Music 114. Music of the Twentieth Century
Musical Bridges to the 21st Century
Winter 2022
Long Listening List Week 6
Janet Sit

mporaryMusicCollective

Erin Graham

9752
Anqi Liu

Nasim Khorassani

nsemble

sani

er
Tania León

ny

a

2FCounciloftheAmericas
Tiange Zhou

https://www.tiangezhoumusic.com/
Anahita Abbasi

ork

si

iaTelevision%28UCTV%29
Celeste Oram

festival
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wFuSru9Rw&t=180s&ab_channel=UniversityofCaliforniaTelevision%28UCTV%29
Lydia Brindamour

estival
https://www.lydiawinsorbrindamour.com/music
Galina Ustvolskaya

Alicia Urreta

Helena Tulve

Kaija Saariaho

Maria Helena Rosas Fernandes

eiro-IPB
Eliane Radigue

s
Hilda Paredes

teo
Younghi Pagh-Paan

Daphne Oram

mo%C5%84czyk
Pauline Oliveros

Liza Lim

ert
Sofia Gubaidulina

rOrchestra
Unsuk Chin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpdm9OS10M&ab_channel=EnsembleIntercontemporain

Chen Yi

y

Wendy Carlos

Music 114. Music of the Twentieth Century
Musical Bridges to the 21st Century
Winter 2022
Long Listening List Week 7
Buffy Sainte-Marie

nel

The Red Bull Singers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVYkHkmgi0&ab_channel=SaskatchewanIndigenousCulturalCentre-Topic

Raven Chacon

Tanya Tagaq

ecords

aix

ssaix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjoLZZYASpg&ab_channel=MarkLawrence
Brent Michael Davids

Inuit Throat Singing

ws

Caroline Shaw

ain
A Tribe Called Red

Hamac Caziim

e

odelChopo
Bro MCs

sTVAFontedaInforma%C3%A7%C3%A3o

Alok

Sak Tzevul

Rockdrigo Vargas

Joy Harjo

usic
Benjamín Kumantukxuxpë

tukxuxpe%CC%88-Topic
Laura Ortman

ation
Vayijel

s
And a compilation by The Wire:
https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/music-by-indigenous-artists-compiled-bydivide-and-dissolve
Music 114. Music of the Twentieth Century
Musical Bridges to the 21st Century
Winter 2022
Long Listening List Week 8
Glenn Weyant

ant

nt

Border Songs Project by Robert Neustadt

EROCK

NCO

Los Pingüinos del Norte

to

n

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2thToywUM&ab_channel=LosPing%C3%BCinosdelNorte-Topic
Cover by Los Lobos:

V
Grupo Codiciado

al
Steven Schick/John Luther Adams

y

Fandango Fronterizo Festival
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AjMBoZPII&ab_channel=FANDANGOATTHEWALL

life

WALL

lNYC

Marilyn Sellars/Los Tigres del Norte

o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ue-YPwvsY&ab_channel=LosTigresNorteVEVO

Música Norteña (Mostly Early Recordings 1940s-80s)

Conjunto Tejano (Mostly Early Recordings 1930s-80s)

tles

oleon

n

no

20

LISTEN BACK, PLEASE !
An essay by Sandeep Bhagwati
Why the German classical and contemporary music scene must still find its place in
the world – and how it could find it. Part I of a two-part essay.
By Sandeep Bhagwati
Translation Zack Ferriday
Title Image Paul Gauguin (edited)
Every now and then my phone rings, and the program director of a German cultural
institution or orchestra informs me that they are planning an India concert or project. India
having become economically important, they ask me for some pointers on Indian orchestral
works. They have already sourced something Indian-esque by Massenet or Holst, or
Roussel or Messiaen, and there is also this young German composer who recently spent a
couple of weeks in India (she is already working on a piece inspired by her sojourn there),
but they have not yet found anything authentically Indian. Money is tight, it is not possible
to fly in any Indian musicians, but they would still like to programme a short work by an
authentic Indian composer – could I please suggest a few names and works?
That sounds like a perfectly fair call, doesn’t it? Why then do such requests provoke only
annoyance on my part? Well, it often becomes clear very quickly that I was only contacted
on account of my Indian name. None of these managers would get in touch if my mother,
rather than my father, were the Indian parent and I were known as Michael Stauffer, for
example. I was born in India, but I have lived in Germany since I was five years old. I went
to school here and studied conducting and composition in Munich – it is not the
background one would expect from an expert in Indian music.
Does a yearning for authenticity not simply indicate a lack of education?
But more to the point: I cannot be an expert on “Indian orchestra music” – because such
experts cannot exist. India has its own classical music system which does not deal in works
for orchestra. In Indian musical life, the presence of eurological art music is as marginal as
that of Balinese music in Germany. The few composers with an Indian name who have
written orchestral works did so for orchestras in Europe and North America. But these
composers – and I count myself among them – cannot be classified as “authentically
Indian,” however one might wish to define the term; by bloodline, by place of residence, or
according to the musical tradition in which one is trained. Moreover, for people like me
who juggle multiple cultural contexts, such an emphasis on “the authentic” always rings
with an unpleasant, if not threatening, undertone. A kind interpretation might hear it as
someone just being unaware of the fact that every culture is in itself an iridescent
patchwork. But all too often, such an emphasis on “the authentic” is a clear indicator for
right-wing sympathies.
Affirmative action instead of artistic interest
Then: it is clearly an exclusionary negotiation strategy to emphasize one’s tight budget
right off the bat – and it is one that intercultural music projects seem to get more than their
fair share of. A few years ago, the program director of a Berlin concert hall wanted to set up
a series with star musicians of classical Arabic music. But in private he was outraged by the
excessive fees they were charging – sometimes “almost as much as he would pay for a
Western classical musician!” Were they not invited to play in his fantastic venue? In Berlin!
How ungrateful… Most likely, he had never heard of the generous fees that these musicians
– masters of their tradition – can command in the Gulf states.
Now imagine if somebody were to display a similarly blatant ignorance of a European
musical tradition, and a similarly condescending stance while interacting with experts on
John Ogden, or Portuguese renaissance music, or Galina Ustwolskaya. No, let us rather not
imagine that! Our classical music managers are far too dedicated, too educated for that.
They do actually care for their music (as much as for their reputations). But apparently,
when it comes to non-European music, it simply does not occur to them to do a little
research. For example, to check whether India even has orchestras, and what kind of music
they play. They simply assume that Western classical music must be everywhere. And if
they are truly honest with themselves, they also assume that the real reason why they have
never heard of any Indian orchestral composers must be because their work is, ultimately,
of secondary relevance. For them, their India project is simply a kind of affirmative action,
not a matter of genuine artistic interest.
All these, I am convinced, are not instances of bad faith. Rather, they shine a light on a tacit
attitude which even those mostly liberal and thoughtful people who professionally engage
with classical music are hardly aware of – because their entire environment is imbued with
its assumptions. What are these assumptions?
The Advanced, the Primitive, the Stagnant, and the Converted.
In October 2019, I gave a keynote lecture at a congress of German music theorists in Zurich.
The topic was simply “Music Theory,” which at face-value would suggest the topic at hand
to be, quite comprehensively, THE theory of ALL music. After reviewing the program
however, one participant dryly suggested that even in the 21st Century, German music
theory is still almost exclusively concerned with European music of the last 1000 years,
with particular emphasis on the period between 1700 and 1950, even though the name of
their field stipulates no historical and geographical limitations. Why do they not name it
appropriately: “Theories of Music Written in Europe between 800 and 2000 CE”?
Do German music theorists maybe secretly believe that eurological art music is the most
evolved – that they quite simply study the most advanced model of music? In this
perspective, all other ways of making music can then be nothing more than withered or
dead-end branches on the tree of musical evolution. Music historian Cristina Urchueguía
caricatured this silent assumption in her keynote speech at the same congress:
»1) Some cultures have actively taken part in this evolution. These are the advanced cultures.
(Congratulations!)
2) Other cultures did not take part. These are the primitive cultures. (Too bad!)
3) Others still at some point missed the connection and were left behind. (That’s on you!)
4) Many cultures have at some point recognized and accepted the superiority [of the
European musical tradition]. (THERE you go!)1
The so-called “serious” music of European extraction is seen by many of its proponents as
the pinnacle of enlightened, universalistic musical progress. Compared to it, all other ways
of making music must be considered as certainly respectable and even charming – but
ultimately inconsequential undertakings.2 They thereby implicitly construe a spurious
parallel between technology and music: The triumphal march of Western technology is
seen to have absorbed and superseded all others to such an extent that non-Western
technologies now appear as nothing more than its more or less primitive precursors. In
their logic, eurological music alone cruises on an autobahn towards the fertile land of the
future, whereas all other forms of music are not more than whimsical, nostalgic detours.
One hopes, of course, that these poor souls will ultimately indeed see the light – be it that of
Haydn’s Creation, or the weekday glow of Stockhausen’s LICHT.
The classical concert: A protective zone for the white bourgeoisie?
Perhaps though, there are even many who do not really want that either. Every now and
then, I am haunted by the nagging suspicion that the so-called “serious” music scene of
Europe and North America is perceived by its enthusiasts as a kind of sonic levée – a
protective dyke against the rising tide of cultural globalisation that they are increasingly
forced to engage with in literature, the fine arts, in cinema, and in theatre. That for some of
their audiences their symphony concerts, and even more their chamber music concerts, are
among the very last places where one can reasonably expect to remain unbothered by
cultural relativism; where one can still enjoy a cultured evening “among one’s own kind.”
Devotees of “New Music” would, of course, vehemently reject such cultural narcissism. A
willingness to go beyond the “comfort zone” and a yen for expeditions into “the Unheardof” are the proclaimed hallmarks of their scene. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely
because of this – a cultural-evolutionist narrative of salvation through art has been deeply
woven into the discourse of New Music since the 1920s: “Avant-garde music will redeem
us,” it seems to say, “and not just the educated citizens of Western cities: no, all of
mankind!”
One hundred years ago, the International Society for New Music was founded in order to
disseminate and promote music based on the European-American avant-garde model on a
global scale. This campaign was a success – there now are national associations of the ICSM
in many countries. At the society’s World New Music Days festival, which annually migrates
around the world, one can hear works by composers whose names come from a large
variety of cultural backgrounds. And they all – with minor local variations – write music in
a characteristic eurological “Avantgarde Music” stance.
Sometimes the Gospel of New Music occasions curious aftertastes. One of them is a story I
have heard from almost all composers with names or roots or origins in Asia, Africa, and
often even Latin America who came to study composition somewhere in the West: They
obviously could only have passed the entrance exams at this university because they had
perfectly absorbed the eurological tradition. Nevertheless, soon after their first lessons,
their teachers would inevitably nudge them to engage with the “traditional music” of “their
own” culture. They were made to understand that without this “authentic” colour, their
“eurological” music could seem too blatant an imitation. It is as if, to these teachers,
composing for violins and pianos is, at its core, a matter for people with white skin and
European sounding names. This benign kind of structural racism is commonplace at music
academies and in the classical music business where an “exotic” cultural identity is also a
handy way to brand an artist. Curiously, such covert musical racism actually increases
when people are aware of colonial history and oppression, and therefore try to be extra
nice. Here, too, half-knowledge is more insidious than ignorance.
Cultural narcissism on the global stage
In such constellations, any openness to the uncomfortable and the unfamiliar seem to be
largely absent. Instead, the world at large is asked to flatter the West by imperfect imitation
– and thus vindicate how revolutionary and unique European music has been over the past
century: so much so that the technical and musical achievements of the composers
resonating through Europe’s concert halls are now mimicked even in the “former colonies.”
Such a complacent attitude, however, seems to be just another instance of cultural
narcissism, this time on the global stage.
To continue to call such music “Eurocentric” or “Western” would then, be misleading – at
least geographically speaking. For some years now, I have therefore used the term
“eurological” for all forms of music that, wherever on the globe they are practised, are
consciously grounded within the cultural logic of Europe – e.g. the New Music of the ISCM.
The global ubiquity of musical practices once developed in Europe has led many in the
eurological contemporary and classical music scene to believe that their own musical
practices have become the measure of all things musical. And likewise, to think that the
geographical reach of these musical practices is mainly due to their transcultural
persuasiveness and unsurpassed quality.
In a way, it is almost endearing that the friends of eurological music view the world with so
much idealism. In linguistics, however, there’s a well-known cynical definition of the term
“language”: “A language is a dialect with an army.” The fact that the eurological musical
tradition is considered by many to be the world’s musical lingua franca is not only coincidental to, but rather a direct consequence of Europe’s violent colonial expansion.
Classical: A musical tradition with an army – and a stock exchange!
Take the example of Claude Debussy for example, who in 1905 became curious about nonEuropean musical traditions. He asked a music connoisseur friend to tell him about the
fabulously beautiful music of the Pacific peoples, on whose seas this friend would soon be
cruising as a French naval and colonial officer. After a while, Debussy received an extensive
essay by the title of “Voix Mortes” (Dead Voices), which pretty much says it all. In it, Victor
Segalen, who would later become known as a theoretician of exoticism, described how the
indigenous music of the Maori and Polynesian people seemed almost non-existent at the
beginning of the 20th Century. Christian missionaries, with the active support of the French
army, had displaced the traditional songs with their own hymns. Segalen realized with
great sadness that occasional strange intonations in the islanders’ singing, strange turns,
and a certain vocal roughness, were the last traces of their now lost musical traditions. His
report to Debussy makes for a depressing read, even if the gradual resurgence of
Polynesian music after 1945 suggests that the Maori people maybe had secretly continued
to cultivate their own vocal tradition.
A lot of indigenous music has, however, indeed been eradicated over the centuries of
European colonization: in militant cultural missionary processes, through economic
marginalisation – and too often through quite comprehensive genocides. No wonder that
for a long time a central mission of ethnomusicology was to “salvage” such vanishing
musics. In a race against time, ethnomusicologists would attempt to document the world’s
immaterial artefacts as best they could, before they were devoured by the predatory
eurological culture. In doing so, they sought to save these pre-capitalist traditions from
being forgotten. Since the late 19th century, ethnomusicologist took wax cylinder
phonographs and soon tape recorders along on their missions – and ever since, wonderful
music that nobody now alive can sing or play has slumbered in countless university and
museum sound archives.
Sometimes though, they do re-awaken: A few years ago, Canadian tenor Jeremy Dutcher
discovered ethnomusicological recordings of his own Wolastoqiyik people in the sound
archive of the Canadian Museum of History. The recordings included songs which elders
remembered with joy, but which they were no longer able to sing. He took on this task on
their behalf, and it deeply moved me to experience his journey as he gradually sought to
revive these lost voices within himself – and within a contemporary cultural context.
Incidentally, this example bears striking parallels to the debate taking place in the museum
world about the restitution of so-called “looted art.” One often encounters defensive
arguments here too: Do we want to make today’s musicians and listeners – innocent of this
history – pay for the atrocities of long-buried colonial politicians, multinational
corporations, and even the other arts, and in doing so ostracize their beloved classical
music? After all, examples of real violent contexts in the history of musical migration are
rather far and few between. Does the medium’s lack of materiality not mean that there can
be no direct parallelism to “looted art” – and, therefore, no such thing as “looted music”?
Looted music, and music that does the looting.
It probably is not quite so simple as that. On the one hand, the processes of economic
globalization continue to eradicate music today – and if this music was recorded by
ethologists shortly before its disappearance and then continues to live on elsewhere, such a
sound archive might indeed be deemed to contain “looted music.” The fact that music isn’t
an object could sometimes facilitate its return, even if this turned out to be an immensely
complicated process due to music’s nature as a form of immaterial heritage. One might also
speak of “looted music” when – as is so often the case at New Music festivals for example –
a composer declares their superficially-altered eurological music to be “intercultural” after
a relatively short engagement with another culture. In other words, when someone exploits
the political or aesthetic capital of another musical tradition to further their own career or
status. This often also affects composers with “non-Western” names who are forced into
self-exoticization by the market forces of New Music.3 Or when a melody is taken from its
non-Western context and plagiarized without making its origin clear – and any royalties or
fees make their way into the bank accounts of the looters. Musical practice, its living reality,
the phenomenon that Filipino musicologist meLê yamomo calls the “sonus” of music,
cannot, of course, be stolen in any literal sense. But is it not stealing when someone does
not ask for permission when they appropriate these sounds in their own music? And
indeed, when someone loots ideas and sounds without any interest in their cultural origin,
in the aspects that make this music precious to its practitioners.
So, if many of the world’s musical traditions today seem, even in their homelands, to be
weak and marginal in comparison to the Western classical tradition, it is precisely because
they were unable to rely on powerful political, military, and economic structural support.
In many countries around the world, governments that want to preserve their indigenous
musical traditions are driven to implement deliberate, sometimes restrictive conservation
policies: desperate acts of institutionalized cultural resistance against a eurological music
business that wants to continually conquer new markets and audiences.
From the royal courts to the Asian symphony halls
In some of these countries, even their own elites clearly see European classical and
romantic music as a tell-tale token of prosperity – to be able to afford an orchestra, or even
an opera house, is to conspicuously display one’s economic and cultural potency. As a
result, those states in Asia (and some in Africa) who find themselves on an economic and
political upward trajectory repeat the same gesture of social upgrading that 19th Century
European and North American burghers enacted when they brought “classical” music from
royal courts and country estates to the newly established concert halls and philharmonic
societies in the hearts of their cities. Those on the rise to power borrow cultural prestige
through the art of their decadent predecessors. It is no coincidence that the term “classical”
was deliberately derived from the “classici” – those citizens of Ancient Rome who were the
richest taxpayers, and therefore the de facto tastemakers. Around 1830, by which point
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were already dead, some critics regarded “classical” as that
music which retrospectively appeared to serve as a model for everything else.
Only India has so far managed to avoid this particular cultural corollary of economic
competition. It is the only Asian country where, especially in the ears of its educated
citizens, the art music traditions evolved in their own land rank far ahead of Western art
music in every respect. Maybe I should, after all, have been more forgiving towards those
orchestra directors with their India programs: How could they have possibly known that of
all the countries in Asia that are on the rise globally, India alone does not aspire to
eurological art music? That it alone does not seem to feel the absence of eurological art
music institutions and traditions as a shortcoming that must be fixed as soon as
economically possible?
We could marshal many more examples, but this much seems clear: Music is not immune to
world’s social, economic, and political inequalities. Quite the opposite, they are deeply
ingrained in its aesthetic weave. As “the West’s” military and economic dominance
unfolded, first eurological art musics and later African-American-derived popular musics
could establish a “natural” privilege on presence, attention, and appreciation through
concerts, the media, and research – a privileged position that in turn unavoidably silences
many other musical cultures and traditions.
How then, can music making navigate in a globalized society with its manifold forms of
social, infrastructural, and aesthetic inequality? Can it embrace and signify both the
dissonances and their resolution? Can making music even contribute to a greater good?
What then would need to urgently change in the “Western” ideal of what music and sound
art are, and to what end they are pursued? How could the practice of making music, as well
its organizational and experiential dimensions, grapple with these inequalities – and thus
enter into a humane, socially productive, and aesthetically enriching process of expanding
the realm of what music can be?
Two models: “Universal Music” and “World Music”
In order to do so, we would first have to come to an understanding what it could mean to
have a true “world music.” Presently, two different but complementary ideas about music
making in a global context circulate in Europe and North American.
Firstly, the notion of a “Universal Music”: This is the fiction that there is only music in the
singular, that music is the only real universal language. This is, at its core, the culturallyDarwinist, colonialist perspective detailed above. This notion tempts many organizers and
listeners to believe that concerts with participants from different cultures playing Brahms
with each other are just as much an expression of a global consciousness as New Music
festivals in which composers with Indian, Arabic, Chinese, etc. names and backgrounds
write works for string quartet, orchestra, electronic instruments, and so on. Because music
is a supposedly universal language, it does not matter that other musics are less present –
in this world music they are thought to be simply subsumed into the more comprehensive
eurological musical praxis and thought.
Gentilis-musicology and middle-class guilt
At German universities – with few exceptions – a fine distinction is still made between
“musicology” or “music theory,” which is primarily interested in eurological music, but
maintains a thoroughly universal self-image, and “ethnomusicology” or “systematic
musicology,” which is supposed to cater for all other “local” sub-forms of music (Clarence
Barlow once sarcastically proposed to call the field of ethnomusicology by its true name:
“Heidenklangkunde” – “Sonology of the Gentiles”). The relatively new trend that
ethnological research also delves into the sacred realms of classical and New Music is
disturbing for the scene and is viewed with suspicion – how can the avantgarde be the
object of ethnomusicology? Such objectifications must be reserved for the “Others” of
Western Classical Music who do not belong to this “universal music,” but rather are
subsumed under.
World Music: A marketing term invented in the early 1980s by a consortium of commercial
recording labels.4 It was intended for music stores as a label for all eurological music that
had clearly discernible and even dominant non-eurological components. Such recordings
often were the result of an “arranged marriage,” a strategic meeting of musicians from
different traditions. Soon, all traditional forms of music were promoted under the “World
Music” label. This kind of “world music” elegantly served a liberal audience who sought to
assuage their middle-class guilt by simultaneously turning away from both classical concert
music (which they found too elitist) and ubiquitous pop music (which they found too
commercial). But since it obviously was music made mainly for record albums, it did not
quite fit into their criteria for high artistic value – for many in the chattering classes,
sellable music and high art are antipodes. The ‘world music’ phenomenon thus helped
cement their prejudice that all forms of art music outside the “European art music”
paradigm must be subordinate forms of expression.
Rather unintentionally, though, the easy access to this “world music” since the 1980s
catered toward the expansionist aspirations of many eurological composers and musicians.
Inspired by the colonialist vocabulary, they aspired to the “as yet unheard”, aimed to
“discover,” “conquer,” and “claim” uncharted “virgin” musical territory, often inspired by
these “pristine” sounds and world musics they encountered in their record stores.
Global music as an ecological resource
It seems that especially to these enlightened musickers, the diversity of global music
making, backwards and limited as it may appear, nevertheless was worth preserving for
one precise reason: As a kind of musical biodiversity resource, useful for the occasional
invigoration of eurological music. Any serious and sustained engagement with its forms
and theories e.g. in school and music university curricula, was (and still is) simply too much
– and probably not worth the effort. You do not go to the trouble of learning Hindi just
because you want to eat a curry.
Well-meaning people in the music business who are, by all intents and purposes,
thoroughly invested in the music “of the others” often become defensive when confronted
with such observations: Have not European intellectuals, propelled by insatiable wanderlust,
immersed themselves in these cultures for centuries? They have found priceless intellectual
treasures and exalted them – from the I Ching to the Rigveda, from Basho’s haiku to the
poems of Rumi and Hafiz. That is correct. But none of these coveted discoveries were –
music. And even today: are not Indian, African, Arabic, even Gamelan music well respected in
the German music scene, do their concerts not attract countless fans? True again: but their
concerts and festivals are almost always ephemeral initiatives of individual promoters,
often from their own diaspora. At the most, they may be exhibited as a curiosity in a
museum or an academic context, at some remove from “real”, “serious”, “classical” music.
By contrast, all of the esteemed and state-financed German music institutions, operas,
foundations, orchestras, academies, broadcasters, and publications dedicate themselves
with enormous energy to the training for, the professional presentation and the critical
reception of eurological art music in past, present and future – to the near exclusion of
anything else.
One would therefore have to change the institutions, or the institutions would have to
examine their own colonial attitudes. But there the question arises: Are there alternatives
to these two models, both of which in their way ooze with colonialism? What, then, could a
model for an equitable global music ecosystem look like? We will discuss this question in
the second part of this essay. ¶
Part 2
From Cristina Urchueguía, “Kartöffelchen am Stiel oder semiotisches U-Boot? Die Note, diese
bekannte Unbekannte.” Keynote: XIX. Jahreskongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Zürich
4.10.2019
1
2 See
also the magnificent essay on this topic by historian Jürgen Osterhammel, “Globale
Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik 1860-1930,” published in the 2012 journal Geschichte
und Gesellschaft, 38th year, issue 1, pages 86-132.
An insightful case study here is Yara El-Ghadban’s text “Facing the music: Rituals of
belonging and recognition in Western art music,” in American Ethnologist Vol. 36 no. 1 pp.
140-160. (2009) ISSN 1548-1425
3
See also: Simon Frith, “The Discourse of World Music” in Western Music and its Others, Born,
Hesmondhalgh (eds.), UC Press Berkeley 2000, pp. 305-322. and Glaucia Peres da Silva’s book
4
“Wie klingt die globale Ordnung? Die Entstehung eines Marktes für World Music” Wiesbaden,
2016.
LISTEN BACK, PLEASE!
Part II of a two-part essay
Why the German classical and contemporary music scene must still find its place in
the world – and how it could find it. Part I of a two-part essay.
By Sandeep Bhagwati
Translation Zack Ferriday
Title Image Henri Rousseau (edited)
The first part of this essay concluded with the question: What could an equitable global
music ecosystem look like?
Over the last 15 years, numerous initiatives in the German music scene have actively
addressed something they call “the decolonisation of music.” The most prominent of these
was “Defragmentation,” a joint effort by the Donaueschingen Festival, MaerzMusik Berlin,
Ultima Festival Oslo, and the Darmstadt Summer Course. A number of attempts with
similar goals can be observed all over Germany, with a wide variety of formats and
innovative processes. As somebody who has been involved in a number of these initiatives,
both as an invited thinker and as an invited artist, there are three aspects that stand out.
Germany’s belated post-colonialism
Firstly, the experts brought in on this topic are mostly thinkers from the Anglophone – and
occasionally the Francophone – academic discourse, where a “New Musicology” has been
active since the late 1980s. This “New Musicology” has tried to address precisely questions
of decolonisation, gender, and other concerns in the humanities, but also increasingly seeks
to collaborate with the neurosciences and other scientific disciplines.
So far, Germanophone musicology as a field has not taken this turn towards this kind of
“New Musicology,” nor to its offspring disciplines (such as artistic research in music) – and,
of course, this lack of curiosity rubs off on the classical and contemporary music scene.
Thus, when it comes to decolonisation, Germany’s musical discourse is unable to summon
any distinctive approach of its own, a take on the subject that would be informed by its own
colonial, musical, and intellectual history. And this in spite of the fact that one can indeed
discern a German discursive tradition of pre-colonial and pre-culturally-Darwinist thought
that would be different from the English and French-language debate: From Magnus
Hundt’s and Otto Casmann’s 16th century definition of modern anthropology, to Johann
Nikolaus Forkel’s ambitious (and unfinished) project of a global music history in the
18th century, Goethe’s idea of “Weltliteratur,” (world literature) and Heinrich Brunn’s
notion of “Kunstwollen” (artistic intent) in the mid-19th Century. This intellectual tradition
is almost never mentioned, much less developed in current debates – hence this abiding
sense that many of these German debates in music and musicology do not really look
ahead, but are instead primarily concerned with catching up.
Secondly, despite its purported openness, the German debate continues to be conducted as
an internal, eurological music dispute. Perspectives from other musical traditions are
barely ever acknowledged, discussed, or represented in central music events. It seems to
me that even with the best intentions, the vast majority of these initiatives and events are
more concerned with developing an expanded intellectual and musical arsenal in order to
bolster the “supremacy” of German music (as Schoenberg had imagined it) and the German
music scene for a few more decades. The creative traditions, ways of thinking, and ways of
listening to musics beyond the eurological ken remain either ancillary or completely
inaudible in these deliberations. In other countries, it would be rather unthinkable to
conduct such debates exclusively “among whites.” In Germany, this is still relatively
common.
And thirdly, it is remarkable how much discursive fuss the “classical/contemporary” music
scene tends to make when they finally do address questions of decolonisation and musical
diversity at one of their festivals or forums. Such self-congratulatory hyperventilation
clearly shows that, at least to them and their audiences, diversity still is not simply a matter
of everyday reality in a modern pluricultural society.
It often seems to me as if this country that once had bitterly bemoaned their late arrival to
the feeding frenzy of colonialisation, now once again seems to be late when it comes to the
process of decolonising. There is still is some work ahead before a real, every-day, steady
decolonisation can come to the German-speaking music scenes – not to mention a musical
listening and making praxis that would genuinely want to move towards anything like a
“global music awareness.” In the last part of this essay, I would like to sketch a basic
framework for such an awareness.
Making music as a cultural knowledge system
In his book “Epistemologias do sul” the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls for a
reorientation of the way in which we perceive our environment and construct meaning.
According to de Sousa Santos, knowledge does not arise in a unique, universally valid way.
Rather, knowledge is perceived, used, and negotiated differently in different cultures and
contexts. For him, the recognition of the diversity of epistemologies is essential for global
equality.
The parallels with music are clear – there, too, is no universal way of being music. In this
context, a rethinking of the relationship between tradition and modernity seems to be
central to any reorientation of musical epistemologies. In contemporary music debates,
these two are often presented as polar opposites: music theory and notation here, oral
tradition there; the contemporary here, the traditional (i.e. the obsolete) there. Such
dichotomies are not only inadequate, but downright misleading.
To be avant-garde is also a traditional attitude
We must reconsider the very notion of tradition, because eurological “New Music” is, of
course, also a traditional form of music, albeit a neurotic one. Its self-image insists upon the
presentation of its own music scene as continually anti-traditional, as if engaged in an
institutionalized revolution. But its praxis fails to live up to this claim: For 70 years, since
Adorno’s eponymous essay, people have noticed the “Aging of New Music.” It has become a
musical praxis in which techniques, aesthetics, and sounds have become stubbornly
entrenched, and in which a modest fanbase now zealously guards its memories of their
vintage “music of the future.” Moreover, anti-traditionalism as an aesthetic imperative is in
itself a centuries-old tradition of eurological music: When, in 1322, Pope John XXII banned
a new style of art music from church services, its practitioners immediately wrote a
manifesto in which they called their music “Ars Nova” – a clean break with the established
“Ars Antiqua.” Ever since then, the necessity of breaking new ground beyond the old and
known has been the only aesthetic constant in European musical history. The avantgardists of the 20th Century are thus quite emphatically a part of this intellectual and
musical tradition. Making new music self-consciously is one of many traditional ways of
sounding the nexus between music, society and time.
How differently do various traditions hear the sound of the world?
So what are the insights we would need in order to further the acceptance of other types of
music in the German contemporary music scene? One of them would be the acceptance of
difference in listening: musical practices and ways of thinking tend to differ in the aspects
of sound they pay attention to. One tradition may listen to pitches and rhythms, another to
roughness and groove, another to the social relationship between listeners and performers,
or to the gender of the performers. Others may enjoy how the space around the music
sounds, or how the audience is dressed.
In each tradition, each of these aspects is assigned different weight. And it is precisely this
individual weighting that often distinguishes one tradition from another. Thus, to de-centre
and de-hierarchise the aesthetic value systems around sound would be an important step
towards a less parochial music scene.
Then: the idea of a steady progress in music, all of its pathways inevitably leading to the
pinnacle of eurological music of the 21st century music, is patently nonsensical – if only
because the aesthetics of different traditions have never shared a common genealogy.
There is no common phylogenetical tree of music around the world. Rather, ways of
listening to and using sound have tended to come together in unique musical
epistemologies that are specific to each unique cultural and historical situation – in large
part also because musical transmission relied on communities, not, as in art, on tradeable
objects. The music of Verdi’s time is not a late descendant of the music of the ancient
Egyptians, and the music of the Noh theatre did not evolve from that of the Greek theatre.
Jazz is not a variant of Balinese music, and the various Austrian twelve-tone theories from
the beginning of the 20th century owe no heritage to the twelve-tone music theory of 18th
century Carnatic musicologist Venkatamathi.
Living traditions are always contemporary
There are, of course, signs of mutual influence – Edouard Glissant calls them “traces”:
“If we leave behind this thinking in systems, it is because we realize that they have enforced an
absolute standard for being. This was their depth, their greatness – and their limitation. […]
Thinking in traces stands in contrast to thinking in systems, as when going astray can show us
the right way. […] Creole languages are one such trace, and jazz is a another, a re-constructed
trace that runs across the world”1
In seeking the reality of our musical existence on this planet we should maybe rely less on
narratives of progress and development, and much more on such traces: we may lose them
at times, they may become submerged and some of them may return only as shadows.
Living traditions are constantly and radically contemporary; they always interpret the past
in a pragmatic way, as a toolbox for the present. If we parse tradition in this way, historical
truth and therefore aesthetic rebellions are simply a waste of time. Today’s reconstructed
early music performances, historically accurate as they may be – and precisely for this
reason – must radiate a radical sense of the present and a resolute interest in
contemporary sensibilities. Anything else would be fake.
Making music knows no cultures, only traditions
Creating and listening to music cannot be devoid of traditions – how else would musical
communion come about? Moreover, if we want to comprehend the richness of artistic
phenomena around the world the term “tradition” works much better than the term
“culture.”
A music culture is something one is born into. But a musical tradition is something one
must consciously adopt, and in most cases actively learn. Nobody on the planet has a
particular “music in their blood”: All music is learned, absorbed, transfigured tradition. And
every musician must navigate the strong currents of one or more traditions, especially if
they want to row against or across them.
Moreover, almost all “music cultures” are home to several, clearly distinct musical
traditions – indeed, it can sometimes be trickier to navigate a culture’s own musical divides
than those between traditions from different cultures. So, when we try to picture all music
making in this world, the term “musical tradition” affords us a higher resolution than the
somewhat nebulous “musical culture.”
The music of the past is a foreign land!
This view of music making as invariably tradition-oriented would not only provide a level
playing field for the various global forms of music, it would also release all those musical
expressions of the past from the role assigned to them in the progress narrative: to be
“mere precursors” or “under-complex” forms of music. To amateur listeners, such a
classification might seem strange – but this is how these musics, unfortunately, are often
still discussed – and even taught in the academy.
L.P. Hartley once wrote: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Freeing ourselves from the aesthetic narratives of progress can indeed be key to a true
equality between musical traditions. Every tradition that today vibrates the air, made by
living musicians, would be just as contemporary as any other – a motet by Machaut as
contemporary as a kriti by Thyagarajan, a p’ansori as contemporary as an Anthony Braxton
solo, Mei Langfang’s Guifei Zuijiu (The Drunken Concubine) as contemporary as
Monteverdi’s Lettera Amorosa (love letter). Older forms of music are not historically
obsolete, they simply move within a by now unfamiliar musical-aesthetic land whose
peculiar customs, however, can be learned. Musical traditions are precise, real and richly
developed connections between the perception of sound and its practice – and each one is a
concrete selection made from a theoretically infinite number of conceivable and physically
possible constellations.
Towards an aesthetic of misunderstanding
Of course, our question about a model for a more equitable world music ecosystem can
have no simple answer. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a model of music-making
in the world that is much more sustainable than the eurocentric models of “universal
music” or “world music.” It would be based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of
“Weltliteratur” (world literature) – and UNESCO’s later idea of an intangible world cultural
heritage.
Goethe proposed his concept as a kind of constantly updated anthology of those literary
works that can extend beyond local interest and speak to all people. This view has
sometimes been criticized because it was misunderstood as a “selection of the best” – and
would Goethe not have applied eurocentric quality criteria to such a selection? But
Goethe’s term actually does not say that at all – and he himself never established such a
canon. He merely suggested that, for any curious reader, there could be something
excellent to read from everywhere – that a true reader must transcend the confines of one’s
own culture and language. In literature though, the language barrier and the need for
translation will always constitute a bottleneck that prevents some authors and texts from
even reaching a global public.
Music has a certain advantage here because it does not rely on concrete semantic meaning.
Studies show that people are able to be deeply touched by music whose “sonus” and
cultural context they do not know at all. In this respect (and only in this respect) music
indeed functions like a universal language, albeit one that is effective despite constant
misunderstandings. If you wear sunglasses, an oil painting may still fascinate you with its
richness of colour and its formal language, but the colours you see are likely not the same
as those used by the painter. This is also how music works across traditions: what you hear
is always filtered and re-interpreted to fit into your own aesthetic presets.
And here lies the rub: for if we admit the above, all misunderstandings must be equally
valid. I once experienced such an inspiring misunderstanding when dhrupad master Uday
Bhawalkar listened to Anton Webern’s Variations Op. 27 as if their twelve-tone row were a
very interesting raga. He waxed enthusiastic about its combinatorial richness. The only
criticism on his part was that the composer had developed so little music from it: “He could
have unfolded that over several hours!” This “inappropriate” interpretation, which runs
counter to our own understanding of the piece, must then be just as valid as those
undeniably successful, eurological musical misunderstandings of Ottoman, Indian, Balinese,
Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese music in the works of Mozart, Roussel, Boulez, Puccini,
Holst, Debussy, Messiaen, Cage, Murail, and Hamel for example. Or as acceptable as
misrepresenting spectacular Hindustani court music as spiritual, meditative music.
From genre listeners to listeners to everything
Such creative misunderstandings conjure up a vision of global music in which we all
become listeners to everything. Not in a hedonistic, consumerist sense, though – we would
be as engaged and attuned towards music as a mode of expression as all traditional
listeners are in their respective contexts. It could become a significant part of one’s
aesthetic experience to explore the faults and folds between the musical intention of the
creators and the musical understanding of the listeners – similar to the way in which some
traditions know the pleasure of comparing different interpretations of the same musical
proposition.
It would be worth considering whether event organizers who want to engage with the
world’s music should not also more clearly take into account this differential logic of
listening. Why not create more music festivals and series that are programmed in well
thought-out curatorial settings, and which cross boundaries of genre, tradition, and style? 2
This kind of global music listening would in turn mean a different way of thinking about
what we understand as musical activity. In his book “Musicking: The Meanings of
Performing and Listening,” published 20 years ago, Christopher Small makes a plea for
music to be understood always as an activity, a “becoming” rather than as an object, as had
become common since the invention of the record. And this process of becoming
essentially includes not only those who play music on stage, and those who invent it (if they
are different people), but also and particularly all of those without whom a concert would
not take place – audiences, the staff at the venues, programmers, even the architects. Small
argues that all of these people trust that “musicking” has a fundamental significance in their
society and lives – and that this means that they are indeed active participants in making
this music happen.
Music as a social sculpture
In his book “Music as Social Life,” Thomas Turino even further expands this perspective by
categorizing musical practices according to the different importance they allot to
participation on the one hand and presentation on the other – who participates, to what
extent, and in which role, and what is presented to whom. One tradition may insist that all
listeners contribute to the overall sound and dramaturgy of the music (e.g. by comments,
clapping, or other influential actions). Another tradition may know simpler and more
difficult parts which would allow musicians of different skill levels to take part. A third
tradition might not permit any human musicians at all, would not even force people to be
still and listen – but permit sound to be produced only by those mysteriously powerful
minimalist sculptures known as “loudspeakers.”
The eurological concert ritual of sitting still in silence is so familiar to us, both as a way of
organizing and as a social listening concept, that we hardly ever question it. Many concert
halls, even many new ones, invariably work with fixed seating arrangements. Concerts
almost always take place in the evening between work and bedtime. This organization of
our “musicking” favours some musical traditions more than others. The hall, the ambience,
the form of presentation, and even the movements of musicians and listeners are part of
“musicking” in many musical traditions – it is not just sound that makes music. It is
therefore of particular importance that we do not understand openness solely to be an
open invitation “others” to come and sit on the plush sofa on which we sit so comfortably;
to come to those halls, rituals, and conditions with which we are so familiar. Musique en
marche (music in motion) – what a compelling thought!
What has sound got to do with music?
Much is already being attempted to change our listening habits, to configure musical
experience in new ways – concerts at other times of the day, concerts with the audience
laying down on mats or stretchers, ambulatory concerts, sound installations, music in
public spaces, etc. Such self-examinations and experimentations with our habits is indeed
an important step towards the equal aesthetic presence of different musical traditions
within our cultural consciousness.
Curiously however, it is often precisely those organizers who present music from nonEuropean contexts who are the most conservative in this respect – such events often are
presented in conventional concert halls and emulate their rituals – sometimes to the point
of caricature. Perhaps these organizers know that this non-eurological music, however
artful, is even today still seen as “exotic” and “other,” and that its sophistication and
relevance must be demonstrated, that it must be “elevated,” as it were, by presenting it in a
context that listeners in this country associate with the presentation of “classical” art ?
Our home is always a province of this world
It must be clear that such reflections ultimately are reflections only about ourselves – about
how the European and North American music scene can reposition itself in world affairs.
How its players can understand that while, for many decades, they were fortunate to have
had such a dominant, even bullying voice in the orchestra of global music, the time has now
come to step back a bit, to listen again to the other music traditions, and to let their
contributions be heard. The dramaturgy and sound of this comprovisation3 in which we all
play a part, and which we call “the world,” will and cannot be allowed to become a
monoculture. For over 20 years now, sociologist Deepak Chakraborty has therefore been
asking us to intellectually provincialize Europe: he proposes that we should never regard
our just and important attachment to our cultural homeland as anything more than a
provincial impulse. Let us no longer ask what the music of the world can do for our music,
but rather let us consider what we can do for the many musics of our planet.
I hope to have outlined some insights and strategies for this: but insights into our historic
actions and pervasive prejudices alone will hardly change our “musicking.” Nothing will
change unless we engage in the active and humble act of listening to the sounding, singing
world around us. ¶
Part 1
1
Edouard Glissant, “Traité du Tout-Monde,” Paris 1997, p.19/20.
2 Four
such recent festivals come to mind, all of them on a high musical level: the Musi[name
of the month] festivals (i.e. MusiMars or MusiOctobre) which Denys Bouliane and Walter
Boudreau organized in Montréal from 1999 to 2008, and which in each concert combined a
variety of both European and non-Western art music instrumentations and musical styles
according to a musical or conceptual theme. The two Faithful! festivals 2012/2014, curated in
Berlin by Elke Moltrecht (and in 2012 by Björn Gottstein as well), explored the question of
musical interpretation beyond style, tradition, and genre. Then the Big Ears Festival in
Knoxville, Tennessee, which has regularly taken place since 2009, in which changing curators
from pop, classical, jazz, and new music (Steve Reich, Bryce Dessner, Terry Riley etc.) program
a festival of American music across boundaries of genre and style. Since 2007 in India, there’s
the RIFF Festival Jodhpur, which is similarly inclusive in the context of South Asian music
forms. However, I currently do not know of any carefully curated festival at which all of the
world’s music forms could in principle appear on an equal footing.
“Comprovisation” is a hybrid term, derived from “composition” and “improvisation,” which
like Small’s “Musicking,” is intended to make it clear that every performance of music contains
both planned and unforeseen elements, is “composed” both before and within the concert –
and that traditions may also be distinguished from each other by the way in which their
praxis negotiates between these two poles.
3
Part I

Part II

(Consulta: 5 de noviembre de 2020).
Miguel Gomez Medina, Map of Mexico (1931) | Smithsonian
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, October 26
e Map and the Territory
National borders have colonized our imagination
Translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones
A LONG TIME AGO, a dear childhood friend of mine spent many days walking across a huge desert. Not long afterward, he called me from somewhere in the United States and
explained that he could now help me finish paying for the degree that I was, at the time, struggling to complete in Mexico City. I was touched by the offer and relieved to know he
was alright after a journey I’d tried many times to dissuade him from taking because so many of the stories I’d heard about crossing the northern border involved death and
violence. Some years later, my friend was deported. The next time I saw him was in Ayutla, a Mixe town in the Sierra Norte, in Oaxaca, and as we sat drinking mezcal he told me
that he had seen snow. I myself had never seen snow––the closest I had ever got was seeing a thin layer of white frost covering the perishing plants at dawn.
As teenagers we had dreamed of seeing the world, of visiting other places and experiencing the kind of snow we’d seen in the movies, or read about in the Russian novels we
borrowed. He told me about the snow, about how they survived up there in the winter, and about how our people’s community spirit was being recreated in U.S. cities. I think it
was the first time I’d heard of that—of communities recreated as a way of dealing with the daily challenges of living in a new place. In my friend’s case, he joined a small
community of Mixe speakers who, when he met them, were planning, among other things, the best way of paving a track in Ayutla, Oaxaca, starting on the outskirts of town and
heading all the way into the center. When he returned to Mexico, he became actively involved in the project. In a certain sense, the community had traveled with him, and his own
plans were sketched out against the backdrop of the whole community’s wishes.
The Romani people’s relationship with the land, established over centuries, poses a radical challenge to one idea
that modern nation-states have imposed on the world.
Some years later, the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (IFBO)––coordinated for the first time by a woman, the Zapotecan Odilia Romero––invited me to Los Angeles
to a festival of indigenous language literatures that is organized there every year. It was there that I saw and heard for myself about the indigenous communities from here that
have recreated themselves over there, and the structures that sustain them––the way communal institutions of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca are giving new meaning to many
indigenous peoples’ understanding of community living. The struggle for linguistic rights with which I am involved is being developed over there too, through forms of direct
action that include the training of Los Angeles police to identify, among other things, what linguistic needs migrants might have over and above the jump between Spanish and
English. Watching and listening led me to question my own ideas about the importance of territoriality in the process of identity creation, and even my ideas about what a nation
is.
The history and very existence of a Romani traveler population has long had me questioning the idea of territory and its relationship to the concepts of nation and indigenous
communities. The Romani people’s relationship with the land, established over centuries, poses a radical challenge to one idea that modern nation-states have imposed on the
world: that we must establish physical borders in order to then create processes of identity homogenization within them. Being Mexican, Argentine, or from the United States
means belonging in a legal sense to a certain territory delimited by artificially established borders. The Romani, with their constant wandering, clearly challenge that
understanding because they are not anchored to any particular land. From what I managed to glimpse in the interesting conversations I had with members of the IFBO, being
Zapotec, Mixtec, or Mixe in Los Angeles challenges the existence of borders and the very idea of these indigenous nations’ territoriality. A Zapotec community
continues to exist as a Zapotec community in Los Angeles because it has community representatives elected in assembly, because it organizes
community festivals, because reciprocal working patterns are constantly weaving and interweaving the fabric of the community. The pillars of
“communality” that the Mixe anthropologist Floriberto Díaz and the Zapotec anthropologist Jaime Luna described in the 1980s have found expression
many miles from the original communities from which those Zapotec migrants departed. The battles we fight in our communities in Oaxaca are rooted
entirely in our conception of territory; however, in view of this new evidence, it seems to me we urgently need to broaden our definition of territory to
cover the communities that have been created north of the border.
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil at the Library of Mexico, Mexico City, 2019. | Wikimedia Commons
The establishment of a world divided into nation-states, known as countries, is very recent in the history of humanity. Nevertheless, the existence of these countries as naturally
given entities has been so powerful that it has taken over our imaginations and our identity narratives, and even projected itself onto our past. The official narrative of Mexico as a
country is rooted in a more than two-thousand-year-old “pre-Hispanic” world in which the concept of Mexico did not exist. It’s as though all of human history only happened in
order to give rise to the countries currently in existence––as though every country, every nation-state, was always predestined to exist in its current form. Humanity is organized
into states and chooses the representatives of those states via a democratic system that narrates itself as the ultimate endpoint of a civilizing process, although the incredibly
violent way in which today’s borders are managed negates that idea entirely.
According to data from the United Nations, the world has been divided into approximately two hundred entities. That’s two hundred flags, two hundred nationalities imposed on
thousands of different peoples. Generally speaking, each one of those entities has the same model of internal organization, with an executive, a legislature, and a judiciary.
Representative democracy has been established as the ideal model under which these states should be governed. This diverse world, with its many nations, peoples, cultures, and
languages, is divided into just two hundred entities. All the peoples, languages, and nations that have not constituted their own state remain enclosed within those two hundred
legal entities known as countries: they are stateless nations, stateless peoples, stateless languages. Behind each state, there is a homogenizing ideology that tries to have us believe
that all the people who share the legal status of Mexican or of U.S.-American have cultural, linguistic, or identity traits in common. But there is no single cultural trait shared by all
of us who have the random legal status of Mexican. What is more, those in power who are involved in the formation of states have denied and contested other types of
organization, other identities and territories, other languages not used in state administration. The state has consistently shown itself to be founded on the idea of exclusion. The
idea that Mexico’s northern border divides two cultures is imprecise: the border divides two states, each of which contains multiple languages, cultures, nations, and identities. A
state is not a culture; it is a legal entity that administrates territorialities by means of a violent monopoly.
These state borders were not established instantaneously, but, once they were, they colonized even our
imagination.
The first operation necessary for the creation of the modern state was the establishment of borders: its borders are where Mexico starts, whatever Mexico means. A border is, first
and foremost, a violent intervention into a given territory on the basis of an ad hoc legal justification. Why were borders laid down in their current configurations? Before
establishing physical barriers, nation-states claimed the right to establish boundaries, and this process took a considerable amount of time, which demonstrates the artificiality of
the process itself. In Mexico it was the criollos, the whites, who established the state; in the United States, too, it was the dominant sector of society. Those in power determined
who was to be considered a citizen, which gender should have the right to vote, and what color their skin should be. In Canada, in the first half of the twentieth century, First
Nations people who wanted to vote in elections had to legally renounce their right to consider themselves indigenous. These fledgling democracies were designed for the
convenience of the dominant sector of society. Likewise, it was those in power who oversaw the drawing of borders; arrangements were made between states and their
representatives without ever taking into account the territorial dynamics of stateless nations. This explains, for example, how the Yumanos territory was divided in two—half in
Mexico, half in the United States. Mexico’s southern border, which cuts across the enormous Mayan territory, is further evidence of borders’ violent imposition. These state
borders were not established instantaneously, but, once they were, they colonized even our imagination. To almost anyone, the shape of a country’s territory looks completely
natural, but that image, that figure, symbolizes the enactment of multiple violences. A country’s silhouette marks a boundary on the map of the world, but what it really signifies
today is the separation of families, death, human trafficking, and torture.
Memorial coffins for those killed crossing the border fence in Tijuana, México. | Tomas Castelazos
I have read the news about the caravans of Central American migrants who have decided to cross the Guatemala–Mexico border without papers. It pains me to hear of the
thousands of comments people in Mexico have made about them, comments so similar to those that anti-immigrant white people have made about Mexican migrants in the
United States. Fear becomes hatred, and that hatred is given a legal justification, when in reality it’s nothing more than an administrative offense: coming into Mexico without
papers is not a crime. I have read about Mexicans who say that they would happily give their vote in elections to anyone who promised to seal the southern border, and as an
attempt to subvert that terrible narrative I draw the map of a state—a country—that existed briefly during the nineteenth century and that included, in addition to what we today
know to be Mexico, the countries of Central America, where Nahuatl is still widely spoken today.
If the huge country I have drawn were to exist now, the current southern border wouldn’t exist, nor would those terrible comments about the migrant caravans. The series of
historical events that determined the current silhouette of Mexico also determined what we think of as “us,” an artificial “us” that could well have included people born in El
Salvador or Guatemala. Historic events shaped by the dynamics of power determined what the word us means and why others cannot pass freely through all the territories they
would like to. The same can be said of the northern border, where the voices of stateless peoples and nations did not play a part in its establishment. “They have no reason to enter
a country that is not theirs” is a phrase repeatedly tirelessly without anyone ever really questioning how that country came to be “theirs” or why it can no longer belong to someone
born in Honduras.
Even as borders are legitimately and legally established, preventing free passage through the world, the ongoing dynamics of colonialism continue to exert their power. Most
people have forgotten that it wasn’t long ago that we could move around the world without passports or customs checkpoints. The historical, economic, and social flows that
shaped the emergence of states and state borders also gave rise to mass migration. Colonialism, capitalism, and the patriarchy––the macrosystems organizing our world––are
administrated by the legal entities known as countries. It is a legal entity intervening in other states, creating unsustainably violent situations that force people to flee, people who
are detained at a border established via a legal framework. It is a legal entity that grants mining companies access to indigenous peoples’ territories, thereby impoverishing them
until they are forced to migrate elsewhere and to face another legal entity.
The very existence of indigenous peoples, and their defense of their territories, calls into question the legitimacy
of state borders.
The announcement of the current president, Donald Trump, that he planned to construct a wall on the southern border of the United States is the physical evidence of these
dynamics. I see it as the discursive, almost natural evolution of the ideology that created a world divided into states, because the wall, as many have pointed out, already exists in a
legal, figurative, and objective sense. The physical, totalizing materialization of borders is the most extreme evidence of the violence on which nation-states were built. Donald
Trump’s followers find the construction of an immense, impregnable, metal or concrete wall plausible because they already find the existence of national boundaries completely
natural, given that those boundaries rest at the heart of nation-states. But they are an arbitrary concept to justify the existence of the U.S. nationality and passports, creating an
artificial distinction between “us” and “them” that legalizes fear and consequently hatred. The promised wall is the materialization of the violence on which the idea of the
modern nation-state rests.
Within state borders, the powerful people that created them have systematically ignored other legitimate claims to territory from stateless nations. Indigenous peoples’ campaigns
have often centered on the struggle to prevent the state from violating their lands. These peoples in the United States and Mexico have had their lands plundered by the states that
contain them. However, by migrating to the United States, the indigenous peoples of Mexico challenge the legitimacy of the border the state does recognize. States strengthen and
build walls along the borders they have legally established, but ignore the boundaries of stateless, indigenous peoples’ territories. The legitimization of Zapotec territory has not
prevented it from being violated by extractivism; Mexico’s northern state border, however, detains and violates the Zapotec population trying to migrate to the United States.
From here in the southern Oaxacan mountains, as someone who has not walked through the desert or crossed the northern border, I see that paradox on which Trump’s wall––
both an ideological and a physical artifact––rests: the wall constitutes the reinforcing of a border that dreams of being impenetrable while at the same time penetrating into and
violating the territories of the nations separated by it. Within its borders, the state undermines indigenous peoples’ territories, plundering them, annexing them to its totalizing
and homogenizing project while seeking to seal the borders it forcibly created.
The very existence of indigenous peoples, and their defense of their territories, calls into question the legitimacy of state borders. In the 1980s in Australia, various aboriginal
peoples created their own “aboriginal passport”; it is not recognized by the Australian state but has symbolic power, calling attention to aboriginal peoples’ legitimate claim to the
land. Similarly, the North American Iroquois people, also known as the Haudenosaunee, have issued their own passports since 1923 as a way of claiming a sovereignty that the
state, of course, does not recognize. Having constituted itself as the main administrator of the idea of the border, the state, at one radical extreme, hopes to give it material shape
in the form of a wall, a supposedly impenetrable physical entity: a border taken to its own limit.
Donald Trump’s wall––a wall that in reality already exists but that is made doubly threatening by his words and actions––is perhaps the evolution of nationalism in the extreme, the
physical materialization of a border that began simply as a legal declaration. The wall as a physical intervention makes material the continual violence of the systems of oppression
that order the world, makes material the idea on which states were created. Undocumented migration therefore seems to me to question the very idea of the state and its control of
territoriality. I think about the remittances that nourish, year after year, the shared fabric of the Oaxacan communities from which migrants in the United States originally came.
Mexico’s indigenous migrants completely destabilize the impregnable border of Trump’s dreams, and also strengthen, through their participation in the community and the
remittances they send, the processes of collective resistance to the Mexican state, such as those we have experienced in my own community.
I am still here, and I have still never seen snow.
To return to my conversation with my childhood friend, he told me about the people he had met who had lost their lives attempting to cross the border. Stories that those of us who
have never undertaken such a feat cannot even begin to comprehend. After that conversation, we often heard news stories about the violence on both the northern and the
southern borders of the map we call Mexico, about families separated, cages, tear gas, persecution. “I’d go back and do it again if I had the strength, just to be able to show you
something,” my friend said to me one day when we were talking about such things. The first time he saw snow in the United States he was reminded of our shared childhood and
adolescence, and so he wrote my name in the snow and took a photograph. All those years later, he handed me the photo: “I would go back just to show you that there is no border,
no wall in the world that can stop our desire to see something we have only ever imagined.” I am very fond of that photo, which I keep safe. I am still here, and I have still never
seen snow.
Copyright © 2020 by Yasnaya Elena Aguilar Gil; translation © 2020 by Ellen Jones. This excerpt originally appeared in Let’s Talk About Your Wall, published by The New Press.
Reprinted here with permission.
Born in Ayutla Mixe, Oaxaca, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil is an Ayuujk linguist, writer, translator, and human-rights activist. She has written
for a variety of media in Mexico, including Letras Libres, Nexos, and Revista de la Universidad de México.
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ÁGORA
EL ESTADO MEXICANO COMO
APROPIADOR CULTURAL
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
Si algo se ha discutido en la antropología y en las ciencias sociales sin llegar a un acuerdo absoluto es el término cultura. Sin embargo, se pueden vislumbrar dos
posibles puertos a donde llegar: el uso de cultura que
hace referencia al conjunto de manifestaciones artísticas de una sociedad determinada, o bien el uso del término de un modo más amplio para nombrar sistemas
complejos que subyacen a las conductas, cosmovisiones,
saberes, creencias, rituales, símbolos, por mencionar
sólo algunos elementos, de una sociedad determinada.
En este último sentido, casi todo elemento colectivo parece ser una manifestación de aquello que llamamos
cultura.
Asumimos también que existen culturas distintas,
pero sabemos que no es posible trazar cortes discretos
entre ellas, puesto que siempre se están modificando
mutuamente; se trata de sistemas autorregulados que,
a pesar de las percepciones o preferencias de individuos
puristas, cambian y se replantean constantemente. Del
uso de la palabra ‘cultura’ derivan categorías aún más
problemáticas que parten de una base ya inestable; términos como contacto cultural, aculturación, interculturalidad, incorporación cultural, asimilación cultural
e intercambio cultural, entre otros, representan un reto
en cuanto a su definición y uso. Cada una de estas categorías evidencia que la interacción de los sistemas
culturales se da en diversos y complejos niveles y que
distinguir entre los distintos tipos de interacción cul◀ Desfile de Victoria’s Secret, 2012
130
de los abusos que los grupos culturales hegemónicos ejercen sobre poblaciones o grupos
culturales oprimidos.
A diferencia de otros fenómenos que se dan
en el contacto entre culturas, la apropiación
cultural indebida se enmarca en dinámicas
asimétricas y prácticas coloniales; es más, la
apropiación cultural misma es opresora: mientras que la cultura dominante actúa en contra de los que ejercen la cultura oprimida, al
mismo tiempo toma de ésta elementos concretos para exotizarlos, extraerlos para su disfrute o, en el peor de los casos, sacar provecho económico.
El plagio de elementos de otra cultura es
quizás el caso más extremo de apropiación
cultural, pues la opresión se traduce en explotación económica y se inserta así dentro de
la lógica de explotación capitalista. Otro elemento importante cuando hablamos de plagio es el choque que se da entre las nociones
de propiedad. Como apunta la politóloga mixe
Tajëëw Díaz Robles en su análisis sobre el
plagio de la blusa tradicional de Tlahuitoltepec
Mixe por la diseñadora francesa Isabel Marant, el plagio no se repara con un pago económico, pues la propiedad colectiva de la blusa choca con las concepciones de propiedad
intelectual propias de la cultura occidental. No
sólo se origina un conflicto causado por la misma apropiación indebida sino también, como
lo apunta Díaz Robles, porque los conceptos
de propiedad y reparación del daño se inscriben en sistemas culturales contrastantes.
En Estados Unidos, el debate sobre los casos de apropiación cultural se ha hecho más
intenso con los años: personas blancas que se
pintan el rostro de negro como parte de un
disfraz de Halloween mientras que la represión policiaca contra las personas afroameri-
tural requiere de la consideración de múltiples
factores. Quisiera sin embargo focalizarme
en un término que, en palabras del antropólogo Carlos Mondragón, “emerge de la cultura del litigio estadounidense”, aunque se ha
extendido más allá: la apropiación cultural
indebida.
Hace algunos años, la antropóloga Sheba
Camacho me llamó la atención sobre la discusión que en Estados Unidos tenía lugar: una
modelo que desfiló en el Fashion Show 2012
de la marca de lencería Victoria’s Secret se
mostró ataviada con un tocado de plumas bastante similar a los tocados reservados a guerreros y jefes bélicos de distintos pueblos nativoamericanos. Desde diversas voces, se acusó
a Victoria’s Secret de apropiación cultural indebida. Una de las principales inconformidades tenía que ver con que el tocado se había
despojado de los significados que tenía para los
pueblos nativoamericanos en cuestión. Mientras que el tocado de plumas estaba inmerso
en un sistema determinado que le asignaba
condiciones concretas de uso y se asociaba con
ciertos significados rituales, en el desfile de
lencería se había extraído de la red que le otorgaba el sentido original. El escándalo llegó a
tal punto que algunos ejecutivos de Victoria’s
Secret se vieron obligados a pedir disculpas.
Después de una breve revisión de lo que se
ha llamado “apropiación cultural indebida”,
me percaté de la polémica en torno al fenómeno y al término mismo. Mientras algunos
argumentan que la propagación transcultural de elementos forma parte de la construcción de los sistemas culturales del mundo y
que limitarla es imposible, además de que supone limitar también la libertad de expresión,
otras personas sostienen que la ‘apropiación
cultural indebida’ es una manifestación más
ÁGORA
131
EL ESTADO MEXICANO COMO APROPIADOR CULTURAL
retoma elementos de la vestimenta asumida
como característica de los indígenas para disfrazar de “inditos” a los niños durante las celebraciones católicas del Corpus Christi. Por
un lado, utilizar la etiqueta “inditos” refuerza
un apelativo que ha incorporado ya demasiadas connotaciones racistas; por el otro, la vestimenta, una mezcla de elementos textiles de
distintas comunidades indígenas, ayuda a reforzar un estereotipo y simplifica la gran diversidad textil presente en muy distintas y
contrastantes tradiciones. Esto mismo sucede con otras manifestaciones locales; durante la Guelaguetza, un festival organizado por
el gobierno de Oaxaca para consumo turístico en donde las comunidades de la entidad
presentan bailes supuestamente tradicionales, es posible apreciar a un grupo de mujeres
canas es alarmante, el uso de turbantes en desfiles de moda mientras que la estigmatización
del islam se incrementa, población blanca tatuándose frases en idiomas nativos al tiempo
que se recrudece la amenaza por la construcción de gasoductos en territorios indígenas.
La polémica en el país vecino por estos temas contrasta con la situación en México. Si
bien los casos de plagio evidente, sobre todo
de textiles, se señalan cada vez más, el uso de
elementos culturales que pertenecen a comunidades indígenas por parte de una población
privilegiada y más altamente jerarquizada en
la escala de racialización no prende los mismos focos de alarma. Me parece muy problemática la costumbre mediante la cual la población llamada mestiza, claramente con una
jerarquía más alta que la población indígena,
Blusa de Santa María Tlahuitoltepec y camisa Isabel Marant
ÁGORA
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EL ESTADO MEXICANO COMO APROPIADOR CULTURAL
La cultura mexicana es el
resultado de la apropiación cultural
indebida por parte del Estado
de elementos de culturas a las
que ha querido desaparecer.
mestizas bailar la pieza conocida como “Flor
de Piña” vistiendo huipiles propios de mujeres chinantecas y mazatecas de diversas comunidades que no están presentes.
Más que leerse como una apropiación cultural donde un grupo privilegiado toma un elemento cultural del grupo oprimido, y de esa
forma invisibiliza a este último, reforzando
estereotipos y convirtiendo en una categoría
homogénea tanta diversidad, los fenómenos
arriba señalados se leen como un tributo que
el país le rinde a sus “raíces” indígenas.
Esta narrativa es posible gracias a la construcción del mito del mestizaje, como lo ha
llamado el historiador Federico Navarrete; la
narrativa del mestizaje fue creada por el Estado mexicano para tratar de crear una identidad cultural homogénea; de este modo, todas las personas que tienen la nacionalidad
mexicana pueden utilizar los elementos culturales de los pueblos indígenas porque estos elementos han pasado a formar parte de
algo llamado cultura mexicana. Podríamos decir que, a diferencia de Estados Unidos, la verdadera narrativa del melting pot fue cristalizada en México por el proyecto de construcción
estatal. Así como la narrativa del mestizaje
disfraza el evidente racismo que existe en el
país, también oculta los fenómenos de apropiación cultural indebida.
En el país del norte, los formularios en los
que hay que rellenar distintos recuadros para
clasificar raza o etnicidad (blanco, negro, latino, hispano, oriental, etcétera) mantienen aún
el melting como una idea no cuajada y visibilizan claramente que una persona blanca, perteneciente a la categoría dominante, ha tomado elementos de culturas oprimidas.
Por contraste, en México no sólo la narrativa oficial del mestizaje borra fenómenos de
ÁGORA
apropiación, el mismo Estado mexicano basa
la mitología de su creación en elementos de los
que se ha apropiado indebidamente; los símbolos aztecas son los más socorridos: el propio
escudo de la bandera mexicana es una apropiación de un símbolo cultural nahua. Al mismo tiempo que el gobierno mexicano destinaba recursos públicos e intensas campañas a
la desaparición de las lenguas indígenas, tomaba elementos de estas mismas culturas
para crear esa mezcla artificial que hoy se llama “cultura mexicana”: un baile de esta cultura, los elementos gastronómicos de otra
más los símbolos de estas otras. Mientras las
concesiones que ha otorgado el Estado a empresas mineras canadienses despojan a los
pueblos indígenas de su territorio, la selección
de futbol que representa al país en el Mundial de Rusia se presenta como la “selección
azteca”. La cultura mexicana es el resultado
de la apropiación cultural indebida por parte
del Estado de elementos de culturas a las que
ha querido desaparecer. En este país, la discusión de la apropiación cultural indebida se
desvanece en el mito oficial del mestizaje. Para
entender este fenómeno en México resulta
necesario analizar los mecanismos del principal apropiador cultural: el propio Estado
mexicano.
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EL ESTADO MEXICANO COMO APROPIADOR CULTURAL
ARCHIVE
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN
CLASSICAL MUSIC?
PHOTO BY HENRY LIU VIA FLICKR
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN CLASSICAL
MUSIC?
BY BRENT MICHAEL DAVIDS
ON NOVEMBER 21, 2019
It was my pleasure to attend a banquet honoring my primary composition professor,
Chinary Ung, on the occasion of his Grawemeyer award. Full disclosure: I was a
graduate student working toward two masters degrees, one in music theory and
composition (college of fine arts) and another in the anthropological study of Native
American ritual and performance (college of liberal arts). Chinary’s award-winning work,
Inner Voices, showcased his Cambodian heritage in an exquisite composition. At the
event, the Dean of Fine Arts, Seymour Rosen, who had come to Arizona State University
from his directorship at Carnegie Hall, leaned in to me and commented, “Hearing
Chinary’s work is the first time I’ve ever heard culture in music.” With my best banquet
decorum, I found a conciliatory smile. Inside, my jaw dropped. I had never in my entire
life considered music without culture before; culture was a musical fact like gravity. I
wondered, was every work ever performed at Carnegie Hall without culture? How could
the whole of Western music not have culture when I was certain the music of most every
other heritage on earth likely did? Why would anyone characterize Western music as so
antithetical to the rest of the globe?
The discord of the incongruity stuck with me months later. The longer I thought about it
on a wider scope, the more I realized, the broader issue was two-fold. First, non-Western
traditions are more often than not considered unimportant and rendered invisible in
Western music until, for example, a non-Western composer wins a prestigious award.
One outcome of genocidal imperialism is that erasing people also erases their music, so
the resultant naiveté about Native Americans may sit somewhere along the ignoranceis-bliss scale as a byproduct of ethnic cleansing. Second, there is an air of cultural
neutrality in Western …
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