Decolonization
Sami Abu Shumays
If you have 90 minutes to spare, I urge you to watch the following video—I promise it’s worth it if you care at all about so-called world music, or music that falls outside the confines of Western or Eurocentric popular music:
My good friend Adam Robinson sent this to me and having watched it, it’s taken me several days to process it. I’m still processing it to be honest. This is a subject that has been very much at the forefront of my mind for most of my life. The first time I ever publicly shared my thoughts on traditional music and its incompatibility with academia was 4 years ago, almost to the day, but I barely scratched the surface. What Mr. Shumays is able to communicate here is very deep indeed.
I almost hate to do it, but for this brogpost, I’m going to include the transcript from the video—because time is tight for everyone and it may be difficult to find 90 minutes to watch the video in its entirety. But I do urge you to watch the whole thing. The excerpts I’m including represent only a fraction of perspective that this lecture has to offer. I’m very much looking forward to when his paper on this subject is published.
Although Mr. Shumays is speaking from his lived experiences as a Palestinian-American, and his studies and discoveries learning Arabic music and the maqam, Mr. Shumays’s lecture felt so relatable to my personal experience as a tradition bearer of Japanese music.
17:01
Spoken language is cultural knowledge that individuals contribute to, but is not the invention of individuals. It is a shared body of knowledge that evolves over time, that is changeable and that is basically inseparable from the community. The community doesn’t exist if people are not exchanging this information.
[the maquam] is in the body and it's in the community. It is structured by the physical interactions of people, by the physical body, by the physical instruments, and the constraints of those instruments.
18:18
Should a painter or fashion-designer favor the purest versions of every color rather than complex blended colors? No. We must think of musical scales and pitch in this way especially when we look at musics from non-European cultures, recognizing the influence of instrument and musical system on design on pitch; an infinite spectrum of possibilities with aesthetic choices that don't obey rigid mathematical rules.
The representation of scales as mathematically determined is inherently political, creating hierarchies of correctness and authority. When applied in a colonial situation, these assertions of authority through mathematics are a tool of white supremacy, creating the conditions for exploitation and appropriation, denying agency to musicians and to colonized peoples and enabling cultural erasure.
27:06
…attempts to fix scale tuning are precisely parallel to attempts by colonialists to erase indigenous languages.
…native cultural forms anywhere in the world have been subject to erasure and violence, [of] its language, its cultural forms, its means of exchange.
35:35
…There’s a cultural, social choice that’s being made, and mathematics is being used to rationalize it. However there is a second effect of this, which is the math is difficult. The math is misunderstood. So math becomes a tool of gatekeeping. It creates a mathematical priesthood of music theorists who know more than actual music practitioners.
That is 2,500 years of music theory. [It is] essentially ptolemaic astronomy. [It] is this idea that…these things are mathematically justified and very few people can understand them, and they create systems that rationalize themselves. And those who understand the system join the priesthood get academic positions all over the world; and those who don't are denigrated. So what we have as a result is the erasure of differences in multiple cultures.
45:48
The problem then with music academia is that music is not truly comparative in academia in the way that linguistics is. Music still remains essentially locked into a platonic view because we have MUSICOLOGY! and MUSIC THEORY! and MUSIC COMPOSITION! …and then the rest of the world all in ethnomusicology. So there's no real comparison that's happening in academia; so music theory is still 100 years behind linguistics, philosophically. Perhaps more. This creates another prop for institutional power.
1:03:30
When ethnomusicologists and scholars are going around and they're trying to notate folk songs like this…well, the folk songs seem simple. The Hungarian folk songs seem simple; because you're notating it in a system and stripping it of context. So then this becomes something that furthers the idea that western music is superior to non-western music because the complexity is present in the western notation system and not present in the notation of the non-western musics.
1:08:17
Most attempts of decolonizing music practice and theory that I've seen over the last decade have been essentially … “Let’s get some non-western people to talk about music…” and they’ve still got PhDs. So people who’ve already been mentally colonized are talking about music as a representative of the non-west. Who are the non-colonized practitioners? The people who learn music from oral tradition. Period! Those are the people who learn the music as it is, rather than a set of reduced rules. So for me, decolonization looks like basically replacing the entire music faculty of all Western academia with practitioners of music. It's as simple as that. That's de-colonization; anything short of that is a perpetuation of the system that exists.
I can only imagine how challenging it is trying to learn a non-European music without first discarding western music theory. I can only speak in terms of teaching shakuhachi to folks who have had rigid, singular concepts of pitch and rhythm pounded into their brains, often since childhood.
In my case, I came to music—both Japanese music and Irish music—through very traditional methods. That is to say, orally, from practitioners of music, not academics. That my father had music theory taught to him was incidental, not foundational to his study of shakuhachi. This is how he passed it on to me.
Many commenters took offense at much of what was said in the lecture. Much of the pushback seemed like a knee-jerk reaction or defensiveness. However, one sentiment in particular stood out to me: People who want to study traditional music of their own culture but feel railroaded into western music are still making a choice to study through a western music system. In other words, if they wanted to study the music of their culture, they could choose to study in a non-western, traditional setting. While that may be true, what that comment fails to acknowledge is that in doing so, you will not be taken seriously; that is, not as seriously as someone who studied the music of your heritage, but did so in an accredited school or conservatory. You will not be invited to conferences, festivals, except as a token at best; more likely as an afterthought.
The net result of this is that you will not be able to support yourself through your music, no matter how ardently you committed yourself to your tradition (in my case, Kinko-ryū shakuhachi). It would be nice to say, “that doesn’t matter; money isn’t what keeps a tradition alive.” But until we live in a society that values music and musicians for their art, expertise, commitment, and discipline above academic accomplishments; where tradition bearers are valued even without the pieces of paper and letters after their names, those of us who are in a position to actually teach tradition will continued to be ignored. And in place of tradition you will have a sterilized, antiseptic, homogenized version of traditional music.
One of my favorite aspects of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is that he often ends his segments with So what can we do about it? Personally, I have felt and continue to feel powerless in this struggle against the near extinction-level event that is hurtling towards traditional shakuhachi music. At this stage, the problems have been identified and hopefully, the questions are being asked—as painful as it may be to look at yourself and to what role you may play in replacing the voices of tradition. From there, it is my hope we will find the solutions.
More anon,
Hanz