Postmodernism and Globalization in Ethnomusicology, An Epistemological Problem

by Andy Nercessian
Scarecrow Press, Lanham MD, 2002.
152 pp., Trade, US$ 29.50.
ISBN 0-8108-4122-3.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent,
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent,
Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

The point of this book is that music can have different meanings for hearers from different cultures. The sound remains the same, of course, but the meaning that is attributed to it depends on cultural factors and on psyschophysiological reactions to its 'objective' qualities. One would expect this to be plain common sense. The author, however, claims that current postmodernist trends have blinded ethnomusicologists so thoroughly that they cannot see the obvious. Most of them believe, says Nercessian, that music is only what it means, i.e. its ontological status is entirely dependent on the observer's perception of the sound as music-with-a-meaning. They have come to this position because they took their, in itself entirely justified, attack against an ethnocentric (read: Eurocentric) way of analysing and judging music from non-European cultures one step too far. Claiming that music should be understood in terms of the culture from which it originates, they end up in a complete cultural relativism which denies the possibility of the cross-cultural understanding of musics. Nercessian, on the contrary, argues that music can have several meanings to different people. It is polysemic. Its ontology doesn't depend on a particular, culturally defined audience and its meanings vary from one person to the other, retaining all the while a minimal common denominator.

Nercessian uses the results from an experiment he conducted to support his views. He made twenty-odd Armenian and an equal number of Greek subjects listen to two pieces of Armenian duduk music. (The duduk is a double reed instrument not unlike the oboe. In Armenia it is associated with the sad fate of the Armenians and with sad occasions in general.) He then asked the subjects to choose the adjectives they associated with the music from a list and he had an interview with each of them individually, asking them to describe which movie scenes they 'saw' when they heard the fragments. From their answers, he concludes that the cultural background of the Armenians makes them place the music within a narrower band of interpretations than the Greeks, but subjects within as well as across groups share a certain number of associations. QED.

My problems with this book are threefold. First, the construction of the book itself. It has three parts, starting with a preliminary discussion of the postmodernist position in cultural studies in general and in ethnomusicology in particular. Then, there is a discussion of Kantian and Bourdieusian aesthetics under the misleading title of 'Postmodernism and Its Position in the Western Intellectual Tradition'. (I was amazed when reading Nercessians interpretation of Bourdieu, to say the least!) The third part, 'The Postmodern in Music (sic!): An Examination of the Role of Meaning and Culture in Music' has a lengthy chapter on the Music-Meaning debate and three chapters on Nercessians experiment. In the final part, the author sums up his position and tentatively answers the question 'What is Music?'. I suppose the author chose to construct his book in this way to give it the air of a dissertation or a scientific treatise, which is fine if the book follows a sound scientific methodology and serves to advance the solution of a problem. But here neither is the case as I will show further on. If the book, on the contrary, targets an audience with a general interest in music or ethnomusicology, the lengthy, rambling and dense discussions of postmodernist positions, Kant and Bourdieu and even - god forbid - Eduard Hanslick, are out of place.

My second problem is with the methodology of Nercessians research. To be honest, the author must have been aware of the objections that were to be raised, so he added an apologetic chapter on 'Objections to the Epistemological Validity of the Test', but he fails to answer the numerous points. His list of adjectives is not culturally neutral. Some of his conclusions are formulated quantitatively, while his sample consists of only some twenty-odd subjects in each group. His experimental set up presupposes that subjects from any culture attribute meaning to music, whatever its origin, and he goes on to conclude exactly that. I could continue if I had more space here, but another irritating shortcoming of the book is waiting.

The problem Nercessian sets out to discuss is not what he claims it to be. He does not want to solve some epistemological difficulties in ethnomusicology but he wants to counter the widely voiced criticism of so-called 'world music'. His real but hidden agenda is that it is all right for (western) artists, composers and record companies to appropriate musical material from all over the world and commercially exploit it, without even considering to compensate the people who created it. He hints at this in several places, even if he doesn't say so in so many words. Now, there is no reason why he shouldn't voice his opinion, but to cover a political and ideological debate under a tight layer of presumed scientific work is intellectually dishonest, and that, in my view, is unforgivable.