Rethinking Early Modern “Western Art Music”: A Global History Manifesto

I’ve long been struck by how historical musicologists working on what they call “Western Art Music” (in English, at least) consider the conceptual boundaries of their subject to be self-evident. There are conventions for studying, performing, and listening; a standardized or at least codified set of genres, instruments, and voice types; and a central canon of notated works, accumulated or recovered over the period of more than a millennium. Western Art Music (WAM) is understood to have specific geographic origins, but it is also believed to possess a capacity to transcend physical and social boundaries. Widespread belief in the transcendental potential of this art form has extended to aesthetic and philosophical domains, leading to a prevailing view of WAM’s “universality,” and the autonomy of the musical “work” and of “absolute music.”¹ The art form is thus implied to have immanent hegemonic potential. WAM is commonly imagined as unique, exceptional, essentialist—and yet somehow “universal,” accessible, and a form of cosmopolitan currency. In public discourse (and some scholarly discourse) a number of practitioners, critics, and patrons think of these conditions applying uniformly to more than a millennium of “Western” practice, reflecting in some ways what Lydia Goehr has termed “conceptual imperialism”: the tendency since circa 1800 to project and impose new ideals retrospectively onto historical understandings of the past, “to make it look as if musicians had always thought about their activities in modern terms.”² In the early modern period, however, notions of the object and function of “art music” were radically different from those we ascribe to that concept today, many of which are inherited largely intact from the Romantic era.

The idea and concept of WAM—grounded largely in the canon and the work-concept—is arguably inapplicable for repertory and practices from before circa 1800, and to stretch back that concept and apply it to early modern repertories and practices is both misleading and problematic. Just as ethnomusicologists seek to study musics in their contexts and relativistically, that is, on their own terms, it behooves the historical musicologist to approach earlier music practices according to their own time-bound concepts, and not anachronistically. As Matthew Gelbart has trenchantly observed,

we cannot unproblematically apply the idea of art music without distorting history before the end of the eighteenth century, [but] we cannot ignore it (and its shaping of judgments and historiography) after the turn of the nineteenth century in some circles, and after the mid-nineteenth century anywhere.³

A great deal of music lies beyond the boundaries of normativity we have constructed around our largely score-based understandings of WAM; we can immediately see the desires for an idea of normativity in such a label as “Common Practice.”⁴ Earlier repertories also challenge this notion: Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Kirsten Yri have used examples of contemporary and recent “early music” practice in Europe and North America to question whether “early music” can even be considered “Western Music,” given the deep dimensions of hybridity and cross-cultural exchanges inherent in medieval and early modern music.⁵

It is important to acknowledge the qualitative difference of European music in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—the first truly “global age,” in which tangible and sustained longitudinal networks of exchange first arose—especially with guidance from researchers in historical performance practice who look to a world of diversity before the rise of broad patterns toward standardization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶ The early modern period coincides with the first age of European overseas colonialism and the rise of the major seaborne empires to global dominance. From circa 1500 to 1800, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English forces seized land in the Americas, Africa, and Asia and established colonies and commercial outposts by force (but occasionally by treaty or coercion), as did various companies of Sweden, Denmark, and other nations. Significantly, they did so armed with a great deal of technology, forms of militarism, and musical instruments absorbed from Asia over the period of many centuries prior to the first “Columbian exchange”; the material trappings and accompaniments of early modern European hegemony did not arise ex nihilo. Even the Western European polities and nations that did not embark on overseas expansion were involved: they profited from investment or political and commercial alliances with those that did, effectively engaging in a form of “complicit colonialism.”⁷ The systematic extraction of natural resources in the Americas, underpinned by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, enabled Europeans to achieve their longstanding dream of entering the Asian market, with means that became gradually more aggressive. In the eastern Mediterranean and the borderlands of Eastern Europe, trade by Western European nations with their contiguous neighbors continued, especially the Ottoman Empire and Russia, but through the early modern period the terms of engagement changed dramatically, owing to the wealth and the territorial expansion accrued through overseas colonialism. Immense wealth flowed into Western Europe, causing unprecedented economic growth and triggering the start of a widening global wealth gap (what economic historians call “the Great Divergence”). These contexts had a profound impact on all aspects of musicking.

Thus WAM—if we can call it that—has been entangled with the rest of the world’s societies for the last half-millennium, to varying degrees, and in different shapes and forms. It cannot be studied in a vacuum; it must be situated in a global ontological framework of connected histories. Here a global history approach becomes indispensable. It is important for historical musicologists not to misunderstand what is meant by “global history of music,” thinking, for instance, that it means just studying musics of the past outside the traditional locus of Western Europe. The global history approach is not simply a matter of shifting the spotlight to a niche of unstudied musical practice somewhere in the world; rather, it is an interpretation and analysis of large-scale frameworks, connections, comparisons, and exchanges that explicate and elucidate a specific action or process. Another way to put it is to think of “global history” approaches to music as a form of macro-history: the study of large-scale patterns and processes that elucidate the actions and structures underpinning localized or shared practices. I would contend that historical musicologists and/or (ethno)musicologists cannot embark on new critical approaches to “world history” or “global history” without first taking stock of significant methodological developments and epistemological reflections in sister disciplines, especially the well-established field of global history. An assessment and critique of theoretical work that has been ongoing since the last decade is fundamental for the development of approaches that are appropriate for the disciplines of historical musicology and ethnomusicology.

Our colleagues in history and its subdisciplines have already made a significant distinction between approaches to “world history” and “global history”; the latter is a relatively recent disciplinary development, with many works since 2000 bearing this term and the Journal of Global History being established in 2006. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson have defined the two fields in the following way: “‘World history’ is the history of the various civilizations, especially their internal dynamics, and a comparison of them, whereas ‘global history’ is the history of contacts and interactions between these civilizations.”⁸ Economic historian Patrick O’Brien on the other hand, in his prolegomenon for the first issue of the Journal of Global History, sees global history as a history of either connections or comparisons, pointing out that historians tend to emphasize and exaggerate differences as well as points of conjuncture.⁹ Applying these ideas to music involves some methodological challenges, especially given the profound disciplinary shifts in the twentieth century that have arisen from a deliberate and self-conscious rejection of comparativism, and a move toward self-enclosed relativistic studies (i.e., the move from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology). A “world history” of music would attempt to make a comprehensive survey of the music traditions of all human societies, involving large-scale collaborative work; “global history,” on the other hand, could be seen as a critical approach to connections and patterns emerging from worldwide intercultural contact, existing in many forms.

Yet in spite of clear evidence of unprecedented levels of global movement and intensive cultural interactions through music for the past half millennium, WAM is still often seen as a culturally exclusive and elite art form, owing in large part to the ways in which it is represented in academic and public discourse, and in reverential and museum-like performances. It is often assumed, by default, to represent the pinnacle of indigenous Western European musical expression, and to embody a pan-European creative disposition. Joseph Kerman famously wrote in 1985 that “Western music is just too different from other musics, and its cultural contexts too different from other cultural contexts.”¹⁰ The still-dominant tendency toward circumscribed and autochthonous narratives of musical transition in Western Europe has long obscured the question of external cultural influence, except in the case of musical exoticism (embracing Orientalism). I locate this tendency within the ideas of essentialism, exceptionalism, and Eurocentrism in music historiography and discourse, and the continuing desire by musicol­ogists, ethnomusicologists, and independent scholars to see WAM as “exceptional” and “unique,” rather than thoroughly contingent on global processes and constitutive of a clear set of environmental, social, political, economic, intellectual, and religious circumstances.

Until relatively recently, the overwhelming trend in mainstream historical musicology and ethnomusicology has been to see the phenomenon of Western musical impact throughout the world as a unidirectional process of cultural imposition and coercion. There seems to be an implicit assumption underlying much discourse, which could be summarized as follows:

Western Art Music, which developed in a kind of cultural vacuum, wielded a powerful influence over the rest of the world’s musics, but at the same time remained untouched by the rest of the world—with the significant exception that it chose, selectively and on its own terms, to incorporate exotic elements through textual, visual, and sonic representations.

It is thus assigned an essentialized agency that sets it apart from all other forms of musical practice; it is seen as a force that can influence other cultures, but which is impervious to outside influence, except when it chooses actively to engage with its Others. Part of this is due to the longstanding scholarly focus, during much of the twentieth century, on WAM as a canon of “works” rather than cultural practice, and the “whitewashing” of much music historiography and discourse, which has occluded the presence of ethnic Others in the formation of what we now call WAM. It is time to look beneath works and focus on cultural practice, the global operations of Western Europe, and the reverse impact of the world on Western Europe.

So how did Europe’s global projects of colonialism, trade, and scientific enquiry impact on concepts and practices of music in early modern Europe, beneath the level of self-conscious exoticism? I say “beneath exoticism” rather than “beyond exoticism” (Timothy Taylor’s attractive formulation¹¹) because although the principal paradigm for studying European engagement with the rest of the world has been the analysis of musical exoticism, I would contend that this is the surface level of engagement: European works made predominantly by Europeans for Europeans. Of course, the underlying discourses of these works have entered into a feedback loop that reinforced attitudes and stereotypes and injustices; for us as musicologists, though, our overwhelming focus on cultural representation and its attendant discourses arguably diverts us from asking how deeper degrees of global interconnections and in many cases economic hegemony have shaped and influenced the making of WAM itself. What, precisely, are these substrata of external influences on musical practice? They include: hidden hybridities that have been so thoroughly naturalized and normalized—we could say indigenized—within European practice that their exotic origins are forgotten (in­struments, dances, genres, performance styles); wealth extracted systematically through colonialist exploitation that provided the bountiful economic support and patronage of large-scale musical activities in Western Europe; materials of music (such as woods and metals) that were incorporated permanently into the instrumentarium; and—through the beginnings of global music ethnography and criticism—the reflexive processes of oppositional self-definition that shaped European philosophical perspectives on music, especially concepts of “modernity” from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The encounter of Europeans with the world fundamentally changed the way Europeans thought about themselves, and their musics. All these phenomena were set in play through the unprecedented expansion of global movement and worldwide social interaction in the early modern period.

WAM is caught in a paradox: that of claims for uniqueness being pitted simultaneously against clear evidence of its internal (and internalized) hybridity. Many discourses surrounding WAM have included narratives of exceptionalism and essentialism, belief in its potential to attain cultural universality, and its capacity to effect ethical and moral improvement. Meanwhile, critics of WAM underscore its cultural contingency as an artistic product of the European elite, its association with hegemony and cultural imperialism, and the exclusionary nature of discourses about this music that are based on race, class, politics, and religion. Yet both sides of the debate contain fallacies, since WAM—in its practices and materials—is arguably a hybrid, global phenomenon, which emerged from the very conditions of worldwide exchange that gave rise to the concept of “the West” itself.¹² WAM was crafted and conditioned through the long-term absorption of ideas, practices, and materials across cultures throughout the world over the past half-millennium. The rise of this music to a position of prestige, and its gradual commodification, is intertwined with the rise of material wealth within early modern Europe, and the rise of material wealth in Europe can in turn be attributed to overseas colonial empires, and the complicit colonialism of internal European trade. While other disciplines in the humanities have already critiqued the idea of “the West” as a monolithic entity, musicology has only relatively recently begun to tackle the ontological issues that underpin the defining adjective of its very object of study.¹³ It is time to rethink ideas of “the West” in music history as unexceptional and thoroughly contingent on global patterns and trends. Let’s write global histories of musical practices within or derived from Europe that eschew or at least go beneath the concept of Western Art Music.

1. As Mina Yang pointed out, “classical music adherents often characterize the music of Bach and Beethoven as a universal language that transcends historical and geographical boundaries and stands apart from the complex realities of politics. Recent scholarship strongly challenges this assertion, divulging classical music’s complicity in nationalist and racialist projects of the last two hundred years, and argues that Western music’s ‘universal’ qualities have been invoked in the past to avow the superiority of European culture.” Mina Yang, “East Meets West in the Concert Hall: Asians and Classical Music in the Century of Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and Mul­ti­culturalism,” Asian Music 38, no. 1 (2007): 2.
2. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 245.
3. Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 274.
4. Susan McClary has aptly described the eighteenth-century emergence of tonality as a “historical anomaly, a myth of common practice . . ., [and] a blip on the screen that stands . . . in need of cultural analysis.” Susan Mc­Clary, “Editorial,” Eighteenth-Century Music 6, no. 1 (2009): 5.
5. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds,” Ethnomusicology 45, no. 1 (2001): 1–29; Kirsten Yri, “Thomas Binkley and the Studio der Frühen Musik: Challenging ‘the Myth of Westernness,’” Early Music 38, no. 2 (2010): 273–80.
6. On the idea of difference in musicology, see Olivia A. Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, eds., Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Reinhard Strohm, “The Dif­ference of Early European Music,” in Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows, ed. Fabrice Fitch and Jacobijn Kiel (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 380–87; Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
7. See Ulla Vuorela, “Colonial Complicity: The ‘Postcolonial’ in a Nordic Context,” in Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. Suvi Keskinnen, Salla Tuori, Sara Irni, and Diana Mulinari (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 48–74.
8. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19.
9. Patrick O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Re­storation of Global History,” Journal of Global History 1, no. 1 (2006): 3–39.
10. Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fon­ta­na, 1985), 174.
11. Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
12. Thanks to Nicholas Tochka for his input on the expression of this idea. Nicholas Cook writes: “‘Western music’ refers to a classical tradition now most strongly rooted in Asia, and a popular tradition that is in reality a global hybrid. . . . The concept of ‘the West’ . . . goes back no further than the late nineteenth century. . . . And as much as its antonym ‘non-Western,’ it [the word ‘Western’] is an essentializing term, suggesting a homogeneity that is largely spurious.” Nicholas Cook, “Western Music as World Music,” in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Philip V. Bohlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89. In my current work I am endeavoring to trace the internalized hybridity and heterogeneity of European music further back by several centuries.
13. Richard Taruskin sets out the geographical and cultural scope of The Oxford History of Western Music as follows: “Europe, joined in Volume 3 by America. (That is what we still casually mean by ‘the West,’ although the concept is undergoing sometimes curious change: a Soviet music magazine I once subscribed to gave news of the pianist Yevgeny Kissin’s ‘Western debut’—in Tokyo.).” Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:xiii. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, in their edited volume Western Music and Its Others, state that they decided “to refer to the longstanding concept of ‘Western music’ while distancing ourselves from those traditions of analysis which have taken such a category for granted, or which have privileged it, or both.” Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, “Introduction,” in Western Music and Its Others, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 47, fn. 1. For a more recent take on the idea of Western Music, see Cook, “Western Music as World Music.”