chapter 1
History, Historicism, Historiography
In the autumn of 1898, Guido Adler stood before his colleagues at the University of Vienna to announce his vision for musicological study at the institution and across the German-speaking world. He began his inaugural address to the faculty by describing the disciplinary ambitus of what he described as scientifically oriented research in the arts, defining its boundaries by contrasting it with the activities of creative artists and composers. Where colleagues such as the musicologist Philipp Spitta and the art historian Moriz Thausing had insisted that the academic study of art or music can have nothing to do with the production of paintings or symphonies, Adler announced, in his opening minutes, his strong opposition to their vision. He proclaimed that “the highest goal to which I aspire in the study of art is to work on behalf of art through the knowledge of art” (Adler 1898, 31). Adler stressed that the latter is only to be pursued in service of the former, that musicologists must study music’s histories to advance the work of contemporary composers.
Looking back, Adler’s speech marked an inflection point in thinking about music history, historiography, and musicological study. It signaled not so much a new turn in an ongoing conversation as an awareness that one of several strands of thinking was coming to the fore. By the time he spoke, that strand, now broadly understood as a historicist mode of thinking, had fueled conversations not only about the creation of new works of art but also about the cultural diversity, mapped geographically, of musical practices and idioms, and about the peoples whose musics defined them in discourse about identity, difference, and belonging among Europe’s constituent cultural communities. This chapter will consider each of these fields of conversation in turn: Adler’s vision for his emergent discipline, meditations on the uses of history against which he wrote, a century of endeavors to describe the world’s peoples in terms of their musics and the histories they embody, and attempts to draw on those sounding histories as a communally binding, living force.
Adler’s Vision
When appointed Eduard Hanslick’s successor in the musicology chair at the University of Vienna, the forty-two-year-old Adler looked back on his time as a student at the Vienna Conservatory. There, as co-founder of the Viennese Academic Wagner Society and an early member of the Reading Society for German Students, he had worked to spread enthusiasm for Wagner’s Bayreuth project and appreciation for the writings of the figure whom Richard Wagner identified as his most promising philosophical interlocutor, the young Friedrich Nietzsche. By the time of Adler’s return to Vienna after a momentous early career in Prague, it had been nearly a quarter century since Nietzsche had turned his back on Wagner. But Adler’s address to his new faculty colleagues belied his early, formative commitments, with Nietzsche’s early, Wagnerian pronouncements resounding on nearly every page.
In a series of essays written between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche extolled the value of historical study for the project of sustaining the “unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people,” and he declared that the principal charge of German youth—budding historians among them—was “to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us” (Nietzsche [1873] 1997a, 5; Nietzsche [1874] 1997b, 160). But Nietzsche also cautioned about avoiding the trap of overly venerating a nation’s historical achievements, since focusing too intently on the past can stifle its vitality in the present and the future. If a nation is to thrive, he urged, its members must strike a balance between “historical” and “unhistorical” modes of thinking. They must seek to identify and then hew closely to “the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present” (Nietzsche [1874] 1997c, 60).
Two decades later, standing before the faculty, Adler recalled Nietzsche’s concerns about the promise and perils of historical research. “As a child of the times,” Adler announced, “one has the right—and, I would add, even though I am a historian, the duty as well—to greet the works of present-day artists with love and respect, and not to crush them by making inappropriate comparisons with works of the past” (Adler 1898, 39). Tracing and updating Nietzsche’s argument, he reminded his audience of fellow historians that they must never lose sight of their responsibility to work on behalf of advancing the work of living artists. The musicologist, he declared, must carry out his research in the service of the creation of new music, and the lines that some attempted to draw between scholarship and creative work must be emphatically erased:
The duty of the scientific scholar of music is not to hate but to love, to advise, and to help. Art and the study of art do not reside in separate domains with sharply drawn boundaries. Rather, only their methods of working are different, and those things change with the times. The more closely science [Wissenschaft] remains in contact with living artists and progressive art [fortschreitenden Kunst], the closer it comes to its goal: to work on behalf of art through the knowledge of art.
(Adler 1898, 39; see further Karnes 2008)
Though radical in relation to the positions advanced by some of his historian colleagues, Adler’s vision of history as a living force that animates the creation of new musical works was, as its Nietzschean foundations make clear, a distinctly nineteenth-century one. A half century ago, Hayden White described the narratives constructed by nineteenth-century historians in terms of their “emplotment”: the ways in which they seek to “explicate ‘the point of it all’ or ‘what it all adds up to’” (White 1973, 11). As Richard Taruskin has more recently proposed, “the point of it all,” in a great deal of nineteenth-century musicological writing, was a historicist point. That is, such writing was grounded in the belief that music history progresses in accordance with an underlying logic or teleology. Historical narratives were constructed to illustrate the evolutionary schema that had given rise to the present and would persist into the future. A historicist history of music might account, say, for how Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had responded necessarily to what had come before it, and for how that work (or its composer) had advanced the progress of music as a whole (Taruskin 2010, 411–116). Mid-century writers of historicist history—Taruskin takes the Wagnerian Franz Brendel as his case in point—were the intellectual forebears of Adler’s vision of musicologists striding hand-in-hand with composers into the twentieth century. They would engage in historical research in order to understand how the past had become the present, and they would write about that historical unfolding in ways that promised to guide creative work in the future.
Yet the historicist impulse, or at least its underlying conviction that history unfolds in accordance with an animating, rational, cohering purpose, pervaded not only disciplinary conversations like Adler’s but also discourse about music broadly, and not just in German-speaking Europe. As explorers and anthropologists heard and described musics performed in geographical spaces then considered at the periphery of the European world, they charted what the historian Charles W. J. Withers calls “stadial” or “conjectural” histories, in which differences perceived presently among the world’s peoples were mapped onto a single, imaginary line believed to plot the historical evolution of humanity as a whole (Withers 2007, 139). And, as movements dedicated to cultivating national consciousness exploded across European spaces, folk songs and other vernacular musics were widely situated at what Philip V. Bohlman describes as “the border between myth and history”—a place where intimations of a collective past, given voice in song, were heard as pointing to inexorable futures of communal perseverance or resurgence (Bohlman 2011, 24). Traveling backwards from century’s end to its midpoint and finally to its beginning, we may turn now to these histories and backgrounds of Adler’s fin de siècle vision.
Uses of History
Nietzsche’s essays upon which Adler drew, published serially as Untimely Meditations, responded first and foremost to Wagner, to whose artistic and social projects the philosopher had dedicated his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872). Among the subjects Nietzsche addressed was Wagner’s pamphlet of 1849, penned while the composer was also writing the libretto of The Ring. There, Wagner unfolded a narrative of the historical evolution of Western music that pointed to the future—indeed, immanent—appearance of an artwork whose status he proclaimed in his title. That work would be The Artwork of the Future, and its creator would be Wagner himself. What Wagner meant was what he was already calling the music drama, and specifically his Ring tetralogy. The historical tale Wagner spun in his essay had no use or regard for historical research. Yet Wagner’s arguments about the necessary, inevitable, logical course of music’s historical development, supposedly culminating in the appearance of his own creations, would prove highly influential for later writers on music history of all persuasions and stripes. “German music,” Nietzsche proclaimed in The Birth of Tragedy, was constituted, as a whole or a tradition, in “the mighty, brilliant course it has run from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner” (Nietzsche [1872] 1999, 94). Or, as Adler astutely noted in his own study of the composer, published in 1904, Wagner’s music drama “is not only an artwork of the future, but an artwork of the past as well” (Adler 1904, 7).
Wagner’s history of music, like those of many, began in ancient Greece. In their Attic dramas, Wagner averred, the Greeks had expressed—and had witnessed being expressed—the tenets of what he called their religion: the values and common history that made each individual feel a part of his or her community. In that way, the drama of the Greeks had cemented a shared understanding of what their community was (Wagner [1849] 1911, iii.62). Moreover, he held, in the staging of their dramas, the Greeks had realized a perfect union of several art forms—music, dance, and poetry among them—and, in its musical dimension, a harmonious balance between melody and rhythm (iii.84). Thus, he argued, their ancient drama had communicated intuitively to the entire person: heart, mind, and body. With the advent of Christianity, Wagner explained, and particularly liturgical chant, the delivery of liturgical texts had taken center stage, to the detriment and eventual obliteration of an animating, dancelike rhythm. Later experiments with harmony and counterpoint had failed to enliven polyphonic composition. The operatic aria, inspired by an ill-considered turn to folk song, had also proved to be a dead end. It was only with the symphony, Wagner argued, that the life-giving rhythms of dance were restored, especially in the fusion of such rhythms with the folk-like melodies he heard in the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (see further Pederson 2013).
Taking his cue from E. T. A. Hoffmann, Wagner proceeded to climb a rhetorical ladder leading out of the past and toward the present, emerging from Haydn’s joyous symphonic strains into Mozart’s passionate depths, to reach a pinnacle with Beethoven. Yet even Beethoven, Wagner suggested, had felt instrumental music to be an inherently limited form of expression. After several attempts to bring human immediacy into his instrumental works, Beethoven finally brought singers onto the stage with the “Ode to Joy” crowning his Ninth Symphony. Wagner announced: “Beethoven’s final symphony is the redemption of music from its own, peculiar element, so as to become a universal art. It is the human gospel of the art of the future. Beyond it no progress is possible. Only the perfect artwork of the future—the universal drama—can follow it, to which Beethoven has forged the key” (Wagner [1849] 1911, iii.96). In Wagner’s narration of the history of Western classical music, the course of that history had led inevitably to Beethoven, whose final symphony pointed inexorably toward “the universal drama” (das allgemeinsame Drama) of Wagner’s own creations.
Wagner’s historicist narrative promised the restoration of something more than an imagined Grecian fusion of music, dance, and poetry, however. It promised to restore a thing akin to what he regarded as the role of Attic drama in service of the ancient “Hellenic religion”: namely, the potential of the artwork to nurture and even cement a sense of communal belonging through its sensual treatment of myth and history (Wagner [1849] 1911, iii.63). Wagner’s move in this direction was not only aesthetic but also political, for he imagined molding, with his music dramas, the innermost identities (or senses of self) of countless individual listeners, such that each would come to identify herself not only as an individual but also as a member of a vital cultural community. For Wagner, that community was national and specifically German, the racial boundaries of which he would soon make clear in such essays as “Judaism in Music” (1851) and “What Is German?” (1878).
As the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points out, Wagner, in framing his historicist history, tacitly drew on the work of a figure widely regarded as the progenitor of historicist scholarship itself, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Lacoue-Labarthe 1994, 1997). In particular, Wagner responded to Hegel’s prediction of the 1820s that the age of communally celebrated, community-cementing artworks was already nearing its end. (Lacoue-Labarthe called such works “Great Art.”) As Hegel saw things, the art of the Romantics had constituted the “final stage of art,” in which “subjectivity [is] made the principle” and the ideal is “absolute inwardness.” In the Romantic age, Hegel explained, one’s view of the world was no longer constituted as it had typically been before, in relation to natural phenomena or such communally validated constructs as gods or heroic deeds. Rather, one’s views were constituted in “the actual individual person in his inner life, who acquires infinite worth” (Hegel 1975, 518–520).
For Hegel, what spelled the end of Great Art flowed from his cardinal thesis, that “it is the vocation of art to find for the spirit [Geist] of a people the artistic expression corresponding to it.” The problem of the present, as Hegel saw it, is that if spirit or Geist is now everywhere regarded as most perfectly realized in the inner life of the individual person, then there is no longer a collective people whose common spirit or Geist art exists to express. As he put it in his lectures on aesthetics, “today there is no material which stands in and for itself above this relativity, and even if one matter be raised above it, still there is at least no absolute need for its representation by art” (Hegel 1975, 603, 605). From the ancient Greeks through the 1810s, art was needed by women and men to configure, locate, and understand their beings in relation to the broader world. In the Romantic age, the need for such understanding was widely felt to have disappeared. With that, for Hegel, the need for art itself was disappearing.
Here, for Lacoue-Labarthe, is where Wagner stepped in. Wagner’s signal achievement, the philosopher wrote, or at least his hoped-for achievement, was to “mak[e] possible once again a ‘great art,’ a modern equivalent to tragedy … a properly religious art” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1994, xv). This claim for Wagner is rooted in the work of Martin Heidegger, who, despite his aversion to the composer, credited Wagner with at least attempting to revive what Heidegger called a “collective artwork”: a form of art capable of speaking to and about more than an isolated individual; a form of art that could once again “be a celebration of the national community”; a form of art that could be, in Heidegger’s words, “the religion” (Heidegger [1936] 1979, 85–86). In this light, Wagner’s historicism was not just self-serving but also self-servingly political. With his music drama, Wagner saw a “chance to give back a meaning” to individual lives as parts of a vital community, to “ordain” a sense of “being-in-common” with other members of the nation (Lacoue-Labarthe 1997, 152). Like all politics, Wagner’s required the creation of a myth—here, a myth of music’s history, its teleology, and the great men (all males) who propelled it. Contrary to Hegel, Wagner maintained that the creation of socially transformative art was still possible. All that was needed was the skill or the cunning to interpret the logic that had animated the unfolding of its history, and to divine from that logic the course of artistic progress into the future.
To realize such a vision of historical fulfillment requires the work of a leader, a figure, Lacoue-Labarthe observes, “who in no way represents any form of transcendence, but incarnates, in immanent fashion, the immanentism of a community” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1990, 70). For Nietzsche, Adler, and countless other writers on music history in the nineteenth century, Wagner was that figure. He was the leader whose vision of history inspired the historicist fantasies of so many others. In this way, Wagner’s was an essential, perhaps the essential, nineteenth-century vision of the uses to which history can be put.
Geographies of History
“Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut” (“And the Moon Descends over the Temple that Was”). Claude Debussy gave this title to the second of his Images for piano, published in 1907. With its grace notes displaced across descending octaves, its gong-like resonance in the depths, and its repetitive cycling through pentatonic pitch sets, “Et la lune” is one of Debussy’s most vivid reflections on his encounter with the sounds of the Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. In a well-known letter of 1895, he recalled the experience of listening at the event: “Remember the Javanese music, which encompassed every nuance, even those that cannot be named, where tonic and dominant were nothing but vain ghosts for the play of clever children” (letter to Pierre Louÿs, January 22, 1895, in Debussy 1993, 107). In the foreign sounds of a distant land, as many have observed, Debussy discovered unfamiliar sentiments within himself, as well as previously unknown resources for use in his own creative projects.
But Debussy’s title is also significant: “And the moon descends over the temple that was.” For it reveals that the sound of the gamelan evoked for him not only a distant place but a distant time as well. It recalled for the composer a nebulous age somewhere deep within an imagined past, a historical moment forgotten long ago by most inhabitants of his modern, industrial France. In fact, his title was doubly historical, for it also pointed to a specific moment in Europe’s relatively recent history. In its conflation of physical and temporal distance, it hinted at modes of geographical thinking that had their origins in the Enlightenment of a century earlier, when travel emerged as a central project of learning about the world, and when Paris and other European capitals hosted exploding markets for travel literature of all kinds (Withers 2007, Wolff 1994).
As writers from Europe’s westerly reaches fanned out across the globe in the decades just prior to 1800—to Asia, Africa, Russia, and the Americas—they traveled with their eyes and ears attuned to the sights and sounds of difference. From their impressions, they constructed portraits of peoples and spaces often radically different from those of more familiar locales. Underlying the accounts of many such travelers was discourse on what was termed stadial or conjectural history, which held that differences perceived presently among the world’s peoples could be mapped onto a single, imaginary line believed to plot the evolution of worldwide humanity as a whole. Accounts of travel were written and read as contributing to a “chart of the world that was at once chronological and geographical,” as Withers writes, with the historical evolution of global humanity theorized in terms of “geographical evidence”—directly perceived—of “actual human difference” (Withers 2007, 13, 139). In this way, stadial history was a precursor to what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls “the denial of coevalness” in nineteenth-century anthropology: “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (Fabian 1983, 31). Invariably, that other time was historical, antecedent to the traveler’s own. To voyage from Paris to Jakarta or Moscow was to travel backwards in time, with the sounds heard in those distant locales echoing and providing direct, sensible access to those of earlier ages. Here again, the course of time was believed to unfold in a purposeful, rational way, driving all the world’s peoples logically and inexorably, if unevenly, toward the “Enlightened,” Western present (see further Karnes 2018).
Writing in 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder evinced such thinking in his account of listening to music-making by Latvian-speaking peasants on the outskirts of the Imperial Russian city of Riga. “I myself had the occasion to experience the living remnants [lebendige Reste] of these ancient and uncultured [alten, wilden] songs, rhythms, and dances among living peoples,” Herder wrote, “peoples from whom our customs have not yet managed to take away language, songs, and manners, only to give them something garbled or nothing at all in return” (Herder [1773] 1985–2000, ii.457–58). To the theologian Johann Georg Hamann, Herder’s mentor from Königsberg, the sounds of singing by Russia’s eighteenth-century serfs constituted what he took to be echoes of Homer’s ancient monotonic recitation (Hamann [1762] 1821, ii.304–306). In 1761, on missionary assignment in the Polish duchy of Courland, the pastor Gotthard Friedrich Stender observed that “one can regard the little peasant songs of the Latvians as the earliest inklings [den ersten Anfang] of Latvian poetry” (Stender 1761, 152). For all of these writers, the musics of Eastern Europe’s peoples seemed not just foreign but also “ancient,” in Herder’s terms, with their sounds marking those who made them as inhabiting a stage of cultural development prior to Western Europe’s urban present. That earlier stage was one that the travelers’ ancestors might once have inhabited themselves, somewhere in their own distant pasts, and it was one that would eventually lead even peasant peoples into the age of Enlightenment. The grandchildren of the Latvian singer would someday learn to write poetry, Stender suggested; the songs she sang in the 1770s would one day be supplanted by musics that Herder described uncritically as ours.
These writers’ conviction that all the world’s peoples would eventually become modern was underwritten by faith in what was then widely regarded as the perfectibility of all humankind. Such faith did not endure very far into the nineteenth century, but the reflexive mapping of geographical distance onto historical distance persisted throughout its duration. In this guise, Fabian’s denial of coevalness became a mainstay of not only anthropology but music history as well. In the first volume of his monumental History of Music (1862), August Wilhelm Ambros sought to go back to the earliest origins of the art, to what he called “the very beginnings of music” (die ersten Anfänge der Tonkunst), and he dedicated the first part of his volume wholly to those beginnings. There, Ambros found much of his material in the contemporary musics of faraway peoples and lands—China, India, and the Middle East—whose geographical distance from his native Austria seemed to correlate to what he perceived as the relative primitiveness of their musics. Before treating those musics directly, however, Ambros paused on his opening pages to consider the originary musical utterances of the Naturvölker: peoples of nature, or those wholly without culture. There, in the musics that had ostensibly attended the very birth of the art, the rhythmic element dominated, he suggested, and “the melody is artless and inspired by the impulses and desires of the moment” (Ambros 1862–82, i.4).
But how did he know? And who performed this most ancient kind of music? Peoples of the distant past, he reasoned, peoples whose progeny had eventually become modern, and presumably even German. But he knew how it sounded because, he held, it was still performed in the present day, by peoples who still seemed to embody—in the 1860s—what he regarded as the very first stage of human development. Those peoples, for Ambros, were nineteenth-century Naturvölker, men and women who remained stuck at the starting point of a unitary arc of human evolution. “The simple musical utterances of peoples at the very lowest level of cultural development,” he wrote, “of the Polar reaches, of inner Africa, and of the South Sea Islands, fully confirms what was said above about the nature of primitive music” (Ambros 1862–82, i.6). After thus surveying music’s beginnings, Ambros shifted to what he considered the slightly less primitive sounds of Asian and Arab musics. From there, he proceeded to musics of the ancient world (of the Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans) and finally to that of the Middle Ages. After that, his study treated Western classical music exclusively, the development of which he traced chronologically, inching toward the present. Save the first, all the volumes of Ambros’s History focus exclusively on the European West, and their outline is strictly chronological. But to the point of greatest historical remove from his Austro-German present, Ambros assigned the most foreign-sounding musics that he knew, and he peopled that earliest historical moment with individuals and groups whose present-day cultures and places of dwelling struck him as most distant from his own.
Three decades later, on the eve of his retirement, Eduard Hanslick recorded his impressions of Ambros’s History. While lauding the study as a whole, he was baffled by “the arid, unproductive material of the first volume: the music of the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Egyptians, Hebrews, and so forth.” Hanslick did not object to Ambros’s remarks about the “primitive” nature of those peoples or their musics. Rather, he found preposterous the notion that they participated in any sort of historical development at all—the least of which being an evolutionary line that had eventually given rise to the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms. “The pile of miserable details that comprises our knowledge of the music of Asian, Islamic, and pre-Classical peoples,” Hanslick wrote, “prompts one to interject: This is no sort of music at all, and it has no history” (Hanslick 1894, i.338). Here, we reach a point in stadial theory where history becomes divorced from teleology, where, as Alexander Rehding observes, nonliterate and non-Western peoples were believed to live “in a time bubble, as it were, in a perennial state of nature” (Rehding 2000, 356). Decades earlier, in his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel had distinguished between human time, which progresses along a linear, nonrepeating course, and natural time, which “exhibits only a circular course [Kreislauf] that forever repeats itself” (Hegel 1949–58, xi.89). In his remarks on Ambros, Hanslick expanded Hegel’s natural time to encompass not only plants, animals, and celestial motion but some of the world’s peoples as well—namely, those peoples who resided beyond the boundaries of the European West. Another University of Vienna professor, Richard Wallaschek, presented an extreme version of this view in a book of 1893, entitled Primitive Music. The drawings and songs of “savages,” Wallaschek wrote, evince “exactly the same mistakes and peculiarities as with our children.” But whereas “our children” are destined to outgrow their primitive natures, the “savage”—for Wallaschek, the resident of Java or most anywhere else beyond the Western world—never will (Wallaschek 1893, 281–82).
At the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, Debussy encountered the gamelan alongside an array of what Wallaschek would call primitive musics, with performances arranged on the festival grounds according to a “double hierarchy,” as Annegret Fauser describes it. All such musics were performed in spaces physically separate from those that hosted the festival’s concerts of Western classical repertoires. Yet among the festival’s “remainder of musics,” those outside of Western classical traditions, Fauser notes, European folk music was likewise accorded pride of place, uniquely situated amid the fairground’s restaurants and pavilions. In contrast, the musics of Africa and Asia were confined to the colonial exhibition, while those of Morocco and Egypt, “the exotic music best known to Europeans and closest to Europe,” was placed directly between the two (Fauser 2005, 158, 162). In this fashion, as Glenn Watkins writes, the musical attractions of the fair were distributed spatially “according to the relative primitiveness of various civilizations. The five continents were recognized as representing distinct degrees along an imaginary civilizational curve” (Watkins 1994, 21). As a Parisian review of the “exotic” musical portions of the fair made clear, Debussy’s nod to the legacy of the Enlightenment, with its stadial mapping of geography onto history, was not an isolated case. As the critic Julien Tiersot wrote,
We find, in the various sections of the Exposition Universelle, many opportunities to study the different musical forms specific to those races who understand art in a very different fashion from ours; and even when these forms should be considered by us as characterising an inferior art, we nevertheless have to pay attention to them, because they show us new aspects of music, and are probably infinitely closer to the origins of our art that, today, is so complex and refined.
(quoted in Fauser 2005, 146–147)
Peoples of History
Writing in 1900 of the project on which they had embarked a couple years earlier, collecting the melodies and texts of Jewish folk songs in western Russia, Shaul Ginzburg and Pesach Marek recounted their inspiration. The nineteenth century, they explained, had seen momentous transformations in the ways in which many Russian Jews had come to think about themselves and the world they inhabited—in their mirosozertsaniye, their Weltanschauung. With the experience of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and Imperial Russian administrative reforms, many Jews had come to identify themselves as increasingly secular. St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Riga had even seen the coalescence of economically prosperous Jewish communities and a highly educated Jewish intelligentsia. But with those shifts, Ginzburg and Marek felt, many had lost a sense of personal connection with the collective heritage of Russia’s Jewish peoples, embodied foremost in Jewish folk songs (narodniye pesni). Indeed, as they observed of their own experience in St. Petersburg, the “neglect” of such songs “among us is such that we even find categorical assertions in the literature that we have no folk songs whatsoever” (Ginzburg and Marek 1901, ix–x). In compiling and publishing their monumental Jewish Folk Songs in Russia (1901), Marek and Ginzburg sought to counter such views by assuring that future generations would have an archive of songs through which to assert or rekindle their sense of belonging to a greater Jewish community. In this way, they directed their work toward ushering in a desired future, toward nurturing the vitality of Jewish life in the years and decades to come.
And yet, Ginzburg and Marek’s project was also grounded in a distinctive way of thinking about history, for they regarded folk songs—“songs created by and for the folk,” they wrote—as expressing and embodying traces of a collective past, at once premodern and timeless. “Life was changing in every respect,” they wrote of Jewish life at the end of the nineteenth century, “and only here and there, where the old streambed was deeper, does one yet find still waters preserving evidence of the earlier flow. This circumstance prompted us, while it is still not too late, to record these unique materials in which the folk itself serves as its own historian, as the recorder of its way of life” (Ginzburg and Marek 1901, x). As Bohlman observes, Ginzburg and Marek regarded their project as a “rescue mission,” initiated “in the final moment” before Jewish folk songs would be lost forever to history’s debilitating flow (Bohlman 2005, 19). By publishing what had survived of those songs, they hoped to cultivate among their contemporaries a “sense of history [that] goes beyond knowledge to empathetic involvement,” to borrow from David Lowenthal (Lowenthal 1985, 212). They were convinced that folk-song texts and melodies testify to earlier, possibly ancient ways of experiencing and expressing Jewish life. And they hoped that their readers, when encountering them anew, would come to identify those songs as their own, as sounding testaments to histories of their families and communities, histories they shared with countless other Jews throughout the empire.
Ginzburg and Marek’s method of working had deep roots in European folk-song collecting, going back all the way to Herder, whose monumental Volkslieder (1778–79) had cemented the term folk song in the nineteenth-century vernacular. In the earliest days of their project, they advertised widely in the Jewish press, recruiting assistants from across western Russia to transcribe the songs performed in their communities, and to send their transcriptions to their office in St. Petersburg, to be added to the store of transcriptions they had already received from others. (In the end, they published only the texts of the songs they received, entrusting transcriptions of their melodies to the composer Joel Engel) (Ginzburg and Marek 1901, vi–vii, ix n2; on Herder’s network of assistants, see Bērziņš 2007, 77–80). In this way, their collecting project was a communal endeavor, drawing diverse individuals from across physical geographies into a community of cultural activists.
Underlying Ginzburg and Marek’s project was yet another variant of a mode of historical thinking we have considered throughout this chapter. Like Herder, Hegel, and Wagner before them, they believed that history unfolds in accordance with a rational, animating purpose: that present circumstances arise from past events in a logical and necessary way, and that the future will unfold in accordance with that same historical logic. But in fact, the “history” (istoriya) of which they wrote was a complex and problematic one, for the collectors’ vision of the folk-song singer as a “historian” (istorik) of her people conflates collective history—a nebulous concept in itself—with the subjective and notoriously unreliable vagaries of individual memory. Such tension between memory and collective history has been famously probed by Pierre Nora, who, writing of memorials to France’s Revolutionary past, cautions: “history is a representation of the past, [while] memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present” (Nora 1996, 3; I have reversed the order of Nora’s clauses in the quotation).
Many writers on European nationalism have acknowledged the potential of folk-song singing and collecting to promote a sense of belonging to what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community (Anderson 1991; cf. Herder and Bohlman 2017, Šmidchens 2014). Few, however, have recognized just how much that community-cementing potential owed precisely to the murky confluence of personal memory and collective history that folk songs were often held to embody. In part, what made the memory work of folk-song collecting so alluring to activists across the continent was something that Paul Ricoeur has noted of memory in general: “To remember something is at the same time to remember oneself” (Ricoeur 2004, 3). In other words, the act of remembering is, in itself, the very thing that ensures one’s embeddedness in the course of history. Remembering, for Ricoeur, is a deeply creative act; it is an act of inventing oneself, a self with a history, in the present moment. “Remembering is not only welcoming, receiving an image of the past,” he explains. “It is also searching for it, ‘doing’ something” (56). When the memory in question is putatively collective, as Marek and Ginzburg considered those preserved in Jewish folk songs to be, Ricoeur’s “doing something” becomes, in Nora’s terms, “a duty to remember.” Nora explains: “For the individual, the discovery of roots, of ‘belonging’ to some group, becomes the source of identity, its true and hidden meaning. Belonging, in turn, becomes total commitment” (Nora 1996, 11). Or, as Bohlman puts it, collecting and singing folk songs enables individuals “to take charge of their own narratives”—their memories—of personal or collective history, “and to weave these into the histories of their own nations” (Bohlman 2011, 29).
By 1901, when Marek and Ginzburg published Jewish Folk Songs in Russia, their eliding of personal memory and collective history had been a staple of European discourse about folk song and national belonging for a century. Where Ginzburg and Mark invoked the metaphor of a rushing stream whose calmer eddies still harbored age-old songs, the German poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, in their folk-song collection The Youth’s Magic Horn (1806), had conjured an image of folk songs as ancient trees, standing upon a mountaintop:
O dear God, where are the old trees under which we rested only yesterday? Those most ancient markers of sturdy borders, what has become of them, what is happening to them now? They have already been nearly forgotten among the folk, and we stub our toes painfully on their roots. If the top of the mountain is logged bare even once, the rain will wash away the soil and tress will never take root again. That Germany not be squandered in this way: this is what engages us.
(Arnim and Brentano 1806, 428)
A half-century later, as diverse national movements spread throughout Europe’s northern and easterly spaces, the appeal to personal memory as a constituent of collective history—with both memory and history given voice in song—echoed across geographies, languages, and faiths. In 1860, the schoolteacher Jēkabs Zvaigznīte wrote the following to his fellow Latvian-speaking Russian subjects:
Folk songs are a great, beloved inheritance, and if a folk does not take care to preserve this inheritance, then it cannot rightly be called a folk. … So I would like to ask: Latvians, where have you hidden your folk songs? In what graves have you buried them? Do you not have ancestors about whom you would like to sing? Did they not accomplish deeds that children can celebrate in song? Turaida’s hills, have you no echoes recalling the events of the old days? Daugava, Gauja, Venta [three local rivers], do you not carry out to sea, upon your famous waves, the stories of our grandfathers’ famous deeds? (Zvaigznīte 1860, 11–12)
In St. Petersburg at the turn of the century, echoes of the past still resounded in song. Shortly before Ginzburg and Marek’s collection appeared, the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences published the first volume of Krišjānis Barons and Henrijs Visendorfs’s Latvian Folk Songs (1894), whose very first song encapsulated succinctly the merging of personal memory and collective history that had defined the discourse since Herder:
One girl sings in Riga ([variant:] in Cēsis),
another sings in Valmiera ([variant:] in Pernava).
Both sing the same song.
Are they daughters of a common mother? (Barons and Visendorfs 1894, 1)
The domain of the nation performed in this song radiates outward from wherever its singer might be, to encompass all the disparate locales in which Latvians resided in the expanse of empire. In all those places, this collection attested, a single song was sung by countless individuals, all of whom shared a single mother, and thus a common history.
As it happened, it would be some time before Joel Engel would publish the melodies he received from Ginzburg and Marek. When six of them appeared in 1909, they did so in a form that embodied musically, and even dramatized, the collectors’ vision of collective history as both progenitor of the present and a harbinger of future vitality (Engel 1909). Like dozens of Ginzburg and Marek’s assistants, Engel had worked in the field himself, transcribing songs in the Imperial Pale of Settlement beginning in 1898. But he was also a trained composer with a diploma from the Moscow Conservatory, who believed, as the historian James Loeffler observes, “that Jewish music required aesthetic enhancement to qualify as true art” (Loeffler 2010, 69). In fact, “true art” is precisely what Engel aspired to when he sat down with his store of transcriptions. He endeavored to transform them into art song, into classical music.
Figure 1.1 shows the first page of Engel’s arrangement of one of the folk songs he transcribed, “Sait gesunter-heit,” or “Farewell” (Engel 1909, 8). It exemplifies his approach to arranging all the folk-song materials with which he was entrusted.
Figure 1.1 Joel Engel, “Farewell,” mm. 1–11, from Jewish Folk Songs (1909)
In preparing his arrangement of “Farewell,” Engel left the melody exactly as he had transcribed it in the ethnographic field. “Nowhere have I actually added anything to the original melody,” he wrote of his arranging practice generally. “I did not insert one note” (Loeffler 2010, 70). Here, the melody was transcribed in a melodic mode often called freygish, which the pioneering Jewish Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovskiy described as an “altered” Phrygian scale (izmenennyy frigiyskiy lad), featuring a characteristic half-step between its first and second degrees (here F♯ and G) and an augmented second between its second and third (G and A♯) (Beregovskiy 1987, 40).
For Engel, the distinctive interval of this ostensibly ancient melodic mode provided an opening through which to mine the rich vocabulary of late-Romantic, post-Wagnerian harmony in the piano accompaniment. Already in the song’s first two bars, Engel treats the interval and its harmonic implications thematically. His introductory move from the tonic B minor to a dominant F♯7 chord is attained via two distinctly modern-sounding sonorities, both of which play with the melody’s signature pitches: an unexpected G6 in measure 1, and a diminished-seventh chord on E, in which the pitches G and A♯ are conjoined. Engel set the first two lines of text over a more conventional foundation of tonic and dominant. But the brief piano interlude that follows experiments with further ways of conjoining the melody’s signature pitches harmonically. In measure 5, the tonic B minor, which sounds for the first three beats, yields to a Fr+6 chord on beat four, which resolves to a dominant sonority in the next bar—a harmonic passage that repeats between measures 6 and 7. Like the Edim7 chord of measure 2, this augmented-sixth chord and its dominant resolution play on the melody’s signature pitches, G in the former and A♯ in the latter.
The interval of the augmented second shapes the cadence eliding the first and second stanzas as well. After a brief harmonic excursion in measures 8–9, Engel prepares his move back to the tonic with yet another sonority uniting the pitches G and A♯: an E half-diminished seventh chord on the third beat of measure 9, which yields to a C♯7 chord (V7/V) on the downbeat of measure 10. At that point, the lower voice in the pianist’s right hand plays the melodic figure G♯–G♮–A♯ across two bars (mm. 10–11), with the A♯ voiced as the leading tone (third degree) in the dominant-seventh chord that arrives at the end of measure 11. Just before that moment of arrival, however, another G sounds as an upper neighbor in the piano’s left hand, once again bringing the constituent pitches of the traditional melody’s defining interval together within a distinctly modern harmonic gesture. Here and elsewhere in Engel’s collection, an ostensibly ancient melodic mode provides the nucleus for a bracingly modern harmonic setting.
On November 30, 1900, Engel and some of his musician friends performed some of his folk-song arrangements before an audience for the very first time. After the concert, held at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, the public’s response was ecstatic. This was, some would claim, “the first-ever concert of Jewish music” on Russia’s stages, if not those of the world (Loeffler 2010, 70). For many listeners, Engel’s arrangements pointed to a future in which Jews would appear in concert halls across the globe, playing not Wagner or Verdi or Bach but a distinctively Jewish classical music, a conspicuously modern musical art created from the materials of an ancient Jewish past. As such, Engel’s work would become the soundtrack for the broader cultural resurgence Ginzburg and Marek imagined, where a vital Jewish future would spring from the soil of collective Jewish history.
In the final analysis, every history considered in this chapter might be read as a “history of belonging,” to adapt from Dipesh Chakrabarty: a story told in order to account, to oneself or another, for one’s place within the otherwise disorienting worlds that one inhabits (Chakrabarty 2000, 115). Ginzburg and Marek claimed such a position explicitly. They sought bearings, in folk songs and in the ancient heritage they believed such songs to recall and voice, amid a social and political landscape of unprecedented and rapid cultural change. So too did Richard Wagner, when he grounded his own modernist art in a line of German musical tradition ostensibly extending backwards in time through Mozart and Beethoven to the sounds that had accompanied the coalescence of the German nation itself. The same can also be said of Herder and writers on stadial history through Ambros and beyond, who located their present cultural moments on a continuum of universal human development that helped them to explain their own relations to the radical diversity of cultural practice they had recently begun to discover. We might even extend such a reading to Adler, who published stories about his subjects—his history of Wagner’s music dramas among them—not only to guide the work of contemporary composers but also to define and stake his position and authority within the professional domain he took as his own.
The high point of historicism in the writing of Western music history might well have been reached with Wagner and his followers. But the more general vision of temporality in which historicist thinking is rooted—the conviction that history unfolds in accordance with an animating, rational purpose—underlay a dizzying array of statements about music, geography, and nation produced from the eighteenth century through the start of the twentieth. Whereas Adler, following Nietzsche, believed that the future of Austro-German music would be assured through careful study of the past, Herder believed that the musics of Russia’s peasants would one day, inevitably, merge with the German. Hanslick and Wallaschek firmly rejected positions such as Herder’s, maintaining instead that Germanic art had followed its own, distinctive line of stylistic development. Meanwhile, Engel, steeped in post-Wagnerian harmony, was charting a course into a distinctly Jewish musical future by exploring ways of merging the latter with the presumably ancient melodic language of Jewish folk song. That this way of thinking about music’s history and its inevitable impress upon present and future has not fared well in more recent times owes nothing to any alternatives issued in the nineteenth century itself. Its fall from grace in musicology owes instead to the disastrous uses to which historicist history was put in the twentieth century, the burdens and implications of which we all must continue to bear.