Music and the New Global Culture: From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age by Harry Liebersohn

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music and the New Global Culture: From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age by Harry Liebersohn Jake P. Smith Music and the New Global Culture: From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age. By Harry Liebersohn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 343. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0226649276. The history of globalization is often told as a tragic story in which an array of impersonal forces—empire, capitalism, technology—run rampant across the earth, destroying local cultures and melting everything solid into air. Harry Liebersohn’s new book, Music and the New Global Culture, by contrast, tells a markedly different story. Rejecting the pessimistic visions propagated by critics on both the left and the right, Liebersohn narrates the history of globalization as a story of cosmopolitan encounters, academic exchanges, and expanding opportunities. Globalization, he argues, has widened our horizons of experience and knowledge, “stimulate[d] self-assertion” (260), and helped to generate a “new global culture” that celebrates diversity. To make his case for this decidedly upbeat view of globalization, Liebersohn documents the piecemeal emergence of a global music culture from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Liebersohn sets about tracing the emergence of this new global culture in music primarily by following a colorful cast of characters from Germany, England, and the United States as they observe, study, categorize, collect, and eventually come to admire musical forms from around the globe. Whether he is describing Carl Engel’s attempts to preserve popular music, A.J. Hipkins’s meticulous analysis of instruments as a means of cross-cultural understanding, Alexander Ellis’s mobilization of mathematical methods to explore variations in scale, Carl Stumpf’s archival work at the Phonogram Archive in Berlin, Emile Berliner’s experiments with recording technologies and subsequent work in jumpstarting the global music industry, or Fred Gaisberg’s raucous travels across the globe in search of new “talent,” Liebersohn deftly illustrates the power of individual agency. The globalization of music, he argues, was the work not of impersonal forces but of individuals looking to make sense of the foreign, to uncover the underlying logic and innate beauty in what many of their contemporaries considered to be uncivilized noise. Liebersohn’s commitment to showcasing the role of individuals in the emergence of this new global culture does not, however, lead him to ignore larger structural forces. [End Page 617] As he notes in the introduction, writing the history of globalization necessitates a close attention to and a delicate balancing of micro- and macronarratives—advice he follows throughout the course of the book. Indeed, Liebersohn consistently highlights the interconnections between individual actors and global networks of empire, commerce, and knowledge. His central characters exchanged ideas in cosmopolitan metropoles like London and at academic conferences throughout Europe and the world; they observed foreign musical performances at colonial exhibitions and took advantage of “revolutionary network[s] of knowledge” ranging from traveling ethnographers to the foot soldiers of the European empire (152). The individual ingenuity of figures like Engel, Stumpf, and Berliner was clearly important for sparking the emergence of this new global culture, but the acts of observing, categorizing, and collecting in which they engaged were only possible because of the historical conjunctures in which they operated. Without the expansion of European empires and trade networks around the globe, without the emergence of cosmopolitan metropoles like London, and without the development of German research universities, all of their ingenuity might have been for naught. Early in the book, Liebersohn signals his intention to avoid overarching narrative trajectories, noting: “It would simplify the story to write it up as a narrative of either decline and fall or of exchange and appreciation—but it is too discontinuous for that” (4). And yet, an overarching narrative clearly does emerge in the text. Amidst the web of personal histories that Liebersohn so skillfully weaves together, a recurring pattern takes shape in which creativity, initiative, and rigorous analysis almost always result in the dissolution of imperialist paradigms. Take, for example, his discussion of Carl Stumpf, who, despite the fact that he remained devoted to Eurocentric narratives of cultural evolution—in which cultural forms like music progressed along a...