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Journal of Musicological Research, 24: 205–226, 2005
Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc.
ISSN 0141-1896 print / 1547-7304 online
DOI: 10.1080/01411890500233924
1547-7304
0141-1896
GMUR
Journal of Musicological Research
Research, Vol. 24, No. 3-4, July 2005: pp. 0–0
MUSIC AS REPRESENTATION
Philip V. Bohlman
Music V.
Philip as Representation
Bohlman
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University of Chicago
1
See, for example, Margaret J. Kartomi, “Music and Trance in Central Java,” Ethnomusi-
cology 17/2 (1973), 163–208; “Lovely When Heard from Afar: Mandailing Ideas of Musical
Beauty,” in Five Essays on the Indonesian Arts, ed. Margaret Kartomi (Clayton, Australia:
Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1981), 1–14; On Concepts and Classifi-
cations of Musical Instruments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); “Indonesian-
Chinese Oppression and the Musical Outcomes in the Netherlands East Indies,” in Music and
the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 271–317.
Music as Representation 207
between Europe and its Others during the Age of Discovery (the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries), when European colonizers and missionaries
realized that the music of indigenous peoples in the Americas, sub-
Saharan Africa, or Asia was not what Europeans had thought music to
be; for example, it might accompany acts of cannibalism, as the French
missionary Jean de Léry observed during the 1550s while among the
Tupinamba, an indigenous people living around the modern Bay of Rio
de Janeiro.2 The wonder that characterized the music of colonial encoun-
ter led to the creation of a representational moment in the sixteenth cen-
tury, for in order to understand why the music of Europe’s Others was
different, Europeans began to employ various new ways to represent it,
not least among them transcriptions brought from the New World and the
introduction of other people’s music into European musical genres, such
as the Spanish villancico. The techniques and technologies of representa-
tion at such significant moments inevitably attempted to represent both
the music itself—the objective parts understood by the Europeans—and
the traits that the Europeans did not understand because of a subjectivity
of radical difference. It is not surprising that the study of music as repre-
sentation actually begins with Early Modern Europe and the accompany-
ing development of print technologies and the spread of musical literacy.
Ethnomusicology seeks to demystify music—to understand its otherness—
by developing representational languages and technologies. The importance
of technology as a response to music’s capability to represent should not
be overlooked: Ethnomusicology accompanies and even empowers the
spread of representational technologies. Again, we witness an aspect of
the representational paradox when scientific approaches are used to unlock
the secrets that music’s otherness holds. When we undertake the study of
music as ethnomusicologists, we concomitantly learn and develop many
techniques to represent it. Quite early in our studies, we begin to transcribe
music that we collect with recorders in our fieldwork. By transcribing, we
2
See Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America [1578],
trans. by Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
208 Philip V. Bohlman
again make decisions about representing self and other in music. Western-
trained ethnographers generally employ the techniques of Western notation—
ideally combining them with culture-emerging systems—to represent the
aspects of selfness, but we inevitably introduce new symbols to transpose
aspects of otherness that Western notation cannot transcribe. Transcription
is one of ethnomusicology’s representational “metalanguages.”
The ethnographic approaches of ethnomusicology, not least the central
practice of fieldwork, produces other metalanguages as well, ranging
from prose accounts of individual performances to the use of film to doc-
ument large-scale ritual. It is very significant that most ethnomusicolo-
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gists find that any one metalanguage is in itself inadequate and that it is
preferable, instead, to develop as many as possible. Each representational
metalanguage has the potential to capture several specific traits of music
particularly well, but the truly complex representational nature of music
ultimately demands techniques and technologies that make it possible for
performers and scholars alike to represent as many aspects of music’s
selfness and otherness as possible.
3
Margaret Kartomi, “Tabut: A Shi’a Ritual Transplanted from India to Sumatra,” in Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Century Indonesia: Essays in Honour of Professor J. D. Legge, ed. David P.
Chandler and M. C. Ricklefs (Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash
University, 1986), 141–162.
Music as Representation 209
4
See Pi-yen Chen, The Chant of Purity: The Liturgical Chants of the Chinese Buddhism
(Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, forthcoming).
210 Philip V. Bohlman
1. Sound 1. Silence
2. Sign 2. Story
3. Structure 3. Senses
4. Secular/Everyday 4. Sacred
5. Self-Identity 5. Power
(other) are intentionally parallel. This will become clear to readers when
they look at music as “sound” in the first group and compare it with music
as “silence” in the second. However, not all comparisons from group to
group are quite that straightforward, because, of course, the ways in
which music represents are not at all straightforward. It may be most
helpful to use the ten practices and the dialectical tension between the two
groups as a point of departure and a framework for embellishing and
expanding individual experiences.
Sound
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Silence
6
See, for example, Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in
Kaluli Expression, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
7
See, for example, John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1961).
Music as Representation 213
Sign
That music is more than sound and silence is evident in the many ways
signs are used to represent it. The use of signs further suggests the wide-
spread concept that music does not effectively represent itself, but rather
humans prefer to employ an intermediary level of representation that
draws the selfness of music closer to us only through translation. In this
section, I distinguish between two different uses of signs to represent
music. In the first, music is imagined to function like a language, hence
opening the possibility of describing music and even writing it as if it
were a language, with smaller and larger linguistic units. In the second,
signs are used simply to create a substitute for music, but indeed a substi-
tute that explains what music is through other media, especially visual
forms.
8
See William P. Malm, Six Hidden Views of Japanese Music (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986).
214 Philip V. Bohlman
9
See Kofi Agawu, “The Challenge of Semiotics,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook
and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 138–160.
10
Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale [1916], critical edition, ed. by Tullio
de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1972).
11
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sandres Peirce, 8 vol., ed. C. Harsshorne,
P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1966).
12
See, for example, Harold Powers, “Language Models and Musical Analysis,” Ethnomusi-
cology 25/1 (1980), 1–60; and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology
of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Music as Representation 215
Story
Societies throughout the world turn to music to tell their stories and
record their histories. Music represents through narrative in two ways that
reveal the extent to which we allow music to reach far beyond itself and
rework stories so that they are made more meaningful. These two narra-
tive possibilities of music and the ways in which their similarities and dif-
ferences overlap are already evident when we distinguish them in several
languages. In English, the distinction is clearer when we employ the terms
“story” and “history,” but in other languages the narrative power of music
is not as easy to disentangle from the commonplace names for narrative
(storia and storia in Italian, or Geschichte and Geschichte in German). To
understand the distinction in music’s narrativity it is helpful to think of
two different kinds of representation. First, music may represent through
narrative by serving as a context, which allows music to be a participant
in the sociopolitical changes we call history. Second, music may itself
provide the text for a story, in other words the material that tells a story,
by representing it in ways unique to music. Clearly, just how music tells a
story is very complex, for in order to tell a story, music must combine
many ways of representing what lies beyond itself.
Just as different societies and cultures understand their histories in dif-
ferent ways, so too is music used to represent history in different ways. If
history is imagined through the telling of mythological tales, music often
provides a context for performance. The mythological cycles of Hindu-
ism, the Ramaya0a and the Mahabharata, are musically performed in
South and Southeast Asia, that is, in the classical musics of India and
Indonesia. Mythological cycles often produce epics, which in turn may be
transformed into more canonic historical texts, and music, again as a per-
formance medium, may contribute extensively to the transformation. The
various mythological-historical cycles that distinguish the cultures of the
216 Philip V. Bohlman
Structure
simple as all that. There may be no real reason to assume that the music of
every culture possesses structural unity; in fact, there are musics in the
world that may demonstrate the lack of structure—even chaos—quite
extensively. My interest here is not to argue for or against the presence or
absence of structure in music, but rather to examine the ways in which the
assumption that music has structure has generated analytical approaches
that formalize vocabularies emphasizing what is often called simply “sys-
tem.”
System has both musical and cultural components. Until recently,
anthropology—especially social anthropology, but also cultural anthro-
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13
See Thomas Turino, “Structure, Context, and Strategy in Musical Ethnography,” Ethno-
musicology 34/3 (1990), 399–412.
218 Philip V. Bohlman
Senses
Secular/Everyday
Are all human beings musical? Do we find music in the everyday worlds
of all human beings? Ethnomusicology answers both questions positively,
and by doing so it embraces a belief in the power of music to represent
that distinguishes it from other types of musical scholarship. Long before
modern ethnomusicology had developed, the recognition that there were
musical practices we would today call folk music was based on the belief
that music could represent the everyday. When Johann Gottfried Herder
actually used the term “folk song” (Volkslied) for the first time in the
1770s, he did so to describe as many activities as possible as musical and
16
Marina Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medi-
cine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
17
Feld, Sound and Sentiment.
220 Philip V. Bohlman
passed through the day in different ways, different types of folk song
developed. Work songs were specific to the labors of different workers.
Children sang songs that differed from those sung by adults. All such
songs, however, represented the interaction of human beings with the
worlds in which they lived every day.
Special repertories developed from the interaction with the everyday
world. The changing activities of the everyday during the course of
annual working cycles in rural societies formed the basis for “calendric
songs,” such as those for harvest. The “rites of passage” and “rituals” in a
society also gave birth to special repertories of music. In fact, a ritual also
may be interpreted as a departure from the everyday, but the important
point for us to keep in mind is that music has a way of representing the
everyday aspects of ritual by turning it into a shared cultural experience,
what Victor Turner would call communitas19 or what Pierre Bourdieu
would call habitus.20 Music and ritual interact to represent the very edges
of the everyday, those borders between the secular and the sacred.
Some of the most important folk music scholars and ethnomusicolo-
gists have been concerned with how music represents the everyday.
German folk song scholar Ernst Klusen was especially interested in the
way music was crucial to the formation of groups, both small and large,
within the contexts of everyday society. In ethnomusicology itself, it was
John Blacking who most forcefully claimed that what made music special
was the way all human beings used it to represent the everyday. In his
book, How Musical Is Man?, Blacking developed a theory that the
presence of music throughout human societies was species specific.21 In
other words, one of the things that all human beings do is turn to the
world around them with music. It is one of the most distinctive goals of
18
See especially Johann Gottfried Herder, Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Leipzig:
Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1778) and Volkslieder (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1779).
19
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
20
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
21
John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973).
Music as Representation 221
Sacred
The secular qualities of the everyday belong to the self, while by contrast
the sacred belongs to a realm of otherness. Precisely because the sacred is
found at such a distance in the realm of otherness, it must be drawn closer
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between sacred realms, and again there are various processes of exchange
that represent the importance of nature in Suyá religion.23
The second way in which music represents the sacred is by enhancing
the intelligibility of the voice of a sacred being. Without music, under-
standing the voice of the sacred being might be entirely impossible. It is
for this reason that music is rarely absent from the performance of
revealed texts, such as the Qur’an in Islam. Whether read “in silence” and
privately by a Muslim worshiper or collectively in the cyclical perfor-
mance of an annual liturgical cycle, the Qur’an must be performed with
musical alteration of the texts themselves.24 The Muslim worshiper, then,
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Self-Identity
becomes possible when, for example, a song transmitted through oral tra-
dition is transformed into a recording or a written version, both of which
can be purchased and owned. When a decision is made about letting
music represent self-identity—say, the self-identity of a nation with
national music—a process of producing and reproducing the musical
object often follows.
Music may represent a self-identity that is very individual or a group
identity that expresses the common culture of a larger collective. The
expression of identity through music, however, is the product of paradox,
and because of that paradox we learn a great deal about how music repre-
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Power
27
See Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002), 88–110.
224 Philip V. Bohlman
28
See, for example, the essays in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and
Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Music as Representation 225
29
See, for example, Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
30
For a discussion of the distinction of classes of meaning within classification, see
Kartomi, On Concepts and Classification, 16–24.
226 Philip V. Bohlman