The Two Cultures of Western Musicology
The concept of a universal or all-encompassing history reaches deep into European intellectual tradition. Its origins can be traced to the world chronicles of late antiquity and even to sacred texts like the Bible. As a guiding principle, the idea that everything on earth shares a single narrative thread has long seemed essential for storytelling about the past. Postmodern thinking, however, has taught us to confront the fundamental unpredictability of culture and history. Even the ancient chroniclers would have struggled to weave all events into one coherent tale. In the internet age, where available data multiplies at an accelerating pace, any ambition toward a truly universal history has become deeply unrealistic. This data explosion partly explains why modern historiography has splintered into countless specialized areas. Still, the question of how things connect on a global scale persists, not just in popular science and textbooks but as a vibrant scholarly field — including musicology.
The idea of a "world history of music" first appeared in the eighteenth century. Authors such as Padre Martini, Charles Burney, and Johann Nikolaus Forkel began composing ambitious, mostly unfinished, general histories of music. It is reasonable to say that modern music history in Europe was born alongside the concept of a world history of music, an idea that, as we will see, steadily lost its importance after the nineteenth century.
Of greater relevance to present debates than its eighteenth-century roots is the rejuvenation of this global vision after World War II. In 1949, UNESCO launched a project for a "world history of music as a dialogue of cultures." That history has never been completed and remains an ambition to this day. It differs significantly from the Enlightenment-era histories, so much so that it is more accurate to call it a "second invention" rather than a renewal of the old idea. True to UNESCO's mission of preserving humanity's cultural heritage, the project aimed to collect musical facts and data from diverse cultures rather than to build historiographical connections between them. Today, a whole subfield of musicology operates under the label of "world music," and it continues to grow. However, it remains only a subdomain of the discipline. Major publications such as the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998–2002) and the equally monumental Cambridge History of World Music (2013) are firmly associated with the subject area and methodology of ethnomusicology. Meanwhile, the bulk of historical musicology in the West — particularly in Europe and Germany — restricts itself to what Richard Taruskin calls "the history of western music," meaning the written tradition of European music from the Middle Ages onward, with a modest nod to ancient Greece.
The consequence of this traditional division of labor between ethnomusicology and historical musicology is a mostly peaceful coexistence of two separate perspectives. One perspective explores the diversity of the world's musical cultures, focusing on cultural context and, increasingly, on regional histories and cross-cultural links — though it tends to exclude or marginalize what is called "western music." The other perspective justifies its narrow focus by the closeness and specific character of "western music" in Taruskin's restricted sense. Music thus appears to exist in two distinct categories: as "world music" and as "western music." In other words, the Enlightenment's concept of a world history of music has split into two separate cultures within Western musicology.
The recent turn toward global perspectives in historical studies poses a challenge to historical musicology, and perhaps also to ethnomusicology. Within historical musicology, the widespread critique of Eurocentrism, together with postcolonial discussions about provincializing Europe, has inspired — and continues to inspire — alternative visions of music history, especially regarding what counts as "western music." This article examines the transformation of European music historiography by focusing on encounters between Western observers and Chinese music in particular. The aim is to outline some of the perspectives and consequences arising from current approaches in global historiography.
Looking back: On the History of Music Historiography
To grasp the transformation in how Western music has been represented by its own historians, it is helpful to examine not just the depiction of European music but also the often heavily distorted depiction of its opposite: non-Western music at different historical periods and in different historiographical forms. General histories of music from the eighteenth century contain only sparse information about music from non-Western regions such as Asia or Africa. Following biblical narratives, only Egypt and the ancient Near East are included in the historical story, which proceeds from the beginning of time to the present state of the world. Contemporary non-Western musical cultures in Arabia, the Americas, Africa, India, or China seem to inhabit an uncharted space outside history. They remain outside history insofar as they can be discussed only to highlight their strangeness and incomprehensibility, or to draw comparisons with much older historical periods.
Johann Nikolaus Forkel's General History of Music, published in two volumes between 1788 and 1801, contains brief but revealing remarks on Chinese music. These comments demonstrate both Forkel's very limited knowledge and a firmly Eurocentric conception of history. In the foreword, Forkel states that people such as the Turks, Persians, Chinese, or "American savages" construct melodies that lack any order or beauty to European ears. Yet what sounds like pure disorder and ugliness to Europeans, Forkel writes, could be beauty and order to others — just as European music must appear disordered and ugly to foreign ears. At first glance, Forkel's statement may remind us of relativistic positions today. But that is precisely not his intent. Living in the age of enlightenment, he believes in universal laws of music that develop over time through constant progress. The differing reactions he describes therefore prove to be responses from people at different stages of development. The historiographical model Forkel adopts for arranging musical cultures is the lifespan of a human being: childhood, youth, and adulthood. The enlightened European consciousness and modern European music — with major-minor tonality, harmony, and its speech-like melodic structures — represents adulthood, while the music of "savages" and African people represents childhood. Chinese music, which in Forkel's narrative has neither an age nor a history of its own, resembles the music of ancient Egypt, and both represent the stage of youth.
Forkel's observation of certain musical similarities between China and Egypt rests mainly on perceived likenesses between Egyptian and Chinese script and characters. Throughout his comments on Chinese musical notation, Forkel assumes the superiority of European notation. He argues that the European system can represent any type of music, while Chinese musical characters are limited to specific types and are too intricate to read. Beyond these observations, Forkel also argues, pejoratively, against those German contemporaries who admired China for its arts and sciences — those who would praise the perfection of Chinese music regardless of the limitations of its notation. Only in such subtext does one detect the high esteem that the European Enlightenment, from Leibniz and Wolff onward, could hold for China in general.
Music histories of the nineteenth century resemble those of the eighteenth in that the historical narrative follows the developmental line of Western music. An innovation is that musical cultures from Asia or Africa are now discussed in separate chapters. A clear difference also emerges in the steadily expanding body of knowledge about cultures across the globe. François-Joseph Fétis, for example, whose unfinished Histoire Générale de la Musique appeared in five volumes between 1869 and 1876, includes numerous musical examples, transcriptions of unwritten music, and illustrations of instruments and music-making. Far from meeting such ethnographic standards, music historians of the early nineteenth century had to rely on travel reports, often decades old and rarely written by trained musicians. A rich example is William Cooke Stafford's History of Music from all Nations, published in 1830. It is rather disappointing in terms of historiographical coherence but highly entertaining for its vivid descriptions of difficult encounters between European and non-European music and ears. Regarding the situation in China, one reads about Chinese listeners showing maximum disinterest while hearing a British military corps, describing the music as "not made for Chinese ears." The British, for their part, hastily left a Chinese theater performance after hearing only the first notes. All English authors from Charles Burney to Cooke-Stafford seem to agree that Chinese music bears a strong resemblance to Scottish music, since both are based on the pentatonic scale.
Fétis and August Wilhelm Ambros — whose three extensive volumes of his also unfinished History of Music were published between 1862 and 1868 — belong to the era of historicism. Ambros arranges the immense material he gathered within broad historical periods; Fétis organizes his material according to different human races. Ambros shows an affinity with historical science in the age of Ranke and Droysen; Fétis orients himself by contemporary anthropological categories in the age of Darwin. Interestingly, both histories place China at the beginning of the story, something like a prologue before the actual history starts. Despite their overall positivist tone, both historians readily offer value judgments about Chinese music. Fétis misses musical "logic" in Chinese melodies. Ambros cannot comprehend the melodic leaps of the famous tune "Mo-Li-Hua" ("Jasmine Flower"); he harmonizes it — and misinterprets it — in correct four-part German church style and major-minor tonality. Ambros emphasizes the point that Chinese music theory and Chinese music practice seemed largely independent of each other. The rationality and scientific approach of Chinese music theory seemed to fit perfectly with European traditions reaching back to ancient Greece. As is well known, the exact calculation of equal temperament in twelve steps within the octave was discovered in China and the Netherlands almost simultaneously, in 1585/1586. But almost like Forkel before him, Ambros shows little understanding of China's contemporary musical practices.
It is no mere coincidence that the music histories of Ambros and Fétis remained fragments. Already in the nineteenth century, it was an illusion for one person to collect and arrange all existing knowledge about every musical culture on the globe within a single lifetime. Their histories are perhaps the last genuine attempts to write a true, scientific general history of music. The more knowledge accumulated, the less attractive — and, above all, the less practicable — the model of a general history became. Put differently, a general history has always been (and still is) the appropriate format for historians and readers with only limited knowledge. The actual presence of music from all parts of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance on recordings, relieved music historiography of one of its earlier functions: the simple collection of heterogeneous knowledge. Western music historiography in the twentieth century, increasingly refined in its methodology, focused on ever narrower contexts: nations, stylistic periods, musical genres, and musical works, as well as historiographical coherence. The music histories of central and Western Europe — especially Austria, Germany, Italy, and France — have since constituted the main body of what is considered music's history.
At the same time, ethnomusicology was established as a subdiscipline of musicology. The invention of sound recording made it possible to transport unwritten music from all over the world and to subject it to systematic study. With ethnomusicology, the study of non-European musical cultures now had its own institutional home, separate from historical musicology. The two cultures of Western musicology were thus firmly established.
This need not be a negative assessment. One criticism of nineteenth-century historicism suggests that a scarcity or economy of knowledge could be advantageous compared with a culture overwhelmed by historical information.
Not long afterward, professional methodologies for musicological fieldwork took shape. The purview of comparative musicology, or ethnomusicology, was confined to traditional music from Europe and to all music from other continents — music that in the late twentieth century would be called “world music.” Historiography was not the primary focus, though theories like the “Kulturkreislehre” were employed to interpret the global dissemination of instrument families and musical scales from a historical standpoint.
Yet today’s comprehensive ethnomusicological compendia represent exactly the opposite of the general music histories of the Enlightenment. Their preferred format is the encyclopedia — that is, not a historical narrative but a systematic collection of knowledge. Even though historical questions have gained relevance in recent decades, the volume titled The Cambridge History of World Music is clearly not a coherent history in the traditional sense; it is a loosely connected set of heterogeneous essays on diverse historical topics within current world music research. Jonathan Stock, for instance, does not write about the history of Chinese music but rather about the histories of Chinese music, most of them authored by Chinese scholars. When he focuses on “four recurring themes” in Chinese music historiography, “history” refers generally to the past millennia, not primarily to the historicity of music and its historiography. From this perspective, developments such as the encounter between Chinese and European concepts of music during globalization appear merely as reiterations of age-old processes: “China was from the earliest days multicultural as well as being involved in cultural exchange with neighboring peoples,” Stock notes, paraphrasing the Chinese musicologist Shen Zhibai.
3. Global History / Global Modernity
As stated at the beginning of my lecture, the central question in a particularly active field within the historical sciences is how things are connected globally. One leading figure in this research direction in Germany, historian Jürgen Osterhammel, has sketched possibilities for a newly conceived global history of music in a 2012 article titled “Global Horizons of European Art Music.”
What is striking in Osterhammel’s approach is that his perspective undermines the simple distinction between “world music” and “western music”; from the outset, he discusses western music within a global frame. Although Osterhammel is far from the first to address the worldwide dissemination of western music or the reflection of world music within western compositions, examining some of his ideas proves revealing. First, he characterizes European art music by following Max Weber’s famous rationalization hypothesis. Despite potential influences from Arabian music and music theory in the Middle Ages, European art music is distinct and internally coherent, Osterhammel asserts citing Weber. It is distinct because of its specific organizational rationality, the calculation of pitch space and temperament, notation in scores, and the grammar and syntax of tonal forms. Like other elements of European modernity, these rational foundations underpin the effective globalization of European music to this day. One is reminded of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who described European art music as “transportable music,” contrasting it with the cultural and geographic rootedness of Japanese music.
Second, Osterhammel outlines some ways the “western impact” took shape within a global historical perspective on music: he discusses the mobility of military orchestras, the role of Christian missions, the migration of musicians, and the globalization of European music education during the critical years of musical globalization between 1860 and 1930 — all counterbalanced to some degree by European music’s openness to foreign influences since early modernity. Overall, Osterhammel paints a vivid picture of the birth of our modern globalized musical world.
However, Osterhammel overlooks one crucial point. He rightly speaks of European art music’s openness to influences from other cultures, including China. The tradition of musical exoticism — from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les indes galantes through Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (in which Puccini famously uses Mo-Li-Hua) — is well known.
But Osterhammel treats European art music as a rather stable system. In fact, musical modernity in Europe led to constant transformation and destabilization of music’s foundations even before the period Osterhammel examines. Every aspect that might demonstrate the rationality and coherence of European art music — from major-minor tonality and periodic structures of meter, rhythm, and musical syntax to the concept of the musical work — has been called into question over the past 250 years or so. At the same time, there has been not only a long history of exoticism but also a complete replacement of certain musical concepts by others. Modernist western music since Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky developed its own kind of ‘otherness,’ clearly distinct from the rationality of traditional European art music. It is crucial to recognize how this modernist otherness contributed to the widespread acceptance of “world music” among western audiences in the twentieth century — but also the acceptance of music that the Forkels and Ambroses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were simply unable to comprehend.
Related to this, a second aspect Osterhammel fails to mention: the migration of music was not only about classical European music spreading across the globe, followed by a reverse migration of traditional music from all parts of the earth. There was also the migration of the concept of musical modernism. As Christian Utz recently demonstrated for German-speaking readers, China experienced at least two waves of musical modernism in the twentieth century — one shortly after World War II and another in the 1980s, when composers like Tan Dun began not only to adopt principles of the western avant-garde but also to reflect their own traditions musically. Utz calls this second wave, labeled the “New Wave” in recent publications, “perhaps the most important phase of Asian music in the twentieth century.”
The differing contexts and shapes of musical modernity in Asia are only now beginning to be understood within western musicology. Characteristic misunderstandings persist. Western scholars who sympathize with modernist music often react rather negatively to twentieth-century Asian composers who adopted older, classical European styles and wrote music in a romantic mode, colored by pentatonic harmony and melody.
This negative reaction carries a certain irony: after centuries, western musicologists have learned to understand or at least appreciate traditional music from Asia and other parts of the world, yet the same scholars seem to have lost the capacity to ‘understand’ non-European people speaking the traditional European musical language, simply because musical modernism has rendered Europe’s own genuine musical language obsolete. Consequently, to communicate with and be understood by western audiences, Asian composers today must write in a high modernist style. They are positively expected to display some of their home countries’ musical traditions within their compositions. Is that not, in some ways, a continuation of the old Eurocentric attitude?
To sum up: globalization has produced manifold interrelations between different musics and musical cultures. Historical musicology is called upon to analyze and explain the processes and structures involved in these interrelations. A global history of music seems possible and even necessary when told in ways different from the old European idea of a general history of music. The provincialization of Europe has generated a thorough critique of Europe’s historical guilt and Eurocentric attitudes within academic discourse. European art music can certainly no longer serve as the single measure for music from all times and places. But, on the other hand, it seems neither necessary to exclude European art music from global musical narratives nor to simply perpetuate the antiquated opposition between world music and western music. The provincialization of Europe has also fostered greater sensitivity to the manifold cultural contexts in which diverse forms of music evolve over time. This is the field historical musicology should turn toward now. However, one of the most important lessons from history might be that a global history of music should be narrated not only by those western scholars who benefit from resources and academic traditions, but by the community of those who contribute to its musical archive.
4. Provincializing Europe (in Asia)
Dipesh Chakrabarty, who introduced the term “provincializing Europe” in his 2000 book of the same title, pointed to a general ambivalence in Europe’s role in post-colonial discourse. Although Europe might factually be politically provincialized since at least the middle of the twentieth century, it still occupies a dominant position in almost all relevant academic discourses worldwide. Concepts like democracy, political modernity, scientific rationality, social justice, and so forth would be unthinkable without their inseparable connection to Europe. Yet at the same time, says Chakrabarty, these concepts, with their European history, prove insufficient for understanding democracy or political modernity in India. They are “both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the various life practices that constitute the political and the historical in India.” Isn’t the same true of musical concepts like ‘art music,’ ‘world music,’ ‘modernism,’ or ‘avant-garde’? While universalizing such concepts may be highly problematic, these musicological terms nonetheless seem indispensable when trying to understand, for example, the musical ‘modernisms’ in China or East Asia generally. In the foreword to the 2008 reissue of Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty stated that his aim was never to “‘pluralize reason’” but rather to adhere to a differentiated idea of the universal: “I emphasized that the universal was a highly unstable figure, a necessary placeholder in our attempt to think through our questions of modernity.” Thus, provincializing Europe does not mean somehow liberating ‘the world’ from its European inheritance; rather, it means asking how universal concepts like ‘modernity,’ ‘art,’ and ‘musical modernism’ are modified within particular regional contexts.
Like ‘world history,’ concepts of regional or national history have a similarly questionable history. Area studies and the entire discipline of ethnology still struggle with the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, often lapsing into an inverted eurocentrism when focusing too heavily on the otherness and alterity of non-European areas’ cultures. Positively, however, regional history could be conceived as a format situated somewhere between ‘too big’ and ‘too narrow,’ and between the ideological fallacies of both universal world histories and exclusive national histories of music.
Asian music historiography appears already to benefit from post-colonial queries and reflections by scholars born and raised in Asia. When Taiwanese scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen released his influential book Asia as Method in 2010, he gave fresh impetus to Asian musicologists — effects already observable in conference programs of the recently founded IMS East-Asia Regional Association (IMS-EA). The general question seems to be how the east-west dichotomy — which, as is well known, was an essential aspect of European self-descriptions within the paradigm of ‘orientalism’ — could give way to an Asia-sensitive historiography of music without dropping universal categories like ‘modernity’ and ‘art music’ entirely, and without falling back into the black-and-white thinking of (Asian) self and (European) other (or vice versa). Topics discussed at the 2013 conference in Taipei — where most speakers live and work in East Asian countries — include: “Hōgaku among Overseas Japanese in the Pre-War Era: Locale, Vocation and the Contexts for Professional and Amateur Practice”; “Musical Communications Between Okinawans, Mainland Japanese and Micronesians before WWII”; “A Study of Hidemaro Konoye: His View on Orchestral Music and his Contribution to the History of Japanese Reception of Western Music”; “Do Chinese Listeners Perceive Chinese Music and Western Music in the Same Way? A Cognitive Study”; “Musical ‘Contact Zones’ and Musical Connectedness of East Asia 1895–1945: Piano Culture in Shanghai, Seoul and Osaka/Kobe”; and “Robert Schumann’s Vocal Works in Meiji Era in Japan.” Topics like these might contribute to an Asian regional history of music that has yet to be written.
5. Provincializing Europe (in Europe)
What consequences could post-colonial approaches yield for European music history? One of the most intriguing perspectives might be the self-application of Chakrabarty’s idea of provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty himself recognized that there is not one but many Europes, so a new sensitivity to the dialectic between the universal and the local will certainly prove useful in (re-)writing regional histories of music within the European context — for example, dealing with the problem of how to write the music history of the Spanish peninsula: Is there a Spanish history of music? Is there a Catalan history of music? Should we speak of a branch of European (or southern European) music history? Or should we conceive a Mediterranean history of music capable of including Arabian and Muslim influences on European music?
The situation in Northern Europe presents analogous challenges. What has functioned as an east–west divide for Oriental studies operated as a north–south division within European discussions—discourses traceable back to Greek and Roman antiquity. The dichotomy between a more advanced or civilized South and the “barbarian” North influenced European thought, as did the reversed opposition between the rationalized, modern North and the vital yet backward South in subsequent debates up to the current European crisis. Considerable—and often ideologically charged—discussion has taken place regarding a shift of Europe’s economic and cultural centers from the Mediterranean South toward the Northwest and the Atlantic Ocean.
Music historians are well aware of the complex question of confessional differences between the Protestant North and the Catholic South—a distinction that operated more powerfully as an idea in texts and polemics than in the actual music and its forms. The far North of Scotland, Scandinavia, as well as parts of Russia and America became a legendary realm: one of Europe’s internal frontiers inhabited by one of Europe’s “internal others.” Scholars and musicians from Johann Gottfried Herder to Percy Grainger believed they discovered here autochthonous forms of music, in contrast to the “hybrid” musical culture of Central or Western Europe, where the styles of Italy, France, Germany, and Austria had mingled for centuries.
Musical modernity within Europe has long been understood as a metropolitan phenomenon, tied to such symbolic locales as Fin de Siècle Vienna, the Paris of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Debussy, or the Berlin of Literary Naturalism and Richard Strauss. But should we not take the impetus to contextualize and pluralize the universal, and ask about particular Modernities in parts of Eastern, Southern, or Northern Europe as well? We might then gain quite different perspectives on composers such as Wilhelm Stenhammar, Jean Sibelius, Karol Szymanowski, George Enescu, or Federico Mompou. This perspective is not confined to “urban musicology” but may also include reflections on the tension between urban centers and rural retreats.
What has been laid out in the previous paragraphs is little more than a sketch of possibilities, a bundle of questions to ask, of ways to narrate partial histories of music. To be sure, like Asia, the concept of Europe is vague and often a mere construction or myth. Yet since it is impossible to start thinking about history from degree zero, it seems appropriate to begin with one’s prejudices (in a Gadamerian sense)—that is, with traditional concepts—and then find paths toward new concepts and new narratives. Without concepts that help structure historical narrative, there is no history. And as long as history can be regarded as a privileged and necessary means of orienting ourselves in the world, even the explosion of data and knowledge in the internet age should not discourage us from asking how things and events connect on a larger scale across time. In terms ofres gestae, a global history of music has existed at least since the advent of global modernity. Even if it may prove difficult in practice to gather the strands of the manifold histories of music being narrated in all parts of the globe, there is no reason to abandon the idea of a global history—at least as a regulative idea, it could prove useful for future music historians.