Eurological ways of curating music tend to ignore their own social and aesthetic contexts. In his essay, the composer Sandeep Bhagwati asks for more wakefulness in choosing that acknowledges the pluralities of musics today.
Curating music events is always a process of exclusion. We choose from what is offered. What is on offer, then, is driven by all kinds of societal forces. Some artists are pushed to your attention, some others are your own «discoveries». Each curator has pet artists, often only because they found them before someone else did. Each local, regional, global scene has pet artists, mostly for reasons that have little to do with the art they make or the aesthetic insights they offer. I don’t want to attack curators, or any scene, but to make it clear that curating, being a primarily social and not so much an art-driven activity, is subject to the exclusion mechanisms of the wider society it operates in.
The world is full of interesting musics, but you only listen to those made by people like you. Or those you already know how to access. Or those you do not need to research or slowly warm to, only «approve of» or «find interesting». I believe that in curating, the disregard for and the invisibility of certain artistic practices and artists is often nothing more than the result of sloppy thinking and lazy research: research that does not want to see through the system of exclusion that it relies on – and that does therefore not even look for ways to counteract it. The kind of colonialist, white, male-centered curating and programming that we still see in many of our music institutions and festivals to me is not so much a moral problem as a lack of professionalism. Merit-based selection? A question of artistic quality? Not so much. To me, many music seasons and festivals rather read as if someone had been sleeping on the job. In today’s information galaxy, decolonization and gender-awareness to me are moral or political arguments only on a meta-level – they are failures of research – and a lack of the ability to listen with your ears awake. But those who choose can simply not afford to snooze.
How does one counteract the ill effects of the artistic pyramid of exclusion when one is curating at its top? How does one stay wakeful to the world’s musical and artistic diversity even while engaging in an inevitable process of selection? The most powerful tool of this waking up to the world is what Dipesh Chakraborty has called «provincializing». Provincializing means to look at everything that you think is central and dominant – and rethink it as one of many possibilities. Let us quickly look at how one could provincialize a few assumptions in the dominant music practice.
Four Basic Premises of Eurological Music-Making
Western Art Music
Western art music is music that came out of a small landmass, situated on the northwestern corner of the Asian continent. Indeed, Anglo-Indo-Portuguese composer Clarence Barlow likes to call Europe the «North-West Asian Subcontinent» (Barlow and Panke 1990). Using this name for Europe does not diminish its achievements, but it reminds us of geographical realities that are often obscured by the term «the West» which always sounds as if it were half the globe.
The Sit-Still-and-Listen Concert
The sit-still-and-listen concert is a format that was introduced around the beginning of the 19th century when musicians could no longer rely on feudal sponsors and subscriptions and thus were forced to sell tickets to their performances. Music in a quasi-public setting had formerly always been a gift from a sponsor, a noble or a merchant: It was a kind of decoration or special feature to a social event. One did not pay for tickets to orchestral music as such, the performance was one of the many perks of privilege. Haydn famously had most of his London concerts performed in the Rotunda, a kind of shopping mall for the nobility of London, with restaurants, shops, and an orchestra in the same space (Small 1998). Now, with the sale of tickets, the same music became a merchandise – and suddenly it was necessary to eliminate all the walking and talking, so that everyone would get their money’s worth of sound. Hence the need for silence – and then, consequently, for music made to be listened to in silence.
Virtuosity in Music
And hence also the need for virtuosity in music. If you want to sell musical events to merchants, industrialists, lawyers, and career bureaucrats, all heavily competitive people; if your music must survive in a capitalist economy, then – you are practically forced to introduce the concept and reality of competitiveness also into music-making. But – most of the criteria for good music employed by musicians the world over, such as emotional depth, beauty, elegance, spirituality, fulfillment of traditional criteria etc. cannot really be quantified. They need education, time and sensibility to grasp – while speed and dexterity are immediately accessible to every observer and listener. So virtuosity becomes a necessity to convince the superficial listeners in a paying audience that they have witnessed something that is indeed worth paying for.
The Idea of an Avant-Garde
The idea of an avant-garde is, of course, closely linked to the North-West Asian idea of progress and social evolution that peaked in the early 20th century – North-West Asian technological, economic and social progress as the beacon that leads the world to a better future. In a spurious analogy, North-West Asian musical life seems to still think that eurological avant-garde music has a technical, social, aesthetic superiority that can lead the world at large towards a better music for all. Other music traditions do not necessarily have to believe this analogy – and even if they should accept the analogy, they still rightfully question the premise.
Maybe in future histories of music the entire history of 20th-century eurological art music will be written under the subheading: «The Opening Up of European Music» and will be correlated with all the other big globalization and hybridization processes in the history of human music-making – for example the two hybridization surges in Chinese music: the first during the Tang Empire (pan-Empire hybridization) and, later, during the late Ming and the Qing (hybridization of music in China with traditions from beyond Asia).
In thus highlighting these four basic premises of eurological music-making, I do not want to say that they are problematic per se, and therefore should be abandoned or even abolished. Nothing of the kind: all of these are amazing cultural achievements and sources of much musical wonder. I just wanted to describe them as accidents of circumstance, as points on a wide spectrum of equally rich musical and cultural possibilities rather than, as so many musical colleagues tend to think, as the natural winning outcome of universal cultural progress, natural selection or even divine will.
Provincializing means exactly that: to not abolish or despise your own tradition – but to come to the insight that what you hold high and dear is but one of many traditions. That what we think of as the norm, the best or the most developed, is in truth only the product of particular contexts. And that a change in these contexts might require us to change our view on our aesthetic idées reçues.
Festival for Written Music Composed by Male Composers over 30
And, if as a curator you really – and rightly – want to focus on a particular type, school, context of musical inventivity, just say so in your announcements: do not refer to your event with a misleadingly inclusive title such as «Festival of New Music». Rather, use a more accurate and specific designation such as «Festival for Written Music Composed to Commission by White Male Composers over 30».
This is not a moral argument – we need not be asked to listen to and engage creatively with other music-making traditions and other music-makers because they morally should have a place at the table we are sitting at. Everyone should have the right to sit with others or to sit alone – especially if they cook their own food, grown in their own garden. Rather, decolonization targets the belief that the table one sits at offers the best food – and that all tables must also offer the same. A rather sober and calculated insight tells us that it is highly unlikely that a section of the world’s population with a specific skin color has found the only future-proof way of thinking and creating music and that it is even more unlikely that its most notable creators should all be male.
Monocultures are never really healthy. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it: «The cognitive empire of eurological thinking seems to be coming to an end. Not in any catastrophic sense – more in the sense that its power to explain our world on its own terms seems to decrease. We see that in order to survive in our world we need cognitive, artistic, and yes, musical ways of seeing the world that lie beyond those that eurological thinking offers us – not least because those seem increasingly to be part of the problems we face.» (de Sousa Santos 2018)
Too many provincial thinkers and musickers, particularly in Western culture, have mistaken the world they know for the world that counts. To say it again: it is not wrong to be proud of your tradition and its musical achievements – it is just unreasonable to believe that it is the best or most advanced or most artistic tradition. To me, such claims are the cultural equivalent of right-wing populism.
I would like to plead for less musical populism and more engagement with the real world: and that will require intense study, research and engagement with the aesthetics of other ways of making music. It will require the energy to get up from your comfortable armchair and to move from a philharmonic sensibility (one who loves harmony) towards a wider sensibility one might call it «philo-sonic» (one who loves sounds).
In the following sections, Bhagwati calls for more wakefulness in one’s research and the pitfalls of provincializing one’s own perspective towards trans-traditional, non-hegemonic, and reality-based curatorial visions. He names three central modes of musical looting that mistake music for a commodity: re-placing local traditions, re-framing alien traditions within a familiar aesthetic and temporality, and re-purposing external traditions for internal artistic use.
As long as we the curators offer booklet and media-ready interpretations of another practice or tradition or of the meaning of the collaborative process, we exploit it through the act of framing it for our purposes. In interacting with traditions of expression that we or our audiences do not know we must force ourselves to go not against but beyond interpretation.
I think that in order to arrive at a sustainable and resonant decolonization, we need to return to the etymological roots of the word «curator». Its current meaning, that of an itinerant conceptualist who assembles, dismantles and re-assembles artistic expressions, aesthetic significances and societal concerns into new, ephemeral, momentary event formats, is a relatively recent meaning.
In the art world, curators have for hundreds of years already been guardians, caretakers, preservers, contextualizers of collections and performing traditions. They care for art as a gardener would care for plants. It is in this older sense, rooted in the Latin word «curare» (to heal, to care for, to nurture, to worry about) that a curator in a decolonized music world that seems to be drifting aimlessly through very interesting times would probably need to operate.
A nurturing caretaker of processes, a watchful guardian of co-eval-ness, a defender and enabler of creative misunderstandings... In this perspective, curating musical expressions today can be an important calling, a process of finding out not what the music scene, much less one’s contemporary music peers expect, accept and will praise – but what music and its multi-aesthetic communities need as nourishment.
I think we must look beyond petty parochial aesthetics applied to musical activity, and pay close attention to the finessed listening, the inner drives, the wordliness as well as the saintliness of all kinds of music. Curating becomes a sustained research into burning questions: what kind of musical engagement, which degree of musical sustenance, how much musical resilience and musical warmth do our very own interesting times need? And how can the music made today become a map through the apparent chaos of the human and the non-human world in which we all may, hopefully, continue to live together?
