Nat Hist Music
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A NATURAL HISTORY OF MUSIC, PART ONE: INVENTIONS OF INSTRUMENTS, ORIGINS OF ORGANS Matthew Wayne Fox A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE November, 2004 © Copyright by Matthew Wayne Fox, 2004. All rights reserved. Abstract A Natural History of Music, Part One: Inventions of Instruments, Origins of Organs An interdisciplinary synthesis aimed at recovering the basic musicality of oral poetic performance traditions. First, a survey of ethnographic literature demonstrates that music (song, dance, instruments) is panhuman, pervading human cultures. The work then moves to specific times and places around the world to narrate a musically attuned natural history. Chapters One and Two contrast Aristotelian and Darwinian approaches to art, nature, and chance, discussing the evolution of hearing, voices, and vocal-auditory ecologies in the animal world. Chapter Three surveys the archaeology and early history of human musical practices, focusing attention on Paleolithic instruments, Neolithic dance cultures, and Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and other early Near Eastern musical cultures. Chapter Four reads the Homeric hymn to Hermes within the context of archaic and classical Greek music; its narrative is an origin myth for the Greek aoidos (“singer”). Ritual practices like male initiation and festival contests, the complex symbolism of the lyre, and calendrical concepts are discussed. Chapter Five reads musical turtle-trickster tales from Africa, North America, and South America. Folklore motif methods of story comparison are juxtaposed with iii context-sensitive readings of musical myths and practices in South America, including among Warao, Cuiva, Ayoreo and Guajiro Indians. Chapter Six considers Bronze Age Chinese musical culture, reading Shijing, Chuci, and other texts to hear the musicality animating ritual clan feasts, where large bell orchestras summoned ancestral spirits to partake of musical liturgies. Qi of Xia, son of Yu the flood hero, is interpreted as mythical founder of the Nine Songs tradition. Chapter Seven turns to the metallurgical and musical cultures of pre-Columbian Mexico. The aesthetics of micro-bells and the poetics of “flower-songs” are highlighted against the tragic backdrop of the Spanish Conquest. Chapter Eight examines the orality and musicality of ancient Vedic songs and ritual practices. In the Rgveda, Samaveda, Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka Upanisads, sound, voice, and song undergo apotheosis, especially in the ritual soma-pressing. Chapter Nine concludes with the musical culture of Nidu in the South Pacific. Here, as elsewhere, communal musical practices are crucial to constituting society, reciprocity, divine cult, and symbolic ecology. iv “Ain’t no reason to get excited,” the thief he kindly spoke, “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, But you and I we’ve been through that and this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. —Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower élhye¤h d¢ par°stv so‹ ka‹ §mo¤, xr∞ma dika¤otaton. —Mimnermus, fr. 8 v A Natural History of Music PART ONE Inventions of Instruments, Origins of Organs ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii Inventions of Instruments, Origins of Organs 1 OVERTUR/E/NTRANCE 9 ONE Technê, Phusis, and Tuchê: Art, Nature, and Chance 38 TWO From Sounds Unheard to Hearing Voices 51 THREE Music’s Archaeology and Early History 68 FOUR Hermes meets Tortoise at the Threshold 93 FIVE Intermezzo: Turtle the Trickster 152 SIX Qi 啟 brings Nine Songs ㈨歌 down 降 from Heaven ㆝ 183 SEVEN Contrapunto: Cast Copper Bells in Pre-Columbian West Mexico 249 EIGHT AUṂ, Vāc, Ātman-Brahman: The Creative Force of Sound, Voice, Breath 269 NINE Coda: Islands of Musical History 320 BIBLIOGRAPHY 333 vi Acknowledgements This dissertation took three years to write, and several more of initial research and preparation, during which time many people have acted as teachers, mentors, instigators, friends, patrons, and encouragers. Professor Richard Martin deserves my foremost gratitude for seeing me along the way from the very beginning of graduate school until now, remaining on my dissertation committee despite his residence on the opposite coast; for showing me the anthropology stacks in Firestone library—five floors below the Classics collection where we were expected to spend our time—and for encouraging me to peruse them liberally and often. It was because of his ethnographic prodding (and so that I, in my profound ignorance, could figure out what he was talking about) that I took the anthropology department graduate seminar with Professor Isabelle Clark-Deces (then Nabokov), whose unstinting kindness, support, and friendship since that time have been invaluable. Professor Andrew Ford was good- humored enough to allow himself to get roped into my general exams committee (literally site unseen), then staying on with me as my primary advisor. Without his keen and timely criticisms I would never have undertaken the needed complete revision after an initial draft. Only with that revision did my understanding and representations of musical practices become rooted in concrete realities of specific rituals, landscapes, materials. Professor Tom Hare has been an inexhaustible fount of encouragement ever since I met him upon his move to Princeton. Our occasional conversations about music, scripts, politics, culture, disciplinary boundaries, and other exotica are always vii refreshing and invigorating. (Professor Hare also has the dubious honor of being the only member of the Princeton faculty who, to my knowledge, has witnessed me “perform” in my other guise as cowboy folksinger.) From the time I first arrived at Princeton (and even before), Professor Robert Fagles has been more than a mentor, magisterial, always kind, unstinting in generosity of spirit and practical support. Not least, he arranged for an emergency grant to pay for the salvaging of a crashed computer hard-drive which contained my life’s work to date. Such a work of wide-ranging synthesis is perhaps only possible in certain historical periods of exceptional conditions for scholarship and intellectual endeavor. The twentieth-century was such a time, especially its last fifteen or twenty years. During this time, while I was growing up, many strands of thought and research were “coming together,” and I have done what I planned if this work furthers in whatever degree that (as I will dare to call it) humanistic-scientific synthesis still very much in the making. But without the countless works of dedicated, rigorous, meticulous, and trustworthy specialist and generalist scholars across the disciplinary spectrum that I have learned from, this work would not be. For this reason my greatest debts are registered at the end of this document, in the bibliography. Whatever virtues and merits may be in what follows, the real credit goes to the fact that I have been lucky enough to be heir to and contemporary with the many excellent souls whose labors, theories, and insights have collaborated to make this volume. Its demerits and faults, which I am sure are many, belong solely to me. The Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton provided the several years of graduate fellowship that enabled me to learn and conduct research in an viii environment always favorable and supportive in every possible way. Words are inadequate to express the humble gratitude that I feel for the generosity, institutional and personal, that afforded me such opportunities. Special recognition must be given to Carol Szymanski, Charlotte Zanidakis and Kathleen Allen for their daily assistance over the years with all the ins and outs of procedure, unwritten protocols, and paperwork. They were often there also with a needed nudge of motivation or boost of morale at times when the going got tough. I must thank Jim Clark and Tom Habinek for their liberal patronage and support of my work. Davíd Carrasco’s insightful graduate seminar on Mesoamerica ended with a trip to central Mexico, a profound trip that changed my cosmovisión (como se dice) and the way I experience the New World in general. The summoning up of the Museo Nacional at Chapultepec in the opening of this work is a memorial to that action- packed week in America’s original metropole. A coincidental encounter with Michael Nylan in Princeton’s Gest Library gave me the chance to field some questions on textual puzzles I was working on—and to put a kind face to her brilliant book on the Chinese literary canon that I was reading at the time. Similar chance conversations with Gregory Nagy have been profitable beyond appearances. Steven Lowenstam taught me to read Homer. His recent passing was a great loss for classical scholarship. Pietro Frassica, Dennis Feeney, Alessandro Barchiesi, Kathryn Chew, April Alliston and Robert Hollander have each in different ways given of themselves on my behalf. Simone and Ilaria Marchesi are true friends, without peers for hospitality and convivial good cheer. Both have given time and again, and taught me more than they know. ix Bob Tybee showed me that tricksters are real life personalities, who follow their instincts, scrape by, break out of army stockades, evade federal authorities, and still somehow wind up doing alright as they near retirement. My family keeps me sane, fed, healthy, rested, and grounded. They put up with my silences and, when my nose is not in a book, endure my ceaseless guitar plunking. With them I suffer losses, entertain hopes, and accept the ups and downs of here and now. These include my siblings and their spouses, Mindy, Steve, Libby, Mark, Holly, Carolyn, Tony, Tim; my parents Jim and Cathy, Dianna and Tim; our family of friends, Kevin, Alyson, Claudia, Wendy, Sally, Maya and Cassia; finally Kate, who knows me better than anyone and who has daily collaborated in this book’s gradual genesis. She’s been there from the beginning, when she gave me my first harmonica as a birthday present and, later, her humble old nylon-string guitar for me to learn on.