Global Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 204 pp. (Graphs, figures, maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$105.00, cloth; free ebook. ISBN 9789463725125.
What gives music its unique power to move us and groove us, to bind us together in the moment, to herald shared histories and capture deeply felt cultural communalities? For western Pacific Island cultures, these questions have a special salience, as numerous writers (e.g. Edwin Burrows, Karen Nero, Judy Flores, Brian Diettrich, Jessica Schwartz) have underscored the importance of performative arts (music, dance, oratory, etc.) vis-à-vis visual arts in the aesthetic and expressive repertoires of the cultures of the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands. In Music Worlding in Palau, Birgit Abels—professor of cultural musicology at Georg-August-University at Göttingen in Germany—deftly deploys an arsenal of analytic concepts from neo-phenomenology, principally the work of German philosopher Herman Schmitz, supplemented with concepts from process philosophy and the philosophy of movement, to probe these questions.
Although informed by 16 years of intermittent fieldwork in Palau, and analysis of historical collections of musical recordings from Palau dating to early twentieth-century wax recordings, the book is primarily conceptual and not ethnographic in nature. Each chapter opens with a music-related ethnographic vignette, such as a discussion between the author and several elder Palauan women gathered at a senior citizens centre, querying the indeterminate “feel” that a particular vocal genre of traditional chants should possess; or a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of a traditionally titled leader, anxiously performing a traditional chant before a sizable audience at the annual Palau Women’s Conference and not quite achieving the desired conventional melody; or an evening dance performance by a line of rollicking, foot-stomping men at the annual celebration of Palau’s independence; or a subtly mocking rendition of a traditional chant by a titled chief at the opening ceremony celebrating Palau’s newly built national capitol complex, the veiled mockery an allusion to tensions between traditional and modern elected systems of leadership. In addition, the book includes five QR codes allowing readers to link to audio and video recordings of Palau music and dance.
The vignettes and recordings provide a glimpse into the cultural settings and significance of music in Palauan life, but Abels’ primary concern is in offering a framework for understanding how music achieves its desired effect in Palau, or for that matter, in any cultural setting. Music worlding implies a process of enactment, whereby making music partakes of “becoming with a world in which natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not pre-exist their intertwined worldings” (19, emphases added). The neo-phenomenological approach to music making and music worlding seeks to unpack “the imbrication and interlacing of the felt body with its material and social environments” (22).
For readers unfamiliar with the groundwork of neo-phenomenology, the book’s theoretical scaffolding will be difficult to hang on to. The two key analytic terms in Abels’ argument are meaningfulness and atmospheres. Meaningfulness “refers to the layered complexity through which music makes sense, via the felt body, in a distinctly musical way” (20). Musical meaningfulness is not the same as musical meaning, but rather, implies a gestalt of meanings that may be inseparable and indistinguishable from one another, and that contain an emotive quality that the performers find essential to their singing. Meaningfulness is thus experiential, manifesting as musical sensation, and “is a prerequisite for knowing through music” (64).
If readers find the meaning of meaningfulness difficult to get a firm grip on, the second key analytic term, atmospheres, is an even more clouded and elusive concept. Abels deploys this concept to unpack the “sonic workings of music-making” (33). She is interested in how a specific atmosphere’s musical suggestion of motion is able to grab people, propelling them to dance and sing along with the music. This concept speaks to the “relationality intrinsic to the human experience of being-in-the-world” (30). She acknowledges that the concept is vague, and difficult to operationalize.
Part of the difficulty here, as Abels reiterates throughout the text, is music’s self-explanatory or self-referential quality. Music eludes verbal explication. “Language, including scholarly language, is forever bound to fail musical meaningfulness” (20). This dilemma recalls the anecdote of the visiting researcher, who sits spellbound through a 45-minute performance by a Native dance troupe. At its conclusion, the researcher exclaims, “Bravo! Awesome!” and turns to the choreographer. “Can you explain that dance to me?” the researcher asks. “Certainly,” the choreographer replies, then stands and proceeds to perform another 45-minute dance.
To overcome the inherent difficulties of verbalizing her argument, the author takes pains to lay it all out for the reader. The monograph is bookended with introductory and concluding chapters, and each individual chapter has its own introductory abstract, set of key terms, and conclusion. Each chapter also has its own bibliography, and chapter bibliographies are compiled together at the end of the book, along with a glossary. This produces some redundancy in the author’s argument and the book’s layout, while perhaps lending guidance to faltering readers. Even so, the text is dense, and readers may struggle with sentences like “Meaningfulness arises in the processual interlacing of suggestions of motion, their sonic enactment and manipulation, and the resonances they yield within surrounding ontological and epistemological frameworks” (91–92).
Occasional ethnographic misstatements appear, as when Abels, citing the work of Gary Klee on Palauan time-reckoning and the seasonality of human activities, writes, “The first half of each lunar month belongs to Rekil Ongos, the time of easterly winds, and the second, to Rekil Ngebard, the time of westerly winds” (129). This implies that the winds shift direction semi-monthly, contradicting Klee’s description, correctly, of winds shifting direction semi-annually.
Readers daunted by the price of US$105 for the printed hardback book can download a free PDF version from https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53683. For those readers interested in scholarly debates on musical meaning within twentieth- and twenty-first-century music studies, Abels’ work will be illuminating.
Donald H. Rubinstein
University of Guam, Mangilao