As mentioned in my last post, I've written three papers since starting this blog, all focused on the very special, and to my thinking absolutely central, relation between the musical traditions of the African Pygmies and Bushmen. One has already been published, two years ago, in an especially interesting journal devoted to the study of hunter/gatherer archaeology and anthropology: Before Farming. Another was accepted last year for publication in the journal Ethnomusicology and is, as I understand it, currently slated for publication in the upcoming Fall issue. The most recent is slated for publication next year in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony, as held (without me) in Tbilisi, Georgia.
I'm pleased to report that the publisher of Before Farming has, at this time, generously granted permission for me to share the first of these papers with the readers of this blog (you'd need a subscription otherwise). So, without further ado, here's the pdf file: New perspectives on the Kalahari debate: a tale of two‘genomes.’ Avid readers will notice that the paper is based rather extensively on materials already posted here, in sections 64-75, and to a lesser extent sections 76-82. However, the paper presents this material in a considerably more disciplined, less discursive, judiciously edited, and generally easier to follow and far more readable format. Please note that several audio clips can be accessed via Appendix 1, on page 11, and there is a discography with more information on the sources of these recordings on p. 13.
I have also received permission to provide blog readers with a special preview of the most recent paper, written for the Tbilisi Symposium, but I'll need a bit of time to prepare before I provide you with that link. While I won't be able to make the Ethnomusicology paper available here, I do plan to offer a brief summary and discussion on this blog at some future point. In fact I'm planning to discuss all three papers here, with the aim of both summarizing the most essential points and moving on to some further considerations based on what I've been learning over the last two or three years. Since I'm also busy with other projects (see previous post) I may not be able to post here on a regular basis, so I'm hoping interested readers will be patient and check for new material from time to time -- or better, yet, become subscribers.
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8 comments:
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting read indeed.
Yes thanks indeed, these are great articles and I'm very grateful that you've shared them with us. I have lots of ideas running through my mind, but here's the question I have regarding the central theme:
Why is it necessary to go back to the common genetic ancestor of these two groups? The African Americans who brought the blues styles up into the Appalachian mountains and the western plains probably had a very similar genetic distance from the Anglo-Americans who picked up the style, but that happened in a matter of years, not centuries or millenia. Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "punctuated equilibrium" makes for a perfect metaphor in musical evolution: change can happen in very sudden bursts and spread rapidly even among hostile cultures and in unlikely environments.
Is it not far more likely that there were once many more similar hunter-gatherer groups who could have bridged the geographical gap in more recent times, as in the case of Native Americans? The idea that a musical tradition could survive for tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand years is conceivable, but where is the evidence for "cultural isolation"? I have to admit that I know next to nothing about African history or culture (though I do own a few cd's, "the heart of the forest" is among my favorites) although I would speculate that in far more recent times there would have been larger numbers of small hunter/gatherer bands throughout the central jungles, whose cultures have since been decimated, and this would be a perfect conduit for the development and distribution of this musical style in something more like the two to three thousand year time scale in which the Indian, Chinese, and European/"Western" styles have spread.
What I'm missing in your writing is the historical and contextual information that would explain to an uninformed reader (such as myself) how these people avoided the consequences of colonialism (Western or otherwise), the slave trade, the mineral exploitation, the urbanization of African cities, etc. I'd find it hard to believe that their present location is where they've "always" been, or have been even for the last few centuries. So if that's the case, where were they before that time and who were they in contact with?
I do really like your work so far though, I'm VERY glad to see someone working in the "comparative musicology" vein and especially that you've kept the Cantometrics project alive - it's a tremendously undervalued tool that should be in every musicologist's analytical toolkit.
Thanks, Maju, I'm glad you were able to take the time to read the article. Stand by for more!
Glen, your questions are very much to the point. In fact it is exactly this type of question that fueled the Kalahari debate itself. There is, of course, no way to know for sure whether a common musical style stems from a common genetic ancestry or a relatively recent contact and as you say, there are many instances of the latter that we know about, such as the modern spread of the blues. Nevertheless, there are a great many things that can help us decide which possibility is more likely, and also which conforms most closely to an important principle of science: "Occam's razor," which states that, all other things being equal, then, regardless of how counter-intuitive it might seem, the simplest explanation that accounts for all the evidence is to be preferred.
As far as the blues is concerned, it's important to understand 1. that the blues is already from the start a hybrid style, with elements of both Anglo-American/European and African music fused together, and 2. the blues spread through the United States largely via the efforts of professional or semi-professional musicians. This latter point is especially important, because P/B style, as found among both the Pygmies and Bushmen, is practiced, and in fact mastered, by literally everyone in the group, not only musical specialists. It's well known that a new musical style can spread very rapidly among professional or semi-professional musicians, but it's much harder to see how it could completely take over the musical consciousness of an entire population.
(continued from previous comment)
I'm a bit puzzled by your use of punctuated equilibrium in this context because p. e. doesn't pertain to change due to the influence of one group on another, but (relatively) sudden change due to the isolation of a particular subgroup of a species, due most likely to environmental catastrophe. I happen to think that p. e., in the form of what geneticists refer to as a "population bottleneck," is highly relevant to musical evolution, but not in the sense that you mean.
"The idea that a musical tradition could survive for tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand years is conceivable, but where is the evidence for "cultural isolation"?"
Your point is very close to that of the revisionists in the Kalahari debate, but I believe the answer is already contained in my paper. The most convincing evidence is the genetic evidence, because it does indeed point to the isolation of certain populations (i.e., certain groups of Pygmies and Bushmen) over tens of thousands of years. If they had not been isolated, that would have shown up in the genetic evidence -- and it does not.
As for your speculation "that in far more recent times there would have been larger numbers of small hunter/gatherer bands throughout the central jungles" who could have influenced one another, that is always possible, and, again, is consistent with the revisionist view.
However, the mainstream view of African history held by most anthropologists is that, until the last few thousand years, the Bushmen were more or less the sole inhabitants of most of Southern Africa, while the Pygmies have inhabited the forests of western and central Africa for tens of thousands of years -- and this view is borne out by both the archaeological and the genetic evidence. Relatively recently, over the last 2 to 4 thousand years, something called the "Bantu expansion" took place, where a relatively small group of Bantu speakers, living in West Africa, moved both east and south to eventually dominate almost all of west, central and southern Africa. As a result of this expansion, the Bushmen were forced into the marginal Kalahari desert region, where they have been relatively isolated over the last few thousand years.
Given such a history, it's difficult to see how the same musical style could have spread, in relatively recent times, among Pygmies living in such disparate forest areas of central Africa and Bushmen living in the Kalahari desert. All of these populations appear to have been isolated from one another for many tens of thousands of years. If we had found such a style everywhere among the Bantu that would have been a different story, because there is good reason to believe the various Bantu groups did move freely through vast regions of Africa and could have influenced one another. But they have a very different and much simpler musical style than the Pygmies and Bushmen.
I've provided a somewhat simplified and still somewhat controversial picture of African history in the above summary and there is certainly room for dispute, as the revisionists continually argue. The balance has been tipped, however, in my view, by the genetic evidence, which appears to be decisive -- though only time will tell whether or not new genetic evidence or a new interpretation of it might change things.
As I see it, the best we can do to sort things out is formulate testable hypotheses and then proceed to test them as best we can using the best evidence we have. One key that I find especially important, in addition to the genetics, is the distribution patterns we find when we look at the broad musical picture worldwide, a process that is greatly facilitated by Cantometrics, which enables us to see such patterns much more clearly.
Thank you for an intriguing article. I'm very happy to see this blog active again and look forward to reading more about this fascinating subject.
Wishing you all the best,
Dan
I had to think about this more, and I understand the arguments better now that I've had some reflection time. My comment on p.e. was not exactly well thought out, but I meant it more as a metaphor than in a literal correlation, since I don't believe music "evolves" in any way similar to the ideas of biological evolution. Better off just dropping that line of thought, I think. I do appreciate the thoughtful response though.
So next I'm thinking about why these shared "neutral markers" (I like that term) would be a surprising find. My own research leads me to believe that almost all of the basic musical elements that some folks in musicology-land like to believe are "natural" are in fact pretty arbitrary, so their current universality (to varying degrees) also points to a development a long time ago. Am I with you?
And what is the general consensus on the p/b sense of tonality? I did some checking, and in the handful of recordings I had on hand I found that they seem to be using 5 relatively equidistant intervals...something pretty close to the "slendro" system down in Indonesia. Is that something you've come across?
Glen wrote:
"My own research leads me to believe that almost all of the basic musical elements that some folks in musicology-land like to believe are "natural" are in fact pretty arbitrary, so their current universality (to varying degrees) also points to a development a long time ago. Am I with you?"
You say a lot in that one sentence, Glen. And if I understand you correctly, then yes, you are with me. While some aspects of music may be "universal" (more or less) due to "nature" -- i.e., aspects of the way the human mind works that can be fully explained through cognitive science, most seem to me, as you say, arbitrary, i.e., due largely to contingencies of history. If, for example, hocket was an important feature in the music of early "modern" humans, that may well have been due to the fact that our primate ancestors were in the habit of interacting verbally through "duetting" and/or "chorusing." The same goes for Darwinian explanations based on adaptation to the environment. As far as music is concerned, they seem to me much less likely than explanations based on historical contingency.
Of course hocketing is not a universal, so maybe that's not the best example. But I think the same reasoning could be applied to other features of music that are usually understood as "universal," such as, for example, the use of (more or less) rational pitch relationships. Which brings us to your second point . . .
Glen wrote:
"And what is the general consensus on the p/b sense of tonality? I did some checking, and in the handful of recordings I had on hand I found that they seem to be using 5 relatively equidistant intervals...something pretty close to the "slendro" system down in Indonesia. Is that something you've come across?"
The whole question of scales and tunings, particularly as applied to vocal music, appears to be much more complicated than it originally seemed when the pioneers of comparative musicology became so fixated on these issues.
Because musical tones are in fact strongly analogous to linguistic phonemes, it is not always clear what it is that we are hearing -- and whether what we think we hear is due to purely acoustical or largely psychological phenomena.
There was a rumor going around that Simha Arom, who has studied Pygmy music in some depth, was saying it was based on an equidistant pentatonic scale, as you say, and that might have been the impression he had at one point. My own experience is that Pygmy (and Bushmen) scales originally appeared to me based on more or less "perfect" fourths and fifths, with maybe some neutral thirds thrown in, to form pentatonic scales quite close to those we find in European folk music.
When I began to transcribe some of this music, I discovered, as did Arom, that the situation is in fact much more complicated, indeed puzzling. One day I'd hear a certain note as a G and the next day it might start to sound more like an F# to me. And this with a keyboard right in front of me to "make sure" I was getting things "exactly right."
To my relief I subsequently learned that Arom himself came to more or less the same conclusion as the result of very systematic studies of Pygmy scales and tunings. He concluded that we do indeed hear musical notes, as we do phonemes, based not only on acoustics but also psychological factors.
I have copies of two very interesting papers, one by Arom and his student Susanne Furniss, and the other by Furniss alone, that report on the research they were doing. Unfortunately they're from rather obscure sources, the "Contemporary Music Review," vol. 9, 1993 and the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences and Music, Newsletter no. 4, Oct. 1993. At one point they write: "Thus, two scale degrees which appeared an octave apart vertically were revealed to be forming an interval of a major seventh on the separate audition of the two parts which contained them." A bit later: "if in one case the seconds and sevenths were quite close to the Pythagorean system, in other cases they were closer to equipentatonic intervals."
What I think is happening is: first, the Pygmy singers are continually adjusting their pitches to the tonal field as a whole, which is continually shifting depending on the particular combination of notes being sung in a particular passage; second, the listener is also adjusting his hearing depending on the state of the tonal field and also the degree of intensity with which s/he is listening. Listening casually you tend to hear an equidistant pentatonic, whereas I was used to hearing a more or less just intonation pentatonic. However, as I listened more intently while transcribing I found that I ran into the same difficulties described by Arom. So this is not such a simple question as it might seem.
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