Lexical Semantics: Bela Bartok and the Devaluation of Ethnomusicology

I assume you expect to hear from me, during this presentation, a commentary or account of the content in the essay by Bela Bartok, “The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music” (Bartok, 1931), as well as a description of what ethnomusicology is, along with it’s history.  For purposes of keeping within the academic frame, let me not call it an assumption and rather an educated guess (lexical semantics at play from the onset).  I, however, have decided to approach the problem from a different perspective, that is, to look at how lexical semantics might have led to ethnomusicology being regarded in some circles as the lesser sibling in the musicological family.  Indeed the task at hand requires me to at least answer, even if in passing, those more obvious questions stated above.  Why have I decided on this approach?  Quite simply, I don’t believe we’re here to describe or rehash music history.  My thinking is that we are here to offer opinions, question and think critically on musical events, ideologies, history and music self.  In this vein I offer my most humble opinions.

Let me begin by getting those obvious questions out of the way.  Who was Bela Bartok?  Without going into too much detail – again with the assumptions – I think you’ve all prepared for this class and thus have glanced at, at the very least, the Wikipedia article on the man in question.  According to Grove Music Online (which falls into the same lexical trap),

“[Béla Bartók (b 1881, d 1945)] Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pianist…a relentless collector and analyst of folk music…is recognized today principally as a composer.  His mature works were, however, highly influenced by his ethnomusicological studies…” (Gillies, 2014).

The same article, in the Legacy section, goes on to say,

“The ethnomusicological legacy of Bartók has been varied. Within the international history of that discipline, his stature is more that of a precursor than of a seminal figure. His significance outside Hungary is now largely historic, as an early proponent of transcriptional exactitude rather than as a founder of enduring disciplinary principles” (Gillies, 2014).

Encyclopædia Britannica Online adds, “…as an ethnomusicologist he was one of the first to examine folk music with attention to its historical and sociological implications” (Stevens, 2014).

This leads me to the much-anticipated analysis of the prescribed reading for the week.  Let me begin by taking the expected approach, the essay in question discusses and describes ethnomusicology at its beginnings and in its most basic form.  As the title of the essay suggests, Bartok is here discussing how “peasant music” has informed certain compositional choices within “…higher types of art music” (Bartok, 1976:340). Aesthetics, “…the philosophical study of beauty and taste” (Munro & Scruton, 2014) as well as the approach to studying and using folk music – the science of it - are the prominent themes.

 

On aesthetics of folk music, Bartok asserts,

“Its expressive power is amazing, and at the same time it is devoid of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments.  It is simple, sometimes primitive, but never silly” (1976:341).

When speaking to the approach of how to study folk music, the science of it, Bartok asks and answers the question,

“What is the best way for a composer to reap the full benefits of his studies in peasant music? It is to assimilate the idiom of peasant music so completely that he is able to forget all about it and use it as his musical mother tongue” (1976:341).

It is here where he asserts the idea of a type of anthropological field study that is synonymous with ethnomusicology,

“In my opinion, the effects of peasant music cannot be deep and permanent unless this music is studied in the country as part of a life shared with the peasants…It must be pervaded by the very atmosphere of peasant culture” (Bartok, 1976:341).

From this point onward, Bartok enters a theoretical and compositional description of the different ways in which folk music can be used and gives various examples of composers who have successfully used it.  These include Stravinsky and Beethoven, amongst others.  He explains, “…the ways in which peasant music is taken over and [how it] becomes transmuted into modern music…” (1976:341).

Before I offer my perspective on the matter, I must begin by saying that Bartok does indeed speak highly of folk music, as is evident in how he writes about its aesthetic qualities.  This is commendable.  However, the fact that he describes folk music as peasant music, contributes, in my mind, to ethnomusicology being seen as a study of “the other”.  As Charles Seeger so aptly points out,

“Two meanings of the term “ethnomusicology” are current.  One equates the prefix “ethno-“ with the adjective “ethnic,” meaning “barbarous, non-Christian, exotic”; the other, with the prefix “ethno-“, as in ethnology.  The former implies that the study now known as “ethnomusicology” is limited to musics other than its students’ own; the latter, that it is limited to the cultural functions of music” (1961:77).

Similarly, in the introduction to her essay, Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds, K. K. Shelemay states,

“…while questioning power inequities within the societies they study and interrogating their discipline's colonial roots, ethnomusicologists have continued to pursue studies of "other" musics - musical traditions that in some way stand outside the world of the Euro-American classical tradition, whether these boundaries are defined by geographical origins, transmission patterns and technologies, or socio-economic positions” (2001:1).

This peasant music Bartok juxtaposes to what he terms “…higher types of art music” (1976:340), which stratifies genres and creates a class structure in music.  It plays into the idea that,

“Among musicologists, music educators, and even ethnomusicologists, the doctrine that Western European art music is superior to all other musics of the world remains a given, a truism.  Otherwise intelligent and sophisticated scholars continue to use the word "primitive" when referring to the music of Africa, American Indians, aboriginal Australians, and Melanesians, among others” (Becker, 1986:341).

If in the same sentence Bartok refers to a certain kind of music as a higher type he refers to the other music as “…folk music…” why then can he not use that term throughout the article?  Similarly he states,

“…the new chord of the seventh which we use as a concord may be traced back to the fact that in our folk melodies of a pentatonic character the seventh appears as an interval of equal importance with the third and the fifth” (Bartok, 1976:342).

Now it may seem I am being fastidious or over scrupulous, but let us look at the time in which the essay was written.  This was during the early twentieth century, a time when the ideas of a certain Francis Galton were gaining steam, specifically the science of eugenics.  These ideas were partly responsible for the atrocities of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, the monstrosity we call apartheid and the abuse that came with racial segregation in the United States of America at the time. 

To quote Lola Young,

“Galton defined eugenics as ‘the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally’… Eugenics may be characterized as the coming together of the scientific, the statistical, and the social. This synergy is exemplified in the work of Karl Pearson, a student of Galton… Pearson believed black people to be of genetically inferior origin the ‘science’ of eugenics provided a justification for the actions of…new imperial bureaucrats and professionals, who believed that their ‘racial’ superiority suitably bred them for the imperial roles” (2007).

So such reasoning does not come as a surprise given the time and context.

 

In conclusion, the power of lexical semantics should not be taken for granted, particularly when describing or discussing any form of art in social or scholarly contexts.  Words, science and art can very easily play into the hands of bigots.  Now, I must make it very clear that I am not saying Bartok himself was racist, sexists or classist, but his choice of one particular descriptive word belies his apparent aversion to prejudice and discrimination. Bartok could have chosen a better way to describe his peasant music to show him as the man who,

“As the specter of fascism in Europe in the 1930s grew ever more sinister…refused to play in Germany and banned radio broadcasts of his music there and in Italy” (Rodman, 2014).

As I’ve said above, such utterances contributed then and do now to the “devaluation of ethnomusicology” as a scientific field, confining it to a peasant science.

Bibliography

·      Young, L.  2007.  Eugenics.  The Oxford Companion to Black British History.  Available: http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192804396.001.0001/acref-9780192804396-e-139 [2014, April 24].  

·      Bartok, B. 1949. The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music. Tempo, New Series. (14): 1949 - 1950.

·      Becker, J. 1986. Is Western art music superior? Musical Quarterly. : 341-359.

·      Gillies, M. Bartok, Bela. Grove Music Online.

·      Merriam, A.P. 1960. Ethnomusicology Discussion and Definition of the Field. Ethnomusicology. 4(3): 107-114.

·      Rodman, M. 2014. Bartok, Bela. Available: http://glnd.alexanderstreet.com.ezproxy.uct.ac.za/Person/15322 [April 2014].

·      Seeger, C. 1961. Semantic, Logical and Political Considerations Bearing upon Research in Ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology. 5(2): 77-80.

·      Shelemay, K.K. 2001. Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds. Ethnomusicology. 45(1): 1-29.