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Music as Representation
Philip V. Bohlmana
a
University of Chicago,
To cite this Article Bohlman, Philip V.(2005) 'Music as Representation', Journal of Musicological Research, 24: 3, 205 226
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MUSIC AS REPRESENTATION
Philip V. Bohlman
Music V.
Philip as Representation
Bohlman
University of Chicago
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1
See, for example, Margaret J. Kartomi, Music and Trance in Central Java, Ethnomusi-
cology 17/2 (1973), 163208; Lovely When Heard from Afar: Mandailing Ideas of Musical
Beauty, in Five Essays on the Indonesian Arts, ed. Margaret Kartomi (Clayton, Australia:
Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1981), 114; On Concepts and Classifi-
cations of Musical Instruments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Indonesian-
Chinese Oppression and the Musical Outcomes in the Netherlands East Indies, in Music and
the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 271317.
Music as Representation 207
Saharan Africa, or Asia was not what Europeans had thought music to
be; for example, it might accompany acts of cannibalism, as the French
missionary Jean de Lry observed during the 1550s while among the
Tupinamba, an indigenous people living around the modern Bay of Rio
de Janeiro.2 The wonder that characterized the music of colonial encoun-
ter led to the creation of a representational moment in the sixteenth cen-
tury, for in order to understand why the music of Europes Others was
different, Europeans began to employ various new ways to represent it,
not least among them transcriptions brought from the New World and the
introduction of other peoples music into European musical genres, such
as the Spanish villancico. The techniques and technologies of representa-
tion at such significant moments inevitably attempted to represent both
the music itselfthe objective parts understood by the Europeansand
the traits that the Europeans did not understand because of a subjectivity
of radical difference. It is not surprising that the study of music as repre-
sentation actually begins with Early Modern Europe and the accompany-
ing development of print technologies and the spread of musical literacy.
Ethnomusicology seeks to demystify musicto understand its otherness
by developing representational languages and technologies. The importance
of technology as a response to musics capability to represent should not
be overlooked: Ethnomusicology accompanies and even empowers the
spread of representational technologies. Again, we witness an aspect of
the representational paradox when scientific approaches are used to unlock
the secrets that musics otherness holds. When we undertake the study of
music as ethnomusicologists, we concomitantly learn and develop many
techniques to represent it. Quite early in our studies, we begin to transcribe
music that we collect with recorders in our fieldwork. By transcribing, we
2
See Jean de Lry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America [1578],
trans. by Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
208 Philip V. Bohlman
again make decisions about representing self and other in music. Western-
trained ethnographers generally employ the techniques of Western notation
ideally combining them with culture-emerging systemsto represent the
aspects of selfness, but we inevitably introduce new symbols to transpose
aspects of otherness that Western notation cannot transcribe. Transcription
is one of ethnomusicologys representational metalanguages.
The ethnographic approaches of ethnomusicology, not least the central
practice of fieldwork, produces other metalanguages as well, ranging
from prose accounts of individual performances to the use of film to doc-
ument large-scale ritual. It is very significant that most ethnomusicolo-
gists find that any one metalanguage is in itself inadequate and that it is
preferable, instead, to develop as many as possible. Each representational
metalanguage has the potential to capture several specific traits of music
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3
Margaret Kartomi, Tabut: A Shia Ritual Transplanted from India to Sumatra, in Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Century Indonesia: Essays in Honour of Professor J. D. Legge, ed. David P.
Chandler and M. C. Ricklefs (Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash
University, 1986), 141162.
Music as Representation 209
4
See Pi-yen Chen, The Chant of Purity: The Liturgical Chants of the Chinese Buddhism
(Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, forthcoming).
210 Philip V. Bohlman
1. Sound 1. Silence
2. Sign 2. Story
3. Structure 3. Senses
4. Secular/Everyday 4. Sacred
5. Self-Identity 5. Power
(other) are intentionally parallel. This will become clear to readers when
they look at music as sound in the first group and compare it with music
as silence in the second. However, not all comparisons from group to
group are quite that straightforward, because, of course, the ways in
which music represents are not at all straightforward. It may be most
helpful to use the ten practices and the dialectical tension between the two
groups as a point of departure and a framework for embellishing and
expanding individual experiences.
Sound
duction and the reception of sound. It is music that humans use as a tool
for determining what forms of organized sound will have meaning. It is
music that allows sound to provide a template for an expression of sonic
selfness that contributes beyond itself to the broader processes of organi-
zation that we call representation.
Silence
6
See, for example, Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in
Kaluli Expression, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
7
See, for example, John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1961).
Music as Representation 213
its own, and the listener focuses attention on the vastness that emptiness
can be. It is not a moment outside or beyond music through which one
moves to reach sound again, but rather a moment within music that asks
us to listen beyond sound. Listening beyond sound is really the crucial
point, because when we think about silence in this way, we realize that
music has itself entered several new metaphysical levels: those evident in
musics interaction with religion, with the human senses, and with human
experience. The point is that music represents silence by representing
much, much more. By studying the ways music also represents silence,
we therefore dramatically multiply the ways in which we understand how
music allows us to understand the many musical traits lying outside music
itself.
Sign
That music is more than sound and silence is evident in the many ways
signs are used to represent it. The use of signs further suggests the wide-
spread concept that music does not effectively represent itself, but rather
humans prefer to employ an intermediary level of representation that
draws the selfness of music closer to us only through translation. In this
section, I distinguish between two different uses of signs to represent
music. In the first, music is imagined to function like a language, hence
opening the possibility of describing music and even writing it as if it
were a language, with smaller and larger linguistic units. In the second,
signs are used simply to create a substitute for music, but indeed a substi-
tute that explains what music is through other media, especially visual
forms.
8
See William P. Malm, Six Hidden Views of Japanese Music (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986).
214 Philip V. Bohlman
not immediately present.11 Peircean signs are more objective than linguis-
tic in their functions, and accordingly they do not insist on an assertion
that signs, in and of themselves, tell us how music functions in society. At
first glance, it might seem as if the Saussurean emphasis on social func-
tion and linguistic system would be more appealing to ethnomusicologists
than the Peircean emphasis on traces and icons that stand in for music, but
in fact it is the opposite that is true.12 It is indeed the case that Western
thinking about music more often imagines that music functions like lan-
guage, but the moment non-Western thinking is introduced, the more neu-
tral role of Peircean signs has more utility.
The use of notation to represent music quite obviously relies on the
belief in literate societies that it is possible to understand musical meaning
by replacing sounds with signs. Notation, though it is learned at an early
age in literate societies, may be so extensive as to replace hearing music
with reading music. Arguably, the sign systems of notation make it
possible to experience music after dispensing with sound altogether. Eth-
nomusicologists have a tendency to distrust notation as an inadequate or
misleading sign system, which is one of the reasons that most ethnomusi-
cologists modify notational systems to suit the music they are transcrib-
ing. Ethnomusicology also multiplies the types of signs and sign systems
it uses: Anthropological ethnomusicologists integrate ethnographic sign
9
See Kofi Agawu, The Challenge of Semiotics, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook
and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 138160.
10
Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale [1916], critical edition, ed. by Tullio
de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1972).
11
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sandres Peirce, 8 vol., ed. C. Harsshorne,
P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19311966).
12
See, for example, Harold Powers, Language Models and Musical Analysis, Ethnomusi-
cology 25/1 (1980), 160; and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology
of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Music as Representation 215
Story
Societies throughout the world turn to music to tell their stories and
record their histories. Music represents through narrative in two ways that
reveal the extent to which we allow music to reach far beyond itself and
rework stories so that they are made more meaningful. These two narra-
tive possibilities of music and the ways in which their similarities and dif-
ferences overlap are already evident when we distinguish them in several
languages. In English, the distinction is clearer when we employ the terms
story and history, but in other languages the narrative power of music
is not as easy to disentangle from the commonplace names for narrative
(storia and storia in Italian, or Geschichte and Geschichte in German). To
understand the distinction in musics narrativity it is helpful to think of
two different kinds of representation. First, music may represent through
narrative by serving as a context, which allows music to be a participant
in the sociopolitical changes we call history. Second, music may itself
provide the text for a story, in other words the material that tells a story,
by representing it in ways unique to music. Clearly, just how music tells a
story is very complex, for in order to tell a story, music must combine
many ways of representing what lies beyond itself.
Just as different societies and cultures understand their histories in dif-
ferent ways, so too is music used to represent history in different ways. If
history is imagined through the telling of mythological tales, music often
provides a context for performance. The mythological cycles of Hindu-
ism, the Ramaya0a and the Mahabharata, are musically performed in
South and Southeast Asia, that is, in the classical musics of India and
Indonesia. Mythological cycles often produce epics, which in turn may be
transformed into more canonic historical texts, and music, again as a per-
formance medium, may contribute extensively to the transformation. The
various mythological-historical cycles that distinguish the cultures of the
216 Philip V. Bohlman
Structure
simple as all that. There may be no real reason to assume that the music of
every culture possesses structural unity; in fact, there are musics in the
world that may demonstrate the lack of structureeven chaosquite
extensively. My interest here is not to argue for or against the presence or
absence of structure in music, but rather to examine the ways in which the
assumption that music has structure has generated analytical approaches
that formalize vocabularies emphasizing what is often called simply sys-
tem.
System has both musical and cultural components. Until recently,
anthropologyespecially social anthropology, but also cultural anthro-
pologyhad assumed that cultures were organized around systems (for
example, kinship systems) that told us who was related to whom and by
extension how societies reproduced themselves. Musical systems can be
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13
See Thomas Turino, Structure, Context, and Strategy in Musical Ethnography, Ethno-
musicology 34/3 (1990), 399412.
218 Philip V. Bohlman
Senses
standing of what music is and can be has been its examination of musics
presence in and influence on the body. Ethnomusicologists look not only
at the effect of music on the emotions, but how the emotions are repre-
sented specifically through musical characteristics. For ethnomusicolo-
gists, the senses acquire physical meaningin other words, they are
inseparable from the way the human body participates in all acts of music
making. When ethnomusicologists think about music as humanly orga-
nized sound, they are also making a claim for musics ability to represent
the body. Music represents, therefore, because it can effectively embody
the senses.
The musical representation of the senses has two basesbiological
and emotional. These two forms of representing the senses are wide-
spread throughout many music cultures, but significantly they show dif-
ferent nuances from culture to culture. They therefore reveal an almost
universal recognition that the body is a source for producing music, and at
the same time is affected by music because it is also the physical site
where music is perceived. The physical relation between the production
and perception of music is extremely significant for certain ontological
concepts of music. The performance of zikr (remembrance, i.e., the
extended repetition of the name of Allah to draw the body closer to Allah
in Islam) unfolds as a physical process accelerated by singing, dancing,
and even hyperventilation to heighten the sense of euphoria.15 The extent
to which musics biological properties shape beliefs in musics efficacy
and impact on human beings is also clearly evident in the frequent use of
14
Oskr Elschek, Musikforschung der Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Vienna: E. Stieglemayer, 1992);
Albrecht Schneider, Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology, in Comparative
Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl
and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 293317.
15
Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession,
trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Music as Representation 219
Secular/Everyday
Are all human beings musical? Do we find music in the everyday worlds
of all human beings? Ethnomusicology answers both questions positively,
and by doing so it embraces a belief in the power of music to represent
that distinguishes it from other types of musical scholarship. Long before
modern ethnomusicology had developed, the recognition that there were
musical practices we would today call folk music was based on the belief
that music could represent the everyday. When Johann Gottfried Herder
actually used the term folk song (Volkslied) for the first time in the
1770s, he did so to describe as many activities as possible as musical and
16
Marina Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medi-
cine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
17
Feld, Sound and Sentiment.
220 Philip V. Bohlman
Sacred
The secular qualities of the everyday belong to the self, while by contrast
the sacred belongs to a realm of otherness. Precisely because the sacred is
found at such a distance in the realm of otherness, it must be drawn closer
to the self to be effective in religion. It is for this reason that music is so
important as a means of representing the sacred: Music mediates the dis-
tance between the secular and sacred worlds, drawing them closer
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together. More to the point of this article, music is especially good at rep-
resenting the sacred, and it is for that reason that virtually every culture
and religion recognizes the sacred attributes of music itself. When music
unleashes wonder, strengthens prayer, or accompanies the performance of
sacred texts, it functions to represent the sacred. Histories of music in
many cultures, moreover, may be fundamental examinations of the con-
stantly changing responses to musics ability to represent the sacred. The
history of music in South Asia, for example, takes the notion that Vedic
chant can represent the order of the universe in its embodiment of the
intoned and unwavering fundamental pitch of um. The migrations of
music as a component of ritual lend themselves to interpretation of the
historical longue dure of exchange between South and Southeast Asia.22
Even Western music history unfolds along a metaphysical path, along
which each milestone also reveals different attitudes toward representing
the sacred.
Music represents the sacred in two different ways. We might refer to
the first way as mediation. In other words, music is conceived to occupy
the space between the everyday and sacred world, and functions to trans-
form the meanings of the sacred so that they are understood on a more
human, everyday level. Many of the concepts of music that we find in the
cultures of indigenous peoples in the Americas demonstrate these mediat-
ing functions. The Native American peoples of the Great Plains of North
America encounter the musical pieces in their repertories by experiencing
them in dreams, where animals often sing them as songs. Animals were
previously important figures in Native American religion, hence, the
songs that Plains people experience through the mediation of dreams even
allow them to lay claim to such songs as personal compositions. The Suy
people of the Brazilian Amazon, too, understand song as a form of mediation
22
See, for example, Kartomi, Tabut, 141162.
222 Philip V. Bohlman
between sacred realms, and again there are various processes of exchange
that represent the importance of nature in Suy religion.23
The second way in which music represents the sacred is by enhancing
the intelligibility of the voice of a sacred being. Without music, under-
standing the voice of the sacred being might be entirely impossible. It is
for this reason that music is rarely absent from the performance of
revealed texts, such as the Quran in Islam. Whether read in silence and
privately by a Muslim worshiper or collectively in the cyclical perfor-
mance of an annual liturgical cycle, the Quran must be performed with
musical alteration of the texts themselves.24 The Muslim worshiper, then,
hears the voice of God in the Quran as a musical voice. It is perhaps of
additional importance that the musical performance of the Quran is not
called music, as if music itself undergoes a transformation when it repre-
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sents the revealed voice of Allah. Music plays a crucial role in many reli-
gions in the formation of canonical sacred texts, from the Jewish and
Christian bibles to the brahmanic texts of Hinduism to the daily rituals
chanted by Buddhists throughout the world. These canonical sacred texts,
finally, are testaments to the extensive ways in which music can represent
the sacred.
Self-Identity
becomes possible when, for example, a song transmitted through oral tra-
dition is transformed into a recording or a written version, both of which
can be purchased and owned. When a decision is made about letting
music represent self-identitysay, the self-identity of a nation with
national musica process of producing and reproducing the musical
object often follows.
Music may represent a self-identity that is very individual or a group
identity that expresses the common culture of a larger collective. The
expression of identity through music, however, is the product of paradox,
and because of that paradox we learn a great deal about how music repre-
sents. In a nutshell, the paradox is that self-identity is not immanent or
authentic, but it is imagined to be. National songs as often as not come
from outside the nation, but this does not in the least diminish their power
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to represent the self-identity of the nation for those who sing them.27 The
problem derives from what I have been calling the representational para-
dox throughout this article: If selfness does not exist, then music provides
a means of constructing it. The meaning of self-identity in music depends
more on what self is not than what self really is. There must be some kind
of investment in constructing self-identity with music, and that invest-
ment is clearest when music makes the identity of the self historically
more and more different from the identity of the other.
Power
27
See Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002), 88110.
224 Philip V. Bohlman
28
See, for example, the essays in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and
Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Music as Representation 225
tation of nature often reflects ideas not unlike the representation of the
sacred. The representation of the order of the universe often treats music
as a physical object, with abstract structural characteristics. In each such
case, the representational question is not so much about how as about
what, and in this article I have suggested that ethnomusicologys exten-
sive incorporation of representational practices results from its greater
concern for questions of how. In this way, the field of ethnomusicology
differs from other musical disciplines, in which whatmusical works
or nature, for instanceshapes ideas about music as representation.
The representational attributes that generate ethnomusicological theory
and practice are neither exclusive nor fixed, but rather they overlap with one
another. Critical to ethnomusicological thinking is the recognition that music
draws from and depends on multiple attributes when representing. Ethnomu-
sicology does not ignore questions of what, or for that matter of where
or when. Instead, it recognizes the ways in which representation also
depends on these questions. Quite literally, questions of what, where, and
when lead to an even more engaged concern for music as representation, and
that is why ethnomusicology refuses to ignore such questions. Perhaps most
important, such questions about representation show just how extensively
music possesses wide-ranging and complex representational attributes. Eth-
nomusicology formulates these questions as a complex, which intentionally
allows us to consider representation as globally as possible, recognizing that
the field changes as ideas about representation change.
The wealth of representational practices notwithstanding, ethnomusi-
cologists also are distinguished by the critical stance they take toward
29
See, for example, Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
30
For a discussion of the distinction of classes of meaning within classification, see
Kartomi, On Concepts and Classification, 1624.
226 Philip V. Bohlman