Were it not for the author’s confession that eleven chapters of his book are for the most part already published elsewhere, readers would never guess it themselves. The book cohesively presents a strong scholarly concept and a no less strong yet highly provocative approach to the most disputable questions of contemporary ethnomusicology. Dr. Aubert’s fearless engagement with numerous sharp problems of modernity is always marked by a rare broadness of erudition and no less rare personal nobility.
Dr. Laurent Aubert is curator at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva, Switzerland, and director of the Ateliers d’Ethnomusicologie, an institute dealing with music worldwide. He is the founder of the excellent journal Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles. Besides, he has rich and productive fieldwork experience and has published a dozen valuable discs and numerous books. All of these provide a solid basis for his truly multifarious professional involvement in the most current discussions in the field.
The content of The Music of the Other speaks for itself: The elsewhere of music: paradoxes of a multicultural society; Shared listening, an ethnomusicological perspective; Tradition in question: a problem of boundaries; The paradox of the concert, or the evocation of tradition; An artist’s life, or the challenge of representation; The art of hearing well: a sketch of a listener’s typology; The invention of folklore, or the nostalgia of origins; World music, or the last temptation of the West; The large bazaar: from the meeting of cultures to the appropriation of the exotic; Learning the music of the other: a transcultural itinerary; The fascination of India: lessons from personal experience.
Briefly, the book is dedicated to paradoxes of a multicultural society taken from an ethnomusicological perspective. Aubert ponders how to learn the “soundscape” of the other at such a “great bazaar” of various musics which surround us in the era of globalization, the era of “world music.” Aubert calls it “the last temptation of the West” and understands it deeply--not as synonym for the Westernization of the rest of the planet, but rather as “a vast and indefinite game of distorting mirrors, in which the other sends back to us the altered image of our transient identity” (53). He likes this image of the mirror and repeats it again in order to make his point absolutely clear: “The interaction between traditional music genres of the world and their new audiences develops like a game of mirrors in which each looks to the other for the reflection of his or her own ideal: on one hand, a need for prestige and wherewithal; on the other, a quest for authenticity and openness. This relationship testifies to a redefinition of roles, in which it is not ourselves but the other whom we value as exemplary” (32). In a word, Aubert considers the impact of world musics on our values, our habits, and our cultural practices.
Aubert re-evaluates the notion of culture and especially that of musical culture (see p. 7). It is crucial for him to emphasize that “if music is the expression of culture, it is also necessarily the expression of society and the individual within it” (10), and that “the historic development of a culture is thus a normal phenomenon, which only a narrow-minded conception of tradition would refuse to take into account” (21).
Like many modern ethnomusicologists, Aubert has his own particular fascination, having been for years involved in practical study of the music of India and having played the sarod, a plucked string instrument. This practice changed his mind and even his identity--he began to identify with this music and does not believe anymore “in the fable of genetic determination of cultural acquisition” (81). Probably, not only Aubert would state that immersion in the world of the music of the other contributed to a rethinking of one’s own field of musical perception, manner of living in music, and to a large extent, one’s vision of the world itself. “Now, it is impossible for me to listen to a genre, whatever it is, as before, my auditory exigency having transformed itself so much” (80). The book ends with the notorious question of the musical universal being reformulated into the concept of a universal model--a model of synthesis “between tradition and creation, between fundamental structures and individual expression” (83).
However, there is an evident (at least to me) discrepancy between this personal conclusion and the initial premise of the book, with its broad definition of ethnomusicology as “relation between music and society” (9). That premise is most probably of a sociological nature whereas the conclusion is rather anthropological. Aubert stopped at the middle--along the road from sociology of music with its “shared listening” and the unclear ambition to “carry out an ethnomusicological study on a symphony orchestra, a techno-music milieu or rave parties” (9) to musical anthropology with its deep and remarkable “auditory exigency.” The faculty of listening to the other is the core of the author’s concept but he does not offer an analytical tool for such an anthropological analysis of sociological phenomena. Still, he does come close to such an offering by giving a valuable sketch-typology of the listener in chapter 6 (“The Art of Hearing Well”). That analytical tool, I propose, is what I have called “ethnohearing,” a faculty we all apparently possess [1].
The least successful chapter is chapter 7, “The Invention of Folklore,” where one particularly feels the lack of data from those countries where traditional folklore is still alive. Folklore, as Aubert believes, “has been condemned ‘without trial’” (47). But, the author fails to answer the truly tough questions about folklore and folklore study today, and his attempt to show the ambiguity of the term does not help much.
Although English-speaking readers should be indeed grateful to Aubert for introducing them to literature and ideas that probably were unknown to them, for readers who are capable of reading Eastern European languages, the lack of Slavic concepts and data, for example, is deeply saddening. Here and there a reference to other scholarly traditions would be much appreciated. For example, summarizing current opinions on three basic categories of music--traditional, folk and world--the author claims that traditional music is perceived as authentic, folk music as eclectic, and world music as syncretic (16). However, in Russian scholarship folk music is perceived as syncretic, world music as eclectic, and only traditional music is thought to be authentic, whatever one understands by this term.
In conclusion, I will agree with Anthony Seeger who points out that the “book does not pretend to be exhaustive or to define all of its terms precisely” and yet appears to be “ideal for ethnomusicology courses” and “very stimulating reading” (viii). Being aware of Laurent Aubert’s creativity and productivity as a scholar, one feels after reading through this book that there will be a much anticipated sequel to follow. New times put forward new challenges for ethnomusicology and folklore study, and the experience of a renowned Swiss colleague should be taken into account by the scholarly community at large.
Footnotes
[1] These ideas have been elaborated by the author of the review in two articles: “Ethnic Hearing in the Socio-Cultural Margins: Towards the Identity of Homo Musicans Polyethnoaudiens.” Bar-Ilan University Collection of papers, forthcoming 2008; and “Polyphony as ‘Ethnohearing’ and Its ‘Musical Substance’: Homo Polyphonicus in Action” In: The Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony, edited by Rusudan Thurtsumia and Joseph Jordania. (Tbilisi: V.Sarajishvili State Conservatory, 2004), 25-31.
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[Review length: 1238 words • Review posted on April 16, 2008]