Philip V. Bohlman

TRADITIONAL MUSIC AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: PERSISTENT PARADIGM IN THE HISTORY OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY1

1. Reassessing the Intellectual History of Ethnomusicology As many of the articles in this volume of the Yearbook for Traditional Music celebrate the first forty years of the ICTM and the concerted, if indeed polyphonic, voice that that organization has provided the study of traditional music throughout the world, they evoke a mood of reflection and reexamination of the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Reflection was abundantly evident as the ICTM paused in 1987 to call attention to its achievements with a grand commemoration in Berlin, itself taking stock of a 750-year history. But the reflective mood of the ICTMs fortieth year was not simply a matter of panegyrizing the past; rather, it seemed equally concerned with reexamining the present and future in light of that past, with contrasting the old and the new, with juxtaposing them and encouraging ethnomusicologists to welcome that which has more recently come to shape our understanding of music throughout the world. In this article I shall be taking the current mood of reflection as both a point of departure and of arrival; in other words, I shall be looking at the subject of that reflection-the intellectual history of the field-and speculating about some of its motivations, some of the reasons that the past has come to play such an important role in assessing the present. Indeed, this concern with the past has begun to distinguish current directions in the field and to inform our present discourse by forging new ideas and fresh concepts. Ethnomusicologys reflective mood, then, may well be signaling a new look at the future with its refined assessment of the past. Birthdays and anniversaries, such as the fortieth of the ICTM and the 750th of Berlin, usually cause the celebrants to reflect on both youth and more advanced age. During much of the past forty years, however, ethnomusicologists more commonly thought of theirs as a young field, and to some extent it is safe to say that many still do. Perhaps this results from a preference for using data we ourselves collect. Fieldwork, ethnography, transcription, and even classification often stress the individual decision and involve some exercise of personal control over the material presentation of someone elses music. Our constant concern for musical and cultural change also molds our historical thinking in special ways, ensuring that we not ignore the present and spurring us to speculate on the future. There are, of course, other reasons why many ethnomusicologists seem preoccupied with the present and nervous about their disciplinary past. Surely there were early ethnomusicological studies that resulted from orientalist abuses or that relied on forms of collection and analysis whose accuracy has to be questioned. Looking at any historical body of scholarship turns up studies that are wrong-headed, and partic

Music as Representation

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.

Herder's Nineteenth Century

I begin this essay epigrammatically with song, with a single song that came to tell an historical tale of the nineteenth century (Fig. 1, p. 3). We know this single song in many versions, though it is perhaps the second version that most musicians and scholars of the nineteenth century, more accustomed to playing or hearing the keyboard music of Johannes Brahms than singing Child ballads, know best (Ex. 1). In the Brahms setting, the first of his op. 10 Balladen for solo piano, it may perhaps no longer be a song at all, for its narrative has been stripped of words.

Auditives Wissen im Moment der Ekstase

Das Klangerlebnis in der Religion kann durch auditive Vermittlung entstehen, und zwar im Moment der Ekstase. Die Stimme eines Gottes oder die Verkorperung eines Schamanen wird als ein Erlebnis jenseits des Alltags offenbart. In dem auditiven Grenzgebiet der religiosen Praxis wird das Auditive zum Wissen erhoben, um die Klanglandschaften des menschlichen Glaubens ontologisch zu realisieren.

The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World

FOREWORD BY ALAN DUNDES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1. The Origins of Folk Music, Past and Present 2. Folk Music and Oral Tradition 3. Classification: The Discursive Boundaries of Folk Music 4. The Social Basis of Folk Music: A Sense of Community, A Sense of Place 5. The Folk Musician 6. Folk Music in Non-Western Cultures 7. Folk Music and Canon-Formation: The Creative Dialectic between Text and Context 8. Folk Music in the Modern World Bibliography Index