Tradition, Heritage, History: A View on Language

I remember the time (1981) when the IFMC—the International Folk Music Council—renamed itself ICTM (International Council of Traditional Music). I was relieved to hear this, because, as a German brought up in the 1950s, I had learned to suspect the notion of Volk (or Folk, whichever). Tradition felt like a good thing. It sounded less patronizing and more inclusive; it seemed to include the music of the middle classes, urban music, African music—and it seemed to imply musical history. But so did folklore. William John Thoms (1846) invented the term Folk-Lore as a replacement of the terms popular antiquities or popular literature. He considered it as belonging to the uneducated classes, and keenly explored its history, back to the antiquities of the Saxon era. The kinds of folklore studied by Thoms were not only literary (popular fairy-tales), but also material (built structures) and performative (rituals, songs). There is a striking similarity between his research interests and UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH).

The 1981 name-change of our admirable musical council replaced an essential reference to social structures (folk) with another to continuities in time (tradition). It is not certain whether that was meant to imply an increased interest in the study of past developments, but let us assume so for the moment. Tradition denotes, after all, something that has been established over a longer time span—and, how would we know that something is a tradition if we did not know anything about its past?

Today the ICTM describes itself as a scholarly organization which aims to further “the study, practice, documentation, preservation, and dissemination of traditional music and dance, including folk, popular, classical, urban, and other genres, of all countries.”¹

This is a rich and stimulating formula, which busily enumerates the genres for which the organization feels responsible, and almost as busi­ly explains what it wishes to do with them. To “study, practice, document, preserve, and disseminate traditional music and dance” implies, I believe, the acceptance of a responsibility for the history of these genres. Past, present, and future are all wrapped up in this agenda when we consider it closely. To “study” and to “document” surely imply researching not only the present, but also the past or ancestry of something. To “document” and to “preserve” are what historians do with the past. To “practice” is a present action, and to “preserve” is a present action which also looks backward to a past and forward to a future. To “disseminate” is an action directed to the future: it seeks to create a new generation of practitioners and audiences. All these verbs capture aspects of what historians do. There is also a commitment to change: “to disseminate” traditional music implies preparing the future by introducing non-traditional forms of transmission. Traditional music that is disseminated (online, for example), will no longer be the same, as comparisons with its past will reveal; it will be known to and practiced by new people. Between the past, present, and future statuses of a tradition, there are transmissions and disseminations: changes.

I believe that change is a primary subject mat­ter of history—although the two terms do of course not mean quite the same. I defer to the authority of Bruno Nettl, who recently declared his interest in the study of change without even using the word history in its description.² Such implicitness is quite common. The increasingly authoritative term heritage implies history. Researches on cultural fusion, hybridity, globalization, transculturalism, mobility, and similar processes are typically predicated on historical comparisons—for example, in describing a postmodern world that is oh-so-different from what we were used to—but the admission that his­torical methodologies are used and historical panoramas unfolded, is quite rare in those studies. Nettl, in his essay, states his continuing belief that “in important ways ethnomusicology has always been a field of study in which history, in the broadest sense of the word, has played a major, if gradually changing, role.”³ Good to hear it said.

Excluded History?

I worry just a little, however, about what Nettl may mean by “history, in the broadest sense of the word.” Is he saying that history plays a major role in ethnomusicology only in the broadest sense of the word, not in the narrower sense of the nitty-gritty of historical practice, such as looking up archives and transcribing old music? I do not think he would want to exclude that practice. Rather, his meaning of the “broadest sense” may be that it is the worldwide history of music which plays a major (if gradually changing) role in ethnomusicology—whereas the study of Western music alone represents a narrower sense of history. This interpretation would be one I agree with. It is a main argument for my Balzan research project “Towards a Global History of Music” (2013–17), which criticizes the Western scholarly neglect of the musical history of other cultures. Not only Guido Adler’s “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (1885), but also a long tradition of minor writings seem to deny non-Western music the status of being historical. In the words of Martin Stokes, “‘People without history’ have been made so by others who gain from having it.”⁴ This colonial principle has influenced Western musicology for various reasons, for example, because it seemed more convenient to research history only at home, cultural anthropology only abroad.

Explicit denials of historical methodology have also been known. Years ago, I participated in a conference where I had to say something on musical patronage in the Renaissance. A noted American ethnomusicologist objected in the discussion: “How can you say that about the sixteenth century? You weren’t there!” I humbly replied that I was a historian, and making statements about the past was what historians do.

A comparable, although entirely friendly, exchange happened at the 20th Quinquennial IMS Congress in Tokyo in 2017. In the discussion of the roundtable “Towards a Global History of Music,” somebody asked me “What is history?” I was delighted with the question and replied, in the same style as at the earlier event, “History is the study of the past.” But this apparently did not cut any ice, and although I later had an opportunity to add something like “History reaches the parts memory cannot reach,” the brief discussion then revolved around the unreliability of history. It was said to be biased, always only written and therefore suspect from the start; it was suggested that memory, recovered by fieldwork, might be a more truthful witness of culture.

Presumably, ethnomusicological fieldworkers develop mutual understanding and trust between themselves and their interviewees to a degree that they can rely on their oral statements more than on written records or sound archives. Afterward, however, they are right to transmit their knowledge not only orally. Written records, databases, and sound archives, biased as they may be, should not generically be suspected: they usually reflect honest (if biased) intentions to transmit knowledge. And, the archive is not the only tool of historians. They interview witnesses, use iconographic or archeological materials, compare different types of evidence, and so forth. As regards the reliability of interviewees, what do people living today actually know about their past? We must assume that in 2018, a researcher visiting certain areas of Germany with the interview question “What is your heritage?” might get many honest answers to the effect that their heritage is what the refugees are threatening to destroy. (Equivalents of this can be seen and heard in German TV documentaries.)

The 2017 Abu Dhabi Conference of the IMS, ICTM, and IAML, entitled “Music as Cultural Heritage,” featured many encouraging demonstrations of the links between records of the past and the preservation of cultures. This seems the way to go with the concept of heritage—but the use of the word in public debate is often different. In fact I heard regrets from researchers how much the notion of heritage has become a political football. It is publicly defined, against the wishes of many researchers, as a national property. Although the close identification of nation with folk culture and heritage is a political falsification of Herder’s ideas, in governmental and media language heritage has joined the spin collection of folk, nation, identity, and community. The heritage industry does not aim at reproducing historical legacies; David Lowenthal wrote about a “heritage crusade” which was in effect replacing history.⁵ Admittedly, these processes may all be covered by the benign blankets of hybridity and glocalization.

Official policy statements of UNESCO’s initiative, ICH,⁶ a campaign we all applaud, have gradually relegated historical research from their purview. Whereas earlier formulas (for example, of 1989) on the “safeguarding of traditional culture and folklore” had “supported scholars and institutions to document and preserve a record of disappearing traditions,”⁷ the UNESCO General Conference of 2001 issued a Report on the . . . Protection of Traditional Culture and Folklore, which proposed to support only the practitioners of these traditions of today, rather than their investigation or documentation (including that of their past). “The continuity of intangible heritage would require attention not just to artifacts, but above all to persons, as well as to their entire habitus and habitat, understood as their life space and social world.”⁸ Such policies ought to be supported by all music researchers, too, although their own work is now largely taken out of the equation. What happened to the research of traditions, of the past? By a sleight of hands, the universally shared wish to protect not only material artifacts (tangible heritage), but also practices (intangible heritage), has become distorted to a presumption that “people and practices” are only those living now, not those of the past—and to a presumption that written transmission and archival documentation are not alive and therefore irrelevant to the preservation of cultures. It may seem attractive to us in the performing arts that UNESCO has switched its cultural protection from the past to the future, from the dead to the living. But shouldn’t we also remember that humanity started its culture by respecting the dead?

Restored History

I almost feel the need to apologize to those of my colleagues in the field of ethnomusicology who have maintained and practiced historical research. Of course their work is the most precious in our context altogether: they have demon­strated often enough how cultural history is not only about written artifacts—as its detractors suggest—but mainly about people and practices.⁹ (Sometime in the future, however, written artifacts will be re-admitted to a respected place in the global cultures, even the written artifacts of non-Western origin which the heritage lobby is now marginalizing.)

If the historical study of past traditions (people and practices) can no longer be supported under the initiative of ICH, other organizations are committed to doing so. Relevant societies whose mission statements emphasize history include the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), which describes itself online as follows: “Founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology is a global, interdisciplinary network of individuals and institutions engaged in the study of music across cultural contexts and historical periods.”¹⁰ The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE), as a former UK chapter of the ICTM, has adopted the precise mission statement of the ICTM itself (as given above), which emphasizes tradition rather than history but of course means both. As regards the IMS, I still believe it is committed to the cultivation of historical studies, although its latest mission statement found in the IMS Newsletter does not contain the term history. The 2017 Quinquennial IMS Congress documented the commitment to musical history and the study of traditions in forty-eight countries. Former IMS Vice President Ryuichi Higuchi wrote to me in his invitation: “As can be seen from the provisional time-table, the entire congress reflects the world history of music.”¹¹

On the website of the Brook Center of CUNY we read that in “1979 [Barry S.] Brook initiated, under the auspices of the International Music Council of UNESCO, a global project called ‘The Universe of Music: A History’ intended to provide a comprehensive history of the musical cultures of the world.”¹² Some of the material, edited by Malena Kuss, has been published.¹³ The project could have inaugurated a re-evaluation of the sisterhood of historical and ethnological studies, had it been continued on the envisaged scale.

An impressive multi-author and one-designer book of 2013 is called The Cambridge History of World Music. I quote from the blurb:

Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected religions, cultures, languages, and nations throughout world history. . . . The contributors critically examine music in cultur­al encounter and conflict, and as the critical core of scientific theories from the Arabic Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Overall, the book contains the histories of the music of diverse cultures, which increasingly become the folk, popular and classical music of our own era.¹⁴

What is announced here is not only a panorama of worldwide historical processes in the field of music, but also a theory of how these hang together “throughout history,” for example, “increasingly.” History—the study of the past in remembering and forgetting¹⁵—means not only taking snapshots of present moments while tolerating the attached bags of dead traditions (equivalent to heritage): history is the knowledge of how things have become. Such knowledge may be said to be fundamental to cultural respect. Each culture has a historical depth which we should respect; its past may reveal more about it than its present practitioners can say.

But what about traditions that are no longer with us? Humans should not flatter themselves that they matter only while they are alive. It is a public consensus today that we must think for our children and do something for the future, but by the same token, our identities are co-determined by what our ancestors have done. This mutual consideration between present and past people is something that most of the people whose cultures we study, take for granted.

In announcing his first workshop session of the Balzan musicology project (dedicated to the “medieval” era), Jason Stoessel summarized:

Fundamentally different concepts and practises mark precolonial encounters between the cultures of Africa, Asia and Europe, and these differences continue to resonate in subsequent intercultural relations. To move beyond an account of these differences towards transcultural understanding is but one of the challenges for a global history of music in the millennium before the rise of European [powers] as colonial world powers.¹⁶

The “resonance” of past practices and differences in our time is one justification for historical research, but it is not the only one. We need to know about those things, because we must interrogate tradition and heritage. That tradition and heritage are not automatically “ours,” can be seen, for example, when modern national administrations lay claim to cultures that had been created by completely different people in the past who just happened to live in a similar region. Conversely, we have to respect the agency of people today who continue traditions that they have not created, but made their own through practice. It is important to know about historical agencies, changes, and appropriations, and where necessary, criticize them. This also applies to historiography. The conference The Future of Music History of the Serbian Academy of Science (September 2017) was a multi-voiced dialogue of mostly challenging and critical interpretations of the musicological traditions of Western Europe. Thus music history was being restored to its proper purpose. I would say that we need to restore even more history, and to say explicitly that we are doing it.

1. “Rules of the International Council for Traditional Music,” accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.ictmusic.org.
2. Bruno Nettl, “Have You Changed Your Mind? Reflections on Sixty Years in Ethnomusicology,” Acta Musicologica 89, no. 1 (2017): 55–57.
3. Ibid., 63.
4. Martin Stokes, “The Middle East in Music History: An Ethnomusicological Perspective,” in The Music Road: Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India, ed. Reinhard Strohm (London: The British Academy, forthcoming).
5. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (London: Viking, 1997); earlier US edition published as Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: The Free Press, 1996).
6. “What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?,” accessed November 15, 2017, https://ich.unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-00003.
7. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production,” Museum International 56, nos. 1–2 (2004): 53.
8. Ibid., 53–54.
9. For a case study of the workings of ethnomusicology in historical perspectives, see Stokes, “The Middle East in Music History.”
10. “SEM Information,” accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.ethnomusicology.org.
11. “Wie es aus dem angehängten provisorischen Programme hervorgeht, der ganze Tokio-Kongress spiegelt eben die Weltgeschichte der Musik.” Personal letter to the author, August 7, 2016. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity given to me by the IMS to hold a roundtable on the Balzan project “Towards a Global History of Music” at the Tokyo Conference.
12. “Barry Shelley Brook,” accessed November 15, 2017, https://brookcenter.gc.cuny.edu/about/
    barry-s-brook.
13. Malena Kuss, ed., Performing Beliefs: Indigenous Peoples of South America, Central America, and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); Performing the Caribbean Experience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).
14. Philip V. Bohlman, ed., The Cambridge History of World Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), i.
15. A first-rate philosophical exploration is Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).
16. “Mongols Howling, Latins Barking: Voice and Song in Early Musical Encounters in Precolonial Eurasia,” workshop flyer, December 2, 2013. See also Jason Stoessel, “Voice and Song in Early Encounters between Latins, Mongols, and Persians, c.1250–c.1350,” in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project, ed. Reinhard Strohm (Abingdon: Rout­ledge, forthcoming).