Theory for Ethnomusicology

Histories, Conversations, Insights

Harris Berger, Ruth Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315408569
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, Second Edition, is a foundational work for courses in ethnomusicological theory. The book examines key intellectual movements and topic areas in social and cultural theory, and explores the way they have been taken up in ethnomusicological research. New co-author Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone investigate the discipline's past, present, and future, reflecting on contemporary concerns while cataloging significant developments since the publication of the first edition in 2008.

A dozen contributors approach a broad range of theoretical topics alive in ethnomusicology. Each chapter examines ethnographic and historical works from within ethnomusicology, showcasing the unique contributions scholars in the field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs, while illuminating the field's relevance and pointing the way toward new horizons of research.

New to this edition:

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• Every chapter in the book is completely new, with richer and more comprehensive discussions.
• New chapters have been added on gender and sexuality, sound and voice studies, performance and critical improvisation studies, and theories of participation.
• New text boxes and notes make connections among the chapters, emphasizing points of contact and conflict among intellectual movements.

1 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches to Ethnomusicology

From Abstract Structure to Situated Practice

Jayson Beaster-Jones

One of the first issues that I and other ethnomusicologists confront in the classroom is the persistent fallacy that music is a “universal language,” the meanings of which transcend the particularities of musical systems, cultural contexts, and processes of social and historical change. This idea misunderstands language as much as it misunderstands music, and despite its implied assertion of the social value of music as a way to unify humankind, misunderstands the meanings generated by both forms of expression. Part of the problem here is the tendency to think about music as a thing, rather than as a process (see Attali 1985; Small 1998; Turino 2008; Rahaim, this volume), which is tied to larger questions about how ideologies influence the way that listeners experience sound as music or noise.

Few ethnomusicologists today would agree that “music is universal language,” but despite the misunderstandings that this idea entails, it raises a number of useful questions. What do we mean when we say that music “means” or “communicates” an idea? How does music mean or communicate? What kinds of relationships exist among music, language, and other forms of communication?¹ Exploring these topics, ethnomusicologists have pursued linguistic analogies for music, as these analogies provide insights into the ways that musicians, listeners, and scholars have thought about music as a mode or system of communication. This chapter will begin by describing some of the key theoretical debates in the field of linguistics, including the notion of the linguistic sign, the role of structure in language, the idea of linguistic competence, and larger issues of language and meaning. I will not endeavor to summarize the entire field of linguistics in this chapter; instead, I will focus upon linguistic theories that have had particular relevance for ethnomusicology and allied disciplines. I suggest that over the course of the twentieth century, many humanistically oriented linguists have shifted away from thinking about language as an abstract, decontextualized cognitive system to emphasize language-in-use as a form of situated, and situating, interaction. Ethnomusicologists interested in music communication have, I argue, followed a similar trajectory by moving away from decontextualized analyses of musical structure to approaches that examine the situated meanings and values of music in performance contexts. Exploring this history, the chapter discusses some of the adaptations of linguistic theory in ethnomusicology and applies ideas from this work to the musical and social analysis of the Hindi language song “Pal pal hai bhaari,” from the 2003 Bollywood film Swades.

The Field of Linguistic Theory

Published three years after his death, the Course on General Linguistics by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is the most significant contribution to the field of structural linguistics in the twentieth century ([1916] 1998). Based on class notes taken by his students, the Course made observations about the structure and operation of language that were adopted and developed by generations of linguists and influenced the thinking of scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Central to Saussure’s work is the distinction between language (langue) and speech (parole). He used the first term to refer to the system of a language as a whole, while he used the second term to refer to the particular utterances, manifestations, or performances that are outcomes of that system. For Saussure, language is the product of a community (rather than an isolated individual), relatively stable within a given historical moment, and governed by a system of rules that determine correct performance in speech. The consequences of the language/speech distinction are profound: because language is a system produced by a community and distinct from any given performance, one cannot observe language directly. Instead, one must observe performances of language in order to map the system that underlies it, a process akin to using individual pings of sonar to map an ocean floor as a way to predict the trajectories of ocean currents.

More than just conceptualizing language as a system, Saussure created the field of semiology, the study of sign systems in social life.² He argued that languages and other systems of communication are built on, around, and through signs. A combination of cognitive and physiological phenomena, Saussurian signs emerge from mental representations that occur in relationship to things (objects, ideas, and so forth) that exist in the world. Sign are composed of two parts: the “signifier,” which is a group of sounds or images (e.g. the sound of the word “tree” or the letters t-r-e-e) and the “signified,” which is an object in the world (e.g. trees themselves). In language, Saussure argued, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, by which he meant that there is no necessary or inherent connection between, say, a tree in one’s field of view and the French word arbre as it is written or spoken. Low-level signifiers have an arbitrary relationship to their signifieds, but at higher levels of linguistic structure, signifiers become less arbitrary; for example, the individual components of a compound word like landscape (“land” and “scape”) may be arbitrary, but the compound word itself clearly is not. Additionally, Saussure notes that it is not just the signifiers that vary from one language to the next but the signifieds as well. For example, the Sanskrit sign saṅgīt and the English sign music have different signifiers (the word saṅgīt and the word music). In addition, the signifieds of those two signs also differ, as the sign saṅgīt includes phenomena that in English would be captured by the concepts of both music and dance.

Another central feature of Saussure’s semiology is the distinction between sign meanings and sign values. A sign’s meaning is defined by the connection between a signified and an idea existing independent of language as a self-contained conceptual unit. A sign’s value, however, is defined strictly through its contrasts with the other signs in the system. For example, the meaning of the sign “tree” might be positively defined by listing its attributes (a large plant with roots, a trunk, leaves, etc.); however, its value is defined negatively and in opposition to other signs in the sign system (cf. “bush,” “shrub,” “vine,” etc.). This notion of linguistic value is critical to Saussure’s larger view that linguistic analysis should focus on structure rather than content, a perspective that he applied to other aspects of language, like speech sounds and grammar. On the surface, this distinction between meaning and value might not seem important, yet it and Saussure’s broader emphasis on systemic contrasts in language gave his approach the power to explain large-scale linguistic transformations within language communities. By attending to the way that signs necessarily exist in relationship to other signs and have their values determined through these relationships, large shifts in a language’s phonemics (its system of speech sounds), morphology and syntax (the structure of words and sentences in a language), or semantics (word meanings) can be explained in elegant theoretical terms, with even minor changes creating effects that ripple across the system as a whole. These large-scale shifts are difficult to explain if language and its meanings are understood only through its positive attributes. Identifying the systemic property of language was central to Saussure’s project of transforming linguistics into a science, which was eminently desirable for scholars of his generation.

Finally, Saussure notes that language involves both an abstract set of relationships and a system of classification. That is, in addition to containing the rules that make speech coherent and meaningful, language serves as a means for classifying the world. For instance, Saussure notes that English speakers see a relationship among the terms river, stream, and creek, which are all categories of moving water based upon their relative size; in contrast, the French language parcels the space of moving water into different terms, where flueve and rivière are differentiated both on their relative size and whether they flow into an ocean. This insight, combined with the notion that humans utilize many different kinds of signs and sign systems (of which, Saussure argues, language is predominant), led scholars in a variety of disciplines to explore the inter-relations among sign systems. Applying these ideas about structure and classification to the study of literature, kinship, food, and a wide range of other topics, scholars in an array of academic disciplines expanded structural linguistics into the broad intellectual movement of structuralism, which I will examine in further detail below. In addition, many analysts have attempted to apply Saussure’s ideas about the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified to music, with greater or lesser success. Like language, music seems to operate through abstract, structural relationships among musical sounds. Accordingly, Saussure’s idea of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified was particularly influential in ethnomusicology.

In the mid-twentieth century, the most important linguist to develop the Saussurian conception of structural linguistics was Noam Chomsky (b. 1928). Like Saussure, Chomsky is fundamentally interested in pursuing a scientific study of language, as well as exploring the relationship between language and the mind. Starting with the observation that every human cultural group uses language, Chomsky proposed the notion of a “universal grammar”—an innate, biologically based capacity among humans for language, one that emerges from their largely unconscious use of language structures to produce correct sentences. Despite their apparent differences, Chomsky argued that all human languages are based on a shared “deep structure,” an underlying pattern of organization that is built into the human mind. The rules of each individual language are a product of this deep structure. Particular utterances have a “surface structure,” which emerges from the underlying rules of the language in question, which, in turn, depend upon the deep structure of language in general (Chomsky 1965). While the universal human capacity for language acquisition is not an especially controversial idea these days, the relationship between these structuring principles and linguistic meaning is subject to extensive debate (e.g. Lakoff 1971, 1987), and Chomsky has adapted his theory several times to account for new developments in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science (e.g. Chomsky and Lasnik 1977; Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995). Another Chomskian idea that has been adopted by some ethnomusicologists is the notion of “generative grammar,” which offers a very specific vision of the way a system of language rules produces sentences. Observing that humans can create an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of grammatical rules, Chomsky argued that language rules must be recursive, with one set of rules nesting within other sets to produce the complex sentences found in everyday speech. To take a very simplified example, one could imagine an English grammatical rule that states that sentences may have a subject, a verb, and an object (e.g. Chris likes music); in this context, a second-order rule might state that one could recursively replace the sentence’s object with another subject, verb, and object (e.g. Chris likes it when Jan makes music). These notions of generative grammar and recursive rules became useful for the analysis of creativity and creative play within the operation of systems like language and music (e.g. Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1985), though they do not account for the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of language described by linguists like Roman Jakobson, who I discuss below. Finally, Chomsky refined Saussure’s ideas of langue and parole by drawing a distinction between “linguistic competence” (a speaker-hearer’s knowledge of a language) and “linguistic performance” (the use of language in a particular context) (1965: 4). By accounting for the relative level of the speaker’s or listener’s ability to comprehend and perform language when its structure and meanings remain consistent, this distinction helps to explain how miscommunication occurs in everyday language use.

The work of structural linguists like Saussure and Chomsky was one of the main inspirations for structuralism, an intellectual movement that shaped a wide range of scholarly disciplines in the twentieth century. Like earlier theorists who argued for an underlying rationality of human cultural experience, the structuralists were concerned with understanding the cognitive systems that they believed had language-like properties and produced the cultural forms (e.g. myth, music, food, or kinship systems) of each individual society. Because systemic properties were common to the cognitive systems that produced a society’s bodies of myth or music, the analyst, it was believed, could compare seemingly disparate phenomena from within a society and uncover the properties and organizational principles that they shared. By this logic, situated social contexts of use were unimportant because it was the underlying structural mechanisms that were primarily responsible for generating performances. By aggregating together many performances of key cultural texts, analysts sought to reveal the underlying structural-organizational principles that produced them. These principles, they argued, could ultimately be reduced to sets of binary oppositions through which all forms of cultural expression might be coded and compared. Mapping out these structures of binaries enabled direct comparisons between systems, which, the structuralists supposed, would enable researchers to expose cultural universals in ways that would be relevant to scientific enquiry. The foremost proponent of this approach was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who developed structuralism into a broad-based theoretical orientati...