Music, Time & Place: Essays in Comparative Musicology by Martin Clayton (review)

In this collection of previously published chapters, articles, and unpublished seminar and conference papers, Clayton explores pervasive issues that have engaged ethnomusicologists and comparative musicologists throughout the past century. He addresses such themes as the role of transcription, the mutual influence of musical theory and practice, the identification of meaning in music, the analysis of rhythm and meter, the ways in which music is expressive and generative of social identities, and the difficulty of theorizing one musical form using the terminology of another. He explores these issues as they apply to case studies of Hindustani music and to ethnomusicology in general. Throughout, Clayton conveys an overarching concern to sharpen the analytic tools of ethnomusicology and to challenge some notable assumptions and omissions of the discipline.

Music, Time & Place is divided into three sections. Section 1 deals with meter, tal, free rhythm, and entrainment, with varying emphasis on cross-cultural comparison, structural analysis of Hindustani music, and the experience of music. Section 2 features topics of historical interest, including the often-overlooked ethnographic recordings by early twentieth-century British field recordists and the problematic transcriptions by one such scholar, A. H. Fox Strangways. Section 3 addresses a range of issues, exploring the “many lives” of the guitar in India (151), analyzing the “musical expression of identity” in popular music by British-Asian musicians (179), and questioning notions of musical meaning that privilege semiotic analysis over “phenomenological, experiential and/or non-symbolic studies” (214). Despite the wide range of topics covered, a set of core issues permeates discussions throughout the book.

Many of Clayton’s essays discuss issues surrounding the representation of music. In early chapters, he considers the adequacy of the term “metre” in representing the rhythmic and temporal structure of Hindustani music. After discussing the ways in which meter and tal overlap, he provides examples of how tal theory has contributed to change and stability in certain forms of Indian music over time. In his chapter on A. H. Fox Strangways’s early twentieth-century transcriptions of Indian music, Clayton shows musical transcription to be a problematic form of representation. He likens transcription to literary translation, which masks, distorts, and amplifies key features for the sake of cross-cultural intelligibility. While exposing the shortcomings of Strangways’s transcriptions, he shows how contemporary ethnomusicologists continue to struggle with many of the same issues and pitfalls that Strangways encountered one century ago. Later in the volume, Clayton considers how music is represented within an individual’s experience. He argues that the listener’s primary experience (of Indian music, at least) is not recognition of structural and melodic devices but rather a process of entrainment whereby the “listener adjusts his internal rhythms to match those in the music” (79).

Throughout Music, Time & Place, Clayton offers divergent but complementary explanations of how music conveys meaning. In his chapter on British-Asian popular music, Clayton focuses on musical meanings projected by the language, lyrics, instrumentation, and electronic samples within songs. Elsewhere he considers the meanings conveyed by “hybrid” musical forms. He suggests that we consider musical fusion not as “the manipulation of natural categories” (197) but rather “as a reconfiguring and intensification of older patterns of interaction as a dialectic between notions of difference and interaction” (199). In his chapter “Towards a Theory of Musical Meaning” (205), he draws from James Gibson’s work on animal perception, writing that “any musical event is meaningful insofar as it offers affordances to an individual” (213). In taking such a stance, Clayton departs from his earlier structural analyses of music to emphasize the social and experiential elements of musical experience over formal musical characteristics.

In most of these essays, Clayton privileges theoretical and analytic inquiry over ethnographic-thick description. However, one of the richest (and most unconventional) chapters in this volume is “The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar” (151), a survey drawn from six weeks...