Toivo Burlin: “Symptom of the universe“ – Behind “music”, beside musicology

There is a broad, name-, and concept-less phenomenon approximately called “sound” behind what in the Western world is called “music” – not yet understood. Therefore, I will argue for the need of a fundamental rebuild of the concepts, questions, and visions of musicology. The principal challenge could be to critically investigate this phenomenon, beside the concepts of “music”, and the scholarly tradition(s) of musicology. Musicology still is, and despite the complementing traditions of ethnomusicology and other sub disciplines, captured in a conservatory tradition from the 19th century – let’s mention the paradigmatic importance of music theory, rather than acoustics, in the centre of curriculum. Therefore, defining musicology’s borders against other (music) disciplines is a non-question. Contrary, we need to cross disciplinary borders more and abandon them.

With the purpose of better understanding the phenomenon sound we maybe can understand the specific in the Western concept of “music” – as well as other conceptualizations of sound, tones, and rhythms – better. “Music’s” development since the beginning of modernity, shows that it is a time-bound construction, that probably will be a historical parenthesis. Therefore, we must takethe product of intersecting social relations. This interpretation of space will serve as a base for a feminist approach to the concept’s dominance today globally, seriously. It is historically recent: thoroughly established and contextualized the last one hundred and fifty years under influence from concert and opera houses, modern recording technology, copyright laws, media systems, and new arts. All this seems to make it obvious that “music” really exists – in all human history, all cultures, that is, universally – but it is an idealistic illusion. In music archaeology and sound studies, the universality of the concept is rightly questioned, and it should be questioned on a more principal level.

One example of pre-modern “music” concepts, not understood, is the sounding vitra paths in Northern Swedish folklore. They were connected to old beliefs in magic, shamanism and the Underworld: the “melodies” and “sounds” of the supernatural vitra, along their physical paths in nature, is not possible to interpret and understand within a traditional musicological terminology, but rather needs to be interpreted through the lenses of anthropology and sound studies. And this is, I think, a symptom of the conditions in the musicology universe. Probably, there is also other more or less forgotten conceptualizations of sound and “music”, that points in the direction of a – much needed – de-construction of the normative aesthetics and value criteria of Western music concepts that still is implicit in paradigmatic musicology – and that prevents development of innovative, original perspectives of the sounds that we hear and create.