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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
This article examines postcolonial affect as expressed in the Belgian-born Singaporean citizen Robert Casteels's L’(autre) fille aux cheveux de Bali (2002), in which it is shown that sonic identities (gamelan and Chinese instruments; quotations from Debussy and Bartók) give way to the ambiguous, modulating relationality of dis/affiliation, dis/affinity and a/proximity. Micro-changes in musical affect lead to the loosening of enculturated or acculturated emotional and perceptual responses associated with established identities. Musical affect thus serves as a corrective to neatly differentiated identities that are constructed in narratives of imperial exoticism, postcolonial autonomy or multicultural harmony.
1 Recent relocation projects have included the Parliament House, the National Stadium and the National Library.
2 ‘The Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore’ (Singapore: Ministry for Information and the Arts, March 2000), <http://www.acsr.sg/PDF/RCP_I.pdf> (accessed 20 March 2012), 4.
3 See, for example, the ‘Singapore 21 Report’, <http://www.singapore21.org.sg/menu_flash.html> (accessed 20 September 2012). On Westernization, see Joseph Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore's Soul: Western Modernization and Asian Culture (Berlin, 1996).
4 Homi Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, The Location of Culture (London, 2004), 145–74.
5 On postcolonial ambivalence as instrumental in the emergence of the Other as the Other (rather than as Western stereotype), see Olivia Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge, 2008).
6 See, for example, Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (New York, 1999).
7 See Ralph Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge, 2009).
8 More historical research needs to be undertaken to trace the pentatonicization of Chinese music. Given the propensity of mass-media forms towards homogenization, however, an interpretation which assumes that non-Westerners are composing in conformance with Western expectations (‘neo-orientalism’) would be hasty. Indeed, critique in this vein may well be rooted in an orientalism of authenticity, where non-Western musics are defined solely through non-syncretic forms. For a critique of the discourse of authenticity, see John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry (London, 2000), 124.
9 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7 (1990), 1–24 (p. 5).
10 Veit Erlmann, ‘The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s’, Public Culture, 8 (1996), 467–87.
11 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
12 For an example of the Other as autonomous, see Musics of Multicultural America: A Study of Twelve Musical Communities, ed. Kip Lornell and Anne Rasmussen (New York, 1997).
13 The score and recording of L’(autre) fille aux cheveux de Bali are available at <http://www.robertcasteels.com/composition/show/25> (accessed 20 March 2012). A biography of Casteels can also be found on his website.
14 Affect promises emancipation from cultural order through the emergence of the ‘new’. Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique, 31 (1995), 83–109 (p. 87). Of the many strands of affect theory, the ones most directly related to Deleuzean philosophy are premissed on the loosening of affective territories, or what Deleuze would call ‘deterritorialization’. In the larger scheme of things beyond the scope of this article, affect encompasses not only perception and feeling but also other varieties of embodied capacities, such as action. A lucid articulation of how affect can be translated into freedom is found in Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom’, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, 2010), 139–57.
15 Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, 91.
16 Debussy's pentatonicism after 1889 is widely imagined to be the result of his encounter with the gamelan at the World Exposition. For more on whether Debussy's pentatonicism exoticizes the gamelan, see Locke, Musical Exoticism, 233.
17 These insights into Casteels's life and work were gleaned from an interview with the present author on 20 September 2007.
18 Liner notes for privately produced CD Kreisleriana, Singapore: NUS Center for the Arts (2004).
19 Ibid.
20 Haydn, quoted in Donald Grout and Claude Palisca, A History of Western Music (6th edn, New York, 2006), 467.
21 Personal communication in interview on 20 September 2007.
22 See, for example, Chang's review of a new-music concert: ‘The stereotype of the unapologetic Schoenbergian or Boulez-wannabe seems to be in the minority these days, with more composers re-embracing tonality and its aural comforts.’ Chang Tou-Liang, ‘The Music, Our Works: A Review’, <http://pianofortephilia.blogspot.com/2012/05/music-our-works-review.html> (accessed 1 October 2012).
23 See Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH, 1993).
24 Feelings are defined as body states in interaction with modes of thought conditioned by the body. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL, 2003), 83–136 passim.
25 For an introduction to affect, see The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham, NC, 2010).
26 The division between musicology and ethnomusicology is not absolute, but it is clear from journal publications that there is a differentiation of genre and geography between the two terms: high-art and avant-garde music from the West versus other musics from other places. There is the isolated case of the canonized non-Western composer Tan Dun, who is in fact based in the West and who is also the subject of an article in a musicological journal, but this proves the general point. Samson Young, ‘Reconsidering Cultural Politics in the Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Music: The Case of Ghost Opera’, Contemporary Music Review, 26 (2007), 605–18.
27 Barbara Mittler, Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China since 1949 (Wiesbaden, 1997); Christian Utz, Neue Musik und Interkulturalität: Von John Cage bis Tan Dun (Stuttgart, 2002).
28 Isang Yun is the subject of a few publications in German. See, for example, Der Komponist Isang Yun, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister and Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer (Munich, 1987).
29 See Samson Young, ‘The Voicing of the Voiceless in Tan Dun's The Map: Horizon of Expectation and the Rhetoric of National Style’, Asian Music, 40 (2009), 83–99, and Christian Utz, ‘Listening Attentively to Cultural Fragmentation: Tradition and Composition in Works by East Asian Composers’, The World of Music, 52 (2010), 7–38; and see also ‘Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’, ed. Daniel Avorgbedor, special issue of The World of Music, 45 (2003). Ann Warde and Andrew McGraw write about avant-garde practices within the tradition of gamelan music based in Indonesia: Ann Warde, ‘Contemporary Indonesian Composition: Elastic-Edged Experimentalism’, Asian Music, 34 (2002), 111–53; Andrew McGraw, ‘Radical Tradition: Balinese Musik Kontemporer’, Ethnomusicology, 53 (2009), 115–41. See also Michael Tenzer, Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music (Chicago, IL, 2000); Dieter Mack, Zeitgenössische Musik in Indonesien: Zwischen lokalen Traditionen, nationalen Verpflichtungen und internationalen Einflüssen (Hildesheim, 2004); and David Wong, Music of the Chinese in Sabah: The Keyboard Culture (Kota Kinabalu, 2009).
30 Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Middletown, CT, 2004).
31 Composer-centred books include Noriko Ohtake, Creative Sources for the Music of Tōru Takemitsu (Aldershot, 1993); James Siddons, Toru Takemitsu: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 2001); A Way a Lone: Writings on Tōru Takemitsu, ed. Hugh De Ferranti and Yōko Narazaki (Tokyo, 2002); and Peter Burt, The Music of Tōru Takemitsu (Cambridge, 2006). See also Francisco F. Feliciano, Four Asian Contemporary Composers: The Influence of Tradition in their Works (Quezon City, 1983). Book chapters on Takemitsu and the Egyptian composer Gamal Abdel-Rahim appear in edited volumes with an ethnomusicological emphasis. See Intercultural Music, vol. 1, ed. Akin Euba and Cynthia Tse Kimberlin (Bayreuth, 1995), and Barry Shank, ‘Productive Orientalisms: Imaging Noise and Silence across the Pacific, 1957–1967’, Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario, ed. Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid-González (Lanham, MD, 2008), 45–64.
32 See, for example, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), and The New (Ethno)Musicologies, ed. Henry Stobart (Lanham, MD, 2008).
33 For an exception, see, for example, Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music (Urbana, IL, 1995).
34 ‘Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts 1989’, <http://www.acsr.sg/PDF/ACCA_Report.pdf> (accessed 20 March 2012); ‘The Renaissance City Report’.
35 The musicological literature on Singaporean new music is not substantial, consisting of a single book and three articles which include uneven coverage of composer biographies, post-war history of music and some music-analytical notes. For coverage of new music since 1995, see Gavin Lee, Scions of the Musical West: Singapore at Cultural Crossroads (Singapore, 2009), deposited at the National Library Board (<http://nlb.gov.sg>). For a history of music-making in the high-art genre in the postwar period (covering composers, performers, musical institutions and cultural climate), see Chu-San Ting, Yoon-Pin Leong and Bernard Tan, ‘Singapore’, New Music in the Orient, ed. Harrison Ryker (Buren, 1991), 97–114. For coverage of traditional musics and new music since around 1980, see Joseph Peters, ‘Singapore’, The Musics of ASEAN, ed. Ramon P. Santos et al. ([Manila], 1995), 190–232. For a composer-focused take on postwar music, see JoAnn Hwee-Been Koh-Baker, ‘Music Culture in Singapore’, Asian Composers in the Twentieth-Century, ed. Japan Federation of Composers (Tokyo, 2002), 285–95. Several composers have their own websites, including Robert Casteels (<http://www.robertcasteels.com>), John Sharpley (<http://www.johnsharpley.com>), Zechariah Goh (<http://zechariahmusic.com>), Phoon Yew-Tien (<http://www.phoonyewtien.com>) and Hoh Chung-Shih (<http://www.chungshih.info>).
36 Bruno Nettl, The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation, and Survival (New York, 1985).
37 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony’, Public Culture, 4 (1992), 1–30 (p. 1).
38 See, for example, Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, 2001), and Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham, 2006).
39 George Yong-Boon Yeo, ‘Building in a Market Test for the Arts’, Speeches: A Bi-monthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches, 15 (1991), 54–7 (p. 54).
40 On authoritarianism and the economy, see, for example, Christopher Lingle, Singapore's Authoritarian Capitalism: Asian Values, Free Market Illusions, and Political Dependency (Fairfax, VA, 1996).
41 For a narrative of local agency that precludes neocolonial hegemony, see Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia, PA, 1982). Feld's defence of his exclusion of neocolonial industrialization in this work is found in his ‘From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: The Discourses and Practices of World Music and World Beat’, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George Marcus and Fred Myers (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 96–126.
42 See, for example, George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London, 1994), and Timothy Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York, 1997), 197–206 passim.
43 Yassar Mattar, ‘Popular Cultural Cringe: Language as Signifier of Authenticity and Quality in the Singaporean Popular Music Market’, Popular Music, 28 (2009), 179–95. On ‘cultural cringe’, see Arthur Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture (Melbourne, 1959), 89–95.
44 ‘The Renaissance City Report’, 25. The fact that all these cities had been ruled by Britain for over a century speaks to the former colonial power's dominance in the past and its continued influence in the present through legislative, political, economic and cultural institutions that survived former colonies’ independence. In the light of the polysemy of ‘cosmopolitanism’, we should rethink the use of the concept as an antidote to the imperialist overtones of Western exoticism. For this latter use of cosmopolitanism, see Björn Heile, ‘Transcending Quotation: Cross-Cultural Musical Representation in Mauricio Kagel's Die Stücke der Windrose für Salonorchester’, Music Analysis, 23 (2004), 57–85, and Amy Bauer, ‘The Other of the Exotic: Balinese Music as Grammatical Paradigm in Ligeti's “Galamb Borong”’, Music Analysis, 27 (2008), 337–72.
45 ‘Census of Population 2010: Advance Census Release’, <http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/popn/c2010acr.pdf, pg. 35> (accessed 20 November 2012).
46 The persistence of race is acknowledged in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano (Chicago, IL, 2000).
47 For a critique of anti-racist, multiculturalist discourse as perpetuating a false image of equality, see Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN, 2011). See also Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica.
48 Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference’, 5.
49 Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 2002), 95–127.
50 On the exotic repertoire, see The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston, MA, 1998), and Locke, Musical Exoticism. For a critique of scholarly appraisals of exotic music, see Matthew Head, ‘Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory’, Music Analysis, 22 (2003), 211–30.
51 On ‘colonial diachrony’, see Bloechl, Native American Song, 13.
52 Bartók's use of imitation at the opening of his piece is probably meant to suggest the texture of gamelan music. However, the gamelan texture referenced by Bartók (‘polyphonic stratification’) actually consists of the elaboration of a slow-moving core melody on instrumental parts with smaller rhythmic units. For an introduction to Balinese music, see Lisa Gold, Music in Bali: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford, 2005).
53 On the integration of pentatonicism and tonality in La fille, see Jeremy Day-O'Connell, ‘Debussy, Pentatonicism, and the Tonal Tradition’, Music Theory Spectrum, 31 (2009), 225–62 (p. 248).
54 Personal communication during an interview with the present author on 11 May 2013.
55 Entries on ‘polarize’ and ‘indistinct’, <http://oxforddictionaries.com> (accessed 1 October 2012).
56 On the relation between musical ambiguity and feelings of anxiety and surprise, see Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, IL, and Cambridge, 1956), 27–30. The two modes of listening I have described correspond loosely to Ihd's embodied (listening as myself) versus objectified (listening to myself) modes of auditory imagination. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (Albany, NY, 2007), 120–1.
57 Sara Ahmed's analysis of happiness shows that the emotion arises from proximity, affiliation and affinity. Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregg and Seigworth, 29–51.
58 ‘National Pledge’, <http://app.www.sg/who/45/National-Pledge.aspx> (accessed 30 November 2012).
59 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 27–82 passim.
60 Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London, 2006), 63–4.
61 David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York, 2011), 218–19.
62 Ibid., 199–200.
63 On the perception of musical ambiguity, see Daniel Pressnitzer, Clara Suied and Shihab Shamma, ‘Auditory Scene Analysis: The Sweet Music of Ambiguity’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5 (2011), 1–11.
64 Eagleman, Incognito, 20–54.
65 James Currie, ‘Music After All’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62 (2009), 182–92.
66 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music: Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 505–36 (pp. 513, 524).
67 A notable exception to the study of embodiment in other than musical terms is Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley, CA, 2006). Bruce Holsinger's Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA, 2001), for instance, relies primarily on texts and images.
68 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), 31–9.
69 See, for example, Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, 2000), and Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA, 2010).