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Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

Some disciplines have ancient and endearing beginnings. Chemistry has its ancestry in alchemy and music theory once dealt with the sympathetic motion of planets. Ethnomusicology has no such luck: its beginnings are related to a rather less charming history of colonialism and racism. Ethnomusicology today could not be further removed from Eurocentrism and racial scientism, and some would therefore argue that the discipline proper started only after the Second World War, or perhaps a bit earlier with the ascent of twentieth-century comparative musicology. To a modern ethnomusicologist, pre-twentiethcentury representations of non-Western music create unwelcome guilt by association, a liability that requires one to disown, or at least create the greatest possible distance from, an inconvenient past. Defying such conveniences, Bennett Zon looks at racism unflinchingly and at the same time disabuses us of the notion that modern ethnomusicology came solely out of post-war and post-empire liberal politics. He argues that, despite a history of colonialism, some features of the discipline that still hold today began in the long nineteenth century, including resistance to racism, a genuine curiosity about the wider world, and above all a thoughtful approach to how other cultures might be explained to a home readership in a way that is both faithful and communicable. This may all seem counterintuitive, yet Zon produces an impressive body of evidence for his case. He navigates a complex grid of discourses and disciplines, consistently showing how these could lend equal authority to widely diverging ideologies and world views. The more thoughtful individuals in Zon’s survey are also the ones who enjoyed a lasting influence, and through their influence, the discipline had progressed considerably already in the late nineteenth century, making its greatest leap in the early twentieth. It was ultimately fieldwork and evidence that confounded prejudice and liberalized the discipline ahead of its musicological counterparts. Zon reminds us that early twentieth-century general histories of music (i.e. ‘historical musicology’ as we know it today) were far less sympathetic and far more Eurocentric in their treatment of non-Western music (p. 8).The message is clear: even in its beginning ethnomusicology was, on balance, a force for the good in a world awash with racism. It is, of course, up to the reader to decide whether the evidence supports this conclusion, and for that one would need more political context, largely absent here. It might also be worthwhile to explore other intellectual trends beyond Britain (also absent), which undoubtedly influenced the individuals discussed in this book (e.g. Hegel’s historicism, Gobineau’s ‘scientific’ racism, and so on). That said, the book is a feast of discourses and sources, assimilating an enormous body of work on the history of ethnomusicology, the British empire, anthropology, Orientalism, evolution and Darwinism, psychology, and many sources such as travelogues and historical studies. The first two parts are especially packed with names and facts (at times to an overflowing abundance), describing a long and uneven progress. The last two parts concentrate, respectively, on Samuel Myers and A. Fox Strangways, two early twentiethcentury forenamers of modern ethnomusicology. With so much to narrate, it is perhaps inevitable that several pertinent political and intellectual contexts will be left out, and yet the evidence we do get lends much substance to Zon’s overall optimistic trajectory. In Part I, ‘Early Anthropological Influences’, Zon examines the influence of four prominent points of view of human development, largely borrowed from Gustav Jahoda’s Images of Savages (New York and London, 1999): monogenism (the biblical or Bible-based explanation), polygenism (belief in diverse biological origins), the pre-evolutionary and teleologically ridden belief in developmentalism and degenerationism (the rise and decline of civilizations), and the particularly offensive ‘great chain of being’ (a continuum from ape to European man). The influence of the most blatantly racist ‘great chain of being’ is not examined in any detail, which is problematic, but in some