Hybridity

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

No culture is an island. The mirage of pure and “uncorrupted” languages, rituals, recipes, beliefs, and bloodlines evaporates on closer inspection. Human beings are genetically inclined toward interaction, cooperation, and mimicry. As big-brained social animals, we constantly absorb, transmit, and reconfigure concepts, behaviors, and technologies. The greater the contact, both within and between cultural groups, the greater the mixing, both culturally and biologically. Beneath the veneer of pristineness is an accumulation of elements, often with roots reaching beyond the scope of memory.

Such hybridity is a musical norm. Virtually everywhere and at every time, internal and external forces have accelerated or decelerated the pace of assimilating forms, styles, patterns, and instruments. Periods of heightened cross-cultural exposure, such as migrations and the Internet age, can both magnify hybridity and heighten the impulse for preservation. But, even when cultural walls are erected, influences inevitably seep through. Moreover, periods of intense hybridization are often followed by periods of stability, in which the new hybrids become “mainstreams” or “traditions.”

On an individual level, the process of musical creation is, almost by definition, an act of hybridization. Consciously and subconsciously, composers and performers mediate between diverse and sometimes divergent influences, intentions, methods, and emotions.

Intentional cross-cultural hybridity has a long history in the Euro-American classical tradition. For instance, Antonín Dvořák originally billed his New World Symphony (1893) as incorporating tunes from spirituals and Native American songs. He later clarified that the music contains “original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music” (emphasis mine). Either way, it is a hybrid. The same goes for composers like Bartók, Copland, and Shostakovich, who meld folk, folk-style, and popular sounds with orchestral techniques.

Perhaps less obvious today are the eclectic tendencies of J. S. Bach. Part of his genius was incorporating sounds from disparate sources: North Germany, South Germany, France, Italy, ecclesiastical chant, etc. Hubert Parry notes in his classic biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Story of the Development of a Great Personality (1909): “[I]t must be recognised that the principles of Italian art, in its broader and more substantial aspects, influenced [Bach] considerably; and in the first few years at Leipzig he endeavoured to accommodate his church cantatas to the prevailing taste in Leipzig.” Among other works, this yielded Cantata 174 (Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte, 1729), which, like the earlier Brandenburg Concertos (1721), showcases Bach’s sophisticated take on Vivaldi’s formal and stylistic signatures.

The dissection of any music—folk, classical, pop, and otherwise—discloses similar eclecticism, varying in degree. These, too, can be self-conscious, like Afro-Cuban or jazz-rock, or masked, like American fiddle music and rock ‘n’ roll. Usually, the amalgamated sounds are not easily picked apart. The organic fusion of elements, whether musical, linguistic, culinary, biological, or otherwise, rarely reveals its seams.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

The Original Musicology

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Musikwissenschaft, the historical study of European art music, began in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria. Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s biography of J.S. Bach (1802) set the tone for the field, which focuses on musical rules, periods, pieces, and personalities. Two more branches of musicology were added during the twentieth century: ethnomusicology, which examines socio-cultural dimensions of global musics, and systematic musicology, which engages the sciences and humanities in investigating musical phenomena.

The three sub-disciplines of musicology have matured and diversified over the decades. Systematic musicology has an especially modern feel, with its interest in acoustics, neuroscience, psychology, and social theory. Guido Adler laid the groundwork for this interdisciplinary approach with his 1885 essay, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (“Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology”), which divides musicology into historical questions about the development of musical conventions and the succession of “great” composers, and systematic questions about the nature of music and human responses to it.

Today, systematic musicology is itself divided into two areas: empirical/scientific and social/cultural. Its tools of computation and theories of analysis are decidedly twenty-first century, integrating lab studies, computer data, semiotics, and the like. However, the questions it pursues are much older than even Adler’s seminal essay.

Centuries before receiving its proper name, thinkers were systematically assessing music in human life. Around the third century, Greek theorist Aristides Quintilianus was already categorizing musical studies into theoretical/speculative (systematic) and practical/didactic (historical). Franchinus Gaffurius (fifteenth century) examined how musical sounds achieve specific ends. Marin Mersenne (seventeenth century) scrutinized acoustics and the speed of sound. As a rule, European scholars prior to the nineteenth century were preoccupied with the big picture. And, even as music history became the dominant focal point, scholars continued to ponder the larger cognitive and spiritual aspects (see my edited collections, The Value of Sacred Music: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 1801-1918 and Music, Theology and Worship: Selected Writings, 1841-1896).

Systematic musicology has benefited from the growing sophistication of the diverse disciplines it draws upon. Yet, underneath its contemporary garb are questions that have attracted thinkers throughout the ages: What is music, how does music work, why does music move us? Although the sub-field is relatively new, its questions long predate interest in historical periods and cultural practices. For this reason, it can be called the original musicology.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Beauty Before Content

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

“I take satisfaction in belonging to a species of creatures with the ability not only to conceive and perform, but also respond appreciatively to such a work.” This declaration comes from Nelson Edmondson’s thoughtful essay, “An Agnostic Response to Christian Art.” Edmondson, an emeritus professor of art and art history at Michigan State University, is the agnostic in the title. The “work” he is referring to is any classic of Christian art, graphic or musical. His attraction to such pieces, despite his lack of faith and regardless of his artistic ability, is a hallmark of our species. We need not be wrapped up in an artwork’s message or subject matter to be moved by it, or to appreciate the skill involved in its creation. Intellectual investment can deepen our involvement, but absence of commitment does not eliminate our emotional susceptibility. To a great extent, the meaning of the work is secondary to its aesthetic force.

If any example proves this point, it is the confession of evolutionary biologist and self-professed “militant atheist,” Richard Dawkins. Dawkins recalls an appearance he had on Desert Island Discs, a British radio show. When asked to choose the eight records he would take with him on a desert island, he included “Mache dich mein Herze rein” from J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. “The interviewer was unable to understand how I could choose religious music without being religious,” Dawkins recalls. “You might as well say, how can you enjoy Wuthering Heights when you know perfectly well that Cathy and Heathcliff never really existed?”

The beauty of Bach’s oratorio does not spring from the text, but from his own musical imagination. In Bach’s time and place, the church was the only institution that could have supported an opus of such grandeur. The words, culled from the Gospel of Matthew and librettist Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), provided Bach a platform upon which to apply his genius. But financial source and linguistic ingredients should not be confused with inspiration. There are numerous cases of composers jumping between sacred and secular subjects, and rarely do they make discernable distinctions. Bach can be grouped among them. Their style, passion, and approach remain virtually the same. Moreover, there are some composers, like Ralph Vaughan Williams, who suspend their own agnosticism to sincerely and convincingly set religious words to music.

More important, our response to these creations is not determined by their ideational content. The music or visual art tends to hit us before we realize what it conveys, and even after we recognize the image or implication, we can stay enthralled. The same occurs when we gravitate to a pop song. The lyrics might be repugnant, imbecilic, or otherwise offensive (if they are intelligible at all), but the music still moves us.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Believing the Best

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Wolli Kaelter (1914-2008) was a leading Reform rabbi of his generation. Born in the Prussian city of Danzig (now Gdansk in north-central Poland), Kaelter was the son of a respected rabbi and one of five students from the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary selected to study in America—a decision that saved him from the horrors of the Holocaust. He launched a camp for Jewish children in Saratoga, California, served as rabbi of Temple Israel in Long Beach, California (1955-1979), and taught at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles for thirty years. Above all, he was known as a musical rabbi.

A retrospective appeared in the Long Beach Press-Telegram shortly after Kaelter’s death in 2008. It describes him as a classical music aficionado, and notes (somewhat oddly) that he considered J. S. Bach to be the last great composer.

It seems strange for anyone, let alone a classical music fan, to identify an eighteenth–century composer as the “last great.” Millions of manuscript pages have been filled since that time, not a few of which have sprung from the fertile imaginations of celebrated geniuses. To suggest that none of these composers is great is to reject nearly three hundred years of music history. Indeed, it is more justifiable to claim, as some have, that Bach was the first great composer, not the last.

In fairness, the statement in the article may have been written in error. It is more likely that Kaelter viewed Bach as the greatest of all composers, rather than of the end of the line (a line that would include Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque composers and exclude everyone else). Either way, his esteem for Bach is illustrative of how most of us hold our musical opinions.

It is normal to have fixed favorites. For a variety of personal reasons—well informed and otherwise—we tend to gravitate toward certain composers and musicians, and identify them as the best. Our tastes become convictions. This stems in part from our need to simplify and categorize the information and stimuli we are exposed to. With our established list of definitive greats, we have firm ground on which to accept, reject and judge the things we hear. The length of the list varies depending on the extent of our musical interests, and is informed by a variety of subjective factors: personal history, cultural trends, education, exposure, peer group, etc. In the end, most of us arrive at quasi-dogmatic conclusions, wherein a musician (or musicians) is placed permanently above all others.

That we hold musical preferences as musical facts is not necessarily damaging. Because there is so much music in the world, our enjoyment can actually increase when we isolate a few artists and convince ourselves that they are the greatest. But, whatever musical ideologies we have—and however broad or narrow they might be—we run the risk of closing ourselves off to music that, under different circumstances, could have been our favorites as well.

The stream of cause and effect leading us to all thoughts, beliefs, relationships and situations is also responsible for our musical views. Once these views are cemented, it can be difficult to allow other sounds in. The belief that Bach or Chopin or John Adams or anyone else is the last great composer (or another hyperbolic designation) sets up a predetermined outcome: nothing can possibly be better.

Upholding a rigid position requires that one actively ignore (or put down) music not included on the arbitrary list. Even if one enjoys a previously unheard piece, it cannot, by definition, be more enjoyable than that which has already been labeled the most enjoyable. Only the best can be the best.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.