Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first book to situate non-Western music within the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain. It covers many crucial issues -- race, orientalism, otherness, evolution -- and explores the influence of important anthropological theories on the perception of non-Western music. The book also considers a wide range of other writings of the period, from psychology and travel literature to musicology and theories of musical transcription, and it reflects on the historically problematic term "ethnomusicology." Representing Non-Western Music discusses such theories as noble simplicity, monogenism and polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, and developmentalism. Zon looks at the effect of evolutionism on the musical press, general music histories, and histories of national music. He also treats the work of Charles Samuel Myers, the first Britain to record non-Western music in the field, and explores how A. H. Fox Strangways used contemporary translation theory as an analogy for transcription in The Music of Hindostan (1914) to show that individuality can be retained by embracing foreign elements rather than adapting them to Western musical style.