Music in the World: Selected Essays

Music in the World

Music in the World

Selected Essays

Timothy D. Taylor

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44225-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44239-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44242-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226442426.001.0001

Chapter 3 was previously published as The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music.’ Ethnomusicology 51 (spring/summer 2007): 281–305. Reprinted by permission of the Society for Ethnomusicology. An earlier version of chapter 4 was previously published as The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the U.S. In Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, edited by Christina Baade and James A. Deaville. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Chapter 5 was previously published as Stravinsky and Others. AVANT: The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard 4 (2013), http://avant.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/Timothy-D-Taylor-Stravinsky-and-Others1.pdf. Chapter 6 was previously published as Les festivals de musiques du monde: La diversité comme genre. Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie 27 (2014): 49–63. Chapter 7 was previously published as Fields, Genres, Brands. Culture, Theory and Critique 55 (2014): 159–74. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com. Chapter 8 was previously published as The New Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture. In Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations, edited by Madeleine Herren. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Springer. Chapter 9 was previously published as Globalized New Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste. In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip Bohlman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Timothy Dean, author.

Title: Music in the world : selected essays / Timothy D. Taylor.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016030085 | ISBN 9780226442259 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226442396 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226442426 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—Social aspects. | Music—Economic aspects. | Music and globalization. | World music—History and criticism. | Music trade. | Capitalism.

Classification: LCC ML3916 .T4 2017 | DDC 780.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030085

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Sherry

Contents

List of Music Examples

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Culture, Capitalism, Globalization, Music

1  The Absence of Culture in the Study of Music

2  Music and Affect in the West: The First 2,000 Years

3  The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of Mechanical Music

4  The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the US

5  Stravinsky and Others

6  World Music Festivals as Spectacles of Genrefication and Diversity

7  Fields, Genres, Brands

8  Neoliberal Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture

9  Globalized Neoliberal Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste

10  Valuing Music

Notes

References

Index

Music Examples

Note: Music examples are available at www.musicintheworld.org.

Example 1.1  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 17, K. 453, III

Example 1.2  Mozart: Don Giovanni, overture

Example 1.3  Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 88, I

Example 1.4  Haydn: Symphony no. 88, III

Example 1.5  Haydn: Symphony no. 88, IV

Example 1.6  Kondástánc, played by Kisar Zenekar

Acknowledgments

Since many of these chapters collected here contained acknowledgments in their original form, I won’t recapitulate all of my thanks, except to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who offered help and advice along the way: interlocutors, friends, colleagues, anonymous readers, and editors. Thanks are also due to various editors and others who requested the chapters included here, as well as to audiences who first heard them as presentations.

But a few of these chapters are new. I would like to thank Wim van der Meer and other participants at the International Conference on Cultural Musicology: Premises, Practices, and Prospects at the University of Amsterdam in 2014 for useful comments and queries on an early version of chapter 1. And I would like to thank Jonathan Sterne and Steven Feld for putting me on the path of the value literature, and Steve and Jessica Cattelino for reading a draft of chapter 10, Valuing Music, and offering extremely helpful comments. Audiences at conferences at the University of Agder, Norway, the University of Hong Kong, the University of London, and the University of Toronto also provided useful feedback on this chapter.

I would like to single out a few individuals, friends, and colleagues, and those who recommended readings or who were kind enough to read something of mine or who served as an interlocutor: Steve Feld, Robert Fink, Lila Ellen Gray, Jocelyne Guilbault, Tamara Levitz, Brent Luvaas, Louise Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa, David Novak, Anthony Seeger, Jonathan Sterne, Martin Stokes, and Bob W. White.

I would also like to thank all those students who have listened to me speak on the various subjects collected here, and those who took classes on particular subjects that some of these chapters represent.

Gratitude also must be expressed to the members of the Anthropology Salon at UCLA, a great group and resource: Hannah Appel, Andrew Apter, Aomar Boum, Philippe Bourgois, Jessica Cattelino, Akhil Gupta, Laurie Hart, Chris Kelty, Gail Kligman, Purnima Mankekar, Sherry B. Ortner, and Shannon Speed.

Thanks also must go to my editor and friend Douglas Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press, who first expressed enthusiasm for this collection. I would also like to thank all of the other good people at the Press who helped with this book: Joseph Claude, Jenni Fry, Ryan Li, Ashley Pierce, and Kyle Wagner. Thanks also go to copy editor Marianne Tatom.

Finally, I would like to thank Sherry B. Ortner, my life partner, for her constant inspiration, encouragement, and support. This book is dedicated to her.

Introduction

Culture, Capitalism, Globalization, Music

This book collects some of my recent writings that are concerned with questions about music in capitalist cultures. I pluralize cultures because this book covers a historical span that begins in the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries and continues to the present, thus encompassing an older, industrial form of capitalism and its transition to the neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades, with resulting shifts in cultural production, dissemination, and consumption.

In many respects, this book serves as a companion to Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (Taylor 2016a). That book provides a broad overview of music and neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades, especially in the US. This collection is probably less comprehensive of neoliberal capitalism, but offers more particulars—about individual musicians, works, issues such as culture, affect, and value—and includes discussions of the production, advertising, dissemination, and consumption of music in capitalist regimes that precede neoliberal capitalism, an industrial capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the finance capitalism of the early twentieth century, and what became known as the late capitalism of the mid-twentieth century.

This book begins with a consideration not of capitalism or globalization but of culture. For that, we still have no better guide than Clifford Geertz. I and many other graduate students were introduced to Geertz’s work by Judith Becker at the University of Michigan, which, during the period I was there, was the beginning of the crisis of representation in anthropology and, to a lesser extent, ethnomusicology. Much of what was taken to be true, or at least correct, was being challenged by publications such as Marcus and Fischer (1986), Clifford and Marcus (1986), and other works. Culture was seen as a homogenizing concept (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991), or an explanation for something that stood in for inquiry into social, cultural, and historical particularities.

It seems to me, however, that Geertz’s ideas about culture and ethnography still have much to offer. I remember well as a graduate student in historical musicology feeling vaguely but increasingly disappointed that the cultural form that I took to be the most meaningful and powerful—music—was being studied in ways that had nothing to do with its meaning or power. We as graduate students were taught to be concerned with musical form, style, and other such things. Meaning came under consideration only if there were a text or plot or program. Geertz’s concern for meaning, however, was central to his thinking. His famous formulation of culture, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, insists that the study of culture should not be the scientist’s search for law but the interpreter’s search for meaning (Geertz 1973, 5). This concern was, and remains, deeply attractive. Keeping it in mind helps the analyst remember to attempt to think from the perspective of her subjects, and helps move beyond descriptions of what people are doing to analyses of why they believe what they are doing to be meaningful. People are, as Geertz once wrote, symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking creatures (Geertz 1973, 140). Symbolic practices such as music are attempts to provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand (Geertz 1973, 141).

Yet, the various reconsiderations of Geertz’s conception of culture have resulted in some important and useful updates and revisions, and I am in agreement with many of those who have offered them, most of all, unsurprisingly, Sherry B. Ortner (particularly Ortner 1999 and 2006). Ortner’s practice theory–inflected revision of the Geertzian culture concept both politicizes it and introduces the problematic of structure and agency, and is thus an immensely useful theoretical and analytical tool.

The Geertzian-derived ideas about culture and meaning comprise one of the main intellectual forces driving all of my work, and I address some of these concepts directly in several essays in this collection. The first, chapter 1, The Absence of Culture in the Study of Music, revisits Geertz’s classic writings about culture as a web of signification, a position that isn’t always adopted in some studies of music. Chapter 2, Music and Affect in the West: The First 2,000 Years, observes that the current interest in affect isn’t that different from Geertz’s concern for meaning, and shows how the understanding of affect in music studies has tended to be ahistorical, assuming that people react emotionally to music the same way and have done so throughout history and across cultures. But even in Western culture, there have been different ways of experiencing music affectively, from the ancient Greeks, who viewed music as a kind of medicinal or mechanical agent that its hearers were helpless to resist, to today’s agential listeners who employ music in complex practices of mood management.

Another driving concern of my work is interest in that form of social organization known as capitalism which, today, has become so pervasive that it cannot really be separated from any human endeavor, including the production and consumption (and distribution and advertising and branding and marketing . . .) of music. This is ever truer today, as neoliberal capitalism produces and is produced by new regimes of globalization, financialization, communications and other technologies, and other factors.

On cultural production in the earlier, Fordist but post-industrializing capitalism and its transition to late capitalism, as well as this new capitalism’s relationship to cultural production, Theodor Adorno’s work continues to be influential, not least in the study of music. Yet, as important as Adorno remains in musicological circles, he is usually seen as simply that, a musicologist or critic, not as a student of the changing capitalism of the mid-twentieth century. Adorno was one of the best witnesses we have to the transition from an older to a newer form of capitalism, which he usually called late capitalism, and the resulting changes in cultural production (see, e.g., Adorno 1987; Horkheimer and Adorno 1990). His study of the culture industries and the changing nature of cultural production and consumption helped identify the transition from an older capitalism to one in which exchange value became paramount, and the true use value of cultural commodities (that they offer trenchant critiques of the society in which they were made) was disappearing, being replaced by false use values of enjoyment and status marking that were really nothing other than exchange values in disguise.

Several of the essays in this collection analyze this transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism that is more reliant on financialization and new communications technologies. Chapter 3, The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music,’ considers the rise of sound reproduction technologies—in this case, the player piano—in the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries and how audiences were convinced that purchasing music as a new kind of commodity, as sound, was better than making music themselves. Chapter 4, The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the US, shows how a single individual’s love of opera helped develop broadcast technology in the first few decades of the twentieth century. American inventor Lee de Forest’s desire to disseminate his favorite art form to the masses was a common position among social elites in the early twentieth century, when they experienced sometimes-conflicting tensions between desires to differentiate themselves from the masses by sacralizing the culture they consumed, while at the same time attempting to ensure that the masses that encounter high culture through new media such as radio did so properly. And chapter 5, Stravinsky and Others, revisits an old question that neither I nor anyone else has been able to answer very well in the past, namely, why is it that nineteenth-century composers, who had fairly easy access to non-Western musics in notation, rarely quoted them? But by the early twentieth century, such quotations had become quite common (in the works of Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and many others). This chapter argues that the rise of finance capital, as theorized by Rudolf Hilferding in the early twentieth century, marked the ascendance of exchange value over use value. Composers, and everyone else, began to regard other musics, other sounds—other objects—as something that could be exchanged. This new relationship to other music continues most prominently but by no means exclusively through musique concrète in the 1940s and into the rise of digital sampling in the 1980s and after.

While Adorno and others employed the term late capitalism immediately following World War II, the first major theoretical attempt to chart late capitalism was Ernest Mandel’s often-cited (though, I suspect, little-read) book entitled Late Capitalism (Mandel 1978). This work was brought to the attention of many readers by Fredric Jameson in his enormously influential article Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (first published in 1984, reprinted in 1991), which focused attention on cultural production under late capitalism. Since then, however, most writings on today’s capitalism have coalesced around the term neoliberal capitalism, a particularly virulent form that emphasizes deregulation of markets, increased financialization, increased commodification, an amplified individualism, and much more (see especially Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2005; and Taylor 2016a).

The chapters that are primarily concerned with the post–World War II era address neoliberal capitalism, examining this new financialized, globalized, technologized capitalism from a variety of perspectives. Globalization is a major theme, as it has been in much of my work in the past couple of decades. Many of my arguments over the years have attempted to historicize our globalization, to show that the globe is not interconnected for the first time in our era of globalization, but interconnected in new ways, though with old ideologies (about authenticity, as well as various forms of racism and xenophobia remaining remarkably resilient). This has profound ramifications for cultural production and consumption, as well as representations and appropriations of cultural forms from places far from Western metropoles. Several essays tackle these and related questions.

Two chapters are concerned with the rise of world music, a category of music that emerged in the 1980s as non-Western popular musics increasingly found their way to Western metropoles. Western radio programmers, retailers, and reviewers weren’t sure how to classify these new sounds coming (mainly) from Africa and Latin America, and so they settled on the term world music. Since then, the Western music industry (broadly understood here as a conglomeration of industries including the recording industry, publishing, concert promotion, and more) has attempted to standardize and genericize world music in order to render it manageable, knowable, and emulatable by music industry workers. Chapter 6, World Music Festivals as Spectacles of Genrefication and Diversity, argues that today’s world music festivals serve numerous functions, including reducing various aural expressions from around the world to this putatively knowable and manageable genre of world music. I argue that the genre of world music is not simply a category containing entities of similar style but an ongoing social practice of categorization and containment. It is necessary to commodify difference in a capitalist system, and this tends to intensify at historical moments when regimes of consumption are changing. All of these factors were already in play with the construction of the world music market in the 1980s. Festivals maintain and push this process further, for they contribute to the cultural work of putting world music in its (generic) place.

Chapter 7, Fields, Genres, Brands, further addresses the music industry’s attempts to genericize world music, efforts that are ongoing. World music is not (yet) a genre, though it is nonetheless possible to talk about it as a field of cultural production: there are identifiable forms of capital, such as the types of authenticities musicians are expected to sound and exhibit; and there are identifiable positions available to be taken, most prominently, the position of whether or not to sing in English or another major European language, and the proximity of the musician’s sound to Western popular music. This chapter takes up the theoretical problem of genres and fields: What is the relationship between an industry-imposed genre and a field? How do forms of capital congeal in fields? In today’s neoliberal capitalism, it is clear that the fields of power and economics are increasingly encroaching on all fields of cultural production, to the extent that some genres of music have become brands.

The growing realization around the world of the importance of cultural expression, particularly of those cultures that are threatened by Westernization or urbanization or other modernizing forces, has resulted in some protectionist measures. Chapter 8, Neoliberal Capitalism, UNESCO, and the Reenchantment of Culture, concerns the growing global interconnectedness and continuing spread of capitalism in the postwar era, which accelerated rapidly with the rise of new communications technologies in the 1980s and after, and led among other things to increasing perceptions of the smallness of the world and the threats posed by modernization to local and indigenous cultural forms such as music. These perceptions eventually gave rise to UNESCO’s creation of the designation Masterpiece of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity early in this century; UNESCO now works with many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to preserve intangible cultural heritage. This chapter examines the history and deployment of the Masterpiece designation as the central node in a network of organizations dedicated to the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. In particular, I am concerned with how employment of the Masterpiece label has a kind of halo effect that can result in introducing those protected cultural forms to the market.

Chapter 9, Globalized Neoliberal Capitalism and the Commodification of Taste, interrogates the ubiquity of the term globalization as a way of viewing the present and recent past. The term appeared relatively recently, yet it has come to dominate considerations of the present, both in and out of academia, eliding some aspects of other perspectives. This chapter examines what is lost when globalization as an analytical framework becomes dominant. Globalization as a perspective and a related body of theory can help us understand how musics travel, for example, but is less useful in explaining what happens once world music has traveled and entered the Euro-American music industry in an era of neoliberal capitalism. With the explosion of music available on the Internet and the difficulty of finding what one wants, what emerges, among other things, is the importance of what people in the culture industries call search: the means of finding music or other cultural products. The importance of search has resulted in the increasing commodification of taste, in both the form of music supervisors, who choose music for use in films and television programs and who have become increasingly influential in the entertainment industry, and the rise of complex algorithms that help consumers find music to listen to based on their prior purchases or listening habits and those of others.

Finally, chapter 10 completes the Geertzian arc by considering the questions of the value of cultural goods. This chapter departs from the common ideas that the labor that produces cultural goods is somehow special, or that cultural goods themselves are special sorts of goods, instead insisting that our focus should be not on making taxonomies of labor or types of goods, but rather on how they are valued. Drawing on anthropological theories of value, some of which I believe are related to Geertz’s focus on meaning, I argue that there are regimes of value in which cultural goods can find themselves, an older regime that emphasizes the exchange value of cultural goods, and, today, a newly significant regime in which the digital distribution of music has given rise to forms of value derived from users’ curation of music as represented in the creation and sharing of playlists through social media and popularity on YouTube. This newer form of value derives from what I am calling, drawing on David Graeber (2001), users’ meaningful action.

For the most part, I have resisted the urge to engage in major editing in those items collected here that have been previously published, though there are some minor updates here and there. I have made one systematic change, however: some of the chapters in this book originally used the term new capitalism (drawing mainly on Sennett 1998 and 2006) rather than neoliberal capitalism. The earlier adoption of new capitalism (and before that, late capitalism) was a way to avoid what I viewed, and continue to view, as the over-economistic connotations and ahistorical usages of the term neoliberal. I am more interested in the interpretation of cultures than the crunching of numbers though, of course, this matters, too; I have no reason to throw out Marx’s conception of base and superstructure, as long as we understand that both are caught up in a complex and dynamic relationship, one of the many things we learned from Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and elsewhere. But neoliberal seems to be the term that has gained the most traction, and if I want to participate in conversations about today’s capitalism, I need to employ this term.

I hope that these essays, taken together, offer a useful and critical guide through the capitalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and some forms of musical production and consumption therein.

One

The Absence of Culture in the Study of Music

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. KARL MARX, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

I begin with the famous statement by Karl Marx to make a point not about history but about culture. Few concepts are bandied about with the regularity of that term while at the same time being set aside. While plenty has been written about the overuse of the term culture or its limitations (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; and Troulliot 1991), I continue to find it a useful concept. My concern here is the absence, or feeble presence, of it in many studies of music.

In the American context, at least, this problem is exacerbated by centuries-old ideologies of individualism (see de Crèvecœur 1981 and de Tocqueville 2003), ideologies that are extremely difficult to overcome. American individualism has fostered the understanding of the world as a congeries of cultures, but normally stops short of using the concept to understand ourselves, except as a means of differentiating ourselves from other (usually ethnicized or racialized) groups. In the American context at least, culture has usually come to refer not to the anthropological concept, but, simply, to difference: my culture is different from yours. Culture in this sense is thus a concept that merely replaces older ideas of race, ethnicity, or blood in American parlance.

The elision of culture is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the reception and studies of music, in which individual creators are seen as just that: music is thought to emanate directly from someone’s head. Concepts of genius and talent are too often taken as axiomatic, not as ideologies with specific histories. Musicians lead complex lives (as does everyone), but are reduced to being isolated individuals who emit music, not people with various amounts of different forms of capital, people situated as subjects in different class, gender, generational, racialized, ethnicized (and still other) positions.

This sort of focus is one of the challenges facing any field that studies a particular aspect of a culture rather than culture (as in anthropology), society (as in sociology), or history (as in history). Focusing on a single practice, no matter how broad and variable, can lead to a view of its practitioners as nothing other than practitioners; culture can be rendered secondary, if it enters the analysis at all. There is thus a general tendency in many music studies to examine the people who make culture, not how they are made by culture; study of music as (anthropological) culture becomes just the study of music as (non-anthropological) culture. Ethnographies of musicians who are people in a culture too often become just biographies of those musicians. Biographies are useful in and of themselves, of course, but do not always shed light on the cultures that shape musicians and their music.

Culture and Ethnography Revisited

Let’s revisit the culture concept as promulgated by its most celebrated and influential proponent of the past half century, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. I am sure it is not necessary to rehearse Geertz on the culture concept, save to reiterate this famous formulation: culture is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life (Geertz 1973, 89). Clear enough, one would think: meaning is our focus, what is meaningful for social actors. The analysis of culture is the study of shared