Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T17:39:15.089Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Non-Western national music and empire in global history: interactions, uniformities, and comparisons*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

Bob van der Linden
Bob van der Linden*
Affiliation:
Independent researcher, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Inspired by C. A. Bayly’s notion of global uniformities, this article investigates the different ways in which elitist non-Western music reformers, often with state support, canonized and institutionalized modern national music traditions during the age of liberalism and empire. As these non-Western music reformers reinterpreted liberal and earlier Enlightenment ideas, they envisaged their own musics hierarchically in comparison with Western music. In the context of comparative musicological thinking, they became particularly preoccupied with the systematization of scales, equal temperament tuning, and the origins of their own music. In the process, they often incorporated claims about authenticity and spirituality in music to give strength to burgeoning national, if not anti-imperial, identities. However, beneath the appearance of formal similarity and mutual translatability of non-Western national musics, significant sonic and cultural differences remained. As a contribution to global history scholarship, the article principally attempts to establish these global parallels and comparisons.

Keywords

empireEnlightenmentglobal uniformitiesnationalismnon-Western music
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 431 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am most grateful to the editors and two readers of this journal for their incisive and supportive comments.

References

1 Bayly, C. A., The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914: global connections and comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 7Google Scholar. See also Armitage, David and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, eds., The age of revolutions in global context: c. 1760–1840, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009Google Scholar; Darwin, John, After Tamerlane: the rise and fall of global empires, 1400–2000, London: Allen Lane, 2007Google Scholar; Hopkins, A. G., ed., Globalization in world history, London: Pimlico, 2002Google Scholar; Hopkins, A. G., ed., Global history: interactions between the universal and the local, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Conrad, Sebastian, ‘Enlightenment in global history: a historiographical critique’, American Historical Review, 117, 2012, pp. 1001CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1009.

3 Bayly, , Birth of the modern world, p. 285Google Scholar.

4 Raj, Kapil, Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p. 223Google Scholar.

5 Besides the works mentioned in the earlier footnotes, see Bayly, C. A., Recovering liberties: Indian thought in the age of liberalism and empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012Google Scholar; Linden, Bob van der, Moral languages from colonial Punjab: the singh sabha, arya samaj and ahmadiyahs, New Delhi: Manohar, 2008Google Scholar; Linden, Bob van der, Music and empire in Britain and India: identity, internationalism, and cross-cultural communication, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mishra, Pankaj, From the ruins of empire: the revolt against the West and the remaking of Asia, London: Allen Lane, 2012Google Scholar.

6 Bayly, Birth of the modern world, ch. 8 (‘The theory and practice of liberalism, rationalism, socialism, and science’); Bayly, Recovering liberties; van der Linden, Moral languages.

7 Conrad, , ‘Enlightenment’, p. 1022Google Scholar.

8 For example, Irving, D. R. M., ‘The dissemination and use of European music books in early modern Asia’, Early Music History, 28, 2009, pp. 39–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woodfield, Ian, English musicians in the age of exploration, Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995Google Scholar; Woodfield, Ian, Music of the Raj: a social and economic history of music in late eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian society, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

9 For example, Baker, Geoffrey, Imposing harmony: music and society in colonial Cuzco, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Budasz, Rogério, ‘Black guitar-players and early African-Iberian music in Portugal and Brazil’, Early Music, 35, 1, 2007, pp. 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. RIrving, . M., Colonial counterpoint: music in early modern Manila, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Irving, D. R. M., ‘Hybridity and harmony: nineteenth-century British discourse on syncretism and intercultural compatibility in Malay music’, Indonesia and the Malay world, 42, 123, 2014, pp. 197–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 The classic here is Nettl, Bruno, The Western impact on world music: change, adaptation, and survival, New York: Schirmer Books, 1985Google Scholar. See also Bohlman, Philip V., World music: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar; PBohlman, hilip V., ed., The Cambridge history of world music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014Google Scholar; Clayton, Martin, Herbert, Trevor and Middleton, Richard, eds., The cultural study of music: a critical introduction, New York: Routledge, 2003Google Scholar (2nd edn 2011); Taylor, Timothy D., Beyond exoticism: Western music and the world, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hopkins, A. G., ‘The history of globalization – and the globalization of history?’, in Hopkins, Globalization, p. 33Google Scholar.

12 Van der Linden, Moral languages, p. 19.

13 Nettl, , Western impact, p. 3Google Scholar.

14 Nettl, Bruno, Nettl’s elephant: on the history of ethnomusicology, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010, p. 57Google Scholar.

15 On Western temperaments, see further Kelly, Thomas Forrest, Early music: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 76–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Millward, James A., ‘Cordophone culture in two early modern societies: a pipa-vihuele duet’, Journal of World History, 23, 2, 2012, p. 249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 The diatonic scale is the foundation of the European musical tradition. It is an eight-note musical scale composed of seven pitches and a repeated octave: it includes five whole steps and two half-steps for each octave, in which the two half-steps are separated from each other by either two or three whole steps, depending on their position in the scale.

18 Bayly, , Birth of the modern world, p. 1Google Scholar.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., pp. 1–2, 462, emphasis in original.

21 Ibid., p. 20.

22 Conrad, , ‘Enlightenment’, p. 1025Google Scholar.

23 Melvin, Sheila and Cai, Jindong, Rhapsody in red: how Western classical music became Chinese, New York: Algora, 2004Google Scholar; Woodfield, English musicians.

24 Michael Adas did not mention these interactions in his classic Machines as the measures of men: science, technology, and ideologies of Western dominance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

25 Baker, , Imposing harmony; Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher, eds., Brass bands of the world: militarism, colonial legacies, and local music making, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013Google Scholar; Irving, Colonial counterpoint; Woodfield, English musicians.

26 Araci, Emre, ‘Guiseppe Donizetti at the Ottoman court: a Levantine life’, Musical Times, 143, 1880, 2002, pp. 49–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chehabi, H. E., ‘From revolutionary tasnif to patriotic surud: music and nation-building in pre-world war II’, Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 37, 1999, pp. 143–154Google Scholar.

27 Budasz, Rogério, ‘Opera and musical theatre in eighteenth-century Brazil: a survey of early studies and new sources’, Studi Musicali, 35, 1, 2006, pp. 213–253Google Scholar; McClellan, Michael E., ‘Performing empire: opera in colonial Hanoi’, Journal of Musicological Research, 22, 1–2, 2003, pp. 135–166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See further McLean, Mervyn, Pioneers of ethnomusicology, Coral Springs, FL: Llumina Press, 2006Google Scholar; Nettl, Nettl’s elephant ; Zon, Bennett, Representing non-Western music in nineteenth-century Britain, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007Google Scholar.

29 A pentatonic scale has five notes per octave in contrast to the seven notes of the diatonic major and minor scales.

30 Gelbart, Matthew, The invention of ‘folk music’ and ‘art music’: emerging categories from Ossian to Wagner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 4 (‘The invention of folk modality, 1775–1840’).

31 Sharp, Cecil J., English folk song: some conclusions, London: Simpkin and Co., 1907, p. 44Google Scholar.

32 See, for example, Chehabi, ‘From revolutionary tasnif’; Kraus, Richard Kurt, Piano and politics in China: middle-class ambitions and the struggle over Western music, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989Google Scholar; Melvin, and Cai, , Rhapsody in redGoogle Scholar; Powers, Harold S., ‘Classical music, cultural roots, and colonial rule: an Indic musicologist looks at the Muslim world’, Asian Music, 12, 1, 1980, pp. 5–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Racy, Ali Jihad, ‘Historical worldviews of early ethnomusicologists: an East–West encounter in Cairo, 1932’, in Stephen Blum, Philip V. Bohlman, and Daniel M. Neuman, eds., Ethnomusicology and modern music history, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp.68–91Google Scholar; Toru, Takenaka, ‘Isawa Shuji’s “national music”: national sentiment and cultural Westernization in Meiji Japan’, Itinerario, 34, 3, 2010, pp. 5–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 The case of national music in Europe is well known. For Germany and Britain, see Applegate, Celia and Potter, Pamela, eds., Music and German national identity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002Google Scholar, and van der Linden, Music and empire: for a fascinating perspective on German and British cultural nationalism in music, see Gelbart, Invention.

34 Gelbart, , Invention, p. 276Google Scholar.

35 Allen, Matthew Harp, ‘Tales tunes tell: deepening the dialogue between “classical” and “non-classical” in the music of India’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 30, 1998, pp. 22–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moro, Pamela, ‘Constructions of nation and the classicisation of music: comparative perspectives from Southeast and South Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 35, 2, 2004, pp. 187–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Powers, ‘Classical music’; Schofield, Katherine Butler, ‘Reviving the golden age again: “classicization”, Hindustani music, and the Mughals’, Ethnomusicology, 54, 3, 2010, pp. 484–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Beng, Tan Sooi, ‘The 78 rpm record industry in Malaya prior to World War II’, Asian Music, 28, 1, 1996/97, pp. 1–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kinnear, Michael S., The gramophone company’s first Indian recordings 1899–1908, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1994Google Scholar; Miller, Karl Hagstrom, ‘Talking machine world: selling the local in the global music industry, 1900–20’, in Hopkins, Global history, pp. 160–190Google Scholar.

37 Miller, , ‘Talking machine world’, p. 168Google Scholar.

38 Slobin, Mark, Folk music: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Hopkins, A. G., ‘Introduction: interactions between the universal and the local’, in Hopkins, Global history, p. 19Google Scholar.

40 Wade, Bonnie C., Music in Japan, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, including CD, p. 15Google Scholar.

41 Takenaka, , ‘Isawa Shuji’, p. 99Google Scholar.

42 As cited in Wade, Music in Japan, p. 13.

43 Takenaka, , ‘Isawa Shuji’, pp. 108Google Scholar, 110.

44 Ibid., p. 100–1.

45 Ibid., pp. 102, 110.

46 Ibid., p. 113.

47 Cook, Nicholas, ‘Western music as world music’, in Bohlman, Cambridge history, p. 77Google Scholar.

48 Hosokawa, Shuhei, ‘In search of the sound of empire: Tanabe Hisao and the foundation of Japanese ethnomusicology’, Japanese Studies, 18, 1, 1998, p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Ibid., p. 10.

50 Conrad, ‘Enlightenment’, p. 1023.

51 Shuhei, ‘In search’, p. 13.

52 Ibid., pp. 13–14.

53 See Tanaka, Stefan, Japan’s orient: rendering the past into history, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993Google Scholar.

54 Mishra, , From the ruins, p. 5Google Scholar.

55 On modern musical developments in China, see Kraus, Piano; Lau, Frederick, Music in China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008Google Scholar, including CD; Melvin and Cai, Rhapsody in red; Mittler, Barbara, Dangerous tunes: the politics of Chinese music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997Google Scholar; Rees, Helen, Echoes of history: Naxi music in modern China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

56 Melvin, and Cai, , Rhapsody in red, p. 96Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., p. 199.

58 Gelbart, Invention, ch. 4.

59 Melvin, and Cai, , Rhapsody in red, pp. 124–125Google Scholar.

60 Cho, Gene Jinsiong, The discovery of musical equal temperament in China and Europe in the sixteenth century, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003Google Scholar.

61 Jones, Stephen, Folk music of China: living instrumental traditions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995Google Scholar, including CD.

62 Mei Lanfang was the stage name of Mei Lan; his most famous roles were those of female characters.

63 Guy, Nancy, Peking opera and politics in Taiwan, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005Google Scholar.

64 Stock, Jonathan P. J., ‘Four recurring themes in histories of Chinese music’, in Bohlman, Cambridge history, p. 410Google Scholar.

65 As cited in Joys Hoi Yan Cheung, ‘Chinese music and translated modernity in Shanghai, 1918–1937’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2008, p. 311.

66 See, for example, Davis, Ruth F., Ma’luf: reflections on the Arab Andalusian music of Tunisia, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004Google Scholar; Farhat, Hormoz, The dastgah concept in Persian music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levin, Theodore, The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996Google Scholar, including CD; Racy, ‘Historical worldviews’; Shannon, Jonathan Holt, Among the jasmine trees: music and modernity in contemporary Syria, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006Google Scholar; Stokes, Martin, The Arabesk debate: music and musicians in modern Turkey, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992Google Scholar.

67 Aydin, Cemil, ‘Globalizing the intellectual history of the idea of the “Muslim world”’, in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global intellectual history, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. 159–186Google Scholar.

68 Shannon, , Among the jasmine trees, p. 71Google Scholar.

69 Racy, , ‘Historical worldviews’, p. 83Google Scholar.

70 Davis, Ma’luf.

71 Shannon, , Among the jasmine trees, p. 72Google Scholar.

72 On modern musical developments in Persia and Central Asia, see Chehabi, ‘From revolutionary tasnif’; Farhat, Dastgah concept; Levin, Hundred thousand fools; Nettl, Bruno, The radif of Persian music: studies of structure and cultural context, Champaign, IL: Elephant and Cats, 1992Google Scholar; Powers, ‘Classical music’.

73 Slobin, Folk music, pp. 61–2.

74 Bartók, Béla, Turkish folk music from Asia minor, ed. Benjamin Suchoff and with an afterword by Kurt Reinhard, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976Google Scholar; Stokes, Arabesk debate, pp. 38–9 (on Hindemith).

75 Bartók, , Turkish folk music; Eliot Bates, Music in Turkey, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011Google Scholar, including CD; Stokes, Arabesk debate.

76 On the classicization of Javanese gamelan as national music, see Moro, ‘Constructions’; Powers, ‘Classical music’; Sumarsam, Gamelan: cultural interaction and musical development in central Java, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

77 On Hindustani music, see Bakhle, Janaki, Two men and music: nationalism in the making of an Indian classical tradition, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bor, Joep, ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, Jane Harvey, and Emmie te Nijenhuis, eds., Hindustani music: thirteenth to twentieth centuries, New Delhi: Manohar, 2010Google Scholar. On Carnatic music, see Subramanian, Lakshmi, From the Tanjore court to the Madras Music Academy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006Google Scholar; Weidman, Amanda J., Singing the classical, voicing the modern: the postcolonial politics of music in south India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Weidman, Singing the classical.

79 Clayton, Martin, ‘Musical Renaissance and its margins in England and India, 1874–1914’, in Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon, eds., Music and Orientalism in the British empire, 1780s–1940s, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, p. 85Google Scholar.

80 Bor, Joep, ‘Introduction’, in Bor et al., Hindustani music, p. 14Google Scholar.

81 Flora, Reis W., ‘Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840–1914): the Melbourne connection’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 27, 3, 2004, p. 304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Ibid.; Capwell, Charles, ‘Representing “Hindu” music to the colonial and native elite of Calcutta’, in Bor et al., Hindustani music, p. 288Google Scholar.

83 Bor, ‘Introduction’, p. 16.

84 Rahaim, Matthew, Musicking bodies: gesture and voice in Hindustani music, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012, p. 29Google Scholar.

85 Rahaim, Matt, ‘That ban(e) of Indian music: hearing politics in the harmonium’, Journal of Asian Studies, 1, 26, 2011, pp. 20–21Google Scholar.

86 See, for instance, Dennen, David, ‘The third stream: Odissi music, regional nationalism, and the concept of “classical”’, Asian Music, 41, 2, 2010, pp. 149–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van der Linden, Music and empire, ch. 5 (‘Sikh sacred music: identity, aesthetics, and historical change’); Schultz, Anna, Singing a Hindu nation: Marathi devotional performance and nationalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013Google Scholar.

87 On national music in Brazil, see Appleby, David P., The music of Brazil, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983Google Scholar; Hertzman, Marc A., Making samba: a new history of race and music in Brazil, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murray, John P., Music in Brazil, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006Google Scholar, including CD.

88 Hertzman, Making samba, pp. 25–6.

89 Bellman, Jonathan, ed., The exotic in Western music, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998Google Scholar; Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David, eds., Western music and its others: difference, representation, and appropriation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000Google Scholar; Farrell, Gerry, Indian music and the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997Google Scholar; van der Linden, Music and empire; Taylor, Beyond exoticism.

90 Hertzman, , Making samba, p. 14Google Scholar.

91 Moore, Robin D., Nationalizing blackness: afrocubanismo and artistic revolution in Havana, 1920–1940, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997Google Scholar.

92 Eduardo P. Archetti, ‘Gaucho, tango, primitivism, and power in the shaping of Argentine national identity’ (English translation of ‘O “gaucho”, o tango, primitivismo e poder na formação da indentidade nacional Argentina’, Mana, 9, 1, 2003, pp. 9–29), https://popularymasiva.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/archetti-tango-and-gauchos.pdf (consulted 1 May 2015); Thomas Turino, ‘Nationalism and Latin American music: selected case studies and theoretical considerations’, Latin American Music Review, 24, 2, 2003, pp. 169–209.

93 Turino, ‘Nationalism’; Wade, Peter, Music, race, and nation: música tropical in Columbia, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

94 Cook, , ‘Western music’, p. 79Google Scholar.

95 Van der Linden, Music and empire.