"Universalism" and "Imperialism" - how does Music "spread"?

[ahinton]

Julian Bream, in Life on the Road, his memoir based on conversations with Tony Palmer, tells a hilarious clash-of-cultures story of a concert he was asked by the British Council to do, a long time ago, at a college in Assam where they hadn't had a concert of western music before. He went on stage to see hundreds of people, mostly women and children, milling about, babies crying....he played the first half of his normal concert, including a Bach suite, and went off for the interval, only to have the promoter hurry after him to ask where he was going....Bream said it was the interval, the promoter said Indian concerts didn't have intervals, Bream said western concerts have intervals half way through, the promoter said is this half way, Indian concerts go on for hours, and "Oh sahib, you must play longer than that because if not I'll have a riot on my hands". So Bream went back onstage and played every piece he could remember, until he ran out of pieces - didn't look up, didn't wait for applause because there wasn't any.... there was bedlam in the hall, people coming and going, noisy air conditioning units, his guitar constantly going out of tune...at the end the promoter gave him a huge pile of grubby banknotes that had been collected from the audience.....He'd agreed to do the concert with no fee on condition he was given a bottle of whisky and his plane ticket to Assam, so was able to go back to his hotel in a state of collapse and drink the whisky.

Nowadays I daresay something more interactive might have been considered appropriate.

This story reminds me of a performance at London's Tagore Centre at Hornsey Town Hall in 1987 in which Jane Manning participated with pianist David Mason and where the audience conducted itself similarly although I do not recall any whisky been given thereafter...

[Bryn]

. . . I do not recall any wishy been given thereafter...

I bet you wisk there was.

[ahinton]

I bet you wisk there was.

How right you are (and typo corrected, by the way!)...

[Richard Barrett]

It was the Concert for Bangladesh

Yes of course, I should really have checked that.

I also recall a passage from Colin McPhee's autobiographical A House in Bali, where McPhee plays various pieces of Western piano music to Balinese musicians, from Bach to Debussy, and they remark that it's interesting but it all sounds pretty much the same.

[oddoneout]

There are obviously various ways in which western music has been introduced to non-western countries/cultures, such as invasion, commerce, religion, and various ways in which it might become part of such cultures - force, fashion(keeping up with the gentry/Jones). Something else which presumably plays a part is the extent to which the music simply appeals to the listeners, who then want to hear more and/or adopt it into their own musicmaking?

[gradus]

Memorable tunes help music spread, sometimes they're 'universal' eg last movt of LvB 9, sometimes 'Imperial' EE Pomp and Circumstance 1. Being whistleable helps.

[Richard Tarleton]

Imperialism of course - same reason why people in Japan and almost everywhere else wear Western clothes, use the Western calendar and so on. I don't think there's anything inherent to Western music that gives it greater appeal except that through the historical, geographical and colonial position of Europe it's been capable (as your examples show) of assimilating features of any other kind of musical style into itself in a way that Noh theatre music isn't (although the formative period of Noh was contemporary with for example Guillaume de Machaut whose music isn't internationally popular of course!).

How are we defining imperialism for the purposes of this thread (a historian asks)? In the 16th-20th centuries it was primarily an economic, strategic, diplomatic, military and political activity – with different emphases in different theatres, for example Africa primarily strategic and military (economic hardly at all, barely featuring in GB’s GNP), India economic and strategic, Latin America likewise (seen by all participants as somewhere to be plundered), China economic (opium…) etc. etc.…. Cultural motives really didn't feature at all (as I’ve suggested re India), and I’d venture to suggest that the sort of cultural transfers we’re talking about are really a phenomenon of the post-imperial era? In the case of Indian music, from what little I know, hasn't there really been quite a lot of traffic in the other direction? Are we using “imperial” in a more metaphorical sense here, rather than in the technical sense in which it would be understood by historians?

Just asking.

[MrGongGong]

Memorable tunes help music spread, sometimes they're 'universal' eg last movt of LvB 9, sometimes 'Imperial' EE Pomp and Circumstance 1. Being whistleable helps.

"Great" as those might be
they aren't 'universal'

[Richard Barrett]

"Great" as those might be
they aren't 'universal'

It's kind of interesting how people get fixated on the idea of a hummable tune being at the heart of music when for most of history and geography that idea hasn't played much of a role. I remember reading somewhere that Purcell was the first composer as celebrated for his "tunes" as for anything else.

RT, I'm using "imperialism" in the fairly precise Marxist sense, and in that sense there is certainly no "post-imperialist" era, we are most certainly in the thick of it!

[Richard Tarleton]

It's kind of interesting how people get fixated on the idea of a hummable tune being at the heart of music when for most of history and geography that idea hasn't played much of a role. I remember reading somewhere that Purcell was the first composer as celebrated for his "tunes" as for anything else.

RT, I'm using "imperialism" in the fairly precise Marxist sense, and in that sense there is certainly no "post-imperialist" era, we are most certainly in the thick of it!

Ah. Thank you.

Tunes - are you excluding songs here? Composers were celebrated for their songs pre-Purcell.....and instrumental "divisions" or variations on popular tunes an important genre from first half of 16thC (Narvaez, Mudarra, Dowland and many more), no?

[doversoul1]

Memorable tunes help music spread, sometimes they're 'universal' eg last movt of LvB 9, sometimes 'Imperial' EE Pomp and Circumstance 1. Being whistleable helps.

So why do you think we* are not (we don't seem to be) picking up good tunes from other cultures’ music? Our music is universal but not theirs? gradus, I don’t by any means to be mean but that is (almost) the point of my question.

*with an exception of Mr.GG

[gradus]

So why do you think we are not (we don't seem to be) picking up good tunes from other cultures’ music?

Well, in the short time I gave to it they were the ones that sprang to my attention. Very happy to be corrected if I overlooked better candidates that are universal.

[Richard Barrett]

Tunes - are you excluding songs here? Composers were celebrated for their songs pre-Purcell.....and instrumental "divisions" or variations on popular tunes an important genre from first half of 16thC (Narvaez, Mudarra, Dowland and many more), no?

Indeed, although I think it would be true to say that the original "popular tunes" from that period are mostly not the work of named composers, and while Dowland contributed a couple of melodies which became quite well known, I think it would also be true to say that these form a relatively small proportion of his output. I don't think I could take that argument much further, not having enough facts at my fingertips!

At a tangent though, when you say that Africa during the British Empire didn't contribute much to the economy, surely the slave trade was extremely profitable? and wasn't it also a prerequisite for the profits extracted from the Caribbean colonies?

[doversoul1]

Well, in the short time I gave to it they were the ones that sprang to my attention. Very happy to be corrected if I overlooked better candidates that are universal.

Can you think of any equivalent from non-Western music? If you are happy, clap you hands is originally a Japanese pop song but is composed in the western scale.

[gradus]

It's kind of interesting how people get fixated on the idea of a hummable tune being at the heart of music when for most of history and geography that idea hasn't played much of a role. I remember reading somewhere that Purcell was the first composer as celebrated for his "tunes" as for anything else.

RT, I'm using "imperialism" in the fairly precise Marxist sense, and in that sense there is certainly no "post-imperialist" era, we are most certainly in the thick of it!

Isn't P and C1 used all the time to stoke 'patriotic fervour' and wasn't it written at the height of our Imperial power?