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Alejo Carpentier's Unpublished Text ACADEMIC ARTICLES READING MUSIC BACKWARDS: ALEJO CARPENTIER’S UNPUBLISHED TEXT ‘LOS ORÍGENES DE LA MÚSICA Y LA MÚSICA PRIMITIVA’ Katia M. Chornik Open University Abstract This article examines Alejo Carpentier’s unpublished and undated text ‘Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva’ (The Origins of Music and Primitive Music). This important but hitherto unknown document appears to be the most important antecedent for the musicological discussions narrated in Carpentier’s groundbreaking novel Los pasos perdidos (1953), an account of a musicologist-composer who travels into the South American jungle to collect musical instruments and discovers the origin of music among South American so-called primitives. In ‘Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva’, Carpentier proposes that speech and music emerged simultaneously, seeking the origin of music in rhythm. He incorporates the paradigm of cultural evolution, making extensive use of the nineteenth- century analogy between prehistoric humanity and current-day ‘primitives’. Carpentier also adheres to some of the concepts and methods of comparative musicology – which made use of evolutionary models – stressing the potential of primeval music for Western researchers and composers. The present study frames ‘Los orígenes de la música’ in the context of evolutionary theory, drawing on a range of anthropological and musicological accounts. It traces how Carpentier assimilates, resists, distorts and challenges theories concerning primeval music by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Richard Wallaschek, Jules Combarieu and Fernando Ortiz, among others. The article concludes with a brief examination of the discussions of primeval music and ethnomusicological research in Los pasos perdidos. Keywords: primeval music, Darwin, evolutionism, comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, Los pasos perdidos International Journal of Cuban Studies 3.1 Spring 2011 IJCS3-1 10 28/02/2011 08:46 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S ‘LOS ORÍGENES DE LA MÚSICA’ 11 ‘Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva’ is an undated 19-page typescript which I discovered at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí in Havana in 2008. My own transcript and English translation of the entire text are found in the Appendix of my doctoral thesis (Chornik 2011: 122–36). I believe Carpentier wrote ‘Los orígenes de la música’ around 1943, as he mentions his recent ethnomusicological research in Haiti which took place in that year.1 The text seems to be a draft for a talk or a radio programme script, as it has a number of incomplete sentences and extension marks suggesting sections where Carpentier might have improvised or added further comments. There are several notes to show instruments and play excerpts of records. The labels of the latter are curious – ‘Disco 1’ followed by ‘Disco I’ and ‘Disco G’ – which suggests Carpentier may have taken his musical examples from a talk he had delivered somewhere else. ‘Los orígenes de la música’ appears to be the most important antecedent of the debates on primeval music narrated in his groundbreaking novel Los pasos perdidos (1953), an account of a musicologist-composer who travels into the South American jungle to collect rare musical instruments and ends up discovering the origin of music.2 ‘Los orígenes de la música’ precedes two other important works of Carpentier, the novel El reino de este mundo (1949) which was fundamental to his conceptualisation of ‘lo real maravilloso’ and also came after his ethnological work in Haiti, and the treaty of Cuban musical history La música en Cuba (1946) which discusses certain aspects of contemporary ‘primitive’ culture that are addressed in ‘Los orígenes de la música’ (for instance the ritual of bajar el santo). It is possible that the argument on prehistoric music in the unpublished text was initially intended to form part of La música en Cuba.3 In ‘Los orígenes de la música’, Carpentier associates prehistoric humankind with current-day non-Western ‘primitive’ people, employing the same equation for musical instruments. He refers to several European precursors of modern ethnomusicology, Erich von Hornbostel, Curt Sachs and Jules Combarieu. He does not mention by name Richard Wallaschek, author of the influential book Primitive Music (1893). It is difficult to believe that Carpentier did not encounter this study, for his own discussion contains a striking affinity of ideas about the origin of music in rhythmical impulse, the simultaneous emergence of speech and music, the role of onomatopoeia, and a similar objection to the Darwinian explanation about the courtship function of prehistoric music. Prior to my examination of ‘Los orígenes de la música’, I shall summarise the most relevant nineteenth- and early twentieth-century research on the origins of music that relate to Carpentier’s argument. IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals cubanstudies.plutojournals.org IJCS3-1 11 28/02/2011 08:46 12 ACADEMIC ARTICle – KATIA M. CHORNIK European and Latin American Research on Primeval Music Herbert Spencer, best known as the main theorist of Social Darwinism, proposes in his essay ‘On the Origin and Function of Music’ that enhanced speech provided the foundation from which prehistoric music developed. Spencer arrives at this reasoning after noting that sounds span a greater tonal range and volume when speech becomes emotional (Spencer 1858 [1857]: 368). Given his evolutionary view of society, he equates ‘savage’ people of his present time with one of the past historical stages of a more developed culture, suggesting that the development of a society entails an enhancement of language: the dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous; and in virtue of their monotony are much more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of civilized races. […] we see that the earliest vocal music of which we have any account differed much less from emotional speech than does the vocal music of our days. (pp. 371–2) Darwin, in The Descent of Man, opposes Spencer’s explanation of the relationship between language and music, and attributes musical qualities to the sounds produced by animals. He concludes that ancestral music preceded speech and had a courtship function, as musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling, and are consequently used instinctively, or through association, when strong emotions are expressed in speech. (Darwin 2004 [1871]: 638–9) In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin establishes close links between the actions and feelings of man and animals. He expands on the idea of ‘animal music’: That animals utter musical notes is familiar to every one, as we may daily hear in the singing of birds. It is a more remarkable fact that an ape, one of the Gibbons, produces an exact octave of musical sounds, ascending and descending the scale by half-tones. (Darwin 2009 [1872]: 87) Spencer’s and Darwin’s ideas were particularly important for subsequent theories on the origins of music. Alexander Rehding (2000) notes that the German scholars who founded modern musicology around the turn of the twentieth century (Adler, Hanslick, Jadassohn and Stumpf, among others) followed an ideology that invested special significance in the point of departure (Ursprung- sphilosophie). For him, all the different approaches to the question of music’s origins converged in two points: International Journal of Cuban Studies 3.1 Spring 2011 IJCS3-1 12 28/02/2011 08:46 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S ‘LOS ORÍGENES DE LA MÚSICA’ 13 First, no matter what kind of evidence each group of musicologists had at its disposal, they all looked for the principle that had brought music to life before its history proper began. And second, the belief that the origins of music would reveal its essence is common to all; all shared the resonances of purity, simplicity, authenticity, and stability. (p. 379) Among the most influential schools of thought around the turn of the twentieth century was comparative musicology. Comparatists aimed to outline the relationships between world music systems using evolutionary models and genetic classification in biology. They grouped cultural traits into geographical circles of distribution representing their evolutionary stages of development. Comparative musicologists did little fieldwork and often based their studies on recordings made by explorers. This style of research became known as armchair ethnomusicology (Rice 2001). Comparatists saw the potential of pure primeval expression for Western art music, as Bohlman explains: Their definitions of comparative musicology stressed this value and these influences, and the praxis of research was often designed so that the musical capital produced through investment in non-Western musics transferred directly to the store of European musical thought. (Bohlman 1992: 120) Among the most influential comparatists was Richard Wallaschek, who embraced the notion of cultural evolution yet dismissed Darwin’s explanation that human music and its accompanying feelings of pleasure developed from courtship sounds in our progenitors (Wallaschek 1893: 242–8). He also opposed an unnamed previous theory that proposed that human music should be understood as the direct outcome of birdsong (p. 248). Arguably, Wallaschek could be referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential Essay on the Origin of Languages, in which
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