Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication by Bob van der Linden (review)

In the opening phrase of Bob van der Linden's introduction to Music and Empire in Britain and India, the author states that "music largely remains a neglected subject in the historiography of the British Empire" (1), and to prove his point, he goes on to mention a few standard works on the history of the British Empire, none of which mentions music at all. In fact, he could have added that music is generally not a very prominent subject in historiography. Of course, what is often simply called musicology is actually the history of the European musical tradition, or as one of my colleagues used to say, "the study of dead composers." Curiously and notoriously, culture is strikingly absent in that history. And in the rest of historiography, music is equally strikingly absent. Van der Linden has embarked on a brave attempt to remedy at least some of these shortcomings with special reference to the interactions between Britain and India from the second half of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. He rightly stresses the importance of such research: "music is an essential topic for the discussion of processes of (national) identity formation, as well as transnational networks and patterns of cross-cultural communication between colonizer and colonized" (1). As a cultural musicologist I can only endorse this idea; in fact, the relation between music and culture in musicology has been treated as one-way traffic, and it is only recently that musicologists are showing that music is a unique marker or mirror of cultural change.

Van der Linden is a historian, and since I am a musicologist writing this review for a journal concerned with music, my perspective is different from his. The obvious advantage is that he brings a number of unexpected and refreshing angles to the study of music and culture; the disadvantage is that the musicological information tends to stop where we would like it to start. As a historian he certainly has a different approach to certain issues than what I would consider to be the more generally accepted views among musicologists. As an example, I could cite his treatment of Arnold Bake, whom he describes as a key figure in the development of Indian ethnomusicology. Frankly, as I see it, Bake is a rather marginal figure in Indian musicology—but opinions do differ.

In five chapters, Music and Empire discusses Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger, John Foulds and Maud MacCarthy, Rabindranath Tagore and Arnold Bake, and finally Sikh sacred music. In passing, many other figures show up, including Fox Strangways, Daniélou, Coomaraswamy, and Sourendra Mohan Tagore, to mention just a few. At first this seems a somewhat disparate collection, but there is a logic to it, as I hope to make plausible.

Cyril Scott I knew as a dreamer who wrote a little book called Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages (1933). I have often thought of removing it from my library, but after reading Van der Linden's account, I am glad I didn't. It is not unusual that musicians have ideas that strike a musicologist as odd, but in reality musicians' ideas about music are an important document for musicologists.

Of course, Percy Grainger is better known among musicologists, thanks to John Blacking's book about him (1987). Yet this second chapter does add a lot to our understanding, as it deals extensively with the network within which Grainger operated. In fact, Scott and Grainger knew each other from the conservatory in Frankfurt, but beyond that Van der Linden clearly places each of them in relation to their times, in which primitivism, occultism, spiritualism, theosophy, and cosmopolitanism, as...