I wrote this article in 1998, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. at Duke University. The entire article may be downloaded, but without the figures. Most of the figures are from the scores, which are available from the publishers or from the composers, and I have referenced all of these in the paper by page, section or measure numbers. The arguments laid out here have been important in formulating my personal approach to cross-cultural composition. What I referred to in the paper as the politics of representation, I would now broaden to an ethics of composition of which the politics of representation is a part. I have discussed this ethical framework briefly here, and in this published article:
Reflections on Cross-Cultural Composition, in Arcana II: Musicians on Music, edited by John Zorn, Hips Road/Tzadik, 2007.
Download the complete article in PDF format. It does not include figures, but most examples refer to specific measures in the scores.
Cross-cultural Hybridity in Music Composition: Southeast Asia in three works from America.
Christopher Adler, 1998, unpublished manuscript.
The act of composing is an engagement with hybridity. Every composer must mediate between the diverse influences, intentions, theories, and emotions impinging upon the compositional moment. For some composers these mediations may be relegated to the subconscious, for some they may be considerations of fine distinctions that come into play only at the level of detail. The compositions discussed in this article, Spiral, by Chinary Ung, Banyuari, by Michael Tenzer, and Aneh Tapi Nyata, by Evan Ziporyn, inhabit different hybrid realms between multiple categories of music, including: Euro-American contemporary concert music, popular musics, Balinese gamelan, Khmer classical music, and beyond, and as a result illustrate very different approaches to musical hybridization.
The hybridity of these works is foregrounded by the composers’ decisions to compose between prior musical categories. The intentional, self-conscious cross-cultural hybrid has a long history within the Euro-American classical tradition, with such composers as Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison, to name a few from this century. The intentional cross-cultural hybrid takes on an increasing significance in Euro-American contemporary music in this postmodern era of rapidly globalizing artistic, culture and commodity flows, where many composers are exposed to musicians, artists, recordings and ethnomusicological documentation of musics from the most distant corners of the world. While hybridity may be fundamental to musics everywhere, this exposure to global diversity is often dependent upon conditions of power and privilege which favor musicians of the urban centers of the West and around the world. At the same time, the privilege of exposure does not imply a privileged access or understanding. This motivates my concern in this paper with the question of representation: how, through interconnections of music, discourse, and prior knowledge, a cross-culturally hybrid artistic form can communicate knowledge about a musical Other.
I am taking it as axiomatic that music means in multiple, political, cultural ways, a notion which is in opposition to the popular modernist aesthetic of art as autonomous and apolitical. (For a discussion of this notion and its critique, see Taylor (1995).) Music is a product of people and is received by people and is thus dialogic in nature, that is, its meanings are always produced and reproduced in its creation, anticipation, reception and interpretation. The meanings can not be confined a priori by a particular ideology (such as of the separability of music and politics), an inevitability which is merely foregrounded in the cross-culturally hybrid work. This ongoing emergence of meaning implies that the discourses, both individual and cultural, that contribute to an individual’s musical experience are relevant to any musical analysis, for analysis is an assertion of music’s meaningfulness. The relevance of this body of discourse problematizes any closed or complete analysis, for no analysis can take everything into account, and that analysis itself is a potentially transformative addition to that same body of discourse.
One possible path of musical meaning which can be especially controversial is interpreting a particular piece as representative of a larger musical category. Although such an interpretation may be open to critique, it is nonetheless frequently made by musicians, musicologists and everyday listeners alike, and is therefore an important component of musical analysis. It is all the more crucial to consider the representation of musical categories in works such as those under consideration here, the composers of which have consciously decided to compose between prior musical categories. The composers here all have extensive experience in the musics to which they make reference and in fact may be considered participants in those traditions. But it is ultimately impossible and I would argue undesirable to qualify or disqualify an individual to act as representative based on lived experience, ethnicity, gender or any other aspect. My concern is not with the quality of representations in these pieces but in the multiple and myriad ways in which they may come to have representative meaning in a cross-cultural context. …