"Song! It Will Again Be What It Once Was!": The Moments of Music as Art, Artifact, and Fact*

Song! It will again be what it once was!    Sensitive to the entire being of life!    Speaking from the human heart…with God, with itself with all of nature!

—Herder, Von deutscher Art und Kunst¹

In 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) broke into song with a passion and intensity that would remain unbridled through the 1770s and beyond, over the course of his life as one of the great philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, polyglots, and polymaths of the Enlightenment—and as the thinker who coined the term, Volkslied, folk song. Herder not only coined the term, but he also gathered Volkslieder, as an ethnographer no less than as a philologist, published them in anthologies, set debates about their meaning in motion, and profoundly rerouted the history of music as a science dedicated to the understanding of music as art, artifact, and fact. This was a moment of music, indeed, a moment after which the art and artifice of music would never be the same. The idea of song that Herder called forth as ontological fact, first in 1773, had limitless potential, for he truly believed, as did many who heeded his call, that song could be sensitive to "the entire being of life."²

Herder's Enlightenment moment of music provides me with a touchstone for my reflections on the IMS Stavanger conference's themes of art, artifact, and fact. My approach to the moments of music I locate historically throughout the present essay version of my keynote address in Stavanger will be broadly ontological, for I look for the moments in which the fact of music acquires new meaning and identity, the phenomenological expression of a chronotope—time and place —unfolding as history of art and artifact that unfolds across many moments.³ The moment of music is notable because it is never static, hence its ontological power is unleashed through the discursive triangulation of art, artifact, and fact, in other words, through history. The epigraph above states this unequivocally: "Song! It will again be what it once was!" We might even understand Herder's 1773 proclamation as the ontological motto for the moment of music as I seek to understand it in the pages that follow. The narrative threads that connect an eight-part typology that represents the moments of music in this essay often begin with Herder and run through his substantial body of work on music.⁴ Of even greater importance is that these narrative threads return to Herder. His ontological moment in the Volkslieder thus resurfaces in the moment of intimacy we find in his Lieder der Liebe, his remarks on the biblical Shir ha-Shirim (Song of songs), and the great epic of Spain, El Cid. The essay further passes through early and modern moments in South Asia in part because these are the focus of much of my own current ethnographic research, and in part because it was Herder who was the most important early German scholar to call attention to the moments of song in early Sanskrit writings, and then to translate several critical texts.⁵

Before moving more expansively to extend the historical and geographic landscape of music's ontology, I turn briefly to the questions that so preoccupied Herder and his age when folk song came into being. No work poses these questions more sweepingly than the first major collection of folk songs, which appeared as two volumes, each containing three books, called first Volkslieder, and in later editions, Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of the people in songs). In the 1778/79 Volkslieder, folk songs, ontologically becoming a fact of music, acquired new functions, both different and distinctive. On one hand, folk songs retained Herder's goal of illustrating the historical qualities of song, with emphasis on the old and the ancient. Rather than merely establishing these historical qualities more specifically for German and Scottish repertories as he had in 1773, Herder looked beyond the historical and linguistic borders of Northern and Western Europe to establish age and oral transmission as qualities...