Towards a Global Music History

Intercultural Convergence, Fusion, and Transformation in the Human Musical Story

Mark Hijleh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138088733
• eBook ISBN: 9781351613804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

How do we explain the globalized musical world in which we find ourselves in the early 21st century and how did we arrive here? This extraordinary book outlines an understanding of the human musical story as an intercultural—and ultimately a transcultural—one, with travel and trade as the primary conditions and catalysts for the ongoing development of musical styles.

Starting with the cultural and civilizational precedents that gave rise to the first global trading and travel network in both directions across the Afro-Eurasian Old World Web in the form of the Silk Road, the book proceeds to the rise of al-Andalus and its influence on Europe through the Iberian peninsula before considering the fusion of European, African and indigenous musics that emerged in the Americas between c1500-1920 as part of Atlantic culture and the New World Web, as well as the concurrent acceleration of globalism in music through European empires and exoticism. The book concludes by examining the musical implications of our current Age of Instantaneous Exchange that technology permits, and by revisiting the question of interculturality and transculurality in music.

1Introduction

Global musicianship and global musicology

How and why do Italian bel canto singing, Anglo-Celtic jigging and reeling, Latin dance forms from the tango to the Macarena, modal (maqam) improvisation in the Middle East and the Balkans, toasting and rapping in the Caribbean and the United States, Central European polka, the bell-patterns of West African drumming, the timbre-rich droning of Australian aboriginal music, and the colotomic processes of Javanese gamelan cross so many cultural boundaries with such energy, boundaries at which so much else comes to an abrupt halt?

—Martin Stokes (2004:76)

In my musical journey I have had the opportunity to learn from a wealth of different musical voices… and have wondered how these complex interconnections occurred and how new musical voices were formed from the diversity of these traditions.¹ Whatever we might think the present is, it has come from deep interconnections among people. This continuum, as a historical view, is a metaphor. In the life of creativity and invention, purity doesn’t really exist… When you look back through world history, there have been many instances of increasing ­globalization—it’s inevitable, and continuous. Now it is simply moving more swiftly.²

—Yo-Yo Ma

As of this writing, it would be difficult to deny the global musical influence of Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma (b. 1955). Though coming to prominence from within the Western European tradition, Ma has for more than two decades been an ambassador for what could be called Global Musicianship: a set of perspectives, concepts, and competencies with which twenty-first-century musicians might thrive in a musical world that is increasingly multicultural, intercultural, transcultural—in short, a more “global” musical world.³ Global musicianship encompasses music theory and analysis, music history, and music performance. Ethnomusicologist and composer Michael Tenzer suggests that such a disposition constitutes

a response to economic and cultural transformation making it desirable for musicians to acquire competence not just passively hearing, but contemplating and integrating any music. The well-established ethnomusicological model of bi- or tri-musicality is inadequate to describe us anymore; we are approaching multi- or a virtual pan-musicality. For many this is already a fact of life, and not just for composers: trumpet players do salsa, Corelli, free jazz, and mariachi all in the same week, and the iPod shuffle mode compresses infinite musics, cultures, eras, and locales for listening with consummate effortlessness.

(2006:34)

In this light, the idea that music history ought to remain more or less entirely focused on the contributions of Western Europe—however considerable and commendable those may be—seems ill-advised. And yet that is too often what continues to transpire in collegiate music history curricula at the time of this writing. Certainly, more attention is now paid to a broader plurality of musics, but these are either still seen as peripheral rather than central to musical education, or at best understood to be set apart from one another at levels of remove that preclude the possibility of human musical universality. Such a situation creates a less than ideal context in which students may pursue the sort of competence Tenzer describes—and perspectives are not inconsequential to motivations. As a result, prospective music faculty are not always being prepared to serve their own future students as well as they could.

Tangible physical evidence of human musical activity, in the form of bone flutes, goes back at least 35,000–45,000 years, but there is no reason not to believe that humans were musical from the very beginning, since every human culture today includes music. However, global music history cannot be merely a review of every musical culture that has ever been (as if that were possible). All histories reflect choices, and the one outlined here posits that the human musical story is best understood, in twenty-first-century retrospect, from a global developmental perspective in the context of intercultural convergence, with travel and trade as the primary defining conditions and catalysts. The speed and effect of these intercultural convergences have increased as developing technologies have enabled them over time, eventually approaching the level of instantaneous musical exchange, fusion, and global transculturality that we observe today. This is a captivating story, one that provides a plausible, manageable framework for overall understanding of the human musical journey, a framework into which students and scholars may delve deeper with regard to any one music or group of musics.

This study is by no means the first aiming to address the topic. In 1980, under the auspices of UNESCO, an attempt to write a world music history was undertaken,⁴ but never came to fruition. This may be because, as in other such attempts, certain overly restrictive priorities of ethnomusicology held sway, with proponents insisting on emphasizing cultural distinctives between musical traditions—a disposition that leads to a collection of musical histories rather than a coherent global music history. A clear example of this phenomenon can be seen in a recent attempt titled The Cambridge History of World Music (Bohlman 2013), which gingerly approaches the issues from the perspectives of multiple focused scholars and their specializations, with some trepidation about intercultural exchange that seems to have led to considerable reticence about any transcultural trajectory. Thus we have benefitted from increasingly detailed histories of various musics across time and space, but not as yet from a truly global music history.⁵

This book is not a collection of musical histories. Indeed it is not a comprehensive history of any particular musical culture, but rather a history of a certain metaculture—one that has been advancing, retreating, and advancing again from within the global milieu that has emerged over the past five thousand years. The term “global” is thus used advisedly here. Though perpetually under suspicion, the concept of globalization as interpreted in this book nevertheless provides a coherent thesis: that the cultures of humankind have been increasingly shaped by one another on an accelerating trajectory as travel and communication speeds have increased. With such a state comes increasing interdependence, since the evident inter/transcultural results are otherwise incomprehensible. This does not mean that difference has been erased (as if it could be), but rather that isolation is practically impossible. Thus, with instantaneous exchange now comes constant transformation—which is intercultural to begin with—leading to new transcultural phenomena. The nature of this issue will be revisited in Chapter 10 at the end of the book, after examples of its evidence in human history from roughly 3500 BCE to the present have been reviewed.

In such a milieu, and with such hindsight, a coherent theory is needed by which a single global music history might reasonably be conceived. Moreover, as I have argued previously (Hijleh 2012), there is a practical dimension to the question of how music history should be written and presented in the context of the education of both musicians and thoughtful musical connoisseurs in our time. No one can learn all of the special histories of every musical culture, least of all students in the formative stages of their development (i.e., through the undergraduate years). A single, manageable narrative is needed for the development of global musicianship for a global age. Twenty-first-century musicians can and should become experts in understanding human musical history as a history of synthesis. This is both an imperative and a dilemma. In that sense, we are actually in need of a global musicology, a synergy of theoretical/analytical and historical perspectives and tools for how music has evolved as globalization has unfolded over millennia.

There have been three particularly pivotal inter/transcultural convergences that can be seen as defining the shape of human musical history. Each has led to the next in some ways, and each was part of the acceleration into this age of global instantaneous exchange in which we of the twenty-first century find ourselves. Two of these convergences coalesced in the Afro-Eurasian Old World and the third in the New World of the Americas. The first unfolded from about 200 BCE to 900 CE along a collection of developing trade pathways across the heart of Central Asia, one of which dipped further south into Indian and Persian territory, that came to be called the Silk Road. This Road was anchored by two great empires on either end—Rome in the West and Han China in the East—but encompassed a wide variety of cultures in between that had considerable impact. The second convergence arose in North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and further north into other parts of Europe from about 700 to 1500 CE, emerging and spreading from what the Arabs called al-Andalus. And the third sprang dramatically from about 1500 CE in the Americas with the full flowering of Atlantic culture, proceeded to accelerate into and through the twentieth century, and finally exploded into the current transcultural age.⁶ For the purposes of defining a global music history, the musical cultures of all regions are best considered in the context of their respective roles within any or all of these pivotal convergences. Western European music history, for example, is most important in the scheme of convergences two and three rather than in isolation. The issues surrounding the difficult but inevitable choices this approach demands are explored later in this chapter.

This book, to some degree in combination with my previous volume Towards a Global Music Theory, is meant to serve the global musicianship project by helping to form and inform global musicologists.⁷ The ability to see a wide range of pitch schemes, rhythmic features, musical textures, and processes as individual cultural expressions of qualified human music universals across many times and spaces, as suggested in Towards a Global Music Theory, aids in demonstrating how fusion and subsequent transformation emerge out of the interchange of distinctive musical cultures over time. However, it is important to distinguish further the notion of a global music history from any sense of a global musical style. In the thesis of this book, styles are being constantly forged and reforged through the processes of intercultural convergence, fusion, and transformation—and in fact, one could argue that certain styles dominate globally in certain eras—but no one absolutely global style has emerged or is yet clearly emerging as a result. History thus far has demonstrated that human cultural products remain resistant to the kind of massive consolidation that would be required for a global musical style to coalesce for very long. Therefore “transcultural” here does not imply the consolidation of any single style. Rather, it is shorthand for the specific expressions of these musical universals in various combinations. Because there is a dynamic boundary between interculturality and transculturality in that sense, the term “inter/transcultural” is used freely in this study to capture the resulting tensions.

Global music history: sources, people, and defining characteristics

What constitutes an established musical culture? And how is its history preserved? In a sweeping global context, a broad range of sources must be understood as legitimate. These might include:

• Literary description: When one considers how much more of history can be gleaned from written sources—that is, from the time that language, communication, and eventually music itself appeared in written forms—one understands why this classic element has held sway in making difficult choices.⁸ Music history, like much other history, benefits greatly from the preserved written word, a compilation of countless eons of speech just as musical notation normally reflects music in its elemental—and much more important—incarnation as sound. There are visual depictions and other anthropological evidence that tells us much, but the most helpful of these do not appear to pre-date written sources.

• Visual depiction: Music being performed, music being experienced—­pictures of these moments can provide priceless insights into the way music has been manifested in particular times and places.

• Organology (musical instrument design and use): This turns out to be at or near the top in order of importance for tracing ways in which qualified musical universals are manifested historically within and across cultures, since some instruments actually survive archaeologically while others can be recreated from visual depiction or even literary description. Several chapters that follow will therefore feature spotlights on individual instruments or c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: global musicianship and global musicology
• PART I The Afro-Eurasian Old World Web, c. 3500 BCE–1500 CE
• PART II The New World Web, the third pivotal convergence, and the acceleration of fusion, c. 1500–1920 CE
• PART III The Global Web and continuous transformation, since c. 1920 CE
• Index