Crossing the Disciplinary Divide: Hermeneutics, Ethnomusicology and Musicology

Author(s): Roger W. H. Savage

Source: College Music Symposium , 2009/2010, Vol. 49/50 (2009/2010), pp. 402-408
Published by: College Music Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41225267

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 Crossing the Disciplinary Divide:
Hermeneutics, Ethnomusicology and
Musicology
Roger W. H. Savage

separation of ethnomusicology from musicology attests to an intellectual history

whose continuing validity has come into question. Differences between a disciplin
committed to fieldwork and one that traditionally was devoted to historical research have
been blurred from both sides. Increasingly, critical musicologists turn to contextualizing
practices in opposition to modernist musicological practices of abstracting works fro
their cultural, social, and historical contexts.1 Conversely, ethnomusicologists in search of
the past employ methods of historical research. Nevertheless, the disciplinary bounda
ies separating musicology and ethnomusicology remain relatively intact. Despite some
overlaps in methods, research interests, and even pedagogical orientation, musicology
ethnomusicology and its one-time parent discipline systematic musicology, are identified
institutionally as relatively autonomous fields of instruction, research, and scholarship
I would not, however, want to pass over an important difference - namely the
difference between ethnomusicology 's insistence on the importance of fieldwork an
musicology 's orientation toward textual readings. Even here, the impact of cultura
studies on both disciplines has tended to narrow the gap between them. Nevertheless
the difference between textual analyses and interpretations of music's cultural meanings
based on observations of, and participation in, performance practices and processes
remains one (if not the principle) intellectual and methodological difference that in
some measure continues to help define the identity of these two disciplines.
Rather than tackle this seemingly insurmountable difference head-on, I would
prefer to follow a more indirect route. The appropriation of hermeneutics by both et
nomusicologists and musicologists justifies this strategy. As the "art of interpretation
hermeneutics has been viewed from both sides as a way of responding to methodologic
concerns as varied as the crisis of representation, formalist and metaphysical precept
and the interpretation of cultures. My recourse to hermeneutics, however, will follo
a somewhat different path. After reviewing briefly the historical backdrop to the div
sions among musicology, ethnomusicology and systematic musicology, I intend to
critique the effects that a tradition of thought extending back to Kant's subjectivizati
of aesthetics has had on contemporary disciplinary constructs. Following this critiqu
I will propose some pedagogical and research directions suggested by my analysis of
the hermeneutical presuppositions underlying music scholarship.

'See for example McClary, "Paradigm Dissonances."

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 HERMENEUTICS, ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND MUSICOLOGY 403

Ethnomusicology, Musicology and Systematic Musicology

In the nineteenth century, Guido Adler conceived systematic musicology, together

with historical musicology, as the two arms of a comprehensive science of music.2 Adler
located comparative musicology, from which ethnomusicology subsequently emerged to
become an autonomous discipline, within the field of systematic musicology. By erect-
ing a unified framework for a comprehensive science of music based on the model of
the natural sciences, Adler anchored the study of music in the cultural ethos of his time.
Opposition to the effects of this positivist ethos on music research has taken many forms,
including the recourse to interpretive practices and strategies. Paradoxically, systematic
musicology was perhaps most adversely impacted by Adler 's original schema. Until
recently, systematic musicology as a research field was defined only negatively in op-
position to historical musicology's subject matter. Today, we recognize that systematic
musicology's identity as a research field centers on the fundamental questions it asks:
What does music mean? What constitutes musical expression? How do we understand
music's mode of communicability? These fundamental questions are also basic to the
study of music in its aesthetic, social, cultural and historical dimensions.
The institution of music's aesthetic autonomy within a separate sphere isolated
from practical exigencies is one of the enduring legacies of this era. Joseph Kerman has
remarked on how theory and analysis served to legitimize and defend a cherished canon
of high art cultural works.3 The positivist ethos in which theory and analysis thrived also
justified formalist ideals that Eduard Hanslick, for example, set against the nineteenth-
century's metaphysics of feeling.4 The idea that musical works are self-contained
entities that can be abstracted from cultural, social and historical contexts is one of the
foremost legacies of this era to come under attack. For many ethnomusicologists and
critical musicologists, the idea that the musical work is aesthetically self-sufficient is a
vestige of a modernist defense of high art culture. At the same time, the idea that music
is a cultural phenomenon worthy of study and critical attention has some foundations in
the history that venerated musical works. Consequently, freeing ethnomusicological and
musicological research from this construct calls for a critique of the system of thought
in which the concept of the work's autonomy plays its formative and ideological roles
The idea that music, or indeed, the arts as a whole properly belong to a distinctly
aesthetic sphere owes its force in part to Immanuel Kant's transcendental justification
of judgments of taste. Kant legitimated taste's "a priori claim to universality"5 in the
face of its empirical non-universality by denying taste any importance as a mode of
knowledge. Kant's justification of taste's subjective universality discredited theoreti-
cal knowledge that did not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences. Hence the
transcendental function he ascribed to aesthetic judgment established the foundation
for differentiating between art's aesthetic constitution, and conceptual knowledge and
truth.

2Mugglestone, "Guido."
3Kerman, Contemplating Music.
hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful.
"Gadamer, Truth and Method, 43.

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 404 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM

This radical subjectivization of aesthetics augure

German idealism erected a philosophy of art by se
is the art of genius."6 Moreover, by proclaiming t
Friedrich Schiller presented the demand to "Live a
According to Hans Georg-Gadamer, "Schiller took
which Kant had justified transcendentally the judg
ity, and changed it from a methodological presup
imperative. Schiller founded art's autonomous st
investing Kant's subjectivization of aesthetics with
Accordingly on Gadamer's analysis, the idea of a
Schiller "consists precisely in precluding any cri
dissociating the work of art from its world."10
Aesthetic consciousness and its correlates, aesth
a cultured society, consequently provide a bulwark
exigencies of social and political life, music and ar
human spirit in its purely aesthetic state. Correlative
and the process of abstraction on which it depends in
the experience of it. The conscious differentiation of
of art-religion's view that the cultivation of the aest
and the experience of it, be dissociated from all w
aesthetic consciousness performs enables the work
of art. Music and art establish their supremacy by vi
individual works from the contexts that sustain them
reception.
This abstraction, in turn, becomes the focal point of various critiques. From the
vantage-point of many cultural musicologists, music's abstraction from its socio-
historical context dissembles its value as a cultural work. From this vantage-point,
music's aesthetic autonomy is a chimera. Correlatively, the principle of music's aesthetic
autonomy appears as the ideological defense of a culturally sacrosanct realm of high
art- works shielded from social analysis and critique by the principle that institutes this
realm.
The critique of this principle from within the discipline of ethnomusicology also
turns against the abstraction of works from their "real life" contexts. At the same time,
ethnomusicology 's general rejection of claims and defenses of the Western musical
canon's cultural superiority tended to shift the focus away from the concept of the
autonomous work toward social processes and performance practices. The importance
of fieldwork, the significance of participatory observation, and the value of bi- or multi-

6Cited by Gadamer, Truth and Method, 58; see Kant, Critique, 175.
7Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82.
8Cited by Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82; see Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, 42 ff.
9Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82.
]0Ibid., 85. In proclaiming art to be the practice of freedom, and aesthetic education to be the end of the play
impulse, Schiller founds art's autonomous standpoint in opposition to reality.

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 HERMENEUTICS, ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND MUSICOLOGY 405

musical competence evinces the difference between cultural musicology's and ethno
musicology's investment in overturning nineteenth-century ideals. More importantly
these differences highlight these disciplines' respective ripostes to the effects of a history
from which the concept of a work's aesthetic autonomy, aesthetic consciousness, an
the legitimacy of abstracting works from their life contexts spring.

Crossing the Disciplinary Divide

It is evident from these critiques that one of the main points of contention for cul-
tural musicologists and ethnomusicologists is the idea that cultural values invested
the Western high art musical tradition in reality serve the political and social interests of
privileged individuals and groups. The ideal of aesthetic cultivation clearly presages th
role cultural works play in the struggle for position and power. Hannah Arendt argue
in this respect that culture acquires its social utility by becoming a "matter of social
prestige and social advancement."11 The ideal of self-cultivation through an education
to art decidedly turns art into an instrument of social violence. Pierre Bourdieu explain
that music exemplifies the demand that the bourgeois ethos of aesthetic cultivation makes
of all forms of art: "Music is the most 'spiritual' of the arts of the spirit and a love
music is a guarantee of [a form of] 'spirituality'"12 that disavows any materialist coars
ness. Following the logic of the economic world's reversal, music's aesthetic autonomy
signifies the inner sanctum of a realm of experience free from material exigencies
Hence, as one of the covert forms that violence takes when the use of the direct mean
of violence becomes impossible, the belief in music's transcendent autonomy masks
the social distinctions that this belief celebrates.13
Critical analysis of the belief in music's aesthetically autonomous value too often
identify music's social value as a weapon in the fight for position and power at the expense
of the work's capacity to affirm or contest an existing order of reality. This occultation
of the work's ontological vehemence therefore elicits yet another critique. This critiqu
intersects those mounted from the disciplinary perspectives of ethnomusicology an
musicology. At the same time, in directing itself toward the alienating effects of aesthetic
consciousness, this hermeneutical critique aims at rehabilitating our understanding of
the work with respect to our experience of it.
From the vantage-point of a hermeneutical understanding of the work, the abstraction
that aesthetic consciousness performs (through dissociating the work from its sustain
ing life contexts) alienates us from the experiences that originate with our encounter
with individual works. This experience is the source of our understanding of a work's
meaning. In order to combat the alienating effects of abstracting works from their sus-
taining life contexts, Gadamer undertakes an analysis of the ontology of the work of
art. In this analysis, the mode of being of the work of art, which is the mode in whic
we also encounter it, is that of play. Just as play exists only in its movement as such

"Arendt, Reflections, 179; see Arendt, Between, 202.

12Bourdieu. Distinction. 19.
13See Bourdieu, Outline, 192, 171 ff; see also Bourdieu, The Field, 35.

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406 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM

the work of art has its mode of being in the ordered

expresses the world it presents in its unfolding
by beginning with the experience of art, hermen
more ontological aspects of the experience of pla
exhibition or presentation {Darstellung)'45 is prim
the "objectifications and explanations of historical
historical and lingual experience which precedes
and explanations."16 Correlatively, the hermeneuti
ethnomusicology's and cultural musicology's cr
enshrined in the ideal of its aesthetic autonomy. A
cal perspective supplements, and in a sense surpa
investigating the conditions of meaning which mu
which it ultimately depends.

New Horizons

Systematic musicology's emphasis on research questions basic to music scholarship

lends itself to this investigation into music's mode of communicability, its power o
expression, and its capacity to affirm, subvert or contest congealed social representations
and understandings. Unlike Adler's system, which sets systematic musicology against
its historical counterpart, a more contemporary view sees this investigation informing
research paradigms of the disciplines it intersects. This philosophical investigation
supports and informs pedagogical and research objectives of music scholarship by
contributing uniquely to our understanding of music and its relation to the world.
I would like to conclude by briefly summarizing three related points of inquiry that
indicate some further research directions.

1 . The first point concerns the question of a work's autonomy. In performing,

teaching about, and listening to music from different cultures and historical
epochs, we attest that music bears its meaning within itself. This capacity
of music to speak in new contexts and situations evinces the hermeneuti-
cal autonomy of cultural works. This hermeneutical autonomy contrasts
starkly with the concept of aesthetic autonomy inherited from the nine-
teenth century. Correlative with the ontology of the work of art, the work's
hermeneutical autonomy is the condition of its power to free itself from its
original horizons and to reinsert itself in the world anew.
2. The acknowledgement of this power underscores the mimetic character
of cultural works. This productive character consists in the way in which
individual works redescribe reality. The retreat from reality that for aesthetic
consciousness signifies the institution of a separate realm is only the nega-

14Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 117.

15 Ibid. According to Ricoeur, this function in principle precedes and supports the linguistic medium it summons.
4bid., 19.

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 HERMENEUTICS, ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND MUSICOLOGY 407

tive condition for the renewal of reality in the light of heuristic fictions.
Every claim that music contests or subverts reality secretly acknowledges
the work's power to break open the real by prefiguring possibilities for
alternative ways of inhabiting the world. The power of thought and imagi-
nation at work, in what Paul Ricoeur refers to as the creative imitation of
reality, stands in stark opposition to the alienating effects of the work's
conscious differentiation from practical exigencies.17 In this respect, works
are invitations to think, experience, and feel more.
3. The last point is perhaps the most challenging of the three. It concerns the
relation between music's mode of communicability and its power of expres-
sion. Elsewhere I have argued that music's mimetic character is intimately
bound up with our affective dispositions toward the world.18 Moods and
feelings anchor our sense of participating in the world to which we belong
by attuning us to it. Martin Heidegger goes so far as to suggest that in "po-
etical discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one's
state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclos-
ing of existence."19 Heidegger's comment echoes Aristotle's notion in his
Politics that music is an imitation of states of character.20 Music's power to
redescribe affective dimensions of our experiences is attested most acutely
in its figuration of limit experiences, in which time seems to be surpassed
by its other. On this further horizon, music's power to express the joy and
pathos of our mortal dwelling conjoins human finitude to the mysteries
of time. At this juncture, the study of music merges with a philosophical
inquiry into the meaning of time.

Bibliography

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Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Ernest Barker, and rev
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McClary, Susan. "Paradigm Dissonances: Music Th
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17Ricoeur, Time.
18See Savage, Hermeneutics, 93 ff.; Savage, "Is Music Mimetic?".
19Heidegger, Being, 205; see Ricoeur, The Rule, 221 ff.
20 Aristotle, Politics, 309.

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408 COLLEGE MUSIC SYMPOSIUM

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