Dr. Ernst Lichtenhahn

Text- a helpful ethnomusicological category

'Text', as presented in this paper, is understood in its opposition to 'context'. 'Text' and 'context' mark two fundamentally different approaches in ethnomusicological theory and research. The 'textual' approach observes the totality of musical parameters and their organisation in a 'text' is considered as a singular musical event. The 'contextual' approach takes into consideration the condit-ions, significations and meanings of the 'act of music making' ('Musizierakt') in psychological, social and functional respects. Traditionally, the musicological approach takes into account mainly the 'text' while the anthropological approach is centred on the 'context'.

The history of ethnomusicology since the end of the 19th century shows that these two approaches, the 'textual' and the 'contextual', have never been strictly separated. But they nevertheless were the result of fundamentally different interests and ways to conceive the musical event. The 'textual' approach was in the centre of the early study of non-European music at German and Austrian Universities, especially Berlin and Vienna. This can be seen in the books of Guido Adler, who distinguished two domains in the whole field of musicology: the 'historical' and the 'systematical'. The 'historical domain' is concerned mainly with the history of European art music. The 'systematic part', as Adler explains it, deals with the essential rules and laws governing the different musical styles. The scope is, as Adler points out, an ethnographic one: to compare musical styles for ethnographic purposes (Adler 1885, 16 f.)  And we can conclude that this comparative approach is mainly concerned with the material aspects of music, especially the physical and the acoustic.( Cf. Kalisch 1988, 51). It shows that Adler's systematical approach is essentially related to the 'text'. One of the fundamental studies of early ethnomusicology makes it clear: A.J. Ellis' study On the Musical Scales of Various Nations(Ellis 1885).  Scales are considered here as the basic element of all music. On this basis Austrian and German ethnomusicologists - especially the Berlin school with Sachs and Hornbostel - developed a text-oriented science they called 'Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft', Comparative musicology. This tradition has of course undergone developments and changes, but is still strong. (A few years ago I met an Austrian colleague who had published very good analytical texts on African music, also on Tuareg music, especially interesting for me, since I had worked on Tuareg music myself. So when I met him I asked him when he was last in Africa. More astonished than ashamed, he told me: "I have never been in Africa"; - for him, the tapes collected and brought to him by other scholars were perfectly adequate for his textual approach.)

In the middle of the 20th century a new development in ethnomusicology began, coming from the USA. The exact landmark of this new ethnomusicology was Alan P. Merriam's book Anthropology of Music(Merriam 1964). As the title indicates, this new ethnomusicology is mainly concerned with contextual aspects. As Merriam points out in the definition he gives: ethnomusicology is the study of music in culture. Scholars indebted to the anthropological perspective, though with different interests and methodological approaches, are Charles Seeger and Mantle Hood.(Cf. e.g. Seeger 1966, Hood 1971).  A special direction in American ethnomusicology is represented by Bruno Nettl, whose father, Paul Nettl, a music historian of Czech-German descent, had worked in his youth with Guido Adler in Vienna. A prominent aim of Bruno Nettl's writings can thus be seen in the synthesis of an anthropological and historical approach (Cf. Nettl 1964 and 1983). Without doubt, the approach to a musical event in an anthropological perspective is a broader and more specific one. Studies that use this contextual perspective are often very good and detailed in analysing the conditions, functions and meanings of music-making in a given society. But at the same time, such studies are often limited to these contextual aspects. The musical event itself, style, structure and form and the rules and laws they undergo, are not analysed and discussed; the musical event in itself is - so to speak - not opened but only moved to and fro as a black box in a socio-cultural framework.

The synthesis of textual and contextual approach is indispensable for an inclusive understanding of music. In its way, the old comparative musicology was aware of this, since the final scope of the comparison of scales and styles, forms and melodic lines all over the world was beyond pure material-oriented sytematics, namely it sought to find out - by comparing advanced European cultures with what they considered to be primitive non-European cultures - the laws governing the history and development of mankind. They thought that a contemporary primitive music culture could be considered as an 'image' of the past of their own culture (Reinhard 1968, 8).  On the other hand, Alan Lomax, coming from the American anthropological school, started an enormous project in the sixties under the title of 'Cantometrics', designed to interpret musical styles and forms as direct expressions and emanations of specific climatic, anthropological and social conditions (Lomax 1976 - cf. Lomax 1968). The highly hypothetical, unsatisfactory and unconvincing character of these 'cantometrics' is undeniable, and as the British ethnomusicologist John Blacking points out, ethnomusicology as a whole is generally "little more than a meeting ground for those interested in the anthropology of music and in the music [itself] of different cultures"(Blacking 1973, 94 - cf. also Blacking 1971).

I repeat, the synthesis of textual and contextual approach is indispensable for an inclusive understanding of music. But it is not easy to realise this synthesis. Often - and a little bit as was the case with Lomax - the correspondences and parallels of musical style and forms on the one hand and the socio-cultural contexts on the other are artificially constructed rather than really proved. The African ethnomusicologist Nketia, refering to Kolinsky, calls the corresponding methodological approach the 'Causal Relations Approach' and criticises this approach, "which assumes that there is a one-to-one correspondence and a relation of causality between aspects of music and aspects of culture and society", because it makes "an assumption which leads to difficulties when applied systematically" (Nketia 1981, 24 - cf. Kolinsky 1978). The main reason for these rather unsatisfactory results from one-to-one comparative studies is, I think, that generally not all aspects are taken into account. We can see, for instance, that the scholar already has his knowledge of the cultural traditions and norms of a given society and that he interprets the musical event from this base, trying to understand it as reflecting simply what he already knows. In this case the risk is that a selection of textual aspects is made, that only those textual aspects are considered that fit with the pre-conceived aim of the interpretation. Indeed, one of the main reasons for misinterpretations is, I think, the fact that the autonomy of the text as a whole is not sufficiently respected. That is to say: musical utterings within the framework of a cultural tradition are always marked by conventions and rules, but also by 'artificialisations' (i.e. by stylistic marks, singing and playing techniques etc.) that are not simply and directly 'functional'. I also think that the distinction between 'artificial' music and 'functional' music (in German studies, 'artifizielle Musik' and 'usuelle Musik'), as applied commonly and in a very general way to western art music on the one hand and traditional or folk music (and popular music) on the other, is much too simple and often even wrong. Autonomous artificial elements are often developed by the musicians, from generation to generation, over centuries, and often - and this is especially important - influenced by contacts with neighbouring or foreign music traditions - possibly without adopting at the same time the genuine meanings or functions of these neighbouring or foreign musics. To admit that the act of music-making in oral traditions is only the automatic emanation of feeling and behaviour signifies a return to the old models of 'primitive music'. The importance of what could be called the 'artificial autonomy' of texts in oral traditions has been convincingly demonstrated in the field of African oral literature by Ruth Finnegan (Cf. Finnegan 1970).

It is especially from this perspective that I propose a re-consideration of the 'textual' approach (more detailed in Lichtenhahn 1994).  'Text' or 'singular text' is taken here in the sense of the singular musical event, so far (and only so far) as it is acoustically present and can be recorded on a tape or disc. This text can be analysed on the level of the musical parameters such as pitch, rhythm and metre, harmonics, dynamics, sound-source (voice, instrument), tone colours and formal devices. The aims of an isolated examination of the 'text' in this sense are the following: 1) To deliberately exclude from consideration the contextual aspect, and only to note down the purely musical, structural, and textual elements. 2) At this stage, not to make any comparisons whatsoever (not even within the text itself, if this text is marked - as music in oral tradition mostly is - by repetitions or variations of a given model). 3) At this stage, not to compare it (if this text is a well known and named, pre-existing song) with other 'interpretations' or recordings or printed versions. The aim is mainly to try to understand a musical event not as a reproduced art work, but as the product at that instant of a musical doing, of a musical action. This is also the only way to understand really what happens musically when music in an oral tradition is - in one way or another - required to be improvised. The music event in unwritten traditions is always marked by some kind of 'improvisation', reacting spontaneously. But in the same time we are - more often than we think - in front of real 'compositions', with broadly consistent structures and forms (Cf. Simon 1984). The 'Text' approach helps me to discover this consistency.

It is only in a further step that I ask which textual conditions are behind the text. Here I can make a distinction between the text repertoire, that is to say the totality of the songs known by a musician or a group on the one hand, and what I would call the 'textuality' on the other, that is to say, the totality of what in a given music culture are the conventions, what is usual and acceptable as musical formulation. This textuality in all its aspects can be seen as the musical system of a given culture.

And it is still a further - and a quite different - step, to open out to the broad field of the contextual conditions, functions and meanings of a musical event.

The aim of this paper is to underline the necessity of a new text-oriented ethnomusicological approach, of course not an exclusive one but one to be combined with the anthropological, socio-cultural, contextual approach that normally dominates today. And seen in the light of our conference, the aim of this paper is also a legitimisation of work with recorded documents, where very often nothing else has come to us than the text.
 
 

Literature: