Western Music and Race

by Julie Brown

Overview

This contributory volume, the first book of its kind, provides a snapshot of the ways in which discourse about Western music and race overlapped and became intertwined during the period from Wagner's death to the rise of National Socialism and fascism elsewhere in Europe. At these two framing moments such overlapping was at its most explicit: Wagner's racially inflected 'regeneration theories' were at one end and institutionalised cultural racism at the other. The book seeks to provide insights into the key national contexts in which such discourses circulated in the interim period, as well as to reflect a range of archival, historical, critical, and philosophical approaches to the topic. National contexts covered include Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and North America. The contributors to the volume are leading scholars in the field, and the book contains many illustrative music examples and images which bring the subject matter to life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521838870
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/30/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 10.04(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Julie Brown is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Read an Excerpt

Cambridge University Press
9780521838870 - Western Music and Race - Edited by Julie Brown
Excerpt

PART I
Overviews and critical frameworks

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CHAPTER I
Erasure: displacing and misplacing race in twentieth-century music historiography

Philip V. Bohlman

‘The Gypsy Laddie’ (Child Ballad no. 200)

1. An English Lord came home one night
    Enquiring for his lady,
    The servants said on every hand,
    She’s gone with the Gypsy Laddie.

3. Oh he rode East and he rode West,
    And at last he found her,
    She was lying on the green, green grass
    And the Gypsy’s arms around her.

8. It’s I can leave my house and land,
    And I can leave my baby,
    I’m a-goin’ to roam this world around
    And be a gypsy’s lady.

10. Just what befell this lady now,
    I think it worth relating,
    Her gypsy found another lass
    And left her heart a-breaking.

‘Djelem, Djelem’ –‘I’ve Traveled, I’ve Traveled’

1. I’ve traveled, I’ve traveled a very long way,
    And I’ve met many Roma along the way.
    I’ve met rich and poor,
    As well as their many children.

2. Roma, where do you come from?
    Where do you come from, that you are so many?
    We come from India.
    We Roma are all one large family.

3. Oh, Roma, it was a difficult path
    That we’ve followed upon this earth.
    With carts and with miserable tents,
    With tears and with pain.

    (performed by Ensemble Milan Jovanović, 1990; recorded and transcribed by Ursula Hemetek)

PROLOGUE: VOICES OF RACE, DISCOURSES OF RACE

I begin with the voices of race, appropriated, transformed and displaced to lay bare the ways in which they have been woven into the discursive fabric of music. In these two opening songs, the first about Roma people, the second by Roma themselves, the voices of race both are and are not audible. They appear here epigrammatically, as fragments and variants, but as such they appear severed from the racial contexts in which they originally figured. As songs, these two by and about Roma concern themselves intensively with place – the journey of Rom history, the path of the everyday upon which Roma are abundant not invisible – but it is place that separates the Roma from the rest of the world. Unequivocal only is that we encounter the powerful and disturbing discourses of race, discourses ultimately marked by pain, whether or not we choose to listen to those discourses.

The well-known Child Ballad no. 200, ‘Gypsy Laddie’, reproduced completely in Appendix 1.1 in a version that circulates in oral tradition in the rural region of the American Midwest in which I grew up, gives voice to a discourse about Roma that both is and is not my own.¹ Crucial to the ballad’s meanings is not only the wanton employment of stereotype, but also the romantic reimagination of Rom identity over the course of centuries of displacement.² That displacement, even if the variant cited above is unfamiliar, has historical, geographical and musical dimensions. It is in the musical dimensions, indeed, that we witness the very realisation of the narrative of displacement.

In the performance of ‘Djelem, Djelem’ the processes of appropriation are in many ways different from those projected by the American variant of ‘Gypsy Laddie’ in Appendix 1.1. The variant’s text transforms the song into an historical narrative about racism, but extends the historical dimensions of racism to include genocide and holocaust, indeed the Holocaust of the Nazis, in which Roma were among the racial Others Germany incarcerated and murdered in concentration camps. In some variants, the camps, especially Auschwitz, are named explicitly. ‘Djelem, Djelem’ circulates in oral tradition in East Central Europe, where it has been elevated through written tradition to serve as the ‘Anthem of the Roma’. In its many variants, wherever they are sung, ‘Djelem, Djelem’, nonetheless, bears powerful witness to discourses of displacement.³

These songs by and about Roma reproduce the narratives of nationalism and anti-nationalism that have been ascribed to ‘Djelem, Djelem’, narratives that move a ‘people without history’ into the modernist narrative of the nation state. As displaced peoples, Roma move across European landscapes, both in the past and in the present, taking their place in Europe by denying place in its political and nationalist geographies. And also by being denied that same place. The denial of place in Europe is a corollary of their racial otherness, which is crucial to the racialisation of the discourses of displacement I examine in this chapter. As songs that are, in fact, relatively well known in their historical and modern versions, ‘The Gypsy Laddie’ and ‘Djelem, Djelem’ shift our gaze and our witness from the deeper meanings to the surface features, which in turn reside in the musical dimensions of the song, confirming, or even adding, the link to the chain of racialisation that grows from the discourses of displacement and connects them to music.

THE DISCOURSE OF DISPLACEMENT

The name Arabesque is taken from the country in which this kind of ornamentation reached its most dazzling development. But there the art was one occupying space; whereas in the present case it is applied to time.⁴

The theoretical focus of this chapter is not specifically the presence of race in music, but rather the ways in which race inflects the ways in which we imagine and talk about music by employing implicitly racial vocabularies. It is this speech about race and music that produces the ‘discourse of displacement’, whereby I mean to draw in several ways on the themes that the editor and authors have woven into the present volume. Displacement, as I should like to develop the theoretical formulation in this chapter, has many dimensions. There are the more literal dimensions, for example, the reality of peoples who have been displaced, which is to say, forced from the places that allow them fully to embrace their identity and culture. There are the more figurative dimensions, particularly those dimensions that shape processes of representation.

Many, if not most, of the dimensions that accrue to displacement contribute substantially to the ways in which the discourses of displacement are crucial to the construction of race and the unleashing of racism. It is impossible to uncouple the literal and the figurative dimensions of racial displacement, for example, in concepts such as Blut und Boden.⁵ It is, nonetheless, the very impossibility of uncoupling the racial dimensions that requires alternative discourses, those that deny through erasure a discourse of displacement with particularly pervasive musical dimensions.

‘Erasure’ is one of the most racialised results of the discourse of displacement, and it therefore requires brief clarification. Erasure does not eliminate the traces of race from the discourses of modernity and modernism, rather it removes them and redeploys them. Erasure, it follows, results from and contributes to specific forms of displacement. Most specifically, erasure results when we shift discourses from the literal to the figurative. In the discursive practices constituting twentieth-century music historiography that shift occurs when the historical and cultural realities of race and racism are replaced with musical dimensions, when, as Béla Bartók famously announced, one applies ‘the word racial here to the music itself, and not to the individuals creating, preserving or performing the music’.⁶

Erasure undergoes a transformation to a racial discourse through the process of replacing the racial dimensions of music with the music itself. Historically erasure has occurred when the West appropriates a music of an ‘Other’ and transforms it to serve as a music of the ‘Self’. We witness precisely this discourse of erasure in the literature of musical and colonial encounter. The Western account concerns itself most extensively with the physical, corporeal dimensions of music-making Others, particularly dance and the collective movement in ritual. In the earliest colonial records, for example, those reproduced by Montaigne from the missionary accounts of Jean de Léry, in which Tupinamba songs from South America were effectively treated as if they were on occasion transmitted through the consumption of flesh by cannibals, the music of the Other was literally regarded as if inseparable from the body itself.⁷ The ethnographic space between observing European Self and observed non-Western Other, therefore, turns into a zone of racialisation, where the rationalism can only understand the physicality of non-Western music-making across the chasm of displaced musical discourse. The very notions of difference in music upon which modernist musical thought is predicated arise from the racialised displacement of presumed otherness.⁸

It is, moreover, critical to recognise that many of the major moments of historiographic revolution resulted from the appropriations and transformations of otherness. Such moments recur repeatedly in the Jesuit commentaries on Latin America and by extension the historiography of Latin American music. In the Enlightenment they directly influenced Johann Gottfried Herder and the creation of a discourse with ‘Volkslied’ as a concept that locates all difference in a distinctively Western discursive domain.⁹ At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we witness this discursive appropriation no less in the many different metaphysical practices we call ‘world music’.

PLACE AND RACE, DISPLACEMENT AND RACIALISATION

Why do those without place become racialised Others? In what ways does music become the vehicle for racialisation? To answer such questions I should like briefly to discuss the ways in which displacement emerges from theories of African-American history and African diaspora¹⁰ and from more recent attempts to interpret geography and identity as extensions of history and memory.¹¹ Displacement allows individuals and communities to express their connection to a particular place even when they are not residents of the places from which they draw their identity. In one of the most fundamental ways of understanding the concept, displacement characterises diaspora, in which a people interprets its history as a journey that has the potential of leading them back to a homeland they have not been able to occupy, usually because they were violently expelled from the homeland or because survival in the homeland was for various reasons no longer viable. Diaspora represents a certain type of historical journey, in which, necessarily, the point of departure in the past and return in the present are not usually the same. Displacement, however, can assume many different forms, which in turn bear witness to many different forms of racialisation. Displacement, therefore, is frequently redeployed as a corollary to racism, providing an alternative, an escape, and even a means of survival when racism is most threatening and violent.

Europe is also notable for the ways its historical narratives have been responsible for creating displaced peoples. Racism and ethnic prejudice have prevented Jews, Roma and other minorities from being able to have their own state or from receiving protection from any state. New forms of racism, reimagined from the old, for example in Serbia, Albania and Macedonia, also rely on history as a justification for placing geographical restrictions on peoples without lands of their own. Like its counterparts, racism and nationalism, displacement has the power to generate memory and history, and in this sense, that is, because it forms a counter-history, displacement has powerful historical dimensions that are distinctively European.

There are many denied a place in European history because they do not fit in the nation and its history, perhaps because they speak the wrong language (or fail to speak the right one in a certain way), or because they are explicitly marked as racial Others. Displaced peoples often bear their history with them, in the stories and songs they employ to express selfness and, above all, in the music that allows them both to transmit their narratives of selfness and perform these as expressions of group identity. The music of nationless peoples in Europe is well suited to the processes of displacement. Music that maps history as change and adaptation, an expression of the individual and the collective body, rather than as repertory rooted in the soil, is the music that distinguishes Europe’s displaced people. It is perhaps for this reason that the displaced people of Europe have been recognised publicly as peoples whose cultures are marked by music – Roma, Jews and Saami, Travellers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and minorities of all kinds. Displaced peoples are, indeed, singled out as if their specialities in music were the fragments of the nation they were allowed to occupy, enough to sustain the journey of displacement but insufficient to establish a sense of place in which music and musical style can fully express an authenticity attributed to that place.

What are the conditions that produce displaced peoples? Throughout European history, displacement has resulted when certain groups of people have been denied the ability to occupy and own land. With the emergence of the nation state after the Enlightenment, ownership of property is of particular importance because of the ways it establishes legal relations with the state, thus drawing the citizen into the nation’s sphere. Those owning land have legal obligations to the state, and the nation relies on them to expand its own control over the lands within and, in times of military expansion, outside its borders. Just as there are musical repertories that connect people to the land locally, regionally and nationally, there are also those that reflect the mobility of displaced peoples. The folk songs of the Sephardic Jews of the Balkans, for example narrative romances and other ballads among the repertories of romanceros, contain references to the lands in which their Jewish singers are living or have lived in south-eastern Europe, but also contain the linguistic and stylistic structure of Andalusia in south-western Europe. Saami and Traveller repertories express the seasonal movement of the groups who cultivate them. For those lacking land of their own, music ascribes identity by not depending on the institutions and processes of collection and inscription that turn music itself into national property.

The music of many displaced peoples in Europe reflects the necessity of negotiating borderlands. Displacement, therefore, becomes a process of juxtaposing diverse styles, repertories, functions and languages. Music responds to placelessness by opening cultural domains between those with the power and means to exclude others and those who occupy no other place. Several border regions of Europe are notable for the ways in which repertories expand because of the capacity to absorb the music of the displaced peoples living in those regions. It is almost futile to divide into national styles the folk-music repertories along the arch of the Carpathian Mountains. The national borders that run along the Carpathians do little to encumber extensive ethnic mixture and the generation of hybrid styles. As a border region and a national crossroads at the centre of Europe, the Carpathians have nurtured musicians whose repertories are enriched from the contributions of fellow travellers. Rom and Jewish repertories in the Carpathians not only overlap at times, but even form variants that result from folk-song texts with several languages.¹²

Throughout European history, those regarded as non-European have been denied place. The displacement generated by foreignness has deep historical roots, so deep, in fact, that they were firmly implanted long before the Enlightenment and the rise of modern forms of nationalism. Even until the present, the legal restrictions placed on Europe’s foreigners have extended primarily to the denial of place. Turkish guest workers in Germany and Algerian labourers in France are pushed to the extremes of the industrial landscape, where they struggle, usually in vain, to acquire the legal status of a citizen, enabling them to cast off the brand of foreignness. Struggles over the building of mosques or the transformation of existing buildings into mosques rage in hundreds of large and small German cities, not unusually focusing on the ways in which the foreigner’s music, the call-to-prayer, or adhan, would fill and thus take over the urban spaces of Germany.

The most pervasive mark of foreignness is that of Asian origins, however many generations may have preceded extended presence and residence in Europe. Modern attempts to displace Europe’s Jews, Roma, Muslims, and even Saami, therefore, construct models of non-Europeanness based on myths of land and culture being taken from Europeans by historical foreigners who had left their own land and culture, those of Asia. The race sciences appropriated by European scholarship during the 1930s and 1940s were quick to seize on the putative traces of Asianness in music of those groups they wished to racialise as foreign, and thus incapable of occupying space in the European nation. Music that confirmed foreignness, therefore, also confirmed placelessness.

The displacement of Europe’s nationless peoples almost always had racial dimensions prior to the Holocaust. The ghettoisation and genocide of the Holocaust were themselves forms of displacement, for entire peoples – especially Jews and Roma, who were thought to be anathema to racial nationalism, with its emphasis on Blut und Boden – were deprived of the spaces in which they lived, assembled in concentration camps, and there murdered. The vocabulary of race permeated the songs Europeans sang about its displaced peoples, for example, the English-language ballad repertories, in which Roma were always dark-skinned and Jews always lived outside society, thus exaggerating the danger they presumably posed. In the new forms of European nationalism taking shape in the wake of the Holocaust, race has again asserted itself in ways that are sometimes oblique,

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Preface: Music, history, trauma: Western music and race 1883–1933 Julie Brown; Part I. Overviews and Critical Frameworks: 1. Erasure: displacing and misplacing race in twentieth-century music historiography Philip V. Bohlman; 2. Secrets, lies, and transcriptions: revisions on race, black music and culture Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jnr.; 3. 'Gypsy Violins' and 'Hot Rhythms': race, popular music and governmentality Brian Currid; 4. The concept of race in German musical discourse Pamela M. Potter; Part II. Racial Ideologies: 5. Strange love, or, How we learnt to stop worrying and love Wagner's Parsifal John Deathridge; 6. Otto Weininger and musical discourse in turn-of-the-century Vienna Julie Brown; 7. Ancestral voices: anti-Semitism and Ernest Bloch's racial theories of art Klara Moricz; 8. Percy Grainger and the American Nordicists Malcolm Gillies and David Pear; 9. Race and hybridity: Kaikhosru Sorabji's 'Oriental Orientalism' Nalini Ghuman Gwynne; Part III. Local Contexts: 10. Race, identity, and difference: musical acclimatisation and the Chansons populaires in Third Republic France Jann Pasler; 11. The anti-Semitic strain in German writing on music: 1900–33 Erik Levi; 12. Italian music and racial discourses during the Fascist Period Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala; 13. Romanticism, technology, and the masses: Honegger and the aesthetic allure of French Fascism Jane F. Fulcher; 14. The concept of race in Spanish musical literature (1915–36) Gemma Perez-Zalduondo; 15. Manuel de Falla, flamenco and Spanish identity Michael Christoforidis; 16. 'The old sweet Anglo-Saxon spell': racial discourses and the American reception of British music 1895–1945 Alain Frogley; 17. Re-thinking the Revue negre: the critical reception of black musical shows in twenties' and thirties' Paris Andy Fry.

Editorial Reviews

'… a densely packed and annotated, but hugely readable, survey. … All in all, a tremendous read, edited to a high standard.' Gramophone

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