Authentic Choral Cultural Music vs. “In the Style Of”

     Amoung the western classical ensembles, that is orchestras, bands, and choirs, the world music or cultural music movement has been most deeply felt amongst choirs. There are many reasons for this, the primary one most likely being that the there are appealing songs from many cultures and there are so many choral singers in the world that cultural musics becoming part of the repertoire was probably a forgone conclusion. Folk song arrangements have long been a favourite part of the literature. Still, approaching any song that is not in the Western canon or of a Western musical tradition always involves some special considerations.

     Recently, there have been a large of number of choral works appearing on festival repertory lists that sound “ethnic.” Sometimes they have nonsense texts, but often they have real texts from a non-Western or non-Western-classical tradition. Only, in some of these cases the music is newly composed “in the style of” by a choral arranger. Some, through marketing and wording of preamble materials, attempt to pass themselves off as authentic cultural works, others make no such attempt. These kinds of pieces are being composed as they fill a vacuum between musicians’ desire to perform cultural works and the ability of the publishing companies to provide arrangements or compositions to fill that niche. As a scholar and performer I am deeply suspicious of such works — I tend not to program them for my own groups. But, I understand why a composer would create them. What do we accomplish by rehearsing and performing these works. Are we exposing singers to cultural musics, challenging them with unfamiliar systems, inspiring them with a new window on our world? Or, something else? What?

With newly composed works “in the style of” we run no risk of showing disrespect as we need not strive for cultural authenticity. We simply need to do what is written down in the score. This seems easy enough. But, does programming such works give our singers and audiences the kind of experience they can have with authentic cultural musics? The questions that cultural music performance demands of us is more valuable than the inadequate and rationalized answers we most often generate. It is valuable  to ask ourselves what the music itself is about, why a group of people might have kept singing such a piece, and what it means to share in the experience of singing that piece even if final answers seem trivial or less than insightful. It is the inquiry process itself that reveals the value of striving for authenticity. 

Cultural music performance is a bit about stylistic signifiers (rhythms, modes, scales, articulations), but it is much more about our relationship to others who have carried this music through time and experience. With each person that takes up a piece of music, the piece grows and changes. The remarkable thing is that as we are changing the piece — altering it, arranging it for a Western choir, using our training to communicate it — the piece is also changing us. Cultural music is a remarkable opportunity for transformative experience. Music written “in the style of” is merely a shadow of its cultural originator or inspiration. Some of these works are indeed creative and inspired. This makes me think they should and can be performed effectively. But, a deep opportunity to connect with others through more authentic music is simply not available through such works.

Choral singers love learning and singing cultural musics (think of how beloved the Spiritual has become). Singing songs that were passed down through generations as comfort songs, freedom songs, or even lullabies invites us into a deeper experience and exploration of what it is to be human.

We are mysteries to ourselves. Much of what we are defies our understanding. Music helps us towards something of an understanding, an experience, perhaps a sharing of a piece of the human puzzle. Singing cultural musics, even the attempt, represents an invitation towards connection and sharing across temporal, political, and geographic boundaries with those “others” who also loved to sing. 

Representing Cultures? or Experience?

Western musicians throughout history has tried to represent other cultures within their own style of music. Examples include Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, Debussy’s use of pentatonics, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin, and many hybridized “cross over” songs from world music and pop labels. Artists wrestle with questions of how they are to represent other cultural musics, or systems within their works. If a composer simply copies or imitates certain musical idiosyncrasies, the result is often unsatisfactory, perhaps with the quality of kitsch (in tacky or poor taste). Even when attempted by master artists the “foreign” elements lend a sense of exoticism to the work. There is a strong sense of “other,” which may be exactly what the composer wishes.

There is another approach to which I often ascribe. That is, don’t imitate at all. Instead, in working in cross-cultural musics, instead look to human experience. If one is writing a song about say, Japanese Internment during World War II in Canada, and assuming one has done their research, one might be tempted to “imitate” a type of music modern Westerners associate with the exoticism of Japan (hints at gagaku and perhaps a koto arpeggiation). But, that music has very little to do with the experience of those who were interned (but perhaps a lot to do with why the government carried out that unspeakable act in the first place). It is always possible to ground experience-informed musical works with one style or system, perhaps a system most appropriate to the composer, the performance medium (Western choral? Orchestral? Rock?). In the case of those who experienced the internment, their musical environment was almost identical to that of everyone in their neighbourhoods at the time. There were cultural differences and the visible difference of race. In a musical work, those issues may be best dealt with through language, and not by trying to adopt a pseudo-Japanese music idiom.

Of course, one of the joys of working in cross-cultural musics are all those wonderful sounds! So what do you use and what do you not use? What is authentic and what is kitsch? How does one show respect for a culture in a cross-cultural work? How does one show disrespect? I’ll tackle those in the next few blog entries!

Authenticity I: On Performance Practice

Musics from all over the globe bombard us daily. They range from European classical, Cape Breton folk, to Chinese pop (Cantonese and Mandarin), from punk to Jamaican Reggae, and beyond. In music performance circles — acapella groups, choirs, rock bands, etc. — authenticity comes up a lot especially when working with cultural musics. There are  unsettling questions. Is it important to perform cultural music in an authentic manner? Is such a thing even possible? What does it mean to be ‘authentic’? What is Cuban about Afro-Cuban music? What does it mean to be authentic in shakuhachi’s honkyoku (original melodies)? Can a non-Native American play Native American flute authentically? Is authenticity related to genetics, culture, belief (a real issue in church music)?

For the past several decades, Western music scholarship engaged in a field of musical study called “performance practice” also referred to as “historical performance practice.” Performance practice is an approach to music that says, “Authenticity depends on ‘the original.’ The closer we perform something to the ‘original’ the more authentic the performance.”

Out of this approach came performances with historical (“original”) instruments, rethinking on ways that musics were sung or played, new notions of tempi (the metronome didn’t exist prior to Beethoven’s works), and research in many other aspects of music from the perspective of performance practice. (What was the original version like? What did it sound like?) The strength of this approach is that it recognizes music as part of a larger context — cultural, historical, technological. Its weakness is that it provides a narrow definition of authenticity not necessarily shared by all musical cultures. Performance practice ignores a basic fact of cultural musical development, that musics are lost and rediscovered, reimagined, and reconstructed in each generation. The “original” version is not necessarily the most authentic, desirable, or most satisfactory. Why? Because musical traditions are “living traditions” whether or not we see them that way or educate our musicians to treat them as such. Western classical musicians are trained in “conservatories” designed around the idea that music is to be conserved or preserved. This is a strongly held notion in Western classical music and completely at odds with the perspective in Western popular music where originality and novelty are valued above historical or stylistic execution.

Musics of many cultures (including many European ones) do not have a “performance practice.” Applying the approach of performance practice to another type of music doesn’t necessarily result in authenticity in practice or performance. Even if one applies the concept of “playing the music as the original was played” strictly to say, the works of J.S. Bach, one quickly gets into a bit of trouble. Bach was a church musician. His works were handed out often just before the service to the choir and orchestra, who had to read from his handwritten manuscript. We know from pay records he seldom had adequate vocal and instrumental forces present. There were no doubt, many notes and rhythms missed or played wrongly, and many of the more difficult scores (those of us who perform Bach know that almost every score is difficult) were surely a muttle. So, to perform Bach as he performed it does necessarily result in what we think of today as satisfactory performance. The discussion after this realization gets into what would Bach want his music to sound like (intentions of the composer). This, taken too far, can venture into the realm of the ridiculous, “If Mozart had access to a synthesizer he would have surely . . . ”

With regard to the singing of songs from certain African cultures performers have told me, “That’s how ‘they’ sound! Shouldn’t we sound that way?” It’s a good question. If we are to be authentic in our musical performances how should we sound? What should we sound like? It’s helpful in these cases to reverse the roles. Instead of North Americans trying to sound more “African”, picture instead a Kenyan choir (kwaya) visiting Canada. They get to hear one or two pretty good Canadian choirs, but that is their entire impression and they proceed to try and recreate all North American pieces based on what they heard during their visit. Is this authentic or merely imitative? Or stated another way, does imitation result in authenticity? Would such a result be satisfactory? What kind of experience might it yield? What would we North Americans think of a Kenyan choir doing a poor imitation of us while singing the works of Healy Willan or William Billings? I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m fairly sure many of us would find such a performance to be bizarre at best.

So, where do we go from here? Well, like a lot of things in our multicultural world, the answer is complex — just as people and cultures themselves are seldom simple. The answer involves the perspective of individuals, communal agreements, politics and policies, economics, and more. After this confusing post you are probably asking yourself, “Is it possible to be authentic in adapting or performing cultural music?” Be cheered good reader, the answer is a definitive “yes.”

Identity and Music

That music and identity go hand in hand In today’s individualistic and multicultural world comes as no surprise. All around us people are “plugged in” listening to their iPods. What are they listening to? Most of them would say that they are listen to “their music.” Or perhaps they would say something like, “Contemporary jazz is my music, What is yours?” Individuals especially identify with music in a more intense and personal way than with other arts. The depth of identification with music is similar to that of a loyal fan and a professional sports team. It is commonly thought that the contents of someone’s iPod are worth knowing because they say a great deal about the person who listens to that particular collection of music. The music is then a sort of mirror of some internal aspect of that person. Whether or not this assumption is true is not the issue here. But, it is the fact that we identify so personally and closely with music that is not even created by ourselves, that deserves attention. It is often not even created by anyone we know, or who knows us. We may deeply identify with musics outside of our immediate cultures! I love reggae music (no, really, I love it! Bob Marley was really cool!) and while my mother was born and raised in Jamaica, she feared Rastafarians and would have nothing to do with “their music.”

Because individuals identify so closely with certain musics (so much so they refer to music as “my music.”) it follows that it is easy to intentionally or unintentionally hurt, insult, or otherwise “harm” them by insulting, criticizing, or even passively disregarding “their music.”

Does this personal identification we observe in individuals apply to communities or cultures? Is it possible to steal the music of another culture? Is it possible to unintentionally or intentionally show disrespect through an uninformed or sloppy performance of a cultural music? Musicians in the West tend to see any music as raw materials for their own “original” creations. But, are there musics that need to be beyond this? Are there places that bands and composers just shouldn’t go?

We know that some peoples hold dearly and identify closely their cultural musics — Canadians raised in the Maritimes, Maoris, Tuvan Throat Singers. So, it follows that adopting, adapting, and performing these musics outside of these cultures, by non-culture members may be in some way disrespectful (insulting?) to at least the official representatives of that culture.

Basing performance standards on cultural respect was never mentioned during my time in graduate school. Even courses on multicultural or world musics didn’t speak much about cross-cultural performance, hybridization, or music in diaspora. It was as if cultures were contained and defined either by race, language, tribe affiliation, or political boundaries. Music, of course, is not easily contained by political borders, language groups, or bloodlines and people outside of cultures of musical origin regularly assimilate and adapt musics identified with other races, politics, or cultures.

But, there are acknowledged cultural musics and through UNESCO at least, these musics are “legally” an acknowledged and important aspect of what is called “intangible cultural heritage.” More on this in another post. So, who can play or perform these musics? Does one have to be Japanese to study and perform Japanese classical music? The big question is this: What is the right, ethical, or moral way to engage the music of another culture — to study it, perform it, adapt it?