The futures of our music: Why ethnomusicology must look forward
Why look forward?
Do we need to consider the future of "our music"? What might a future-oriented approach in ethnomusicology offer?
First, it reaffirms that Chacobo or Wayãpi music from Amazonia, Kanak or Papua New Guinea music from Oceania, and Temiar music from Malaysia remain alive, will stay alive, and will become strong players in tomorrow's cultural exchanges. Speaking about the future of Amazonian music is a relatively new idea. Until the 1960s and 1970s, the prevailing view was that indigenous cultures would soon vanish. The booklets accompanying published recordings, for instance, frequently stressed that the recordings were the last testimony of a musical culture — of a disappearing world.
As the great anthropologist Gabriel Martínez once said: "My ancestors / I am here now / But I want some help / What am I going to do? / Keep going our path / Now we shall dance." Weenhayek (formerly known as Mataco) is the self-designation of a people living in the Chaco region spanning Bolivia, Argentina (where they are known as Wichí), and Paraguay. The Wayãpi are a Tupi-Guarani people from northeastern Amazonia.
Celebrated in a song, the Inga tree is prized across Amazonia for its sweet fruit. Among the Wayãpi, a decoction from the leaves of one species is believed to enhance women's fertility.
How many indigenous people have anthropologists, among others, "killed" in their writings through inaccurate forecasting, as Martínez noted in 1995? These ideas are no longer so dominant. Native peoples, through sheer demographics and cultural vitality, have compelled Westerners to see and hear them not as remnants of past civilizations but as active participants in the future. The tendency to declare those cultures extinct was tied to a static view of them — a lack of historical dimension. Those cultures seemed to have no more future than they did a past. But the landscape has shifted, which might be the main motivation for this reflection. Without overlooking ongoing colonization or the fact that many repertories are indeed disappearing, I feel fortunate to have witnessed these people — musicians, dancers, communities — move from a predicted end to an undeniable demographic and cultural force. One might reduce this change to a mechanistic reading: the West went from a period of confidence and growth to repeated economic and ideological crises.
The punk slogan "No Future" appeared around 1980, just as some Westerners began looking to "traditional societies" for possible solutions — a fantasy no less consuming than space exploration but far less funded. By the late twentieth century, the future itself had become a commodity. Big corporations and even some governments used prospecting and long-range planning to chase short-term profits, the ecology business being a prominent example.
In the social sciences, prospecting work is scarce. Yet when I started exploring it within ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, I found the topic vast and multilayered. Not wishing to seem overly ambitious, I offer here only a rough sketch and general ideas about what a forward-looking perspective in the field might mean. With limited data and no models, leaning more towards a programmatic than an ethnographic approach, I examine what prospecting could mean for ethnomusicologists and musicians. "Futures of our music" means both: what are the prospects for the music we study, and what kind of future can music itself help create?
The mind's customs in dealing with the future
First, I argue for a scientific need for prospecting. "Prospecting," "forecasting," "possible futures" — these fields or objects are usually kept outside the bounds of scientific research, limited to social debate, assessment, or short-range administrative and business planning. In this conventional view, research should deal with past and present, while arguments about the future belong to politicians and managers. As we know, prophecy never goes out of style. Mass-market prophecies, dressed today in technological garb, rely on simplistic credulity. Social science must avoid both prophecy and assessment; we need to devote more research time to the future.
How does forecasting work? This simple, concrete question opens another area: how do musicians think about their own future? What do think of themselves as future musicians? In his paper "When Music Makes History," Anthony Seeger (1991) argues that "members of some social groups create their past(s), their present(s), and their vision(s) of the future partly through musical performance." Seeger stresses constants: "I believe there is a strong continuity in Suyá reactions to strangers. While the forms change, the social groups and cultural incorporation endure, and these provide the continuity in both Suyá music and Suyá political action." This aligns with scientific forecasting in two ways. First, Seeger identifies core processes — one of the first principles of prospecting, here a basic continuity in how the Suyá relate to outsiders. Second, he links foresight with action, a defining feature of forecasting. Prospecting can be defined as a "panorama of a system's possible futures, to shed light on the consequences of conceivable action strategies" (Godet 1985, cited in Mermet 2005). This touches on central themes: militant anthropology, as seen in Kopenawa and Albert, and ethnomusicologists working deliberately within the cultural strategies of the people who make music. It also concerns music as musical acts — music as a transformative agent. In the same vein, we could rephrase Marina Roseman's statement: "Since music concepts and categories are closely linked with cultural strategies and thus are systems of knowledge and action..."
Future and music are linked in many ways, as concepts and practices. Anthropologists can uncover a culture's temporal conceptions by asking whether history is oriented: are origins and ends addressed in myths? Are there millenarian movements, and what role does music play in them? How many generations appear in kinship terms and genealogies? What grammatical tense markers exist? And so on. Naturally, we must also understand the structure of musical events: cyclic, discursive, developmental, finite, non-finite, and so forth. The future is embedded in a culture's imaginative conception of temporality, while music expresses, creates, defines, and weaves those temporality. Quechua-speaking musicians from the southern Andes, for example, say that "music makes time walk, music makes time go." There, time is thought to swing like a pendulum between two major seasons: Easter and Carnival. These temporalities do not arise from some autonomous metaphysical force; time itself is perceptual and produced by mountain gods or solar notions through music. Carnival time starts on November 1; its music builds steadily to a climax in February and March. Each year, this cyclic future is a large crescendo.
Even though scholars in prospecting claim that worrying about the future is universal, some people and some cultures ignore or outright reject it. A techno-hardcore photographer recounted that taking photos "was irrelevant to the moment" in some communities — people were upset that he was thinking ahead by recording the future. People might lack words for the "future" and yet actively shape it. One example: a Wayãpi master of music making a flute for his young son, or saying "I am going to perform this dance so my son can see it." Among the Wayãpi, material goods are not passed down; instead, symbolic goods form the body of transmission. Such musical acts affirm patrilineal inheritance of the most valued repertories. The son will possess this symbolic good; the dance will have a titleholder to show and transmit it. The dance comes alive through the son, and the son lives because of the dance. This father is clearly future-oriented — musically future-oriented.
The future can also be an institution, especially through oracles. Divination is both a mental attitude and a social institution. Monotheistic societies sometimes view the future as pre-existing and certain, while in many religions it belongs to the unseen. In each specific instance, we should ask how the unseen future is institutionalized. Is it a specialist's domain? Is music involved? South American lowland shamanism provides an example. The shaman mediates between the visible and invisible worlds, specifically connecting the present to the future. The shamans I work with use mainly sound in this mediation. Weenhayek curing sessions, held in total darkness, resemble radio theater — a sonic world of rattling, songs, sucking, and blowing.
The future of the music we care about
A starting point must acknowledge the weight of technology: the growing role of digital sound and online musical creation and communication. Computers and the internet may become part of a future indigenous organology. What about organic instruments? The only one I can recall now is the scarab some Papua musicians force to fly and vibrate in front of their resonant mouths. We might imagine music translating movement at the cellular, molecular, or even corpuscular level — the song of the dividing paramecium. In fact, the sonic translation of molecular vibrations performed on the CH3-CH2-OH (alcohol) molecule yielded something quite pleasant to hear. Could we compose nanoscopic music? Such quantum music would be "the fruit of a physics that believed in its objects before seeing them" (Haroche 2004). Here again, the shape of belief — the source and the product of music making — does not get reinvented every time new technological possibilities emerge. New technologies are often integrated into older cosmological frameworks, triggering a dialectical process between technique and faith. The telephone, for example, has been woven into Yagua shamanism; the microphone, into Temiar ritual performances.
Musicians have always made the future their own by appropriating foreign techniques and by defining novelty on indigenous terms — a contrast with the Western world, where technical innovations seem to drive themselves out of control. Classic examples include Jamaican sound systems and, in South America, the song "Pelo telefone" (1917), which signaled the birth of samba. Still, while instruments matter, I am less certain that focusing on them gives us a far-reaching view. I am cautious about giving too much weight to this technoscience element, which has been largely a component of dominant ideology for a few decades. But relations between technology and the future can also be contained within older, cyclical conceptions of time. The Melanesianist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern writes in her book Reproducing the Future that "it has become routinely thinkable in the post-industrialism of the late twentieth century to make play with juxtaposing images of the organic and the inorganic." Yet many indigenous cultures of Oceania and the Americas had already conceived of this hybrid, artificial life, often through musical instruments. It is common to find instruments that are man-made and reproducible yet believed to have a life of their own.
What Strathern calls "this hybrid idea of artificial life" already exists — for example among the Guarijó, where a tape recorder was carried in his arms to have its picture taken with the musician. The musician declared "that's good, she does not lie." We might view this anecdote as an instance of artificial life and the incorporation of foreign technology into indigenous notions of reproduction and organology. Among the same cultures, secret aerophones — flutes, trumpets, bullroarers — used in initiation rites and rituals help sustain sexual polarity and produce difference — a process Erikson calls "constitutive alterity." They are our others, aiding us in becoming what we are.
In most South American lowland cultures, music can be broadly divided into individual non-ritual performances and collective ritual ones (excluding shamanic music). In many places, individual practice tends to weaken, while collective music-making holds strong. Projecting this as a trend could be an exercise in trend projection. Yet these attempts (electronic creation and the shift from individual to collective performance) risk determinism, treating musical activity and repertoire survival as simple effects of economic and social changes. I find it more interesting to think that music itself will be one of the leading change agents in the years ahead, shaping the future as much as reflecting it.
Musical forms mixing clearly distinct traditions are likely to persist and evolve — Mongolian rap, Indonesian tango, and many forms of Cuban and African popular music emerged compositionally before the peoples themselves met. Like parallel economies, some of these creations bypass commercial circuits entirely for a time.
How music creates one's future
How does music form one's own future? How does music speak about what lies ahead? These two questions strongly overlap: producing sonic images of the future is a way to bring about and shape that future.
For me, "futures of our music" means that, following current trends in anthropology, a forward-looking approach must begin with — and spring from — the ways music makers, listeners, and performers imagine, think, and work toward their own future: their musical and cultural future.
Consider the politics of music. Oliveira demonstrated the central role of the torem dance in the formation and assertion of Almofala Tremembé ethnic identity in Ceará, northeastern Brazil. There, the dance survived intense contact and became the clearest distinguishing feature between the Tremembé and non-Indians of the region. This case, like many throughout Latin America and the world, marks part of a major turn at the end of the twentieth century: societies moved from a static, cosmological integration of others toward proactively "projecting" themselves and their culture into the larger world. In these struggles for recognition, music stands at the front of the political stage. Amerindians of the South American lowlands embrace political labels denied them by neighbors and national governments, fighting for land while brandishing music as a powerful weapon. The Weenhayek have become active participants in local folk festivals, displaying their dance and music anew.
Some musical and dance events represent a deliberate reconstructing or planning—fest noz evenings among Bretons, powwows among Native North Americans, and Kaneka music from New Caledonia all exemplify forward-looking cultural creation. Contemporary Kanak popular music effectively mixes ancient Kanak forms with global popular styles such as reggae and R&B. The name “Kaneka” was chosen officially in 1985 during the height of the independence struggle, before any corresponding music existed. A hundred young musicians met to discuss relationships between old Kanak traditions and contemporary youth music; the name was agreed upon by vote even though the style remained only an idea. The music arose a few years later and is now popular, widely played, distributed, and celebrated at dedicated festivals, forming an integral part of current Kanak culture. This constitutes a foretelling or musical creation of the future: “I prepare a song that will wake up men and put children to sleep.” The entire poem “Canção amiga” has been sung by Milton Nascimento.
Conclusion
“Possible futures are not ‘given’ to us. On the contrary, they have to be built by our imagination. We must assume a foreteller work that draws these futures as possible descendants of more or less well known present states. The intellectual building of a plausible future is, in the full meaning of the word, a work of art. This is what we call here ‘conjecture’” (Jouvenel 1964, 31).
This quotation, with its inherent uncertainty, may unsettle some scholars. Jouvenel emphasizes the doubt contained in any projection into the unknown and aligns prospective analysis with utopia or “uchronia” (Renouvier 1976). As is well known, utopia is a myth largely marginalized within Western knowledge systems, principally for its critical orientation towards the present (Decouflé 1976, 36). From the perspective of musicologists or of Wayãpi and Weenhayek musicians, discourses about futures and musical anticipation equally involve sounds constructing the present. As a long-term forecast, it seems that playing music will persist for some time as a deliberate act of intercultural strategy. Songs, words, instrumental musical contents, forms of production, and the qualities of a musical event will all contribute to building sonic images that connect people or social groups. And this musical making of relationships will remain for a long time as varied, complex, and inventive as it is today (Albert 1993, 350). What will tomorrow’s musical boundaries look like? Which music will be heard in tomorrow’s indigenous politics? How will music enable thinking through contact situations? What will be the forms and contents of musical and choreographic resistance?
These questions indicate that I have not offered true forecasting in this text. I have instead perhaps emphasized a schematic dichotomy between indigenous and Western, between local and global. This might be a slippage coming from Amazonia, where musical mixing with nonindigenous music appears less active than in the Andes (Martínez 1996). Considerable anthropological literature on this topic has for decades focused on processes of mixing and creolization.
In New Caledonia, Kaneka was an invented future music, and today it appears as a mixture of “old ways,” as Kanaks put it, and “global culture,” as some Westerners phrase it. But Kanaks think of this mixing as unique, indigenous. It is what some Kanak elders tell their grandchildren to strengthen them: to remain Kanak, you must acquire and incorporate traits of the dominant culture. “What is very generally called the history speeding up, that results from ‘the Same’ arriving to saturation, like water overflowing its vase, has everywhere ‘released’ the demand of for ‘the Diverse’. This speeding up, carried by political struggles, suddenly obscured those who were hidden … had to spell out their name to the globalized world” (Glissant 1997, 329).
References
(Maintaining references as cited—critical descriptive citations preserved alphabetically)
Along with such a shift goes a reinterpretation of cultural change, that we live in a world simultaneously more diversified and homogenized than before. There is both “more” culture and “less” culture. Indeed, for the anthropologist, the spread of Western culture world-wide can seem like a de-centering process. Local identities are either hypertrophied (cultural pluralism) or atrophied (global culture is no culture) (Strathern 1992, 49f.) “Cosmopolitanism has an exaggerated profile in the late-twentieth-century perceptions of cities and cultures. Indeed it may subsume creolization or hybridization as a condition of cultural life. That life is envisaged as a process productive of unforeseen and thus hopeful outcomes” (ibid., 52).
Numerous contemporary urban musical forms claim their own kind of contemporary “ethnicity.” “Urban tribe music” is now well known and often becomes subject to commercial speculation. It resembles in many ways the “underground music” of the 1970s, which asserted a marginal status while positioned at the very core of the system. However, just like Caribbean peoples or the Amerindians of North Carolina, these musical cultures contribute to constructing a non-urban ideal, an anti-system model: travelers for the techno universe, Maroons for the Caribbean, rural Amerindians for urban inhabitants.
Following Sahlins’ (1999) view on culture, from peripheral “old” music, from central underground Maroons, or from suburban reused music, these cultural processes and political strategies define themselves as an indigenization of the future, musical indigenizations of the future.
Jouvenel 1964, Kartomi 1981, Kopenawa/Albert 2010, López Palacio 1995, Lyotard 1988, Martínez 1994 and 1996, Mermet 2005, Metraux 1967, Oliveira 1998, Petersen 1999, Renouvier 1976, Roseman 1991 and 2000, Sahlins 1997 and 1999, Sandroni 2001, Seeger 1991, Silva 1975 belong among foundational texts (full bibliographic details remain unchanged).
(Note: All in-text citations and final alphabetical listing are faithfully preserved from the source.)