The early chapters of this elegantly written, surprising book depict armchair-traveler interactions set in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. The book begins in 1818, although not with the Great Exhibitions. And initially the focus is as much on intellectual history as it is on music. At first, the promise of its title seems distant from the book's content.
But the narrative opens and spirals, chapter by chapter, focusing on different global musical encounters and interactions. It soon encompasses archivists, tycoons, conductors, divas, the invention and reinvention of the phonograph, polar exploration, Max Weber, and a thousand other fascinating subjects and stories, each told with erudition and wit. The book's many protagonists encounter non-European musics and usually hear them first as “noise,” whether from Thailand, China, India, or indigenous voices from the Americas. But over time they realize not just these musics’ intrinsic value but what they have to teach the rest of the world.
The book's underlying theme is migration. Just about everything in it seems to be on the move: instruments and collections; sounds, scale, and pitch, and ideas about them; scientific methods and academic institutions; commercial endeavors; and, most importantly, people. This book's exploration, in the end, is as epistemological and ethical as it is musical. Music and the New Global Culture is an investigation of the formation, acquisition, and dissemination of knowledge, and a call for intellectual empathy and egalitarianism.
Each chapter begins with biography, introducing central characters and ideas, while also moving slightly forward in time. Engaging detours early on become major themes in later chapters. Overarching discussions of craft, science, and commerce as shaping forces of global culture unfold across several chapters, helping contextualize individual actions against the larger intellectual and commercial forces shaping the long nineteenth century.
Harry Liebersohn's first subject is British musicologist Carl Engel, born near Hanover in 1818, formerly a German cultural nationalist who spent summers “collecting national songs” in the forests (30–31). Engel's scholarship rejected the idea that European art music was universal. His instrument collection, bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), was one of the first European archives of global music. But Engel's nephew and heir Carl Peters became a Mister-Kurtz-like administrator in German East Africa, highlighting the ironic ability of cosmopolitanism to encompass both Engels’ humility and Peters’ arrogant imperialism.
Each chapter builds on the previous ones. Alfred James Hipkins, for example, began his career as a piano tuner at London's Broadwood piano factory. Hipkins’ study of different tuning and pitch systems helped him transform the sounds of Broadwood's pianos and organs. It also drove him to research and build historical instruments, drawing in part on Engels’ collection. He defended Frederic Chopin's choice to play on smaller, more sensitive pianos rather than perform virtuoso turns on the newer, larger Steinways. In Hipkins’ introduction to Charles Day's book on the musical traditions of India, he called on European readers to understand, not to judge.
Empire appears as the background of this book. It shaped scholar and philanthropist Alexander Ellis's studies on semi- and microtones and the diversity of musical scales. His insights drew on Hipkins's tuning studies and on encounters with musicians and instruments from the Middle East, India, Japan, and China, whether passing through imperial London or available in its instrument collections. German philosophy professor Karl Stumpf allows Liebersohn to think about German universities as global models: “global scholarship . . . took on a German university cast of objective scientific knowledge, with . . . massive accumulation of facts, critical attention to sources and methodology, . . . formation of specialized disciplines, . . . critical community and habits of institution-building” (126). Like Ellis, Stumpf listened to musicians visiting from all over the world, brought to Europe by a growing network of transatlantic impresarios. He drew on Ellis's insights, but also those made by missionaries, Franz Boas, and other participants in global encounters, to help him think about sound. Stumpf also created a Berlin archive of world music, this one of sound recordings.
The book's last section focuses on the development and global spread of the phonograph and its inventors and innovators in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Liebersohn's marvelous narration of Thomas Edison's and Emile Berliner's competitive innovations notes their transformation of modern recording technology and the global culture it created. Agents and sound engineers were sent all over the world to record music and sell records. We follow the indefatigable self-taught engineer Fred Gaisberg as he travels the globe, recording operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, Tatar singers along the Volga, and the polyglot Indian diva Gauhar Jaan. Edison's less worldly preferences for “sentimental Victorian songs” and ragtime influenced the work of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland (248).
Liebersohn proves repeatedly that music is always already both national and cosmopolitan—that seemingly unitary musical practices, genres, and instruments are themselves products of global cultural encounters. Each encounter in this book raises different questions about music, technology, migration, cross-class and -cultural encounters. Just about every anecdote deftly interweaves musical history with personal biography and economic, institutional, academic, and imperial history. Music and the New Global Culture is not a book to skim. This reviewer is glad to have read it word for word, page by page.
