The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology

Abstract

According to Philip Bohlman, “national music reflects the image of the nation so that those living in the nation recognize themselves in basic but crucial ways. It is music conceived in the image of the nation that is created through efforts to represent something quintessential about the nation” (Bohlman 2004, 82–3). Like all nations, Britain conceived of music in its own image, whether indigenous or foreign, and while the British Empire expanded from the seventeenth century onward, so too did its characterization of its own, and the world’s, national music. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this characterization was premised on an early anthropological model called developmentalism, but, from that time forward, evolutionary models increasingly challenged its hegemonic position. This chapter explores the relationship between anthropological theory and the representation of non-Western music from the heyday of the British Empire to its decline after World War I. It sets the scene by tracing the often-fraught history of anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism, highlighting important developmental paradigms, such as monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, and slightly later the evolutionary models of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. It then situates these developmental and evolutionary templates with contemporary representations of world musics, providing in fine a suggested explanation for their adoption and abandonment.