Stagecoach (1939), through Hugo Friedhofer's score for Broken Awow (1950),. Leonard Rosenman's music for A Man Called Horse (1970), and John Barry's ...
Beverley Diamond
Musically Imagined Communities Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. Western Music and Its Others. Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. An anthology of work by eleven academic luminaries in musicology, ethnomusicology,
and popular music studies, Western Music and Its Others comprises a wide array of approaches to the study of music as a means of articulating intercultural relationships. The title does not shy away from problematic concepts. What is "Western music"? Which others? Other to whom or what? Why difference and not sameness, representation and not other aspects of productiordreception processes? Why "appropriation" rather than borrowing, alliance, or indeed theft? The answers to these questions range fruitfully from one essay to another, demonstrating how both the subject matter of each essay and the disjunctures among them render these questions complex. Extending Paul Gilroy's (1993) concept of the Black Atlantic, Richard Middleton's "Musical Belongings: Western Music and Its Low-Other" interprets intersections of race and class issues in works by Mozart, Gershwin, Ellington, and South African composer Abdullah Ibrahim in relation to what he calls the "Low Atlantic." Considering the implication of7for Black subjectivity, Gilroy differentiates the uses of popular and elite music in the representation of low-class characters in Mozart's Magic Flute and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, on one hand, and, on the other, Duke Ellington's Cotton Club period "jungle" music and Ibrahim's choral works. Similar kinds of musical appropriation are nuanced negatively in the case of the first two and positively in work of the last two, with reference to their "double consciousness." He argues against a claim that music can belong to a social group, preferring instead the possibility that listeners may come to belong to the music, "making ourselves at home within its temtory (78).
Joan Passler offers an important demonstration that Orientalism is not monolithic but multifunctional in "Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the 'Yellow Peril."' She contrasts the South Asian experiences of early-twentieth-centuryFrench composers Roussel and Delage, and compares their subsequent use of Indian musical materials as compositional fodder. Roussel was associated with the conservative Schola Cantorum whose belief in the "immutable [superior] racial qualities of the French influenced his choice to subject Indian melodies to substantial transformation. Delage, on the other hand, was Conservatoire-trained and affiliated with the more avant-garde group, several "Impressionists" among them, who formed the Societe Nationale and Societe Musical Independente. His encounters with India led him to critique the limits of the West and respect the integrity of Indian musical materials and vocal techniques. Passler accurately observes that both Roussel's aim to "effect spiritual transformation" and Delage's to "introduce new musical sounds" (110) and thereby participate in the development of the modernist movement, were fundamentally Orientalist. While she travelled to India in conjunction with this research, the superficiality of her knowledge of Hindustani and Karnatic classical music is occasionally apparent: she relates the Hindu tradition of North India to "South Indian vocal music" (101), for instance.
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Demonstrating the complexity of debates about music's role in nationalist discourses in "Bartok, the Gypsies, and Hybridity in Music," Julie Brown discusses Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's shifting attitudes toward the "Others," whose music was a component in the imagining of Hungarian nationhood. She observes that, in line with prevalent, pre-war attitudes about "racial purity," Bartok's early collecting of Hungarian peasant songs was a reaction to the urban gypsy music that Liszt and contemporaries had appropriated as "Hungarian." "The potentially good hybrid was the soughtafter fusion of his own art music with folk sources; the bad hybrid was Gypsy music" (123). After 1920, however, with an eye toward the rise of fascism, Bart6k began to question the concept of peasant purity, now seeing foreign influences as potential enrichment. Peter Franklin's "Modernism, Deception, and Musical Others: Los Angeles circa 1940," is, chronologically, a sequel to Brown's. He examines the development of modernism by European and Russian emigres in Los Angeles circa 1940, "a mirror-hall of otherness, where most were foreign, few 'at home"' (144). Among them were the anti-modern Theodor Adorno; the populist (?)Rachmaninoff; Stravinsky and Schoenberg, both vying to define modernist style; and the film composer Julius Korngold. He observes the antithesis between "idealized art" and film music, the metier of Korngold and a frequent destination for Rachmaninoff's music. Also engaging the history of modernism in America, John Corbett examines the appropriation of non-Western, particularly Asian, music by post-Ivesian American composers in "Fkperimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others." His thesis that "musical experimentation becomes micro-colonialism" has been well-worked by others, although not previously in relation to the specific repertoire that he chooses for a quick tour: Cage's Ryoanji, Cowell's Persian Set, Reich's Drumming, Hassell's Dream
Z%eory in Malaya, Eno and Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. An important element of his exploration is the Asian "Neo-Orientalism" in works by Tom Takemitsu and Tan Dun. Philip \! Bohlman's "Composing the Cantorate: Westernizing Europe's Other Within" examines the role of nineteenth-century Viennese cantors who used the synagogue pulpit as a "stage" to create a public space for Jewish musicians, a means of inscribing Jewish history as "Western." Unlike the articles preceding Bohlman's, where power relations are not problematized, he provides a useful analysis of circumstances in which the Other "exists within the space also occupied by the self, thereby creating a situation of competition rather than awe" (191). He demonstrates shifts in the nature of the "public sphere" within the Jewish community and, with these shifts, new forms and genres of popularization (e.g., broadsides). He argues that, until the 1930s ascent of the Nazi regime, the hazzanut, that is, the cantors of Central Europe and the work they created, became "the tool with which to perform and then write Jewish history," only to be forced to retreat to the sacred space of the synagogue as the Holocaust loomed. Martin Stokes's "East, West, and Arabesk offers, in my view, the most important challenges to the editors' conceptualization of the volume. He explores a range of discourses concerning the stylistically elusive Turkish popular music genre, arabesk, between its advent in 1969 and the early 1990s. Embraced by the semi-urban proletariat, critiqued by leftist intellectuals, co-opted in the mid 1980s by the political party of Torgut ~ z a lthe , genre's history demonstrates, as Stokes explains, that "colonial representations have a trajectory in (post)-colonized society which require understanding in their own locale, with attention to their local specificities. And secondly, these too have to be understood (and critiqued) in local and plural terms" (215). Furthermore, Stokes challenges unitary "readings" by demonstrating that music embraces many contradictions and may be "appropriated by different groups for quite different reasons" (216). Claudia Gorbman's "Scoring the Indian: Music in the Liberal Western" takes a step back toward unitary reading, albeit with a view to articulating the film industry's codified stereotypes of Native Americans. From the co-composed score of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), through Hugo Friedhofer's score for Broken Awow (1950), Leonard Rosenman's music for A Man Called Horse (1970), and John Barry's music for Dances with Wolves (1990), she demonstrates that music remained conservatively encoded even while more positive images of Native Americans were emerging. It is unfortunate, however, that Gorbman never ventures from Hollywood, and, in particular, does not examine work by First Nations, Metis, or Inuit film-makers,whose nuancing of stereotypes draws on parodic traditions and whose soundtracks also make wide use of contemporary Native American music. The reprint of a shortened version of Steven Feld's "The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop" (originally published in volume 28 of the Yearbookfor DaditionalMusic) is welcome in this anthology since it introduces issues of intellectual property and political economy. Feld examines the complex trajectories of "traditional" recordings of BaAka
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Pygmy music, as it undergoes multiple stylistic and economic mediations in the corporate colonialism of the world music industry. Acknowledging "today's increasingly blurred and contested lines between forms of musical invasion and forms of cultural exchange" (254), he lays out a complex series of strategies for rationalizing appropriation in the processes of "schizophonic mimesis." Unlike interpreters such as George Lipsitz (1994) or Tony Mitchell (1996), who see agency for traditional musicians in many world music alliances, ultimately his judgement is negative; he reminds us, in dedicatee Colin firnbull's words, that "noise kills the forest."
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Like Stokes, David Hesmondhalgh relies on ethnology rather than merely textual analysis in "International Times; Fusions, Exoticism, and Antiracism in Electronic Dance Music," a case study of the West London-based independent company Nation Records. This sophisticated analysis goes much deeper than that of the Orientalism watchers. The case study complements Feld's. The liberal, Caribbean and Pakistani owners of Nation sought to enable British Asian artists, maximizing the potential of musical fusion and preventing the very sorts of appropriation endured by the BaAka. Hesmondhalgh examines, in particular, the dance fusion band Transglobal Underground and the British Asian hip-hop act Fun-da-mental, finding the practices of Nation Records less innocent than their intentions with regard to exoticization and sampling ethics. But far from censure, the analysis of their "brave but flawed attempt to provide an alternative" (301) points once again to the multiple agendas-or, as Hesmondhalgh calls them, "modalities of Black identity at Nation" (299)-that inform readings of both musical strategies and processes.
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The veteran British writer on popular music, Simon Frith, concludes the anthology with a survey of "The isc course of world Music." He explores ethnomusicology's contribution to the definition of the "genre" at a point where academic and commercial concerns have come together. Academic perspectives on "authenticity," "hybridity," "resistance," and "globalization" have all been influential. He urges us to "recognize the ways in which world music has itself been constructed as a kind of tribute to and parody of the community of scholars" (320). Finally, I return to the formidable "Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music" with three sections by Georgina Born and two more coauthored by Born and Hesmondhalgh. This is the best synthesis I have seen to date of current thinking about postcolonial analysis and music studies, musical modernism, hybridity and fusion, the representation/articulation of socio-cultural identities, and techniques of the musical imaginary. I particularly like Born's model of ways in which musically imagined communities may be articulated (35-36). Nonetheless, there are still a few traces of bias with which this reviewer would take issue. "Representation" is overemphasized, as if all musical meaning is discursive and after performance, not embedded in processes of production. Articles by Stokes and Hesmondhalgh prove otherwise. While gender and sexuality are also given the nod as aspects of "otherness," there is a reluctance to engage these issues, even where specific authors have done so. They "emphatically" assert that "this book is not an exercise in methodological relativism," stressing that interdisciplinarity is their aim. But given that none of the authors speaks from a non-Western perspective, one senses that the issue of cultural
relativism, and the spin-off of methodological relativism that often results, is evaded by bounding the interdisciplinarity very neatly. Would the responses of Native Arnerican film-makers and movie-goers raise different issues about the musical representation of indigenous others from those identified by Gorbman? Would BaAka listeners critique the world music recordings studies by Feld in a different way? Given the editors' rejection of methodological relativism, the division between textual interpretation and ethnography is striking in this anthology. Scholars of Euro-American classical music continue to define their role as ideal interpreters of texts, while scholars of other traditions more often see themselves as "messengers" of locally based musicians. There are exceptions, of course; Passler and Brown both examine the localized politics that inform compositional practice. Feld offers a textual analysis, albeit one informed by interviews with many of the musicians whose work is interpreted. Like all anthologies, the authors' frameworks and the political implications of those frameworks vary. I was struck by the extent to which dichotomization still informed many of the essays, particularly those that offer readings of Orientalism rather than explorations of the processes of production. As Stokes notes, "the critique of Orientalism .. . has a way of reproducing the very voicelessness that the critique itself diagnoses and problematizes" (115). Most successful, in my view, were articles such as those by Brown, Stokes, Bohlman, and Hesmondhalgh that insisted on plural perspectives and examined the cultural contingencies that formed them.
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Ultimately, then, this anthology is a significant one both for the complexities upon which it insists and for the controversial readings of music's meanings that it posits. It will stimulate debate and inform opinion. Its ultimate value may be as an assessment of where we were with regard to music and difference, Western music and others, at the turn of the century, but it will be no less valuable for that. References
Feld, Steven. 1996. "The poetry and politics of pygmy pop." Yearbook for traditional music 28: 1-35. Gilroy, Paul. 1 993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness London: Verso. Lipsitz, George. 1994. Dangerous crossroads: Popular music, postmodernism and the poetics of place. London: Verso. Mitchell, Tony. 1996. Popular music and local identity. London: Leicester University Press.
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