Gypsy Music in European Culture: From the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

4 | Gypsy Music and Race

chapter four ••••• Gypsy Music and Race The Concept of Race in Musicological Literature The word race entered European Romance languages in the thirteenth centuryasaresultoftheArab-MuslimpresenceontheIberianPeninsula.During the Spanish Reconquista, from the eighth to the fifteenth century, the term did not carry racist overtones in Spanish texts (Roth 1995, 229). The concept began to slowly penetrate other European languages around the sixteenth century, and only entered mainstream use with the advent of the Enlightenment. Music would often be referenced in the construction of race as a concept: influenced by Rousseau, the view became widespread that nature itself was responsible for the creation of different races and music. Rousseau argued that music was derived from language and, in the words that often accompanied music, he saw the ability of music to reflect racial difference (Radano and Bohlman 2000, 14). The German philosopher Johann Herder later adopted a similar view on ties between music and racial difference, joined by collectors of folk songs around the turn of the nineteenth century. Around the same time, generalizing or appropriating tendencies took hold with regard to race in Europe. And, as claimed by Richard Middleton (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, 23)—drawing on the work of Peter Stallybrass and AllonWhite,ThePoliticsandPoeticsofTransgression(1986)—theEuropeanconfrontation with other musical cultures often entailed a good deal of projection. Seventeenth-andeighteenth-centuryworksinwhichthesedynamicsplayedout includeMusurgia universalis (1650), by Athanasius Kircher, Relation d’un voyage à la côte des Cafres (1686–1689), by Guillaume Chenu de Laujardiére, Moeurs des sauvages américains (1724), by Joseph-François Lafitau, and The Oriental Miscellany (1789), by William Hamilton Bird (Radano and Bohlman 2000, 17). In the nineteenth century, influenced by Charles Darwin’s theories, per- Gypsy Music and Race 101 ceptions of difference were subjected to evaluation. Works fitting this mold prevailed until the mid-twentieth century, with a typical example being the study of a given musical culture from antiquity to the present day. Such works usually began with chapters devoted to the music of primordial peoples and of countries of the Orient (Bücken 1937, 9). The first half of the twentieth century lent itself to a linked approach to questions of music and race. De Lafontaine, describing the music of Gypsies in Spain, used the terms weird race and bizarre race, implying that a race’s inherent features would be reflected in the music created by its members (de Lafontaine 1907–1908, 32). Sinclair, discussing Gypsies’ music in the same year, similarly describedthemas“outcastsandadespised race”(Sinclair 1907,28).Suchviews were common across Europe: in 1925, the Polish composer Szymanowski expressed his conviction as to the “dependence of the creative individual on the features of his race, its permanent substructure” (Szymanowski 1989, 172). With time, the quest to preserve purity in music became associated with the quest to preserve racial purity. The darkest manifestation of such an effort began in 1933 with Germany’s Third Reich, when musicologists established racial standards to be applied, among other places, in repertoires for public concerts. These attempts also involved reimagining and reinterpreting a musical past (Meyer 1975, 651). Activities aimed at preserving the racial purity of German music found ardent advocates among politicians as well as musicologists, with GermanpropagandaministerJosephGoebbelsrepresentingaflagrantexample oftheformer.Hecontendedthatmusicproducedoutsidethecountry’sborders wouldbeimpossibletoimaginewithouttheinspirationprovidedbyGermany’s operas and symphonies (Drewniak 1969, 10). The roots of the Nazi application of racial theory to music can be found in RichardWagner’scirclefromthepreviouscentury,andparticularlyinWagner’s infamous pamphletonJewsinmusic.Twomaincurrentsonracemaytherefore be discerned in the musical scene of the Third Reich, as laid out by the Polish musicologist Andrzej Tuchowski. The first was oriented toward “the problem of formulating the relatively Germanic Nordic racial features within music,” and the second was concentrated exclusively on research into the Jewish race. Throughrigorousstudy,musicologistsintheGermanregimesetouttocreate a method for determining “racial” features in music (Tuchowski 1998, 42–48). These featurescouldbeidentified,first,bysimplylisteningandanalyzing;thus, it was suggested that there was music created by Jews and music not created by Jews (Stutschewsky 1935, 12). The process was aimed at undermining the notion that Jews had any creative disposition, although Jews were allowed a 102 Two Models of Discourse “certain ability to show a copied mediocrity in technique and feel” that could bring about effects of a startlingly high artistic level (Stęszewski 1996, 50). A secondmethodwasaimedatdeterminingtheracialaffiliationofawork.Efforts in this arena stemmed from Hans Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1929), which inspired Richard Eichenauer’s Musik und Rasse (1932). The latter text presented composers from six different races and detailed...