Why is music so ideological, and why do totalitarian states take it so seriously? A personal view from history and the social sciences

Journal of Musicological Research

Volumn 26, Issue 2-3, 2007, Pages 91-122

  Keller, Marcello Sorce ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249142235     PISSN: 01411896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01411890701361086     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Music (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978)
2. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalish-Schönen: ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst [1854], trans. Gustav Cohen, The Beautiful in Music (Indianapolis: Bob Merrill, 1957)
3. it contains the famous statement: "Tönend bewegte Formen sind der Inhalt und Gegenstand der Musik." Hanslick is mostly mentioned in connection with his youthful pamphlet, rather than with his later, more mature writings. Hanslick's earlier extreme formalist position is probably at the origin of what Virgil Thomson used to call "the music education racket," whose philosophy of music listening emphasized form recognition, rather than discussion of music's narrative and ideological import. Virgil Thomson, "How Composers Eat," in The State of Music [1932], 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1962)
4. See, for instance: Henry Pleasants, ed., Hanslick's Music Criticisms [1950] (reprint Dover, 1988)
5. and Fred Everett Maus, "Hanslick's Animism: A Simple Account of Hanslick's Relation to Contemporary Musical Aesthetics and Musical Analysis," The Journal of Musicology 10/3 (1992), 273-92
6. Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952)
7. Judith Becker, Traditional Music in Modern Java: Gamelan in a Changing Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1980)
8. Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Publication No. 88, 1968), vii
9. This idea is brilliantly commented on and applied to musicology by Gary Tomlinson in "The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology," 19th-century Music 7/3 (1984), 350-62
10. Even aesthetic pleasure is not, as our Romantic heritage leads us to believe, pure contemplation of "beauty" (however defined). Social scientists look at it differently; for instance, Vera L. Zolberg, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
11. later reprinted in Sonus 16/2 (1998), 33-41
12. Elsewhere I was offered the opportunity to elaborate on how easy it is to misconstrue and misunderstand music's original sense, and how creative and respectable an activity such as "misunderstanding" can be: "Why Do We Misunderstand Today the Music of AU Times and Places, and Why Do We Enjoy Doing So," in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. Barbara Haggh (Paris-Tours: Minerve, 2001), 567-74
13. Philip Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
14. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)
15. Michelle Duffy, "Performing Identity Within a Multicultural Framework," in Social and Cultural Geography, special issue on "music and place" 6/4 (2005), 677-92
16. Marcello Sorce Keller, "Economia, società e modi del far musica nelle culture tradizionali," in Enciclopedia delta Musica, III (La prospettiva interculturale), ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 2003), 505-38
17. All such distinctions are no less necessary today than they once were. It is one of the contradictions of our so-called "age of globalization" that cosmopolitanism is not at all fashionable, and people are more than ever obsessed by their "roots." See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 5-7
18. The proliferation of musical genres and styles we are experiencing (Bruno Nettl is surely right in maintaining that there never was so much musical diversity on our planet as there is today) may be taken as a significant indicator of how common it is to feel "locally." See Bruno Nettl, The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation, and Survival (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985)
19. The idea that music is made up of discrete pieces, each one of them "works" to be revived in performance and appreciated as "monuments" to be handed down to posterity is of Romantic coinage. It reveals itself as inapplicable to most cultures, and has been effectively challenged over the past few decades even in the realm of Western art-music: Patricia Carpenter, "The Musical Object," Current Musicology 5 (1967), 56-87
20. Hermann Danuser, Helga de la MotteHaber, Silke Leopold, and Norbert Miller, eds., Das musikalische Kunstwerk. Geschichte-ÄsthetikTheorie. Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1988)
21. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meaning of Performance and Listening (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998)
22. Michael Talbot, ed., The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000)
23. See Peter Manuel, Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 169-70
24. One good example is represented by those narrative songs called "ballads" (like "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" or "The Two Sisters") that are shared across the Western world, although melodies associated with their narratives may change considerably. See Marcello Sorce Keller, "Sul castel di mirabel: Life of a Ballad in Oral Tradition and Choral Practice," Ethnomusicology 30/3 (1986), 449-69
25. Wilhelm Tappert, Wandernde Melodien: eine musikalische Studie [1890] (Oosterhout, the Netherlands: Anthropological Publications, 1965)
26. So, for example, across the Mediterranean countries (and indeed across the world), local genres thrive under a more or less substantial layer of Anglo-American rock. See Marcello Sorce Keller, "La popular music come riflesso dei contatti culturali nell'area mediterranea. Un'occasione per riconsiderare la definizione corrente di cultura," in Antropologia della musica e culture mediterranee, ed. Tullia Magrini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 133-46
27. reprinted in English as "Popular Music in the Mediterranean: A Case for Reconsidering the Current Definition of Culture," Criticus Musicus 1/2-3 (1993), 52-63
28. Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
29. John Blacking, Music, Culture, & Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking, ed Reginald Byron, foreword by Bruno Nettl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 232
30. Saint Augustine, "Confessions" (excerpt) in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, vol. 1 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 73-5
31. He added that the noble person plays sweetly and gently, keeps an equable disposition, enlivens and stimulates, and will not nourish in his heart moods of pain and mourning, defiant or violent. The playing of the common man, on the contrary, is quite different: loud and fast, then again moribund and vague, the reflection of a spirit that is not tempered and balanced. That there should be a similarity between harmony in music and harmony in society was considered so important in ancient China that a department of music was established in the government over two thousand years ago. See Lawrence Picken, "The Music of Far Eastern Asia," in New Oxford History of Music: Ancient and Oriental Music, vol. 1, ed. Egon Wellesz (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 86-8. In Japan, the traditional musician strives to reproduce secular musical gestures and forms of expression as faithfully as possible, so as to attune himself to the cosmic and social order that depends for its support on the music so faithfully handed down from one generation to the next
32. Even on the level of taste and preference, someone who maintained that listening to Beethoven's quartets or U2 is not the same thing at all would risk being considered "politically incorrect" at the time of this writing. That is probably because ethnomusicologists had to fight a long battle to convince society that Western art-music is not per se better than other musics. See, for instance, Judith Becker, "Is Western Art Music Superior?" Musical Quarterly 72 (1986), 341-59
33. Ralph P. Locke, Music, Musicians and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986)
34. In "Über den Fetisch-Charakter der Musik und die Regression des Hörens" [1938], in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Kleine Vandenhoek-Reihe, Vol. 28/29, 1956), Adorno presents the philosophical core of his sociology of function: i.e., the theory of musical fetishism, strictly related to the Marxian theory of the fetishism of goods (use-value vs. exchange-value, i.e., value accepted as an autonomous and original reality). Use-value, in the field of musical experience, is the intrinsic content of a musical work; the exchange-value is the economic value that musical works have on the market when they become commodities
35. Einführung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1962)
36. Other, non-ideological dimensions of music, seldom recognized and little studied, are unquestionably those of sexual arousal and (possibly not totally unrelated to it) that of "play." See Marco De Natale, La Musica come Gioco. Il dentro e il fuori delta teoria (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004)
37. See on this theme Marcello Sorce Keller, "Gilgamesh, La 'Illegal Harmony' di Cage, La 'Vendetta di Mussolini' e Varie Altre Cose," Il Saggiatore Musicale 11/2 (2004), 329-43
38. The company emphasizes that the purpose of Muzak recordings is not to instill a love of music in those who hear its products, nor to improve listeners' minds, nor to elevate their thoughts, but simply to create certain psychological and physiological states, "like a pretty painting or a room decoration." During the war the BBC broadcast its own version of Muzak, "Music While You Work," not music to calm but music to "invigorate" those on the factory floor, programs of "tuneful, rhythmic music for war-workers," introduced in June 1940, "at the height of the Go to it period, when every minute counted more desperately than we knew." "The American battleship Alabama was built to music," the Radio Times assured its readers. See Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Sound(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 214-5
39. For example: "Twilight of the Yobs: How Classical Music Helps Keep Order," The Economist, January 8, 2005, p. 36
40. Hobsbawm called Soviet realism "a sort of upbeat sentimental mythology," in The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Abacus 1995), 504
41. See Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov, and others, Soviet Writers' Congress 1934 [1935] (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 25-69
42. J. V. Stalin, Il marxismo e i problemi della linguistica (Roma: Edizioni di Rinascita, 1952), first published in the June 20, July 4, and August 2, 1950 issues of Pravda
43. Zofia Lissa, Fragen der Musikästhetik. Einige Probleme der Musikästhetik im Lichte der Arbeit J. W. Stalin "Der Marxismus und die Fragen der Sprachwissenschaf" (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1954)
44. Renaud de Jouvenel, "Problèmes de la musique," La nouvelle critique 46 (1953), 138-55
45. Bernd Buchhofer, Jürgen Friedrichs, and Hartmut Lüdke, Musik und Sozialstruktur. Theoretische Rahmenstudie und Forschungspläne (Köln: Arno Volk Verlag-Hans Gerig, 1974)
46. "Rumba in the Jungle," The Economist, December 20, 2003, pp. 57-9
47. That is precisely Milton Babbit's position, an important representative of the American avant-garde, grown up in a democratic society, who expressed this in a famous article "Who Cares If You Listen?," in Elliott Schwartz & Barney Childs, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 243-50
48. In Praise of Folly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), ch. XXIV
49. Herbert Spencer, "The Bias of Patriotism," in The Study of Sociology (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873), ch. IX, 77
50. Amin Maalouf, Les identitées meurtrieres (Paris: Gasset & Fasquelle, 1998)
51. "The Singing Nation" and "National Anthems," in Philip Bohlman, World Music, 92-6 and 99-104, respectively
52. Friedrich Engels, Dialettica della natura [1895], trans. Lucio Lombardo Radice (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971), 38
53. Amnon Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1992), 65-6
54. Graeme Smith, besides analyzing the very special Australian case, gives the reader a comprehensive overview of the entire phenomenon in Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music (Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2005)
55. Also quite informative in this connection are "Folk Music Revival in Europe," The World of Music (Special Issue) 38/3 (1996)
56. Richard A. Reuss and JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music & Left-Wing Politics 1927-1957 (Lanham, Md., and London: Scarecrow Press, 2000)
57. Michael Brocken, The British Folk Revival 1944-2002 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2003)
58. Among others: Svanibor Pettan, ed., Music, Politics and War (Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 1998)
59. Jane Sugarman, "Imagining the Homeland: Poetry, Songs, and the Discourses of Albanian Nationalism," Ethnomusicology 43/3 (1999), 419-58
60. Tomislav Longinovic, "Music Wars: Blood and Song at the End of Yugoslavia," in Music and the Racial Imagination, eds. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 622-43
61. Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997)
62. Katherine Radford, "Drum Rolls and Gender Roles in Protestant Marching Bands in Belfast," British Journal of Ethnomusicology 10/2 (2001), 37-59
63. "Marie von Clausewitz, ed., Vom Kriege: Hinterlassenes Werk des Generals Carl von Clausewitz, vols. 1-3 (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1832-34)
64. Emanuel Kant, Par. 53, "Comparison of the Respective Aesthetical Worth of the Beautiful Arts," Critic of Judgement, 2nd rev. ed., trans. and ed. John Henry Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1914)
65. Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism," in Philosophic Problems, eds. Maurice Mandelbaum, Francis W. Gramlich, Alan Ross Anderson (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 481-9
66. Peter Sculthorpe, Sun Music: Journeys and Reflections from a Composer's Life (Sydney: ABC Books, 1999), 165
67. See Bruno Nettl, "The Universal Language" and "The Non-Universal Language," in The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 36-43 and 44-51, respectively
68. In On the Sensations of Tone, by Hermann Helmholtz (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1954), Appendix, 514
69. Otto Baensch, Aufbau und Sinn des Chorfinales in Beethovens Neunter Symphonie (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1930)
70. Esteban Buch, La Neuvième de Beethoven: Une histoire politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1999)
71. Andreas Eichorn, Beethovens Neunte Symphonie: Die Geschichte ihrer Aufführung und Rezeption (Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1993)
72. Charles Burney, General History Of Music (London, 1776)
73. See Ermanno Comuzio, "Da Bergamo alia Turchia sulle ali della musica: Giuseppe Donizetti e Adolfo Camozzo," Atti dell'Ateneo di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti di Bergamo 60 (1996-97), 35-147