Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Cambridge History of World Music
  • Cited by 14
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139029476
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139029476
Subjects:
Ethnomusicology, Music, History, Music: General Interest
Series:
The Cambridge History of Music
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Music
Information

Book description

Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected religions, cultures, languages and nations throughout world history. The chapters in this History take readers to foundational historical moments – in Europe, Oceania, China, India, the Muslim world, North and South America – in search of the connections provided by a truly world music. Historically, world music emerged from ritual and religion, labor and life-cycles, which occupy chapters on Native American musicians, religious practices in India and Indonesia, and nationalism in Argentina and Portugal. The contributors critically examine music in cultural encounter and conflict, and as the critical core of scientific theories from the Arabic Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Overall, the book contains the histories of the music of diverse cultures, which increasingly become the folk, popular and classical music of our own era.

Reviews

'With The Cambridge History of World Music, Philip Bohlman and company have confronted the hazards of this complex enterprise head on while at the same time inspiring the kinds of curiosity, wonder, and delight that ensure its vitality as a historical subject. World music needs history, ethnomusicology needs world music, and world music and ethnomusicology alike need this book. Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'

Michael B. Bakan Source: Ethnomusicology

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 16 - Four recurring themes in histories of Chinese music
    pp 397-415
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the convergence of historical and anthropological practices that connected vernacular music practices to time and place. It establishes the ways in which the very collections of folk song yielded the possibility for history and history writing that proliferated to form the narratives of nineteenth-century Romanticism, particularly its political forms as nationalism. Folk song entered world-music history eponymously, that is, as narratives about people, the Volk. The chapter explores Johann Gottfried Herder's influence as a translator of epic, direct and indirect, deserved and undeserved, on the synthesis and fragmentation of world-music histories that accompanied the expansion of nationalism into colonialism and the subsequent human crises of modern history in the twentieth century and beyond. As epic, Herder's Cid relies on the language of power that divides Europe from Africa, the history of Europe from that of its other.
  • 17 - On the history of the musical arts in Southeast Asia
    pp 416-440
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Charles Fonton's project echoes Enlightenment approaches to music, music aesthetics, and the double nature of music as both art and science. Fonton starts with an account of the origins and history of oriental music. Music can be used as a clue and as a key that can disclose vital facets of human culture. The debates about music that raged in eighteenth-century France signal that the Enlightenment was dealing with materials and arguments that were too complex to be answered or solved in a satisfactory manner. In the emergence of later discourses of orientalism, the Enlightenment came to produce a bewildering number of simultaneous conversations intrinsic to the cultural and geographic exchange. By examining the different ways world music took shape in French music and musical scholarship in the eighteenth century, this chapter shows how the reflective horizon of Enlightenment authors and composers stretches beyond the West.
  • 18 - Musicians and the politics of dignity in South India
    pp 441-472
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the relationship between anthropological theory and the representation of non-Western music from the heyday of the British Empire to its decline after World War I. It traces the history of anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism, highlighting important developmental paradigms, such as monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, and the evolutionary models of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Although Tylorian anthropology would set the scene for modern British ethnomusicology, the history of ethnomusicology in Britain begins much earlier, in the eighteenth century, much of it in travel literature translated from other languages. Spencer's influence in music begins with his hugely controversial article The Origin and Function of Music and continues into the early twentieth century with numerous related, and equally contentious, articles. Acolytes of developmentalism persisted in increasingly unsupportable anthropological views, yet Darwinians struggled to substantiate evolutionary theory.
  • 19 - Images of sound: Erich M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogram Archive
    pp 475-497
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the development of Western music in Korea, and the impact it has had on music and musical discourse. The twentieth century saw the development of music education and musicology in Korea, and the introduction of music training in universities and conservatoires, using Western models and, initially, focusing on Western music. Western music became a formal part of the Korean school curriculum shortly after Japan took control. Music training for budding Western musicians was initiated at the Choyang Club. Musicology catapulted kugak into the public arena, encouraging government agencies to promote it. The transition whereby kugak moved onto public stages was assisted by recording and broadcast technologies. Post-liberation at the end of the Pacific War, Western music dominated the media in South Korea. Public pop music retained eponymous pan-Asian balladry, based in Korea on yuhaengga, until democracy and music videos arrived in the early 1990s.
  • 20 - Music in the mirror of multiple nationalisms: sound archives and ideology in Israel and Palestine
    pp 498-521
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on how the concept of folk music played out more specifically in Eastern Europe. Most studies of European musics posit three basic categories of music: folk, popular, and classical. The musical sounds of folk music were always of interest, however, and the ethnographic study of the music was greatly enhanced by the invention of sound-recording technologies in the 1880s. The chapter mentions a few song collectors who contributed to the understanding of what constitutes folk music in Eastern Europe. Ethnomusicological and musical-folklore literatures offer many overviews of folk-music sound in Eastern Europe. The chapter sketches some organizing structures such as religion, life ways, musical instruments and song forms of ethnographic fact. Folk music generated different meanings and served different ideologies in Eastern Europe from other parts of Europe. This may have been particularly true among the Slavic peoples.
  • 21 - Repatriation as reanimation through reciprocity
    pp 522-554
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the discourse on folk songs and dance, the so-called folklore musical, that appears in well-known texts. A Gaucho is the hero of the Martín Fierro, considered to be the national epic. Argentine music is often associated with the Gaucho singers and dancers of the plains, obliterating other significant Indian- or African-influenced repertories and traditions, both urban and rural. A discursive history of Argentine musical folklore necessarily includes an account of the dialectics of exclusion and inclusion that the Gaucho social type suffered over time, within texts controlled from the outside. Gauchos from Buenos Aires and elsewhere fought against the attempted British invasions in1806 and 1807. Musical novelties from the independence period are far from the radicalism that assumed the political break with Spain and the scrapping of colonial structures and hierarchies. Romanticism took Buenos Aires by storm in the early 1830s, immediately spreading to provincial cities.
  • 22 - Landscapes of diaspora
    pp 557-583
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Historical writings are not only long-established, but are also richly diverse. There have been very significant shifts in the contexts surrounding and impelling the writing of fresh histories of music over the long period of Chinese cultural identity, and historians at any single time have taken multiple and divergent approaches to their subject. This chapter compares how selected histories present four key themes that include music's origins, a connection between a nation's musical pitchscape, the contributions of specialist musicians, and China's music history as an account of culture contact, within and across China's national boundaries. Many historians have documented the importing of foreign sounds throughout the long history of Chinese music, most notably the entertainment orchestras brought to the court from numerous other states during the Tang Dynasty. The writing of musicologist Shen Zhibai offers examples that illustrate what is at stake in the writing of music history.
  • 23 - Sufism and the globalization of sacred music
    pp 584-605
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter provides an overview of Southeast Asia's music history and examines some of the main themes in the historical discourse, including historical aspects of publications on the music cultures of the region. It focuses on a few of the sources, focusing mainly on the most-studied music cultures in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. A number of sources show that between the first and the tenth centuries CE, many parts of Southeast Asia experienced commercial, artistic, architectural, and religious contact with India and China, which substantially influenced the musical arts. Muslim proselytization, partly through the musical arts, continued to spread in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Malaysia, and the southern Philippines. Over the past half millennium, Southeast Asia's musical expressions have been closely related to its economic and political history, experience of colonialism, achievement of independence, grappling with modernization, and gradual entry into the global market economy.
  • 24 - Global exoticism and modernity
    pp 606-634
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South India, media sources, and secondary literature, this chapter invites thinking cross-culturally beyond sublime qualities of sound to reach for more compelling accounts of musical dignity, or how performers cultivate and defend their sense of self-worth between the work of art and the art of work. It talks about developing a framework via India and other case studies for thinking historically about musical pasts and human inequalities, including those that privilege the very act of historicizing itself. The chapter focuses on the modern Enlightenment categories of labor and dignity, an approach rooted in an earlier call for tactical humanism, or the use of a shared political language to find a place to stand vis-à-vis cultural difference and global disparities. Five interrelated themes in particular figure prominently in the discourse on musical pasts represented in the chapter: mobilities, values, bodies, technologies, and rights.
  • 25 - Encountering African music in history and modernity
    pp 637-660
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In Carl Stumpf's approach, tone psychology was directed toward individual and experimental research and it played an important role in comparative psychology, one of Stumpf's primary interests. With the Berlin Phonogram Archive established, Stumpf specified three goals for comparative musicology: the analysis of sound using musical criteria, examination of the psychological role of music for human beings and the study of musical instruments. Together with Stumpf and Otto Abraham, Erich M. Von Hornbostel made contributions that are recognized in the history of world music as instrumental in the establishment of comparative musicology. Hornbostel and Stumpf were interested in the comparison of acoustics and music. Hornbostel published an article on comparative acoustic and music psychological studies, in which he specifies the methods to be used in the comparative study of world music: experiments with non-European subjects, pitch-measurements on musical instruments and studies that employ phonographs.
  • 26 - The politics of music categorization in Portugal
    pp 661-677
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The invention of the phonograph toward the end of the nineteenth century brought music to the forefront of folk-song scholarship, hitherto focused almost entirely on lyrics. Transformed into sound objects, the oral musical traditions, could be collected, stored, and subjected to sustained scholarly scrutiny. Musics are collected in the southeastern Mediterranean, west of the Jordan River, known variously as Eretz Yisrael, Israel, Palestine, and the Holy Land. This chapter focuses on the different ways in which collectors of traditional music have negotiated specific artistic and scholarly interests and agendas with competing ideologies of nationalism in four large scale music recording and archiving projects based in and around Jerusalem. In the utopian vision, spiritual renewal, attained through the creation of a society based on Jewish cultural and ethical values, was the primary goal of Zionism, and a prerequisite for political emancipation.
  • 27 - The world according to the Roma
    pp 678-702
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Laura Boulton collection's history includes disputes between the collector and various institutions, and among and within the institutions as well, about the extent and nature of its contents. Through repatriation, the cultural and scholarly value of archives like Boulton's, this chapter suggests ways to move ethnomusicology forward as an ethical as well as scholarly enterprise, by confronting the moral obligations the discipline has incurred. The diversity of Boulton's sources, representing hundreds of different performers, dance, cultural traditions, communities, and languages, of which Boulton's knowledge was uniformly superficial at best, further hinders assessment of the collection as a scholarly or public resource. The recordings and films Boulton had made were her only claim to significance as an ethnomusicologist. Musical archives are only meaningful, only valuable for any purpose at all, when they are embedded in and actualize networks of forward-looking reciprocity. Their value in a history of world music is inseparable, morally and ethically, from such reciprocity.
  • 28 - Disseminating world music
    pp 705-725
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores some of the routes that music has traveled through the peripheral geography, focusing especially on the sounds of the sacred, on what it means to sing one's self in Diaspora. World music has been shaped by the experiences of diasporic, Caribbean communities, and this was the case for many even before they arrived in the region. Accounts of musical performances and of the creation of body art on board ship during the middle passage illustrate the power of the expressive arts to shape experiences and to combat psychic and physical violence. Highlife and jùjú, are two West African genres that have been affected by musical styles emanating from the Caribbean. The Caribbean has transplanted its inhabitants across the globe and has also transplanted its musics and its festivals to new locations, implanting them in new contexts where ethnicity, nationality, and identity take on new meanings.
  • 29 - Musical antinomies of race and empire
    pp 726-743
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the twenty-first century, Sufism and Sufi music appear to be predisposed for an accelerated and universalized globalization that includes and, indeed, privileges music as the most ubiquitous and instantly transmitted sonic medium. Approaching sacred versus world music, Philip Bohlman posits that music history in the Islamic world embodies narratives that profoundly depend on the different ontologies of music that are central to Islamic thought. Islamic musics have undergone extensive processes of globalization, and some repertories, such as the Sufi qawwali, are inseparable from world music today. Given the fact that Sufi world music is derived directly from its traditional counterpart, this chapter explores the relations between Sufi music as sacred music, on the one hand, and Sufi music as world music on the other. A historical orientation is built into Indic Sufism, for it is hierarchical and based on seniority and spiritual ancestry.
  • 30 - Globalized new capitalism and the commodification of taste
    pp 744-764
  • View abstract

    Summary

    European appropriations of exotic and primitive musical cultures for the development of musical modernism were paralleled by Occidentalist appropriations of Western music globally. The rise of mass-mediated popular musics and developments in recording technology over the past century served as cardinal signs of modernity in both the West and the East. This chapter explains that the exploitation of Asianness within intra-Asian popular culture has been inspired by a wide array of motivations. It focuses on examples of Chinese and Chinese diaspora popular music from the more recent past that illustrate the roles of world music and Orientalist representation in proclaiming modernity and ethnic pride for Asian and Asian American musicians. The chapter suggests that these developments increasingly proceed independently of direct Western/white intervention and many of these musicians were initially inspired by models of cross-cultural appropriation from Euro-American musics, both modernist and popular.
  • 31 - The time of music and the time of history
    pp 767-785
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The ethnomusicological glance at the musics of sub-Saharan Africa historically wrestled with the issues of change and adaptation, especially in regard to the roles of traditional culture in tandem with modernity. This chapter provides an overview of African music within a history of discourse. It focuses on literature about African music as adaptive and responsive. In addition to the continent's indigenous musical traditions there have been Arab-influenced traditions, as there are varieties of Asian traditions commingling with local traditions today in a variety of contexts. More recent efforts by African and European ethnomusicologists and musicians provide substantial analytical reflection on contemporary issues that are critical to the current generation's glance across the African continent. Ethnomusicologists working in contemporary Africa on highly charged topics are often requested to advocate for their colleagues, often to intervene with local and governmental authorities. Research on medical and healthcare issues is often characterized by such activist interventions.
  • 32 - The ethics of ethnomusicology in a cosmopolitan age
    pp 786-806
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore, popular-music studies, and related disciplines, categorization has been the subject of recurrent debate. Drawing upon the ethnographic and historical research on nationalism and cultural politics in modern Portugal, this chapter addresses the politics of music categorization. It focuses on three distinct periods marked by political transformations that had a major impact on Portuguese society and culture. The first period saw two major political regimes: the monarchy and a short lived republican government that was established in 1910 and ended with a coup d'état in 1926. The second is a period of turmoil leading to the establishment of the totalitarian regime dubbed Estado Novo led by António de Oliveira Salazar in 1933 and lasting just over forty years before ending with the April 25, 1974 revolution. The third period of democratic rule extends from1974 to the present, the second decade of the twenty-first century.
  • 33 - Toward a new world? The vicissitudes of American popular music
    pp 807-825
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A recent recording by Ensemble Caprice insists that the entire collection is largely music played by Roma, or what they call 'Gypsy Music'. The only literal trace of Roma in the collection is the word 'Czigany'. Writing about the ways in which African American music came to be considered exquisitely expressive to white audiences, sociologist Jon Cruz has coined the term 'ethnosympathy' to describe what happens when progressive attitudes regarding a particular group are combined with romantic ideas about them, especially their suffering. With a small Romani population, the Roma played a series of familiar roles in Czech society that can be articulated by comparing Červený and Hertán's "Cigán" with a more famous piece written around the same time, Janáček's Diary of One Who Vanished. The most famous appearance of the Auschwitz song occurs in the film LatchoDrom, a staged documentary telling the musical story of the Romani journey from India to Spain.

Page 2 of 2

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.