Ethnomusicology Or Transcultural Musicology?
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EDITED BY FRANCESCO GIANNATTASIO GIOVANNI GIURIATI Perspectives on a 21st Century Comparative Musicology: Ethnomusicology or Transcultural Musicology? stems from the ‘International Seminars in Ethnomusicology’ that F. Giannattasio conceived within the activities of the Intercultural Institute for Comparative Music Studies of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, devoted st to a wide reflection on aims, methods and objects of study of PERSPECTIVES ON A 21 CENTURY ethnomusicology in the light of the profound changes occurring in COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY: this field at the beginning of the 21st Century. It concerns a radical rethinking - at a theoretical and epistemological level - of the history of the discipline, due to the contemporary profound transformation ETHNOMUSICOLOGY OR of the object of study. The volume has the ambition of offering new (EDS) GIURIATI GIOVANNI FRANCESCO GIANNATTASIO views on what a comparative musicology could do in its enquiry into TRANSCULTURAL MUSICOLOGY? contemporary music making processes. Scholars coming from different parts of the world, and from different fields of study such as W. Welsch, L.-Ch. Koch, T. Rice, S. Feld, J. Guilbault, J-L. Amselle, contributed to the volume presenting theoretical approaches as an implicit or explicit reaction to the CENTURY theoretical issues presented by Giannattasio. Together with them, st some Italian scholars (G. Giuriati, C. Rizzoni, G. Vacca, R. Di Mauro, M. Agamennone, F. Gervasi) present their thoughts drawn from research in two contexts identified as case studies: the area of BOOK IM05 Naples and its surroundings, and the Salento. MUSICOLOGY: COMPARATIVE ETHNOMUSICOLOGY OR PERSPECTIVES ON A 21 PERSPECTIVES MUSICALI ioni ez TRANSCULTURAL MUSICOLOGY? rs inte 30,00 € BOOK IM 05 Intersezioni Musicali BOOK IM05 Series editor: Giovanni Giuriati Editorial board: Francesco Giannattasio, Maurizio Agamennone, Vito Di Bernardi, Serena Facci Editing: Claudio Rizzoni Translation: Ruggero Bianchin (chapter 10), David Kerr (chapters 12-15), David J. Graham (revision of chapter 1) On the front cover: details of Paolo Angeli prepared Sardinian guitar (photo: Nanni Angeli) ©2017 NOTA – Valter Colle / Udine nota p.o.box 187 33100 Udine tel./fax (+39) 0432 582001 [email protected] www.nota.it Graphic design & PDF authoring Giuliano Michelini - luckyassociates.com Print Luce - Udine ISBN 9788861631502 EDITED BY FRANCESCO GIANNATTASIO GIOVANNI GIURIATI PERSPECTIVES ON A 21st CENTURY COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY: ETHNOMUSICOLOGY OR TRANSCULTURAL MUSICOLOGY? Contents Foreword . Pag . 6 Francesco Giannattasio Perspectives on a 21st Century Comparative Musicology: an Introduction . Pag . 10 Wolfgang Welsch Transculturality - the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today . Pag . 30 Timothy Rice Toward a Theory-driven Comparative Musicology . Pag . 50 Lars-Christian Koch Tonsinn und Musik Carl Stumpf’s Discourse on the Mind as a Condition for the Development of Ethnomusicology and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel’s Proposals for Music-psychological Examination . Pag . 66 Steven Feld On Post-Ethnomusicology Alternatives: Acoustemology . Pag . 82 Jocelyne Guilbault The Politics of Musical Bonding New Prospects for Cosmopolitan Music Studies . Pag . 100 Jean-Loup Amselle From Métissage to the Connection between Cultures . Pag . 126 Giovanni Giuriati Some Reflections on a new Perspective in Transcultural Musicology: the Area of Naples as a Case Study . Pag . 136 4 PERSPECTIVES ON A 21ST CENTURY COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY ETHNOMUSICOLOGY OR TRANSCULTURAL MUSICOLOGY? Giovanni Giuriati The Music for the Festa dei Gigli in Nola . Pag . 146 Claudio Rizzoni Tradition and Reframing Processes in the Madonna dell’Arco Ritual Musical Practices in Naples . Pag . 158 Giovanni Vacca Songs and the City Itinerant Musicians as Living ‘Song Libraries’ at the Beginning of the 20th Century in Naples: the ‘Posteggiatori’ . Pag . 176 Raffaele Di Mauro Identity Construction and Transcultural Vocation in Neapolitan Song: a ‘Living Music’ from the Past? . Pag . 186 Maurizio Agamennone Current Research in the Salentine Area: an Introduction . Pag . 222 Maurizio Agamennone An Historical Perspective on Ethnomusicological Enquiry: Studies in the Salento . Pag . 226 Flavia Gervasi Rhetoric of Identity and Distinctiveness: Relations between Aesthetic Criteria and the Success of Salentine Musicians in the Contemporary Folk Revival . Pag . 248 Notes on Contributors . Pag . 272 5 Theorizing on multipart music making Steven Feld On Post-Ethnomusicology Alternatives: Acoustemology 82 PERSPECTIVES ON A 21ST CENTURY COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY ETHNOMUSICOLOGY OR TRANSCULTURAL MUSICOLOGY? There seems to no longer be a need for traditional ethnomusicological research and there is a risk that our field of study will be considered archaic and obsolete. For this reason, in this new global soundscape in which we are immersed, it is becoming in- creasingly urgent to make an assessment on ethnomusicology, its status, fields, tasks and methods of investigation. This review is so crucial that it could call into question the very name of our field of study.1 The provocative and poignant introductory paper by Francesco Giannatta- sio (2013) that animated the conferences leading to this volume questioned a number of very troubling tendencies in mainstream ethnomusicology. These include a proliferation of new essentialisms and reifications of ‘ethnicity’, ‘tra- dition,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘the meta-culture of diversity’. How could it be that a discipline that takes as its object musical difference, could become so com- plicit in the banalization of musical difference? The invitation to the 2014 seminar underscored the seriousness of this critique and joined convergent concerns raised by Giovanni Giuriati (2010) that asked participants to engage this ‘[…] urgent necessity […] to set free ethnomusicology from the weight of its founding myths and from an unacceptable stagnancy’. This is a conversa- tion that I am happy to join, for it is of longtime concern. Coming of age in the radical 1960s, I never liked the term ‘ethnomusicology.’ Its 1950s vintage felt terribly burdened by the legacy of colonialism and the cold war. ‘Ethnomusicology’ (even without the original and more problematic hyphen) immediately signaled to me the music of the Other. This missed out on the musical energy and ethos that compelled me in the moment of my own initiation to multiple musical realities, a politicized wave of worldwide exper- imental folk, rock, jazz, electro-acoustics, improvisation, and avant-gardism. At a time when one could embrace the musical cosmopolitanism of so many contemporary experimental fusions, as well as engage in research in remote and distant places that questioned the Eurocentric construction of ‘music,’ why follow the conservative path, policing the borders of what musics are to be deemed ‘traditional,’ or ‘popular,’ or ‘art,’ or ‘Western,’ or ‘non-Western?’ In 1972 I had a first chance to apply my 1960s musical and political radical- ization to the concept of ‘ethnomusicology’ and the alternatives proposed by my professor, Alan Merriam, in his book The Anthropology of Music (1964). The assigned paper I wrote for his graduate theory seminar began with this sentence: ‘What about an anthropology of sound?’ For the next twenty years, into the early 1990s, I developed answers to this question, particularly through empirical studies in rainforest Papua New 1 See Giannattasio, in this volume, p . 11 . 83 Guinea, (cf., e.g. Feld 2012) and through scrutiny of the emergence of the ‘world music’ genre of global pop (cf., e.g., Feld 1995). The anthropology of sound idea continually offered zones of critical response to what I perceived as increasing limitations of the dominant anthropology of music paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s: Alan Merriam’s theorization of ‘music in culture’ (1964) and John Blacking’s theorization of ‘humanly organized sound’ (1973). Central to that critique, the anthropology of sound idea argued for an expanded terrain when engaging global musical diversity. That expansion acknowledged the critical importance of four areas typically left out, or, when included, un-theorized or under-theorized, at programmatic conjunctions of musicology and anthropology. These domains were (1) language, poetics, and voice; (2) species beyond the human; (3) acoustic environments; (4) techno- logical mediation and circulation. While the idea of an anthropology of sound was meant to help decolonize ethnomusicology’s disciplinary paradigms, the presence of ‘anthropology’ still made it too human-centric; the prepositional ‘of’ marked too much dis- tance and separation, and the nominal ‘sound’ seemingly made it more about propagation than perception, more about structure than process. Other intel- lectual equipment was needed to address the sounding worlds of indigenous and emergent global geographies of difference across the divides of species and materials. Since the early 1990s I have tried to further develop some of this intellectual equipment through the notion of ‘acoustemology,’ and it is to this idea that I now turn. Acoustemology imagines an alternative to the classic triad of music in culture, music and culture, music as culture. It tries to imagine an alternative to the musicology vs. anthropology debates that have dominated each ethnomusi- cological identity crisis for the last fifty years. It tries to think with and -be yond ethnomusicology’s best recent theorizations of plural ontologies of mu- sic (e.g., Bohlman 1999), and to add a critical posthuman and posthumanist