This is a review of ‘A Cultural History’, not ‘The Cultural History’, and it’s A Cultural History of Western Music in the Age of Enlightenment. It is volume four in a six-volume chronological series (general editors David R. M. Irving and Alexander Rehding). ‘Let’s Use Scare Quotes’, proposes contributor Elisabeth Le Guin in the playful subtitle to her chapter on ‘Popular Culture’, and scare quotes are present or implied throughout the volume. ‘Western Music’, most obviously, but also ‘Enlightenment’, a term that certainly did not represent a form of thought or experience that was available to all. According to the editors, Irving and Estelle Joubert, ‘we are using this label in a loose sense to indicate some of the most renowned shifts in thinking – such as moves toward the ideals of human freedom, human rights, human equality, and the universal access to education’ (4). ‘A cultural history’ is qualified by an intellectual history. As a cultural history, the editors wish ‘to locate music as an element of life that is deeply embedded within the broad spectrum of human experience’ (4). This is why the conventional stylistic periodization for the timespan of the volume (1650–1790), later baroque and classical, is too narrow and ‘Enlightenment’ is preferred. The fundamental problem, of which the editors are aware, is that the shifts in thinking do not map evenly onto peoples’ experiences. The idea of equality did not extend to women; children were not necessarily considered when it came to human rights; and, needless to say, few thinkers conceptualized freedom with the millions of people who were not white in mind.
The volume’s Introduction by Irving and Joubert works to ameliorate the contradiction between idea and experience by offering a breathtaking survey of subjects that includes, to name a few, the alignment of the history of music with the history of the slave trade, the intellectual history of sentiment, the importance of secularization and how multiple modes of musicking relied on ‘natural resource’ extraction. In other words, the economic and social infrastructure that undergirded both Western music and the Enlightenment is highlighted, which helps to suture together the era’s remarkable musical history with its terrible human history. The editors are avowedly inclusive. The section on ‘Diversity in Enlightenment Music History: Race, Ideas, Gender’ is a roll call of composers, musicians and audiences who were historically marginalized, but are now held up as important because they were not white or because they were women. Enumerating these people demonstrates that they exist, and implies that they can be further studied and taught about. (Thankfully, this is already happening among scholars of the eighteenth century.)
The eight chapters of the book take up a sequence of keywords that are used to organize each volume in the larger series: Society, Philosophies, Politics, Exchange, Education, Popular Culture, Performance and Technologies. (One wonders why, of all of these, only Philosophies and Technologies get to be plural!) The contributors to the volume are well known for their expertise, and they bring a variety of approaches to the seemingly impossible task of encapsulating their keyword in about twenty pages. Some survey the topic, others are more argument-driven. All of the chapters speak to, and with, each other in useful ways that would make this an excellent volume from which to teach.
Chapter 1, ‘Society: Music and Community’ by Estelle Joubert, sets out an ambitious topic. Every word in the chapter title could be pluralized. Joubert opts to nail down social life in four domains using case studies: music and spectacle in Parma, Anglo-Atlantic hymnody, music criticism in German-language periodicals and Parisian concert life. These case studies allow us to consider multiple kinds of public: the restricted yet capacious community of courtly elites, the ambivalent groupings of white Protestants and the Africans they claimed to own, the emerging court of public opinion in print and the fashionable crowds for whom Joseph Bologne performed. It would have been interesting to read, in each case study, how personhood related to power. Power emerges vividly in David R. M. Irving’s chapter, which addresses the polyvalent term ‘Exchange’ by funnelling its mercantile associations into the topic ‘Musical Transactions around the World’. The transactions that took place in the context of colonialism – which is typically the context for a global survey of Western music in this period – were generally unequal. But Irving, whose work has long explored sources of musical intercultural exchange, elects to delve into ‘examples of exchanges that were made on ostensibly equal terms’ (110–111), because doing so highlights something that some Enlightenment thinkers were all too aware of: their theories of cultural difference and musical universalism were just as likely to be disproved as validated by actual examples of intercultural encounters. He sidles up to the topic through representational art, presenting the reader with well-chosen examples that illustrate more reciprocal or at least ambivalent modes of exchange, then presents a dizzying series of examples from the Caribbean to China that serve as a kind of reception history for Western music abroad and in Europe (the reception was, unsurprisingly, mixed).
Roger Mathew Grant’s chapter, ‘Philosophies: Making Sense of Vibration’, begins with a delightfully bold assertion, that the first words of modern philosophy were about music: ‘The object of this art is sound. It aims to delight by moving the various affects within us’ (63). He is quoting René Descartes’s first complete treatise, Compendium musicæ, published posthumously in Utrecht in 1650. How and how well music moved ‘us’ changed in the eighteenth century, as Grant lays out, from mimesis (which music was not terribly good at) to affect (at which music excelled). Thanks to the convergence of three Enlightenment philosophies – empiricism, aesthetics and affect – music gained a towering position among the arts. Grant walks the reader through the work of famous philosophers (among them Rousseau, Rameau, Kant and Hume). The chapter concludes with Grant’s summary of eighteenth-century writers’ burgeoning interest in taxonomizing and historicizing musical developments around the globe. It is not the inconsistency and racism of universalizing theories that Grant seeks to illuminate, but the fact that a division between ‘the West and the rest’, with its myriad methodological ramifications, continues today.
Chapter 3, ‘Politics: Music and the Law’ by Rebekah Ahrendt, addresses the power of music in the polis. Platonic ideas about music’s morally ambiguous influence over humans created an impasse between Enlightenment thinkers: perhaps it could be universally civilizing, but perhaps it should be rationally controlled through legal rules. Ahrendt’s deft analysis sets aside that conundrum by noting that music’s effects were (and are) unpredictable, then sets out to assess how specific polities directed legal mechanisms to control music in a period when professional musicians and the formation of multiple new kinds of musical public made the question of regulating music’s social power all the more urgent. Her case studies encapsulate the unpredictable ways music rebounded against various legal and political constraints. In Interregnum England, the music theatre of Oliver Cromwell’s children sought to create a parliamentary body to promote music. Lully’s monopoly over opera in France had the unintended consequence of encouraging musicians to utilize international legal means to work abroad (to divided reception by political authorities). Banning music was futile, though tempting, in multiple places. Such legal constraints are easy to condemn today. So too is the ideal of universally ‘good’ Western music imposing harmony across different peoples and places, which Arhendt returns to in her conclusion. Both attempts to control and attempts to homogenize become, through her analysis, understandable goals in the context of wars, civil unrest, economic uncertainty and the regular epidemics through which people in the polis suffered.
The debates about music’s moral status and social effects did not diminish the need for trained musicians, although qualms certainly insinuated themselves into discourse about what constituted proper education. Stephen Rose’s chapter on ‘Education: Forming Musical Identities’, covers three distinct but related topics: educational institutions, the pursuit of music as a form of cultural capital and pedagogical methods. A reader who wants a general survey of education is well served by this chapter. Of particular interest, and perhaps most transferable to regions outside of the areas of Europe and England discussed by Rose, is the final section on embodied knowledge. Previous themes in the book, such as being moved by music, disciplining the self and music, and contested ideas of universalism come into sharp focus when we consider a student doing exercises to strengthen their fingers.
Elisabeth Le Guin’s chapter ‘Popular Culture: Let’s Use Scare Quotes’ zeroes in on one rhythmic practice, the sesquiáltera, and traces it around the Atlantic to reveal the fundamental imbrication of African, Hispanic and Indigenous worlds as a result of colonization and the slave trade. The chapter is fun and didactic. Le Guin begins by problematizing a series of terms (using the above-mentioned scare quotes), then teaches the reader the sesquiáltera, varying combinations of triplet and duple rhythms that are possible in 3/4 or 6/8 metres. Le Guin’s characteristic emphasis on the embodied experience of music guides the reader through multiple genres that deploy the rhythmic possibilities of the sesquiáltera, including public sacred villancicos, revered folk dances such as the sarabande and the fandango, and the elite minuet. Fleshing out the challenges and sources for understanding the live experience of music is Geoffrey Burgess’s chapter ‘Performance: On and Off the Page’, which ranges widely to consider what turns out to be an elusive topic. A discussion of terminology (the number of different words used in the eighteenth century to refer to performance, from ‘execute’ and ‘play’ to ‘produce’ and ‘represent’), close analysis of engravings that depict performances, an overview of notated scores and their realization (along with what we do and do not know about ornamentation), and the use of rehearsal time are just some of the topics covered in the chapter.
‘Technologies: Musical Media of Enlightenment’ by Rebecca Cypess closes the volume. Adopting a broad understanding of the keyword, Cypess argues that not only scientific instruments but music itself was a technology, or as she puts it, ‘a tool with the power to shape an enlightened self’ (200). Through the lens of ‘technology’, familiar topics are revealed to be rife with subjective interpretations and historical coincidences. Cypess explores the intersection of individuals’ inventions, Enlightenment epistemology, aesthetics, culture and prejudice through case studies on musical glasses, observations of birdsong, music notation, musical automata and a wide variety of keyboard instruments. Her consideration of how even the hearing human ear was technologized – in that it was a tool to mediate between the outer world and the inner soul, and centres the human body and the human self – is an apt conclusion to the volume.
The ‘broad spectrum of human experience’ is not consistently considered across the chapters. ‘Western music’ and those who practised it sit in an unsettled relationship to ‘the Other’ and ‘the Elsewhere’. ‘The Other’, postcolonial theorists’ term for those against whom Westerners defined themselves, is particularly relevant for this volume, given the emergence of new understandings of the self in this period. To perpetuate a division between Other and Self would be antithetical to the inclusive moves of this project, and yet, to incorporate the Other – to make them merely ‘others’ or even ‘us’ – would be to impose a Western framework of subjectivity where it is not necessarily wanted. Not everyone wants to be included, as Sara Ahmed reminds us (On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)). This is a problem the volume does not address consistently, but those interested in it should turn to Irving’s chapter. ‘The Elsewhere’, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s term for the West’s conception of space outside ‘the Here’ (Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)), is also unevenly accounted for across the volume. Either noted or not, it was defining for Western music in ways we still grapple with today, as Grant argues. The volume as a whole reminds us that we already have the important keywords for analysing Western music’s impact on the world: universalism, power, difference, violence and publics.
