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i
Modeling Ethnomusicology
ii
iii
TIMOTHY RICE
1
iv
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rice, Timothy, 1945–
Title: Modeling ethnomusicology / Timothy Rice.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2016] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016033655 (print) | LCCN 2016034734 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190616885 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190616892 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190616908 (updf) | ISBN 9780190616915 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnomusicology.
Classification: LCC ML3798 .R55 2016 (print) | LCC ML3798 (ebook) |
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v
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Ethnomusicological Theorizing 1

1. Toward the Remodeling of Ethnomusicology 43
2. Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience
in Ethnomusicology 63
3. Reflections on Music and Meaning: Metaphor, Signification,
and Control in the Bulgarian Case 87
4. Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and Ethnography 109
5. Reflections on Music and Identity in Ethnomusicology 139
6. Ethnomusicological Theory 161
7. The Individual in Musical Ethnography 201
8. Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble 233
Index 255
vi
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter 1 was originally published as “Toward the Remodeling of Ethno

musicology,” Ethnomusicology 31(3): 469-488 (1987). Chapter 2, “Toward a
Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience in Ethnomusicology,” first
appeared as a chapter in Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Field
work in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley
(Oxford University Press, 1996) and is reprinted here by permission of
Oxford University Press. Chapter 3 was published as “Reflections on Music
and Meaning: Metaphor, Signification, and Control in the Bulgarian Case,”
British Journal of Ethnomusicology 10 (1): 19–38 (2001). Chapter 4 appeared
as “Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and Ethnography,”
Ethnomusicology 47(2): 151–179 (2003). Chapter 5 began as “Reflections on
Music and Identity in Ethnomusicology,” Muzikologija (Musicology, Belgrade)
7: 17–38 (2007). Chapter 6 was published as “Ethnomusicological Theory,”
Yearbook for Traditional Music 42: 100–134 (2010). Chapter 7, “The Individual
in Musical Ethnography,” Ethnomusicology 56(2): 299–327 (2012), was coau-
thored with Jesse D. Ruskin. Chapter 8 was published as “Ethnomusicology in
Times of Trouble,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 46: 191–209 (2014).
For permission to reprint the articles and chapters in this book, I am grateful
to the Society for Ethnomusicology, publisher of Ethnomusicology; the British
Forum for Ethnomusicology, publisher of the British Journal of Ethnomusicology
(today, Ethnomusicology Forum); the International Council for Traditional
Music, publisher of the Yearbook for Traditional Music; the Institute for Music
of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, publisher of Muzikologija; and Oxford
University Press.
I also would like to thank the staff at Oxford University Press: editor Suzanne
Ryan for her enthusiastic support of this project and Julia Turner, Eden Piacitelli,
Jamie Kim, and Danielle Michaely for the care they took shepherding the book
through the production process.
viii
ix
x
â•‡ 1
Introduction
Ethnomusicological Theorizing
On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication in 1987 of “Toward the

Remodeling of Ethnomusicology,” I am pleased to present this story of my long
encounter with ethnomusicology through the writings of others and my own
research in the area of Bulgarian traditional music. At another level, this con-
tinues my long interest in the nature of ethnomusicology as a discipline among
other disciplines and my advocacy for a stronger sense of the communal, social
nature of our work revealed through the processes of ethnomusicological theo-
rizing.1 Each essay in this collection, which follows the course of my career
and thinking on the larger subject, represents a particular type of theorizing,
illustrated by a specific thematic focus, shown in Figure 0.1.
Why did I write these essays? I entered the field as a graduate student at the
University of Washington in 1968 already committed to the study of Bulgarian
traditional music. As a named field of study, ethnomusicology was a youth-
ful teenager, and the literature we read suggested that, like a human teenager,
it was, as we said in those days, “trying to find itself.” I found the arguments
between those trained in musicology and those trained in anthropology and
the articles defining the field and its methods more intellectually engaging than
many of the descriptive articles about particular music cultures. I loved the
clangorous engagement with self-â•‰reflexive questions like who are we?, what
are we doing?, how and why are we doing it?, and what should we be doing
differently?, questions that still engage us today. I realize, in retrospect, that
my interest in these questions was consonant with my interests in the study of
history, my college major. I always found historiography, the study of the cul-
tural, social, political, and personal conditions that produced histories, more
1. For another recent personal retrospective in the form of collected essays, see Koskoff 2014.
2
2 M odeling E thnomusicology
Figure 0.1 Rice essays that model ethnomusicology.
fascinating than the stuff of history itself. (That is no longer so true for me, as
it happens.) These essays flowed in no small part from my early experiences as
a university student.
Fast-forward through my years of dissertation research and writing on
Bulgarian traditional music to 1980, when I received a call from Society for
Ethnomusicology (SEM) president Gerard Béhague offering me the editor-
ship of the society’s journal, Ethnomusicology. I was pleased, of course, but also
amazed. I had only received my PhD three years earlier, in 1977, and was just
publishing my first two refereed journal articles that very year (Rice 1980a,
1980b). After accepting this honor, I wrote to family and friends that I was the
only person on the editorial board I had never heard of. My appointment con-
firmed the famous advice that 80% of life is showing up. I had been attending
SEM annual meetings for a decade at that point, and perhaps it seemed to others
in those years, when the field was so young, that I was already an old hand. This
kind of opportunity for a young scholar is almost impossible to imagine today.
From my perch as editor of Ethnomusicology from 1981 to 1984, I had a great
view of our maturing, thirty-year-old field. Key to those observations was the
refereeing process. I sent each submitted article to two referees, people whose
3
Introduction 3
research would allow them to provide an authoritative opinion on whether

the submission represented original research and an important contribution
to knowledge in our field. Referees’ comments allowed me to see the sausage
being made, as it were. They were advising the authors and me about what con-
stituted good work in our field. Most telling were reports that suggested that
the submission not be published because the work was “not ethnomusicology.”
At a time when I and many other ethnomusicologists were unclear about how
to define what ethnomusicology was, some apparently did not find it difficult
to say what it wasn’t.
In those days the two qualities that placed a submission beyond the pale of eth-
nomusicology were ones that did not involve fieldwork and those that depended
on value judgments about the relative quality, in aesthetic terms, of genres of
music, especially submissions that valorized European or European-derived clas-
sical music in comparison to other types of music. I suppose that guardians of
the frontiers of our disciplines, if there are any left, would still be on the look-
out for these transgressions, and perhaps new ones. The field today clearly admits
historical studies not dependent on fieldwork (see, e.g., Lam 1998), and a paper
by Michael Tenzer (2015) evinces an interest in “objective aesthetics,” although
informed by an ethnomusicological sensibility far from the puerile, tendentious
judgments of musicological aesthetics, which Canadian philosopher Francis
E. Sparshott dismissed devastatingly in his article on aesthetics in the 1980 edition
of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.2
While most ethnomusicologists adopt a stance that advocates for the human
value of all music and that brackets critical judgments, especially invidious
comparisons of classical versus popular and disco versus rock favored by fans,
a critical strain beyond such comparisons has underlain ethnomusicological
writing since its beginnings. The first was Jaap Kunst’s definition of the field,
which excluded popular and European classical music from its purview (Kunst
1959).3 Later John Blacking (1973) argued that judgments about the human, as
2. In the current Grove Music Online, Sparshott’s article on the aesthetics of music and its
critique of musicological aesthetics no longer appears in its original form. Rather, Lydia
Goehr summarizes some of his ideas about aesthetics in an article on “Philosophy of Music
I: Introduction” and joins him as coauthor of a section called “Philosophy of Music: Historical
Survey, Antiquity-1750.”
3. A few years after Kunst’s original definition in 1950, Willard Rhodes (1956a: 460, 462) pro-
posed a more capacious definition of ethnomusicology. Citing Charles Seeger, he wrote, “If
the term ethnomusicology were to be interpreted in its broadest sense it would include as its
domain the total music of man, without limitations of time or space… . Let us not become
narrow in the pursuit of our special field.” And in another article in the same year he specifi-
cally included popular music, writing, “To these fields of study [‘Oriental art music and the folk
music of the world’] we inherit from the past [of comparative musicology] should be added
4
opposed to the aesthetic, value of music may be a part of the ethnomusicolo-

gist’s responsibility. Since then, Charles Keil, Jeff Todd Titon, Thomas Turino,
and others have suggested on occasion that they find participatory modes of
musicking of more human value than some music played by expert musicians
for a passive listening audience. So the strain of judgment has always been pres-
ent in ethnomusicology even if attenuated by our professional stance, which
requires us to overcome aesthetic biases in the study of all the world’s music.4
Choreographing the discussions between writers and referees over what
constituted acceptable research in ethnomusicology forced me to think more
intently than I otherwise might have about the nature of the field.5 In those
days, the most influential model of the field was known as the Merriam model,
published two decades earlier in the book The Anthropology of Music. In it,
Alan Merriam (1964: 32), an anthropologist and one of the four founders of the
Society for Ethnomusicology, proposed what he called a “simple” model that
had three “analytical levels”: “conceptualization about music, behavior in rela-
tion to music, and the music sound itself.”
Merriam’s model had at least three advantages, I thought. First, with only
three parts, it was easy to remember. In those days if people from outside the
field asked us what we did, some of us, after giving them Merriam’s even shorter
answer, “the study of music in culture,” could easily reel off Merriam’s three lev-
els. Second, it had the quality of completeness. As such, it was more than a list of
analytical levels; here, I am defining a list as incomplete or provisional—other
items can be added to it or it can be reconstituted in various ways. Merriam’s
model is a typology, which I define as a complete list or structural representa-
tion of the qualities or features of a domain, in this case the domain of research
in ethnomusicology. Third, Merriam’s model was also what the anthropolo-
gist Clifford Geertz called a “model for” reality, in Merriam’s case a model
two categories which seem rightfully to belong within the framework of our discipline, popular
music and dance” (Rhodes 1956b: 3). Still, he could not refrain from a judgmental tone, con-
tinuing with, “In more complex civilizations this category would include jazz as well as most
of the commercial music that clogs our airwaves” (p. 4). I am grateful to Timothy Cooley for
directing me to this latter source.
4. See Berger (2009) for a detailed treatment of the notion of stance.
5. For this Introduction I choreographed another kind exchange about the field of ethnomu-
sicology by inviting comments on an earlier draft of this Introduction from former students
(Michael Bakan, Dave Wilson, and Louise Wrazen); colleagues at my home institution, UCLA
(Daniel Neuman, Helen Rees, Roger Savage, Anthony Seeger, and Timothy Taylor); and schol-
ars whose work I cite (Gregory Barz, Harris Berger, Timothy Cooley, Steven Feld, Ellen Koskoff,
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Gabriel Solis, Martin Stokes, and J. Lawrence Witzleben). I am grate-
ful to each of them for their perspicacious comments and suggestions and for directing me to
sources that illustrate some of my arguments.
5
Introduction 5
for the way a “music culture” works. Geertz (1973) distinguished two kinds
of models: models of reality and models for reality. Models “give meaning,
that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by
shaping themselves to it [models of] and by shaping it to themselves [models
for]” (Geertz 1973: 93). This distinction can be applied to Merriam’s model.
Merriam’s is a model of music culture that tells us what it consists of and gives
its form a structure. Merriam’s model also shaped a musical culture to it by sug-
gesting that in a music culture, native concepts about music would drive social
behaviors with respect to music, which would in turn affect the music sound
itself. The model then predicted that if something new emerged in the musical
sound, then concepts about music would change, creating a feedback loop that
would explain musical change, a phenomenon Merriam and many ethnomusi-
cologists were interested in at that time.
What interests me to this day about simple models like Merriam’s is their
heuristic function. By heuristic function I mean the ability of a model to help
researchers think about and discover patterns in their data and explanations
for the particular things they are studying. Had I employed Merriam’s model
heuristically for my own research on Bulgarian music, it would have suggested
to me questions I might otherwise not have asked, and I might have tried, for
example, to find an instance where a change in musical concepts changed musi-
cal behaviors. As it turns out, I am not sure whether anyone took the heuristic
potential of Merriam’s model seriously, but, if true, that says more about the
field than about the value of his model. Many similar theoretical points have
been made since 1964, but I have a feeling none could be understood as either
enriching Merriam’s model or requiring its remodeling.
In retrospect, I realize that I might have invoked it in one of the first arti-
cles I published in a scholarly journal (Rice 1980b). For my dissertation on
Bulgarian polyphonic singing (Rice 1977), I was influenced by a theory about
culture called cognitive anthropology, which claimed that culture was in the
mind and that a researcher could access culture through carefully constructed
interview protocols and the creation of taxonomies, typologies, and other con-
ceptual structures that emerged from those conversations. During the course
of my research I learned that Bulgarian villagers did not seem to have a cover
term for the linguistic domain we label music in English. Rather, this unnamed
domain had five subdomains in Bulgarian: (1) instrumental music (a “play-
thing”) and its playing, (2) songs and singing, (3) laments and lamenting,
(4) drums and drumming, and (5) dances and dancing. Had I used Merriam’s
model as a heuristic device, I might more quickly have realized the behavioral
correlates that accompanied these conceptual distinctions: men were almost
exclusively the instrumentalists, women the most important singers, minority
Roma the drummers, and so on. Thinking with the model might have led me
6
to ask about the relationship between concept and behavior and whether or
not it could be plausibly argued that there was a causal relationship between
concept and behavior in the Bulgarian case. I might also have broadened the
theoretical claim for the mechanisms of change by demonstrating that each of
the analytical levels was glued to its counterparts in culture such that changes in
cultural concepts might cause changes in musical concepts, a common notion
in ethnomusicology today. In one study (Rice 2003), I did just that, report-
ing on how new, modern concepts of behaviors appropriate to women led to a
woman taking on the social behavior of a bagpiper, a role traditionally limited
to men. But that explanation flowed less from the Merriam model than from
fieldwork observations.
After my term as editor of Ethnomusicology ended, I decided to remodel
ethnomusicology not because I was unhappy with the Merriam model’s heu-
ristic potential (I actually hadn’t thought about that at the time) or because
I didn’t think it was satisfactory as a “model for” the way music cultures worked.
Rather, I came to realize, based on my editorial experience, that in the early
1980s it didn’t work very well as a Geertzian “model of ” ethnomusicology. In
those days, while twenty years had passed since Merriam had proposed his
model, not everyone in the field had followed him down that path. Although
studies along the lines he suggested were growing in number, an awful lot of
work in the early 1980s had other foci. It was at that point that I encountered
Clifford Geertz’s (1973: 363–364) epigrammatic formulation about culture, that
it was “historically constructed, socially maintained, and individually applied.”
I immediately recognized this simple three-part formula as a better “model of ”
ethnomusicological writing at that time than Merriam’s model and as a poten-
tial “model for” the “formative processes” at work in music cultures. My model
states that “music is historically constructed, socially maintained, and individu-
ally created and experienced.”6
Chapter 1, “Toward the Remodeling of Ethnomusicology,” was first pre-
sented as a paper at the 1986 SEM meeting and published in 1987 with
responses from three ethnomusicologists, each representing one of the
dimensions of the model, plus a fourth by a historical musicologist (Shelemay
1987 on historical construction; Koskoff 1987 on individual creativity and
6. Recently I learned that sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) had created a similar model for “the
sociological imagination,” which involved history, biography, and social structure. That model,
through biography, allowed him and those whom he studied to connect “personal troubles of
milieu” to “the public issues of social structure” (p. 2), a move similar to my sense that indi-
vidual experience and creativity are a formative process in music making and thus central to
ethnomusicological research: “No study that does not come back to the problems of biography,
of history and of their intersections within society has completed its intellectual journey” (p. 6).
7
Introduction 7
experience; Seeger 1987 on social maintenance; and Crawford 1987, the

music historian). Predictably, historians Kay Shelemay and Richard Crawford
generally approved of the model, mainly because it is an accepting “model
of ” the field that includes historical studies within ethnomusicology and
that connects us to our sister discipline, historical ethnomusicology. In other
words, they could see themselves in it. They also understood its heuristic
nature: Shelemay (1987: 489) called it “a useful guide for future inquiry,” and
Crawford (1987: 511) referred to it as a conceptual “Swiss Army knife.” Ellen
Koskoff and Anthony Seeger argued that Merriam’s thinking about the field
was more complex than suggested by what he called his simple model. This
is, of course, true: ethnomusicology is endlessly complex and changing as
rapidly as the musical world it purports to study. But a simple model doesn’t
mean that the thinking or the phenomena it represents are simple. Simple
models are “what if ” statements. What if we bracketed some of the complex-
ity? Would simple patterns emerge? In physics, for example, what if we pre-
tended that friction doesn’t exist? Could we find a simple formula to explain
the forces at work when a ball rolls down an inclined plane? Yes, as it turns
out. Merriam’s and my models ask, “what if ” we thought about ethnomusico-
logical research not in its full complexity but in a simple, three-dimensional
way? Could we see patterns and forces at work that we might not have other-
wise? The answer for both models is yes, I would argue.
Not all models have to be simple, of course, and A. Seeger, in his response,
and Bell Yung, in the audience for my presentation in 1986, preferred the com-
plexity of Charles Seeger’s (1977) unitary field theory of ethnomusicology to
Merriam’s and my “simple” models (see Yung and Rees 1999 on the legacy
of Charles Seeger). The C. Seeger model, in a way a remodeling of Guido
Adler’s 1885 taxonomy outlining the Gesammtgebäude (total structure) of
Musikwissenschaft (Mugglestone and Adler 1981), goes in the opposite direc-
tion of simple models by trying to understand musicology in its full complex-
ity rather than sifting through that complexity for simple patterns. C. Seeger’s
overview of musicology, a broader category than ethnomusicology tradition-
ally understood, spreads across two pages with eight major divisions, each, in
turn, with many subdivisions and further sub-subdivisions; it aspires to com-
pleteness or totality. He regards it as a “two-dimensional road map … whose
miraculous terrain the musicologist may drive at his pleasure” (p. 127):
Begin at the top and as you read down … remember that you are tracing
your own progress over the terrain. When you come to a fork, you must
decide which path to follow first but not to stay on it so long that you
forget to go back and follow the other fork; for it is the drawing of the two
together that is essential to the reading of the table. (C. Seeger 1977: 125)
8
He is outlining how to use his “total structure” as a heuristic device to ask as

many questions as possible about music, the same goal that I find so attractive
about Merriam’s and my simpler models.7 I prefer the latter, however, because
they make easier-to-remember claims about the nature of music than his model
does: I can keep them in my head and repeat them from memory on demand,
whereas, like a real road map or GPS app, I would have to keep his open beside
me to remember its features and figure out where I was going. My preference in
this regard is partly a matter of style (simplicity versus complexity) and partly a
matter of substance (the goals of the project). Both clearly share an important
heuristic, question-asking value as researchers approach their particular case
studies.
But how well did my model account for the current literature in Ethno
musicology? Looking over articles in issues from 1978 to 1986, I classified them
using this model (Figure 0.2). Publications at that time addressed these three for-
mative processes in a pretty balanced way, although, to provide an inductive model
of ethnomusicology at that time, I had to add three other categories: (4) musical
analysis (Merriam’s “the music sound itself ”), (5) surveys of musical cultures, and
(6) general theoretical reflections. As it turned out, my model provided a pretty
good basis for a model of ethnomusicology in those days, though even at that, it
only accounted for 73% of the articles in the issues I surveyed.
What would a similar survey of articles published in Ethnomusicology in the
last ten years (2006 to 2015) reveal?8 As Figure 0.3 shows, my model accounts
for 81% of the articles, a little better than the 73% in Figure 0.2 for the period
nearly thirty years earlier. The relative weight of the three parts of the model
remains close to the same as well, with the percentages of articles on history
and society growing slightly and those on individuals being lower than before.
I continue to find it a useful model of research in ethnomusicology, and I used
it as the basis for three chapters of my recently published “very short introduc-
tion” to ethnomusicology (Rice 2014).
Satisfied that this was a good model of ethnomusicology, I also recognized
that its simplicity made it a useful heuristic model for thinking about processes
in music cultures. Each of the three elements of the model is connected to the
other two elements in a bidirectional fashion, as in Figure 0.4 reproduced here
7. Anthony Seeger (1992: 94) elaborated on his view of the utility of his grandfather’s model,
pointing out, among other things, that its totality allows us to see where on the road map
we have been and where we have not been and to trace the history of the way “the questions
musicologists have asked about music have waxed and waned.” Later, after worrying about
“some missing continents yet to be discovered,” he remodeled one part of the C. Seeger road
map: V. The Audiocommunicatory Event (A. Seeger 2006: 229, 231).
8. Jesse Ruskin, a recent PhD graduate from UCLA, compiled the data for me in Figure 0.3.
9
Introduction 9
Figure 0.2 A classification and count of articles in Ethnomusicology from 1978 to 1986
(Rice 1987: 476).
Figure 0.3 A classification and count of articles in Ethnomusicology from 2006 to 2015.
Historical Construction
Individual Creation Social Maintenance
Figure 0.4 A model for reciprocal relations between formative processes in music.
from the original article. I suppose one measure of the success of this or any
model for research might be how often it is credited with being used. Though
I have no way of reliably measuring that, I regularly hear from students around
the world who have applied it to their case studies. On the other hand, I don’t
10
find much evidence that ethnomusicologists regularly engage with heuristic

models, whether by Merriam, C. Seeger, or me, as an aid in their research. I am
left to wonder whether ethnomusicology would be more fun if there were more
play with these kinds of models. I still think so all these years after this article
was originally published.
My next foray into thinking about larger issues in the field of ethnomusicol-
ogy, presented here as Chapter 2, “Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and
Field Experience in Ethnomusicology,” and published in 1996, had to wait until
I had finished a book-length musical ethnography on Bulgarian traditional
and neotraditional music entitled May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian
Music (Rice 1994). During the course of writing that book, Roger Savage, a
colleague and philosopher of music at UCLA, introduced me to the German
philosophical tradition of hermeneutics and to the phenomenological herme-
neutics of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. This line of argument, it seemed
to me at the time, provided a strong foundation for a version of the social sci-
ences that recognized the impossibility of a positivist, scientific approach to
truth. As Paul Ricoeur (1981: 193) memorably wrote, “Between hermeneutics
and absolute truth one has to choose.” Whereas the starting point for good
science is to erase biases and prejudices and to start afresh in some intellectu-
ally neutral position, hermeneutic philosophers take as their starting point
the notion that human beings are “thrown” into an existing world that encul-
turates them in ways of being in the world and of understanding the world.
What hermeneutics asks of us is not the truth of science but better under-
standings and better interpretations of the way the social world, as opposed
to the physical world, works. Ricoeur labels the path to those understandings
a “hermeneutic arc” from “preunderstandings” of the world as experienced
and known before the investigation begins, through “explanation” based on
disciplined observation and empirical research techniques, to “new under-
standings” of the social world and its workings. This philosophical tradition
appealed to me for three reasons. First, it put on a solid philosophical foot-
ing the kind of qualitative work we do in ethnomusicology. Kenneth Gourlay,
in the late 1970s, had already critiqued the field for its scientific pretensions,
arguing that our research results and our claims to truth about music cultures
depend in no small part on researchers’ social and historical positions and
the kinds of conversations they have with other socially and historically posi-
tioned individuals during fieldwork (Gourlay 1978). Gourlay and the herme-
neutic philosophers were pointing out that in this kind of social-scientific and
humanistic research, the scientific injunction to eliminate prejudice and bias
(preunderstandings) was not going to be possible. And yet I was suspicious.
Before majoring in history, I had trained in the physical and biological sci-
ences and hoped to become a medical researcher. Although I was sympathetic
11
Introduction 11
to Gourlay’s critique, I was loath to give up scientific research principles as the

intellectual foundation of our discipline in favor of vague relativistic claims, as
attractive and even obvious as those claims were. The hermeneutic tradition
provided me with the philosophically grounded foundation that I needed to be
able to choose hermeneutics, with its attention to situated interpretations and
multiple truths, over science, with its “absolute truth.”
The second reason I was attracted to phenomenological hermeneutics was
that its notion of being thrown into a world that one cannot at first understand
and can never completely master and explain seemed an apt description of field
research. Ethnomusicologists who set out to understand a foreign music cul-
ture, as so many of us do, have little to carry into the field but our preunder-
standings of the formal structures and “elements” of music and of the social
order and human values given to us by our culture and its music. With these
preunderstandings we set about to explain to ourselves and our readers how
this other culture works musically, culturally, socially, politically, and economi-
cally. My own fieldwork process, which I describe in hermeneutic terms in this
chapter, provided continuous challenges to my musical and social preunder-
standings. Although my encounters with music and people in the field did not
erase the concepts and values I brought with me, the data I was collecting and
the experiences I was having could be characterized as new understandings
that I could explain.
The third reason I found the phenomenological aspect of this tradition
attractive was that it provided the philosophical basis for writing self-reflexively
about the self-knowledge generated during fieldwork and the hermeneutical
arc that all fieldworkers travel along. Self-reflexivity in the form of first-person
accounts for research processes and insights have figured prominently in book-
length musical ethnographies since the efflorescence of the genre in the late
1970s (Berliner 1978, Chernoff 1979, Keil 1979, and Feld 1982 are well-known
examples from this period). In my own book in this genre, self-reflexivity
took two forms: juxtapositions of my interpretations with those of the people
I worked with, and introspective self-understandings of playing music when
my teachers couldn’t explain something to me. For example, I wanted to inter-
pret the meanings of some song lyrics differently from the woman who sang
them for me. She interpreted them as literally true reports of events that actu-
ally had happened, while I preferred to interpret them metaphorically within
a genre that, after long experience, I came to understand had been composed
by, as the singer told me, “some sharp-witted woman” to express women’s often
troubled relationships with men. Her interpretation and mine stand side by
side in my book. Readers may prefer one interpretation over the other, but I felt
free to report them both and not to choose one as “true.” Perhaps they both are,
a position that hermeneutics allows.
12
The other intellectual problem where hermeneutic self-reflexivity was at

work in the book concerned my attempt to learn to play the Bulgarian bagpipe.
I have written about this extensively elsewhere (Rice 1985, 1994, 1995) but also
in Chapter 2. When I threw myself into the project of learning to play this
instrument, my teacher could not “explain” to me the ornamentation in a way
that I could understand. I had to explain it to myself through introspection and
trial and error. After a long and frustrating struggle, I finally acquired what
my teacher told me I would have to: “bagpiper’s fingers.” Once I could play
with these fingers, which by the way often seemed to be driven not by me but
magically by something beyond myself (perhaps by my “new understanding”
while “I” was still the I of my preunderstandings), my musical interpretations
were confirmed by Bulgarians’ verbal and nonverbal behavior: they danced to
my playing, they called me a bagpiper, and they noticed that my fingers moved
like my teacher’s fingers. Their comments and actions were the confirmation
I needed that I had acquired bagpiper’s fingers. But I was left to wonder whether
my new understanding, located in my head and hands and which I could report
in words, corresponded to understandings in the heads of “real” Bulgarian bag-
pipers, understandings that my teacher could not express in words. To answer
this question, which remains open in Chapter 2, today I would turn to phe-
nomenology, which eschews the psychology inherent in my question to argue
that the confirmations I received of my playing were indicative of shared inter-
subjective understandings; they were signs that I had entered the horizons of
understanding of the Bulgarian musical world into which I had been thrown.
Chapter 3, “Reflections on Music and Meaning: Metaphor, Signification,
and Control in the Bulgarian Case,” published in 2001, resulted from an invi-
tation to contribute to a special issue of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology
(today Ethnomusicology Forum) devoted to music and meaning. As I point out
in the opening paragraphs, the question of whether and how music references
ideas and emotions beyond itself and the way it resembles or differs from the
referential, semantic, discursive features of language has been an inveterate
question in (ethno) musicology and one still open for discussion. Volume edi-
tor Martin Clayton (2001) distinguished between two senses of the concept of
musical meaning: a narrow sense involving its structural properties and semi-
otic potential for referencing ideas and emotions within and beyond itself,
perhaps reducible to the term signification, and a broad sense involving musi-
cal experience and its significance for individuals and groups. Clayton’s and
my consideration at some length of the “meaning of meaning” is not simply
a pedant’s errand. Naming and defining concepts is fundamental to descrip-
tive and theoretical work in ethnomusicology and indeed any academic field.
For example, in Chapter 5 of this book, I examine a subset of the literature on
the theme of music and identity and find it wanting precisely because authors
13
Introduction 13
leave the term identity undefined. By taking its meaning for granted, these
authors deny themselves the possibility of contributing to general understand-
ings of music’s role in creating and reflecting individual and social identities.
In ethnomusicology, one master of this definitional tactic is Thomas Turino.
In all his publications, he can be counted on to define carefully the terms and
concepts he is using. To give just one example, his monograph Nationalists,
Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Turino 2000) is frequently
cited not least because of his careful definitions of cosmopolitanism, national-
ism, and national sentiment.
In the section of Chapter 3 called “Metaphors and the Nature of Music,” for
the first time I make a claim that will resonate through a couple of other publi-
cations, namely, that ethnomusicologists’ metaphorical claims about the nature
of music are among its most important contributions to music studies. A meta-
phor is a verbal (is) or analogical (as) structure that by some accounts guides
all human thinking (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). This is/as structure links one
domain of human experience to another in a way that attributes qualities of the
predicate domain to those of the subject domain. “Time is money” is a classic
one in English; its “truth” leads us to spend, save, invest, and waste time just as
we do money. Some metaphors are fleeting and literary, but I argue here that
some take on a life that infuses the way our research subjects act and the way
we design and conduct research. I conclude with an example of the way four
metaphors (music as art, as social behavior, as text, and as commodity) interact
in a study of Bulgarian musical experience. I continue to think that analyz-
ing particular music cultures through the lens of their subjects’ metaphorical
claims about the nature of music and sound is a fruitful heuristic tool. This sec-
tion on metaphor corresponds roughly to Clayton’s broad notion of meaning,
that is, its significance.
The next section of Chapter 3, on musical signification, matches his nar-
row notion of meaning and employs Peircean semiotic theory as outlined for
music by Thomas Turino (1999, 2008, 2014). Here I employ semiotics to answer
questions about the way Bulgarian musical signs and sign-types (icons, indexes,
symbols) are interpreted. The chapter does not deal as thoroughly as it might
have with one of Turino’s most important claims about musical semiotics,
namely, that the iconic and indexical properties of musical signs explain the
affective power of music. I have come to believe that, particularly as Turino has
elaborated it, it is one of the most important theories (music as sign) we have
about the nature of music and the way it works for individuals and in music
cultures. Theories such as this function as effective heuristic tools for thinking
analytically about particular ethnographic cases.
In the last section of Chapter 3, I look at “the control of meaning,” inspired
partly by Michel Foucault’s skepticism about the freedom of free will and partly
14
by my ethnographic experience in Bulgaria’s totalitarian political regime.9 Here

I argue that, while everyone has their own deeply personal musical experiences,
some of us work in areas where state government, other organs of power, and
powerful groups and individuals try to determine and control those experi-
ences. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes not. If their attempts at
control are not successful, that may be explained by music’s semiotic fluidity
and force, which enable musicians to evade control and bend musical practice
to their own political and expressive ends.
In Chapter 4, “Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and
Ethnography,” published in 2003, I use metaphorical understandings of the
nature of music as one of three building blocks of a model of musical experi-
ence. I do so because I believe that, beyond the hundreds of music cultures
ethnomusicologists have documented and described, our most important con-
tributions to the general study of music are our claims about the nature of music,
expressed most cogently and powerfully in metaphors. In this article musical
metaphors are placed along one axis of a three-dimensional space I label “the
space of musical experience and ethnography.” In other words, musical expe-
rience and ethnography are structurally similar. The other two axes are time
and place. As a theoretical model, it does a number of things. First, it argues
that the studiers and the studied experience and understand the musical world
within a common abstract experiential framework. It makes more precise my
claim in Chapter 2 that ethnomusicologists’ interpretations are never objec-
tively true but always begin with preunderstandings that are modified into new
understandings during fieldwork. (By the way, in hermeneutic terms, these new
understandings, because they are confirmed intersubjectively in the field, fall
outside the common subjective-objective dichotomy of science.) In Chapter 4
I suggest that the hermeneutic arc of Chapter 2 can be rendered analytically
and visually as travel through this three-dimensional space of time, place, and
metaphor. In this chapter I do not give an example of my own self-reflexive
ethnographic travels through this space, but Figure 0.5 is a model of musical
ethnography, that is, of the way imaginary ethnographers navigate this space in
their trajectories from preunderstandings through explanation to new under-
standings. A similarly structured abstract three-dimensional space also func-
tions as a “model for” musical experience, in other words as a way to think
about and explain particular musical ethnographic projects. In Chapter 4 I give
9. “I believe the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills.
Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the material-
ity of power operating on the very bodies of individuals… . The individual, with his identity
and characteristics, is the product of a relationship of power exercised over bodies” (Foucault
1980: 55, 74).
15
Introduction 15
New understanding 2
Event 4
Explanation 2
Event 3
Preunderstanding 2
New understanding 1 Event 2
Explanation 1 Event 1
Preunderstanding 1
Home Field Home
Figure 0.5 A three-dimensional model of musical ethnography.
examples from my fieldwork in Bulgaria to illustrate the way it can be used to

explain changes in individual musical experience and conflicts between indi-
viduals and groups who hold different views on the nature of music, conflicts
that create what I label “experiential tension.”
Why am I interested in individual musical experience and conflicts among
individuals when the name ethnomusicology and much of its history are based
on the study of groups of people in societies, communities, subcultures, micro-
cultures, scenes, ethnicities, tribes, nations, or races? There are two reasons.
First, ethnomusicologists have long reported on individual differences in musi-
cal taste, values, and behaviors within particular music cultures. This model of a
conceptual space for thinking about musical experience offers an explanation for
those observed differences: they appear when individuals occupy different posi-
tions within the shared space of musical experience and when they have traveled
along different trajectories through it. Second, in the modern world, a large and
growing number of individuals are wandering the globe in search of new homes.
To account for this new world, ethnomusicologists have added a consideration
of the complexity of modern societies to older ideas of musical styles as coherent
expressions of homogeneous cultures. This complexity includes societies that
are still holding together and those that are breaking up (see Slobin 1993). In
such modern circumstances, I suggest that researchers might engage in what
I call “subject-centered music ethnography,” and in Chapter 4 I create a model
for such work. Using that model, ethnomusicologists can observe and analyze
the way their subjects view their own musical practices and those of others from
three different perspectives: their place in society understood geographically
and socially, the time periods they have lived through, and the metaphors they
16
use to express their understandings of the nature of music. Analyzing modern

musical practices from these three perspectives helps to explain the variability
that ethnomusicologists observe during their work with particular individuals
living in or between particular cultures.
Andrew Killick (2003: 182) did just that, taking my model for a “road test” by
“steer[ing] a course through the history of three related musical narrative and
theatrical genres from Korea.” He found it useful “as a conceptual framework
for charting a course of historical development and changing meanings within
a culture” (ibid.). He argues that this model, and I dare say similar models by
others, “help[s]‌us achieve more ambitious goals than the description of single
cultures or practices, and to that end, should lead us to a comparative stance,”
(ibid.) just what I have always hoped for the process of modeling.
Chapter 5, “Reflections on Music and Identity in Ethnomusicology,” resulted
from an invitation from the Institute for Musicology of the Serbian Academy of
Sciences to contribute to the 2007 issue of their journal, Muzikologiya, on the
theme of music and identity. I suppose they expected me to write something on
Bulgarian music, but I decided to take the opportunity their invitation afforded
me to write more generally on this theme. In this chapter I argue for the first time
that one “model of ” ethnomusicology consists of a list of “themes” around which
ethnomusicologists organize their research. I list a few of them here, including,
for example, native concepts about music (Merriam 1964); music and gender,
which became common in the 1980s; and music in relation to war, violence, and
conflict, a more recent theme since the late 1990s. Among the most ubiquitous
of these themes has been music and identity, which entered the field in the 1980s
after I completed my doctoral dissertation in 1977. The concept figured not at all
in my graduate education, but, given its prominence today, it is hard to imagine
a time when it did not even register as a theme ethnomusicologists explored.
For reasons of time, I limited my survey of this theme for this article to the
journal Ethnomusicology (hence the italics in the title).10 I began the study curi-
ous to know when the theme entered the field. I also assumed that two questions
animated this theme: how do people use music to construct an identity? and how
does music making give people their sense of identity? I learned that ethnomusi-
cologists began to write about this theme early in the 1980s, and my survey dem-
onstrated that ethnomusicologists’ writing on this theme had developed more
fine-grained ways of treating this theme than I had anticipated. Unfortunately,
from my point of view, I had to classify those ways because the authors did not
seem to understand themselves as writing within a tradition of studies on this
10. In the wake of this article, Nolan Warden (2016) has surveyed this theme in reference to a
much broader swath of the literature.
17
Introduction 17
theme: none defined identity and, with one exception, none cited the work of
any of the others. Each article was an idiographic account of a music culture;
they effectively created what I called, uncharitably I know, an “arid desert” of
ethnographic “grains of sand.” This chapter argues that a serious discipline can-
not be built on such infertile soil, and that ethnomusicologists must read each
other’s work on the themes that interest them and generate questions, issues, and
problems within that theme if we hope to place our discipline on a solid founda-
tion and make important contributions to knowledge of humankind.
One way to think about the way our particular studies might relate to a com-
mon ethnomusicological theme would be to list its subthemes and theories
and the issues, questions, and problems they suggest. In the case of identity, for
example, there appear to be two broad subthemes: individual identity and social
identity. A theory is a claim or explanation about what music is or does or how
it is structured. Questions arise from fieldwork or from previous literature in or
outside of ethnomusicology. An issue is a disagreement that flows either from
inconsistencies in the fieldwork data or from conflicting theoretical positions
that previous writers have taken. Problems are persistent questions and issues
that have resisted analysis, explanation, and understanding. Answers are explana-
tions that writers provide to the questions, issues, and problems they encounter
in their work on the theme. In Chapter 5 I presented my analysis of the music-
and-identity theme and its subthemes narratively, but, to make my assessment
clearer, I provide in Figure 0.6 an outlined list of the way the theme of music
and identity was subdivided in this corpus of work. Similar lists for the large and
growing number of themes that are engaging ethnomusicologists today would
surely generate the kind of theorizing (question answering if you will) that I argue
in Chapter 5 would strengthen the intellectual vitality of our field.
After publishing the essay in Chapter 5 in an important national jour-
nal, I decided to register my concerns about the field in a “call to action” on
the part of readers of and contributors to the journal on which the article is
based, Ethnomusicology (Rice 2010). The editor invited seven responses. Those
responses, with one exception, seemed to be in the category of “yes, but… . ”
That is, most agreed that I had identified a real problem, but they wanted to reg-
ister caveats or propose alternate solutions. For example, one wrote, “We really
ought to have an ethnomusicology keyword website … that could serve as a
gauge of keyword elasticity” (Slobin 2010: 338). One concern of some was that
perhaps journal articles are not the place to engage in lengthy disquisitions on
theoretical matters and literature reviews, that those are better left to book-length
musical ethnographies and edited collections on particular themes. There is no
question that both of these writing genres are rich sources of ethnomusicologi-
cal theorizing on music and identity, and had I looked there I might have found
the “theoretical moisture” I couldn’t find in the Ethnomusicology articles. But as
18
Figure 0.6 Music and identity: its subthemes, theories, questions, issues, problems, and
answers.
my title indicates, I was writing about Ethnomusicology, not ethnomusicology.

I don’t agree that journal articles, because of their brevity, are not the place for
the sort of thematic comparisons I call for in Chapter 5. They just have to take
a form appropriate to the genre and to the ethnographic case under discussion.
It does not have to take the form of a lengthy review of the literature, although
where questions, issues, and problems relevant to the case study suffuse the liter-
ature, such a review might be more extensive and the article might try to answer
the questions, resolve the issues, or solve the problems. If such considerations
are not the point of the article, if it is mainly ethnographic, and if a concept
like identity is at the core of an article, as is the case for the articles reviewed
in Chapter 5, I still would expect something like the following: “I take identity
to mean… . ” I wouldn’t even insist on a footnote, but one could explain tele-
graphically the subset of the literature that the author has examined. It might go
something like this: “I arrived at this definition after reviewing Smith (1998) …”
and then, if relevant, continuing to summarize in a condensed form the range
Another random document with
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and James Reynolds. What had Mr. Hamilton to say to that? Even under the
least provocative circumstances, Hamilton was quick-tempered, and here
was something to arouse the lion in him. For a moment he raged in his
resentment. The visitors, a little moved, perhaps, stood their ground. They
had papers and the right to an explanation. His fury having consumed itself,
Hamilton realized that there was something to explain, and he was ready.
Would they meet him at his house that night? They would. The three men
rose, bowed, departed.
When they reached the Hamilton home that winter night, they found
Oliver Wolcott, the protégé of the host, there before them. In the presence
of these enemies it was wise to have one friend as a witness. The visitors
were received with the courtly courtesy of which Hamilton was capable,
and after they had found chairs about the table, he produced some papers of
his own, spreading them out by the candlelight, before him. Then, quite
calmly, and with an occasional touch of humor, he made a remarkable
confession.
It was the old story of a great man’s weakness. One summer day in 1791
a Mrs. Reynolds had appeared at his home with a pathetic story of her
desertion by her husband and a plea for funds to enable her to return to her
family in New York. Strangely enough, no description of this adventuress
has come down to us, but it is a reasonable presumption that she was
comely. The family of Hamilton was in the house. The master was moved.
Naturally he would accommodate her, but at the moment he had no money
with him. He would take her address and send or bring it in the evening.
That night the gods looking down from Olympus might have seen one of
their favorite earth-children furtively making his way through the dimly
lighted streets, away from the fashionable quarter into the section of cheap
boarding-houses. The woman received him in her room. It was the old story
of Cæsar and Cleopatra, albeit this was a Cleopatra of the more vulgar sort.
‘After that,’ said Hamilton, ‘I had frequent meetings with her at my own
house, Mrs. Hamilton and her children being absent on a visit to her
father.’[698] The comedy hurried on. At length he thought to bring it to a
termination, and it was then that Mrs. Reynolds proved herself a mistress of
her art. She was passionately in love. A separation would break her heart.
Here, surely, was a violent attachment—perhaps it would be better to break
off gradually. The lover was not lacking in the finer sensibilities, and then,
too, his vanity was pleased.[699] With the continuance of the amour, Mrs.
Reynolds, simulating a consuming passion, began to flood her innamorato
with tender epistles.[700] The climax was on the wing. One day an
hysterical note announcing the husband’s discovery of her infidelity, and
warning that, if no answer was forthcoming to the letter the Secretary would
receive from the irate husband, Mrs. Hamilton would be informed. Would it
not be wise to see him? Hamilton thought so and summoned Reynolds to
his office. The cunning rascal had his story ready: the wife discovered
writing a mysterious letter—a black messenger traced to the Hamilton
house—the accused wife on her knees confessing all.[701] After
negotiations the heartbroken husband decided that a thousand dollars would
salve his wounded honor. ‘And I will leave the town ... and leave her to
Yourself to do for her as you think proper,’ he added.[702]
In the midst of these painful revelations, Muhlenberg and Venable
declared themselves satisfied, but Hamilton insisted on telling the story to
the end. Then followed the most amazing part of the tale. The husband
invited his wife’s lover to resume the amour. Hamilton was coy. Mrs.
Reynolds added her plea in illiterate, pleading letters. The vanity of
Hamilton was likewise persuasive, and the comedy was resumed. When he
sought to escape notice by going by the back way, Reynolds was indignant.
‘Am I a person of such a Bad carector [character] that you would not wish
to be seen Coming to my house in the front way?’ he wrote.[703] This
should have put Hamilton on his guard, but he fell into the trap. A witness
had been provided in another blackmailer, Clingman, who had been a clerk
in Hamilton’s office, and was an unspeakable scoundrel. Then more money
was demanded. Mrs. Reynolds was again alarmed. Her husband was often
morose and beat her. At times he threatened to murder Hamilton. Loans
were made. This, then, was the nature of the mysterious financial relations
with Reynolds.
When the party rose to leave, Muhlenberg and Venable were apologetic
—but not so James Monroe. He bowed stiffly, the sternness of his features
unrelaxed, as the three passed out into the winter night. Hamilton had
vindicated his official honor at a painful sacrifice. It was understood that the
confession should be sacredly confidential, but in a sense he had lost. As he
sat with Wolcott before the fire after his tormentors had departed, he
realized that his enemies were out to wreck his official reputation. He may
have had a premonition of the storm that was about to break.
III
Nine days after the scene enacted by candlelight in Hamilton’s library,

the bill authorizing the President to negotiate a loan of two million dollars
to be applied to the reimbursement of a loan made of the Bank came up for
consideration in the House. William B. Giles, who was now dividing the
leadership of the Jeffersonians with Madison, was instantly on his feet with
a request for postponement. Perhaps some method could be found without
recourse to a new loan. It might be better to pay the loan by selling the
stock the Nation owned in the Bank. The watchful Sedgwick was shocked
at the suggestion. Dumping so much stock upon the market would reduce
the price and not enough money would be realized to meet the country’s
obligation to the Bank. It was a mild premonitory skirmish.[704]
Christmas Day brought an armistice, but the next day the discussion was
resumed, with Madison taking a leading part. Why was so much more to be
borrowed than was demanded by the Bank? To his personal knowledge a
large sum was lying idle and unappropriated in the Treasury. If this balance
was appropriated by the President, he wanted to know it. A delicate subject
to discuss, suggested Sedgwick. Not at all, thought Madison. It was time for
some ‘candid explanation.’ Was the appropriation lying dormant in the
Treasury, borrowed to meet the obligations to France, being demanded by
the country to which it was due? The important question concerned the
diverting of money appropriated to that specific purpose to the payment of
Bank installments. Could gentlemen justify themselves to their constituents
for such conduct? The debt to France was one of gratitude and justice, and
he wished the money could be sent thither on the wings of the wind. True,
the debt in whole was not yet due, but in the critical condition of our
benefactor, it would no doubt be particularly acceptable and he was
opposed to the diversion of any part of it.[705] Why two millions for the
Bank? demanded Giles. True, two hundred thousand dollars would be due
the Bank on January 1st, but why two millions? No one had offered an
explanation of how the money lying dormant was disposed of, or how it
was intended to dispose of it. No member rose to explain, and the bill was
lost.
During the next month the lobbies, boarding-houses, taverns, buzzed
with discussions of the finances of the country. After all, even the members
of the House, presumed to be familiar with the fiscal affairs of the Nation,
knew scarcely anything. They had appropriated blindly. There was
something uncanny in the silence. Would the raising of the curtain disclose
skeletons in the closet of the Treasury? At any rate, the House had a right to
the facts and figures. Throughout the month Madison and Giles were
frequently at the table or about the blazing fire at Jefferson’s. Here the
campaign was planned. The fight should be forced into the open on the
floor of the House. Jefferson could not participate, for manifest reasons, but
he could direct. Madison could assist in the preparation of the resolutions
and in the debate. Giles, who was a masterful debater, fearless and slashing
in attack, could sponsor the resolutions and lead in the assault. Because of
the part he then played, it has been the fashion to dismiss him flippantly
with a shrug and a sneer—but this is absurd. Giles of Virginia was
unsurpassed by any American debater of his time.
IV
Giles was a veritable D’Artagnan of debate, a gusty, lusty Gascon

transplanted to the tobacco-fields of Virginia, eager always for a fight or a
frolic, and lightning-swift with his blade. A blustering fellow, true, quick to
assert his rights and repel assault, he carried himself with a swagger that did
not endear him to the Federalists, who rather plumed themselves on having
a monopoly on that particular vice or virtue. But sneers at his ability are
absurd. He who won the admiration of Patrick Henry,[706] commanded the
confidence and respect of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, received the
discriminating praise of Randolph of Roanoke,[707] and the reluctant tribute
of Justice Story,[708] cannot be sneered from a respectable place in history
by a wretchedly unfair caricature by a partisan English biographer of one of
his enemies.[709]
The young Virginian who appeared in Philadelphia in the winter of
1790-91 was not prepossessing in appearance. Of average height, the
fullness of his person conveyed the impression of a squat figure. His face,
large, round, but colorless, bore none of the indications of genius, albeit
there was something of virility in his brown eyes that harmonized with the
robustness of his physique. One who knew him has recorded that he was of
fair complexion,[710] but another who heard him frequently in debate
commented on his dark color, and, since his hair and eyes were those of a
brunette, we may accept the latter as more probable than the former.[711]
All agree that he was careless in his dress, after the then prevailing Virginia
manner,[712] although we have the record of one dramatic appearance in the
Virginia Legislature, at the height of his renown, ‘elegantly dressed in blue
and buff’ and with the Gascon touch of being ‘booted and spurred, with a
riding-whip in his hand.’[713] If there was nothing imposing or picturesque
in his appearance, his manners were such as to make him stand out
conspicuously among his fellows. These were such as to impress the none
too finished Maclay that ‘the frothy manners of Virginia were ever
uppermost.’ It is easy enough to reconstruct the scene at Washington’s table
where Maclay met our Gascon, with Giles, the good liver, dwelling
unctuously on Virginia canvasback ducks, Virginia hams, Virginia chickens,
and the old Madeira, which was a little more mellow when drained from a
Virginia glass in a joyous Virginia dining-room. Proud of Virginia was this
provincial from the tobacco country, and proud as D’Artagnan himself of
his physical prowess, for didn’t he take more manual exercise than any man
in New England? No place like the Old Dominion where the living was
‘fast and fine,’ where from noon to night the people drank wine or cherry
bounce like gentlemen. Thus he thundered along, to the amazement of
Maclay, who observed that ‘he practiced on his principle every time the
bottle passed.’[714] The picture is no doubt true, for Giles was racy of his
native soil. The Amelia County of his early days was of the frontier, with all
that that implies of the primitive vices and virtues. The sparsely settled
country, with its miserable roads, lived very much to itself, and strangers
who ventured among its inhabitants were treated coldly. The living was
truly ‘fast and fine’ and rather loose, for the men were careless, indifferent
to dress, heavy drinkers, inveterate smokers, their conversations picturesque
with profanity; and they were fighters, too. Dumas’s three immortals would
have found it to their liking, and had they encountered young Giles at some
crossroads tavern they would have taken him to their hearts. The spirit of
independence flamed on every hearth, and the religious dissenters found it a
happy hunting-ground.[715] It was in this atmosphere that Giles grew up.
Like most of the Jeffersonian leaders, he was a frontiersman.
When he went to Princeton to complete his education, we get again the
D’Artagnan touch. He set forth like a Virginia gentleman with his negro
slave to serve him, no doubt kicking, cursing, and loving him all the way.
Then followed a law course at William and Mary—and then a law office
was opened in the little tobacco town of Petersburg. We are interested in
this period of his career only in that it throws light on his character and
capacity. He favored the ratification of the Constitution, and, as a fascinated
spectator of the debates in the Virginia Convention, formed a deep
admiration for Madison. In the evenings he argued for ratification at the
tavern, no doubt in the taproom. Hearing him one night, George Mason, a
leader of the opposition, made the comment that ‘he has as much sense as
one half of us, though he is on the wrong side.’[716] He was not, then, an
anti-Federalist on the Constitution.
Immediately on entering Congress at twenty-eight, he commanded
attention, for he had a genius for congressional life. He became at once a
giant in debate. When John Randolph, more cynic than flatterer,
pronounced Giles the Charles James Fox of the House, he referred to the
impression made by the Virginian in action. Fox was a student; Giles was
not. Fox was capable of sustained research; Giles was not. Fox was a lover
and reader of books, and Giles cared nothing for them. He bore a closer
resemblance to Mirabeau or Danton in his methods, absorbing his
knowledge from others in conversation. In the tavern, on the highway, at the
dinner table, he was a tireless talker, and by provoking his friends into
discussion he tested, corrected, and formed his impressions of events and
measures. His mind absorbed like a sponge, his memory was retentive. The
idea that Jefferson or Madison outlined his speeches for him is ludicrous.
He merely assimilated what they said—and then gave it out more forcefully
than either could in debate.[717]
It is impossible to reconcile the slurring references of some historians to
his manner in debate with the speeches that speak for themselves on the
musty pages of the ‘Annals of Congress.’ Here was a man speaking directly
to a purpose. No critic need kill off his Roman consuls, for there were none.
No craving here for a reputation for erudition. No mere rhetorical flourishes
to confuse the sense. No theatrical appeals to the emotions. No verbosity at
all—but ‘a clear, nervous expression, a well-digested and powerful
condensation of language,’ which could make an impression on the
scholarly Story. That great jurist, an unfriendly witness, could not hear him
without admiration. ‘He holds his subject always before him,’ he wrote,
‘and surveys it with untiring eyes; he points his objects with calculated
force and sustains his positions with penetrating and wary argument. He
certainly possesses great strength of mind.’[718]
Having prepared himself to meet all comers, he thus dashed to the
combat. Having assimilated all that he had absorbed, his native
resourcefulness and ready command of good plain English did the rest. He
spoke with the forceful fluency which was the best possible substitute for
eloquence. A powerful voice, a virile manner, compelled attention and
respect. Did an enemy attack him as he rushed along? He either crushed
him with brutal strength, or cleverly ducked the blow—and was on his way
again. Instinctively he knew when to strike and when to dodge. When on
the floor, he dominated the scene. This was the man, so much belittled,
whom Benton wrote down in cold deliberation as ‘the most accomplished
debater which his country has ever seen.’ This the man selected in the
conferences of Jefferson and Madison to lead the attack on the Secretary of
the Treasury.
During this period of waiting, with the gossips busy in the taverns and
the streets, Freneau was zealously seeking to create the right atmosphere for
the attack. With the Hamiltonians ascribing all prosperity to the policies of
their chief, Freneau and other editorial enemies were making much of the
protest of ‘Patriot,’ who had been ruined through the abuse of these fiscal
policies.
The tale is true [it ran]. I loved my country. In 1775, my only son fought
on Bunker Hill.... His mother sent the chair down to carry him home. She
wiped the blood from his face and dressed the wound in his breast. He died.
My neighbor, Smallacre ... said it was the proper reward for rebellion, but
that a halter would have been more proper. I persevered in the cause of
freedom. Congress wanted money—I called in my debts and sold all my
land excepting forty acres. In ... 1778 I had 12,000 in paper. I loaned the
whole, and when they were consolidated at forty for one I had a loan office
certificate for $300. In 1784 the General Court issued a large tax. As I could
obtain neither the interest or principal of my loan office note I was obliged
to sell it. My neighbor, Smallacre, saved his property from the waste of a
cause to which he was heartily opposed, and he appeared to buy my note at
Three Shillings for Twenty. By this means I paid my State tax of Nine
pounds, ten shillings and had four pounds left for town and parish taxes. As
my son was dead I was content to be poor.... My old chair and horse
remained.... My neighbor, Smallacre, has now become rich by purchase of
public securities from people distressed as I was. He tells me that our
Hancocks and our Sam Adams and those kind of men know how to pull
down a government, but do not know how to build one.[719]
Prosperity? Yes, but for whom? demanded the enemies of Hamilton,
poking the ‘Patriot’s’ protest under the nose of his defenders. With the
Hamiltonians crediting their idol with all the good things that had occurred,
Freneau was moved to mirthful verse:
‘Whales on our shores have run aground,

Sturgeons are in our rivers found—
Nay—ships have on the Delaware sailed,
A sight most new.
Wheat has been sown—
Harvests have grown—
On coaches now, gay coats of arms are borne
By some who hardly had a cent before—
Silk gowns, instead of homespun, now are seen,
Instead of native straw, the Leghorn hat,
And, Sir, ’tis true
(Twixt me and you)
That some have grown prodigious fat,
And some prodigious lean.’[720]
This press crusade against Hamilton was carried on along with much
laudation of Jefferson, inspired by the report of his decision to retire from
the Cabinet. ‘Mirabeau’ heard with distress that ‘the leader of democracy’
wished to ‘seek the peaceful shades’ to ‘solace himself with his favorite
philosophy.’ True, the sea had been made tempestuous for him, but ‘the
crew are his friends, and notwithstanding the endeavors of the officers to
raise a mutiny to supercede him ... his honest labor and firmness has
frustrated their wicked intentions and he rides triumphant.’ But with his
retirement ‘monarchy and aristocracy would inundate the country.’[721]
Right, agreed ‘Gracchus,’ ‘for though he has been in office near four years
he has never assumed the insolence of it. His department has been that of a
Republican and in no one action or expression has he manifested a
superiority over his fellow citizens.’[722]
Hamilton and his followers had frankly sought to drive Jefferson from
the Cabinet and failed; the plan was now complete for driving Hamilton
himself into private life.
VI
On January 23d, the result of the deliberations of Jefferson, Madison,

and Giles appeared when the latter rose in the House to present a set of
resolutions calling upon the President to submit complete reports on the
fiscal operations of the Government. To these the House was clearly
entitled. Nor was there anything violent or outrageous in Giles’s speech in
which he explained them. The House had been legislating for four years
‘without competent official knowledge of the state of the Treasury or
revenue.’ They had ‘engaged in the most important fiscal arrangements,’
and had ‘authorized a loan of the Bank ... for more than $500,000 when
probably a greater sum of public money was deposited in the Bank.’ They
were now on the point of authorizing a further loan of $2,000,000 in the
dark—and they were entitled to light. ‘I conceive that it is now time for this
information to be laid before the House.’[723] No one rose to object and the
resolutions were adopted.
To Hamilton, who looked upon Congress as a meddlesome body, they
appeared as something more than a bore. They were an imposition and an
insult. He was entrusted with the financial arrangements, and all he asked
was to be let alone. But he realized that such a lofty tone could not be
publicly assumed. Suppressing his indignation, he set to work with
meticulous care to prepare the fullest possible reports before the expiration
of the congressional session. His enemies thought to burden him with a task
that could not be performed in so short a time. Their strategy was to let the
resolutions with their implications seep in on the minds of the people
throughout the ensuing summer; his cue was to thwart them in that purpose,
to achieve the impossible, to meet the resolutions during the session, and
win a triumph.
Not for him, that winter, the gala nights at the new Chestnut Street
Theater, nor the dinners at the Binghams’, nor the dances at the Stewarts’,
nor the felicities of the hearth with Eliza at his side. His place was at the
Pemberton mansion, day and night, until the work was done. Oliver Wolcott
and the clerks were doomed to the same drudgery. Far into the night the
lights gleamed in the windows of the old house, and dark and deserted were
the streets when the workers made their way to their various homes after
dreary hours of poring over figures, assembling facts, and writing
explanations.
Within twelve days, the first report, with elaborate tables containing the
most minute details of transactions, was sent to the House. Two days later,
the second report was done and in. A week more and the third was sent.
Another six days, and the last was finished. The intense application, the late
hours, the nervous strain, told perceptibly on Hamilton, who was never
robust. The color left his cheeks when they were not flushed with
excitement. His nights were all but sleepless. His waning strength was
sustained by the driving force of his powerful mind. When it was over, even
Wolcott found that his routine business had fallen behind and that he would
‘be busy for some time to bring it up.’ To his father he apologized for
failure to answer letters. There was no time for letters. ‘The winter ... has
required every exertion which I could make.’[724]
As these voluminous reports poured in upon the House in rapid
succession, the Jeffersonians were amazed and the Hamiltonians beside
themselves with joy. A startling intellectual feat, to be sure. ‘I can recall
nothing from the British Minister in all the conflicts of party equal to it,’
wrote one admirer. ‘Even Neckar’s boasted account of the finances of
France ... is inferior, although that was the result of long study and elaborate
preparation, and Hamilton’s the work of a moment. Poor fellow, if he has
slept much these last three weeks I congratulate him upon it.’[725]
Wonderful reports, agreed the ‘Centinel’ of Boston. ‘The manly
unequivocable sentiments—the fair and accurate statements, and the
judicious arrangements ... must fix his character as a Patriot, a statesman,
and an able and honest financier.’[726] Yes, added another, ‘he will come
forth pure gold.’[727]
But his enemies were not so much delighted. They read and studied the
reports, complaining that the wizard of the speculators was up to his old
tricks. A maze of words, interminable sophistries, columns of confusing
figures, arguments instead of facts, and special pleading—no one could
understand these reports—such the verdict of the rank and file. To which
the Hamiltonians responded with a sneering verse:
‘The Secretary makes reports

When’er the House commands him;
But for their lives, some members say,
They cannot understand him.
In such a puzzling case as this
What can a mortal do?
‘Tis hard for ONE to find REPORTS
And understanding too.’[728]
But the leaders among the Jeffersonians were studying the reports and
finding a few things that they could understand. Evidence of corruption
they did not find, but they found technical violations of the law, an
indifference on Hamilton’s part to the clear intent of Congress in making
appropriations—quite enough, as they thought, on which to continue the
attack. Again Giles and Madison sat with Jefferson in his home going over
the reports, and framing the second set of resolutions with which it was
hoped to drive their enemy from the Cabinet.
VII
Three days before the end of the session, Giles presented his famous
resolutions in condemnation of Hamilton’s official conduct, based on the
disclosures in his reports. It does not matter who originally wrote them. A
scholarly historian[729] has produced proof of the part played by Jefferson.
In the very nature of things he must have had a part. Madison
unquestionably made suggestions and possibly revamped the copy
produced by Jefferson. Giles presented them, and they embodied the
conclusions of the three outstanding leaders of the opposition.
These resolutions, intemperately denounced from the day of their
appearance, set forth some novel theories, in view of the manner in which
the Treasury had been administered, but, read in the light of the present
regulations in the matter of appropriations, they are scarcely remarkable and
not in the least vicious. They set forth that ‘laws making specific
appropriations of money should be strictly observed by the administrator of
the finances’; that a violation of this rule was tantamount to a violation of
the Constitution; and charged that Hamilton had violated the law passed
August 4, 1790, making appropriations of certain moneys authorized to be
borrowed in the following particulars, viz.:
First, by applying a certain amount of the principal borrowed to the
payment of interest falling due upon that principal, which was not
authorized by that or any other law.
Secondly, by drawing part of the same moneys into the United States
without the instruction of the President.
They charged him with deviating from the President’s instructions, with
neglecting an ‘essential duty’ in failing to give Congress official
information of his proceedings in the transactions of the foreign loans.
More to the point, politically, was the charge that he ‘did not consult the
public interest in negotiating a loan with the Bank of the United States, and
drawing therefrom $400,000 at five per cent per annum, when a greater sum
of public money was deposited in various banks at the respective periods of
making the respective drafts.’ In conclusion, it was provided that a copy of
the resolutions should be transmitted to Washington.
The main thing proved by the investigation was something that required
no proof—that Hamilton had been managing the finances in the spirit of an
autocrat, a little contemptuous of the rights of Congress, a little indifferent
to the specific terms of the appropriations. These he had not hesitated to
juggle to suit his own purposes. In so doing he had been guilty of technical
violations of the law, but he had committed no crime. His hands were clean.
Yet money intended for France had not been paid, and money not intended
for the Bank had gone into its vaults. This was enough. Suspicion did the
rest.
The most censurable feature of the attack was the introduction of the
resolutions on the eve of adjournment. Jefferson, Madison, and Giles had no
idea that they would or could be disposed of before Congress should
automatically expire. Copies had gone to the papers of the four corners to
be read by the people, and it is probable that it was the intent that they
should have the summer and autumn to make their impression on the public
mind. It was manifestly an unfair advantage. But the Hamiltonians had no
thought of permitting any such delay. They were in a majority in the House.
In the Pemberton house, by candlelight, the Treasury clan was summoned
to a council of war, and they went forth to force the fighting to a speedy
finish.
The reports had settled nothing with Hamilton’s enemies. ‘When
Catullus[730] invited America to look through the windows of his breast and
judge of the purity of his political motives, he did not invite in vain,’
exulted ‘Decius’ in the ‘National Gazette.’[731] Willing to meet his
accusers? sneered ‘Franklin.’ ‘Pardon me, sir, if I am one of those
unbelievers, who, placing no confidence in any of your professions, do
verily think that you neither wish, desire nor dare to meet full and fair
inquiry. Have you asked it, sir?’[732] These jeers and exultant cries were
intolerable. The vindication of the House must come speedily.
On the last day of February there was a preliminary skirmish, and on
March 1st, the contending armies were marshaled for a decisive struggle.
Sedgwick and the faithful Smith of South Carolina led off for Hamilton,
and Giles followed for the Resolutions. Fitzsimons of Philadelphia and
Laurance of New York City, both representatives of the commercial
interests, attacked, and Mercer of Maryland replied. Boudinot defended
Hamilton, and Madison rose to make the premier argument in
condemnation of the policies of the Treasury; and Ames, the most brilliant
of the Hamiltonian orators, who had been held in reserve for Madison,
replied. Thus the day wore on, darkness fell, and the candles had long been
lighted before the House adjourned for dinner. Seven o’clock found the
galleries packed, Senators upon the floor, favored spectators in the rear of
the Chamber packed in close. The leading drawing-rooms were dark that
night, for their mistresses looked down upon the drama of the black eyes
and bloody noses. The struggle continued far into the night.
Here let us pause to catch the drift of the speeches. The supporters of
Hamilton made the most of the failure to find any evidence of criminality.
‘They present nothing that involves self-interest or pecuniary
considerations.... Instead of anything being detected that would disgrace
Pandemonium, nothing ... which would sully the purest angel in Heaven.’
Thus spoke Smith. No longer ‘the foul stain of peculation,’ but ‘the milder
coloring of an illegal exercise of discretion and a want of politeness in the
Secretary of the Treasury,’ said Barnwell.[733] What if a critical
examination had revealed a deviation from the letter of the law, exclaimed
Laurance. Was that an excuse for sounding ‘the alarm from St. Croix to St.
Mary’s?’ No corruption! cried Mercer, who had been forced to deny
campaign charges he had made. ‘I still entertain the opinion that there is
corruption.’ The House was in turmoil, and the Marylander was sharply
called to order. On he plunged, recklessly fighting his way against calls to
order.
No charge of corruption stained the lips of Madison, who moved on
solid ground. There had been a technical violation of the law, and he proved
it. There had been a disregard of the instructions of the President, and he
showed it. He went thus far, no farther, and he hammered home the facts. ‘I
will not deny,’ he said, ‘that there may be emergencies in the course of
human affairs of so extraordinary and pressing a nature as to absolve the
Executive from an inflexible conformity to the injunctions of the law. It is,
nevertheless, as essential to remember ... that in all such cases the necessity
should be palpable; that the Executive sanction should flow from the
supreme source; and that the first opportunity should be seized for
communicating to the Legislature the measures pursued, with the reasons of
the necessity for them. This early communication is equally enforced by
both prudence and duty. It is the best evidence of the motives for assuming
the extraordinary power; it is a respect manifestly due to the Legislative
authority.’ On this ground he stood, and there stood Giles.
The charges were dismissed by Ames, ex-cathedra-wise, with a shrug.
What if there had been a juggling of the funds? ‘It is impossible,’ he said
unblushingly, ‘to keep different funds, differently appropriated, so
inviolably separated as that one may not be used for the object of the other.’
Nothing criminal had been proved.[734]
One by one the resolutions were taken up and overwhelmingly voted
down—voted down even where Hamilton had admitted the charge and
justified his acts. Before the last vote was reached, many of the members,
worn by the excitement, the confinement, and fatigue, and confident of the
result, deserted their posts and wandered forth into the winter night.[735]
VIII
Hamilton had sought, through his anonymous letters, to drive Jefferson

from the Cabinet—and failed. Jefferson had tried, through this
investigation, to drive Hamilton from public life—and failed. The struggle
must go on. Each had caused the other some distress, each drawn a little
blood, but neither had inflicted a serious wound.
With the adjournment of Congress, the skirmishing was taken up all over
the country through the press. The Boston Federalists opened fire upon the
‘Boston Argus.’ It had published the resolutions, but not the Hamilton
reports. The resolutions had been carried on the same mail that conveyed
the vote of vindication, and the defeat of Giles had not been mentioned.
Infamous![736] ‘Marat’ proposed satirical resolutions declaring ‘highly
reprehensible’ every official ‘who by integrity, talents, and important
services ... conciliates the esteem and affections of the people.’[737]
Hamilton had come out pure gold, wrote a Philadelphian to a citizen of
Rhode Island. ‘The more it is rubbed, the more it will shine.’[738] A writer
in the ‘Connecticut Gazette’ was moved to a frenzy of indignation. ‘Dutch
Republicans murdered De Witt and ate his heart. Republicans banished
Aristides, the first, and condemned Socrates to Hemlock. And yet we have
confined the punishment of eminent services and ability to attempts to
degrade them from office by innuendoes, electioneering slanders, and
newspaper detraction. This however may be the prelude to eating and
banishing.’[739] A traveler in the Southern States wrote of the effect of the
investigation in Virginia. It had ‘opened the eyes of many who have hitherto
been under the explicit direction of a certain would-be umpire of the United
States.’[740] He found that prejudice had been created against Hamilton on
the ground that he ‘had not done as much as he ought to assist certain needy
men to their claims for services,’ but he was pleased to find that ‘the unjust
prejudice against the industrious patriot is decreasing daily.’[741]
Everything possible was done to make Hamilton’s vindication a veritable
triumph. When the Providence Society of New York met at Haut’s Tavern
for a dinner, the toast, ‘The Secretary of the Treasury—may his
distinguished talents and integrity command universal respect,’ was
received with shouts and the clicking of glasses.
But the Jeffersonians were unimpressed. ‘After all,’ they said, Hamilton
‘acknowledges the freedom taken with appropriations and strives to work
out an apology, rather than a justification.’[742] A week later, the ‘National
Gazette’ presented an analysis of the vote of which the Jeffersonians were
to make much. Vindication, indeed!—and by whom? Three were directors
of Hamilton’s National Bank. Fifteen or twenty were reputed to be
stockholders in the same institution. ‘Can these men be admitted as judges
—men who in fact are parties to the cause?’[743] All over the land the
Jeffersonians were making it uncomfortable for many members who had
voted to vindicate, and the Kentuckians soon had Christopher Greenup
begging for a suspension of judgment until he could explain.[744]
‘Vindicated!’ cried the Hamiltonians. ‘Yes, and by whom?’ answered the
Jeffersonians. ‘By Bank directors, by Bank stockholders who profited, by
congressional speculators in the funds.’
IX
Thus the Jeffersonians sought to explain their defeat and even turn it to
account. The master mind among them expressed no surprise at the result.
He drew up a list of the members who had voted the vindication, indicating
which owned Bank stock and which speculated in the funds. When
Jefferson journeyed back to renew his strength and courage on his beloved
hill, others of his party followed. A little later there was a movement of the
leaders to the country home of John Taylor of Caroline at Port Royal,
Virginia, where the conferences were continued. Thither went Giles,
Senator Hawkins of North Carolina, and Nathaniel Macon. The master of
Port Royal was a remarkable character, an ardent Republican, an earnest
champion of the agricultural interests, a robust, original thinker with
something of the political philosopher, an able writer, a dignified though
reluctant Senator. His mind ran much in the same groove with Jefferson’s
and Madison’s, both of whom were anxious to enlist him more actively in
their fight.
Just what occurred at the conferences that summer is not known. A few
months later, however, the probable fruit of the discussions appeared in
Philadelphia in the publication of a startling pamphlet, ‘An Examination of
the Late Proceedings of Congress Respecting the Official Conduct of the
Secretary of the Treasury.’ Here in an analysis of the vote the charge that
interested parties had furnished the majority was not only made, but names
were given. Of the thirty-five supporters of Hamilton, twenty-one were set
down as stockholders or dealers in the funds, and three as Bank directors.
Referring to the fervent declaration of Smith of Charleston that Hamilton
was as free from taint ‘as the purest angel in Heaven,’ the author of the
pamphlet commented that ‘it is well known that [Smith] holds between
three and four hundred shares in the Bank of the United States, and has
obtained discounts, ad libitum.’ As for Hamilton’s reports, they contained
vindications of his conduct ‘in certain particulars relative to which no
charge had been brought forward.’ His explanation of the shuffling of
appropriations was unimpressive. A deficiency in the appropriation? ‘In
such event it becomes his duty to state the fact simply and correctly to the
Legislature, that they might, in turn, furnish fresh and additional funds.’
Hamilton had done nothing of the sort. He had treated the House with
contempt and violated the law.
Here was clearly the answer of the Jeffersonians to the vote of the
House. It found its way to every city, town, and hamlet, to the cabin in the
Kentucky clearing, to the mansion of the master of many slaves on the river
James, to the pioneers about Fort Pitt on the far frontier. John Taylor of
Caroline had struck his blow.[745]
Thus the congressional battle merely served to accentuate the differences
of the parties. It marked, in great measure, the close of the purely fiscal
phase of the struggle. Neither Jefferson nor Madison was qualified to cross
swords with Hamilton in the field of finance. Giles was hopelessly
inadequate. A little later, a Jeffersonian leader was to join them whose
genius as a financier would be as far above all the Federalists, save
Hamilton alone, as Hamilton was superior to Giles, but he was still waiting
in the wings for Fate to give the cue for his appearance.
Even as Taylor wrote, a new issue had appeared, made to order for the
purposes of Jefferson.
CHAPTER X
ÇA IRA
U P to this time Jefferson had been fighting under a disadvantage. In the

field of finance he was unable to cope on equal terms with his great
protagonist. The mass of the people were not consciously concerned
with the Hamiltonian policies, few comparatively had been swindled by the
speculators, and, while they resented their neighbors’ sudden acquisition of
wealth, it was not easy to capitalize their discontent.
Then the French Revolution entered a more dramatic stage, captivating
the imagination of the multitude. As the real significance of the struggle
began to take form, with the crowned heads of the Old World marching in
serried ranks under the leadership of Brunswick on the French frontier, the
excitement was electric; and when they were turned back by the gallant
resistance of the Revolutionists the floodgates of enthusiasm broke. One
prolonged, triumphant shout went up from the masses. The ‘people of no
particular importance’ somehow felt that the victory was theirs. They had
been a little indifferent, these men of the shops, taverns, wharves, and the
frontier, over the disputed financial and economic policies of their country,
but they could understand the meaning of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity.’ It
meant democracy. Thus the news of the French victories shook the bells in
the New York steeples, Tammany celebrated with song, shout, and speech
in her wigwam, and the bung was knocked out of the barrel of illiterate
oratory in the beer saloons. These ‘people of no importance’ had been
inarticulate, and they were moved to eloquence. They had found a cause
they believed their cause—the cause of the people against privilege.[746]
The enthusiasm swept over the country, and the scenes of riotous joy at Mr.
Grant’s fountain tavern in Baltimore[747] were imitated at Plymouth,
Princeton, Fredericksburg, Norfolk, Savannah, Charleston, Boston,
Philadelphia.
In Boston there was a salute of cannon at the castle, and a picturesque
procession moved, fluttering French and American flags, bearing a roasted
ox of a thousand weight for the barbecue and a hogshead of punch to wash
it down, while girls and women waved from the windows, boys shouted
from the roofs, and the frenzied throng roared approval to the eloquence of
Charles Jarvis, the Jeffersonian leader, and to the Revolutionary poem by
‘Citizen’ Joseph Croswell.[748] The cheers of Boston were echoed back
from Charleston, where the artillery boomed in the day, mingling its
thunder with the bells of Saint Michael’s. Only ‘the pen of a Burke could
describe the scene on State Street’ packed with exultant humanity, with men
looking down from the chimney-tops, while ‘bevies of amiable and
beautiful women’ blessed the marchers with their smiles from the balconies
of the houses.[749] On to Saint Philip’s tramped the crowd for religious
exercises, for these men were not anarchists or criminals, but decent
citizens, moved to the depths by the defeat of the persecutors of France.[750]
And observing the unprecedented enthusiasm from his quiet corner,
Thomas Jefferson rejoiced. At length the masses were politically awake,
and the enemies of democracy had their answer.
II
The issues precipitated by the French Revolution had everything to do

with American politics—inevitably so. There were sentimental reasons for
the popular enthusiasm for the nation that had served America with men
and money; and there were economic reasons for the opposition in the fact
that the great merchants operated on English credit. But the political
significance of the divisions soon to appear have been persistently written
down, where they should be written up.
With some exceptions the Hamiltonian leaders were hostile to the
purposes of the French Revolution from the beginning. Here was a rising of
the people with a claim to power, and the keynote of Federalist policies was
distrust of the people; here was defiance of ‘authority,’ and they were
sticklers for constituted authority; here was a challenging of privilege, and
they honestly believed in privilege; here was democracy, and they hated it.
They were against it, just as Burke was against it, because it was an
iconoclastic movement, a trampling on tradition. The death of the King, the
slaughtering by the guillotine, the stupidity and infamy of Genêt, the
intemperance of the American ‘Jacobin clubs,’ the defiance of
Washington’s proclamation—on these they were to seize to neutralize or
destroy the popularity of the Revolution, but it was the proclaimed
principles of the Revolution that they hated.
In the Senate, where the Hamiltonians were dominant, this was evident
from the beginning. As early as December, 1790, when the resolutions of
condolence adopted by the National Assembly on the death of Franklin
were submitted to the Senate, Adams, in reading the letter from the
President of that body which accompanied them, referred sarcastically to
the writer’s titles, apropos of the action of the Assembly in abolishing titles
of nobility.[751] A few weeks later Oliver Ellsworth and Rufus King, the
ablest Federalists in the Senate, openly denounced the French, and ridiculed
their claims upon American gratitude, and when Maclay made indignant
protest, Ellsworth, taking snuff, pretended not to hear, Adams talked
audibly with Otis the secretary, and other Senators gathered in groups to
talk aloud. As early as February, 1791, the Hamiltonians in the Senate were
in no mood to listen to a defense of France.[752] Even the concession of a
constitution by Louis XVI was resented by the senatorial fathers of the
Federalist persuasion. The more democratic House adopted a reply praising
‘the wisdom and magnanimity’ shown in its formation and acceptance, but
when it reached the Senate, George Cabot objected to the word
‘magnanimity,’ Ellsworth supported him, the Federalists voted accordingly,
and it was stricken out. ‘Too many Frenchmen, like too many Americans,
panting for equality of persons and property,’ grumbled Adams as early as
April, 1790.[753] ‘We differed in opinion on the French Revolution,’ wrote
Adams in retrospect to Jefferson many years later.[754] Adams and
Hamilton, King and Ellsworth, Cabot and Ames, Jay and Bingham, looked
with mingled cynicism and alarm upon the Revolution from the moment it
began to take on a popular character and to aim at the destruction of
privilege.
Jefferson was just as ardent in its support. He knew the miserable state to
which the feudalistic institutions of the Bourbons had reduced the masses of
the people. He had seen justice bought and sold in France on the auction
block, the operations of the hideous game laws that threw open the
peasants’ fields to the trampling of the horses of the aristocracy, the bestial
poverty of the poor, the insulting of their wives and the debauching of their
daughters, with justice open-eyed and leering. He knew the wantonness of
Versailles, the drunkenness of the King, the profligacy of the Queen, and he

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Introduction: Ethnomusicological Theorizing 1

Chapter 1 was originally published as “Toward the Remodeling of Ethno­

On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication in 1987 of “Toward the

Figure 0.1 Rice essays that model ethnomusicology.

research would allow them to provide an authoritative opinion on whether

opposed to the aesthetic, value of music may be a part of the ethnomusicolo-

experience; Seeger 1987 on social maintenance; and Crawford 1987, the

He is outlining how to use his “total structure” as a heuristic device to ask as

Individual Creation Social Maintenance

10 M odeling E thnomusicology

find much evidence that ethnomusicologists regularly engage with heuristic

to Gourlay’s critique, I was loath to give up scientific research principles as the

12 M odeling E thnomusicology

The other intellectual problem where hermeneutic self-​reflexivity was at

14 M odeling E thnomusicology

by my ethnographic experience in Bulgaria’s totalitarian political regime.9 Here

New understanding 1 Event 2

Home Field Home

Figure 0.5 A three-​dimensional model of musical ethnography.

examples from my fieldwork in Bulgaria to illustrate the way it can be used to

16 M odeling E thnomusicology

use to express their understandings of the nature of music. Analyzing modern

18 M odeling E thnomusicology

my title indicates, I was writing about Ethnomusicology, not ethnomusicology.

Nine days after the scene enacted by candlelight in Hamilton’s library,

Giles was a veritable D’Artagnan of debate, a gusty, lusty Gascon

‘Whales on our shores have run aground,

On January 23d, the result of the deliberations of Jefferson, Madison,

‘The Secretary makes reports

Hamilton had sought, through his anonymous letters, to drive Jefferson

U P to this time Jefferson had been fighting under a disadvantage. In the

The issues precipitated by the French Revolution had everything to do

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chapter 1 was originally published as “Toward the Remodeling of Ethno

10 M odeling E thnomusicology

12 M odeling E thnomusicology

The other intellectual problem where hermeneutic self-reflexivity was at

14 M odeling E thnomusicology

Figure 0.5 A three-dimensional model of musical ethnography.

16 M odeling E thnomusicology

18 M odeling E thnomusicology