Defining the Classical in Studies of South and Southeast Asian Music:
A Review and Evaluation of Pertinent Scholarship
by Pamela Moro
Assoc. Prof. of Anthropology
Willamette University
pmoro@willamette.edu
There is a long tradition in the West of distinguishing between “high” and “low” art. All of us who have been formed in that tradition first absorb this grand dichotomy as an obvious bit of common sense, and then when we go off to study aesthetical matters in an Asian society, we take one or another version of it with us. Sometimes it appears as a contrast between “sophisticated” and “folk”; sometimes as one between “élite” and “popular”, sometimes as one between “court” and “country”; sometimes it even takes on an air of scientific precision and objectivity: “Great versus Little Tradition”, “Civilization versus Culture”, “Art versus Craft”, “Literature versus Lore”.
When we actually attempt to understand a particular sort of artistic expression, in the societies to which we journey, an odd thing happens. We discover both how inadequate and uncommonsensical the distinction is, and how inevadable and unsuppressible it is. The harder we struggle to replace the high art/low art contrast with something more appropriate to local realities, the more insistently the issues that, however clumsily, it brings into view demand to be confronted.
Clifford Geertz (1996:245)
For scholars like myself, trained in anthropology and Asian Studies in the last decades of the twentieth century, Clifford Geertz has been a towering and inspiring figure. If he has had something to say about a topic, we pay close attention. Luckily, he has written a lot, about nearly every aspect of our fields. In the publication from which the quotation above is drawn, Geertz nudges us to reexamine the easy labeling of “layers” of culture, a project more frequently attributed (outside of Asian Studies, at least) to American historian Lawrence Levine (1988). Following the lead of both Geertz and Levine, I hope to explore how the high/low, classical/nonclassical distinction has been found inadequate in the analysis of South and Southeast Asian music--and yet, how it appears to be unsuppressible, a friendly and reliable old tool to which we resort again and again. I will begin by reviewing how “the canonic” and “the classical” have been reevaluated over the last fifteen years or so, and will then compare the works of particular scholars who have reckoned with these terms in the context of South and Southeast Asia. Ultimately, I hope to account for the persistence of “the classical” and to confront, as Geertz says, the issues it brings into view. The present work provides the intellectual backdrop to a larger project with which I have been engaged, a comparative study of how elite music became redefined as classical in India, Indonesia, and Thailand (Moro 2004) [1]. In all three cases, classicized music became a crucial ingredient in conceptions of nationalism and middle class identity. The place of Western-authored scholarly definitions of the classical is a crucial addition to this picture of the construction of canonic, prestigious music in Asia.
The social and historical contingencies behind the division of music and other arts into categories of canonic/non-canonic, classical/non-classical, has been vigorously explored by scholars in a number of disciplines since the 1980s, and in fact are central to contemporary analyses of the arts. As an ethnographic fact, it is likely that all societies differentiate and rank musical forms according to some sort of hierarchy of prestige or value. However, considerable recent scholarship unveils the ideological and social situatedness of canons in complex societies, at particular historical moments. With its succinct presentations, the major reference work on music, The New Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, can serve as a barometer of current scholarly consensus. There, Jim Samson describes canons as historically fluid constructions of bodies of works “assigned value and greatness by consensus” (Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2001-2002). Of crucial concern is who is assigning value and greatness, and why. Canon formation in 19th century western and central Europe is related to the emergence of a middle class and several other features: the development of the professionally-performed public concert as the central institution of musical life; the establishment of a core, highly valorized repertory; and the growth of taste-creating print media (Weber 1975). Such a constructivist view contradicts earlier ideas inherent in the very idea of canon: that there are “ahistorical, and essentially disinterested, qualities of these repertories” (Samson ibid).
The term “classical” has been similarly reevaluated, though with regard to music the reappraisal has perhaps come more recently. The New Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001) once again provides a snapshot of current understanding of the terms “classic” and “classical.” The Grove’s entry, by Daniel Heartz and Bruce Allen Brown, emphasizes the historical situatedness of various definitions of the terms, implicitly rejecting any essentialist notions of the classical. While the terms “classic” and “classical” have been used in a number of ways in Europe, and these have changed somewhat over at least four centuries, their general use to signify a model of excellence “. . .has had the widest currency over the longest time” (ibid). Classical music is prestigious, exclusive, and old, and inherently rests on its separation from other musics. It was in 18th century England that the word first began to be used to refer to musical works distinct in terms of quality and age (Weber 1992). Narrower use of the word with regard to music refers to a formal, balanced style confined to a particular era in European composition (Rosen 1971); we might speak of the classicism of Haydn and Mozart, or of music from the classical era.
What Janet Wolff has called the “aesthetic autonomy” of European music--so crucial to received usages of the words canon and classical--has been ripped away to reveal the social practices, and in particular the class divisions, lying behind our perceptions of high and popular culture (1987). Susan McClary has gone so far as to associate particular compositional features with class structures, for example suggesting that the harmonious, formally balanced music of the 18th century Enlightenment reflected the social values of a stabilizing European middle class, while the more fragmented, ornamented, dissonant music of the 17th century celebrated bourgeois struggles against the church and aristocracy (1987:18-19). Many ethnomusicologists would be wary of McClary’s application of class analysis to actual musical structure, instead treating musical sounds or styles as symbols which carry their own culturally-constituted meaning and relevance, and which need to be approached through broad consideration of context. McClary’s comments prod us to consider the possibility that there is something “in” musical structure which corresponds very deeply indeed to the class circumstances of performance, an approach ironically similar to older approaches to “the classical”--asserting there is something distinctive “in” classical music.
The view that the classical and its associated canon is not an autonomous, unchanging category of music that simply is better than other repertories, to borrow a phrase from McClary, provokes us to ask why some music gets called classical and other music, inevitably, does not. In the writings by ethnomusicologists on the musics of Asia, two contradictory things have been true: from early on, while there has been skepticism about terms like “classical” and “high art,” we have routinely fallen back on received categories of analysis drawn from European and North America scholarship, including terms like classical and art music. “Classical” has been used as a convenient label, resting upon assumptions shared by author and reader and informed by familiarity with European music. Occasionally, authors have problemmatized the concept, and attempted to offer a definition that either can be applied cross-culturally or is specific to the culture under study. In this section, I shall introduce a series of these in the form of a continuum, with reference to South and Southeast Asia, beginning with those authors who have struggled to craft broadly applicable definitions of “classical” or “art” music, and ending with authors who emphasize discourse, fluidity, and the experiences of performers within larger frameworks of meaning.
As long ago as 1956, a founding father of ethnomusicology (and scholar of Indonesian music) Mantle Hood argued that terms such as “primitive music,” “folk music,” “popular music,” and “art music” were “almost meaningless when applied to music in the Orient” (1959:201 regarding 1956). He offered instead a two-part model distinguishing between ingenuous music and cultivated music. The key factor separating the two was the presence or absence of “conscious improvement”--cultivated music by definition was studied, refined through conscious effort. Hood’s model stands apart from the casual use of the terms he rejected (such as art music and primitive music) in that he did not consider such features as function, popularity, class, commercialization, the sorts of factors that lay behind the usual layer-cake descriptions of culture and prestige hierarchies. His examples came primarily from Java and Bali. While Hood’s pair of terms never caught on firmly in ethnomusicology--perhaps because they substituted one dichotomy for another--the article in which they appear stands as an early, significant critique of received classifications of music.
A similarly problemmatic but provocative attempt to define “classical music” or “traditional art music” is an article by Harold Powers, published in 1980, just on the eve of the explosion of critical theory in analyses of literature, music, and other arts. Powers’ ultimate goal was to argue that there was no classical music in the Middle East, but in order to do so, he had to define the classical. Professionalization of performers, the presence of articulated music theory, patronage, and a somewhat amorphous conception of “cultural grounding” are his key characteristics. Powers summarizes,
In a completely paradigmatic case. . .the performers would be indoctrinated specialists, patronized by connoissuers; their art would be linked to other domains in the high culture, yet musicians and connoisseurs alike would claim for music an independent and autonomous canonical basis. (1980:11)
Powers’s definition emerges from his own familiarity with three musical traditions: those of Western Europe, India (especially the north), and Java. The definition is intended to be cross-culturally applicable, yet rests upon an empirical understanding of a very particular swath of the world. When he states that his inquiry does “not stem from any a priori abstract notions of what is ‘art’ or what is ‘classical’” (ibid:10), Powers rejects the sort of culturally-based “model of excellence” identified in The New Grove’s entry. He considers, instead, “. . .the essential features common to the prestigious styles of music” (ibid) in those three musical areas most familiar to him as practitioner and scholar. Somehow one cannot help but feel that Powers’ work is not as divorced from customary ways of defining the classical as he would have liked--especially in his emphasis upon cultural holism and integration, and his conception of music as autonomous expression “. . .that can stand on its own as the centerpiece of a cultural performance” (ibid:11), so very like the disinterested canon rejected by Wolff and McClary.
These first two authors--Hood and Powers--seem to say that if we can look very closely at music held to be prestigious in its own setting, we will figure out what all such musics have in common, though they are not looking within the music so much as at contextual features just outside the music. A somewhat different tactic is taken by subsequent scholars.
The work of Kathryn Hansen on Nautanki theatre of North India stands out as a kind of bridge between the approach of Harold Powers and the remaining authors. In trying to identify common features of classical performance traditions in India, she considers not the internal, textual features of the art but “. . .the sources of a tradition’s authority, its modes of reproduction, and its relation to dominant social groups” (1992:44). Like Powers, Hansen emphasizes textual authority, trained specialists, and support from an elite social group of patrons or connoisseurs. Unlike Powers, Hansen is particularly concerned with the dynamic movement of performers as agents, who actively desire their work to be considered “classical” in order to gain access to financial resources and audience support in contemporary India. She thus rejects any sort of static identification of art forms as folk or classical, including the folk/classical continuum suggested by Blackburn and Ramanujan, which acknowledged interplay and complexity between the two realms, but did not recognize agency on the part of performers (1986:15).
If Hansen draws our attention to the possibility of fluid movement along high/low cultural hierarchies, other authors have pointedly examined the process by which music or other performing arts become defined as or elevated to the status of classical, with all that term entails. The historian Partha Chatterjee has used the term classicization to describe the elevation of select aspects of culture, specifically as part of a deliberate and negotiated process of national culture formation. A classicized tradition is one which has been “reformed, reconstructed, fortified against charges of barbarism and irrationality,” and hence made palatable for the tastes of middle class people. . .and appropriate content for a nationalized cultural identity (1993:127). This link to nationalism is particularly insightful, and helps us to think about the classical in the arts in new ways.
Susan Reed (2002) employs Chatterjee’s notion to describe the elevation of Kandyan dance in Sri Lanka since the 1950s, a process by which the dance form became “respectable” and appropriate for middle-class participation, largely through systematization of dance practices and movement of the dance to modern educational institutions. The dance thus became “the” classical dance of Sri Lanka, and part of the “tool-kit” of symbolic material that supports national identity (borrowing a concept from Orvar Löfgren 1993.) Like Hansen’s work on North Indian theater, Reed addresses the actual re-classification of an art in a ranked hierarchy of expressive forms. Kandyan dance became classical under the changing social conditions of the 20th century, especially the construction of nationalism based on middle-class ideals. Reed highlights the experiences of the performers as participants on the ground, and quotes extensively the voices of dancers and teachers of dance for whom the changing national attitudes towards their art have meant very real changes in life circumstances.
A final pair of authors stands out for their strong emphasis upon how conceptions of classicalness emerge from texts and communication--be it from popular writers, religious authors, scholars of the period, or administrators--which constitute a consensual view of reality, imbued with normative power. Such approaches fundamentally support the critical rethinking of canonic and classical with which we began this discussion, for they heighten our consideration of how, why, and for whom expressive forms are ranked in hierarchies of prestige. Matthew Harp Allen (1998) introduces the phrase classicist discourse to denote the ways in which both South Asian and non-South Asian scholars and musicians have defined a “classical” musical tradition hierarchically distinct from non-classical forms (ibid:23). Allen traces this dyad to both ancient Indian and European source, and argues it has had a profound impact on the way South Asian music is analyzed and experienced. He describes, for instance, how since the late 19th century the South Indian music tradition known as Karnataka (a term suggesting “ancient” and “southern”) was updated and refined, in the English language, as “classical” in a distinctively South Indian way, “a music simultaneously sophisticated, systematic, ancient, and sacred.” This reidentification helped transplant the music, Allen argues, from its original court and temple setting to an urban milieu where the public concert became particularly important. He writes:
The classicist discourse came to play a vital role within the nationalist movement, presenting a vision (however mediated) of India’s great ancient artistic traditions to contemporary Indians, effectively countering colonial British claims of cultural superiority at a crucial time in the evolving nation’s history [Qureshi 1991]. Partly as a result of this classicist discourse, the Hindustani and Karnataka traditions are today revered as national treasures within India, and recognized and appreciated around the world (ibid:25-6).
At least one writer dealing with Southeast Asia has explored in depth a discourse of the classical, unraveling its complex indigenous and European roots. This is Jennifer Lindsay, whose 1985 doctoral dissertation explores notions of classical and traditional in Javanese performing arts; similar material is recounted by Sumarsam (1995, Chapter 3). Like Allen in south India, Lindsay explores in great specificity Indonesian vocabulary which label music and dance according to “traditionalness” or “classicalness,” and traces nuanced changes of meaning over time. Her working definition of the classical highlights the authority of such forms, their place in a prestige hierarchy, and the possibility of considerable change over time, as she writes about the process of classicalising--or traditionalising--the Javanese performing arts of the courts. “By this I mean the process of defining certain models of dance, music, and dance-drama as classical models to be accepted as the highest and authoritative examples of the form, and perpetuated as such” (1985:5). Like Matthew Allen and Susan Reed, Lindsay is concerned about the implications for such compartmentalizing of music, especially with regard to governmental policy towards the arts, and on the choices and strategies of performers as active agents.
The various readings of the canonical and the classical presented thus far treat the concepts as problems, as categories or processes which must be defined in one way or another. Nonetheless, any reader familiar with ethnomusicological scholarship, including the standard reference works, knows that most frequently, “classical” remains a term applied persistently and unproblemmatically. It is certainly a term used in popular discourse by marketers and promoters of recordings, concerts, festivals. How might we account for the persistence of the classical/non-classical dyad in Asian music scholarship?
First of all, the term, or something very much like it, is actually in use in the Asian musical traditions which ethnomusicologists study. The European origins of or at least impact upon such terms may be obscure; like other aspects of contemporary culture, the effect upon Asian performing arts of European colonial discourse has been unveiled relatively recently. As both Allen and Lindsay show, discourses of the performing arts in India and Indonesia have either adopted European words for the classical, or have indigenized European words to subtly fit the needs of the local context. At least in the case of India, the Western classical/non-classical dyad corresponds temptingly yet blindingly to taste hierarchies within the culture, where contemporary notions of the classical have intertwined complexly with categories from ancient written traditions. Early- and mid-20th century anthropology’s assumptions about cultural homogeneity and the distinctiveness of “nations”--including their musical traditions--predispose the observer to overlook the historical flow between and intertwining of cultures, and to neglect the dynamics of power that lie behind changing vocabulary.
The discursive division of classical from non-classical intertwines with other dichotomies, prevalent in writings on South Asia especially. These are what Bonnie C. Wade has called the “master cleavages” in scholarly conceptions of South Asia (and noted their recent demise or at least reevaluation, 2001)--the very same dyads which Clifford Geertz complained about in our opening quotation: Little and Great Traditions, rural-urban, village-city, tribal and non-tribal, folk and classical. Perhaps most pervasive and long-lasting has been the separation of Great and Little Traditions, a model developed by anthropologists Robert Redfield, Milton Singer, McKim Marriott, and Surajit Sinha at the University of Chicago in the 1950s (Singer 1972). While the model has been applied usefully to music (cf. Capwell 1991), its limitations have also been exposed. For example, Indian tribal musics fit awkwardly if at all into the dichotomy (Babiracki 1991), and the constant, historical exchange between rural and urban musicians in India suggests that a strong division between the two is nonexistent (Allen 1998, Neuman 1981). Application of these dichotomous models to music has often rested on false assumptions about sophistication and artfulness, assumptions that just don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, and yet remain entrenched as models for understanding South Asian music and culture.
A further reason for the persistance of the classical label among scholars of South and Southeast Asian music--or many musical traditions of the world, actually--may have to do with the positioning of researchers vis á vis the music they study. Ethnomusicology has frequently been a scholarship of admiration. We are drawn to become long-term students, or even practicing disciples, of music because we feel a strong connection to it. We may feel love for the music we study; we certainly feel a sense of obligation and respect towards our teachers and informants (Barz and Cooley 1997) Ethnomusicologists have frequently taken a position of promoter or defender of a particular music. How better to raise the status of a music, to promote its worth, to assist our performer friends and teachers, than to persistently label the music as “classical”? The words traditional and authentic have been used for some of the same reasons. Some of the authors discussed in the present paper take clear performer affirming stances.
Even if we can at least partially account for the persistence of high/low, classical/nonclassical distinctions in the arts, we are still left--as Clifford Geertz reminded us--to confront the issues that such distinctions bring into view. The critique of “canon” gets at this well. If canons have an ideological character, an authority to legitimate and exclude, they cannot be accepted as measures of quality pure and simple. The “interestedness,” the “constructedness,” of prestige hierarchies demands our attention, whether on local or transnational levels. We should commend the authors discussed here who recognize the responsibility of scholarship to liberate, not stifle, the full range of creative voices in Asian performing arts.
Footnotes:
[1] An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual conference of ASPAC (Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast), Eugene, Oregon, June 18, 2004. Research was supported through a sabbatical leave from Willamette University, and my period as an affiliated fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands, fall 2002.
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