Cultural Music in Historical Context - Essay Example

Running Head: CULTURAL MUSIC Cultural Music By ______________________ Table Of Contents Introduction 3 Cultural Music in terms of values.. 4 Musician Perception 5 Cultural Music in Historical Context.. 6 Cultural Music contribution to Negroes.. 6 Historical use of Cultural Music. 7 Historical Abuse of Cultural Music 8 Cultural Status of Negro Music.. 8 Factors that distinguish cultural music from modern music... 9 Spiritual Rituals ..10 Religious Rituals .10 Conclusion 13 References 14 Introduction Cultural music is confronted to the misconception that represents music in the boundaries of its functions. However cultural music should not be considered in the limitations of modern musical instruments, it depicts the traditions and norms to which we belong. Moreover cultural music depicts those values, which we have put in oblivion today and which became our identity as these presents our roots that our predecessors left. Cultural music addresses questions not just about music but about the nature of contemporary culture, because changing perceptions of music have less to do with the music itself than with changes in other cultural practices, values, and attitudes. What we are going to explore in this paper are the values, cultural music uphold, its historical significance, where it came from and the factors that distinguishes the cultural music from that of popular culture. We would put light across factors like religious rituals, social rituals, materialism and how it developed. Cultural Music in terms of Values Cultural value becomes a relative idea today because it is everywhere turned into something quantifiable, as the principle of exchange value (i.e., price) is extended into all spheres of life. Music when considered on a broad spectrum, is an art, and the value of art becomes a shifting term in an economy of cultural meanings, defined by its relation to other signifying elements in the cultural system, not to anything "real" to which it might ultimately refer. But when it comes to musical judgments, cultures are never explored in the context of social values. Though the formation of "taste cultures" has always been socially defined. Participation in certain genres of music say, grand opera, street ballads, or rural folk music was historically determined by a person's social position, not by a purely independent aesthetic choice. Indeed, from a sociological perspective, cultural taste is always a social category rather than an aesthetic one; it refers to the way we use cultural judgments as social "currency, " to mark our social positions. This may be less clear today, since contemporary society is characterized by the fragmentation of older taste cultures and the proliferation of new ones. In this context, cultural musical transactions take place with increasing rapidity hence the heating up of the cultural economy and its rapid turnover of new products. Not only are taste cultures themselves shifting, but people now tend to move between them with greater ease. These factors contribute to a sense of the relativity of any single position. Contemporary musical choices enable us to make selection from among umpteen choices, such choices refer to the pluralism, and the effect of that plurality is inevitably to confirm that, in matters of musical judgment, the individual can be the only authority. (Johnson, 2002, p. 7) Musician Perception Musicians are perceived as "speaking on behalf" of the cultures they perform. As Harnish says, "For those of us teaching in geographic areas of little diversity, we are charged with or charge ourselves with the task of representing the music and culture of the ensemble". (Solis, 2004, p. 14) Debate about music, even technical debate between musicians, has always been an attempt to wrestle with this conundrum: music flows from individuals to other individuals and yet seems to be shaped by supra individual forces. The basic model of that conundrum does not change. Music teachers, however, are the only representatives of these cultures in the areas where they teach. Those involved with music of ethnic groups not only strongly represented in the U. S. but also to the population that tend to present public performances almost exclusively before nonheritage. Directors thus find themselves relatively free to present to their students no direct aural experience of the tradition other than hearing themselves and audiences any type of repertoire, played at nearly any level of competency. The sonic and visual novelty is often enough, initially, to sustain interest and to entertain for reasons entirely at odds with "authentic" aesthetic criteria. (Solis, 2004, p. 46) History makes it clear that there is nothing natural or essential about the ways we experience music today and the ways we account for that experience. That means cultural music oblivion has made us to forget our origins and the nature to which we belong. Today fiercely emotive defense of an individual response to music is not only of relatively recent historical origin but, from an anthropological perspective, is actually rather peculiar. The world's diverse cultural music has been overwhelmingly communal activities, understood through collective frameworks such as religious and social rituals. Cultural Music in Historical Context American cultural music has its roots embedded in the origins of black and white race, intellectuals began to embrace the new sense of black subjectivity, they forged links between a humanitarian reformist redemption politics of abolitionism and a quest for cultural authenticity. 'Douglass' had embodied the cultural and ethno sympathetic turn; he demonstrated a newly visible black authenticity. And for the first time, black subjectivity and authenticity became accessible, and decipherable, and was able to be drawn into new circuits of familiarity. Authenticity could be formulated hence, known in ways that brought the listener closer to the meanings and intentions of the makers of black music. Indeed, the interest in the slave narratives helped prepare the ground for the sympathetic reception of black music, beginning with the spirituals, as this was the beginning of their cultural music. (Cruz, 1999, p. 45) Cultural Music Contribution to Negroes Black cultural practices, which had hitherto been misunderstood as well as scorned, derogated, and dismissed, were discovered, objectified, and edified by cultural music. Hence we can say that cultural music upholds the onus on its shoulders for it presented blacks with what they were seeking. "Independence". Their desire to transcribe black song making, particularly the Negro spiritual, reflected a tendency that extolled the virtues of a preferred and idealized notion of the culturally expressive and performing subject, in this case the spiritual-singing Negro. Historical Use of Cultural Music This perspective had a dual function: it provided the recognition and admission of a specifiable black culture, and it granted black culture admission into the larger and certainly contentious domain of "American" culture. Muted, indeed eclipsed, in the process were the argumentative, critical, and elaborate black voices that had already emerged in the slave narratives. These voices had preceded the discovery of the Negro spiritual, but were overshadowed by the larger, newer, aesthetic appreciation of the preferred black culture. The accomplishments of the interpretive turned toward the margins and were numerous and important. . (Cruz, 1999, p. 48) The new ethno sympathy enabled the discoverers to seek an underlying authenticity of subjects through their cultural practices. It promoted a schema of interpreting the inner culture of individuals and groups. It established scaffolding for an inquiry that was proto ethnographic and prophetic as well as pre scientific of future analytical refinements. It highlighted cultural performances, practices, goods, and objects that could be studied in order to uncover a posited deeper reality. Cultural authenticity was the key to subject authenticity and that was achieved through identifying cultural music. Both, furthermore, could be studied as complementary parts of the interpretive vision that attempted to bring society into better focus. Historical Abuse of Cultural Music The accomplishments also propelled the ethno sympathetic spirit along a path of increased rationalization, where the epistemological desires of modern science could be accommodated. And this accommodation also involved attempts to reframe and tame the older romantic and reformist impulses. The result was (and remains today) an inexpugnably tension between hermeneutic and objectivistic orientations toward cultural analysis in general and the study of cultural forms in particular. With regard to a sociology of black music making and its place within the rise of modern American cultural interpretation, none of these forms of emergent knowledge is visible if one stays within the comfort of received knowledge whether it be of religiously inflected perspectives focusing on the essential virtues of fixed cultural objects or of the dehistoricized scientist objectivism that lacks the reflexivity to recognize its own hand in the making of the "objective" world. (Morgan, 1991, p. 23) The challenge was to grasp sociologically the discovery of the spiritual. This discovery was considered to be a part of a larger cultural confluence in which black cultural music played a central role in the rise of modern modes of cultural interpretation. This angle required shifting the attention from treating black song making as an essential feature of an ethnic-specific world. Cultural Status of 'Negro' Music The cultural status of the Negro's music reflects upon a particular cultural form, which has found its way into print since the late-nineteenth century. What seems incontrovertible is the fact that black religious song making, as with all other forms of music making, served multiple functions under slavery. It is a well-established fact that music was one of the primary means by which slaves cultivated collective knowledge and solidarity. Music making helped create as well as maintain fledgling and fragile black public spheres. This aspect of culture has not been lost upon scholars of American history and culture, and it remains a lesson that deserves to be continually underscored. From gospel to blues to soul and to rap and hip-hop (and certainly more forms will follow), black music making remains an important part of their culture as an enormously important as well as a sprawling black cultural public sphere. It was in the context of slavery that black music emerged as a distinct analytical object. Particular interpretive schemas developed from this interest, and they helped launch the concern for what black religious singing might mean to those who produced it. This interest, given form by moral and political entrepreneurs who remained outside of the most fundamental practices of blacks themselves, was certainly linked to black music's functions within historically embedded social and cultural negotiations. But it cannot be reduced to any cultural essence attributed to music. The new orientations toward discovering cultural black music yield the modern pathos-oriented mode of hearing that enabled white and black commentators to elevate the spirituals to such new interpretive heights and to invest in them such interpretive depth, that moulded the form of music into a modern vocal but devoid of spirituality. (Morgan, 1991, p. 67) Factors that distinguish Cultural Music from Modern Music The division of culture by the musical images created a void between cultural music and modern music, however music of high and low performance may be regrettable but has informed cultural criticism for too long simply to be ignored. Spiritual Rituals For its proponents, the origins of this musical division lie in religious ideas of a spiritual ascent from the earthly to the heavenly. In this model, the low music is confined to the physical and material conditions of our animal existence, whereas the high music is concerned with the spiritual. The low music is mortal and ephemeral, whereas the high music is immortal and eternal. For its opponents, on the other hand, the metaphor maps directly onto the class divisions that embody hierarchies of social power. Low musical culture is thus that of the oppressed, and high culture that of the oppressors. Low culture voices a refusal of oppression, however impotent, while high culture celebrates power and confirms repression in the aesthetic domain. The first interpretation, in its secular form, is that of idealism, which had a definitive philosophical influence on aesthetics; the second is that of historical materialism, which exerted a similarly definitive influence on sociology and cultural studies. The first insists on a formal understanding of art, but in downplaying social and historical categories, it is apt to appear politically reactionary. The second emphasizes the primacy of social and historical conditions but is apt to make the artwork itself peripheral. (Morgan, 1991, p. 329) Religious Rituals The distinctive historical claims of music-as-art are no longer heard when the term "art" becomes indistinguishable from terms like "culture, " "entertainment, " and "leisure. " Art becomes one of an interchangeable list of activities or pastimes people engage in when they are not at work. Most people are aware of a difference between what public institutions (galleries, concert halls, and theaters) define as art and a more informal use of the term to refer to almost anything that demonstrates great skill or is considered attractive. But while we may not usually reflect on why that division exists, we often challenge others' use of the term and are defensive if our own use of it is questioned. Because "art" has come to refer to something highly valued, the term is inevitably contested. Even people who don't care much about art can argue passionately that something is or isn't art. The term still functions as an accolade; to call something "art" is to invest it with all the value that has accrued around such objects in the past. It is to claim that the object is quite different from other human artifacts and to give it an aura usually reserved for sacred objects in religious cultures. So, music is somehow related and associated with religious syndromes. The ideal of humanity on which we have based our greatest religious, ethical, philosophical, and political thinking is not defined by our outward, material surface but by our capacity to exceed the limits of our material existence. Great art expresses this ideal in every work. In rejecting it to embrace the ideal of a blank and depthless surface embodied in contemporary culture, we reject that ideal of humanity and instead embrace a simulacrum a synthetic and hollow substitute. Human potential is not well expressed by the fashionable, the glossy, or the chic, and yet we allow ourselves to be dominated by a culture defined almost exclusively in these terms. In doing so, we collude in our own reduction to objects. Today's music claims to fulfill what religious icons and the doctrine of transubstantiation once claimed: that a material object becomes more than the sum of its material parts, that it projects a spiritual energy. In this way, high art realizes, in secular form, what was once the domain of religion. And as with religious icons, what begins as authentic experience may deteriorate into fetishism and outward observance. The object does not literally possess a magical power, but it invites a kind of participation from the subject that results in "miraculous" things. In a religious context, this was a matter of faith, of ritual and collective belief. Art, too demands a certain kind of attention, but it is far more shaped by the form of the object and the experience it facilitates. It does not necessarily deliver an experience most people would call religious, but art, even when it is most obviously concerned with the secular, implies something beyond itself, and in this sense it is metaphysical. (Johnson, 2002, p. 54) The satire that art's metaphysical yearning should be reduced to a material function in an age when great art is more accessible than ever before is only one of several ironies arising from the contemporary dismissal of cultural music as elitist. Not the least of these is the fact that the original popularity of cultural music derived from its democratic appeal, the aspiration of inclusiveness expressed in its fusion of high and low. But a particularly acute irony is that the society that labels cultural music elitist also ensures that it continues to be so. Willful exclusion aside, what prevents people from participating in music-as-art comes down to problems of literacy or "style competence, " as it is sometimes more euphemistically called. This is a far more profound barrier to understanding music than ticket prices or the perceived class structure of the audience; without it, cultural music is, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible. (Johnson, 2002, p. 87) Conclusion According to Tomlinson, (1999) "Song, notwithstanding its own cultural valences in any particular circumstances, can serve as a more neutral and less limited coinage than music". (Tomlinson, 1999) There is no doubt that cultural music in any era has influenced people and their surroundings in a manner that they remember their origin. People use it in different ways to mediate their experiences of the world. Its capacity to shape those experiences and to define one's self-awareness is the subject of myth and legend and a fact of everyday life. That such symbolic mediations can have a power and a reality greater than the everyday is an important characteristic of our symbol-dominated culture. Individually, one often makes different musical choices in different social contexts, because one expects music to fulfill a range of functions in those contexts. Our judgment about the cultural piece of music can change completely depending on its context. References & Bibliography Cruz Jon, (1999) Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation: Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Johnson Julian, (2002) Who Needs Classical Music Cultural Choice and Musical Value: Oxford University Press: New York. Kenyon Nicholas, (1988) Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium: Oxford University Press: Oxford. Morgan P. Robert, (1991) Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America: Norton: New York. Solis Ted, (2004) Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. Strathmore Brings the Arts Together; Diverse Cultural Groups Call Music Center Home In: The Washington Times: January 15, 2005. Page Number: B03. Tomlinson Gary, (1999) Music and Culture: Vico's Songs Detours at the Origins of (Ethno) Musicology In: Musical Quarterly. Volume: 83: 3. American Music UNESCO, Read More