University of Illinois Press

Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago

Toward a Desegregated Music Historiography
Author(s): Leo Treitler
Source: Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 3-10
Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of
Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779374
Accessed: 19-10-2015 20:26 UTC
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TOWARD A DESEGREGATED MUSIC

HISTORIOGRAPHY
LEO TREITLER

The study of black-music history and the study of the history of the
Western European classical tradition (to be denoted hereafter as WECT)
have proceeded side by side, but for the most part independently. The
differences of subject matter, the rather fundamentally different slants on
the nature of the musical object and the context of its existence, and the
different motivations underlying the two kinds of study are responsible
for the very different historiographical frameworks within which they
have been pursued. In this paper I will focus on the historiography of the
WECT and consider how it might be affected by taking as a criterion that
it would embrace black-music history together with its traditional subject
matter.
Clearly there is not now a single historiography for the WECT that is
agreed upon by the constituency represented by the American Musicological Society. The historiographic paradigm that one could describe
some thirty years ago appeared under close analysis of its logic to be
quite circular, producing histories with premises that assumed conclusions and conclusions that repeatedly reaffirmed premises. And rather
than being driven by the force of logic and evidence, as was believed, it
appeared rather to model cultural self-images that are immanent in the
very idea of a WECT-a narration of the rise of Europe, of Western culture, of European music. It is history functioning as myth, providing criteria for the representation of music.
LEO TREITLER
is professor of music at the City University of New York-Graduate Center.
His publications treat the topics of European music in the Middle Ages, historiography and
epistemology of musical study, and critical studies of music from the Middle Ages to the
twentieth century. He is General Editor of a revised edition of W. Oliver Strunk's Source
Readings in Music History and is currently working on a book on the invention of a European
music culture.

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BMR Journal

Since its emergence in the early Middle Ages, "Europe" has been a historical concept, belonging to a political geography in which it divides the
world with Asia and Africa. It provides the geographical framework for
a "grandiloquent and boastful self awareness of the roles, duties, rank,
and privileges of an aristocracy" (Leyser 1992, 28).
From the first, "Europe" entailed the idea of "renovation," with its implied corollary, "decay." The label "Carolingian Renaissance," in use as
such since the early nineteenth century, is really a Carolingian self-image.
Alcuin, Charlemagne's minister of culture, one might call him, spoke of
the new Athens and deplored the Saracens' domination of Africa and
over most of Asia. "Europe" was conceived as the unifying idea of the
Empire, and Charlemagne as unifier of Europe.
The concept of "Europe" lies at the root of the designation of the historical epoch into which we divide European history-and especially the
histories of Western music and art. One way or the other these have the
historiographic concept of "Middle Ages" as their foundation stone. The
"Renaissance," after all, had invented a "Middle Ages" in order to establish its own superior self-image. But twentieth-century scholars characterized the Middle Ages as that epoch that created Europe-from north
to south. This idea retrieved the Middle Ages from its role as backdrop
for the brilliance of the Renaissance. So there have been two competing
narratives of the rise of European civilization: that of the "World History" of which Charlemagne's unified Europe marked the beginning--represented by the Monumenta GermaniaeHistorica (1879-1919)-and Jacob
Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissancein Italy ([1860] 1958). Constraints of space do not allow me to pursue the hint in these two titles that
more than a competition of abstract historiographic models is involved.
The difference is reflected in narratives about the "beginning" or the
"rise" of the "European" music culture. It can be anticipated that one potential benefit for WECT historiography of embracing black-music history is the independence of its historiography from this system.
The earliest book that presents itself explicitly as a history of the
WECT-with all of its ideological implications-has this title: Geschichte
der europaisch-abendlandischen
oder unsrer heutigen Musik [History of the European-Westernor Our Music of Today],published in 1834 by R. G. Kiesewetter and in English translation only fourteen years later. In his opening
pages the author picks up a medieval question and writes, "Moder
music flourished only in proportion as it began to separate and withdraw
itself from the system laid down and enforced by the Greeks.... That
Grecian or Hebrew melodies should have found their way into the assemblies of Christians seems altogether incredible.... Their natural horror of everything connected with the heathens ... was too great for the

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Treitler * Toward a Desegregated Music Historiography

admission among them of such melodies as had been common to the

pagan temples or theatres" (Kiesewetter 1848, 1-4).
As far as I know, the most recent entry in the genre that is the heritage
of Kiesewetter's book is Reinhard Strohm's The Rise of EuropeanMusic,
1380-1500 (1993), and it is pretty clearly the Burckhardt model that underlies the title. As a student of the musical practices of the Carolingian
era, I see the threatening implication in Strohm's title that what I regard
as the oldest European music to which we have access is either not European or it is not music (or indeed that it is neither).
On the other hand, the Belgian composer and musicologist Francois
Auguste Gevaert (1890, 32) wrote, "As for the musical interest which the
old melodies offered to the artist,... that is not a matter of pure curiosity, as would be the music of exotic people-Chinese or Hindu-where we
encounter bizarre melodies and rhythms . . . strange to our manner of
feeling." He made the cut so as to sweep in Gregorian chant, but what is
more to the point, he worked with the same duality of a WECT and music
that is outside of it. This duality has even worked its way into the annals
of black-music history. In his memoirs Dizzy Gillespie (1979, 111) quotes
an outburst from Cab Calloway about bebop: "Man, listen, will you
please don't be playing all that Chinese music up there!" (Even in China,
Chinese music is treated as music of the other; in the conservatories of
Beijing and Shanghai, its study is pursued in the departments of ethnomusicology.)
Can we formulate a historiography for our discipline absent such dualities, which seem to have such power over the structure of our thinking-even if only in the effort to shed them? What is there about black
music and its history that poses the challenge? Is it simply the historical
fact of its exclusion from WECT or is it something immanent in the history of black music making? The answer has to be "both." The historical
concept of a WECT excludes black music and black-music history by definition. And the exclusion is reinforced by the screening effect of a network of strands of the music concept that goes with the idea of a WECT
historically. Briefly, it comes down to the work concept, with its axioms
about musical coherence and its linkage with musical notation.
Johann Nikolaus Forkel wrote in his GeneralHistory of Music (a book
that is sometimes reckoned as the founding document of modem historical musicology) about travelers' reports on the music of "wild and uncultivated people" that "the melodically incoherent tones of these pieces
are so peculiar that they could not be grasped by the travelers and could
not be written down with European notation" (Forkel [1792] 1962, 5).
This enunciates, for the first time as far as I know, the dogma that writeability is at the core of musical coherence, marking this inseparable rela-

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BMR Journal

tionship as a point of that opposition between "our" music and the music
of "others" that was made explicit in the next century.
The attitude that holds literacy to be a condition of discipline, coherence, and value survives in different ways in contemporary historical
musicology, and it has as its corollary the ontological bias, first given
voice in the early nineteenth century, that the essence of the musical object resides in the written score and can be read from it (there is nothing
so novel in the current fashion of speaking of musical interpretation as
"reading"). A consequence is that performedmusic has drawn comparatively little attention among the objects that interest scholars of the
WECT, whereas it is at the very center of black-music history. The difference would reach into all aspects of historical understanding.
Does the historical study of black music have suggestions for a more
open historiography that might still be a historiography of the WECT?
Such a historiography would require something other than the sort of appropriation of new subject matters that has been accomplished in the recent past, in which musical traditions have imposed upon them the characteristics of music of the WECT in order to render them susceptible to
the accepted methods of analysis for that tradition (recent examples are
jazz, Italian opera, and most salient for me, Gregorian chant, which is reconstituted in a process that I have called "Tailoring the Present as Fulfillment of a Desired Past" [see Treitler 1991]).
I shall try now to identify some examples of recent work on blackmusic history that can highlight and reinforce current interests and turns
in the practice of the historical musicology of the WECT. I take most of
my specific references from the Black Music Research Journal. Perhaps
through such comparison we can glimpse elements of a shared historiography.
It is written all over studies in black-music history that pursuit of the
subject apart from the study of its historical situations is unthinkable.
Treating black music as through and through historical has not seemed to
require the pronouncement of historiographic doctrine to that effect or
the rejection of a strong concept of music that has accompanied the newhistoricist slant of recent WECT musicology.
John Chernoff (1985) writes that music is much more a part of the social and historical context of the lives of Africans than is the case for Europeans. This impression may, of course, be owing to the focus of WECT
musicology on the music of "high culture" as well as to the historiographic split between high and low culture that has been a premise of historical musicology but far less so of black-music history. That is evident
in the very terms of the framework of comparison: "black-music" history
and the history of the "Western European classical tradition." But Cher-

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Treitler * Toward a Desegregated Music Historiography

noff writes, too, that "it is not the social meanings that people attach to
their music that make it important to them; rather, aesthetic involvement
is what gives the traditional symbols their depth,... engaging artistic creativity with the important situations of life" (19).
If there had been a reading list for this session, one of the most important items on it would have been our chairman's essay "On Two Traditions of Black Music Research." Crawford (1986, 2) writes: "the most basic
question of all [is] 'Is the very idea of scholarly research, which tends to
emphasize the gathering of all available evidence and viewing it with detached objectivity, too foreign to the spirit of Afro-American music-making to contribute much to a real understanding of its qualities and
achievements?"' We would do well to consider the advantages of this implied proposal to let the character of the musical poiesis determine the
scholarly methodology as opposed to the blanket imposition of a taboo
against such scholarly research as "positivist musicology."
Crawford represents the two traditions of his title with Eileen Southern's book The Music of BlackAmericans:A History (1971), which he calls
musicological, and LeRoi Jones's Blues People (1963), which he calls literary. The former is a well-documented chronicle, whereas the latter addresses itself to such questions as "What qualities of Afro-American experience give black music-making its special character?" and "What kind
of Afro-American experience does the most typical black music reflect?"
(Crawford 1986, 3). If there were a tendency to want to answer Crawford's "most basic question" in the affirmative, it would be, I should
think, because of the belief embedded in Jones's book that Afro-American
music is not comprehensible except as an expression of Afro-American
experience.
In September I lectured in the conservatories of music in Beijing and
Shanghai. One of my subjects was historiography. As I began to prepare
my lecture on that subject, I wondered how the word "history" would be
rendered in Chinese. I learned from a former student that the counterpart
is li se and that those two characters have the literal meaning "a record of
experience"-an externalized account of internal states. It struck me at
once how this preempts quarrels that are raging ferociously just now in
fields like mine: Is history a representation of something real or is it all
smoke and mirrors, i.e., language? (Crawford [1986, 7] writes, "a theory
like Jones's ... reminds the scholar that his or her subject is real people
having real experiences in a real world." But this would be contested.)
And thus, what is the place of experience-of music and of life-i.e., of
subjectivity-in the historiography of music? What should be the vantage point of historical representation, that of the participant or that of the
detached observer? The emphasis on experience that black-music history

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BMR Journal

elicits opens one to thought about these questions and reinforces my own
doubts about how far they have so far been worked out on the side of the
WECT.
From the present, well-placed enthusiasm for raising questions about
meaning in music, we have been offered confident exegetical accounts of
works of the canon interpreted as cultural practice and social discourse,
unaccompanied, however, by even the suggestion, not to say the demonstration, that such interpretations reflect the experience and the interactions of those works in the historical environs of their creation and circulation. What they reflect are the interests and values of the exegetes.
Without such links to the experienced past, we are right back again to the
analysis of autonomous works, supported by no framework of interpretation to replace the rejected formalist framework, only by the raw intuition of the interpreters. Achieving greater clarity about what is being
claimed is now a matter of the highest priority.
The linear history that long gave dimension to historical representation
of the WECT has two axiomatic properties that are put into question from
the point of view of black-music history: first, the conflation of novelty
with historical significance and value; second, the tendency to give concepts of inheritance priority over concepts of invention in historical explanation.
Orin Moe (1986) argues that the criterion of novelty is irrelevant to and
even prejudicial against black music history, since black concert music is
rarely "innovative." What is entailed here-and always has been entailed
in the historiography of the WECT-is in a sense the wrong kind of interaction or the confusion between the two historiographic strains that
Crawford identified: the chronicle and the critical account.
Just as I was writing this paper, the latest issue of Acta Musicologica arrived, containing an essay by Wolfgang Jaedke with the title "On the
Meaning of African Rhythm for the Success of Rock and Pop Music in
Western Culture" [my translation]. The opening paragraph has, I think,
the same fundamental purport as the argument of Orin Moe:
Evolutionaryconceptionsof history,anchoredin nineteenth-centurybeliefs
in progress, always interpreted a linear teleology or development from
primitive to higher forms in human phylogenesis.Even the phenomenologically influenced theory of culturalcontexts still understoodmany non-Europeanculturesas essentiallyhistoricalrelics,in which the Europeanscould
recognize states of their own past. Such conceptionshave now been superseded. Everyculturehas its own history,and an evolutionarydynamicin the
sense of Western"high culture"cannot be presupposed [or superimposed,
we might add]. (Jaedke1995,20; translationmine)

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Treitler * Toward a Desegregated Music Historiography

This calls up another useful distinction introduced by Richard Crawford (in his book "The American Musical Landscape [1993])-that of the
"cosmopolitan" as against the "provincial" perspectives on American
music history. The decision whether or not to view American music from
a cosmopolitan (i.e., a European-evolutionary) perspective establishes
criteria of value and determines what music will even be included in the
historical field and what will count as historical explanation.
Probably the most prominent historical question about black-music
history-at least in this country-is that of the "origins of Afro-American
music." Here it is interesting to study how far the formulation of the
question has been prompted and guided by the habits of WECT historiography and how far it has proceeded independently. In his essay "Filiation or Innovation?: Some Hypotheses to Overcome the Dilemma of AfroAmerican Music's Origins," Denis-Constant Martin moves toward
independence. He writes, "Putting the stress on heritage or filiation, irrespective of whether that heritage is traced from Europe or Africa,
amounts to denying black people transplanted in the Americas the ability to cope with a new environment, to adapt to it-that is, to create a new
but truly black culture and, consequently, to transform their new environment" (Martin 1991, 19). Placing the stress on filiation precludes a historiography that represents its objects coping in their natural environments.
What is valuable here is both the willingness to consider invention as
an explanatory concept and the very historiographical consciousness that
the author displays. Lawrence Gushee (1989) has shown us that the same
awareness that a problem of historical explanation is on the table and that
it is to be addressed by provisionally fitting explanatory hypotheses to it
can be learned from the investigation of particular black-music histories.
Gushee's essay is as illuminating about the problem of historical explanation as it is about music in New Orleans. The larger framework is the
articulation of "the basic pattern of development of jazz up to 1940," and
Gushee considers a number of alternative stories that are told about
this-in respect to the evidence that supports them and the force that
they have as stories apart from evidence. His metaphor about their being
"worked into the tapestry of jazz history" is not just colorful, it conveys
the sense of history as something made up, but not out of whole cloth
(Gushee 1989, 1, 2).
I'll close with a question which I am not able to address in this context,
but which is probably better left for discussion. How, in practical terms,
do we find our way toward a historiography of the WECT that can embrace black-music history? Would it be by thinking how to reduce the

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BMRJournal

10

segregation of our publicationsand other institutions of scholarly transmission and exchange?

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