Studies on a Global History of Music
A Balzan Musicology Project
Edited by Reinhard Strohm
First published 2018 by Routledge
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6 ‘T he transformation of the world’: Silk Road musics, crosscultural approaches, and contemporary metaphors
M AX P ETER B AU MANN
7 Music education in modern Japanese society
R INKO F UJ ITA
8 The (musical) imaginarium of Konishi Yasuharu, or how to make Western music Japanese
O LIVER S EI BT
9 ‘European music’ outside Europe? Musical entangling and i ntercrossing in the case of Korea’s modern history
J IN -A H K IM
10 Korean music: de finitions and practices
11 East Asia in a global historical perspective – approaches and challenges
N ICOLA S PAK OWSKI
TH A N d SOu TH -E AST A SI A
12 Heavy metal bamboo: how archaic bamboo instruments became modern in Bandung, Indonesia
H ENRY S PI LLER
13 Cultural autonomy and the ‘Indian exception’: debating the aesthetics of Indian classical music in early 20th-century Calcutta
M ATTHEW P RIT CHARD
14 Orientalism and beyond: Tagore, Foulds, and cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and Western musicians
15 Why did Indians sing? The appropriation of European musical practices by South-American natives in the Jesuit reducciones
L EONARDO J . W AI SMAN
16 The global mission in the music of Jesuit drama
T OMASZ J E ż
17 From ‘abandoned huts’ to ‘maps of the Pampas’: the topos of the h uella and the representation of landscape in Argentine art music
M ELANIE P L ESCH
18 ‘Minor Mode and the Andes’: the pentatonic scale as topic and the musical representation of Peru
J
ULIO
M EN D í VI L
19 ‘The rending call of the poor and forsaken street crier’: the political and expressive dimension of a topic in Silvestre Revueltas’s early works
R OBERTO K OL B -N EU HAUS
20 Passion and disappointment: waltz and danza topics in a Venezuelan musical nationalism masterpiece
21
and
Illustrations
3.1 Chinese melody from Du Halde’s Description of China and the Water- Castle at Canton circulated as printed ephemera, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Harding Mus. L5 (36)) 49
3.2 Illustration of instruments in Carsten Niebuhr’s Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern (1774), Bodleian Library, BOD 3 DELTA 1148 54
3.3 Transcription of three Iroquois songs in Marpurg’s Historisch-Kritische Beiträge zur Aufnahme der Musik 5/5 (1762). Bodleian Library, Tenbury f.12 (1–5): insert between volumes 4 and 5 56
4.1 Edward Bunting’s epigrammatic quote (Bunting, 1809: i).
Image used with courtesy of the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago 65
4.2 Comparative organology of harps (Bunting, 1809: 19).
Image used with courtesy of the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago 66
4.3 ‘The Twenty-Four Measures of Welsh Music’ (Bunting, 1809: 21). Image used with courtesy of the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago 67
4.4 Thomas Moore: Go Where Glory Waits Thee (Irish Melodies, vol. 1, 1808: 7). Image used with courtesy of the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago 69
4.5 The form of a kriti in Karnatak music 75
4.6 S. M. Tagore: Yantra Kosha, or a Treasury of the Musical Instruments of Ancient and of Modern India, and of Various Other Countries (1875; in Bengali, with English title page) 77
5.1 Map of the Mongol Empire (including Timurid Empire c a. 1400). From Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd (1923). Public domain. Adapted from image courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin 85
5.2 Liturgical song texts in the Codex Cumanicus, adapted from Drimba (2000) in consultation with the facsimile of the original in the same publication 100
6.1 The cross-cultural dimension of systems of society, organisational structures and individuals 116
6.2 The diversity and plurality of cultural socialisation (Baumann, 2015: 24) 130
6.3 Cu ltural conflicts and the intertwining of cultural discourses 131
6.4 The holarchy of transcultural awareness 133
7.1 Koi zumi’s four types of basic tetrachords and two yona-nuki scales 144
7.2 St atistical analysis of the tempo estimation (Fujita, 2007) 150
10.1 The circular mode of exchange in training, performing, and promoting Korean traditional music (kugak) 209
10.2 The circular mode of exchange in training, performing, and promoting Korean ‘folk’ music (Minsok ŭ mak) 210
12.1 Ka rinding Attack (photograph by Henry Spiller) 242
12.2 Map of West Java, showing location of Bandung. From Robert Cribb, Digital Atlas of Indonesian History (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010), reproduced with permission 242
12.3 Ka rinding performed by Mang Teddy (photograph by Henry Spiller) 243
12.4 Celempung performed by Abah Akim (photograph by Henry Spiller) 24 4
12.5 Ba mboo microphone stands (photograph by Henry Spiller) 250
12.6 Celempung renteng (photographs by Henry Spiller) 252
14.1 R āga Paraj – ascending and descending forms 287
14.2 R āga Vasant – ascending and descending forms 290
15.1 Fragments from Archivo Musical de Chiquitos. (a) MS R38 f 12v (from Joseph Brentner, four-voice motet Gloria et honore, bass part); (b) MS R35 f 46v (anonymous, solo motet O dulcissime Jesu, soprano part); and c) MS R41 f 4 (anonymous, six-voice motet Ascendit Deus, basso continuo part)
320
15.2 Archivo Musical de Chiquitos, MS R80 f 3 (two partimenti from the introductory didactic material to an extensive collection of pieces for organ) 321
15.3 (a) Archivo Musical de Chiquitos, MS R16 f 29 (anonymous, sacred aria Ad Mariam properate, copy from the late 18th century; (b) Archivo Musical de Chiquitos, MS R 76 ff 3v–4 (anonymous, song in chiquitano Ñaquipi yane, copy by Javier Cuyatí, 1934)
17.1 Comparative map of Argentina. The image on the left shows the different geographical regions of the country, while the one on the right shows the two regions celebrated in Argentine music nationalism
322
347
17.2 Eduardo Sivori, Pampa (1899), oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires 351
x Illustrations
17.3 Ceferino Carnacini, El rancho en la loma (V Salón Nacional, 1915). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist’s descendants 352
17.4 Os car Díaz, cover for Pampamapa. Colección Estampa, Editorial Lagos 368
18.1 Ly rics of Ein Indiojunge aus Peru. Author’s transcription and translation 391
19.1 Wals de las gorditas de horno, by José Antonio gómez (gómez, 1840: 160–61). My thanks to the Heremoteca Nacional de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for permission to reproduce this figure
40 0
19.2 Transcription of the pregón: ¿No tomarán chichicuilotitos vivos? (‘Won’t you buy live chichicuilotes?’) (garcía Cubas, 1904: 268) 402
19.3 Ca mpos’s musical transcription of the pregón ‘mercarán chichicuilotitos vivos ’ (1928: 17)
19.4 Mu sicalisation of ¿Mercarán chichicuilotitos vivos? by Jesús Martínez, completed by Rubén M. Campos (1928: 326)
403
40 4
19.5 Th ree pregones, transcribed by Mendoza from garcía Cubas (1904). The third is ‘Chichicuilotes ’ 405
19.6 Pregón de los chichicuilotes. Collected in Mexico, 1942 406
19.7 Pregón del pastelero (‘confectioner’s cry’) 406
19.8 Pregón of the vegetable scrubbers
413
Preface
The idea of a global history of music was present in 18th-century Europe, when traditional notions about the music of the ancient Mediterranean world were first challenged by knowledge about recently colonised world regions. Was there any communality in the cultivation of music beyond the Western ‘classical’ tradition? What might be the origins and destinies of the many musical practices observed by Europeans in other continents? These questions have been raised and researched throughout the era of Western colonialism and nationalism. They were often combined with a hope to find ‘universal’ explanations for the diversity of the musical material (for example, by assuming shared substructures) and usually with a Eurocentric outlook that projected the historical convergence of all global musics onto Western forms.
Today, many musicians and musical researchers contribute to our awareness of a world heritage in music. Heritage implies history, but what we need are conceptual frameworks for a history of music that abandons Eurocentrism and pays due attention to global relationships. How might a historical interpretation of those relationships proceed? How should it position, or justify itself? What would ‘Western music’ look like in an account of music history that aspired to be truly global?
The Studies on a Global History of Music presented in this volume aim to promote post-Eurocentric historical thinking. They are not intended to create a global history by themselves and, certainly, not one single, hegemonic history. They rather explore the paradigms and terminologies that might describe a history of many different voices. In the years 2013–2015, researchers supported by the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music have studied the relatedness and the singularity of historical musics around the world. They have developed and tested dialogue structures and narrative strategies that would cope with the multiplicity and interdisciplinarity of their studies. Some of these are case studies, devoted to specific intercultural practices; others discuss burning questions of understanding and narrating musical relationships in history. None of them subscribe to the discourse of an easy or innocent ‘globalisation’ in the arts: what they
ar ticulate, in their different ways, is a panorama of controversy, resilience, and, at the very least, interaction.
The Balzan musicology project Towards a Global History of Music arose in 2012 from the award of the Balzan Prize in musicology to the project leader, Reinhard Strohm. The International Balzan Prize Foundation (Milan/ Zu rich) awards these prizes every year to scholars and scientists in the fields of literature, moral sciences, and the arts; of physical, mathematical, and natural sciences and medicine; of humanities, peace, and fraternity among peoples. The Prize Committee stipulates that in each individual award, one half of the prize money should be used to support mid-career researchers working on a specified programme. I opted for a project on global music history and, together with a Steering Committee, decided to invite researchers of historical musicology and ethnomusicology to six participating institutes for study visits, to carry out or to complete their researches on the music of different world regions.
The studies assembled in this volume are selected, peer-reviewed, and revised versions of research writings arising from these visits and of further papers from the international workshops convened by the members of the Balzan Musicology Project, as follows:
‘Mongols Howling, Latins Barking’: Voice and Song in Early Mu sical Encounters in Pre-Colonial Eurasia . Convened by Jason Stoessel. 2 De cember 2013, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford.
Alternative Modernities: The Postcolonial Transformation of ‘Traditional’ Music in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Convened by Tobias Robert Klein and Laurenz Lütteken. 15–17 January 2014, Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Theorizing across Cultures: Ethnomusicological and Historical-Musicological Perspectives. Convened by Suddhaseel Sen. 27 May 2014, Department of Music, King’s College, University of London.
Alterity and Universalism in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought. Convened by David R. M. Irving and Estelle Joubert. Faculty of Music and Wadham College, University of Oxford, 30 May–1 June 2014.
Many Kinds of Music History: A Cross-Cultural Enquiry. Convened by Reinhard Strohm, Michele Calella, and Angharad gabriel-Zamastil. 10–11 October 2014, Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Universität Wien.
The Global Music Culture of the Catholic Missions in the 17th–18th centuries. Convened by Tomasz Je ż and Jia Shubing. 6–7 February 2015, Department of Music, King’s College, University of London.
Topical Encounters and Rhetorics of Identity in Latin American Art Music. Convened by Melanie Plesch. 13–15 February 2015, Faculty of Music and Wadham College, University of Oxford.
Transfer, Reception and Appropriation of Music in a Global Context: Methods, Concepts, Practices. Convened by Jin-Ah Kim. 30 May–1 June 2015, Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Universität Zürich.
The introduction by Martin Stokes was commissioned separately.
Preface xv
The project members, workshop convenors, and participants are most grateful to the International Balzan Prize Foundation for its generous support, including the invaluable advice and help given to the project leader by the g eneral Secretary of the Foundation, Suzanne Werder, and by gottfried Scholz as subject supervisor and mentor of the project. We gratefully acknowledge the active collaboration of all the hosting Music Departments and their administrators, especially Margrit Straub at Zurich and Catherine Lieben at Oxford. Workshop participants also thankfully re member the hospitality of Wadham College Oxford and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. The editor expresses his warmest gratitude to the Steering Committee members, advisors, and research co-ordinators of the project, who helped with the creation of these Studies: Laurenz Lütteken, Sławomira Ż era ń ska-Kominek, Ruth HaCohen, Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Hermann Danuser, Keith Howard, August Schmidhofer, Michael Fend, Martin Stokes, Jürgen Osterhammel, Michele Calella, Anna Maria Busse Berger, Karol Berger, Marie-Alice Frappat, and Angharad gabriel-Zamastil. Sp ecial thanks are due to our expert copy-editor, Susannah Sallé, who never flinched in the face of a bewildering diversity of musics, texts, and research styles, to the peer-reviewers, and to the editorial team of Routledge.
Reinhard Strohm
Contributors
Max Peter Baumann is Professor Emeritus for Ethnomusicology at the Institute for Music Research of the University of Würzburg. His research interests include Latin American music, music and religion in the intercultural discourse, the methodology of field research, intercultural understanding, the cultural anthropology of hearing and listening, and issues of music in different contexts of local traditions and globalisation. He is editor of the series Intercultural Music Studies and was editor of the journal The World of Music from 1988 to 2007. Recent books: Musik im interkulturellen Kontext (Bautz, 2006); Readings in Ethnomusicology (ed.; VWB, 2012).
Philip V. Bohlman (Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago; Honorarprofessor, Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover). Studied piano and ethnomusicology at the Un iversity of Wisconsin–Madison, the Hebrew University of Jer usalem, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. PhD 1984 at Illinois (under Bruno Nettl). Editor of Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music and co-editor of Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, Big Issues in Music, Europea , and Grove Music in Global Perspective. Research interests in Jewish music; Middle East, South Asia, and Europe; music and its intersection with nationalism, racism, and religion; folk music; jazz; aesthetics; intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Most recent books, Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (with gof fredo Plastino, University of California Press, 2016) and Song Loves the Masses (with Johann gottfried Herder, University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Rinko Fujita’s main research interest is in the cultural diversity of European and East Asian music, especially the relationship between musical conception and cognition. She is an active member of several international societies, including the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) and the Society for Research in Asiatic Music. Currently, she is the co-chair of the ICTM Study g roup on Folk Musical Instruments. Since 2010 she has been working as a part-time lecturer at the Department of Musicology of the University of Vienna. Book: Tempountersuchung der
Contributors xvi i japanischen Hofmusik Gagaku: eine Untersuchung über Zeitauffassung der traditionellen japanischen Musik (PhD Diss., University of Vienna, 2007).
Keith Howard is Professor Emeritus, SOAS, University of London, and Kent R. Mullikin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. He was formerly Associate Dean at the University of Sydney and has held visiting professorships at Monash University, Ewha Women’s University, and Hanguk University of Foreign Studies. He has written or edited 20 books, including Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage (Ashgate, 2012), Singing the Kyrgyz Manas (global Oriental, 2011), Korean Kayagum Sanjo (with Chae-suk Yi and Nicholas Caswell, Ashgate, 2008), Zi mbabwean Mbira Music on an International Stage (with Chartwell Dutiro, Routledge, 2007), Perspectives on Korean Music (2 vols; Ashgate, 2006), and Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave (global Oriental, 2006). In addition to academic writing, he is a regular broadcaster on Korean affairs.
dav id R. M. Irving (Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of Melbourne) undertook his doctoral research at Clare College, Cambridge, under the supervision of Tess Knighton. He has held posts at the Un iversity of Ca mbridge, King’s College London, the University of Nottingham, and The Australian National University. His book Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford University Press, 2010) was named one of 18 ‘Books of the Year’ by BBC History Magazine. He received the McCredie Musicological Award from the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2015 and the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association in 2010. As a research visitor of the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music, he investigated ‘Analogues of Antiquity: World Cultures, Ancient g re ek Music, and Comparative Anthropologies, 1500–1800.’
Tomasz Jeż studied musicology in Warsaw, göttingen, and Berlin (with DAAD scholarship). Since his PhD promotion (2002), he has been employed at the Institute of Musicology, Warsaw University. As research visitor of the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music, he worked at Vienna University on ‘Music in the Cultural Strategies of Jesuits in Latin America (17th–18th centuries).’ He has written ca. 50 papers, concerning heuristic, spiritual, and aesthetic contexts of music performance. His main research interest is the music culture of ancient Silesia. His recent book: Kultura muzyczna jezuitów na Ślą sku i ziemi k łodzkiej (1581–1776) [The Musical Culture of the Jesuits in Silesia and K łodzko County] (Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2013) will soon be edited in an English version.
Estelle Joubert (Associate Professor, Fountain School of Performing Arts, Dalhousie University, Canada). Studied piano and musicology at the University of Toronto (BMus, MA); DPhil University of Oxford with Reinhard Strohm (2007) on Opera, Politics and the Public Sphere in Enlightenment
C ontributors
Germany. SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto (2007–2009); Assistant Professor of Musicology, Da lhousie, 2009. Balzan Re search Visitor, University of Oxford, 2014; DAAD Fa culty Research g ra nt, Humboldt University, Spring 2015; Visiting Re search Scholar, University of California at Berkeley, 2015–2016. Rese arch interests include opera and political theory of the En lightenment; op era and histories of sensation; music in the global 18th century; digital visualisation of networks and musical migration; opera and digital cu lture. Currently principal investigator for a large-scale SSHRC-funded project entitled ‘Opera and the Musical Canon, 1750–1815’ (2015–2018).
Jin-Ah Kim is Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, College of Liberal Arts, Seoul/Yongin, and Honorarprofessor at the HumboldtUn iversity of Berlin, Institute of Music and Media Studies. Her fields of research include European music of the 18th and 19th centuries, music in East Asia, sociology of musical practice, and transcultural music studies and globalisation, especially methodology and intercontinental relationships. Her research for the Balzan Musicology Project was conducted in 2015 at the University of Zu rich on ‘Transfer, Reception and Appropriation of Music: East Asia and Western Europe.’ She has contributed to many books and essays and has earned a number of awards.
Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus is a musicologist and performer. He studied oboe at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Holland, and gained his doctoral degree in History of Art from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2007. He is the leading authority on Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, on whose music he has published several books, a critical edition, and recordings. He is founder and artistic director of Camerata de las Americas and is currently the Dean of the Master’s and Doctoral Programmes in Music at UNAM. Recently he collaborated with the Orquesta Sinfónica de gua najuato in the first world recording of Revueltas’s orchestral work Esquinas in its two versions.
Julio Mendívil (Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Vienna) is a Peruvian musician, ethnomusicologist and writer. He was Associate Researcher at the University of Music and Drama in Hannover (20 07–2008), Visiting Full Professor at the Institute for Musicology at the Un iversity of Cologne (2008–2012), and Professor of Ethnomusicology at the goetheUniversität Frankfurt. His research focus is Andean music, popular music in ger man-speaking countries, and the history of ethnomusicology. He has been director of the Center for World Music at the University of Hildesheim (ger many), and since June 2017 has been chair of IASPM, Latin American Branch. Recent book: En contra de la música. Herramientas para pensar, comprender y vivir las músicas (gou rmet Musical, 2016).
Melanie Plesch is an Argentine musicologist and music pedagogue. She is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Melbourne. Her work
Contributors xix focuses on the intersections of music, politics, and society, esp ecially the relationship between music and the construction of national identity in Argentina. As a research visitor of the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music, she worked at the University of Oxford on ‘Towards an Understanding of the Rhetorical Efficacy of Latin American Art Music: Topics of Landscape.’ She has published articles and edited books on Argentine music and general music history, most recently Analizar, interpretar, hacer m úsica: de las Cantigas de Santa María a la organología: escritos in memoriam Gerardo V. Huseby (gou rmet Musical, 2013).
Matthew Pritchard is Lecturer in Musical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds, prior to which he held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fel lowship at the University of Cambridge. Aside from publishing on the history of g er man music aesthetics, including articles on Gebrauchsmusik and the concept of musical ‘character’ c a. 1800, his interest in Bengali music dates from a year spent studying the songs of Rabindranath Tagore at the university Tagore founded, Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, West Be ngal, le arning with Mohan Singh Khangura and Malay Shankar Chattopadhyay. A translation of two of Tagore’s essays on music app eared in Sangeet Natak 46 (2012); a book manuscript tracing the history and consequences of the ‘aesthetics of feeling’ is currently in preparation, as well as an edition (with translations) of Tagore’s songs.
Tina K. Ramnarine (Professor, Royal Holloway, University of London) is a musician, anthropologist, and global cultural explorer. She has ca rried out extensive research across the Nordic countries, especially on Finnish and Sàmi music. She has also worked on Caribbean music and transnational labour histories, music and film in the Indian Diaspora, and intercultural gamelan music projects in Bali. Her book publications include Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music (Chicago University Press, 2003), Beautiful Cosmos: Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora (Pluto Press, 2007), and the edited volumes, Musical Performance in the Diaspora (Routledge, 2007) and Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas.
Juan Francisco Sans is a Venezuelan musicologist, composer, and performer. He studied piano, organ, conducting, and recorder. He gained his doctoral degree in the humanities from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he is currently Professor of Musicology and director of the School of Arts. His research centres on dance music of the 19th century, as well as Latin American piano and orchestral music. He is the general editor of the Classics of the Venezuelan piano literature series (11 volumes published) and of the orchestral music of Juan Bautista Plaza (8 volumes). Recent book: Los bailes de salón en Venezuela (Fundación Bigott, 2016).
Oliver Seibt has been Assistant Professor for Cultural Musicology at the University of Amsterdam since 2016. Before holding positions as interim or guest professor for ethnomusicology at the universities of Cologne, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, from 2009 to 2012 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg’s Cluster of Excellency ‘Asia and Europe in a global Context,’ where he was in charge of an ethnomusicological research project on the globalisation of East and South Asian popular musics. His own research focuses on (the global spread of) Japanese popular music and music in everyday life (Der Sinn des Augenblicks: Überlegungen zu einer Musikwissenschaft des Alltäglichen , transcript, 2010).
Suddhaseel Sen (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, India) has a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and is a PhD candidate in Musicology from Stanford University. His research focuses on cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and European mu sicians in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He has arranged Indian music for Western ensembles in India and Canada, in addition to doing academic research in English literature. As a research visitor in the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music at King’s College, University of London (2013–2014), he worked on ‘Inti mate Strangers: Cross-Cultural Exchanges between Indian and Western Mu sicians 1880–1940.’ His musical interests include Indian music and the orchestral, chamber, and operatic repertoires of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nicola Spakowski is a historian and sinologist who received her academic training at the Universities of Tübingen, Nanjing, and the Free University of Berlin. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Sinology at the University of Freiburg. Her research is dedicated to 20th-century and contemporary China, in particular questions of historiography, history teaching, and the popularisation of history, feminism, and women studies, and the internationalisation, globalisation, and regionalisation of China. She has published on concepts of national, regional, and global history in China and beyond. Recent publications: Mit Mut an die Front: die militärische Beteiligung von Frauen in der kommunistischen Revolution Chinas (1925–1949) (Böhlau Verlag, 2009); Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration (with Marc Frey, NUS Press, 2016).
Henry Spiller (Professor, University of California, Davis) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on Sundanese music and dance from West Java, Indonesia. He is interested particularly in investigating how individuals deploy music and dance in their personal lives to articulate ethnic, gender, and national identities. He has studied Sundanese music and dance for more than 40 years and has conducted fieldwork in Ba ndung, West Java, on many occasions. As research visitor of the Balzan
Contributors xxi
Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music (2014), he worked at Berlin and London on the music of Java. The Society for Ethnomusicology has awarded the 2016 Bruno Nettl prize to Henry Spiller for his recent book Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015).
Jason Stoessel is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of New England, Australia. As a 2013–2014 Towards a Global History of Music research visitor to the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, he examined ‘The Role of the Singing Voice and Concepts of Song in Encounters between Latin, Persian and Mongol Cultures during the Mongol Empire, 1206–1368.’ He has been an Associate Investigator of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2014–2017) and holds a second consecutive three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant. His research is published in numerous journals, including Early Music, Music & Letters, The Journal of Musicology, and in collected writings. He is editor of Identity and Locality in Early European Music (Ashgate, 2009; reissued 2016).
Martin Stokes (King Edward Professor of Music, University of London, King’s College) studied music and social anthropology at Oxford. He taught at The Queen’s University of Belfast (1989–1997), The University of Chicago (1997–2007), and Oxford University (2007–2012). He was a Howard Foundation Fellow at the Chicago Humanities Institute in 2002–2003, a Visiting Professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul on two occasions, and has held an honorary professorship in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In 2013 he gave the Bloch Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent book: The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Reinhard Strohm is Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD at the Technische Universität Berlin in 1971. Since 1975 he has taught at King’s College, University of London, Yale University, and Oxford University and has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Chicago, Rome, Vienna, Zurich, Hamburg, and Budapest (Liszt Academy). Balzan Prize for Musicology, 2012.
Publications include 10 books and 195 essays on European Music History and Musicology. Recent research: Musical Life of the late Middle Ages in the Austrian Region, c a .1340–c a 1520 (online project, University of Vienna: www.musical-life.net); Towards a Global History of Music (Balzan Musicology Research Project 2013–2017: www.balzan. org/en/prizewinners/reinhard-strohm); ‘The Wanderings of Music through Space and Time,’ in: Music Migration in the Early Modern Age (Liber Pro Arte, 2016), 17–32.
xxii C ontributors
l eonardo J. Waisman (Principal Researcher, CONICET, Argentina) studied music at the National University of Córdoba and the University of Chicago. He published papers on the Italian madrigal, American colonial music, the performance practice of ancient music, popular music in Argentina, and a socio-cultural view of musical styles. His special interest is the music of the Jesuit missions in South America. He edited three operas by Vicente Martín y Soler and published an extensive monograph on this composer. In 2015–2016, he was Visiting Simón Bolívar Professor at the University of Cambridge. As a specialist director of Baroque music, he has presented and recorded programmes of previously unrecorded music. His most recent book is Un ciclo musical para la misión jesuítica: Los cuadernos de ofertorios de San Rafael, Chiquitos (3 vols., Brujas, 2015).
1 Notes and queries on ‘global music history’ Martin Stokes
‘People without history’ have been made so by others who gain from having it.
(See p. 7)
The attempt to refocus questions of agency in a global world pushed music research simultaneously in local, pluralising, and historicising directions.
(See p. 12)
The chapters that follow in this volume are case studies in music history traditions that have sought global connectivity, or relativity. They move towards a global history of music. They are guided by the hope that the West might be decentred in such a narrative and that music history writing itself might be reimagined in the process.
A global music history project of this nature must take into account its various pasts. In particular, it must ask what the prospects of success are when we take into account the legacy of comparative musicology and the ongoing questions asked by ethnomusicology, post-colonial studies, and globalisation theory. We might also want to think about how these researches are complicated by today’s sound studies – a topic I will touch on at the end. A ll of these studies have significantly complicated the idea that it is possible to think historically across music cultures. They also raise the question of who would want a global music history, and why.
The problems they raise may in fact seem insurmountable. Comparative musicology is often understood to be entwined with intellectual projects that saw history in terms of the inexorable ‘ascent of the West,’ making it complicit in the racial crimes of the 20th century. We don’t want to go there again. In reacting to comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, many would say, advocated synchronic and functionalist modes of explanation in preference to diachronic and historical ones. To the extent that ethnomusicology and popular music studies now have a say in how music departments organise curricula and present their research, space and geography have supplanted historical ‘coverage’ as the organising metaphor, and the field of music study is better for it. Post-colonial theory, it is often suggested, has denied the possibility of historical knowledge separable from the contexts
of global power – ‘history’ would, in other words, forever be indistinguishable from ‘orientalism.’ globalisation theory has posited a number of wellknown ‘end of history’ scenarios. So all four research directions, today, suggest serious limits to the very idea of ‘a global history.’
Rewinding to a simpler time, before the complications introduced by today’s theory anxieties, is, of course, not an option. Indeed, the problem of global music history is firmly on the critical agenda, these days; the questions are inescapable.1 We clearly need to find some way of reckoning with these critical challenges, learning from the past where we can, avoiding its mistakes, and opening up some kind of dialogue with it. Only by doing so, I would suggest, might a 21st-century global music history take cautious steps forward. With that in mind, let me take comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, post-colonial studies, globalisation theory, and sound studies in turn. What problems do they raise? What encouragement do they provide? And how does the Balzan project situate itself amongst them?
First, comparative musicology. The predominantly ger man-language tradition of comparative musicology is still difficult to think with and about, entangled as it was with the colonial and evolutionist thinking of the early 20th century. The ethnomusicology of the 1950s rejected what it called ‘armchair ethnography’ and its historical schemes. It considered the treatment of living musical cultures as museum exhibits to be both methodologically and ethically unsound. Comparative musicology was more or less invisible and inaudible in my own ethnomusicology training, decades later. And yet many of the questions that preoccupy the broader field of musicology now – the place of knowledge about others in music pedagogy, imagining world music history in more inclusive terms, understanding the material underpinnings of music culture, and thinking both historically and experimentally about musical experience – might be said to be those of the comparative musicologists. Sensitive historical work on the comparative musicological tradition has been going on for some time, of course, giving non- ger man readers (for much of this is still untranslated) a sense of the vitality and diversity of this still rather neglected field. But it sometimes has the feel of special pleading, which underlines the more general state of neglect.2
If methodological and ethical questions still surround the colonial thinking of the comparative musicologists (evolutionist, kulturkreis, diffusionist, and so forth), and if these, rather simplistically, can be understood in terms of later 20th-century anxieties about modes of historicising that reduce living cultures to museum exhibits, their psychological investigations have fared rather better. For comparative musicology was defined, from the outset, by psychology’s status as the new master discipline and had something important to offer it: hard, empirical data. With the invention of the phonograph, and with the energies of the major phonograph archives – the Berlin Phonogram Archiv foremost amongst them – directed towards collecting, transcribing, and analysing music from around the world, scholars had data at their disposal to explore significant questions on the psychology of sense
Notes and queries on ‘global music history’ 5 perception. For example, how might feeling – specifically consonance and dissonance in the context of ‘tone-systems’ – be ‘measured’? How might the complex diffusions of its cultural patterns be explained? (Schneider, 1991).3
The questions posed by a cognitivist music psychology today are, naturally, quite different. However, the idea that music might provide illuminating and measurable empirical data in the pursuit of otherwise complex or intractable psychological issues – emotion, entrainment, and ‘interaction’ for instance – is still a lively one today (Clayton et al., 2013). So it would seem we are happy to revive the memory of the comparative musicological tradition to support musicology’s current cognitive and ‘empirical’ moment (Clarke and Cook, 2004). But we remain ambivalent, at best, about what the comparative musicological tradition had to say about music history.
We continue, then, to remember an important, if once discredited, intellectual scene in highly selective ways. There are some exceptions to this trend worth underlining. The figure of Robert Lachmann has stood out as one particularly sympathetic to modern ethnomusicology.4 Lachmann’s North African expertise, and his Jewishness, informed intense questions about the circulation of the synagogue traditions around the Mediterranean – a Mediterranean Lachmann saw in connective, rather than disjunctive, terms. Lachmann’s sensibility to world music history was one that insisted on the mutual entanglement of the Western and Mediterranean worlds. This vision of things became more and more anathema in Nazi ger many, of course. It pushed Lachmann, a trained Arabist, to the remote Mediterranean margins – in particular the island of Djerba, off the Tunisian coast. Here, the ethnographer felt he could identify the various layers of Tunisian Jewish historical experience in their music and begin to build up a much broader picture of the global circulation of synagogue traditions. For him, this was very much part of the story of ‘the West.’ Methodologically, Lachmann’s Djerba study might still be read as a model in how to listen, how to ask questions, and how to sift complex data in a field in which people have no traditions of writing and little, indeed, in the way of talking about music. It is a model of how one might patiently allow patterns to emerge and hypotheses to grow as the fieldwork process progresses (Lachmann, 1940). It might also be read as an example of highly localised ethnography saturated with global historical questions of a profoundly critical kind.
Lachmann was dismissed from his position at the Berlin National Library in 1935, and he died in Jerusalem in 1939. In his latter years, despite struggling to find a job, he managed to complete a series of recordings for the Palestine Broadcasting Service. His ‘Oriental Music Broadcasts’ were, in part, motivated by the pressing demands of the Zionist project at that particular moment – to imagine the conditions of an inclusive and flourishing musical culture in the Jewish state (Davis, 2013). In part it was also a more general exercise in comparativism, taking advantage of the remarkable conditions of immigration and settlement that prevailed there. The lectures that accompanied the broadcasts are in Lachmann’s characteristically concise and rigorous style, each of the ten dealing with a technical problem
of explanation, analysis, or contextualisation. Each revolves around a case study – ‘Liturgical songs of the Yemenite Jews,’ ‘Liturgical Cantillation and Songs of the Samaritans,’ ‘Men’s Songs for an Arab Village Wedding in Ce ntral Palestine,’ for example – and the case studies are explored comparatively, sometimes wide-ranging, sometimes more narrowly focused.
But his comparisons proceed from the idea that the recordings represent mobile, changing, and mutually influencing music cultures, not historically inert isolates, like pieces in a mosaic. Rebaba (the Arab bowed lute) playing by Bedouins, for instance, raises questions for Lachmann about the relationship of modality, singing, and instrument fingering, which sparks a comparison with gusle (the Balkan bowed lute) playing. A broader argument, reminiscent of Max Weber’s analysis of rationality in tonal systems, is adduced, in which ring finger fingering indicates a movement away from vocal mimesis, towards autonomous, rationalised, tonal design in rebaba performances. We might now query the idea that systemic autonomy and ‘rationality’ might always, qua Weber, be the logical terminus of such developments. But Lachmann assumes, importantly, that each of these ethnographic moments represented by the studio recordings captures, fleetingly, music in historical motion , motion that is recuperable through a variety of comparative, analytic, and ethnographic methods. Music, in other words, whose history connects with others.
The neglect of comparative musicology is unfortunate for two reasons. One is that exemplars, such as Lachmann, might still be learned from – if, arguably, there is still work to do in disentangling him from some of the pathos that currently clings to him5 and locating him in broader intellectual histories. The other is that this neglect has deepened a sense today that the historical and ethnographic traditions in music study are disjunct, separable. We tend to remember comparative musicology for its hands-on attitude towards living musical cultures – its recording, its archiving, its cross- cu ltural analysis, and, if somewhat cautiously, its psychological lines of inquiry. We prefer to forget, it seems, its historical methods, which are treated as though they can be separated from the things we remember more favourably. This creates problems for thinking through global histories of music, which I would argue, need to be simultaneously historical and ethnographic. At a more general level, it has contributed towards a distorted and extremely thin conception of what ethnography, itself, is.
Recent years have, indeed, seen the growth of the idea of ethnography as a specific and isolatable technique, one to be employed amongst or combined with others rather than, as it were, an all-encompassing method. For many now, it is understood to be little more than a question-and-answer technique for getting informants to tell us (as it were, ‘outsiders’) what they (as it were, ‘insiders’) know about the music culture in question. Understandably, such techniques are deemed incomplete and theoretically inadequate by critics, because all they provide us with are, inevitably, ideological constructions supplied by ‘insiders’ for their own complicated purposes.6 Ethnographic methods, thus
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What matter whether we emerge on one side of the pinhead or the other? The distance will be infinitesimal!”
What matter indeed! I clung to the conception. So simple, yet so vast! And suddenly there sprang before me a vision of our little earth back there, already invisible, circling its tiny orbit, a mere nothing in the cosmos of infinite nature. An electron! Less than that—the merest infinite particle of an electron.
This whole universe of stars, merely a cluster of tiny particles, clinging together to form an atom of something else! And trillions of such atoms making up the head of a pin, lying on someone’s bureau!
Dr. Weatherby’s voice quieted. “Suppose ultimately, we were to cross our atom and emerge in exactly the wrong direction. We would find no vastly great emptiness, but merely other atoms like our own, going downward, so to speak, into the pin’s head, instead of merging from it.
“But that cannot happen. Nature, in all its natural phenomena, always chooses the path of least resistance. We could not increase our velocity without adequate distance to transverse, nor increase our size without adequate emptiness to fill.
“You see! We may be going wrongly now. It makes no difference; the ultimate distance will be infinitesimal. But I know that by all natural laws we are seeking greater spaces. We will find, beyond these stars, an infinitely greater emptiness.
“Our size ultimately will fill it. But we will have turned to seek an emptiness still vaster, until, at last, freed from these clusters of substance which themselves are clinging together to form that pinhead, we will emerge.”
V
EMERGING FROM INFINITE SMALLNESS
Alice and I were sitting in the small round tower that projected some six feet above the top of the vehicle, near its forward end. Through the windows here—eight of them, and one above us—the huge, inverted black bowl of the heavens lay fully exposed.
Myriad swarms of stars were thick-strewn everywhere. Freed from the distortion of the earth’s atmosphere, they blazed like balls of molten fire: white, blue-white, yellow and red. Red giants and dwarfs, the old and the young, occasionally a comet with its millions of miles of crescent, fan-shaped tail.
Clusters of stars appeared, blended by distance: binaries, revolving one upon the other, multiple stars; single white-hot suns, blazing victorious with their maturity. And far off the spiral nebulae— patches of stardust, suns being born anew, or complete, separate universes. It was a glorious, awesome sight!
The red Elton Beta ray now preceded us. From here in the tower we could see it, flashing ahead like a dim searchlight beam. We had picked up velocity rapidly, had reached now some three hundred and sixty thousand miles a second, nearly twice the speed of light. Yet in all this scene, these whirling stars at which we were plunging, there was no visible movement. To an ant, crawling along a hillside ledge, the distant mountains seemed coming no nearer.
The dials showed our velocity to have reached very nearly one light-year per hour. No longer was it possible to use the unit of miles: our instruments showed now only light-years. Light travels 186,400 miles a second, and in our earthly year there are 31,536,000 seconds. A light-year, then—the distance light can speed in a year— represents 5,883,000,000,000 miles. This sum now was our smallest unit of measurement.
We were now 4.25 light-years from earth. Alpha Centauri, nearest of all the stars to earth at 4.35 light-years, loomed ahead of us. I stood at one of the forward windows regarding it. Two stars it is, in reality, for it is a binary.
Its components were beginning visually to separate now: two white blazing suns, millions of miles apart, slowly revolving upon a common center with a revolution that took thousands of years.
Yet, as I stood there, I fancied I could see them turning! We were heading directly for them; they were leaping up out of the void. There was a slow but visible movement throughout the firmament now. The stars in advance of us were opening up, spreading apart, drifting past our side windows, closing together again behind us. Dr. Weatherby was at my elbow.
“I shall keep away from Centauri,” he remarked. “And presently, we must go faster, Leonard.”
He went to his instrument table. The red Beta ray preceding us seemed to intensify a trifle; the firmament shifted slightly as our direction was altered. As I stood there, in ten minutes or so, the twin blazing suns of Alpha Centauri came up and swept past us.
I hastened to a side window to watch them. Blazing giants they were, floating off there a million miles away, each of them so large that our own huge sun would have been a match flame beside them.
But suddenly I wondered, blinked and stared with my breathing stopped by the shock of it. Were these indeed blazing giants a million miles off there? Or were they white points of fire a mile away? Abruptly my whole viewpoint changed. I saw these stars, all the blazing white points in the firmament, not as giant suns unfathomably distant, but only as small glowing eyes quite close.
These were gleaming eyes in a black night, gleaming eyes close around me. Eyes no larger than my own! Our vehicle . . . myself— gigantic! I realized it now. All this unfathomable distance around me had shrunk. I saw our giant vehicle floating very slowly, very sedately onward between the staring, crowding eyes.
Dr. Weatherby smiled when I told him. “It is all in the viewpoint, Leonard. In my computations I shall cling to the viewpoint of earth. Miles then light-years. Earthly standards of time, distance, and velocity. But shortly we shall have to abandon them entirely. Sit down, Leonard. I want to talk to you. Where is Dolores?”
“In the galley, I think,” I said, sitting down at the instrument table beside him.
“I don’t want Dolores to hear me. I’ve been wondering whether I should try and have her communicate again with the outside. It has been a month since we did that.”
This, almost more than any other aspect of our adventure, interested me. “Tell me about those thought communications, Dr Weatherby.”
“There is nothing else to tell. There seem to be two . . . shall we call them people? A young man and a girl. They are in dire distress.
The man is intelligent—more so than we are, I should judge. He was surprised to have us answer him.”
“Does he know where we are?”
“No, I think not. But when I told him, he seemed to understand. Dolores gets, not words, but ideas, which naturally she can only translate into our English words. But, Leonard, I do not conceive these beings will be physically of an aspect very different from ourselves. We are . . . so close to them.”
“Close!”
He smiled. “Quite close, Leonard. One of them might be holding us—our whole universe—on the palm of his hands. An inch from a thumb, a foot from his ear. I was thinking of that when I was trying to fathom the possible velocity of thought-waves. It’s all in the viewpoint. His thoughts would not have to travel far to reach us. His brain gives orders to his muscles in a fraction of a second over a far greater distance.”
The dials showed us to be ten thousand light-years from earth, our velocity fifty light-years an hour, when Dr. Weatherby called to us all to assemble in the instrument room. Days, or what would have been days on earth, had passed since we started.
I had lost all count, though upon Dr. Weatherby’s charts the relative time-values were recorded. We ate regularly, slept when we could.
Dr. Weatherby was tired, almost to the point of exhaustion, for though Jim, Alice and I alternated on watch in the tower, Dr. Weatherby remained almost constantly at his instrument table.
Ten thousand light-years from earth! But ahead of us the starpoints stretched unending.
Dr. Weatherby faced us. “We are not going fast enough. I have not dared, but now I must. I want you all to understand. I have had the red Beta ray at very nearly its weakest intensity. I am going to turn it on full, to the intensity I used for the model.
“There will be a shock, but only momentarily You, Leonard, go to the tower. If anything too large or too dense for safety seems coming at us, you can warn me.”
He smiled. “But we will encounter nothing of the sort, I am sure. I’ll sit here at the controls. The rest of you I suggest stay here with
me for a while.”
I went to the tower. Ahead of us was the faint stream of the red ray. The star-points were floating past us, opening to our advance, streaming past, overhead, to the sides, and beneath, and closing after us. Even with my greater viewpoint, the points of fire were passing swiftly now. Some were very near: they seemed like white sparks. I fancied I could have reached out and struck them aside with my hand.
Dr. Weatherby’s voice reached me as I sat in the tower. “Ready!”
I seemed to feel, or to hear, a hum, a trembling. I saw the Beta ray flashing ahead of us with a deeper, more intense red, but for a moment it reeled before my gaze. The nausea I had had at starting from earth recurred. I closed my eyes, but only momentarily, for the sickness passed as before.
Dr. Weatherby’s voice called to me, “All right, Leonard?”
“Yes,” I responded.
The scene outside my windows was a chaos: flashing points of fire. How could we avoid them? Showers of white sparks rushing at us. I tried to shout a warning, but instead I laughed with a touch of madness. Avoid them! Millions of them were already colliding with us! Sparks showering impotently against our sleek electrite sides.
And then I realized that these sparks, these stars, were passing through us! A steady, flashing stream of them. I could see their luminous white points beaming within the vehicle as the stream flowed through.
Stars no longer. Why, these were mere imponderable electrons! Some were dark, shining only by reflected light-worlds like our earth. But I knew they were not imponderable bodies passing through the density of our vehicle. The reverse.
It was we who were the less dense. Our vehicle comparatively was a puff of vapor, through which these tiny bodies were passing.
A stream of electricity, myriad electrons flowing through a copper wire, are not less dense than the wire. The electrons are the densities; imponderable, of a mass imperceptible, because they are infinitely small. But of a tremendous density; it is the wire which is ponderous.
So now with us, I sat bewildered, for how long I cannot say I heard at intervals Dr. Weatherby’s voice: “Light-years a hundred thousand. One million. Ten. One hundred million.”
We were a hundred million light-years from earth! The flashing points of fire continued to stream past. But there was a change, a thinning in advance of us; a clustering white radiance behind.
I sat motionless, tense. It might have been minutes, or an hour.
I found Dr. Weatherby beside me, and I turned to him. I was stiff, cramped and cold. I tried to smile. “We’re all right . . . still, Dr. Weatherby.”
“Look,” he said. “We’re beyond them.”
A darkness loomed ahead. To the sides the brilliant star-points seemed rushing together; clustering to form other, fewer white points. And the whole, sweeping backward into the seething radiance which lay behind us. Soon it was all back there, a shrinking white mist of fire; billions of seething particles of star dust shrinking together.
“Watch it, Leonard. It is our universe. Watch it go!”
We turned to the rear window. Everywhere now was empty blackness, except directly behind us. A silver mist hung back there in the void. It was dwindling. Then I saw it as a tiny, flattened, lensshaped silver disk. But only for an instant, for it was shrinking fast.
A lens-shaped disk! A point of white fire! A single faint star—a single entity! No . . . not a star; nothing but an electron!
For a breath I realized how near it was. A single tiny white spark, trembling outside our window. I could have pinched it with my thumb and finger.
It trembled, vanished into blackness.
A day passed, a day to us because we ate our meals, and slept. But to the worlds, universes outside our windows, congealing behind us into single points, winking and vanishing into an oblivion of space and time, this day of ours was an eternity
Our dials had long since become useless, a billion light-years from our starting point. A billion billion, and even that dwindling with our changing standards and viewpoint into a space we could have
held in our cupped hands. Of what use to try and measure it. Or even conceive it.
The black, empty firmament had only remained empty for a moment. Ahead and off to the sides other luminous points showed. For hours Dr. Weatherby and I sat together watching them.
There was a moment when a single star gleamed far ahead. But soon it was a spiral of whirling star dust. It spread to the sides as we leapt at it. And every myriad particle of it suddenly showed as a tiny swirling spiral mist of yet other particles.
They spread gigantic, each of them a nebula—a universe. One of them whirled directly through us, a white stream of tumbling radiant dust. Behind us it shrank again to a single point. And the billion other points shrank into one. And the one faded and was gone.
A night of this. Was our own universe an electron? I realized it could hardly have been that. Call it an intime. If we had encountered it now, it would have been too small for our sight. The tiniest swirling particle flashing through us now was composed of billions of universes as large as our own.
The night passed. We sat calmly eating our morning meal. The human mind adjusts itself so readily! Physical hunger is more tangible than the cosmos of the stars. Dr. Weatherby gestured toward the windows where the points of luminous mists momentarily were very remote.
“I should say that we . . . this vehicle is larger than any intime now. Possibly larger than electrons.
“Soon we will find ourselves among the atoms, and the molecules. There will then be a change. Very radical.
“A little more coffee, Alice, please. Presently I am going to try and erect our electro-telescope. Then I must get a little sleep.”
He seemed, indeed, upon the verge of exhaustion.
There was a slow change all that day. These glowing things we were passing—universes, stars, or electrons or intimes, call them what you will—they seemed now more uniform; those at a distance, more like opaque globules, gray. And they seemed almost solid and cold. Yet it was the illusion of distance only, for we passed through several of them—streams of white fire mist as always before.
At noon a black void of emptiness surrounded us. It was the longest, the most gigantic we had encountered, an hour of it.
Then again a point showed. It spread to the sides of us. But it was different. I could not say how. It was vague, gray. It streamed past, very distant on both sides and beneath us. At one moment I fancied it appeared as a distant, gigantic enveloping curtain, gray and vague. But then I thought it was a film of tiny globules, solid, entities, unradiant.
I called Dr. Weatherby. But before he arrived, the grayness had all slipped behind us. He saw it as a gray, formless blob. It congealed to a point. And then it vanished.
“That was an atom, Leonard,” he said. His voice had an excitement in it. “That was our first sight of anything of the new realm large enough to have an identity. Substance, Leonard! The substance of which our universe, our earth, is so infinitesimal a part. Everything we see now will be identical with it. The atoms! We are emerging!”
They aroused me from sleep some hours later, calling me excitedly. I found them all in the instrument room crowded around Dolores who was sitting on the couch, her hands pressed against her forehead. Jim cried; “She’s getting thought-waves, Len! Some one is communicating with her!”
Dr. Weatherby was murmuring, “What is it, Dolores? Do you get it clearer now?”
“Yes. Someone is thinking: We can see you! We see you coming!”
“Yes, Dolores. What else?”
“That’s all. We’re watching! We see you coming!”
Jim murmured in a low voice, “The man on the cliff! The young man and the girl in distress!”
Dolores shook her head. “No. This is someone else. Closer. Stronger. The thoughts are very strong.”
“Can’t you see anything, Dolores?” Dr. Weatherby touched her, shook her gently. “Try, child. Tell them to think about themselves.”
“I see—” she stopped, then stammered; “I see . . . a light. A very big light. There are people—”
“Men?”
“Yes. Men. Three or four of them. Sitting near a light. It shines so white. It hurts.” But she put her hand, not to her eyes but to her temple. “I’m thinking to them, Why can’t I see you? I want to see you! Wait. Now, I understand. He, someone thinks at me, Try your telescope! Haven’t you a telescope? Soon you will see us. We have seen you for a very long time.”
Alice blurted out, “How long, Dolores? Ask them that.”
“No,” commanded Dr. Weatherby. “That’s absurd. Dolores—”
But her hands had dropped from her forehead. “It’s gone. I’m tired. My head is tired.”
Jim drew me to the window. “Look there! I was on watch. When this began appearing I called everybody. But then suddenly Dolores began getting the thoughts.”
The scene outside was wholly changed. Beneath us, to the sides and ahead, a grayness stretched, a continuous solid grayness. Elusive, formless, colorless; I could not guess how distant it might be save that it stretched beyond the limits of my vision. But ahead and above us, the scene was not gray. A vague, luminous quality tinged the blackness up there. Luminous, as though a vague light were reflected.
There was no visible movement anywhere. But presently, as one staring at a great motionless cloud will see its shape is changing, I began to see changes. The flat gray solidity was not flat, but hugely convex. And it was slowly turning. Huge convolutions of it were, slowly as a cloud bank, taking new forms. And all of it was slowly moving backward.
Then we came to the end of it. Black emptiness ahead. Behind us was a gray-massed, globular cloud. Then another, its twin fellow, came rolling up beneath us in front, spread to the sides, shrank again behind us.
“Molecules,” said Dr. Weatherby. “See how they’re dwindling!”
I saw presently, swarms of them, always smaller. And ahead of us they seemed congealed into a gray solidity—a substance, it was passing beneath us, and to the sides.
Again quite unexpectedly, my viewpoint changed. I saw our vehicle plunging upward, its pointed bow held upward at an angle. A solidity was around us; to the sides, gray, smooth curtains; overhead a glow of white in a dead black void.
A black void? My heart leaped. That was not blackness up there above our bow! It was blue! Color! The first sight of color. A blue vista of distance, with light up there. Light and air!
Beside us the smooth gray walls were smooth no longer. Huge jagged rocks and boulders, a precipice! We seemed in some immense canyon, slowly floating upward. But it was a dwindling canyon. And then abruptly we emerged from it.
I saw its walls close together beneath us. An area of gray was down there; gray with a white light on it. The light made sharp inky shadows on a tumbling naked waste of rock.
The gray area was shrinking to a blob, a blob of gray shining in a brilliant light. Directly beneath us, stretching to the horizon on both sides, lay an undulating white level surface. The single blob of gray was down there on it. And off in the distance, where the surface seemed abruptly to end, gigantic blurs loomed into the blue sky.
Dr. Weatherby was calling me to the tower. I found him trembling with eagerness. “Leonard, I have the electro-telescope working. Look through it.”
I gazed first through the front and overhead tower windows. The white disk filled a perceptible area of the sky. But it was not like a sun; it seemed rather a smooth, flat disk with light behind it, a white disk with a dark narrow rim. Clear, cloudless sky was everywhere else. And very far away, behind and above the white disk, I saw a gigantic, formless, colorless shape towering into the blue of distance.
“Look through the telescope, Leonard.”
I gazed upward through the electro-telescope. Its condensing lens narrowed the whole gigantic scene into a small circular field of vision. I gasped. Wonderment, awe swept over me. The blue sky was the open space of a tremendously large room: I saw plainly its ceiling, floor and distant walls.
The giant shape was a man. He was bending forward over a table—the table was under me. The man’s hunched shoulders and peering face were above me.
For an instant my mind failed to grasp it all. I swung the telescope field downward, sidewise, and up again. And then at last I understood. This was a room, with men grouped at this nearer end of it around the table—men of human form, intent faces framed with long, white hair.
The undulating surface over which our vehicle was floating, was a slide of what seemed glass, a clear glass slide with a speck of gray rock lying in its center. And the white disk over us in the sky was the lower, small lens of the microscope through which these men were examining us!
VITHE NEW REALM
Twenty days! So full of strange impressions I scarcely know how to recount them. Yet, after such a trip, they were days of almost normality
Our vehicle beneath that microscope had grown rapidly in size. And with our expanding visual viewpoint, and the nearness of solid, motionless objects, its velocity seemed infinitely small. It barely floated past the microscope, settling to the floor of that huge room; and with a normal proportionate size, the Beta ray shut off, it came to rest.
They crowded around us—old men, loosely robed, and with flowing white hair, seamed, sooth, hairless faces, stern, but kindly, and eyes very bright and intelligent.
They crowded around us, at first timid, then friendly, talking together excitedly in a strange, liquid tongue.
Dr. Weatherby tried to greet them and to shake hands. They understood neither his words, nor the gesture. But in a moment they comprehended. And shook hands, all of them with each of us, very solemnly.
The room had oval openings for windows; light was outside but it seemed rather dim. Presently one of the men tried to herd us along the wall of the room.
“No!” said Dr. Weatherby. “Don’t go! We must stay in the vehicle!”
But when we turned toward it the men resisted us with a sudden stubborn force.
“Don’t!” I shouted. “Jim, stop that! We’d better go with them.” The old men seemed to have gone into a sudden panic of violence. They were pushing, shoving us. They obviously had little strength, but the commotion would draw others from outside.
We yielded, and they herded us down the long room. A panel slid aside. We crossed a long, narrow viaduct, a metallic bridge with high parapet sides. We seemed to be a hundred feet in the air
I caught a vista of low-roofed buildings: verdure—giant flowers on the roofs, streets down there, and off in the distance a line of hills.
The air was soft and pleasant. Overhead was a blue sky, with gay white masses of clouds. There seemed to be no sun. The light was stronger than twilight, but flat, shadowless.
At the opposite end of the viaduct the ground seemed rising like a hill. A small mound-shaped building was there: a house with a convex roof which had a leveled platform on one end, a platform banked with vivid flowers.
It seemed a two-storied building, built of smooth, dull-gray blocks. Balconies girdled it. There were windows, and a large, lower doorway, with a broad flight of circular stairs leading up the hill to it.
Our viaduct led us into the second floor of the house. We entered on a large room, an oval, two-storied room so that we found ourselves up on a sort of second-story platform, midway from floor to ceiling.
Low couches were here, a row of them with sliding panels of what might have been paper dividing them. The platform, this second story, was some thirty feet, broadly oval. It had a low, encircling railing; a spiral staircase led downward to the main floor of the apartment.
I saw furniture down there of strange, unnatural design, a metallic floor splashed with vivid mosaic pattern, a large gray frame, ornately carved, with a great number of long strips stretched across it, strings of different length. It seemed not unlike an enormous harp lying horizontal.
Narrow windows, draped with dark gauze, were up near the ceiling. They admitted a dim light. This whole interior was dim, cool and silent. A peace, a restfulness pervaded it. And our captors—if captors they were—seemed more like proud hosts. They were all smiling.
But when they left a moment later, I fancied that they barred the door after them.
“Well,” said Jim. “I can’t say but that this is very nice. Let’s look things over and then go to bed. I’m tired out, I can tell you that. Say, Dolores, it just occurred to me—these fellows can’t understand a word we say. But you were thinking thoughts to them a while ago, and you understood each other. Why don’t you try that now?”
It had occurred to me also. Why had these people understood Dolores’ thoughts, when her words were incomprehensible? Were thoughts, then, the universal language? Tiny vibrations which each human brain amplified, transformed into its own version of what we call words? It seemed so.
Dolores was clinging closely to Alice’s hand. In these unfamiliar surroundings she was at a loss to move alone.
“I did,” she answered Jim. “I tried . . . but there was so much noise. They could not hear me.”
“Try now,” said Dr. Weatherby.
“I will. I am.” She stood motionless, hands to her forehead.
There was a long silence. Then she said, “I think . . . yes, someone thought to me, The Man of Language will come to you.”
“Is that all, Dolores?”
“Yes. That’s all. It’s gone.”
“The Man of Language!” Jim exclaimed. “An interpreter! Dolores, what about that young man and girl who were in distress? They were out here, weren’t they?”
“I don’t know. I never get their thoughts now.”
“Try.”
“I have tried. They may get mine. I can’t say But they never answer.”
They brought us food, meals at intervals, strange food which now I shall not attempt to describe. But we found it palatable; soon we grew to like it.
Then a man came, whom afterward we learned to call the Man of Language. He wore a single garment, a queerly flaring robe, beneath which his naked legs showed.
His face was smooth, hairless. But the hair on his head was luxuriant. His head, upon a stringy neck, was large, with a queer distended look, and with veins bulging upon his forehead.
Yet withal, he was not grotesque. A dignity sat upon him. His dark eyes were extraordinarily brilliant and restless. His smile of thin, pale lips was kindly, friendly. He shook hands with each of us. But he did not speak at first. He sat among us, with those restless eyes regarding, observing our every detail.
We soon found he knew no word of our language. He had come to learn it, to have us teach it to him. We were made aware, later, that all these people, compared to ourselves, had memories extraordinarily retentive. But this man, he called himself Ren, was even for them, exceptional. His vocation was to learn, and to remember.
He began with simple objects: eyes, nose, and mouth. Hands, a table, a bed. As though he were a child, we pointed out our eyes, and named them; one eye, two eyes, a finger, two, three, four fingers.
It seemed like a game. When we told him once, it was never forgotten. But it was a game which to us, even under such conditions, soon became irksome. We were impatient. There was so much we wanted to know. And though we never tried to leave this building in which we were housed, it was obvious we were virtual prisoners.
Ren came after every time of sleep. He stayed hours; his patience, his persistence were inexhaustable. We took turns with him, each of us for an hour or two at a time. Occasionally Dolores would try to make something clear by thinking it. It helped. But he did not like it. It was necessary for him virtually to go into a trance before he could receive Dolores’ thoughts.
Gradually Ren was talking to us, broken sentences at first, then with a flow surprisingly voluble. He used queerly precise phrases, occasionally a sentence inverted; and with a strange accent of pronunciation indescribable.
We had tried to question him when first he could talk. But he avoided telling us anything we wanted to know, save that once, at Dr. Weatherby’s insistence, he assured us that our vehicle was safe. And that the small fragment of rock beneath the microscope—that tiny gray speck which held our universes, our earth—was under guard so that no harm could come to it.
This was a city, the capital, the head city of a nation. Its people had lived here on this globe since the dawn of their history, ascended from the beasts which even now roamed the air, the caves, forests, and the sea.
Ren smiled at us. “You too,” he said. “I can realize you are of an origin the same.”
He did indeed think we were of a human type very primitive. The men of science who had seen us coming out of infinite smallness beneath their microscope, had remarked on it.
The small protuberance in the corner of our eyes, the remains of the beasts’ third eyelid, the shape of our heads, our almost pointed ears—I noticed that his own were very nearly circular—our harsh voices, our thick, stocky, muscular bodies were indications that they remarked on.
We discussed it. But Jim interrupted. “How did your men of science know that we were coming out of that piece of gray rock?”
It had been partly by chance. The fragment of rock had been a portion of the interior wall of a room wherein scientific experiments were being made. Ren used our words, “Experiments in physics and chemistry.”
One of the scientists had found himself receiving strange thought-waves. Ren described them. They were Dolores’ thoughts. The scientist traced them with measuring instruments to the wall of the room, but could be no more exact than that.
Then, later, from a tiny protuberance of the wall, a glow was observed. It proved to be a sudden radio-activity; this protuberance of gray stone had become radiant. Electrons were streaming off from it. The scientists chipped it off the huge block of stone of which it was so small a part, and put it under a microscope. It was violently radioactive. And from it they observed a stream of red.
“Our Beta ray,” Dr Weatherby exclaimed. “Our voyage, the disturbance we set up made the substance give off its electrons.”
“Yes,” nodded Ren. “They think so. They examined it beneath the lens, and after a little while they saw you.”
Alice said, “My sister was getting thoughts from here.” She told him about the mysterious young man and girl, threatened by some unknown danger, a strange cliff, the young couple at bay upon a ledge, the valley beneath them filled with a nameless horror.
Ren’s face clouded. “Yes. We have had thoughts from them. But now the thoughts have stopped. Those two are the children of our ruler. You would call him our king? They are the young prince and his sister, the princess.
“A year ago they both disappeared. A year, that is ten times daylight and darkness. We did not know why they went, or where. Run away, or perhaps stolen from us, for our king is very old and of health quite bad. Soon the prince will be king.
“But they disappeared. There is a very . . . a horrible savage people in the forests beyond the great caves. You spoke it truly, my lady Alice. They are a nameless horror; we do not often speak of things like that. We fear our prince and princess may be there.
“And here at home there is a growing trouble as well. Our women, the young girls particularly, are very restless and aggrieved. They do not like their lot in life. Some already are in rebellion.
“On the great island is a colony of virgins, where no man may go. We thought . . . we hope that perhaps the virgins had stolen our prince and princess, to hold them as hostages that we may be forced to yield to the virgins’ cause.”
“The prince and the princess stolen,” Jim exclaimed, “and you’ve done nothing about it?”
Ren smiled gently. “We have done a great deal, but to no purpose has it been as yet. We got the prince’s thoughts. He was asking us for help. But he would not say what threatened, and he could not say where he was, for he did not know. And then the thoughts suddenly stopped.
“Oh yes, we have searched. The island of the virgins was invaded. But the virgins—indeed no woman of our nation—will admit
knowing anything of our prince. We have organized an army All the nearer forests have been searched. And now we are getting ready to invade the caves. But it is not easy to get men for our army. That nameless horror—”
His voice held an intonation almost gruesome. He changed the subject abruptly.
“Our king, very shortly now he will want to see you. He feels, perhaps, you can aid us. You men, of strength, and these two young women—they might perhaps be of assistance in dealing with our virgins. But you will have to be examined, your minds gauged, so we may know if your oath of allegiance is honorable.”
“By the infernal, mine will be!” Jim exclaimed. “I’ll go with your army to the caves, nameless horror, or not.”
Jim, with Ren, later joined me. And then Dr. Weatherby approached. “Where are the girls?” he asked.
They were in another part of the building. I noticed Dr. Weatherby gazing downstairs with a furtive air, as though he had come here to join us, knowing the girls were not here, and not wanting them around.
Jim was saying, “You think, Ren, that tomorrow—I mean after our next sleep—that the king will want to see us?”
“Yes,” answered Ren. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
“When we’ve taken the oath,” Jim added, “they’ll let us out of here, won’t they. If we’re going to join your army.”
Dr. Weatherby sat down among us. He said to Ren, “You spoke of your king being in ill-health. Do you have much sickness, much disease, here?”
“No,” replied the old man. “Our climate is healthy. Our people have always been so. There is very little—”
“I mean . . . perhaps you have doctors, men of medicine, who are quite skillful?”
“Yes. There are such. In the past they have been very learned. The records of our history—”
“And surgeons, perhaps, very skillful surgeons?” Dr. Weatherby was leaning forward; his hands, locked in his lap, were trembling.
Ren said abruptly, “What do you mean?”
“I mean . . my granddaughter, Dolores, she is blind.”
The man nodded gravely. “That is so. It is very sorrowful. I have seen others here. It is a terrible affliction.”
“But your surgeons, Ren. I have dared hope that she might be cured.”
There was a moment of breathless silence. A pity for Dr. Weatherby swept me. Ren would shake his head: he would say, “No, she cannot.”
But he said, “Why, it could of course be done.”
“There is the question of an eye available.”
“You mean you wonder about a transfer. It is strange, but even though we are so different,” Ren said, “our eyes are identical in structure.”
Dr. Weatherby went into further details concerning the complications of Dolores’ blindness, but Ren shrugged away its import. “It can be done,” he repeated. “And there is a man who will give us the missing link. Loro, a criminal who must die. He is repentant now. At his trials he pleaded that he might live long enough to expiate his crimes.
“Loro will volunteer. I know it.”
VII
THE SACRIFICE
“Are you sure she will see when they take the bandages off?”
“I think she will, Alice. They say she will.”
“But we don’t know. I wish she’d awaken. We can take the bandage off then, can’t we?”
“Yes. Dr. Weatherby will do it.”
Alice tip-toed across the room and back. “She’s still asleep. I wish she’d awaken. Will it have to be as dim as this in here?”
“Yes, I think so. Dimmer, maybe. They’re afraid of the first light for her.”
The intricate, deeply involved operation had evidently created a widespread interest throughout the city Surgeons had come,
examined Dolores, held innumerable conferences, examined Loro, whose eyes, as they had suspected, could be used with perfect satisfaction. They anticipated there would be no difficulties. This was their decision after their final conference: they were capable of giving sight to Dolores.
We had not yet been out for our audience with the king. Nothing more had been said concerning it; the operation had become allabsorbing to everyone. The city quite obviously was in an excitement over it, an excitement only surpassed by our own publicly unexplained presence.
They had taken little Dolores up to our roof-top, where, from below, a curious throng gazed up at her. And then taken Loro. I heard the wild cheering.
I had wondered why they would not take one eye only, that each might see. But they had told me that it was impossible. In this instance, a lone one transplanted could not survive. There were technical, deeply medical reasons for this. I did not pry into these.
Then they brought Dolores back. Her eyes were bandaged.
Hours passed. The healing fluid they said was very swift. When Dolores awoke we could remove the bandages. Alice and I sat together.
Dr. Weatherby entered with Jim. Behind them, lingering near the doorway, was the chief surgeon who had performed the operation. He said softly, “You can awaken her. A little less light. Then you can take the bandages off.”
We awakened her gently. She sat up weakly, in bewilderment. “Oh, the bandage, yes, I remember now. They told me it was over. I was all right. And then I went to sleep.”
We gathered around her. A flat gray twilight was in the room. Dolores sat in the bed. Her long, dark tresses fell forward over her white shoulders.
My breath came fast. To see the light, form, color, the world, for the first time!
Very slowly, gently, Dr. Weatherby unwound the bandages. They dropped from his trembling hands to the bed.
“Now, Dolores, open your eyes, just a little.”
The dark lashes on her cheeks fluttered up, and closed instantly against the light. She could see!
Her eyes opened again, timidly, fearfully. But they stayed open, glorious dark eyes, luminous, eyes that were seeing! Eyes with light in them.
They opened very wide. Surprised, wondering!
“I see! I see!” There were no words to express her emotion. Just surprise and awe surging in her voice, stamped on her face. “I see! Jim, is that you, Jim? Why, that’s Jim I see!” Her hand went to her eyes as though to clear a blurring vision. “That must be Jim. Come here, Jim. I want to see you closer.”
He fell on his knees beside the bed, and her hands went to his shoulders, his face, his hair.
“Jim, it is you! It looks like you!”
“When do you suppose this king will see us, Len?” Jim asked. “How is Loro?”
“Oh, you weren’t here when Ren told us. More to it than he said, of course but that’s none of our business and we’re not going to make it our business. It was the end for Loro. It must have been planned that way.”
“I surmised as much. It’s pretty tough. At least he carried out his last wish and was able to make atonement for his crime by giving Dolores her sight. Now to our problem: I wish the king would see us. What did Ren say about that?”
I understood that our audience would be at any time. Ren was to let us know. Dolores had again fallen asleep. From where Jim and I sat I could see her bed, with Dr. Weatherby sitting there beside her.
Jim said, “When we once see the king and get out of here, things will look different. Why’s the old doc sitting there so long? He acted queer to me, Len. Did you see his face when he knew that Dolores was cured?”
I never answered the question. We heard a sound from in there, a choking cry, and saw Dr. Weatherby with a hand clutching his throat.
“Len, what the infernal—”
