object of study (Western music), and comparative musicology in relation to its objective (showing broad relationships between culturally diverse musics), there is no definitional consensus in relation to ethnomusicology. In fact, when Titon argues that it is the exclusive province of modern cultural studies of music to bear on region, race, class, gender, and so on, he may just as well have been summarizing some of the principal concerns explored in this book. Indeed, these things are, to a greater or lesser extent, those same issues that could be said to engage writers on non-Western music as early as Sir William Jones, arguably the first figure in the history of British ethnomusicology. For example, after defining music conventionally as a science (in relation to the mathematics of sound) and an art (in relation to the effect of sounds combined), Jones proceeds to suggest that this, as a definition, is only a starting point, because it does not take into account the effect that meditation has on our perception of a musical object. Thus, “a man, who knows the Hindoos only from Persian books, does not know the Hindoos; and . . . an European, who follows the muddy rivulets of Mussalman writers on India, instead of drinking from the pure fountain of Hindoo learning, will be in perpetual danger of misleading himself and others.”33 Indeed, one could describe Jones’s methodology as steeped in “contingency,” interdisciplinarity, or continuities.

Conclusion Whether it can be said that some of the historical figures discussed in this book are ethnomusicologists, rather than comparative musicologists, is a matter of

31. Titon, “Textual Analysis or Thick Description?” 171. 32. Ibid. 33. Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” 136.

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considerable controversy. The term ethnomusicology is used by many musicologists and ethnomusicologists today loosely to describe work from a much earlier date, in some instances as early as the 1550s, as, for example, in Frank Harrison’s Time, Place and Music: An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observation c. 1550 to c. 1800 (1973). While many writers like Titon would therefore exclude work on chronological (and ideological) grounds, others might well include it by virtue of its broadly anticipatory methodology. As I show, early figures like Jones, Willard, Day, Myers, and Fox Strangways all studied music in situ, and all leavened their research with a consciousness of the innate cultural contingency in their work. This viewpoint is largely evident in Stephen Blum’s assessment of European musical terminology and its relation to the music of Africa. Blum ranges across a wide geography, covering two generations of ethnomusicologists (by date of birth), and an earlier period before 1825. The period before 1825 (roughly beginning in 1800)—that is, before the first generation—continues up to 1865. The first generation runs from 1866 to 1885, and the second, from 1886 to 1905. According to Blum, members of the first and second generation ethnomusicologists established several types of contact with one another, cutting across national boundaries. They developed institutions, ideas, and techniques that have enabled subsequent scholars to investigate a wide range of musical practices and theories. It is the activities of a considerable number of scholars, and the important contacts among them, that justify our calling them the first and second generations of ethnomusicologists.34

Where Blum refrains from identifying those born before 1865 as ethnomusicologists, many others, as indicated above, do not agree. In addition to Harrison, for example, Helen Myers indicates that “What we now call ethnomusicology began long before that term was invented,”35 citing reference to European folk, North American, and Chinese music in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique (1768), as well as in travel literature, missionary or civil servant reports including Chinese music in Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine (1735) and Joseph Amiot’s Mémoire sur la Musique des Chinois (1779); Arab music in Guillaume André Villoteau’s “De l’état actuel de l’art musical en Egypte” and “Description historique, technique et littéraire des instrumens de musique des orientaux” (1809–22) and Raphael Kiesewetter’s Der Music der Araber (1842); Indian music in Jones’s “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (1784) and Charles Russell Day’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891);

34. Blum, “European Musical Terminology and the Music of Africa,” 3. 35. Helen Myers, “Introduction,” 4.

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and Japanese music in Francis Taylor Piggott’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan (1893).36 Myers’s view largely echoes more geographically limited studies, such as Joep Bor’s work on the sources of Indian music. Bor, takes umbrage at the limitation of the term ethnomusicology as it is applied historically, disputing, like Myers, the prevailing opinion that “ethnomusicology was born as a scholarly and more or less independent discipline when Guido Adler (1885) recognized the importance of ethnomusicological research, A. J. Ellis and Carl Stumpf raised this study to an empirical level, and the invention of the phonograph made it possible to painstakingly analyze and transcribe field-recordings.”37 Bor, in fact, goes further, by suggesting that even Harrison is remiss, not in his chronological framework for ethnomusicology, but in the extent and geographical range of his sources, Indian references being among those most noticeable by their absence. It could be argued, therefore, that the reason for dismissing much of the work of nineteenth-century figures as comparative musicology rather than ethnomusicology is bound up as much with modern ethnomusicology’s changing identity as it is with its historically embedded perceptions of the sort Bor, Harrison, and Myers seek to debunk. Blum puts this down to terminological differences. As he points out, Hornbostel speaks inevitably in Western-laden terms, like “musical system,” “musical thinking,” “motive,” “melodic motion,” “attention,” and “heterophony.”38 Others put it down to the institutionalizational strength and subsequent decline of comparative musicology under the aegis of the “Berlin School of Comparative Musicology,” founded by Hornbostel and Stumpf. Christensen speaks of the international centrality of the Berlin school of the 1920s and 1930s as a “Golden Age of comparative musicology, with the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv [of non-Western musics] as the center of a worldwide network of scholarly discourse, of gatherers of information and recordings, a fountainhead of ideas.”39 On the other hand, he questions whether he has been one the “victims of the Golden Age syndrome,”40 skewing his assessment of the history of ethnomusicology and comparative musicology, and depriving other important historical figures of their place in the pantheon of early ethnomusicology. One issue Christensen debates is whether ethnomusicology and comparative musicology are actual disciplines at all, or simply fields of study, the implication being that comparative musicology is possibly a field, and

36. Helen Myers, “Introduction,” 4. 37. Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 51. 38. Blum, “European Musical Terminology,” 10. 39. Christensen, “Erich M. von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology,” 201. 40. Ibid., 202.

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ethnomusicology a discipline. Ultimately for him, however, and for the current author, both are disciplines conforming to basic requirements, including “a theoretical basis for intellectual order; methods and techniques that permit dealing with specific questions in a systematic fashion; social need for the particular knowledge and insights; and individuals and institutions to carry on research and to provide continuity.”41 This definition is remarkably close to Joe Moran’s. For him the term “discipline” has two basic connotations: “it refers to a particular branch of learning or body of knowledge, and to the maintenance of order and control amongst subordinated groups.”42 In some sense, then, this becomes the “what” and “how” of Bohlman’s conception of modern ethnomusicology, referred to in the introduction to this book. Ethnomusicology, like any discipline, is about understanding and ultimately institutionalizing the interplay of representation (the what) and re presentation (the how), and to create continuities or contingencies between them. Indeed, as this book has aimed to show, it is precisely these ethnomusicological continuities and contingencies one observes in turn-of-the-century figures like Myers and Fox Strangways and arguably in their predecessors in the early history of ethnomusicology, Jones, Willard, Day, and Engel, to name but a few.

41. Ibid., 204. 42. Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 2.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations and musical examples.

aboriginal music: of American Indians, 88–89, 174–76, 235, 243; of Australia, 165–68, 243; of British Columbia (Canada), 171, 235; of Esquimaux (Inuit), 88, 90, 97, 134, 175; intervallic content of, 30–31, 35, 36, 170–71; of Iroquois, 88–89; of New Zealand, 26–29, 26, 27; of Sarawak Malays, 232–38; of Torres Strait, 228–32; of Veddas, 241–46 Abraham, Otto, 169, 171, 235, 243 “The Absurdity of any Mind-Body Relation” (Myers), 185, 192–93, 200, 237 aesthetics, in work of Myers, 212–17; and perception/appreciation of, 212–13; and “psychical distance,” 213; and synesthesia, 214–17 African music, 42, 79–80, 243; articles on, 93; and ethnomusicology, 299; instruments of, 97; intervallic content of, 240–41, 240, 241; and Jamaican music, 239 Amazon region, 24, 37, 44 American Indians, music of, 88–89, 174–76, 235, 243 ancientness vs. antiquity, of music, 33–34; and comparative anthropology, 34–36 ancientness vs. modernity, of non-Western music, 96, 98–102, 104 Anderson, John, 45, 46 Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 119, 136–37 Anthropological Society of London, 114, 115, 116, 118, 136, 162 anthropology: comparative method of, 34–36, 65–68, 88–90, 118, 130–32; and

cultural adaptationism, 4, 12–13, 14, 190–91, 203, 227; and cultural similarity, 7, 18–19; and culture, 175, 294–95; Darwin’s impact on, 71–77, 116, 143–44; definition of, 19, 116; and developmentalism, 17–19, 143–44; and ethnology, 116–17; and ethnomusicology, 293; and Great Chain of Being, 7, 19–20; and heredity, 22–24; and imitation of nature, 6–8, 117–18; and individual differences, xiii, 12–13; and interest in non-Western music, 48–49, 66; later terminology of, 76–77; and monogenesis, 19, 20–21, 22, 34, 72; and musical press, 78–94; and polygenesis, 19–20, 21, 22; professionalization of, 17, 26, 48–49; and racism, 7, 18–24, 42; salvage, 168; societies of, 49, 67; and three stages of human development, 6, 17, 18, 22, 72–73, 91. See also degenerationism; developmentalism; individual differences; individualism; monogenesis; polygenesis antiquity vs. ancientness, of music, 33–34; and comparative anthropology, 34–36 anti-Semitism: of Wagner, 114–15; and work of Chorley, 118–19, 121–23. See also racism/racialization Arabian music, 83–84, 89, 90, 235, 299 The Art of Music (Parry), 110–13, 146, 150. See also Parry, C. Hubert H. Ashantee (Ashanti), music of, 30–31, 37, 63, 79 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5, 48, 59 Asiatick Researches/Asiatic Researches (journal), 48, 49, 51, 83

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Australia, 22–23, 68, 134, 159; anthropological interest in, 164–68 Australian aboriginal music, 165–68, 243; as exogamous/endogamous, 165–66; and individuality, 166–68; instruments of, 167; and song classification, 168; and tribal poets, 166 Baker, Theodore, 174, 176, 243 Bartlett, F. C., 162, 186, 195, 196–97 Batteux, Charles, 57 “The Beginnings of Music” (Myers), 219, 221, 222, 229 Benjamin, Walter, 272–74 Berlin School, of comparative musicology, 169–70, 300 blacks: and imitation of nature concept, 6–7, 117–18; racist views/tropes of, 6–7, 20, 21; sexualization of, 42 Boas, Franz, 175, 176, 235 Bonwick, James, 43–44 Borneo (Sarawak), 161, 225, 243. See also Sarawak Malays, music of Bowdich, T. Edward, 30–31, 37; as criticized by Dauney, 61, 63–64; as criticized by Engel, 135; Prichardian methodology of, 31, 79 British Empire, 1–3; literature of, 2; music of, xii, 2; and Orientalism, xii, 2–3; and racism, 2–4 British music: development of, 98–100; divisions/tensions in (Chorley), 123–28; and “music of empire,” xii, 2; origins of, 120. See also Celtic music; English music; folk song; Irish music; national music; Scottish music; Welsh music Brown, John, 53, 55, 58, 91–92 Bullough, Edmund, 189, 191, 212–15, 216, 218–19 Bureau of American Ethnology, 174, 175 Burmese music, 59, 61, 63, 82; instruments of, 59, 60, 61 Burney, Charles, xiv, 5, 96, 98, 130 Burton, Richard, 42, 44 “Captain Low’s History of Tennaserim,” 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 catch (musical form), 127 Celtic music, 83, 98–100, 100, 101, 103, 107. See also Irish music; Scottish music; Welsh music Chappell, William, 172–73, 256

Chinese music, 83, 89, 299; Chorley on, 121–22; Parry on, 112, 113; Stafford on, 98 Chorley, Henry, xiii; and anti-Semitism, 118–19, 121–23; and comparative anthropology, 118; as criticized by Kaines, 162; on imitation of nature concept, 6–7, 117–18; on national music, 119–28, 129; and racism, 114–19. See also Hebrew music, in work of Chorley; national music, in work of Chorley civilization: and human development, 6, 17, 18–19, 22, 73, 91, 112; and musical development (Engel), 132 color/color hearing, 206, 207–9. See also synesthesia, in work of Myers comparative method, of anthropology, 34–36, 65–68, 88–90, 118, 130–32 comparative musicology, xiv, 169–70, 173, 300–301; Berlin School of, 169–70, 300; issues in, 296–98. See also ethnomusicology Comte, Auguste, as invoked by Rowbotham, 105–10, 131, 163 Cook, James, 5, 26, 96 counterpoint, 83–84, 151, 235 Crawfurd, John, History of the Indian Archipelago, 31–33, 34, 44, 61 Crotch, William, 33–34, 50, 51, 61, 98 Crystal Palace, 22, 23 cultural adaptationism, 4, 12–13, 14, 190–91, 203, 227 cultural similarity, 7, 18–19 Curtis, Natalie, 175 dance/dance music, 42–44, 143, 220 Darwin, Charles, 7, 19, 20, 22, 23, 116, 143, 153, 169; and impact on anthropology, 71–77, 116, 143–44; and link between speech and song, 108, 269 Darwinian theory of evolution, 71–73, 143; and individual differences (Myers), 198–205; and individualism, 177, 183–84; and Pitt Rivers’s criticism of Rowbotham, 163–64, 177; as resisted by monogenesis, 20; and theories of heredity, 22–24; variations of, 72; and work of Tylor, 143–44. See also evolution Dauney, William, 61, 63–68, 114, 253; comparative methodology of, 65–67; and criticisms of Bowdich, 61, 63–64 Davies, James, 34–36

Day, Charles Russell, 89, 93, 94, 235, 255–60, 292, 299; acclaim for, 255–56; and criticism of Willard, 257, 285; as ethnomusicologist, 299, 301; and evolutionary theory, 255–57; as foreignizing transcriber, 285; Fox Strangways on, 278–79, 284; and national music, 259–60; on notation and verbal instruction, 284–85; and transcription/translation of Indian music, 257–60, 278–79, 284–85; and universalism, 261, 278; on work of Jones, 257–58, 260, 284–85. See also The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan degenerationism, 20, 22–23; and nonWestern music, 30–31, 36, 37–41, 78, 86–88; as response to Jones, 80–84 Densmore, Frances, 175–76 developmentalism, 6–7; and anthropology, 17–19, 143–44; and cultural similarity, 7, 18–19; and imitation of nature, 6–8; in musical histories, 96–102, 105; and racism, 6–8, 18–19, 98–100; three stages of, 6, 17, 18, 22, 72–73, 91. See also racism/racialization differential psychology, 12, 13, 135, 159, 185. See also individual differences; Myers, Charles Samuel Donovan, J., 153–54 drum, 131–32, 167, 228, 233; and rhythm (Wallaschek), 152; and three stages of music (Rowbotham), 104, 105–10, 131, 152 dualism, musical, in work of Rowbotham, 104–5, 105, 107–8. See also Rowbotham, John Frederick “The Earthmen” (exhibition), 85–86 East-West musical progression: and CelticEnglish parallels, 98–102, 100, 102, 123–28; compass-point divisions of (Chorley), 120–21, 123–24, 128; and concept of European/Western supremacy, 9–10, 41, 112, 115–16; in context of empire, 1–2; criticisms of/responses to, 91–92, 93–94; evolutionist rationalization for, 256–57; and Judeo-Christian parallels, 120–25; and Orientalism, 2–6, 8, 13–14; and poor-rich comparison, 101–2; and racism/racist teleology, 8–10, 91, 112–13, 114–19; and “savage”-civilized

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dichotomy, 145–48. See also European/ Western supremacy, concept of; music, origins of; Myers, Charles Samuel; racism/racialization; Spencer, Herbert Egyptian music, 37–41, 84, 130; articles on, 90, 92–93, 299; instruments of, 38, 39, 40 Ellis, Alexander, 172–74; and roots of ethnomusicology, 292, 300; on scales, 172, 173; as translator of Helmholtz, 172, 173, 229 Engel, Carl, xiii, xv, 10–11, 12, 64, 77, 88, 121, 129–44; comparative methodology of, 130–32, 134–36; as ethnomusicologist, 301; and imitativeness of music/dance, 143; and influence of Tylor, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140–44, 145; and The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, 121, 129–33, 134, 141; on musical instruments, 129, 131–32; on national music, 133–44, 145; and notation, 11, 135, 139; and Notes and Queries questionnaire, 138–40; and three stages of music, 131–32; as untainted by Western bias, 129–30, 132–33, 134. See also national music, in work of Engel English music: and Celtic music, 98–100, 100; as national music, 123–24, 126–28 Esquimaux, music of, 88, 90, 97, 134, 175 Ethnological Society of London, 116, 118, 136, 137 “The Ethnological Study of Music” (Myers), 170, 178, 219 ethnology, xv, 22, 65–66; American work in, 174–76; and anthropology, 116–17; and three stages of music (Rowbotham), 105–10 ethnomusicology, 292–95; and acknowledgment of early figures in, 291, 292, 298–301; and anthropology, 293; definition of, xi–xii, xiv–xv, 297–301; early work on individualism, 166–67; and early works of, 5–6, 7–8, 48–49, 299–300; and fieldwork, xiii, xv, 11, 12; history of/important figures in, 169–76, 292, 299; and imitation of nature, 6–8; and individual differences, xiii, 12–14, 159, 167, 168; interdisciplinary roots of, 292–93; and Orientalism, 2–6, 13–14; as postwar discipline, 291–92; precursors of, 299–300; and racism, 2–4, 6–8, 12–13, 14. See also comparative musicology;

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ethnomusicology (continued) musicology; see also individual ethnomusicologists ethnopsychology, 184, 185 eugenics, 23–24 European/Western supremacy, concept of, 9–10, 41, 112, 115–16; and cautions against Westernized transcription, 174, 175, 223–24; criticisms of/responses to, 91–92, 93–94; and non-Western music as living fossil, 145, 220, 221, 279; and Orientalism, 2–6, 8, 13–14; as rejected by Engel, 129–30, 132–33, 134; as rejected by Myers, 159, 193–95, 203–4, 220–24, 227–28. See also East-West musical progression; music, origins of; racism/racialization; Myers, Charles Samuel; Spencer, Herbert evolution: and comparative musicology, 297; and individual differences (Myers), 198–205; and individualism, 177, 183–84; and music, 91–92; and musical faculty, 183–84; Spencerian conception of, 73–75. See also Darwinian theory of evolution experimental psychology, 161, 188–93, 224, 227 explorational literature. See travel/ explorational literature Feldeinsamkeit (Brahms), 271 Ferguson, Adam, 17, 18 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 174, 176 Fiji, 23; musical instruments of, 44–45, 45, 46 Fillmore, John Comfort, 174–75, 235 Fison, Lorimer, and Alfred W. Howitt, 164–66 Fletcher, Alice Cunningham, 175, 176 folk song: Fox Strangways on, 286–87; listener’s experience of, 262, 275; as melodic art form, 283, 286; transcription/foreignization of, 286–87 folk song, British, xv–xvi; and “conscious” art music, 271; and link to non-Western music, 101, 235–36, 278–79; and parallels with Indian music (Fox Strangways), 278–79, 282–83, 285–86; and “savage” music (Parry), 9–10, 112; words and music of, 270. See also national music Forster, Georg, and descriptions of South Seas music, 26–30

Fowke, Francis, 48, 51–52, 82 Fowke, Margaret, 51 Fox Strangways, A. H., xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 230n30, 296; biography of, 262–64; as ethnomusicologist, 291, 299; on folk song, 286–87; on individualism in universal context, 13–14, 94, 261–62, 275–76; and inseparability of words and music, 269–70, 272; and literary translation, 264, 266–67; and transcription as translation, 13–14, 277–83, 287–90. See also entries immediately below Fox Strangways, A. H., on The Music of Hindostan, xiv, 13, 249, 263–64, 277–90; and field methodology, 280; as living fossil, 279; and notation, 280–82, 287–90; and parallels to English folk song, 278–79, 282–83, 285–86; and textual explanations of, 281–82, 289; and transcription as translation, 277–83, 287–90; transcriptions in, 281, 281–82; and work of Day, 278–79, 284 Fox Strangways, A. H., transcriptions by, 13–14, 281, 281–82; criticisms of, 249–50; and fieldwork, 175, 250; subjectivity of, 249–50; and translation, 13–14, 277–83, 287–90 Fox Strangways, A. H., on translation, 265–76; as art, 265–66; and Benjamin’s views on, 272–74; and conscience of translator, 266, 267–68; and domestic inscription, 268, 275–76, 287; “fluency” of, 266–67; foreignizing of, 261–62, 275–76, 278, 287–90; historiographical context of, 268–69, 273–74; and inseparability of words and music, 269–70, 272; and issues for singer, 268–69, 271–72, 274; and kinship with original, 273–74; as not equivalent to original, 274–76; and obligation to original, 266, 267–68, 272–73; as problematic, 271; of Schubert, 264, 267–68, 267–68, 271n41; and transcription as, 13–14, 277–83, 287–90; and unintelligible words, 270–71 Galton, Francis, 23–24, 118, 119, 137, 203, 209 Gilman, Benjamin Ives, 174, 175, 176 Glyn, Margaret H., 154–56, 159, 162 Godwin, William, 7, 18–19

Great Britain, music of. See British music Great Chain of Being, 7, 19–20 Greece, Ancient, music of, 35–36, 67, 90, 107, 235 Grey, Sir George: Polynesian Mythology, 34–36; and view of Australians, 22–23 Gunn, John, 65 Gurney, Edmund, 146, 153; and criticism of Helmholtz, 178–79; and criticism of Spencer, 147, 148–49, 178; as criticized by Wallace, 182–84; on musical faculty, 177–84 Haddon, Alfred C., 161, 164, 167–68, 224–25 Harmonicon, 78–84 harmony: as absent from non-Western music, 64, 79, 148, 151, 174, 194, 221; as basis of European music, 64, 111, 235, 279; as counterpoint to rhythm (Myers), 235–38; as culturally loaded concept, 135; and folk song, 283, 286; and Indian music, 89, 279; of nonWestern music, 148, 151, 222, 232; progress of, at expense of melody, 270; and rhythm, 222, 235; as standard for evolved music, 111; and Western-style transcription/notation, 135. See also melody; rhythm harp, 64–65, 125–26, 131 Hawkins, John, xiv, 5, 96, 130 Hebrew music, in work of Chorley, 118–19, 121–23, 124; and antiSemitism, 114–15, 118–19, 121–23; and criticism by Kaines, 162; and Jews as nationless people, 122, 123, 124; and parallels with Welsh music, 124–25 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 142, 154, 172–73, 174, 181, 182, 229; as criticized by Gurney, 178–79 heredity, theories of, 22–24, 203 “Hindostannie airs,” 49–51, 61, 64, 79, 84, 253 Hindu music, 8, 87, 91, 98, 107, 121, 122; emotion in (Glyn), 155; instruments of, 31; Jones on, 48, 51–59, 80–82, 253; as living fossil, 279; modes of, 56; popular airs of, 49–51, 61, 64, 79, 84, 253. See also Fox Strangways, A. H.; Indian music; Jones, Sir William histories of music, 95–96; and ancient vs. modern debate, 96, 98–102, 104; Comtean developmentalism in, 105–10,

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131, 163; and deprecation of nonWestern music, 96–98, 99–100; and evolutionary theory, 108–13; instrumental and vocal music in, 103, 108–9, 111–12; monogenist developmentalism in, 96–103; racism in, 96, 98–100, 112–13; scales, as discussed in, 103–4, 110–11, 112–13. See also national music histories of music (by author): by Hogarth, 8, 95, 100–102, 107; by Hullah, 8, 103–4; by Parry, 110–13; by Rowbotham, 18, 104–10; by Stafford, 5, 9, 95, 96–102, 104; by Stanford and Forsyth, 9, 96. See also Parry, C. Hubert H.; Rowbotham, John Frederick; Stafford, William A History of Music (Rowbotham), 18, 104–10. See also Rowbotham, John Frederick A History of Music (Stafford), 5, 9, 95, 96–102, 104. See also Stafford, William Hogarth, George, Musical History, Biography, and Criticism, 8, 95, 100–102, 107 Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von, 169, 170, 171, 174, 211, 235, 243, 297, 300 Hullah, John, The History of Modern Music, 8, 103–4 human origins, theories of, 7, 19–21 Humboldt, Alexander von, 67–68, 116 Hunt, H. G. Bonavia, 9, 95 Hunt, James, 116, 117–18, 119 “A Hymn to Sereswaty” (Jones), 55–56 imitation of nature, concept of, 6–8, 117–18; and “translation” of poetry by music, 57–59 Indian archipelago (Indonesia), music of, 37, 93; instruments of, 45. See also Javanese music; Sarawak (Borneo); Sarawak Malays, music of Indian music, 121, 235, 243; analysis of, 5–6, 7–8, 48; comparative analysis of, 89, 90; degenerationist view of, 86–87; documentation of, 25, 88, 91, 93; as evolutionary antecedent, 256–57; examples of, 54, 258, 281; indigenous treatises on, 52–53; instruments of, 48, 51–52, 260n46; and parallels with folk song, 278–79, 282–83, 285–86; publication/transcription of, 49–51, 61, 64; and “savage sublime,” 80–81; scholarship on, 48–49, 93–94; and

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Indian music (continued) universalism, 93–94; and Vedas, 154; virtue of, 44; Westernization of, 49–51, 61, 64, 93–94. See also Day, Charles Russell; Fox Strangways, A. H., and The Music of Hindostan; Hindu music; Jones, Sir William; Willard, N. Augustus individual differences, xiii, 12–13, 94, 159, 167, 168; definition of, 185; and development of psychology, 188; history of, 184–88 individual differences, in work of Myers, xiii, 12–13, 159, 167, 168, 184, 186–95; and cultural adaptationism, 12–13, 14, 190–91, 203, 227; and evolution of psychology, 189–90; and evolutionary theory, 198–205; and idea of the self, 185, 187–88; and nonracist stance, 159, 193–95, 203–5, 227–28; and “psychical distance,” 187, 189–93, 212, 213, 217, 219 individualism, 13, 159; in anthropological literature, 162–64; and Australian anthropology, 166–68; and criticism of universalism, 162–63; and Darwinian evolution theory, 177, 183–84; in international ethnomusicology, 169–76 instrumental music, 108–9, 111–12, 132 instruments. See musical instruments intervallic content: of aboriginal music, 30–31, 35, 36, 170–71; and accrescent evolution (Myers), 171, 218–19; of African music, 240–41, 240, 241; of ancient Greek music, 35, 36; and progression from speech to song, 149; of Torres Strait songs, 228–32, 237; of Veddas’ music, 242–43; of vocal music, 108 An Introduction to the Study of National Music (Engel), 10, 129, 133–36, 141–42. See also Engel, Carl Inuit (Esquimaux), music of, 88, 90, 97, 134, 175 Irish music, 33, 107; Chorley on, 125–26; Stafford on, 98–100 Jacques, Edgar F., 89–90 Jamaican music, 239–40 Japanese music: Piggott on, 89, 90, 93, 292, 300; transcription of, 235 Javanese music, 31–34, 61, 89, 90, 235; antiquity of, 33–34; instruments of, 31, 32, 33

Jewish music. See Hebrew music, in work of Chorley Jones, Sir William, 3, 67, 292; and Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5, 48, 59; as criticized by Engel, 135; as criticized by Willard, 253, 285; Day on, 257–58, 260, 284–85; degenerationist response to, 80–84; as ethnomusicologist, 298, 299, 301; and imitation of nature concept, 7–8, 57–59; and legacy of Orientalism, 58; and Ra¯gavibodha, 52–53, 260; and Romanticism, 53, 55–59, 253; and scholarship on Indian music, 48–49, 51–59, 80–82, 253, 257–58, 260, 278, 295, 299; and shift away from Orientalism/racism, 5–6, 8; on superiority of poetry, 53, 55–59; transcriptions by, 5, 53, 54, 56–59, 257–58, 258; and translation, 5, 56–59, 257–58, 258, 260 journals, scholarly, 48, 49, 67, 83 “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (Wagner), 114–15 Kaines, Joseph, 162 Keber songs, 229, 230, 230, 232. See also Torres Strait, music of Kloss, Karl, 84 Kunst, Jaap: Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethnomusicology, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities, xiv, 291 Laing, Alexander, 79–80, 84 Lane, Edward, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 37–41; on Egyptian instruments, 38, 39, 40; sexualization by, 38, 41, 42 Lane Fox, Augustus Henry. See Pitt Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane Fox Langsdorff, G. H. von, 29–30 linguistics, and musicology, 168, 169, 175, 228 Low, James, 61–64 Lubbock, John, 75–76, 77, 130, 131, 137 lyre: of India, 48, 51; and three stages of music (Rowbotham), 104, 105–10, 131 Maine, Henry, 118 Malaysian music, 31, 59 Malu songs, 229, 229–32. See also Torres Strait, music of Mann, Maud, 93–94

Maoris, 36, 134. See also New Zealand, aboriginal music of Marryat, Frank S., 37 McDougall, William, 193, 194, 224, 225 melody: and absence of harmony, 64, 79, 148, 151, 174, 221; as basis of nonWestern music, 64, 111; as culturally loaded concept, 135; of folk song, 283, 286; limitation of, 79; and progress of harmony, at expense of, 270; and rhythm, 152, 222. See also harmony; rhythm modernity vs. ancientness, of non-Western music, 96, 98–102, 104 monogenesis, 19, 20–21, 22, 34, 72; and degenerationism, 20, 30–31; in musical histories, 96–103; musical parallels to, 30–31, 81 Müller, Max, 22 Murray Island (Torres Strait), music of, 228–32 music: and architecture (Bullough), 213; common harmonic foundation of (Fillmore), 174–75; cultural study of, 292–95, 298; dualism of (Rowbotham), 104–5, 105, 107–8; and evolutionary theory, 91–92; natural, 35–36, 119–20, 121, 122; and poetry, 53, 55–59, 81–82; principal differences in (Gilman), 174; and psychology, 169, 170; three stages of (Rowbotham), 104, 105, 106, 107–10, 131–32, 152, 163–64; as universal language, 13–14, 94, 115–16, 135, 162; universal template of (Myers), 171–72, 220–21; as used in conversion, 84–85 music, folk. See folk song; see also national music music, histories of, 95–96; and ancient vs. modern debate, 96, 98–102, 104; Comtean developmentalism in, 105–10, 131, 163; and deprecation of nonWestern music, 96–98, 99–100; and evolutionary theory, 108–13; instrumental and vocal music in, 103, 108–9, 111–12; monogenist developmentalism in, 96–103; racism in, 96, 98–100, 112–13; scales, as discussed in, 103–4, 110–11, 112–13. See also national music music, histories of (by author): by Hogarth, 8, 95, 100–102, 107; by Hullah, 8, 103–4; by Parry, 110–13; by

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Rowbotham, 18, 104–10; by Stafford, 5, 9, 95, 96–102, 104; by Stanford and Forsyth, 9, 96. See also Parry, C. Hubert H.; Rowbotham, John Frederick; Stafford, William music, national. See national music music, origins of: Donovan on, 153–54; and East-West teleology, 91, 145–46, 148; Glyn on, 154–56; and link between speech and song, 108, 147, 149, 269; Myers on, 177, 178, 220–21, 222; Spencer on, 108, 145–47, 269; and Spencer’s critics, 147–49, 177–78; Stumpf on, 170; Wallaschek on, 151–54, 169. See also Spencer, Herbert; Wallaschek, Richard “Music in Embryo” (O. H. H.), 10, 91, 92 The Music of Hindostan (Fox Strangways). See Fox Strangways, A. H., on The Music of Hindostan Music and Letters, 13, 263, 264, 265, 268 The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (Engel), 121, 129–33, 134, 141. See also Engel, Carl The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (Day), 89, 90, 93, 235, 255–60, 299; acclaim for, 255–56; Fox Strangways on, 278–79, 284. See also Day, Charles Russell “Music in Race” (Chorley), 114–15, 118 musical dualism, in work of Rowbotham, 104–5, 105, 107–8. See also Rowbotham, John Frederick musical faculty: Gurney on, 177–84; Myers on, 177, 180, 233; Sully on, 180–81; Wallace on, 181–84; Wallaschek on, 153 Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (Hogarth), 8, 95, 100–102, 107 musical instruments, 44–47, 64–65; as cultural signifiers, 45–47; and development of orchestra, 107; documentation of, 44–45; Engel’s scholarship on, 129, 131–32; names of, 143; Notes and Queries questions on, 139; three stages of (Rowbotham), 104, 105, 106, 107–10, 131–32, 152, 163–64 musical instruments (by region): of Australia, 167; of Burma, 59, 60, 61; of Egypt, 38, 39, 40; of India, 48, 51–52, 260n46; of Java, 31, 32, 33; of Peru, 67, 68, 85, 143; of Sarawak, 233, 234, 235, 236; of Scotland, 65; of Torres Strait, 228

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musical press: Harmonicon, 78–84; Music and Letters, 13, 263, 264, 265, 268; Musical Times, 78, 88–92, 129, 256; Musical World, 78, 84–88; Proceedings of the Musical Association, 78, 92–94; Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 78, 82–83, 84 Musical Times, 78, 88–92, 129; book reviews in, 90; comparative methodology in, 88–90; lectures in, 88–90; and review of Day, 256 Musical World, 78, 84–88 musicology, xiv–xv, 292, 296; comparative, xiv, 169–70, 173, 296–98, 300–301; criticism of, 293–94; deracialization of, 10–11, 12; and early work on individualism, 166–67; and linguistics, 168, 169, 175, 228; and philology, 12, 141, 142–43; racism in, 8–10, 12. See also ethnomusicology Myers, Charles Samuel, xiii–xiv, xv, xvi, 14, 67, 150, 156, 296; biography of, 160–62; and criticism of Spencer, 177–78; and cultural adaptationism, 12–13, 14, 190–91, 203; as ethnomusicologist, 291, 299; on human improvement, 159, 197, 202–5, 204; and industrial psychology, 161, 191, 197–98, 200, 201–2, 201–2, 227; international influences on, 169–76; on musical faculty, 177, 180, 233; as nonracist, 159, 193–95, 203–4, 220–24, 227–28; and Notes and Queries questionnaire, 144; and origins/ “beginnings” of music, 177, 178, 220–21, 222; and relationship with Fox Strangways, 230n30, 249; sexism of, 195; on shell shock, 161, 197, 198; on synthesis and analysis, 237–38; and transcription, 224–25, 229; on universal musical template, 171–72, 220–21. See also entries immediately below Myers, Charles Samuel, ethnomusical writings of, 219; and accrescent evolution, 171, 218–19, 239–40, 243, 246; and counterpoint of rhythm and harmony, 235–38; and evolutionary binarisms, 236–38; and individual differences, 219–20, 221–22; and intervallic content, 170–72, 218–19; on Jamaican music, 239–40; on music of Veddas, 170–71, 241–43, 244, 245, 246; and musical meaning, 221–24; as

nonracist, 220–24, 227–28; and nonWestern music as living fossil, 145, 220, 221; and origins/“beginnings” of music, 177, 178, 220–21, 222; and “psychical distance,” 219, 223–24; on synthesis and analysis, 237–38; and universal musical template, 171–72, 220–24. See also Sarawak Malays, music of; Torres Strait, expedition to; Torres Strait, music of Myers, Charles Samuel, on individual differences, xiii, 12–13, 159, 167, 168, 184, 186–95; and cultural adaptationism, 12–13, 14, 190–91, 203, 227; and evolution of psychology, 189–90; and evolutionary theory, 198–205; and idea of the self, 185, 187–88; and nonracist stance, 159, 193–95, 203–5, 227–28; and “psychical distance,” 187, 189–93, 212, 213, 217, 219 Myers, Charles Samuel, psychological writings of, 189, 196–98, 205–6; Bullough’s influence on, 189, 191, 212–15, 216, 218–19; evolutionary binarisms of, 200–205, 207, 236–38; evolutionary binarisms of (diagrams), 200, 201–2, 204, 208; on human improvement, 159, 197, 202–5, 204; on instinct and intelligence, 198–99, 200, 200; as nonracist, 159, 203–4; popular style of, 196, 197–98; and “psychical distance,” 212, 213, 217, 219; on responses to tonal stimuli and music, 211–17; on sound/hearing and acoustics, 205–7; on synesthesia, 206, 207–11, 214–16, 219, 220; and A TextBook of Experimental Psychology, 161, 189, 191–92, 196, 197 Myers, Charles Samuel, on synesthesia, 206, 207–11, 214–16, 219, 220; and aesthetic appreciation, 215–17; as associative, 214–16; as atavistic, 210; evolution of, 210, 211, 211; as living fossil, 208, 215, 216, 220; and Scriabin, 211; as way of gauging human development, 208–9 National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP), 161–62, 191, 227 national music: as melodic art form, 283, 286; oral tradition of, 135, 286 national music, in work of Chorley, 119–28, 129; and assimilation of

“neighbour-subjects,” 124–25; of Christian-East, 121–22; compass-point divisions of, 120–21, 123–24, 128; of England, 123–24, 126–28; of Hebrew-East, 121–23, 124; of Ireland, 125–26; as natural, 119–20, 121, 122; of Scotland, 126–27; of Wales, 124–25 national music, in work of Day, 259–60 national music, in work of Engel, 133–44, 145; cross-cultural approach to, 134, 141–42; definition of, 133, 142; and problems of notation/transcription, 135, 139; and rejection of Western superiority, 129–30, 132–33, 134; as unifying force, 133–34 national music, in work of Fox Strangways: and parallels to Indian music, 278–79, 282–83, 285–86 The National Music of the World (Chorley), 119–28. See also Chorley, Henry; national music, in work of Chorley natural music, 35–36; Chorley on, 119–20, 121, 122 Newman, Ernst, 146–48 Newman, F. W., 288–89 New Zealand, aboriginal music of, 26–29, 26, 27, 35–36 nose-flute, Fijian, 44, 45 notation, non-Western, 65, 257, 280–82, 284, 288; as absent in national tunes, 135, 286; as taken down in field, 117 notation, Western, of non-Western music, 30, 89, 140, 166; and Burmese music, 59, 61, 63; Day on, 284–85; difficulties with, 63–64, 94, 117, 156; Engel’s methodology of, 11, 139; failures of, as criticized by Engel, 135; and Hindu music, 50, 59, 61; inadequacy of, 135, 139, 239, 250–52, 254, 258–59; in The Music of Hindostan (Fox Strangways), 280–82, 287–90; and Myers’s work, 229–30, 233, 234, 239; and need for accompanying text, 281–82, 284–85, 289; and Siamese and Malaysian music, 59, 62; and translation, 257–60; as way to bridge theory and practice, 254–55. See also transcription; translation “Notes on Indian Music” (Day), 93 Notes and Queries on Anthropology, xv, 10–11, 12, 64, 77; and instructions for field-recording, 219–20; and questionnaire for travellers, 137–40

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“An Old Indian Air”: in Day, 257–58, 258, 284–85; in Jones, 53, 54, 56, 284, 285 “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (Jones), 5–6, 48, 51–59, 257, 299 On the Sensations of Tone as a Physical Basis for the Theory of Music (Helmholtz), 172. See also Helmholtz, Hermann von “On the Vina or Indian Lyre” (Fowke), 48, 51 ’ood (Egyptian musical instrument), 38, 39 Orientalism, xii; and ethnomusicology, 2–6, 13–14; Said on, 3, 4–6; and sexualization, 38, 41, 42; and shift away from, 5–6, 8. See also racism/ racialization “Oriental Music Considered” (F. W. H.), 80–84 Parry, C. Hubert H., 9–10, 91; and The Art of Music, 110–13, 146, 150; on instrumental and vocal music, 111–12; racism of, 112–13; on scales, 110–11, 112–13; Spencer’s influence on, 110–13; Spencer’s response to, 146 Persian music, 78–79, 80, 83, 87, 89 Peruvian music, 85; instruments of, 67, 68, 85, 143 philology, and musicology, 12, 141, 142–43 Piggott, Francis Taylor, 89, 90, 93, 292, 300 pipe: and development of music/ civilization (Engel), 131–32; and three stages of music (Rowbotham), 104, 105–10, 131 Pitt Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane Fox, 46–47, 137, 144; and criticism of Rowbotham, 163–64, 177 Plowden, Sophia, 51 poetry, and music, 53, 55–59, 81–82 polygenesis, 19–20, 21, 22, 72; musical parallels to, 31–34, 61 The Power of Sound (Gurney), 177, 178–79, 184. See also Gurney, Edmund Prichard, James Cowles, 20–21, 31, 100, 102, 116, 137; methodology of, 65–66, 78, 79, 86–88 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 11, 76–77, 140–44, 153. See also Tylor, E. B. Primitive Music (Wallaschek), 143, 169; as eschewing discussions of ancient era, 150; on musical commonality/ universalism, 151; review of, 91–92; on “rhythmical impulse,” as origin of music, 151–54. See also Wallaschek, Richard

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Proceedings of the Musical Association, 78, 92–94 “psychical distance,” 187, 189–93, 212, 213, 217, 219 psychology, 142, 154; development of, 188, 191; differential, 12, 13, 135, 159, 185; experimental, 161, 188–93, 224, 227; and music, 169, 170; Spencer on, 155, 189; and Torres Strait expedition, 224–25. See also individual differences; Myers, Charles Samuel “The Psychology of Musical Appreciation” (Myers), 13, 219, 237–38 Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 78, 82–83, 84 rabáb (Egyptian musical instrument), 38, 40 “Race in Music” [untitled article] (Chorley), 114, 115–19 racism/racialization, 2–4; and anthropology, 7, 18–24, 42; and Christianity, 19–21, 23; and Crystal Palace exhibits/guidebook, 22, 23; and developmentalism, 6–8, 18–19, 98–100; and ethnomusicology, 2–4, 6–8, 12–13, 14; and imitation of nature, 6–8, 117–18; in musical histories, 96, 98–100, 112–13; in musicology, 8–10, 12; and sexualization, 42; of Spencer, 13, 36, 73–75, 148, 156, 227; of Wagner, 114–15; and work of Chorley, 114–19. See also anthropology; developmentalism; Orientalism Ra¯gavibodha (Somana¯tha), 52–53, 260 Ray, Sidney H., 168, 224, 225, 228, 232 recordings, 173; of American Indian music, 174; and birth of ethnomusicology, 300; instructions for making, 219–20; of Torres Strait music, 225, 228, 229, 232; and transcriptions (Fox Strangways), 250, 280; of Veddas, 170, 241, 242 Renehan, F., 103 rhythm: as counterpoint to harmony (Myers), 235–38; and harmony, 222, 235; and melody, 152, 222; as origin of music (Wallaschek), 151–54; of Sarawak Malay music, 233, 234, 235–36; of Torres Strait music, 230, 232; universalism of (Wallaschek), 152. See also harmony; melody

Rivers, W. H. R., 186, 193, 194, 224, 225, 227 Rockstro, William S., 8–9, 95 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29, 81, 299 Rowbotham, John Frederick, 10, 12, 18, 88, 91, 94, 104–10, 150, 256; Comtean approach by, 105–10, 131, 163; as criticized by Pitt Rivers, 163–64, 177; on musical dualism, 104–5, 105, 107–8; and Spencerian theory, 108–10; on three stages of music, 104, 105, 106, 107–10, 131–32, 152, 163–64; on vocal music, 108–9, 111 Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 49, 59 Said, Edward, 1–2, 8, 12; on Orientalism, 3, 4–6 Sapir, Edward, 186 Sarawak (Borneo), 161, 225, 243 Sarawak Malays, music of, 232–38; instruments of, 233, 234, 235, 236; and musical faculty, 180, 233; rhythmic content of, 233, 234, 235–36 “Savage Music and Its Lessons,” 91–92 “savages”: conversion of, through music, 84–85; as exhibited in London, 85–86; and first stage of human development, 6, 17, 18–19, 22, 73, 91, 112; and missionaries, 23; progressive views of, 24; sexualization of, 42–44; simplicity of, 26–30; and Spencerian theory, 36, 74–76, 91; Spencer’s denigration of, 36, 145–46, 147; and sublime, 80–81; and theories of heredity, 22–24; threats to, and need to expedite anthropological study, 138. See also developmentalism; Orientalism; racism/racialization; see also individual countries/societies “savages,” music of: denigration of, 36, 91, 145–48; instruments of, 44–47; racism toward, 91–92, 112–13, 145–48; and “rhythmic impulse” (Wallaschek), 152 Saxon music, 99–100, 101 scales: of Chinese music, 98; evolution of, 110–11; of Greek music, 35, 67, 93, 98; Helmholtz-Chappell disagreement on, 172–73; of Hindu/Indian music, 52, 93, 260, 260n46; of Japanese music, 89; of Javanese music, 33; in musical histories, 103–4, 110–11, 112–13; of non-Western music, 61, 64, 91–92, 103–4, 148–49, 151; Parry on, 110–11,

112–13; of Peruvian music, 67, 68; Wallaschek on, 151; as way of unifying cultures, 134; of Western music, 91, 94, 111, 134 Schubert, Franz, 123, 149, 270; as translated by Fox Strangways, 264, 267–68, 267–68, 271n41 Scottish music, 33, 65, 83, 107, 256, 279n5; Chorley on, 126–27; Stafford on, 98–100 Scriabin, Alexander, 211 Seemann, Berthold, 115–17 Seligman, C. G.: and music of Veddas, 170, 219, 241, 242; and Torres Strait expedition, 224, 225 sexualization, 42–44; and Orientalism, 38, 41, 42 Sherman, Lieutenant, transcriptions of music by, 59, 61, 62, 64 Siamese music, 42, 44, 59, 61, 62, 82, 89, 90, 99, 103, 235 Somana¯tha, 52–53, 56, 260 “Sóma’s air.” See Day, Charles Russell; Jones, Sir William; “An Old Indian Air” “Song-Translation” (Fox Strangways), 265–68, 272 Spencer, Herbert, 11, 13, 47, 77, 110, 169; and denigration of non-Western primitives, 36, 77, 145–46, 147; and evolutionary theory, 73–75; and influence on Parry, 110–13; on psychology, 155, 189; racism of, 13, 36, 73–75, 148, 156, 227; and “Unknowable,” 74–75; and work of Tylor, 91, 142, 143 Spencer, Herbert, on origins of music, 108, 145–47, 269; as criticized by Gurney, 147, 148–49, 178; as criticized by Myers, 177–78; as criticized by Newman, 147–48; and Darwin/ Darwinists, 108, 146–47; and denigration of “savage” music, 36, 145–46, 147; and emotion in speech, 11, 36, 152, 155; and link between speech and song, 108, 147, 149, 178, 269; teleology of, 145–47, 148; and work of Wallaschek, 150–54 Stafford, William, 5, 9, 95, 104, 150; on British music, 98–102, 107; as compared to Hogarth, 101–2, 102; monogenist developmentalism of, 96–102, 100; on non-Western music, as ancient or modern, 98–102

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343

Stanford, Charles Villiers, and Cecil Forsyth, 9, 96 stringed instruments, 131–32, 139, 144 Stumpf, Carl, 169–71, 174, 176, 180–81, 182, 235, 243, 300 Sully, James, 179–81, 184 synesthesia, in work of Myers, 206, 207–11, 219, 220; and aesthetics, 214–17; as associative, 214–16; as atavistic, 210; evolution of, 210, 211, 211; as living fossil, 208, 215, 216, 220; and Scriabin, 211; as way of gauging human development, 208–9 Tahiti, music of, 26–28 Tasmanian music and dance, 43–44. See also Australian aboriginal music three stages of music (Rowbotham), 104, 105, 106, 107–10, 152; as criticized by Pitt Rivers, 163–64; Engel’s variation on, 131–32; ethnological correspondence of, 105, 106, 107 Tomlinson, T. H., 86–88 Torres Strait, expedition to, 77, 159, 160, 161, 164, 193, 197, 203, 224–32; and cultural adaptationism, 12–13, 203, 227; and Haddon’s research on music, 167–68; interdisciplinary character of, 224–25; and Myers’s work on hearing, 206, 225; problems of, 226–27; Reports of, 12, 206, 219, 225–26, 228, 232, 237 Torres Strait, music of, 228–32: age of, 228–29, 231; classes of, 229; examples of, 229, 230, 231; instruments of, 228; intervallic content of, 228–32, 237; recordings of, 225, 228, 229, 232; rhythmic content of, 230, 232; secular songs of, 229, 230, 231, 231, 232; transcription/notation of, 229 Traill, Thomas, 67–68, 116 transcription: cross-cultural, 252; difficulties of, 63–64, 94, 117, 156, 175; of “Hindostannie airs,” 49–51, 61, 64, 79, 84, 253; and rejection of Westernization/domesticization, 174, 175, 223–24; subjectivity of, 250–52; and translation, 5, 56–59, 250, 257–60, 277–78 transcription (by author): by Day, 257–58, 258; by Engel, 11; by M. Fowke, 51; by Jones, 5, 53, 54, 56–59, 257–58, 258; by Lt. Sherman, 59, 61, 62, 64. See also Fox Strangways, A. H., transcriptions by

344

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translation: as art, 265–66; Benjamin on, 272–74; “fluency” of, 266–67; as “foreignizing” and “domesticizing,” 261–62, 267; literary, 265n19, 265n20, 266–67, 277, 288–89; and obligation to original, 266, 267–68, 272–73; and transcription, 5, 56–59, 250, 257–60, 277–78. See also Fox Strangways, A. H., on translation travel/explorational literature, 25–47, 49–50, 68, 88, 90–91, 95; and comparative anthropology, 34–36; and degnerationism, 37–41; and monogenesis, 30–31; and musical instruments, 31, 33, 38, 44–47; and musical instruments (illustrations), 32, 39, 40, 45, 46; Notes and Queries questionnaire, as response to, 137–40; and polygenesis, 31–34; as popular rather than scholarly, 61, 68, 137; as precursor to ethnomusicology, 299–300; and sexualization, 38, 41, 42–44; on simplicity of “savages,” 26–30. See also individual authors and works A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan (Willard), 8, 49, 252–55, 257, 285. See also Willard, N. Augustus Tylor, E. B., 10–11, 12, 36, 44, 47, 67, 76–77, 91, 110, 168; on Australian aborigines, 164; and influence on Engel, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140–44, 145; on music and language, 142–43; and Primitive Culture, 11, 76–77, 140–44, 153; and Spencerian theory, 91, 142, 143 universal language, music as, 13–14, 94, 115–16, 135, 162 universalism, 13–14; as criticized by individualism, 162–63; in musical press,

78, 92–94; in post-Spencer era, 151, 154–55, 159, 162. See also individualism Valentine, C. W., 206, 207, 212 Veddas, music of, 241–46; and accrescent evolution, 243, 246; age of, 242; examples of, 244, 245; groupings of, 170–71, 241–42; intervallic content of, 242–43; “melody-building” in, 243; Seligman recordings of, 170, 241, 242; Seligman’s book on, 219, 241 vina (Indian musical instrument), 48, 51–52, 260n46 vocal music, 103, 108–9, 111–12, 132 Wagner, Richard, 114–15, 184, 221 Wallace, Alfred Russel, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, 24, 37, 44 Wallace, William, 181–84 Wallaschek, Richard, 10, 12, 78, 91–92, 94, 143, 146, 147, 169–70; and criticisms of Spencer, 152–53; on musical commonality/universalism, 151, 159, 162; on origins of music, 150–54, 169; on “rhythmical impulse,” 151–54. See also Primitive Music Welsh music, 83, 99–100, 107; and parallels to Hebrews (Chorley), 124–25 Willard, N. Augustus, 278; and criticism of Jones, 253, 285; as criticized by Day, 257, 285; as ethnomusicologist, 299, 301; on need to consult original sources, 253–54, 255, 285; and problems of transcription, 254, 285; and A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, 8, 9, 49, 252–55, 257, 258, 285 Williams, S. Wells, 44, 46 Williams, Thomas, 23, 44–45, 45, 46 “Words and Music in Song” (Fox Strangways), 268–72

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Bennett Zon’s Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first book to situate non-Western music within the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain. It covers such crucial issues as race, orientalism, otherness, and evolution, and explores the influence of important anthropological theories on the perception of non-Western music. The book also considers a wide range of other writings of the period, from psychology and travel literature to musicology and theories of musical transcription, and it reflects on the historically problematic term “ethnomusicology.” In this book, Zon discusses anthropological influences from the 1780s to the 1860s, investigating their relationship to travel literature and to theories such as noble simplicity, monogenism and polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, and developmentalism. He also looks at the effect of evolutionism— including Spencerian theories of the origin of music—on the musical press, general music histories, and histories of national music. Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain expands on concepts of evolution and individualism within the realm of psychology and explores the importance of Charles Samuel Myers’s evolutionary theories of “individual differences” for his ethnomusicological writings. It also demonstrates that A. H. Fox Strangways, by using contemporary translation theory as an analogy for transcription in The Music of Hindostan (1914), showed how individuality can be retained by embracing foreign elements rather than adapting them to Western musical style. Throughout this book, Bennett Zon reveals that the study of non-Western music evoked often widely conflicting attitudes during the heyday of British imperialism. Yet, through the impact of evolutionism, it gradually produced cohesive, proto-modern, methodologies, which supplied the groundwork for much recent and present-day British and North American ethnomusicology. Bennett Zon is Reader in Music and Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University UK and founding Director of the Centre for NineteenthCentury Music, Durham University. His many publications include The English Plainchant Revival (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Ashgate, 2000).

“This major study explores how various learned ‘discourses’ of Victorian and Edwardian Britain represented—in both words and notation—music outside the western ‘art’ tradition (mainly non-western but also, in the process, folk music of the British Isles). The topic is obviously an important one, bearing on the history of ethnography and social thought, ethnomusicology, the British Empire, and the history of the idea of ‘race.’ Bennett Zon’s book is substantial, comprehensive, extremely scholarly, and well written. It should reach a wide audience.” —Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway, University of London

“Bennett Zon’s Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain examines how non-Western music was represented in the literature of one of the great imperial powers. The result is an important contribution not only to the history of ethnomusicology but also to the larger issue of how conceptions of music were shaped by and, in turn, helped shape British ideas of self and other during a period that formed a great deal of the political and social situation that is still with us. Zon’s knowledge of a dauntingly large body of sources is thorough and comprehensive, and he is keenly aware of the way these texts interact with and influence one another over the ambitiously long period he studies.” —David Gramit, University of Alberta, Canada