Intercultural contact

Cross-cultural study is a notable growth area in musicology, as seen recently in the pages of this and other journals, and there was a good representation of the major themes of current interest at the study day entitled 'Music and intercultural contact in the early modern period' organized by David Irving and Katherine Brown at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on 18 June 2005. Several of the papers were in the field of what might be termed 'historical ethnomusicology', which seeks to locate and interpret early descriptions of the musics of other cultures. These range from the initial reactions of explorers and military men, through to the more considered verdicts of traders and settlers. The predecessors of modern ethnomusicologists are well represented: the Jesuits, with their rigorous approach to the description and classification of what they saw and heard; and, from the period of the Enlightenment onwards, individuals like Sir William Jones who had an avowed scientific purpose. Scholarly studies of these reports usually focus at least as much on the 'observers' as the 'observed'.

As Iain Fenlon pointed out in his paper on music in early Spanish America, the process of categorization and description embodied not so much 'the discovery of the world' as the 'discovery of how to describe the world'. While it is true that this led to 'greater precision in descriptive techniques', a seemingly scientific approach to taxonomy, which emphasized qualities such as accuracy, consistency and attention to detail, could also mask fundamental gulfs in the understanding of wider cultural and social issues. A recurrent theme during this study day was therefore the language of description itself and the problems inherent in interpreting written reports of observations made across cultural boundaries.

Shweta Sachdeva discussed the place of the nautch in 18th- and 19th-century Indian society. A heady blend of music, song, dance and seduction, the nautch functioned as a high-prestige entertainment for guests of standing. For generations of Europeans resident in the subcontinent, it was an integral part of the Indian 'experience'. In the 19th century the nautch lost much of its earlier status, and declined in the direction of thinly veiled prostitution. In contrasting English and Urdu accounts of the phenomenon, Sachdeva effectively demonstrated the degree to which differing approaches to categorization and narrative technique could influence the nature of the historical 'evidence'.

David Irving's paper on the earliest vocabularies of indigenous Filipino languages directed attention back to the linguistic interface of interculturalism: the act of translation itself. Hitherto undervalued as historical resources, these dictionaries, Irving argued, are in effect 'auto-ethnographies' of Filipino culture. As was so often the case with products of the European desire to classify, they claimed authenticity for themselves on the basis that extensive consultation took place with indigenous speakers. Clearly it will be necessary to evaluate the context in which these word books were produced, but there is little doubt that they have the potential to provide a richly detailed resource for the study of instruments and song genres.

The colonial dimension of interculturalism was not surprisingly a significant theme, and several presentations focused on the ways in which 'other' cultures came to be represented on the 19th-century European stage. The distinguished writer on Indian organology Joep Bor presented a wide-ranging survey of attitudes to Indian temple dancers known as bayadères or devadasis. Taking a pragmatic approach to the numerous travellers' descriptions which survive from the 13th-century onwards, he outlined a characteristic ambivalence that saw an initial fascination with the exotic cede some ground to a stance of moral indignation. By the early 19th century, however, the captivating and powerfully alluring figure of the enslaved oriental dancing girl had become one of the most firmly established stereotypes in European ballet and opera. Understandably, the appearance of the 'real thing' caused a tremendous sensation. Bor provided a fascinating account of what was claimed to be the first tour to have been undertaken by an Indian dance troupe in Europe. The show opened in Paris in 1838 and transferred to London; in both cities the dancers had an immediate (if short-lived) impact. Representation on the colonial...