Ruminations about a Timely Book

 

 

Luis Velasco-Pufleau, et Laëtitia Atlan-Duault (eds.). Lieux de mémoire sonore. Des sons pour survivre, des sons pour tuer. Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2021.

 

This is a book worth reading. Like all collective works it is nearly impossible, within the space allowed for a review, to describe and do justice to each single contribution; especially so, and this is precisely the case when they bring to the fore a range of complex issues. I will therefore: a) explain the scholarly context the book belongs to and, b) indicate what I believe there is primarily to gain in reading it.

 

No doubt, this publication should appeal to a wide readership: as a matter of fact, to everyone interested in how music, and sonic activities at large, interact with social life; particularly in contexts where exclusion, discrimination and violence are exerted. I wish it were widely read by denizens of music conservatories, but precisely that is the milieu where it is less likely to find much of an audience. The reason is, that conservatories stubbornly cling to what Françoise Meltzer once called “vestigial romantic attitudes” (Meltzer 1994). She indicates that a pseudo-Romantic worldview, by now mature to be dismissed as a mere historical relic. By following this view, musical works are believed to be significant “in” and “of themselves”, and capable of retaining their import anywhere, always – which is a most a-social, non-social and anti-social aesthetic outlook, if there ever was one. This mantra, unfortunately, couples with the fallacy of considering music the “universal language of mankind”, so pure and noble as to soothe enmities and conflicts, and bring people together: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. Well, this book under review, belongs to a line of scholarship showing precisely how the contrary is true (the reader can find more about it in the bibliographies appended to each chapter, and in the references I include here below). Let me put it clearly: everyone who ever took a course in Ethnomusicology knows full well how music is: a) no universal language at all, b) a form of behavior equally apt to unite people as well as to divide them and make them enemies and c) a form of sonic behaviour that may even at times help people survive. To the best of my knowledge, it was Gilbert Rouget who first strongly described the relationship between musicking and survival (Rouget 2004).

 

Luis Velasco-Pufleau, and Laëtitia Atlani-Duault, wrote the introduction four-hands, and put together eleven case studies focusing on diverse geographic locales and applying different approaches. It all amounts to a publication which, as far as I know, is the first wide-angle treatment appearing in French of how human sonic activities participate in both good and evil. Its sixteen authors are for the most part ethnomusicologists (Eckehard Pistrick, Fernando Garlin Politis, Monika Stern, Helena Simonett, Luis Velasco-Pufleau). Others come from English literature (Katie Harling-Lee, Maria Ristani), anthropology (Kathy Nguyen, Nicolas Puig), political science (Abi Nur), information science (Émilie Da Lage), and psychology (Élise Bourgeois-Guérin). Such an array of different fields of intellectual endevour bears in itself a testimony to how multi-faceted the social entanglements of music-making are; entanglements that justify intervention by the sciences of man at large to be clarified.

 

The variety of themes and sub-themes intertwining throughout the book is considerable. It is a challenge to bring them all into the general picture. But the introduction helps contextualize them, as it both explains and expands upon the intriguing title, Lieux de mémoire sonore (possibly translatable into English as “memory-charged sonic locations”). This is a concept meant to highlight the extent to which memories essential to our identity have to do with sounds and the location where sounds were experienced. To put it another way, sounds are important elements of the experiences that make us what we are, and of where we became what we are. The subtitle of the book anticipates the headings of the two large sections it consists of: “Sound and silence as weapons”, “Sound and music as instruments for survival”. It is therefore evident, on the one hand, what a great platform this publication can be for stimulating discussion in interdisciplinary contexts. The general reader, on the other, will more simply bring home the realization that sonic events, even the most endearingly “musical” among them, are not necessarily “noble”, and actually may at times carry quite “ignoble” ideological connotations. That is after all what the ancients Greeks used to believe: that music is a true pharmakon, that is, something we can used to cure, as well as to cause sickness and death. 

 

All essays bring up issues we feel strongly about at this particular moment of our history. Years from now it will be fascinating to have such a picture of what some of were the most acutely felt social problems at the beginning of the XXI century.

 

Four contributions focus on prisons and refugee camps (Maria Ristani, Nicolas Puig, Eckehart Pistrick, Helena Simonett). Robert Lach, the founder of comparative musicology in Austria, comes to mind in this connection. He, for the first time, conducted research in a prison camp (Lach 1926). Regretfully, he regarded prisoners as mere “human materials”, useful in so far as their memory could yield folk tunes of ethnographic interest. On the contrary, our authors deal with the existential problems of people living in conditions of extreme duress and, by paying attention to their sonic behavior, examine survival strategies, and even processes that may help retain or reconstruct identities and self-esteem severely damaged by circumstances.

 

Two other essays focus on songs of humanitarian import (Abi Nur, Monika Stern and Jean-Pierre Sam). Here we draw a sense of how long-reaching the impulse released by politically engaged songs at the time of the folk music revival during the second half of the XX century. Its impact is still felt today, largely unabated. In more than one respect all of this, which is today the focus of applied ethnomusicology, inevitably brings back memories to those who lived through the 1968 years of how music intertwined with political strife. 

One essay discusses the re-documentation of pre-1975 music in Viet-Nam (Kathy Nguyen). Once again, a relevant topic as in this specific case, as well as in many others, re-documentation of a repertoire made with the knowledge gained through historical perspective, yields a better understanding of what it meant at the time it flourished.
Two essays are about music in exile (Émilie Da Lage and Beshwar Hassan, Élise Bourgeois-Guérin et Calire Lyke). That is a theme that is finally receiving the attention it deserves and is beginning to appear in papers presented at international conferences. We are learning how to comprehend the existential experience of exile, it is crucial to consider what music people remember of their past, what music their memory lets slip away, what is remembered, and what people prefer to forget and, also, of course, what music encountered in the new environment they become attached to. I would suggest reading these two chapters in conjunction with John Lorne Campbell, Music Remembered in Exile (Campbell 1990). One essay, finally, about listening practices helping people to move on with their lives (Katie-Harling-Lee). Suppose one wishes to compare the socially rooted focus of all these essays with the approach of a historical musicologist who can never renounce the idea that musical sound is “per se” significant. In that case, one can peruse, for instance, Gerhard Kilger’s book titled Macht Musik - Musik als Glück und Nutzen für das Leben. (Kilger 2006).  

 

In this connection, it is appropriate to notice how often the editors use the words “sound” and “sonic”, and appropriately so. The word “music” appears today often inadequate for serious scholarly discourse. On the one hand, it is undefinable: no definition exists, valid for all cultures and all periods of their history. Perhaps more importantly, most languages do not even have a word whose meaning even approximates the fuzzy concept evoked in the West by the term “music”. Its connection with the late romantic myths about art functions as a smoke screen that makes it unnecessarily hard to discern aspects of reality that would otherwise be easily visible. Hence the usefulness to take into consideration “intentional”, as well as “unintentional” sonic events (however “musical” or “unmusical” they may appear from any given point of view) - silence and noise included. 


As I consider what this book offers and the line of research that brought the authors to produce it, it becomes apparent how the social sciences dealing with music are progressing to the point where they will soon have to address a few big questions still looking for an answer. Yes, we learned that music may help consolidate ethnic sentiments, memorialize victims and heroes of ethnic conflict, and assert control by more or less violent means over ethnicized urban spaces. But why, when that happens people attach emotional and symbolic value only to a specific kind of sonic configuration and not to the so many others possible and available. Another is the extent to which sonic behaviour and selective memory can be used as an indicator of social adjustment and integration, as some have indicated (Linda Barwick, Marcello Sorce Keller 2012). Another still is the question of why sonic behavior can be divisive as religions are, and the two so easily get together and become functional to war - revolution and war are unlikely to ever be silent affairs (Pettan 1998; Longinovich 2000; O' Connell, John Morgan and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco 2010). Sonic behavior, some may be surprised, can even effectively mix with and support criminal activities (Johnson 2008; Plastino 2014).

 

In conclusion, the message to retain can be expressed as follows: sonic actions always articulate the values and attitudes of a specific social group, large or small, powerful or powerless. Through them, whether we are aware of it or not, people inevitably manifest, exhibit, and even at times advertise, our sense of belonging to a given culture, nation, ethnic group, or social milieu (Glasser 1995; Jarman 1997). Through organized sound we make it clear to ourselves who we are, or at least who we think we are, or think we should be, or at least what we wish to appear. That is why sonic activities (whether considered “musical” or not can never exert universal appeal. “Humanly organized sound” – the expression John Blacking made popular back in the 1970s – attracts symbolic and ideological connotations like a powerful magnet (why that is so is one more puzzle to solve) and is, inevitably, made for someone specific and to exclude someone else – always – everywhere.

 

 

BIBLIO

Barwick, Linda and Marcello Sorce Keller (eds.), Out of Place and Time: Italian and           Australian Perspectives on Italian Music in Australia, Lyrebird, Melbourne, 2012.

Brenner, Helmuth. 1992. Musik als Waffe? Theorie und Praxis der politischen  
         Musikverwendung, dargestellt am Beispiel der Steiermark 1938–1945. Graz:
          Herbert-Weishaupt-Verlag.
Campbell, John Lorne. Music Remembered in Exile. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University           Press, 1990.

 

Glasser, Ruth. My Music is My Flag, Los Angeles: University of California, 1995.
 Jarman, Neil. Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland   
        (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997)
 Johnson, Bruce. Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Farham: Ashgate,           Popular and Folk Music Series, 2008.
 Kilger, Gerhard (Ed.). Macht Musik - Musik als Glück und Nutzen für das Leben. Köln:           Wienand Verlag, 2006.
Lach, Robert. Gesänge russischer Kriegsgefangener. 3 vols. Wien, Hölder-Pichler-
          Tempsky, 1926-1952.
 Longinovic, Tomislav. “Music Wars: Blood and Song at the End of Yugoslavia,” in
          Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman           (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 622-43.
Meltzer, Françoise. Hot Property - The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality,
          University of Chicago Press, 1994, -p-
O' Connell, John Morgan and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (eds.). Music and
         Conflict. Champaign and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
 Pettan, Svanibor (ed.), Music, Politics and War: Views from Croatia. Zagreb: Institut of           Ethnography and Folklore Research, 1998.
 Plastino, Goffredo. Cosa nostra social club. Mafia, malavita e musica in Italia. Milano:  
          Il Saggiatore, 2014.
Rouget, Gilbert. “L’efficacité musicale: musiquer pour survivre. Le cas des Pygmées”.           L’Homme, 2004, no.171-72, 27-52 (English translation in Yearbook of Traditional           Music, 43. 89-121)