Philip Bohlman, Music as Representation

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Journal of Musicological Research

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Music as Representation Philip V. Bohlmana a University of Chicago,

To cite this Article Bohlman, Philip V.(2005) 'Music as Representation', Journal of Musicological Research, 24: 3, 205 — 226 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/01411890500233924 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01411890500233924

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Journal of Musicological Research, 24: 205–226, 2005 Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc. ISSN 0141-1896 print / 1547-7304 online DOI: 10.1080/01411890500233924

1547-7304 0141-1896 GMUR Journal of Musicological Research Research, Vol. 24, No. 3-4, July 2005: pp. 0–0

MUSIC AS REPRESENTATION

Music V. Philip as Representation Bohlman

Philip V. Bohlman

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University of Chicago In contradistinction to common adages proclaiming music’s inability to represent anything other than itself, there are remarkably complex ways in which identities—both embedded within music and appropriated from the extramusical contexts in which music takes place—actually engender culturally distinctive representational processes. The very possibilities to represent music or to be represented by music differ from culture to culture, and they necessarily reveal distinctive ontologies of music. Ethnomusicology’s particular concern for the representation of music deserves special attention, not least because of the discipline’s historical need to recognize the ways music relates to what it is and what it is not—that is, to musical texts and contexts. A framework with ten different processes provides the theoretical core of an examination of music as representation. Five sets of contrastive pairs articulate the larger framework, which consciously and dialectically includes theoretical approaches from all disciplines of musical scholarship. It is because the representation of music and representing with music are so central to what all musical scholars do that musical scholarship acquires an aesthetic and ideologically activist impulse that deserves, if not demands, the attention of all musical scholars.

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY’S REPRESENTATIONAL PARADOX One of the most basic principles of ethnomusicology is that “music is more than itself.” We study music to understand more about cultural contexts, about ideology and politics, about the ways in which language functions, about gender and sexuality, and about the identities of cultures ranging from the smallest group to the most powerful nation. The point is not so much that ethnomusicologists study all these things in and of themselves, but rather that they study music in order to understand all these other things. Ethnomusicologists study music, in other words, because it possesses the capacity to represent. Ethnomusicologists understand music

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as representation, and the concepts and methods used to understand how music represents distinguish the discipline of ethnomusicology from other disciplines of musical scholarship while in fact complementing and considerably enriching those other disciplines. Music’s power to represent in itself results from a paradox: Music represents both self and other. In order to be “more than itself” (other), music also must be itself (self). Just how the self represents the other is the subject of this article honoring Margaret Kartomi, an ethnomusicologist whose contributions to the understanding of music’s representational potential exert a particular influence on musical scholarship precisely because they have known no disciplinary borders. The approach I take in this article consciously reflects and reflects upon Margaret Kartomi’s methodological predilection for systematic structure and lucid argument. She so often has made a signal contribution to ethnomusicology through classification—a form of logical presentation and imaginative representation— thus empowering the connective “and” in her studies of music and meaning, music and religion, music and culture contact, music and musical instruments, and music and race, to reveal how music is always more than itself.1 Most broadly considered, music sometimes represents because its qualities of selfness are like the otherness it reflects, and at other times self and other contrast—even contradict—each other. Music can mediate sameness or transform otherness. The representational paradox has often been dismissed—for example, by composers of Western art music who might argue, as Igor Stravinsky famously did, that music can represent nothing other than itself. Dismissing music’s representational paradox, nonetheless, is only possible if one ignores both ontology and practice— what individuals and cultures understand music to be and how they use music—for the reality remains that belief in the power of music to represent in complex ways is virtually universal. When shifted to a metaphysical level—something I do throughout this article—the representational paradox becomes even more complex, because it is on that level especially that music assumes forms that reveal it to represent through both agency and process. When music serves “as representation,” we are witnessing its subjective potential; when music is 1

See, for example, Margaret J. Kartomi, “Music and Trance in Central Java,” Ethnomusicology 17/2 (1973), 163–208; “Lovely When Heard from Afar: Mandailing Ideas of Musical Beauty,” in Five Essays on the Indonesian Arts, ed. Margaret Kartomi (Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1981), 1–14; On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); “IndonesianChinese Oppression and the Musical Outcomes in the Netherlands East Indies,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 271–317.

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a “representation of ” something, we recognize its objective functions. When it represents, music may be either subject or object, or—and this is when the paradox seems at once obvious and obscure—music can combine the metaphysical traits of both subject and object. The study of music as representation has played a singularly important role in the history of ethnomusicology. It would even be possible to write the history of ethnomusicology as a series of “representational moments,” or perhaps “representational revelations,” when dramatically new concepts of music emerged as a result of a new understanding of representation. Such moments or revelations accompanied the earliest encounters between Europe and its Others during the Age of Discovery (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), when European colonizers and missionaries realized that the music of indigenous peoples in the Americas, subSaharan Africa, or Asia was not what Europeans had thought music to be; for example, it might accompany acts of cannibalism, as the French missionary Jean de Léry observed during the 1550s while among the Tupinamba, an indigenous people living around the modern Bay of Rio de Janeiro.2 The wonder that characterized the music of colonial encounter led to the creation of a representational moment in the sixteenth century, for in order to understand why the music of Europe’s Others was different, Europeans began to employ various new ways to represent it, not least among them transcriptions brought from the New World and the introduction of other people’s music into European musical genres, such as the Spanish villancico. The techniques and technologies of representation at such significant moments inevitably attempted to represent both the music itself—the objective parts understood by the Europeans—and the traits that the Europeans did not understand because of a subjectivity of radical difference. It is not surprising that the study of music as representation actually begins with Early Modern Europe and the accompanying development of print technologies and the spread of musical literacy. Ethnomusicology seeks to demystify music—to understand its otherness— by developing representational languages and technologies. The importance of technology as a response to music’s capability to represent should not be overlooked: Ethnomusicology accompanies and even empowers the spread of representational technologies. Again, we witness an aspect of the representational paradox when scientific approaches are used to unlock the secrets that music’s otherness holds. When we undertake the study of music as ethnomusicologists, we concomitantly learn and develop many techniques to represent it. Quite early in our studies, we begin to transcribe music that we collect with recorders in our fieldwork. By transcribing, we 2

See Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America [1578], trans. by Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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again make decisions about representing self and other in music. Westerntrained ethnographers generally employ the techniques of Western notation— ideally combining them with culture-emerging systems—to represent the aspects of selfness, but we inevitably introduce new symbols to transpose aspects of otherness that Western notation cannot transcribe. Transcription is one of ethnomusicology’s representational “metalanguages.” The ethnographic approaches of ethnomusicology, not least the central practice of fieldwork, produces other metalanguages as well, ranging from prose accounts of individual performances to the use of film to document large-scale ritual. It is very significant that most ethnomusicologists find that any one metalanguage is in itself inadequate and that it is preferable, instead, to develop as many as possible. Each representational metalanguage has the potential to capture several specific traits of music particularly well, but the truly complex representational nature of music ultimately demands techniques and technologies that make it possible for performers and scholars alike to represent as many aspects of music’s selfness and otherness as possible. MUSIC ITSELF AND MUSIC BEYOND ITSELF Because of its power to represent, music may add something to or take something away from that which it represents. When they interpret music as representation, then, ethnomusicologists often ask one of two questions— or indeed both questions at the same time: Does music change that which it represents by making it more than it originally was? Does music reduce that which it represents, making it less than it was before music was introduced to it? Such questions are always ideologically charged, all the more so because of the tension between self and other that the representational paradox creates. To illustrate the ideological issues accompanying representation, let us turn briefly to the ways in which music and sacred texts often generate ideological conflict. When music joins words to enhance the meaning of sacred texts, one is almost always forced to ask, as Margaret Kartomi has in her comparative studies of ritual and meaning,3 whether the meaning is clarified or obscured by music. This question is not as straightforward as it may seem at first glance. First of all, it is almost impossible to find a religion in which song and music do not accompany the performance of sacred texts quite extensively. Second, it 3

Margaret Kartomi, “Tabut: A Shi’a Ritual Transplanted from India to Sumatra,” in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Indonesia: Essays in Honour of Professor J. D. Legge, ed. David P. Chandler and M. C. Ricklefs (Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1986), 141–162.

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is equally impossible to find a religion where music’s presence is not limited in some ways, as if also to limit its power. Third, the questions raised by the representational paradox may not really be about understanding at all, but rather about the ways in which music introduces something entirely different—in other words, the secular. We see this occurring when musical instruments are banned from religious music because they may represent secular practices, such as dance—something that happens in many religions. Further complicating ethnomusicology’s representational paradox is the question of whether music itself changes when it represents. Stated somewhat differently, is music abstract or symbolically specific during the process of representation? When mode—or raga—in Indian classical music represents a particular time of day, a mood, a mythological narrative and set of characters, and visual depictions that include all these characteristics, it is specific in the way its symbols work. A different raga, in the case of Indian music, represents something else. In East Asian Buddhist chant, by contrast, representation is almost entirely abstract. The musical underpinning of chant is indispensable, but repertories and even practices lend themselves to extensive improvisation.4 Especially important to remember when considering the singularity of music and the plurality of musics from a cross-cultural perspective is that musical representation assumes many different forms, and it does so within the same culture. Perhaps it is the narrative quality of music that is more specific and the religious quality that is more abstract, which is generally the case in Western music. In one music culture (such as that of Japan), the semiotics of music may be highly focused, whereas in another (such as many music cultures in the Middle East), music’s semiotic significance may be entirely secondary. These semiotic distinctions become obvious when we remember that the signs that represent the object— music—express meaning in culturally specific ways. The semiotics of notation—the notes on the page—in Western or East Asian classical musics have no parallel in cultures in which music is orally transmitted, even when, as is often the case, other signs are used to provide references to repertory, style, and performance. Signs are no less significant for conveying the subjective meanings of music, for example, when they provide guidelines for the performative limits of music in dance and worship. When ethnomusicologists study music as representation, therefore, they are not trying to determine a set of signs that prescribe how and what

4

See Pi-yen Chen, The Chant of Purity: The Liturgical Chants of the Chinese Buddhism (Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, forthcoming).

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music represents. How music represents is constantly changing, and what music represents differs vastly from one culture to the next.

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WHAT AND HOW MUSIC REPRESENTS Ethnomusicology is a discipline that emphasizes the representation of those things that music is and is not. To understand better the diverse ways in which music represents in these two contrasting ways, the remainder of this article provides an outline or framework that contains ten different types of musical representation. On one level, each one of the ten can be understood as containing an “object that music represents,” say a story or a particular cultural identity. On another level, each one of the ten is a process that also tells us “how music represents,” say by stimulating the senses or giving power to those possessing the technologies of representation. On still another level, the ten representational practices allow us to recognize and understand distinctive “ontologies of music,” in other words the different ways in which representation generates distinctive concepts of what music really is or can be, and how it can be both subject and object. Representation, thus, requires translation—which accounts for the differences between subjectivity and objectivity, self and other—but strives for solutions that identify and draw meaning from their similarities. To permit comparison, I have divided the ten representational practices into two groups whose relation is dialectical. In the first group we consider practices in which music is charged with the ability to represent the self or selfness; in the second group, we find the representation of the other or otherness (see Figure 1). The two groups, furthermore, display a certain tension, in which the representation of what music is as self has a diaectical opposite as other. The comparisons from Group 1 (self) to Group 2 Group 1—Self

Group 2—Other

Music Representing Music

Music Representing beyond Music

1. Sound

1. Silence

2. Sign

2. Story

3. Structure

3. Senses

4. Secular/Everyday

4. Sacred

5. Self-Identity

5. Power

Figure 1. Ten ways in which music represents.

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(other) are intentionally parallel. This will become clear to readers when they look at music as “sound” in the first group and compare it with music as “silence” in the second. However, not all comparisons from group to group are quite that straightforward, because, of course, the ways in which music represents are not at all straightforward. It may be most helpful to use the ten practices and the dialectical tension between the two groups as a point of departure and a framework for embellishing and expanding individual experiences.

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Sound Music’s selfness is most fundamentally embedded in sound. In almost simplistic terms, one could argue that, without sound, there would be no music. Whereas there is little consensus about what other physical phenomena may contribute to music’s being in the world—its phenomenology—there can be no question that sound is indispensable. Music gives meaning to sound, and sound is the basis for understanding meaning in music. Accordingly, there is an intensively and extensively intimate relation between sound and music. They are mutually dependent. Sound provides us with a means of representing by opening many possibilities of organization, and it is for this reason that ethnomusicologists often offer as the basic definition of music that it is “organized sound.” Implicit in such a definition is that representation depends on organization and that we are able to recognize it largely when we understand patterns organized in ways that produce order. If sound lends itself to organization as music, noise serves as an opposing force that produces only chaos. In the most literal sense, music cannot represent chaos, because it would then not be acting as music.5 These may be rather fine points of metaphysical distinction, but they are important if we are to understand just which sounds become music when they are organized. Nature is one of the primary places in which sound is believed to be organized. Music may represent nature in both biological and physical terms—in other words, as sound produced by living organisms (e.g., birds, in many musical cultures) or as the physical properties of sound, which are believed to be ordered and organized (e.g., in the production of musical intervals by increasing the frequency of sound waves). Sound is also a product of 5 Note, however, the somewhat different metaphysical property of “noise” in Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). In Attali’s largely historical argument, the ways in which societies transform noise into music affords social agency and political power to different social and economic groups. Music, therefore, serves as an index for—and hence, a means of representing—the transformation of one era to the next, in which the political economy is more complex, but also more fragmented and socially skewed.

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nature because it is given a special position in human communication. In other words, when speech organizes sound, it also makes an essential move toward becoming musical. In nature, music organizes sound by mediating, by participating extensively in the processes of organization.6 Just where the organization of sound takes place determines how we understand the ways in which it can represent. On one hand, the organization of sound is a phenomenon of physics, in other words of the production of sound. Its organization is thus implicit in its physical structure. On the other hand, sound is a phenomenon of biology—and music particularly a phenomenon of human biology—hence making the organization of sound a property of reception rather than of production. Music becomes representational not only because of what one hears but of how one hears it. It is music, nonetheless, that connects and mediates between the production and the reception of sound. It is music that humans use as a tool for determining what forms of organized sound will have meaning. It is music that allows sound to provide a template for an expression of sonic selfness that contributes beyond itself to the broader processes of organization that we call representation. Silence The absence of sound is given meaning by music. The sonic characteristics of music serve to establish boundaries when they encounter silence, that is, when music ceases to sound. The question to consider here is whether the silence that we experience once sound ceases becomes then a part of music’s selfness, or whether indeed it begins to lead us into that which lies beyond music itself, into what we have been considering as musical otherness in this article. The answer to the conundrum of what music means when it represents silence is one central to ethnomusicology, for that answer is highly culture specific. We have already seen in the previous section that Western concepts of music take the sounded characteristics of music and their organization as a given.7 In other cultures, that is often not the case. In Western music silence begins only when sound ceases, and this means, moreover, that silence has no real independence from sound. We know this when we consider rests in Western music, which simply occupy a place between the end of one set of sounds and the beginning of the next. The musical universe in Western aesthetics, thus, is at all times busy, with organized 6

See, for example, Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 7 See, for example, John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

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sound occurring even in classical and medieval models of music in the harmony of the spheres. The inability to think of silence separately is evident in the ways we speak about it in the West; for example, in the observation that “it was so silent one could hear a pin drop.” Whether or not we accept the inherent contradiction of defining music’s otherness in terms of its selfness—we have to hear something in order to recognize silence— the difficulty of representing silence is clear. There are other music cultures, however, in which representing silence is fundamental to the concept of music. The best known example of such a music culture may well be that of Japan, which by extension owes its concept of silence in music to religious and aesthetic traditions elsewhere in East Asia. In Japanese music, silence has the name ma, which is better translated as “emptiness” than as silence.8 The emptiness of ma exists on its own, and the listener focuses attention on the vastness that emptiness can be. It is not a moment outside or beyond music through which one moves to reach sound again, but rather a moment within music that asks us to listen beyond sound. Listening beyond sound is really the crucial point, because when we think about silence in this way, we realize that music has itself entered several new metaphysical levels: those evident in music’s interaction with religion, with the human senses, and with human experience. The point is that music represents silence by representing much, much more. By studying the ways music also represents silence, we therefore dramatically multiply the ways in which we understand how music allows us to understand the many musical traits lying outside music itself. Sign That music is more than sound and silence is evident in the many ways signs are used to represent it. The use of signs further suggests the widespread concept that music does not effectively represent itself, but rather humans prefer to employ an intermediary level of representation that draws the selfness of music closer to us only through translation. In this section, I distinguish between two different uses of signs to represent music. In the first, music is imagined to function like a language, hence opening the possibility of describing music and even writing it as if it were a language, with smaller and larger linguistic units. In the second, signs are used simply to create a substitute for music, but indeed a substitute that explains what music is through other media, especially visual forms. 8

See William P. Malm, Six Hidden Views of Japanese Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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The linguistic analysis of music has one of two different names— semiology or semiotics—the differences of which are not essential for understanding the importance they have exerted on analytical thought.9 The belief that music and language are related and that they overlap has a long history, but it was the French-Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, who distinguished the ways in which language can provide a framework for representing things other than language, including music.10 Saussure’s theory of semiology has been especially valuable in historical musicology and ethnomusicology because it recognizes that signs actually give social meaning to cultural practices. Music, therefore, represents by communicating something about society. Peircean semiotics (named after Charles Sanders Peirce), by contrast, treats signs as markers for something else, even for something else that is not immediately present.11 Peircean signs are more objective than linguistic in their functions, and accordingly they do not insist on an assertion that signs, in and of themselves, tell us how music functions in society. At first glance, it might seem as if the Saussurean emphasis on social function and linguistic system would be more appealing to ethnomusicologists than the Peircean emphasis on traces and icons that stand in for music, but in fact it is the opposite that is true.12 It is indeed the case that Western thinking about music more often imagines that music functions like language, but the moment non-Western thinking is introduced, the more neutral role of Peircean signs has more utility. The use of notation to represent music quite obviously relies on the belief in literate societies that it is possible to understand musical meaning by replacing sounds with signs. Notation, though it is learned at an early age in literate societies, may be so extensive as to replace “hearing” music with “reading” music. Arguably, the sign systems of notation make it possible to experience music after dispensing with sound altogether. Ethnomusicologists have a tendency to distrust notation as an inadequate or misleading sign system, which is one of the reasons that most ethnomusicologists modify notational systems to suit the music they are transcribing. Ethnomusicology also multiplies the types of signs and sign systems it uses: Anthropological ethnomusicologists integrate ethnographic sign 9 See Kofi Agawu, “The Challenge of Semiotics,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 138–160. 10 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale [1916], critical edition, ed. by Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1972). 11 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sandres Peirce, 8 vol., ed. C. Harsshorne, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1966). 12 See, for example, Harold Powers, “Language Models and Musical Analysis,” Ethnomusicology 25/1 (1980), 1–60; and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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systems into their descriptions of music; systematic ethnomusicologists make extensive use of electronic means of measuring sound, which they then represent with graphs and tables of sound waves, acoustical qualities, and even pitch movement. The concern for just what it is that signs represent is one of the reasons that field recording is a crucial point of departure for ethnomusicologists; by recording, ethnomusicologists rely on a sonic sign system to which they can turn again and again, and on which they can run experiments. Signs mark the space of transition and translation between music and its representation, hence between music as subject and object, and they thus are indispensable not only to representation itself but to the conviction that improving representation is possible only by refining the use of signs. Story Societies throughout the world turn to music to tell their stories and record their histories. Music represents through narrative in two ways that reveal the extent to which we allow music to reach far beyond itself and rework stories so that they are made more meaningful. These two narrative possibilities of music and the ways in which their similarities and differences overlap are already evident when we distinguish them in several languages. In English, the distinction is clearer when we employ the terms “story” and “history,” but in other languages the narrative power of music is not as easy to disentangle from the commonplace names for narrative (storia and storia in Italian, or Geschichte and Geschichte in German). To understand the distinction in music’s narrativity it is helpful to think of two different kinds of representation. First, music may represent through narrative by serving as a context, which allows music to be a participant in the sociopolitical changes we call history. Second, music may itself provide the text for a story, in other words the material that tells a story, by representing it in ways unique to music. Clearly, just how music tells a story is very complex, for in order to tell a story, music must combine many ways of representing what lies beyond itself. Just as different societies and cultures understand their histories in different ways, so too is music used to represent history in different ways. If history is imagined through the telling of mythological tales, music often provides a context for performance. The mythological cycles of Hinduism, the Ramaya0a and the Mahabharata, are musically performed in South and Southeast Asia, that is, in the classical musics of India and Indonesia. Mythological cycles often produce epics, which in turn may be transformed into more canonic historical texts, and music, again as a performance medium, may contribute extensively to the transformation. The various mythological-historical cycles that distinguish the cultures of the

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Mediterranean, from the Odyssey to Tristan to the Hillali epics of North Africa to El Cid are inseparable from music’s performative connection to history. Music may acquire its power to tell stories by organizing the text of stories in musical ways. Ballads, one of the most important genres of musical narrative in European folk music, function in this way. It is common for the words of a ballad to be organized according to scenes in a story or even scenes in a drama, each one of which may be shaped by the melody into a strophe. The narrative practice of music we sometimes call “program music” represents stories in even more deliberate ways. The symphonic tone poem in European classical music, for example, is composed to represent a place or a person, or perhaps an historical event. Chinese instrumental genres, such as those played on the family of zithers known as qin, or on plucked lutes such as the pi’pa, frequently announce in their titles that they represent nature or a battle in an early period of history. The representational power of music is even more directly expressed in Chinese instrumental music, for Chinese musical notation—adapted from the ideograms used in writing the Chinese language—is highly representational. When music tells stories and provides further contextual evidence for history, it does so by weaving many different kinds of representation together. On one level, music may represent through sound itself; on another level it may rely on the semiotic characteristics of signs—for example, the inscriptions on musical instruments played by circumpolar cultures, such as, the Saami of northern Scandinavia and Russia. There may be still other levels in which music incorporates visual depictions, for example, when ballads are circulated on broadsides with pictures also printed on them, or when epic cycles are performed as dramas, such as the different genres of wayang in Java. It is for such reasons that we rely on music to draw us closer to history, to help us tell again the stories about our own past, and about peoples and times we can no longer experience directly. When music tells a story, it draws both its narrative evidence and its listeners closer together, and thus also draws self and other closer together. Structure Of all the assumptions we make when we attempt to represent music, none would seem to result from common sense more than our belief that music has structure. Once we establish what the structure of any given music is, it is the task of musical scholars to represent that structure in such a way that its logic and order are apparent in some kind of universal language. The basis of structure in music, however, may not be quite as

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simple as all that. There may be no real reason to assume that the music of every culture possesses structural unity; in fact, there are musics in the world that may demonstrate the lack of structure—even chaos—quite extensively. My interest here is not to argue for or against the presence or absence of structure in music, but rather to examine the ways in which the assumption that music has structure has generated analytical approaches that formalize vocabularies emphasizing what is often called simply “system.” System has both musical and cultural components. Until recently, anthropology—especially social anthropology, but also cultural anthropology—had assumed that cultures were organized around systems (for example, “kinship systems”) that told us who was related to whom and by extension how societies reproduced themselves. Musical systems can be recognized by the names we give to them when we analyze them according to “modes” or “scales,” or create categories that identify “form” or “genre.” Ethnomusicologists work from the conviction that systems are isomorphic, which is to say that the society we refer to by a name that indicates its high degree of organization also has a musical system that reflects the same degree of organization.13 In “Turkish culture,” then, there are musical structures that produce “Turkish music.” That the representation of structure through systems is open to criticism goes without saying, and yet there seems to be no retreat from methods that emphasize the analysis of structure. The use of representation to identify the structures that produce systems has provided the essential framework for the ethnomusicological study of non-Western “art musics,” especially those of Asia: for example, Indian or Indonesian classical musics. It is noteworthy that when structure generates system, the result is a complex music, which we then call art or classical music. Complexity is unquestionably important if representation is to be applied to the systems of Asian art music. Not only is it critical to transcribe performances according to maqam (Arabic classical music), radif (Persian classical music), or raga (Indian classical music), but analysis proceeds by fitting every piece or performance into one part of the system or another. There are even approaches to ethnomusicology in which virtually all analytical work is carried out to allow experimentation with representation. Notable here is the school of systematic musicology that long dominated Central European ethnomusicology, a school called systematisch-vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Some of the most important analysis in ethnomusicology comes from the major figures 13

See Thomas Turino, “Structure, Context, and Strategy in Musical Ethnography,” Ethnomusicology 34/3 (1990), 399–412.

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in this field, such as Slovak scholar Oskár Elschek and German scholar Albrecht Schneider, who together edit the journal Systematische Musikwissenschaft.14 In systematic musicology, the representation of musical structure using mechanical means—sonograms or computer-generated images—often precedes and even replaces the representation of cultural structures. Order and system are not only placed in the center of every analytical product, but the representational techniques needed to keep system at the center are constantly refined to confirm the dominance of structure in music.

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Senses One of ethnomusicology’s major contributions to an expanded understanding of what music is and can be has been its examination of music’s presence in and influence on the body. Ethnomusicologists look not only at the effect of music on the emotions, but how the emotions are represented specifically through musical characteristics. For ethnomusicologists, the senses acquire physical meaning—in other words, they are inseparable from the way the human body participates in all acts of music making. When ethnomusicologists think about music as “humanly organized sound,” they are also making a claim for music’s ability to represent the body. Music represents, therefore, because it can effectively embody the senses. The musical representation of the senses has two bases—biological and emotional. These two forms of representing the senses are widespread throughout many music cultures, but significantly they show different nuances from culture to culture. They therefore reveal an almost universal recognition that the body is a source for producing music, and at the same time is affected by music because it is also the physical site where music is perceived. The physical relation between the production and perception of music is extremely significant for certain ontological concepts of music. The performance of zikr (“remembrance,” i.e., the extended repetition of the name of Allah to draw the body closer to Allah in Islam) unfolds as a physical process accelerated by singing, dancing, and even hyperventilation to heighten the sense of euphoria.15 The extent to which music’s biological properties shape beliefs in music’s efficacy and impact on human beings is also clearly evident in the frequent use of 14

Oskár Elschek, Musikforschung der Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Vienna: E. Stieglemayer, 1992); Albrecht Schneider, “Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology,” in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 293–317. 15 Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession, trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

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music to heal.16 In shamanistic societies and religions, the music-making shaman (a religious healer with magical powers) may even enter the body of the patient. The field of music therapy may be more scientifically grounded than shamanism, but it nonetheless accepts that music can and does directly change and heal the body. The representation of music as emotion often reveals biological associations of music with the body, but it also extends and multiplies the way in which music’s representational capability is understood. The most difficult question posed by the representation of emotions is whether music’s potential to be reduced to systems is parallel to a similar systemic basis for emotions. A musical vocabulary with a specific syntax for individual emotions was codified in the eighteenth-century European notion of a “doctrine of affections” (Affektenlehre in German). That system of representing senses differs, nonetheless, from the association—both specific and general—of Indian modes, or ragas, with certain emotional states. The Indian raga does not so much codify as provide a framework for emotions, which are also evident in the other attributes of raga, such as association with a time of day or a mythological story. Linguistic anthropologists working in ethnomusicology, notably Steven Feld, far more systematically investigate the ways that music represents specific senses, recognizing and describing—as Feld did among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea—that music may function almost as a language that allows humans to express their emotions.17 The ways in which music represents the senses assumes many different forms, and these challenge ethnomusicologists to refine their methods and expand their understanding of just how music represents. Secular/Everyday Are all human beings musical? Do we find music in the everyday worlds of all human beings? Ethnomusicology answers both questions positively, and by doing so it embraces a belief in the power of music to represent that distinguishes it from other types of musical scholarship. Long before modern ethnomusicology had developed, the recognition that there were musical practices we would today call folk music was based on the belief that music could represent the everyday. When Johann Gottfried Herder actually used the term “folk song” (Volkslied) for the first time in the 1770s, he did so to describe as many activities as possible as musical and 16 Marina Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 17 Feld, Sound and Sentiment.

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to associate those activities with all kinds of people throughout the world.18 The idea that music was representational was very clear in Herder’s formulation, for he described folk songs as “the voices of the people in songs.” Folk song, in fact, formed at the border between speech and music, where it took the form of what he and many others since have called “poesy.” Scholars of folk song in the nineteenth century believed that folk songs reflected the ways people spoke every day, in their dialects or with the images they used to represent their everyday worlds. Folk song was, therefore, a mirror of the everyday. Just as different individuals passed through the day in different ways, different types of folk song developed. Work songs were specific to the labors of different workers. Children sang songs that differed from those sung by adults. All such songs, however, represented the interaction of human beings with the worlds in which they lived every day. Special repertories developed from the interaction with the everyday world. The changing activities of the everyday during the course of annual working cycles in rural societies formed the basis for “calendric songs,” such as those for harvest. The “rites of passage” and “rituals” in a society also gave birth to special repertories of music. In fact, a ritual also may be interpreted as a departure from the everyday, but the important point for us to keep in mind is that music has a way of representing the everyday aspects of ritual by turning it into a shared cultural experience, what Victor Turner would call communitas19 or what Pierre Bourdieu would call habitus.20 Music and ritual interact to represent the very edges of the everyday, those borders between the secular and the sacred. Some of the most important folk music scholars and ethnomusicologists have been concerned with how music represents the everyday. German folk song scholar Ernst Klusen was especially interested in the way music was crucial to the formation of groups, both small and large, within the contexts of everyday society. In ethnomusicology itself, it was John Blacking who most forcefully claimed that what made music special was the way all human beings used it to represent the everyday. In his book, How Musical Is Man?, Blacking developed a theory that the presence of music throughout human societies was species specific.21 In other words, one of the things that all human beings do is turn to the world around them with music. It is one of the most distinctive goals of 18

See especially Johann Gottfried Herder, Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1778) and Volkslieder (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1779). 19 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 20 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 21 John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973).

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ethnomusicology to perceive and describe music in the everyday, and that goal is one of the motivations for the spread of ethnomusicological theory to study popular music more and more intensively at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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Sacred The secular qualities of the everyday belong to the self, while by contrast the sacred belongs to a realm of otherness. Precisely because the sacred is found at such a distance in the realm of otherness, it must be drawn closer to the self to be effective in religion. It is for this reason that music is so important as a means of representing the sacred: Music mediates the distance between the secular and sacred worlds, drawing them closer together. More to the point of this article, music is especially good at representing the sacred, and it is for that reason that virtually every culture and religion recognizes the sacred attributes of music itself. When music unleashes wonder, strengthens prayer, or accompanies the performance of sacred texts, it functions to represent the sacred. Histories of music in many cultures, moreover, may be fundamental examinations of the constantly changing responses to music’s ability to represent the sacred. The history of music in South Asia, for example, takes the notion that Vedic chant can represent the order of the universe in its embodiment of the intoned and unwavering fundamental pitch of um. The migrations of music as a component of ritual lend themselves to interpretation of the historical longue durée of exchange between South and Southeast Asia.22 Even Western music history unfolds along a metaphysical path, along which each milestone also reveals different attitudes toward representing the sacred. Music represents the sacred in two different ways. We might refer to the first way as mediation. In other words, music is conceived to occupy the space between the everyday and sacred world, and functions to transform the meanings of the sacred so that they are understood on a more human, everyday level. Many of the concepts of music that we find in the cultures of indigenous peoples in the Americas demonstrate these mediating functions. The Native American peoples of the Great Plains of North America encounter the musical pieces in their repertories by experiencing them in dreams, where animals often sing them as songs. Animals were previously important figures in Native American religion, hence, the songs that Plains people experience through the mediation of dreams even allow them to lay claim to such songs as personal compositions. The Suyá people of the Brazilian Amazon, too, understand song as a form of mediation 22

See, for example, Kartomi, “Tabut,” 141–162.

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between sacred realms, and again there are various processes of exchange that represent the importance of nature in Suyá religion.23 The second way in which music represents the sacred is by enhancing the intelligibility of the voice of a sacred being. Without music, understanding the voice of the sacred being might be entirely impossible. It is for this reason that music is rarely absent from the performance of revealed texts, such as the Qur’an in Islam. Whether read “in silence” and privately by a Muslim worshiper or collectively in the cyclical performance of an annual liturgical cycle, the Qur’an must be performed with musical alteration of the texts themselves.24 The Muslim worshiper, then, “hears” the voice of God in the Qur’an as a musical voice. It is perhaps of additional importance that the musical performance of the Qur’an is not called music, as if music itself undergoes a transformation when it represents the revealed voice of Allah. Music plays a crucial role in many religions in the formation of canonical sacred texts, from the Jewish and Christian bibles to the brahmanic texts of Hinduism to the daily rituals chanted by Buddhists throughout the world. These canonical sacred texts, finally, are testaments to the extensive ways in which music can represent the sacred. Self-Identity One of the most significant turns in ethnomusicological scholarship in the closing decades of the twentieth century was the study of how music represents self-identity, thus, how music actually contributes to what has been called “the construction of the self.”25 The classificatory schema in Figure 1 suggests a series of practices that represent selfness, but it is with this final concept that we reach a point of culmination, which might well be a representational moment in the present history of ethnomusicology when we compare it to its dialectic partner, “power,” in the following section. Self-identity results when an individual or a society believes it can own music, when its representational practices are based on the claim that “my music” is not and cannot be “their music.”26 It is possible to own music only when music acquires the attributes of an object and is represented in such a way that its self-identity is made entirely obvious. Ownership 23 Anthony Seeger, Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People [1987] (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 24 Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 25 See, for example, Martin Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994). 26 See Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil, and the Music in Daily Life Project, My Music (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993).

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becomes possible when, for example, a song transmitted through oral tradition is transformed into a recording or a written version, both of which can be purchased and owned. When a decision is made about letting music represent self-identity—say, the self-identity of a nation with national music—a process of producing and reproducing the musical object often follows. Music may represent a self-identity that is very individual or a group identity that expresses the common culture of a larger collective. The expression of identity through music, however, is the product of paradox, and because of that paradox we learn a great deal about how music represents. In a nutshell, the paradox is that self-identity is not immanent or authentic, but it is imagined to be. National songs as often as not come from outside the nation, but this does not in the least diminish their power to represent the self-identity of the nation for those who sing them.27 The problem derives from what I have been calling the representational paradox throughout this article: If selfness does not exist, then music provides a means of constructing it. The meaning of self-identity in music depends more on what self is not than what self really is. There must be some kind of investment in constructing self-identity with music, and that investment is clearest when music makes the identity of the self historically more and more different from the identity of the other. Power Because music is represented with so many different, even contradictory attributes, it possesses considerable potential for the displacement of power. The displacement occurs socially, but differently according to whether a group of people is making music or instead using music toward specific social and cultural ends. In some measure, those with the means to represent—the resources to travel to the culture of the other, the finances to invest in technology—acquire power while, those whose music is being represented sacrifice power. If the representational practices that produce power through the control of otherness are the final ones we consider in this article, it is not because the accumulation of power through representation is coincidental. Quite the contrary, the displacement of power is fully present in the previous nine practices, albeit to varying degrees. It is in the tenth practice, however, that it becomes absolutely clear that representation shifts power to self by taking it, through acts of representation, from the other.

27

See Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 88–110.

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The exercise of power, including its abuse, accompanies the encounter of ethnomusicologists with the societies we study. Occasionally, the societies we study while engaged in fieldwork take steps to prevent the exercise of power through representations, for example, when they prohibit the making of sound and video recordings. More often, the potential of representation to enable the ethnomusicologist to take something from a society is very great. My point here is not to shift the focus of this article to ethics, but rather to draw attention to the fact that it is representation itself that skews or shifts the balance of power. The words and performances of informants fill the pages of the ethnomusicologist’s publications—meaning in another society provides the texts of books for which the ethnomusicologist holds the copyright and earns royalties. The ethnomusicologist may give voice to voiceless peoples, but how often do the voiceless people really acquire a voice of their own? Ethnomusicologists recognize that representation far too often leads to the unequal distribution of power. It is for this reason that it is increasingly common for ethnomusicologists to return to those they have studied to show them just how they have been represented, tacitly or explicitly asking for approval. Ethnomusicologists may even share money earned through selling recordings and other media of representation with those who were recorded; Anthony Seeger, to take a case in point, has returned earnings from the recordings of the Suyá people of the Brazilian Amazon to the Suyá themselves. Ethnomusicologists also transform their concern for the unequal distribution of power into political activism, even assuming the role of political spokesperson for the oppressed.28 The representational practices required by such activism may, in fact, be different from those that translate sound into signs, or stories and structures into narrative and systematic language. To address the issues of power, ethnomusicologists raise questions about the inadequacy of representational practices and they approach the problem of representation from everchanging perspectives. In so doing, they restlessly pursue the possibilities and paradoxes of reducing the distance between self and other. THE PERSISTENCE OF PARADOX The ways in which music represents or is represented that I propose as a framework in this article are meant to be inclusive rather than exclusive. There are certain things that music represents that many readers may have expected to find, but that appear not to have been included. There is no section devoted to musical representation in “nature,” for example, 28

See, for example, the essays in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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though I do mention natural attributes of music at several points. I also refer to the cosmological processes that some people believe music represents: for example, the medieval European scientific theories holding that music represented the order of the universe. Though I recognize that music has the representational attributes of both subject and object, I do not create a category of the representation of “musical works” in either of the groups I discuss.29 “Time,” too, might have been objectified in ways that allow us to address how music represents it. There is also no category to reflect modern Western notions of so-called “absolute music,” which develop from a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy claiming that complex music is in fact nonrepresentational. Such subjective and objective attributes both do and do not fit in the categories and groups I have been outlining in this article.30 The representation of nature often reflects ideas not unlike the representation of the sacred. The representation of the order of the universe often treats music as a physical object, with abstract structural characteristics. In each such case, the representational question is not so much about “how” as about “what,” and in this article I have suggested that ethnomusicology’s extensive incorporation of representational practices results from its greater concern for questions of “how.” In this way, the field of ethnomusicology differs from other musical disciplines, in which “what”—musical works or nature, for instance—shapes ideas about music as representation. The representational attributes that generate ethnomusicological theory and practice are neither exclusive nor fixed, but rather they overlap with one another. Critical to ethnomusicological thinking is the recognition that music draws from and depends on multiple attributes when representing. Ethnomusicology does not ignore questions of “what,” or for that matter of “where” or “when.” Instead, it recognizes the ways in which representation also depends on these questions. Quite literally, questions of what, where, and when lead to an even more engaged concern for music as representation, and that is why ethnomusicology refuses to ignore such questions. Perhaps most important, such questions about representation show just how extensively music possesses wide-ranging and complex representational attributes. Ethnomusicology formulates these questions as a complex, which intentionally allows us to consider representation as globally as possible, recognizing that the field changes as ideas about representation change. The wealth of representational practices notwithstanding, ethnomusicologists also are distinguished by the critical stance they take toward 29

See, for example, Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 30 For a discussion of the distinction of classes of meaning within classification, see Kartomi, On Concepts and Classification, 16–24.

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representation. No ethnomusicologist is willing to accept the possibility of a single representational attribute, such as the objective limitations of transcription in Western notation. Nor is any ethnomusicologist willing to employ forms of representation that make absolute claims for authenticity. Though we invest money and time in the development of technologies of representation, we worry about the ways in which these are becoming ineffective almost as soon as they accompany us to the field or take their place in a sound laboratory. It might well be the case that ethnomusicology is overly obsessed with the constant need to respond to the surfeit of representational attributes immanent in the object music and the potential to represent more than itself shaping the subject music. The questions raised throughout this article about what music is and what it becomes when its meanings extend beyond itself have answers that are inseparable from ethnomusicology’s representational paradoxes, but it is those paradoxes—their persistence and their thorny resistance to resolution—that urge us to think critically about what we as ethnomusicologists do, and remind us never to abandon concerns about the reflexive positions we occupy in the field of ethnomusicology. Clearly, it is this very possibility that a deeper and more critically detailed approach to rethinking music as representation at an historical moment of massive globalization that this essay takes as a challenge for all who transform the rich lessons of modern musical scholarship into action.