Reclaiming Meaning in African Musical Traditions — Epoche B2
Participation Is Not an Objection to Formalism The argument to be tested A familiar argument runs as follows. Eduard Hanslick's formalism locates musical value in the internal organisation of sounds [1] . Traditional African music is danced [2] , worked to, mourned to and celebrated with; it is made by many people at once; a performance is inseparable from the occasion that calls for it. Therefore formalism is at best a local theory, adequate to the European concert hall and inadequate elsewhere. The conclusion is drawn so often that it has the status of a settled result. This essay argues that the argument fails, and that the failure matters, because there is a much better objection to Hanslick lying underneath it which the bad argument obscures [3] . The question here is not the one usually asked about Hanslick — whether music expresses emotion — but a narrower one [4] : what kind of thing is the bearer of musical value, and does Hanslick's answer survive contact with a repertoire organised differently from the one he had in front of him. My claim is that his central thesis survives the participation argument untouched, and fails a different test that Kwabena Nketia's and Kofi Agawu's descriptions of West African practice make available. What Hanslick actually claims Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is a polemic against a specific position, which Hanslick calls the aesthetics of feeling. That position holds that the content of a piece of music is a definite emotion, which the music represents and which the listener is to recover. Hanslick's first two chapters argue that this cannot be right, mainly because music lacks the determinacy required: a passage that is said to express hope would do equally well for longing, and nothing in the notes decides between them. His third chapter offers the replacement. The content and object of music, he says, is sounding forms in motion — tonal shapes whose interest lies in how they move, develop and resolve. The argument for the negative half is worth spelling out, because it is more careful than its reputation. A definite feeling, Hanslick observes, has an object and a judgement built into it: hope is hope that something will happen, and it differs from expectation only in what the person believes about the prospect. Music has no means of supplying the object or the judgement. What it can supply is the dynamic profile of a feeling — rising, hesitating, gathering, subsiding — and that profile is shared by feelings which differ in every other respect. So the passage that is heard as hope could as truly be heard as longing, or as impatience, and no amount of attention to the notes will decide between them. The conclusion is not that music is emotionally inert. It is that whatever music determines, a definite feeling is not it. Three things Hanslick does not claim are regularly attributed to him. He does not claim that music fails to arouse feeling; he devotes a later chapter to the difference between attending to a piece and being worked on by it physically, which presupposes that the second happens. He does not claim that music must be free of function. He does not claim that listeners must sit still. His thesis is about what the aesthetic interest of music consists in, not about the circumstances of its production or reception. Why the participation argument misses Once the thesis is stated that narrowly, the participation argument has nothing to strike. That a piece is danced to, and that dancing is how a listener follows it, is a fact about the mode of attention, and Hanslick's claim concerns the object of attention. That a performance is collective is a fact about who makes the sounding forms. That the music belongs to a funeral or a harvest is a fact about the occasion of its use, and European music of Hanslick's own tradition is full of occasional music which he did not thereby exclude. An analogy makes the gap visible. Suppose one argued that because a cathedral is used for worship, and because worshippers move through it rather than contemplating it from a fixed point, architectural formalism cannot apply to cathedrals. The obvious reply is that function and mode of use leave entirely open what the building's architectural interest consists in. The participation argument has the same structure and the same defect. Agawu has spent much of his career objecting to arguments of this shape, and his objection is not a defence of Hanslick. It is that scholarship on African music has been organised around demonstrating difference, and that the demonstration is usually achieved by comparing an idealised European practice with a generalised African one, to the detriment of both. The African Imagination in Music (2016) proceeds on the opposite assumption: that these repertoires reward the same analytical attention as any others, and that treating them as a special case for which ordinary musical concepts do not hold is a form of condescension. An argument that saves African music from formalism by declaring its value to be extra-musical is precisely what he objects to. It concedes the analytical ground and calls the concession respect. The objection that does land Take Nketia's description of how a West African drum ensemble is organised. A short cyclic pattern, usually struck on a bell, runs unchanged throughout. It fixes the cycle and gives every other player their bearings. Around it the supporting drums maintain fixed figures, and a lead drummer works through a repertoire of phrases, choosing, extending and combining them in response to the dancers and the occasion. Two performances of the same piece by the same ensemble will differ in almost every audible particular except the bell pattern and the relations the other parts bear to it. Now ask Hanslick's question of this. Where are the sounding forms in motion whose organisation constitutes the value? Not in the particular performance, or at least not only there, because the tradition's own evaluative