Editorial: Acta Musicologica and Multilingualism

Ever since the foundation of the International Musicological Society (IMS) in 1927 and the first publication of Acta Musicologica in 1931, fostering multilingualism has been an important issue for both the IMS and its flagship journal. So critical is our commitment to this topic that we addressed it already in our first editorial in 2011.¹ Acta Musicologica seeks to fulfill the objective of international networking and cooperation between and among music scholars throughout the world. There is no such thing as a single global musicological discourse, but rather there are plural discourses, which are articulated through various languages, traditions, and regional and sub-disciplinary cultures. We view pluralism as a virtue and are committed to promoting it in the pages of this journal. We further believe that a fundamental component of such pluralism is multilingualism.

The confluence of many languages to form multiple discourses of musical thought has a long and varied history. Language's plurality has, indeed, been fundamental to the longue durée of music scholarship from Antiquity to the present. We often recognize the moments of such confluence through the ways in which they generate new ways of thinking about music, sometimes through the systematization of canon, at other times yielding the more radical change signified by paradigm shifts. It is the quality of multilingualism at such moments that new canons and paradigm shifts rarely remain isolated, but rather they exhibit a broadly influential plurality. Multilingualism, we increasingly recognize, is also multi-sited, thus revealing that the ways in which it becomes increasingly short-sighted to speak of a single Renaissance, when there were multiple renaissances throughout the world, or to address modernism as if it was a twentieth-century stage of a single music history in the West. Coupled with pluralism in music scholarship, it follows, multilingualism affords a capacious process of expanding musical thought globally.

Such expansion was very much the case at the initial stages of music history in South Asia. When the first major treatise dedicated to the aesthetics, theory, and practice of music, dance, and theater, the Nāṭyaśāstra, began to appear in manuscript versions in the third century CE and in variants thereafter, it bore witness to the interaction of multiple languages, first, to codify meaning in Sanskrit, but soon thereafter to allow multiple paths to understanding the arts in their variety throughout South Asia. The multilingualism of the Nāṭyaśāstra opened up multiple paths for musical thought and history, so very essential that they continue to channel South Asian musical practice even in the twenty-first century.

Multilingualism is also critical to the processes of musical exchange and cultural tolerance that fill the contact zones between cultures and religions. The transmission of Greek musical thought through the literary labors of medieval scholars writing in Latin, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish represented the crucial role of multilingualism, often affording it the archaeological functions of salvaging culture. Multilingualism itself, in many cases, opened up and then transformed cultural and musical contact zones, notably, for example, in the writings of the twelfth-century Jewish intellectual, Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), whose writings on music, religion, philosophy, and science moved across the Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic linguistic landscapes of the world of al-Andalus in which he lived.

Maimonides's multilingualism was extraordinary not because of its uniqueness, but rather because it represented the possibilities of unifying musical thought by recognizing the diverse streams that flowed through it. In many ways, he inherited a tradition already fully evident in the thought of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) a century and a half earlier, or in the writings of Ibn Khaldūn two centuries later. The linguistic contact zone that all three inhabited would be sustained by musical scholars from all sides of the Mediterranean, even to the foundational years of Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft in the early twentieth century, when Robert Lachmann and the Egyptian comparative musicologist, Maḥmūd al-Ḥifnī, would translate al-Kindi's writings on music into multiple languages, medieval and modern.

The formation of linguistic contact zones in global music histories were equally as critical...