Whose Global Musicology?

This piece is dedicated to Alexandra Elbakyan. Fight on!

After listening to a stunning, galvanizing performance by Daniel K. L. Chua in support of global musicology (keynote address to the 2019 ARLAC conference),¹ our research group, the Grupo de Musicología Histórica (GMH, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina), set up a series of seminar-like meetings to explore some of the texts discussing this concept. I must say that most of us were baffled. We had left the conference with the sense that an exciting new perspective, full of promise, was making its way within our discipline. But when we started digging, our general reaction was disappointment mixed with a small dose of resentment.

Being raised and educated in the Global South,² focusing our research on musical matters that were close by and easy to access (because we cannot afford connections to Global North scholarly resources) we had ALWAYS practiced a musicology that connected continents. You cannot study the Jesuit missions in Paraguay without relating them to their European generators. You cannot study tango without being conscious that its triumph in Buenos Aires was made possible by its success in Paris. In studying music of the Colonial period, you have to be conscious of the fact that local or regional schools (almost?) never enjoyed a sustained development (we can afford to be envious of the first, second, and third “Burgundian schools” of yore), because each generation felt constrained to import the newest technical tools and aesthetic outlook fashionable in Paris / Naples / New York. In most cases, this meant that successful musicians were themselves imported from Spain or Italy (later on, Leipzig or Liège). A few months ago, I was bedazzled and bemused to find out that my work was considered an outstanding example of global musicology by no less an authority than Oxford University Press.

On the other side, or rather in the opposite direction, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have made a dis-concerted effort to record the influence of Global South musics on the practices of the Global North. These advances have usually been tainted by Westerners’ love of exoticism. We may be talking here of Stravinsky’s tangos, of flamenco’s músicas de ida y vuelta, or, in my main field of Colonial music, the purported American or Afro-American origin of wild dances tamed by European courts: sarabande, chaconne, folía, etc. The input of tango and rumba has been acknowledged by Global Northerners; in contrast, the influence of Julián Carrillo or Alberto Ginastera on twentieth-century music is a loud absence in Northern musicology. Globalization of musicology has usually taken it for granted that non-Westerners are excellent naive providers of popular, rhythmic, spontaneous musics, Westerners are the brains that transform it into art. We in the Global South have often been complicit in this configuration; this is a heritage from colonization that we have not yet been able to shrug off completely.

Let us be forthright: not a single note of Beethoven’s Fifth would have been different if Manuel de Sumaya (another great composer) had not existed. But surely Sumaya’s Mexican polyphonies would have been different if the madrileño José de Torres had not composed his book of masses that quickly made its way to the Mexican choir stalls. Now, it is arguable that Beethoven would have composed differently without the expansive capitalist developments made possible by the “discovery” and exploitation of America (with the indispensable coerced labor of enslaved Africans), but it doesn’t seem conducive to engage with Beethoven in those terms. The remote political and economic origins of a given historical society help us little in understanding the music produced and consumed by/in that society: what’s important is the immediate context.

De-Colonial moves, moreover, are suspect. The great majority of them stem from scholars working in the Global North, starting with the socio-philosophical foundations of Imanuel Wallerstein, Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo (born in my own Argentinian province), and going on to the musicological work of émigré scholars. The only alternative known to me for a change of perspective that stems from the Global South is the idea of subaltern studies, born in India (some of its main proponents, however, have since made the move to the United States or Europe: Chakrabarty, Spivak). Unfortunately (?), such is the heterogeneity of global reality that the main tenets of this current are scarcely applicable to Latin America, which is, of course, my main concern.³ Some de-Colonial scholars take pride in their “border thinking,” made possible precisely because they are migrants. Of course, they are perfectly free to choose to live in the Global North (some have been pushed to do so because of forced exile), but their location gives them a Northern perspective. Living in the belly of the beast, as José Martí supposedly put it, and taking advantage of the economic benefits and intellectual clout afforded by great institutions, they share the perspective of Global Northerners.

Ramón Grosfoguel, a prominent member of the early de-colonialist community, puts it in a nutshell:

The entire academic system is organized for the co-optation of radical thinkers. It is a system that offers good salaries, grants privileges and compulsively leads to publishing in indexed journals of the Global North. By the time the intellectual opens his eyes, he is no longer radical: he now writes what needs to be written in order to be published, promoted and awarded. This decaffeinated decoloniality is the price to pay for a successful academic career.⁴

Accordingly, both émigré Latin Americans (I dare not speak of Africans or Asians) and native Northerners looking at global processes strike me as attempting to be morally superior. Our discipline, in their practice, needs to be better than old Eurocentric musicology, and we need to feel good about what we are doing. We should not contribute to global warming, we should be attentive to the voices of minorities, we should have a musicology that incorporates the Other. (If the reader perceives here an echo of anti-woke speeches, please go beyond it: I have no sympathy for such bigoted attacks.) Down in the Global South, we don’t have to worry about our influence on global warming (we just suffer the consequences); we are, of course, attentive to our own voice (we could certainly be more receptive to the minorities in our midst); the Other is us, so we incorporate it automatically.

I have myself been initiated into the discipline in the Global North. In the ten years I lived in the United States, I studied Global North subjects (mainly, the Italian madrigal, which I still love). Coming back home, it took me another ten years to understand that my research could be more fruitful if its object was closer to home. For one thing, I had no access to European sources and current bibliographies. For another, I could understand our musics from an angle that Northerners were unlikely to discover, a perspective that I would now appraise as far more global than any current theoretician can imagine. Examples: my research on the eighteenth-century opera composer Vicente Martín y Soler focused on his consciously projected image as a picturesque Spaniard in Naples, Venice, Vienna, London, and St. Petersburg. My research on the Hispanic villancico de negros (a most polemical object) attempted to coordinate linguistic, literary, historical, and musical processes from Spain, Africa, and Latin America. My current study on the villancico en jácara locates the repertoire in the ancient and present tradition of celebrating the outlaw; my latest paper links Spanish American seventeenth century villancicos with Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife and Ruben Blades’s Pedro Navaja.

My experience in the United States took place back in the 1970s, and if I were to undergo it now, it would probably go very differently. Sensitivity to race has made the US academic social environment pressure Latino students into studying “their” music, because they are branded as Latino. In contrast, several years after my student times at Chicago, Howard Brown (who had chaired the department) confessed to me that they had used me to fill their quota of Spanish-surnamed students (!!!). During my five years there I had never felt othered, nor did I perceive one classmate being treated as a token African American (such was my feeling of integration that it never occurred to me to ask him!).

Before closing, I would like to comment on an example of a global perspective issuing from Latin America. José Manuel Izquierdo, in a vehement diatribe against “auto exoticism” on our part,⁵ points out that our music of the nineteenth century is centered around the church, and has been accordingly dismissed as non-modern, non-romantic, uninteresting. He goes on to suggest that the ideological blinkers that exclude this music from the canon of the “historical” should be removed, not only for Latin America, but also from mainstream music history. Beethoven will not change, but his place in culture will. This, however, will not happen, because Global North readers do not usually read Global South musicology. I have posted at Academia.edu two similar articles on a mainstream topic, Corelli: one in English,⁶ the other in Spanish.⁷ At last count, the first version (tailored for European and US scholars) had been seen 335 times; the second (made for Spanish and Latin American readers), 954 times.

It is praiseworthy that people anywhere study music from any elsewhere; it is great that they study the connections between all those everywheres. It is patronizing that people in places of power coach those away from centers of power (whom they seldom read) on methods and perspectives that Southern scholars have developed by and for themselves because of the very nature of their objects and their situations.

1. Published in Spanish as Daniel K. L. Chua, “Explorando los fundamentos de una musicología global: Conferencia inaugural del IV Congreso de ARLAC/IMS, Buenos Aires, 5 de noviembre de 2019,” trans. Malena Kuss, Revista Musical Chilena 76, no. 237 (2022): 213–22. Much of its contents has been developed to unforeseen (for me) magnitudes in Chua’s book with Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (New York: Zone Books, 2021).
2. I make no apologies for my use of this expression and the complementary Global North. They are difficult to define and delimit, but, for the most part, we all know what we are talking about.
3. I have discussed some limits of the application of subaltern theory to Latin American musics in Leonardo J. Waisman, “Subalternidad en músicas novohispanas: dos fragmentos,” in De Nueva España a México: el universo musical mexicano entre centenarios (1517–1917), ed. Javier Marín-López (Sevilla: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, 2020), 591–607. The book, a valiant effort, was unfairly criticized in a Global North journal.
4. Gonzalo Armúa and Lautaro Rivara, “Ramón Grosfoguel: ‘La decolonialidad es un proyecto político de transformación del mundo, no una moda académica,’” El Ciudadano. https://www.elciudadano.com/entrevistas/la-decolonialidad. I must admit, though, that Grosfoguel teaches at UC Berkeley.
5. José Manuel Izquierdo König, “Auto-exotismos, la musicología latinoamericana y el problema de la relevancia historiográfica (con un apéndice sobre música sacra y el siglo XIX),” Resonancias 20, no. 38 (2016): 95–116.
6. Leonardo J. Waisman, “Arcadia meets Utopia: Corelli in the South-American Wilderness,” in Arcangelo Corelli fra mito e realtà storica: Nuove prospettive d’indagine musicologica e interdisciplinare nel 350° anniversario della nascita, ed. Gregory Barnett, Antonella D’Ovidio, and Stefano La Via (Florencia: Leo Olschki, 2007), 2:633–65. https://www.academia.edu/3814683.
7. Leonardo J. Waisman, “Corelli entre los indios, o Utopia deconstruye Arcadia,” in Concierto barroco: Estudios sobre música, dramaturgia e historia cultural, ed. Juan José Carreras and Miguel Ángel Marín (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2004), 227–54 and 377–88. https://www.academia.edu/3814665.