The Silence of Music

A series of five public lectures on the aesthetics and politics of world music and global history, February and March 2007, given by

Philip V. Bohlman

sponsored by the Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London
supported by the British Library

Lectures take place on Mondays or Tuesdays from 6 pm to 7 pm at the British Library Conference Centre
Admission is free, without ticket.

The Silence of Music

Music is always far more than sound, for it ceaselessly strives to be more than itself. It is because music pushes beyond the bounds of the sonic that the aesthetic and the political accrue to it, affording it the multiple conditions of power. These lectures respond to the challenge to respond to music in its frightening fullness, the silence that can at once result either from the absence of sound or from the deafening impact of music in the service of power. The silence of music embodies multiple meanings, ranging from the absence of being to the negation of being. If Western concepts of music privilege the soundedness of music-if music is, as John Blacking argued, "humanly organized sound"-these lectures draw us into a counterintuitive way of understanding how music comes into being and what kinds of cultural work it mobilizes. The lectures begin by broadening the aesthetic considerations brought to bear on music, and then shift to the historical considerations that arise from the encounter unleashed by the Age of Discovery. The body as a site of response and perception, not simply a means of sonic production, enters the lectures to introduce additional aesthetic registers. Following its aesthetic emergence, however, the body falls victim to the full force of modernity, the genocides that calibrate our own age. Revival, with its musical and sacred meanings, brings the lectures to the inconclusive conclusion, the history of the present that a multidisciplinary ethnomusicology makes possible. As a group, the lectures follow distinctive historical paths, suggesting alternatives to the silencing impact of a hegemonic Western music history. The religio-aesthetic foundations of the lectures lie in the renewing forces of ontology, eschatology, and soteriology.

Monday 12 February: The Silence of Being

Ontological concerns provide the basis for the first lecture and its identification of the many ways in which music is far more than sound. The lecture begins comparatively, drawing us into an aesthetics of music in which music is not dependent on an opposition to silence. Emptiness, for example, provides a space for contemplation in Daoism and Buddhism. In many religions, recitation of sacred texts need not be sounded, and may very well rely on different rules when performed internally rather than publicly, as in Islam. This lecture continues by raising questions about perception, whether and how, for example, movement, by generating rhythm and moving through the repetitive patterns of time, is fundamental to the meaningfulness of music. The ontological difference between silence and sound often drives a wedge between the West and its others, thus creating a gulf that politicizes difference itself. The greater the aesthetic difference, the more extreme its politicization becomes. Listening across the gulf, even when into the seeming silence beyond, allows for a proliferation of meaning. The lecture draws widely from ethnomusicology and comparative theology to establish aesthetic common ground, across which more complex forms of listening makes it possible to experience musical meaning beyond sound.

Monday 19 February: The Silence of Encounter

The encounter with which we concern ourselves in this lecture derives its meaning from historical conflict and exchange. Cultures rarely encounter each other on mutual terms, but rather one mobilizes the encounter in order to dominate the other. The lecture begins by chronicling the encounter with music in the Age of Discovery, during which time Europeans extended empire beyond their own shores. One of the most striking qualities of music at the moment of encounter is the claim that it utterly lacks meaning. Whether through colonizing or missionizing, the powerful take presumed meaninglessness as justification for replacing non-sounded meaning with music that subjugates. The encounters that we examine in this lecture contrast the initial moments of colonialism and empire (especially, Latin America and East Asia from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century) with the persistent conflicts at the beginning of the twenty-first century (with Roma in Eastern Europe and Islam in Iraq and Iran), which belie any claims that we have entered a postcolonial or postmodern age.

Monday 26 February: The Silence of the Body

Anxiety about the body has historically led to a complex aesthetics and politics of music. In this lecture the body becomes a contested vessel of music-making, at once approved and revered because of the ways in which it creates sound and mediates the voice of the sacred, and reviled because of the ways it channels music into non-sounded forms of musical expression. Dance, ritual, and sexuality all intersect with music through the vessel of the body. In this lecture, located at the midpoint of the series, we examine the ways in which the body becomes the site at which music most extensively moves beyond the boundaries of the sounded. Through performance, the body both internalizes and externalizes music, that is, by relocating it in the public sphere. It is in the public sphere, however, that the music-making of the individual intersects with that of the body politic, thus releasing power that is often unchecked, whether by marshalling the rituals of nationalism or mobilizing the forces of empire.

Tuesday 13 March: The Silence of Genocide

In its most literal form the silence of the body examined in the previous lecture is possible only upon death. This lecture will unfold as a chronicle of silence from the genocides of the twentieth century that now spill over into the twenty-first century. Beginning with the first forays into genocide, notably the genocide wrought by Germany on Namibia (deutsche Südwestafrika) beginning in 1904, and turning to the Turkish genocide against Armenians, the lecture will explore the full intensity of silence that we experience in the Holocaust. Critical to the meaning of this lecture, nonetheless, is the realization of genocide as ongoing in our own age, therefore, the problem of reckoning with the silence of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the civil war in Darfur, and the relentless racism visited upon Roma throughout the world. Although the silence of death resonates through the lecture, we shall once again turn to the possibilities of listening through and beyond music, employing an aesthetics of eschatology.

Monday 19 March: The Silence of Revival

Revival in its many manifestations-sacred, political, musical-rushes in upon the music history of the present. The specter of an end to art-indeed, to music and to history themselves-has retreated, and rebirth has replaced death in the aesthetics of world music. "New musics" of all kinds have provided the palliative that pushes the past into someone else's history, into the silence of another age. Musical revival, as the subjects of previous lectures have done, also requires of us that we rethink the intersection of aesthetics and politics. With an aesthetics of soteriology, the final lecture critically examines the ways in which self-representation has become an aesthetic mode for relocating the music of the past in the present. The politics of revival most directly compared in the lecture come themselves from the past, for I shall compare the "return to Europe" at the end of the Cold War with the "return to Islam" in the aftermath of 9/11. The silence between these two historical processes of return is eerily familiar. The questions that return and revival raise lead us again to the critical questions of meaning that occupy the fissures of history. Ultimately, in the aesthetics of soteriology that so dominates the history of the present, it may well be the silence of music that we must strive most vigorously to share, thus affording us the greatest chances to listen and to understand the silenced voices that only music can sound.

Philip V. Bohlman

is Mary Werkman Professor of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago, and President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Educated in school music programs and as a church musician in rural Wisconsin (USA), he studied at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research and teaching cross methodological and disciplinary borders, with broadly ranging projects on Jewish music, folk music, South Asia, music and religion, and music in the conflicts of nationalism and racism. Bohlman has held guest professorships at Berkeley, Cornell, Freiburg im Breisgau, the Humboldt University in Berlin, Newcastle upon Tyne, Vienna, and Yale. In 1997, he received the Edward Dent Medal from the Royal Music Association, and in 2003, he was awarded a Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. Among his numerous publications are The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988), The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936-1940: Jewish Music on the Eve of World War II (1992), The Music of European Nationalism (2004), and Jüdische Volksmusik - eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (2005). Among his edited volumes are Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (1991, with Stephen Blum and Daniel M. Neuman), Disciplining Music (1992, with Katherine Bergeron), Music and the Racial Imagination (2000, with Ronald Radano), and Music in American Religious Experience (2006, with Edith Blumhofer and Maria Chow). His current projects include Music Drama of the Holocaust (Cambridge), Herder on Music and Nationalism (California), and the edited volume, The Cambridge History of World Music. Philip Bohlman is an active performer and Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret ensemble.

Further information

The British Library is situated at 96 Euston Road, St Pancras, London NW1, next to St Pancras railway station and within walking distance of King's Cross and Euston railway stations. King's Cross St Pancras, Euston and Euston Square are the nearest underground stations. Bus routes 10, 30, 73 and 91 pass the building. There are no car parking facilities for the public on site, except for users with disabilities. There is a covered area for bicycles. The nearest car parks are in Marchmont Street under the Brunswick Shopping Centre and Euro Car Parks at St Pancras station.

Please direct any enquiries to:

Dr Tina K. Ramnarine
Department of Music
Royal Holloway
University of London
Egham TW20 0EX
UK
email: tina.ramnarine@rhul.ac.uk