Ethnomusicology Research Articles

Collections of Music from the Arab World in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv

The number of collections of music from the Arab world housed in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (BPhA), 30 in all, is impressive, as is the great number of wax cylinders. In the beginning, Arab music was not the main concern of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv; there were a small number of collections of music from the Arab world until 1918, but even then, extensive research was being done (see Hornbostel's 1906–7 article on Tunisian music). Recordings made in German prisoner-of-war camps during World War I augmented the holdings. Fieldwork in Arab countries peaked around 1930, with recordings made by Robert Lachmann as the leading figure and several other scholars associated with the Berlin School of Comparative Musicology. This article presents an overview of the BPhA's collections from the Arab world, their status and content, and highlights their specific features compared to its collections from other regions of the world. Based on the historical documents associated with the collections (correspondence, publications), information will also be given about the collectors, their backgrounds, motivations, and fieldwork.

Whom to Remember – How to Return? Brigitte Schiffer, the Voices of Siwa and the Entangled History of the Berlin School of Ethnomusicology

For some years now, there has been an intense and controversial debate about the relationship between the culture of memory and research into the consequences of colonialism, on the one hand, and the Holocaust, on the other. Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory and Nathan Sznaider's contribution to the debate on the vanishing points of memory ("Fluchtpunkte der Erinnerung") provide only a few of several examples. Using the recordings of the German-Jewish composer and ethnomusicologist Brigitte Schiffer, made at the oasis of Siwa in the Sahara in 1932/33, as a case study, the article reflects on the implications of this debate for dealing with the so-called Berlin School of comparative musicology. Beyond that, the article asks how the complexity of competing memory discourses affects current approaches and efforts of decolonizing archives and identifies perspectives and strategies for how to handle such collections today, especially regarding the chances and challenges of so-called recirculation.

Music in the mind and primitive sounds: «only differences in kind»

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions.

Die Fachgruppe „Musikethnologie und vergleichende Musikwissenschaft“ in der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung


 
 
 This article gives a brief insight into the work of the study group “Ethnomusicology and Comparative Musicology” of the “Gesellschaft für Musikforschung” (GfM). It spotlights central issues, historical moments and developments in the past, and more recent activities of the study group. The first part roughly outlines cornerstones from its founding stages in the post-WWII years, when traditional views of “Völkerkunde” prevailed, to the paradigm shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, as comparative musicology gradually shifted towards ethnomusicological approaches grounded in cultural and social anthropology. The second part highlights the study group’s self-reflexive perspective and its recent engagement with topics such as diversity, anti-racism, and (post-)coloniality in the academic field. Drawing on issues discussed in the context of the “crisis of ethnographic representation,” recent debates and activities in the group are driven by ethical and political discussions regarding the power imbalances that shape ethnomusicological methodologies, practices and discourses within and beyond academia, and are thus closely tied to larger questions of social justice, equity, and inclusion.
 
 

Critical Realist Foundations for Berlin Comparative Musicology(vergleichende Musikswissenschaft)

Summary Is it possible to discover the critical realist foundations of Gestalt theory in Berlin comparative musicology (vergleichende Kunstwissenschaft) associated above all with Erich M. von Hornbostel? The balance of natural science explanation and phenomenal experience is a useful model for overcoming Eurocentrism in comparative ethnomusicology, relying both on third-person tools and indigenous music systems. This paper uses Gestalt critical realist epistemology and methodology and a portrayal of the strata making up the understanding of a musical act with chemico-physical, phenomenal and cultural components to create an “amphibian” ethnomusicology. Using this framework it is possible to understand Hornbostel and Sachs’ musical instrument classification system and Hornbostel’s account of “primitive” music as strata in a Gestalt explanatory system. The potential binding agent through the strata is isomorphism.

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger

Reviewed by: The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger Sarah Clemmens Waltz The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries. By Anna Maria Busse Berger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 360 + 25 halftones, 12 musical examples, 2 tables. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0226740348. The disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology currently exist in an uneasy tension as scholars begin to question what distinguishes "ethno"-musicology from the "historical" musicology developed by German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century. Busse Berger's The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries exemplifies the historical underpinnings of this tension by demonstrating the original entanglement of those disciplines through the scholarship and valuation of medieval music. The story of how (and what) music was treated in four different missions in the German East African colony (now Tanzania) connects through the foundations of German musical scholarship, contemporaneous German ideals about collective music-making, the development of scholarship and historical narrative about medieval music, and the birth of "ethnomusicology" from the old "comparative musicology." Above all, Busse Berger's examination of scholarship about and in Africa, occasionally by African scholars, suggests the way forward for a less-blinkered musicological discipline. The historiography in this examination makes it a critical read for musicologists, but the book is also very much of interest to the general humanist. Little of a technical nature intrudes except a few excurses on pentatonic (five-note) scales. German scholars' deliberate invocation of comparative linguistics in developing comparative musicology is a fascinating opening, leading to a covert throughline comparing those who claimed the Indo-European proto-language as superior to those who claimed harmony as a peculiarly Western accomplishment. We find, however, that the book's intriguing "cast of characters" (helpfully referenced in an appendix) was not uniformly motivated by evolutionist notions of culture. The work is in three parts, corresponding to the "scholars, singers, missionaries" of the subtitle. Part I explains the beginning of comparative musicology among German scholars (often of medieval music, not coincidentally) and also how the study of ethnomusicology impacted the discipline of historical musicology. Individual scholars' [End Page 159] work is investigated in detail. Their proto-ethnomusicological work provoked a number of theories now verified by medievalists if still overlooked: that medieval polyphony was most likely improvised, and that polyphony—far from being a purely Western development—existed in a global context of improvised multi-voiced music-making. Especially compelling is the chapter on Nicholas Ballanta, an African scholar born in Sierra Leone who, in the 1920s, described African music from an African perspective. Though Ballanta received the first Guggenheim for music research, his story shows how, despite great support for Ballanta's ability, Western scholarship was unprepared for his research, which was derailed by seemingly surmountable issues—various travel roadblocks, recordings he sent which were lost, leading in the end to a loss of support and inappropriately negative reviews of his research. By detailing Ballanta's publications, compositions, and arguments (for the use of African music and against the use of medieval modes and Western notation), the chapter greatly contributes to the restoration of African scholarship's role in African and African American music. Part II is about the role of group music-making, the use of medieval music, and contemporaneous comparisons to music-making in the missions in Africa as reflected in the growing communal music-making movements in Germany: the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung. These chapters re-center our image of medieval music from, perhaps, arcane esoterica toward an Arcadian realm of simplicity in the contemporary German imagination, explaining how many of those called to mission work were attracted to the idea of simple community life, which also attracted them to medieval music. A historiography of medieval musicology, including landmark performances of the 1920s, blossoms from this. Busse Berger notes that revivals of folk song, the Middle Ages, and interest in nature contributed not just to the development of musicology but to ordinary life: "It is no exaggeration to say that this movement profoundly affected every German in...

Wang Guangqi and Feng Zikai: Two Ways of Appreciating European Art Music in China

This paper focuses on two musical textbooks written by Wang Guangqi 王光祈 (An Outline of the History of Western Music, 1930) and Feng Zikai 丰子恺 (Introduction to Music, 1926). During the 1930s in China, these publications emerged as the dominant genres of literature explaining Western art music: music history and music theory textbooks. The paper examines the influence of German comparative musicology on these notable works. By conducting a comparative analysis of these publications in the context of the themes and values of comparative musicology, the paper seeks to investigate how these influential texts reflect the state of Chinese music culture during the transformative period that followed the May Fourth Movement. The conclusion will summarize the reception of these two influential textbooks at the time of their publication and evaluate their significance in contemporary China.

Ella von Schultz-Adajewski (1846–1926): The Creative Fate of a Musician and Studies of the Musical Folklore of European Peoples

The article is devoted to Ella von Schultz-Adajewski, who left a convincing mark in the Russian and European musical culture of the second half of the 19th — early 21st centuries. The talented musician, born in Russia, continued her creative life in Italy and Germany. Her natural talents and brilliant education (she studied with leading professors of the St Petersburg Conservatory: A.Dreyshok, N.I.Zaremba, A. S.Famintsyn, I.K.Voyachek) allowed her to maximize her professional potential as a pianist, composer, and music researcher. The author of original works in various genres that are attractive to modern performers, Ella von Schultz-Adajewski combined the role of a practicing musician with deep, original theoretical works in the field of comparative musicology. Actually, she became one of the discoverers of this method, which formed the basis of the science of ethnomusicology. The bright artistic and scientific heritage has not yet received a decent assessment in Russian musicology. Meanwhile, in the history of world culture, Ella von Schultz was destined to become the discoverer of the musical folklore of the Friulian Christians, whose folk culture was also the subject of serious scientific interests of outstanding philologists, linguists of St. Petersburg University: I.I. Sreznevsky, I.Baudouin de Courtenay. The works of the musician and wordsmiths laid the foundation of knowledge about the culture of the Slavs, who have been living in Northern Italy for centuries. In the articles devoted to the folklore of various European peoples, the author seeks to find a deep “matrix” reflecting the genetic features of the culture of a particular ethnic group. Innovative for its time are the idea of Ella von Schultz about the inseparable connection of musical folklore and the context of its existence, methods of musical analysis using synoptic tables. The article publishes archival materials for the first time, provides information reflecting the period of Ella von Schultz’s studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, her contacts with Russian musicians after her departure abroad. For the first time, unknown scientific articles are also characterized, in which folklore samples are considered from the standpoint of “ethnological documents”.

From the Editor

From the Editor Ricardo D. Trimillos Aloha kākou! The lead article for issue 54(1) is the print version of Daniel M. Neuman’s keynote address presented at the 2022 meeting of the Society for Asian Music. His homage, “Remembering My Teachers—Bruno Nettl and Sabri Khan,” celebrates the importance of individuals, their agency, and their personae in shaping a music culture; the individual actor is the leitmotif of this issue. Although ethnomusicology has generally been a project of understanding music in broad, culturally defined strokes, studies of individuals have become more frequent, a development that narrows the putative methodological divide between ethnomusicology and historical musicology (the latter is often characterized as giving greater attention to individual composers, performers, and works). The set of essays found here displays an array of modalities for locating artists within the respective genre each inhabits and examines such ancillary themes as copyright, ownership, organology, spirituality, and gender. Neuman’s keynote is a narrative documenting the intersections and inter-penetrations of the personal and the professional in the life of one individual. Neuman is recognized as a leader and pivotal figure in our field, and the experiences he recounts will no doubt resonate with many readers. His engaging, personal account spans six decades; it comprises idiosyncratic histories of ethno musicology and of global Indian classical music populated by prominent personalities from both worlds. Informal in delivery, it nevertheless references important concerns in the field, including processes of continuity, dynamics of globalization, and valorization of those we work with.1 The next contribution provides dramatic contrast: a single performer is the central figure in a contentious legal and public debate concerning ownership and control. The article by Dave Fossum, “Neşet Ertaş and the Ontologies of Turkey’s Folk Music,” examines the rerelease of a recorded song that pits the rights of the composer against those of the performer. In this conflict, modern institutions of copyright, commercialization, and mediatization decenter indigenous notions of ownership, control, and entitlement. Fossum documents ways that the performer Ertaş negotiates and strategizes a pathway through disparate, competing perceptions of folk song and considers how these actions construct a “reality” of the single composition in question. Although the author directs our attention to the performer Ertaş as protagonist, [End Page 1] the figure of the composer Özkan as antagonist occupies a continuous, albeit backgrounded, presence. Elements including the rural-urban divide, regional identity, commercialization, and sonic features inform the multiple ontologies of the title. The lute gambus is part of instrumental-vocal music popular in Malaysia and provides a historical link for Southeast Asia to West and Central Asia. “The Exceptional Fauziah Gambus: Negotiating Novelty, Piety, and Self-Promotion in an Androcentric Malaysian Musical Scene” by Joe Kinzer problematizes notions of gender, religious piety, and consumerism in a contemporary island nation. Like Fossum, Kinzer portrays the performer—a female—as an individual successfully negotiating and rationalizing multiple ontologies that revolve around cultural practices rather than legal institutions. Gender is only one feature of her exceptionalism; her acknowledged mastery of genres within Malay traditional music and “Arab” music further reinforces this status. Her agency employs various strategies to create and maintain an image that is simultaneously diva, pious woman, and national citizen. Kinzer addresses other themes shared in this issue—the rural-urban divide (here, province and metropole), mediatization, and globalization. In the preceding articles the focus is on the performer as the individual of interest. “Staging Noh Performance in Contemporary Opera: The Dance of the Shite in Toshio Hosokawa’s The Maiden from the Sea (2017)” by Paulo Brito foregrounds the composer. In contrast to Kinzer’s study, Brito’s treatment of gender is implicit rather than explicit—the noh creative collaborator for the project is a female practitioner. His attention to intercultural opera reinforces an ongoing construction of a Japanese identity that is self-conscious and global. The historical and the traditional are consciously juxtaposed with the contemporary and the creative. Performance scholarship often emphasizes the inseparability of music and dance—sound and movement—among Asian traditions. Brito meets this truism head-on by using a dance sequence to compare sonic and movement features between the original noh play and...

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

<i>The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries</i>, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries

Comparative analysis of contemporary Yoruba and Igbo gospel music styles

Nigerian Gospel music, in recent times, has featured more creative dynamics in its pathos and ethos. A case study is the interaction between Yoruba and Igbo gospel music styles, even while they retain their distinct characteristic-features. The objective of this effort which situates in comparative musicology, is to attempt a comparative analysis of the two styles with the purpose of delineating the interactive points and the resultant style in terms of performance practices. While Fiadgbezi’s grammatical theory of descriptive approach forms the bedrock for this paper, we collected and analysed its primary data through discography, bibliography and comparative musicological methods. It was discovered that while both Yoruba and Igbo gospel music styles possess peculiar stylistic elements, there have been cross-cultural borrowings that have resulted in a bicultural (Yoruba-Igbo style). The paper concluded that socio-cultural interaction in musical pathos and ethos is aesthetically and socially rewarding.

Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project

Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project

Beyond Western Shores: A Dialogue

Integrating musical and sonic forms and materials from world music into music theory classes steeped in Western musical concepts raises challenging questions and pedagogical conundrums: How might instructors engender interest in students with no training or background in non-Western musical materials? Could non-Western music (NWM) stimulate deeper thinking and understanding about the broader contexts of music production, such as its culture, religion, politics, and history, as well as indigenous musical terms and concepts? To what extent should critical contextual consideration be given prior to the study of non-Western sounds, musics, or performances? How might students and instructors alike engage NWM without extending the troubling histories of colonialism, western hegemony, and privileged, white perspectives? To address these and other questions from multiple viewpoints, this article takes the form of a dialogue between two students and two music professors, the latter representing the disciplines of music theory and ethnomusicology. As these four interlocutors explore the questions above, they also consider and revise a "Pin Drop" assignment, in which music theory students explore the musical culture found at various locations selected around the globe. Rather than offer any final conclusions, the dialogue itself demonstrates how the productive tensions that arise when studying and teaching NWM in Western music classrooms, when examined from multiple disciplinary angles, can be mutually beneficial and enriching, making possible new musical insights, methodological syntheses, and pedagogical priorities.

Nigeria in the Search for Democratic Rebirth: An interrogation of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Musical Impact, Ethno Musicology and Political Expressionism

Nigeria in the Search for Democratic Rebirth: An interrogation of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Musical Impact, Ethno Musicology and Political Expressionism

Interdisciplinary Foundations of Comparative Musicology by Wang Guangqi

Interdisciplinary Foundations of Comparative Musicology by Wang Guangqi

Podróż do źródeł muzyki? Afrykańsko-niemieckie związki muzyczne w I poł. XX wieku

The article is a review of Anna Maria Busse Berger’s book The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries. This volume discusses the role of youth movements (Jugendbewegung, Wandervogel, Singbewegung) responsible for creating the cultural life of Germany, and the interdependencies between musicologist-medievalists, ethnomusicologists and missionaries. It also deals with the fascinating, difficult beginnings of comparative musicology, including the story of musicology as a scholarly discipline that was slowly finding its place among other branches of learning that had already been long established at universities.

Writing about Polyphony, Talking about Civilization: Charles Burney’s Musical ‘Corns and Acorns’

Abstract In the eighteenth century polyphony—from simply being a term denoting a musical technique—became an evaluative-descriptive concept, following this path in association with the idea of civilization. Retracing Burney’s steps as a music historian and a music critic, the article shows how the Musical Doctor adopted a specific kind of narrative developed by Scottish conjectural historians that saw history as unfolding through several specific stages, progressively abandoning simplicity for the complexities of civilization. This seemingly linear narrative is complicated both by showing how making every music fit into this linear scheme was not easy, and by bringing forth the arguments developed especially by Scottish literati in order to explain why their native musical tradition could be considered equal or superior to Western art-music. The discourse, with Rousseauian echoes, that allowed the association between simplicity and positive values that were to be opposed to the excesses and depravity of civilized life, was articulated through the intellectual tools developed during the debate about luxury that raged through the eighteenth century. Nestled in the luxury debate, the non-literate music tradition that in non-Western locations had been considered as an instance of ‘barbarism’ now stood for a noble ‘simplicity’, whose value consequently reversed making artlessness a possible element of sublime beauty. The contradictions in Burney’s attitude towards non-Western musics and national European musics—on the one hand tirelessly collecting information about music-making from any corner of the world and on the other hand promoting only those values that made multi-part music the emblem of musical civilization—will serve to explain the interplay between ideas related to polyphony, civilization, and national musics in the eighteenth century.

World

World

Stanyslav Lyudkevych’s Contribution to the History of Ukrainian Folk Music Research at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

The article explores and analyzes the activities of the famous Ukrainian composer, musical folklore collector and researcher Stanyslav Lyudkevych in the early twentieth century. The article presents an analysis of the ethnographic collection Halytsko-ruski narodni melodii (Galician-Rus Folk Melodies), which contributed to the emergence of a new direction in Ukrainian folk music ethnographic research – comparative musicology. In particular, this analysis explores structural and typological characteristics of Ukranian folk music.