31 - The time of music and the time of history

Summary

This chapter outlines some of the claims made that music symbolizes basic cultural ideas regarding processes occurring over much longer timescales. It concentrates particularly on the idea that Indian music symbolizes cosmological processes. The chapter mentions two case studies: Indonesian gamelan, which has been subjected to comparable readings to the Indian case, and so-called African rhythm, which has been the focus of long debate and high-profile critique of the assumption of essential difference. Notions of time concepts as political and related to power relations have been developed since Thompson's time by postcolonial historians, who have linked the joint development of European modernity and colonialism to the historical mode of thought and to a conception of time. The chapter explores the relationship between musical and historical time under two broad headings, that musical time carries traces of histories of social interaction, and that musical time can partially reflect ideas current in other domains through the imposition of knowledge structures on practice.