As Martin Clayton suggests, the putative relationship between translation and transcription in Fox Strangways is problematical:

As Clayton partially concedes slightly later on, however, it is possible to view transcription as translation, not simply because of their range of metaphoric similarities, discussed below, but also because of the very subjective nature of the two and the way in which that subjectivity is resisted. Interestingly, he does remark that Fox Strangways’s transcription could be seen as

As this book attempts to show, the representation of non-Western music in nineteenthcentury Britain was influenced by a wide array of contemporary discourses and ideologies, including theories of noble simplicity, monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, developmentalism, evolutionism, individualism, and universalism. While among historians of ethnomusicology it is generally recognized that these methods of interpreting non-Western musical cultures informed modes of representation in travel literature and more academic literature of the period, it is not generally acknowledged that the figures discussed in this book—especially Myers and Fox Strangways—were more than mere antecedents in a progression toward modern ethnomusicology. As is strongly suggested in this book, however, Myers and Fox Strangways do appear to conform to a more modern definition of ethnomusicology than is generally considered permissible, especially given the fact that the term “ethnomusicology” derived from Jaap Kunst’s Musicologica: a Study of the Nature of Ethno-musicology, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities (1950).

As this epilogue shows, the use of the term “ethnomusicology” in relation to work carried out before the 1950s is not uniformly agreed upon, despite its putative relevance as a term of description, and many of the figures and ideas explored in this book could, consequently, be said to anticipate later ethnomusicological discourse. The reason for this is, on a certain level, rather simple. Many of the issues that animate the imaginations behind nineteenth-century representations of non-Western music are, arguably, more or less the same as those of the 1950s and later. Indeed, the now heavily “problematizing” discourse of ethnomusicology and the cultural study of music is nothing new. This epilogue is intended to examine more discipline-specific studies that form the basis of this book by exploring these problematizing issues through the history of ethnomusicology and its historical forebears, by taking the reader back through time from today’s largely interdisciplinary study of ethnomusicology and the cultural study of music through the early founding of ethnomusicology and its predecessor in comparative musicology.

The same methodological features one observes in anthropological literature about music is found in work of a strictly musicological kind, principally because the same material is being used in both types of literature at roughly the same time. Unsurprisingly, early general histories of the period from the 1820s rely heavily on travel literature, and as such, evince all the characteristic ideologies of the genre. Among the earliest nineteenth-century histories of music to include reference to non-Western music is William Stafford’s A History of Music (1830). As Joep Bor says, Stafford’s book is remarkable in devoting almost a third “to the music of the ancients and non-Western nations: Egypt, India, China, Persia and Turkey, the Arab world, the Hebrews, the Burmese, Siamese and Singalese, Africa, America and Greece.” The remainder explores Continental and English music in roughly equal amounts, a feature peculiar to Stafford’s book. Generally speaking, however, non-Western music registers very little in broad histories of music even up to the 1920s, making Stafford’s book therefore doubly unusual. In Hogarth’s Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (1835), the issue is dispatched in the Preface and first several pages of chapter 1. In later works it is seldom covered even to this extent, as music histories usually begin with reference to the Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian roots of Western music, brief contemplations on the origins of music, or both. Rockstro’s A General History of Music from the Infancy of the Greek Drama to the Present Period (1886) is typical in disregarding music out of a Western context, and the same could be said of H. G. Bonavia Hunt’s A Concise History of Music from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time (1878), produced under the aegis of the Cambridge School and College Text Books series. Later writers continue this trend. Stanford and Forsyth’s A History of Music (1916) opens with a first chapter covering non-Western music under the title “The Origins of Music,” but this is separated out from the actual opening part of the book (“Part 1, The Ancient Period To 900 A.D.”), which begins with chapter 2.

The universalizing, yet individualizing, tendencies that evolved out of Myers’s synthesis of evolutionism and individual differences culminate in the work of A. H. Fox Strangways, and in particular his magnum opus The Music of Hindostan (1914). Indeed, there is evidence that the two exchanged ideas and offered one another advice. Where Myers, however, derived his sense of individualizing universalism principally from the intellectual landscape of anthropology and psychology, Fox Strangways drew upon the fertile and largely unploughed field of translation. Where this is most evident is in Fox Strangways’s approach to transcription.

When Martin Clayton discusses Fox Strangways’s The Music of Hindostan he shows considerable disquiet over the transcriptions for which there are phonograph recordings. The source of disagreement is at times somewhat technical, concerning incorrect placement of beats and barlines, wrongly situated pitches, and so forth. At other times the criticisms are more broadly systemic. On the one hand, he refers to problems that are essentially objective—manifestly wrong notes, rhythms, and the like—and on the other hand, he cites interpretational problems that clearly exceed this kind of consideration. More important, however, Clayton delves into the notion of subjectivity where it is found to impinge on the technical (or perhaps more objective) data of transcription. Fox Strangways’s illustration of a “Panjabi ghazal” is a case in point, in which the transcription derives “from the subjectivity of transcription as well as the problems resulting from insufficiently intensive fieldwork.”

Clayton does not stop at illuminating difference between the actuality that period phonograph recordings present and the transcriptions that Fox Strangways provides in conjunction with them. He also debates the origin of what he sees as his frequently subjective interpretations, and here proposes a number of reasons for the form of Fox Strangways’s transcriptions. In instances where Fox Strangways could not identify meter, for example, as in a particular lullaby, he imposes meter nonetheless—albeit compromised by expression indications such as fermatas or rallentando signs—because, in his typical Edwardian way, he could not imagine song without meter, or felt his readership could not. Clayton suggests that this may be due to the possibility that “the invention of metre was a strategy for assigning higher status to a piece.”

Among the earliest learned societies, both in Britain and abroad, there is evidence of an anthropological interest in music of non-Western cultures from the 1780s. William Jones, renowned scholar of Indian languages, literature, and philosophy, supreme court judge in Bengal from 1783 and founder of The Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, published Francis Fowke’s “On the Vina or Indian Lyre” in the first issue of the society’s Asiatick Researches in 1788. Not long afterward, he published his own work, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” in the third issue of the same journal in 1792. Gerry Farrell, in his reading of Kejariwal’s important study of the society, suggests that Jones effectively saved Indian music from oblivion, and that part of this salvage process was enabled by the professionalization that his society had begun to undergo. As Richard Drayton writes, “by the 1780s British India began to sustain its own centres of intellectual life. William Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1784, to encourage enquiry into ‘the History, Civil, and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia.’ “

From a musical standpoint, this is recognized as representing the very first steps in the history of British ethnomusicology. Bor, for example, writes of Fowke’s treatise as “highly accurate,” and Harold Powers describes Jones’s essay as bringing Indian music “to the attention of scholars.” Indeed from the time of Jones’s Asiatick Researches, non-Western music entered the increasingly professionalized world of academic anthropological scholarship. Inevitably this process was aided by a proliferation in domestic learned societies with anthropological interests, such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783), the Linnaean Society of London (1788), the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1799), the Geological Society of London (1807), the Royal Asiatic Society (1823), and the Royal Geographical Society (1830). From the 1840s anthropological societies emerged as independent entities, beginning with the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and the Ethnological Society of London (both 1843), and later the Anthropological Society of London (1865).

Myers’s Psychological Writings

Bartlett, with an air of palpable disappointment, writes that Myers’s scientific writing was largely completed by the time he was forty—roughly halfway through his career. He divides what he calls Myers’s “scientific” writings into three clear categories: (1) expository; (2) ethnological with an experimental bias; and (3) strictly experimental. Although he does not provide copious examples of each category, it is clear that he perceives certain works as falling within these three categories quite distinctly. A Text-Book of Experimental Psychology is an example of expository writing; the musicological and anthropological work from 1896 to 1913 is ethnological; and Myers’s work on the direction of sound falls into the strictly experimental category. Bartlett suggests that Myers did his best work early in his career and, generally speaking, in the realm of expository writing. He hails the Text-Book, for instance, but describes the ethnomusicological writings as “fugitive pieces, full of interest, full of promise, but never fully developed.” Myers’s experimental work is given similar treatment. It is “elegant” and “well controlled, and beautifully described,” yet almost certainly wrong in its theoretical interpretation. Of course, as useful as Bartlett’s categories are, they do not present Myers’s work without transparent prejudice, and neither do they take into account the multidisciplinary nature of Myers’s thinking. They also exclude the considerable arena of popular psychology, in which Myers clearly spoke with ease and accessibility, and confine the sizable body of ethnomusicological writings to an ethnological category without any reference to their historiographical or aesthetic import. In fact, although it is true that certain types of Myers’s writings more or less stopped around his middle age, he continued to develop and expand his ideas right up to the time of his death. So far from being effectively superannuated at forty, as Bartlett would have us believe, Myers’s work leavened over time into something of which Bartlett simply disapproved. The wholesale dismissal of Myers’s later writings attests to this, and it distorts the truly contributive nature of his output.

Many of the issues that characterize general music histories are also found in general histories of national music: the “ancient or modern” confusion; the aesthetically deprecating tone; the inability to conceptualize systemic relationships with Western music; and most important, perhaps, the use of racist language as a vehicle for establishing ontological superiority. In this genre, as in general music histories, non-Western music continues to be used as a metaphor for aesthetic and moral inferiority, with Western music lurking in the Western imperial background as the gold standard for all national music. Two figures immediately come to mind in this genre, Henry Chorley (1808–72), dealt with here, and Carl Engel (1818–82), dealt with in the next chapter.

Chorley and the Anthropological Background

Apart from Dauney’s rather advanced proposals, and other earlier papers already discussed, it was not until the late 1860s, in fact, that music was elevated to a topic of discussion within academic anthropological literature. It was with Chorley’s very brief article “Music in Race” (1869) in the Anthropological Review, as well as his slightly later and expanded companion piece (untitled) in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1870–71), that this occurred. Surprisingly, perhaps, Chorley’s earlier article does not discuss race in relation to non-Western peoples, but in relation to Wagner’s anti-Semitic tract, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (1850, rev. 1869), and some works written about it, the later article being more generally expansive in its coverage. Chorley begins “Music in Race” by highlighting the theoretical centrality of race within British anthropology, and suggesting that the fierce debate that Wagner’s book has engendered in Germany demands attention overseas. Needless to say, the attention Chorley gives Wagner’s tract is entirely negative, not simply because of its overt racism, but because Wagner simply refuses to substantiate his views:

There is documentation in English of the music and musical activities of non- Western peoples from as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. Although most pre-nineteenth-century material is recorded by expatriates, travelers, and explorers, rather than by professional musicians, it nonetheless provides an extremely rich and historically important record of non-Western music. From the seventeenth century there are numerous examples of musical commentaries translated into English, as well as those written originally in English, such as Lionel Wafer’s A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699). Eighteenth-century descriptions are plentiful in both English and English translations, and by the end of that century, as a result of expanding Anglo-imperial interests, musical references became increasingly common in expatriate journals, and travel and explorational literature across the non-Western world. As we have seen in previous chapters, Indian music was a particularly prominent feature in late-century documentation, but the geographical range was expansive and covered almost all areas of the globe. Early descriptions, from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tend to be articulated in very brief, often disparate, commentaries, sometimes alongside music, as in Amédée Frézier’s A Voyage to the South-Sea, and along the Coasts of Chili and Peru (1717), Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese-Tartary (1738–41), J. F. G. De La Pérouse’s A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788 (1799), and John Barrow’s Travels in China (1806). Later documentation is often fuller and more generous, both in descriptive and notational content, and occasionally music is singled out for more special expansive investigation, as in T. Edward Bowdich’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (1819). Popular literature of this type continued to provide “raw” music-anthropological material well into the early part of the twentieth century. As anthropology emerged from the armchair, however, into a field-active, independent, and more fully evolved scientific discipline, the reliability of such descriptions was inevitably questioned institutionally, and the genre ceased to be the natural resource it had been over the previous decade.

Comparative Methodologies and Engel’s Histories of National Music

Carl Engel represents an altogether different view of national music. Unlike Chorley, who wrote from a more openly journalistic and populist standpoint, Engel was an organologist and musicologist, and considerably less tendentious. Perhaps the most significant scholar of non-Western organology and music of his age, he compiled an extensive musical instrument collection, most of which eventually went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. An exhibition of instruments was given in 1872 for which he compiled a catalogue, and two years later he produced the Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (1874). In addition to his research on musical instruments, he also published extensively on the topic of ancient and national music. The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864) was followed soon thereafter by An Introduction to the Study of National Music (1866) and the later compilation of Musical Times articles, The Literature of National Music (1879).

As he makes clear throughout his literature on national music, Engel does not subscribe to the prejudices that mark much of the musicological writings of the time. Indeed, Engel is unique in espousing a view of ancient and national music not largely preconditioned by Western aesthetic bias. For Engel the music of ancient civilizations and uncivilized modern nations provides a necessary window into the Western musical past:

As suggested earlier, Myers’s concentration on intervallic content in his ethnomusicological findings is a particularly noticeable feature of his work, because it is in the rhythmic content of the music that he suggests one finds a heightened complexity parallel to that of the harmonic (and ultimately polyphonic) content of European music. Nevertheless, it is from harmonic analysis that Myers is able to extrapolate theoretical underpinnings that explain the evolution of primitive music. The emphasis on intervallic analysis is also important in light of Myers’s theoretical and methodological conviction in individual differences. For the intervals, and their own individual differences, by cent (100 cents equals one equally tempered semitone) and succession within a tune, are significant, and in fact lead to a full-scale historiographical framework. In other words, by differentiating taxonomically the cent composition and successive position of intervals, Myers is able to situate primitive music in a historiographical projection in its own terms, and one ostensibly unrelated to parallel processes in European music. There is, for example, an equanimity in his evaluation of intervallic strength in primitive and European music. He identifies the pure fourth—or the naturally consonant interval—as the probable cause of a harmonic tendency, implicitly, in European music, but in primitive music it is not, because of the superaddition of intervals—or the accrescent model of evolution. So the development of primitive music and European music follow different evolutionary projections. This recognition is not dissimilar to Edward Bullough’s notion of “the morphology of the aesthetic consciousness,” upon which Myers is known to have based his understanding of individual differences in listening to tones and music. In fact, one could make a good case for Bullough’s taxonomy being transcribed into Myers’s intervallic analysis of primitive music, if one takes it, broadly speaking, as a metaphor for accrescent evolution, even in Myers’s adaptation of it. The importance of distance could, in this sense, take on a more concrete meaning than even Bullough could have imagined, in the sense that the importance of distance is intervallic as much as it is methodological. The importance of distance lies in establishing the strength of individual intervallic content, and its import in the accrescent rise of individual primitive musics.

From the late eighteenth century into the 1850s anthropology remained a somewhat unalloyed and disparate set of anthropological studies, including, among other things, nascent research in physical and linguistic anthropology, the ethnology of sexuality, and juridical and economic ethnography. From the 1850s to 1890s, however, anthropology began to be professionalized—principally through the hegemony of evolutionary theory—and the field defined itself in increasingly unified disciplinary, yet more theoretically problematizing, terms.

The earlier stage of anthropology is generally described as developmentalist. This revolves around Enlightenment concepts of cultural and human progression that are fundamentally rigid in their application across all peoples. Thus universal concepts of human growth, both personal and corporate or societal, were applied to non-Western cultures without any flexibility whatsoever. What applies to one culture applies uniformly to another, and it is only the circumstance of each culture that dictates their relative degree of human progression. According to Honigmann, the anthropologist Adam Ferguson, for example, “looked for pattern, law, or direction operating behind the particular events of history” through a three-stage approach—savagery, barbarism, and civil society— which he also used to relate contemporary primitive society to early mankind, a theory otherwise known as comparative anthropology. Ferguson’s approach, needless to say, provides very little for individual or cultural difference, and can—and does—provide for an entirely circular argument about the relationship of man and culture. Condorcet, likewise, maintains that people are “inspired and restricted in discovery and invention by traits already present in culture.” Stocking talks of the developmentalist hegemony as de rigueur, “with similar themes, elaborated in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antoine-Yves Goguet, Charles de Brosses, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, Cornelius de Pauw, Abbé Reynal, John Millar, Jean-Nicolas Demeunier, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and others—down through the culmination of the tradition in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind in 1795.