While it is not surprising that Western music aesthetics has overwhelmingly focused on post-Renaissance Euro-American art music, recent decades have seen a growing interest in aesthetic aspects of non-Western music traditions. Ethnomusicological studies of these have enhanced our understanding and appreciation of diverse world musics and their cultural contexts, as well as highlighting ways in which Western music aesthetics is unique and distinctive or, alternately, comprises themes and approaches of broad cross-cultural applicability.
It should be pointed out that much music outside the geographical West – be it modern commercial popular music or neo-traditional art music, not to mention imported Western genres themselves – may be produced and apprehended in ways not markedly different from that of familiar genres in the West. Accordingly, many Western analytical approaches – whether Leonard Meyer’s theories of the dynamics of tension and resolution (Meyer 1956), or the ongoing academic debates on the nature of the psycho-acoustic process – might be fruitfully applied to a variety of global genres, from Indian classical music to a pop song played in an African nightclub. However, in many traditional cultures worldwide, one can find a rich and dramatic variety not only of musical styles but also of conceptions of musical meaning, much of which could be understood as constituting distinctive forms of music aesthetics.
The cross-cultural study of music aesthetics involves a set of initial problems and challenges pertaining to the definition, delimitation, or identification of concepts of “aesthetics” and even “music.” In many ways these questions parallel and recapitulate discussions by anthropologists and some historians of art regarding the proper approach to non-Western visual arts, especially in non-literate traditional societies (see, e.g. Maquet 1986; d’Azevedo 1973). Restrictive modern conceptions of “art” or “music” as denoting entities produced solely for distinterested aesthetic pleasure, free from any overt social function, would tend to eliminate from consideration a vast realm of expressive activities or products that we might otherwise well consider to be “artistic” or “musical.” Just as many cultures do not have words for “art” per se, some do not have terms for “music” as a general category (though they might have terms for specific entities such as “drumming” or “song”). Likewise, in some cultures, genres (such as chanting of the Quran) which we might regard as overtly “musical” might not be included in the category of “music.” Although defining “music” may remain as elusive and impossible as defining “art,” a working conception might involve the oft-quoted notion of “humanly organized sound” supplemented by the consideration that the sonic entity involve creative manipulation of form for its own sake in order to incarnate feeling or cultural meaning, in a public medium, with sensuous effect (Anderson 2004: 7; Armstrong 1975: 11).
If “music aesthetics” is understood in the narrow sense of scholarly attempts to rationally explain musical enjoyment and evaluation, then we might well conclude that there is relatively little in the way of music aesthetics per se to be found outside the Western or cosmopolitan academy (not to mention before the eighteenth-century writings of Alexander Baumgarten and other philosophers). Alan Merriam, in his The Anthropology of Music (1964) offered a somewhat more elaborate definition of the Western conception of “the aesthetic,” with special reference to music, in an effort to assess its cross-cultural applicability. Merriam defined it as involving (1) psychic distance [that is, a kind or degree of disinterested, detached appreciation], (2) manipulation of form for its own sake, (3) attribution of emotion-producing qualities to music conceived strictly as sound, (4) attribution of beauty to the art product or process, (5) purposeful intent to create something aesthetic, and (6) a presence of a philosophy of the aesthetic (1964: 261–9). He concluded that the Flathead Indians and the Basongye (a Congolese ethnic group), whom he had researched, did not have a music aesthetic in this sense, and that the Western concept of the aesthetic, as he defined it, would prove to be of limited universal applicability.
Subsequent scholars of world music have been less interested in demonstrating the absence of such a narrow Western notion of the aesthetic in the cultures they study, than in exploring, in a more positive sense, what sorts of ideas (explicit or implicit) about music they do in fact have. Such scholars have sought to construct and employ a conception of “aesthetics” that is specific enough to retain some coherence and substance but broad and flexible enough to accommodate the extant rich and vast body of cross-cultural thought about music. As explored in several studies, such a conception of cross-cultural music aesthetics could include: the presence and nature of evaluative criteria for music; the relation of these criteria to judgments about other arts, natural phenomena, social interactions, moral behavior, or the like; the coherence of ideas about music with an indigenous worldview; and the ways that musical form or “sound structure” can be seen to reflect such a broader value system, cosmology, or epistemology, constituting a “philosophy of music” that mirrors a more general philosophy of life. Robert Kauffman’s study of Shona Rhodesian music (1969), for example, argued that a native “aesthetic” could be articulated as reflecting morphology (classification of art types), psychology (human reactions and related behavior patterns), and value theory (relating art and music to other aspects of culture). Some such concerns cohere with broader conceptions of music aesthetics used even in reference to Western (including pre-Renaissance) culture, as specified, for example, by Francis Sparshott, that is:
attempts to explain what music means; the difference between what is and what is not music, the place of music in human life and its relevance to an understanding of human nature and history, the fundamental principles of the interpretation and appreciation of music, the nature and ground of excellence and greatness in music, the relation of music to the rest of the fine arts and to other related practices, and the place or places of music in the system of reality.
(1980: 120).
The fact that such a “philosophy of music” may not be explicitly articulated in many traditional cultures poses a fundamental challenge to the ethnographer, whose uncovering of such an aesthetic may thus depend on extensive fieldwork, involving, among other things, asking the right questions of the right informants. However, the scholarly attempt to discover cases of such “ethnoaesthetics” is laden with inherent dangers. Some ethnographers (e.g. Merriam 1964: 271) have argued that the notion of an “unvoiced aesthetic” or “functional aesthetic,” as posited, for example, by David McAllester among the Navajo (1954), is a contradiction in terms (akin to the notion of an “implicit [music] theory,” where “theory,” in order to be a meaningful concept, should be defined precisely as the conscious use of abstract concepts such as meter and mode to describe music). Similarly, while a few scholars (e.g. Chernoff 1979: 153) have contended that non-verbal actions (such as might illustrate approval or disapproval of a performance) should be recognized as a kind of aesthetic discourse, one could also argue that such suppositions expand the notion of “music aesthetics” to the point where it ceases to have any meaning. Certainly Merriam is correct in suggesting the importance of distinguishing aesthetic notions that are actually articulated by culture bearers, as opposed to those merely hypothesized by ethnographers.
Accordingly, scholars have generally attempted to ground their theses about “ethnoaesthetics” in statements by informants, although this ethnographic quest is far from unproblematic. It is all too easy for the fieldworker, eager to “discover” some unique and distinctive “unvoiced aesthetic,” to inadvertently put words in his or her informants’ mouths, to rely excessively on a single voluble but idiosyncratic informant, to misinterpret general evaluative statements as implying a body of aesthetic criteria, or to impute coherent philosophical notions to statements or actions unable to bear such interpretive weight. (For admonitions against such errors, see, e.g. Merriam 1964: 273; Ladd 1973; Seiber 1973; Maquet 1986). As noted in reference to the study of visual arts, tendentious scholars run the risk of inappropriately imposing Western concepts, or, alternately, of exoticizing and “essentializing” people whose aesthetic notions and worldviews might not in fact be as unique as the ethnographer argues them to be (see, e.g. Agawu 2003). Such imputations of an all-encompassing worldview in a given culture may also negate the degree of autonomy that art and music might have in that society, and the degree of agency that musicians might enjoy (see, e.g. Chernoff 1979: 155, 194). A final consideration is the need to avoid unsustainable generalizations about a culture based solely or even primarily on art or music.
Other questions and problems of scope, definition, and focus arise in the cross-cultural study of music aesthetics. In representational visual arts, the occasionally useful distinction between form and content (i.e. that entity which is being represented) finds a certain counterpart in vocal idioms with varying degrees of relative importance of (musical) form and lyric content. There are many forms of “text-driven” vocal performance – such as religious chant or a narrative epic ballad – in which a lyric of primary aesthetic or ritual focus is rendered melodically, whether in the form of an ornamented reciting tone or a simple, repeated stock melody. Such genres may lie on a continuum between heightened speech and music (or song), depending on the extent to which the purely “musical” or formal aspects are subjects of aesthetic interest, or are able to demonstrably enhance the impact of the text. Susanne Langer (1953: ch. 10) has written insightfully on the process by which, in song, the lyric text is fully “assimilated” into music, losing its status as poetry. However, genres such as tarannum recitations of Urdu ghazals, or Cuban punto guajiro (whose vocalists call themselves poetas/poets rather than “singers”) may be regarded as “song” or music only with fundamental qualifications.
Another kind of analytical conundrum is presented by the variety of laments and other vocal events found worldwide that constitute or incorporate overt weeping. Modern Western scholars of music aesthetics continue to debate whether music actually “expresses” emotion (rather than “being expressive of” it); however, there is general agreement with the point made by Langer (1953: 141–2) and others, that music performance (like any artistic endeavor) does not constitute a form of direct emotional expression (or that any such expression as might occur is extraneous and probably even detrimental to the aesthetic process). However, the existence of several kinds of lachrymose lament traditions in world music problematizes this otherwise persuasive argument. (See, e.g. Feld 1982: ch. 3 regarding the New Guinean Kaluli; Merriam 1964: 266 regarding the Musongye; and Tiwary 1978 regarding the “tuneful weeping” of North Indian villagers.) One might be inclined to categorize such events as ritualized and stylized forms of weeping rather than as any kind of song or music per se. However, some evidence – such as Steven Feld’s accounts of his informants’ interest in his recordings of their weeping songs – suggest that they may represent distinctive (and not uncommon) confluences of aesthetic creativity and direct emotional expression.
Related to the contrast or complex relation between form and content is the equally problematic distinction between functional art and autonomous art created purely for disinterested aesthetic enjoyment. Hence, for example, the designation of “craft” rather than “art” for a knife, where the ornamentation on the handle constitutes an “add-on” to an essentially utilitarian object. Correspondingly, just as European art music was not really “emancipated” from court and ritual functions until the eighteenth century, so does most music-making in traditional societies fall into some category of being “functional” rather than autonomous. While purely recreational forms of music may exist, more typical in such cultures is music’s use to worship a deity, praise a patron, accompany repetitive manual labor, stylize the rendition of a narrative ballad, or dignify and celebrate a wedding or childbirth. As with visual arts, however, the functional aspects of such performances are often inseparable from aesthetic dimensions, such that a study of musical aesthetics need not restrict itself to purely recreational or concert musics constituting “art for art’s sake.” Most kinds of Balinese dance-drama, for example, are functional in the sense that they are conceived partly as a performance for the Hindu gods. However, as Edward Herbst notes, the gods are connoisseurs, such that the artistic merit of the performances is essential to their ritual efficacy (1997: 122). Similarly, in Afro-Latin religious ceremonies such as those of Brazilian macumba and Cuban santería, the artistry and flair of the drumming and singing are essential to inducing the gods to manifest themselves in the form of spirit possession (in Chernoff 1979: 124). Maquet has observed that some overtly functional objects, such as the African chief’s stool or scepter, are typical loci of aesthetic interest, insofar as they are intended to display his power and even connoisseurship (Maquet 1986: 62); similarly, Kwabena Nketia points out that the Akan chief’s drum ensemble serves a similar “function,” whose efficacy is dependent on its beauty or aesthetic excellence (Nketia 1973). Likewise, it is extremely common worldwide for religious music with an explicit religious function to be performed by professional musicians who do not necessarily share the faith of their patrons (such as the Muslim professionals who perform for North Indian Hindu events). In such cases, it may be natural for many such musicians to conceive their music in more explicitly aesthetic rather than utilitarian terms. Such considerations need not imply that the functional aspects of a music genre are irrelevant, but an attempt to understand the music aesthetics of a given society should by no means exclude from consideration genres which have utilitarian dimensions. Merriam’s argument about the absence of a modern Western “aesthetic” in some technologically primitive traditional societies should thus constitute a starting point rather than a disincentive for further inquiry.
With such considerations in mind, several ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have explored notions of music aesthetics, broadly conceived, in a variety of cultures outside the Euro-American mainstream, using diverse analytical approaches and generating a correspondingly varied range of findings. Taken collectively, these studies do not begin to constitute a comprehensive global mapping of music aesthetics, especially since scholars have been particularly interested in isolated, traditional, and often demographically small groups whose worldviews are especially likely to differ from those of the modern world. Nevertheless, the studies undertaken do provide a sense of the richness and variety of vernacular music aesthetics cross-culturally.
In many non-Western societies, evaluative criteria and allied notions of music aesthetics are explicit, especially in the case of the highly evolved and elaborate philosophies of art in the traditional high cultures of East and South Asia. If R. F. Thompson (1973) had to go to some effort to elicit evaluative statements from Yoruba informants about statues, researchers such as John Chernoff (1979) have been able to find West African musicians happy to expound at length on their notions of musical aesthetics. In larger societies with well-established literary traditions, evaluative criteria about music and the arts are also explicit; hence A. J. Racy has been able to document evaluative terms and conceptions in urban Egyptian music culture, while several scholars have described Javanese and Balinese concepts about music (Racy 1998).
Rather than illustrating an exotic worldview, a primarily “functional” conception of music, or a markedly distinct sort of aesthetic approach, the evaluative statements voiced by West Africans and others can often be seen to reflect a fundamentally aesthetic attitude toward music that is not dramatically different from that of the West. Chernoff (1979) quotes at length from his Ghanaian drum teacher, a particularly articulate and reflective artist who dilates on the proper approach to playing the lead dondon drum – when and how often to switch from one pattern to another, how to relate it to the accompanying parts, or to a dancer, and so on. Some of the teacher’s commentary explicitly relates performance to social ethics, stressing, for example, how impulsive, showy, and self-indulgent playing can reflect a lack of emotional sensitivity and respect for tradition. While such comments might be interpreted as reflecting a certain “African” sensibility, they could easily be applied to a variety of music idioms, from salsa piano playing to Irish fiddling. At the same time, even in societies with an unproblematically aesthetic attitude toward music, evaluative and descriptive terminology and statements are sometimes surprising and distinctive, and may be of particular use to outsiders attempting to understand the music. For example, Indo-Trinidadian tassa drum music, with its flashy pyrotechnics and thunderous volume, might be typically characterized by a foreign listener as wild and raucous; yet when performers and other insiders praise a given player or ensemble, they invariably describe it as “sweet.”
Ethnographers of non-Western music cultures have taken special interest in aesthetic statements by informants that are especially reflective of their particular cultural contexts and broader social or philosophical notions, or that suggest aesthetic preferences that obtain in other expressive media and sensory domains. Thompson, for example, notes the sometimes explicit appreciation of composure, poise, and relaxed self-control – as opposed to frenzied abandon or catharsis – in some Congolese and West African drumming and dancing; such an attitude, he argues, can be seen to reflect a broader “aesthetic of the cool” which is valued in social behavior and other aspects of life (Thompson 1966). Barbara Tedlock finds a different sort of extra-musical resonance in the evaluative statements made by her Zuni acquaintances, especially those who praise certain songs as tso’ya – a term imperfectly glossed as “clear, new, beautiful” used to characterize a variety of phenomena (Tedlock 1986: 189). In reference to song, tso’ya could refer to its large melodic contour, clear articulation of lyrics, chromatic passages, and incorporation of two contrasting melodies. A line of identically clad dancers would be distinguished as tso’ya by its inclusion of a single member in a brightly contrasting outfit. In the natural world, tso’ya could characterize the vividly contrasting colors on a swallowtail butterfly or a collared lizard. Ted-lock argues that the recognition and valuing of tso’ya reflect a “Zuni aesthetic” which is distinctive and internally consistent.
Of particular interest to ethnomusicologists have been the ways in which cosmologies or worldviews in a given society can be reflected or rearticulated in formal aspects of music, in such a way that sound structure seems to mirror social structure. Particularly influential in this regard have been Feld’s writings on the Kaluli, a relatively isolated ethnic group of some 1500 people living in the New Guinea highlands. In his book Sound and Sentiment (1982), Feld explored, among other things, the intriguing coherences between song, myth, and folk ornithology, including the belief that the voices of the forest birds represent deceased ancestors. Feld focuses in particular on ceremonial songs in which sung melodies patterned on bird calls and accompanied by drums consecrated with bird blood reach a stage at which they “harden,” in local parlance, provoking weeping; at the same time, such songs are valued by Kaluli informants not merely (or even) as seances or funerary laments, but for their aesthetic values and skillfully rendered formal features. In a subsequent article, Feld expanded on the intriguing ways that singing and drumming – typically with multiple, contrasting, out-of-sync patterns – recapitulate forest sounds (again, especially, the raucous sound of multiple, contrasting bird calls) and even the forms of Kaluli conversation, with its constant seeming cacophony of group interjections and interruptions (Feld 1988). Of special interest, as Feld notes, are the ways the Kaluli use the term dulugu ganalan – roughly, “lift-up-over-sounding” – as a descriptive term not only for such sounds but also for the effective aesthetic deployment of such a texture in music.
Turning to the geographically proximate but socially distant high cultures of Bali and Java, ethnomusicologists have posited similar iconicities between music structure and epistemologies in the sophisticated musics performed on gamelans – large ensembles dominated by metal gongs and xylophones. Judith and Alton Becker have noted how Javanese conceptions of time are dominated to a distinctive extent by various sorts of cycles – not merely Gregorian, solar, and lunar, but also a set of vernacular calendrical periodicities (Becker 1979; Becker and Becker 1981). It is not coincidental, they argue, that Javanese gamelan music is governed – in a more overt and elaborate form than most metered musics – by time-cycles (gongan), whose expressive power derives from their “iconicity” or coherence with local cosmology.
Susan Walton posits yet another sort of iconicity in Javanese gamelan music. She notes that recurrent in Javanese philosophy is the belief in an ineffable, perhaps esoteric, “inner” (batin) level of meaning and reality that underlies most worldly, external (lahir) appearances (Walton 2007: 35). Although traceable to local interpretations of Sanskritic rasa aesthetic theory and Sufi mysticism, such conceptions inform colloquial worldviews as well as learned, literary discourse. Just as Sanskrit philosophy (especially that of the eleventh-century Abhinavagupta) linked aesthetic relish of rasa to a blissful state of heightened consciousness, so gamelan music seems to reflect the state of collective meditative transcendence sought by local Sufi mystics. Moreover, the notion of an elusive “inner melody” implicit in the layered polyphony of the gamelan can be seen as a quintessential batin entity (Walton 2007: 35).
Other scholars have undertaken similar attempts to relate vernacular aesthetic criteria (whether explicit or “unvoiced”) to broader beliefs and values. Margaret Kartomi (1993) has sought a correspondence between Sumatran Mandailing ensemble music and a local tolerance of socially contrasting “freedom and cooperative mores.” Charles Keil has posited a relation between Nigerian Tiv music structure and an affinity toward “circles and angles” in visual aesthetics (Keil 1979). Naturally, ethnomusicologists, like other scholars, need not limit their scholarly output to reporting the “emic” statements of cultural insiders, but may contribute much by advancing interpretations, however speculative. Nevertheless, as suggested above, such endeavors run risks of being more fanciful than empirical, and of creating rather than documenting iconicities.
Some writers have opined that such correlations between worldview and musical form are precisely the sort of thing that distinguishes “primitive” societies from the post-Renaissance West, where the fine arts have enjoyed an autonomy and an explicitly “disinterested” mode of appreciation that allegedly liberate them from any extra-musical influences or conditioning. Others, however, have challenged the notion of such autonomy, from various viewpoints. For instance, the Western preference for closed, symmetrical musical forms – such as sonata form, or familiar song formats like the 32-bar AABA form, in contrast to open-ended, additive forms like a strophic narrative ballad – reflects a broader post- Renaissance aesthetic preference for unified, formally complete art works, such as the novel, or a painting deploying perspective and a realistic foreground– background dialectic. It has been persuasively argued that this aesthetic, voiced in the fifteenth century by Leon Alberti, in which all parts must cohere with the unified whole, should not be seen as a purely formal, autonomous development, but as part of a semiotic revolution conditioned by the advent of capitalism and industrial technology, which generated an unprecedented degree of concern with rationalization of all aspects of life, and a new emphasis on the bourgeois self as opposed to the feudal collective (see, e.g. Marothy 1974; Hauser 1957: 15; Manuel 2002).
The advent of modernity has had dramatic effects on traditional music cultures worldwide, bringing mass media, the sounds of global pop styles, and new modes of musical production, reception, and patronage even to the New Guinean highlands. Conversely, some traditional musics – from Tibetan chant to pygmy singing – have come to be recycled as “world beat” exotica in the West, posing some of the same questions of audience reinterpretation as raised by the familiar “African mask problem” decades earlier. One of the most overt, widespread, and dramatic changes wrought by such developments on non-Western music cultures is what could be called an aestheticization process. The spread of commercial pop styles, whether local or imported, places a new emphasis on musics that are purely recreational, and thus largely free of the “functional” considerations that might condition the form and meaning of work songs, religious music, life-cycle commemorations, praise songs, and the like. Thus, commercial pop musics bring with them not only dramatically new sounds and styles but also a quintessentially and primarily aesthetic mode of appreciation, oriented toward a “distinterested” form of reception (that might include energetic social dance).
In many countries, from Uganda to Trinidad, songs and dances are disembedded from their traditional contexts and performed by folkloric groups on stage, often in the format of competitions. Judges use scorecards whose criteria (“stage presentation,” “attire,” “group coordination,” etc.) are explicitly aesthetic, regardless of how central such considerations were in traditional settings. In such situations, the exclusive emphasis on aesthetic aspects may be new, but the criteria themselves may derive from (and constitute intriguing articulations of) traditional evaluative norms.
A form of aestheticization can also result when traditional genres are rearticulated as modern popular musics, whether presented for local or foreign audiences. For example, the music of the griots of West Africa’s Senegambia region traditionally foregrounded the genealogical praise lyrics sung for its patrons, with the instrumental accompaniment (on cora lute or wooden xylophone) being of secondary importance. Several griots, however, have successfully marketed their music to Western “world beat” audiences, in the process de-emphasizing the lyrics (which are in any case unintelligible to foreigners), foregrounding the melodious instrumental playing, and effectively “liberating” the art from its traditional social function (Racanelli 2009). Such changes need not be nostalgically lamented as alienating or commercializing, as they can stimulate new sorts of musical creativity and dynamism
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See also Analysis (Chapter 48), Classical aesthetic traditions of Asia and the Middle East (Chapter 23), Music and dance (Chapter 43), Musicology (Chapter 45), Notations (Chapter 7), and Understanding music (Chapter 12).
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