British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Philip V. Bohlman
Reviewed work(s):
Sociality - Music - Dance: Human Figurations in a Transylvanian Valley by Paul Nixon
Source: British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 8 (1999), pp. 112-115
Published by: British Forum for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3060854
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PHILIP V. BOHLMAN
Review
essay
PAUL
NIXON,
Sociality
-
Music
-
Dance: human
figurations
in a
Transylvanian
valley (Skrifter
fran Institutionen for musikvetenskap 34,
Goteborgs
universitet). Goteborg: Goteborg University,
Department of Musicology,
1998. xxvii
+
636pp.,
9 illustrations,
77
photographs,
16
maps
/
diagrams,
17 notated music exx.,
6 appendices, notes,
references, ISBN 91-85974-49-
8; ISSN 0348-0879.
(UK:
?30 + ?5
p.&p.; Europe:
+ ?7
p.&p.;
outside
Europe
+
?7
p.&p. [surface],
?14
[airmail].)
This is a
big book,
and it is a challenging
book. There is,
indeed,
nothing simple
about Paul Nixon's Sociality
-
Music
-
Dance. It
challenges
the reader with
tough questions,
and it tackles subjects
for which ethnomusicologists
and social
anthropologists
have historically preferred
convenient answers,
even formulaic
answers that confirmed their convictions that folk music and dance
provided
evidence for societies that were more or less in
running
order. Rhetorically, too,
the book confronts the reader with the need for
multiple reading strategies,
points
of
entry
into an historical and discursive texture that starts and
stops,
that
pushes
readers forward and then arrests their attention,
that unfolds across
multiple historical
landscapes,
each enabling
readers to
experience
the human
figurations
of
Transylvania's Gurghiu Valley
in
multiple ways.
It is
precisely
because this book is
challenging, however,
that it makes such
a crucial contribution to the
emerging
literature on Eastern Europe
since 1989.
Nixon does not celebrate a new
era,
and he eschews any nostalgia
for
bygone
eras. He draws the reader into a world where life itself is
tough,
and where the
human sociality
that music and dance create most often serves as a cultural
strategy
for
moving
from one
day
to the next and for
making
the best of a
history
and culture that have
rarely
not been tough. Therein, however,
lies the
importance
of music and dance for the residents of the Gurghiu Valley,
as
human activities that contribute substantially
to the
warp
and woof of civilizing
processes.
Music and dance are
responses
to the
everyday
and historical
challenges
Romanians have endured and continue to confront,
and
provide
enduring
reasons for readers also to confront the challenge
that the book itself
raises. For these same reasons, Nixon's book, big
as it is,
highly
deserves the
critical attention of all readers interested in Central and Eastern
Europe
at the
end of the twentieth century.
Many
histories are woven into the fabric of
Sociality
-
Music
-
Dance. There
are those narrative threads that
represent
the
history
of
Romania;
there are threads
that tie
together
the lives of
valley residents;
there are
personal
and
autobiographical
threads as well. It is
critical,
I
believe,
to follow all of these
histories through
the various chapters
in which
they
unfold. The
autobiographical
narrative,
in other words,
the history
of Nixon's fieldwork and his
struggle
to
BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL. 8 1999
pp.112-15
REVIEW ESSAY: Paul Nixon -
Sociality-
Music - Dance: human figurations in a
Transyfvanian valley
confront the
challenges
of
anthropological
and
ethnomusicological
institutions in
both Romania and the United
Kingdom provides
a crucial
underpinning
for the
larger story
of the book. When he first embarked
upon
fieldwork in
1979,
Nixon
approached
Romanian folk music with full
objectivity
and a keen
sensibility
for
experiencing
folk music in its full
diversity.
His aim was to read
through
and
beyond
the official
pronouncements
and the
widespread
state
support
of
music-making. Quickly,
that became his
problem.
His hosts in
Bucharest
preferred
that he
amplify
the stories that had so
long
served to
glorify
the folk and their
music,
from Bartok's
Hungarian
nationalism to A.L.
Lloyd's
glorification
of Marxism. The -isms of
generations
of folk-music scholars had
served official histories well, but, as Nixon
discovered, they
would work
against
him
just
as he
attempted
to circumvent them.
In
1979,
Nixon was forced to
suspend
fieldwork in Romania soon after
initiating it, albeit at that moment when his most
probing questions
were
being
voiced. It was
surely
to his
advantage
in the
1990s,
after he could return
upon
the fall of
Ceausescu
to
engage
in
follow-up research,
which however
actually
necessitated reformulation of the
original project.
Nixon
constantly
confronted
the need to
stop
and
start,
to situate himself as an interlocutor and then to
regroup
when told that he must not ask the
questions
he was in fact
asking.
For
ethnomusicologists
this book will be more than a little
sobering
and
thought-
provoking,
for one of its most
disturbing,
if
revelatory,
histories arises from
Nixon's
description
of his exclusion from the British
ethnomusicological
establishment when he failed to tell the same old stories about socialism's
enduring support
of folk
music,
but rather documented human
misery
and the
human destruction that even
state-sponsored
musical
programmes brought
about.
Though
few
ethnomusicologists anymore
would
deny
that their
discipline
has invented its fair share of traditions, we
rarely
read tales of the dire
consequences
that such invention also
produces.
This book bristles with such
tales, some of them
effectively
horror
stories,
which nonetheless demand our
attention and attentiveness.
The fabric of interwoven histories is no less
prevalent
at the microlevel of
the
Gurghiu Valley
than at the macrolevel of the discourse
history
of the book
itself. Nixon
requires
that we
recognize
the full
complexity
of the
Gurghiu
Valley,
where the confrontation with the
everyday,
with the
region,
with the
nation,
and with
present
and
past
is
possible only through
difficult
processes
of
social
decision-making
and
negotiation.
At the
very least, the
valley
is not a
folk-music culture in any kind of traditional sense. Indeed, Nixon's thick
description
of the
valley's
culture
significantly
disabuses the reader of
lingering
notions about the theories of isolation
predicated
on
music-making
away
from the
impact
of
civilization,
be these the theories of
"speech
islands",
or be
they
the
hopeful selectivity
of a B6ela
Bartok,
who researched
extensively
in the
valley.
Drawing upon
Norbert Elias's
concept
of
"civilizing processes",
Nixon
calls for a
description
that excludes
nothing,
but
requires
instead that
multivalent connections
always
be considered: the human need to make music
and to socialize with dance and ritual is
part
of a fabric
including
connections to
113
BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.8 1999
culture of
food, emotion, love-making, religion, commerce, power
and
politics,
and no less to
struggles
between
individuals,
violence and the realities of
degradation.
These
processes
work
together,
but their
togetherness
does not
signal
the
unity
of an
idyllic
world of
peasant music-making. Instead, they
bear
witness to
dissonance, aporia
and
incongruity.
Nixon's observations about the
enduring presence
of dissonance
provide
the theoretical core for his book
(see,
especially,
Part
Four).
In
essence,
he asks that we hear music as it is, not as it
should be, and that we
recognize
interethnic relations between Roma and
Romanians in the
Gurghiu Valley
as
they
are rather than as state officials
would
imagine
them to be.
Listening
to dissonance is one of the most
persuasive metaphors
of the
book,
one that deserves attention
comparatively
and in studies of other local and transnational musics.
During
several narrative
moments of the book, Nixon draws us into the
very personal
lives of
Gurghiu
Valley
musicians and music-makers. He turns no individuals into
heroes,
even
those whose lives
he,
I believe as I read between the
lines, truly
does admire.
One of the most
intriguing
of all the individuals in the book is loan
Farca*,
a
local musician who at first rose to
importance by taking advantage
of the
cultural
agencies
that furthered careers of musicians
willing
to conform to state
guidelines,
but who then rejected the
system
that
had,
in
large part,
made him
who he was. In
reading
of
Farca*'s
rejection
of the
system, though,
we still do
not encounter a hero. The
transcriptions
of
Farca~'s
performances
show that he
was indeed different, and that his
creativity
stemmed from his wanton
avoidance of the
system.
He was
not, however,
better. As a resident within and
outside the
valley,
he nonetheless embodied one human
figuration among
many
others.
The most
disturbing
histories in the book are those told about Roma and the
social
presence
of Roma musicians in the culture of the
valley.
Nixon
goes
well
beyond
the usual
reports
of
large-scale prejudice
and racism. He
looks, instead,
at the dissonance of
everyday
events that have dominated musical life in the
valley throughout
its multiethnic
past
and have lessened not at all in a
post-
Communist era in which a
greater
sense of human
dignity
has
putatively
enveloped
Romania.
Long-time
residents of the
Gurghiu
Valley,
Roma have
historically
been
marginalized
and
stigmatized. They
have suffered enormous
indignity
and violence from
Romanians, particularly physical
and sexual
violence
against
Roma
women,
but have also been forced to
accept
that
violence in order to secure the
position
of male Roma musicians in the
transmission of traditional and
professionalized
music. As the true tradition-
bearers in
many
domains of musical
activity,
Roma musicians
paradoxically
tolerate violence
against
their traditional
family
members and structures in
order not to lose their
position
in the fabric of
Transylvanian society.
In such
ways,
violence and
music,
racism and
history
have become ever more
interdependent.
In the course of
Sociality
-
Music
-
Dance,
that
is,
as the
stultifying
conditions of 1979
give way
to the
liberating changes
after
1989,
the reader
might
well
expect
the
history
narrated
by
the book to become easier or to bear
witness to the sense of liberation. Nixon's book, however,
does not become
114
REVIEW ESSAY: Paul Nixon -
Sociality-
Music - Dance: human
figurations in a
Transylvanian valley
115
easier,
and its fundamental
challenges
refuse to
go away.
The
questions posed
by
cultural
changes
in Romania
today
still have no
ready answers,
and Paul
Nixon insists that we
recognize
just
how
compelling
these
questions
are
by
pointing
out that Romania's cultural
history
is still
being written,
and that the
responses
to the
changes
since Ceauiescu remain
very fragmentary. Still,
Nixon
by
no means abandons
hope. Quite
the
contrary,
he
perceives
that
hope
is
anchored in the human
figurations
that
music,
dance and
sociality
weave
together,
human
figurations
that refuse to
shy away
from the
challenges
of the
present,
human
figurations
that
provide
readers with abundant reasons not to
turn
away
from the
challenge
of this book.
This review was first
published
on the Central and East
European
Music
list
(centr-and-east-euro-music@mailbase.ac.uk),
8
July 1999,
and is re-
published
with
permission
of Professor
Bohlman,
and list owners. To join the
list, or for further
enquiries, please
contact the
owners,
Ann
Buckley
(aab3@cam.ac.uk)
or
Geoffery
Chew
(uhwm006@sun.rhbnc.ac.uk).
Copies
of the book are available from Dr Paul J.
Nixon,
181A Gilbert
Rd,
Cambridge
CB4
3PA, England.
Audio and video materials available for loan.
Note on the author
Philip
V. Bohlman is Professor of Music and Jewish Studies at the
University
of
Chicago. Among
his
forthcoming
books are The Folk
Songs of
Ashkenaz
(with
Otto
Holzapfel;
A-R
Editions, 2001)
and Music and the Racial
Imagination
(co-edited
with Ronald Radano;
University
of
Chicago Press, 2000).
He is
currently working
on a book devoted to musical
change
in
Europe
since
1989,
Music in the New
Europe,
and on a world-music volume for the Oxford
University
Press
series, "Very
Short Introductions". Address:
Department
of
Music, University
of
Chicago, Goodspeed Hall,
1010 East 59th
Street, Chicago,
IL
60637;
e-mail:
boh6@midway.uchicago.edu.