"Some Thoughts on Cross Cultural and Comparative Studies in Ethnomusicology"
by Victor A. Grauer
In a remarkably astute paper entitled "Interpreting Metaphors: Cross-Cultural Aesthetics as Hermeneutic Project,"(1) Angeles Sancho-Velázquez presents a systematic critique of a viewpoint that has, in my opinion, been all too prevalent in ethnomusicology for a very long time. Although directed at certain views of Alan Merriam regarding the dangers of imposing Western aesthetic models on non-Western societies, her argument goes far beyond its immediate mark to challenge many assumptions in our field that have similarly tended to discourage broadly based comparative study and speculation. I will first present a brief summary of her paper and then go on to discuss some of its ramifications, in the light of my own experiences working with Alan Lomax on what was probably the most ambitious and also controversial comparative study of its kind, the Cantometrics project.
The immediate object of Sancho-Velázquez' attention is the chapter "Aesthetics and the Interrelationship of the Arts" in Merriam's Anthropology of Music.(2) In this chapter, Merriam isolates six factors representing what he considers to be the Western concept of aesthetic. Testing each against his own experiences among two tribal groups, the Flathead of North America and the Basongye of Africa, he finds it has no relevance for either of these peoples -- that, in fact, there can be no basis for the notion that "Western aesthetic concepts can be transferred and applied to other world societies."(3)
Let's examine Merriam's treatment of some of these categories and Sancho-Velázquez' responses. The first is "psychic or psychical distance," also referred to as "aesthetic detachment," a notion derived from Kant's Critique of Judgment. As she points out, "Merriam convincingly argues that this detached attitude is not universal, and cites the examples of the Basongye and Flathead for whom the experience of music is always integrated into a cultural context."(4) But, she goes on to question whether the experience of Western art music is fundamentally any different in this respect. Surely the works of Bach, profoundly associated with his religious beliefs, were strongly integrated into their cultural context, as were, in their own way, the secular works of Beethoven, Verdi, and Wagner, to name only a few composers whose music is deeply rooted in social and political issues. More generally, Sancho-Velázquez faults Merriam for ignoring more recent developments in aesthetic theory in favor of Kant's rather stale and, in recent years especially, much maligned, formulation.
As far as Merriam's second category, "the manipulation of form for its own sake," Sancho-Velázquez has no quarrel with his view of tribal music as primarily nonformal in conception.She faults him, however, for failing "to look at the Western composer with the eyes of an ethnomusicologist. Instead of this, his reflections on Western compositional processes are acritically made with the conceptual tools and assumptions of the traditional aesthetics he intends to critique."(5) Clearly the cultural and social contexts which work against formalism among the Basongye and Flathead have counterparts in the West. While a formalist aesthetic might adequately reflect the intentions of certain patently formalist schools of composition in contemporary Western society, it would be a serious misrepresentation of mainstream Western music, classical and popular, where the manipulation of form for its own sake is rarely a priority.
Merriam's third category is of particular significance because of its remarkably strong influence on so much thinking in our field: "the attribution of emotion-producing qualities to music conceived strictly as sound." Merriam is stating, in other words, that we in the West regard musical sounds as in themselves significant, irrespective of social or cultural context. Again Sancho-Velázquez is able to demonstrate that he is operating from the standpoint of an outdated view of aesthetics, that such claims of musical universality are no longer taken for granted, that today, thanks to developments in fields such as semiotics and hermeneutics, it is generally understood that, for Western as well as non-Western music, "works . . . are always historically situated and dependent on tradition."(6)
Merriam's claims regarding the remaining categories, the special role of "beauty," the "purposeful intent to create something aesthetic," and the presence in the West of an "aesthetic philosophy" are refuted with similar arguments. Especially telling is the response to Merriam's claim that, because neither the Flathead nor the Basongye have an aesthetic philosophy, any attempt to treat their music in aesthetic terms would be an imposition of Western thought processes and values on societies which operate according to very different principles. No more so, she counters, than "the absence of an ethnomusicology among the Flathead would imply the illegitimacy of Merriam's own Ethnomusicological investigations."(7)
What is really at stake for Sancho-Velázquez is not simply the status of the aesthetic per se, but a more fundamental question posed and then answered by Merriam much earlier, in the second chapter of his book: "is ethnomusicology . . . a social science or a humanity? The answer is that it partakes of both; its approach and it goals are more scientific than humanistic, while its subject matter is more humanistic than scientific."(8) For her it is exactly here, in the invocation of this asymmetrical dichotomy between science and the humanities, that Merriam's treatment of aesthetic issues defeats itself before it can begin. For what he is seeking is not so much an aesthetic but an aesthetic which can operate within the parameters of scientific method, an aesthetic that, like science, must be universally applicable and thus, already, from the start detached, formal and abstract. As she writes:"When [Merriam] considers aesthetics as a possible subject matter for the social sciences, and not as a discipline with its own approaches and goals, he is suggesting the subsuming of the humanities under the perspective of the scientific approach, not the establishment of a balanced bridging between them."(9) In other words Merriam's emphasis on ethnomusicology as science does exactly to the humanities (and aesthetics) what he claims aesthetics does to the artistic sensibilities of the Flathead and Basongye.
The effect of this line of reasoning on the field of ethnomusicology has been, in my view, devastating. Any attempt to generalize or speculate about the nature of music in a global sense, any attempt, that is, to think in broadly comparative terms, something now taken for granted in just about every other branch of the humanities, has been met with stiff resistance based precisely on the insistence that we cannot take specific instances out of context, and that the application of a single methodology or standard to a variety of different cultures would be tantamount to the imposition of "Western" values on non-Western societies. As though the narrowly "Western" paradigm based on the detached, formal and abstract methodology of either positivistic science or Kantian aesthetics were the only possibility.
In the second half of her paper, Sancho-Velázquez proposes an alternative in the form a very different theoretical framework based on the hermeneutics of Hans George Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Focusing on Ricoeur's innovative approach to metaphor as a source of meaning, and to the "work" as an extended metaphor produced by the "social imagination," she argues that "an aesthetics based on the analogy between work of art and metaphor would be able to bring together aesthetic and cognitive values. Such an aesthetics would consider music as saying something about reality that cannot be said in any other way. Consequently, the relationship between listeners and music would not be conceptualized as detached contemplation. Instead of psychic distance aimed at appreciating beautiful sounds by themselves, the aesthetic attitude would be characterized by the willingness to attempt to understand what music is saying to us."(10)
But who is this "us," to which music speaks? Among many in the social sciences it has become an article of faith to declare that modes of expression such as music cannot be taken out of context, that they can "speak" only to those who already understand and share the value system from which they stem. This highly problematic issue is the basis for a key essay by Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation." Rejecting "the alternative between alienating distanciation and participatory belonging," he argues that a work of art "transcends its own psychosociological conditions of production and thereby opens itself to an unlimited series of readings themselves situated in different sociocultural conditions. In short the text must be able to . . . 'decontextualize' itself in such a way that it can be 'recontextualized' in a new situation . . ."(11) This involves, as Sancho-Velázquez points out, "a moment of distanciation or structural analysis of the work" which must take place before it can be appropriated through recontextualization.(12) The term "appropriation" is especially important here. "As appropriation, as 'making ours,' all understanding entails a self-understanding. The claim being made . . . is that one does not authentically understand unless, in the process of understanding, one's self is transformed."(13)
Reading this remarkable paper for the first time, and with mounting interest, I found myself recalling again and again my experiences working with my old friend, colleague, boss and father figure, Alan Lomax, on the Cantometrics project. Many of his admirers were astonished that someone who had written with such fervor and eloquence about the human side of the arts, its social history, politics and poetics, could trade his typewriter for a computer and spend so much of his time poring over statistical tables. Had the passionately committed humanist turned into a cool, detached proponent of scientific neutrality?
The answer, to be brief, is "no." Despite his newly discovered fascination with factor analysis, taxonomic tables, histograms, and the like, Lomax remained a humanist. Far from adopting the role so valued by Merriam and so many others in our field, of the dispassionate, neutral scientific observer of humanistic content, Lomax always remained the involved, politically active, participant in the struggle over human values. In short, Lomax, before and after the advent of Cantometrics, was biased. And, in my view, commendably so. To Sancho-Velázquez, the "hermeneutic approach . . . opens doors for the overlapping of aesthetics and ethics . . .(14) the "self-inflicted wound of [traditional] aesthetics -- its lack of relevance relative to other fields," -- is healed, for her, in Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, based on "the return to the world of action."(15) In this sense, Lomax, whose bias was grounded in ethical considerations and a need for relevance, was always far closer to Ricoeur than Merriam.
What, then, are we to make of his claims that Cantometrics is, indeed, objective science, that it has supplied us with certain incontrovertible proofs regarding the role of musical style as a reflection of certain fundamental sociopolitical truths? For many in our field, the answer is simple: he was a victim of weak methodology coupled with a measure of self-delusion. And I would not completely deny this. It must also be recognized, however, that Lomax's problems in reconciling his scientific methods with his humanistic goals stemmed as much from a certain kind of moral strength as from any sort of methodological weakness. In defiance of the sort of ethnomusicology prescribed by Merriam, Lomax simply refused to subordinate his metaphoric, ethical vision to the requirements of positivist neutrality. And in some sense which has become evident only now, in the age of Ricoeur, Rorty, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida, he was entirely justified. Because, as these contemporary thinkers have argued, the notion of scientific neutrality is as much a construct as metaphor itself. In other words, we are all biased.
But Lomax himself would probably have rejected such an argument. What he really hoped to achieve was a perfectly traditional "scientific" affirmation of his humanistic vision. And this is where he, tragically, got stuck. Unable to see the value of an approach such as that of Ricoeur or any of his post-structuralist contemporaries, unwilling to proceed simply on the basis of a fundamentally hermeneutic, that is to say interpretive, method, he became caught up in a process of trying to "prove" and thus definitively explain that which by its very nature can never be either proven or fully explained. Caught between his responsibilities as an engaged humanist and a need to satisfy the positivist dogma insisted on by so many of his peers, he would vacillate endlessly between these two poles. He remains, for me, despite his flaws, a visionary whose insights were sharpened and enriched by methods which were never completely either humanistic or scientific, but did partake of many of the strengths (and weaknesses) of both.
What can be the status of such insights? If not strictly verifiable, should they therefore be dismissed? In my view it is extremely important that the kind of research pioneered by Lomax, based in Cantometrics and related disciplines, be encouraged and continue. Ethnomusicology desperately needs methodologies which afford a global, systematic overview of its terrain. But we need to think differently about the meaning of such methodologies. Sancho-Velázquez faulted Merriam for failing to promote a truly "balanced bridging" between science and the humanities. Cantometrics has the potential to do just that. To understand this, let us recall, first, that for all his talk of scientific principles, Merriam never actually developed a scientific methodology. In fact ethnomusicology never has developed very much at all as a science, most of its methodology being borrowed from other fields. Yet, despite all the controversy over Cantometric methodology there is nothing about this approach per se which is incompatible with scientific method. When proper controls are rigorously and critically applied, something Lomax often failed to do, replicable results should emerge. In principle, therefore, even the most controversial of Lomax's claims could in fact be more definitively tested through a more rigorous evaluation of already existing Cantometric data.
Second, and more to the point, Cantometrics is eminently suited to humanistic approaches of the sort represented by Ricoeur's hermeneutics. To better understand this claim, let's return to the essay "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation." Here Ricoeur refers to an "untenable alternative: on the one hand alienating distanciation is the attitude that renders possible the objectification that reigns in the human sciences; but on the other hand, this distanciation . . . at the same time . . . destroys the fundamental and primordial relation whereby we belong to and participate in the historical reality that we claim to construct as an object. . . My own reflection stems from a rejection of this alternative and an attempt to overcome it."(16)
To drastically simplify, Ricoeur deals with the problem by invoking a two pronged strategy: an initial and provisional moment of distanciation characterized by "decontextualization," followed by an integrative moment of "recontextualization," the moment of "appropriation" already referred to. The coding process at the heart of Cantometrics, coupled with the various statistical methods developed for organizing its data, could be understood as distanciation in roughly this sense. Research conducted in such a spirit would be not so much scientific as heuristic. In such a context, the purpose of Cantometric methodology would not be to determine hard and fast correlations but simply to provide a working, provisional, overview that could function in Ricoeur's terms, as a mediating, distanciating "text."(17) Considered in this manner, as the basis for a heuristic search for pattern and meaning, Cantometrics could and should take its rightful place among the very few tools we have for the systematic, cross-cultural study of music in society. As such it would be a model for ethnomusicology as a humanism informed but not controlled by scientific methodology -- and a science fully open to humanistic analysis and critique.
1 "Interpreting Metaphors: Cross-Cultural Aesthetics as Hermeneutic Project," by Angeles Sancho-Velázquez, in Musical Aesthetics and Multiculturalism in Los Angeles, ed. Steven Loza, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology vol. X, Dept. of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology, The University of California at Los Angeles, 1994, pp. 37-50.
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2 "The Anthropology of Music," by Alan Merriam, Northwestern University Press, 1964.
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3 Ibid., p. 259.
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4 Sancho-Velázquez, op. cit., p. 38.
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5 Ibid., p. 39.
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6 Ibid.. p. 40.
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7 Ibid., p. 42.
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8 Merriam, Op. Cit., p. 25.
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9 Sancho-Velázquez, op. cit., p. 42.
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10 Ibid., p. 45.
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11 "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation," by Paul Ricoeur, in From Text to Action: Essays by Paul Ricoeur, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, Northwestern University Press, 1991, p. 83.
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12 Sancho-Velázquez, op. cit., p. 45.
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13 Ibid., p. 49.
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14 Ibid., p. 45.
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15 Ibid., p. 48.
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16 Ricoeur, op. cit., p. 75-76
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17 Ricoeur's difficult and rather idiosyncratic notion of "text" is developed throughout the essay already cited, especially pp. 76 and 84-86.
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