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The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jann Pasler
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Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, musical instruments were seen as embodiments of a country's distinction, useful in ‘the study of man, the diverse races, and their degree of civilization’. This article, focusing on the illustrated French press between 1870 and 1900, examines popular colonial representations of instruments in the context of the complex racial ideologies and the material as well as ideological struggles underlying imperialism. Images of exotic instruments, I argue, served not only to teach about foreign cultures, but also to shape French perceptions of Africa and Indo-China during imperialist expansion there. As such, they help us to situate ethnomusicology's prehistory within French colonialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 129 , Issue 1 , 2004 , pp. 24 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2004

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References

Sections of this paper were presented at the international symposium ‘From Musical Exoticism to World Music: Constructing Ends of Centuries’, City University, London (8 July 2000), the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (23 February 2001), the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth- Century Studies Association conference ‘Exhibiting Culture, Displaying Race’, Eugene, Oregon (21 April 2001), and the International Musicological Society meeting in Leuven, Belgium (7 August 2002). I am grateful to Sue Carole De Vale as well as two anonymous readers for making helpful suggestions, to Jason Heilman, Duke University Educational Media Services and Bill Milhoan of Case Western Reserve University for assistance with the digital scans of my figures, and to the Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, for permission to reproduce the images and maps from L'lillustration.Google Scholar

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4 This idea harks back to early race theorists of the 1850s, such as Gobineau, who saw the white race as the model for all humanity, and history (i.e. progress) as the result of contact with the white race. Other music scholars of the period concurred. John Rowbotham began his three-volume study, A History of Music (London, 1885–7), with the assertion: ‘The history of savage races is a history of arrested developments’ (i, p. 1).Google Scholar

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9 In his Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, 1988), Timothy Mitchell discusses the West as ‘a place where one was continually pressed into service as a spectator by a world ordered so as to represent’ (p. 13). He suggests that Universal Exhibitions reflected people's general tendency to conceive and grasp the world beyond as if it, too, were an exhibition.Google Scholar

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17 This zoo was planned in 1855 by the animal collection staff of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (the Jardin des Plantes) as an extension of its own activities. It focused on a small number of species, each represented by a relatively large number of individuals.Google Scholar

18 In his Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington, 1994), Michael A. Osborne explains that displays of Algerian animals, for example, ‘proclaimed France's ability to use science to subdue, resurrect, and refashion North Africa for the good of both itself and the Africans’ (p. xv). For an image of the public at zoo exhibitions, see p. 121.Google Scholar

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26 In his important treatise based on a study of Algeria, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris, 1874; 2nd edn, 1882), Paul Leroy-Beaulieu used the word rapprochement instead of fusion to describe his ideal of race relations in the colonies. By this he meant a ‘specific process of cultural change’ rather than ‘physical union’. He advocated transforming living conditions through the introduction of railroads, hospitals and private property. Cf. Chouquet, ‘Le musée de notre Conservatoire de Musique’, 198, and Léopold de Saussure, Psychologie de la colonisation française dans ses rapports avec les sociétés indigènes (Paris, 1899), 17.Google Scholar

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28 Schoelcher's collection is described in ‘Nouvelles’, Revue et gazette musicale (27 December 1872), 406–7. In 1874 he also gave six more non-Western instruments, mentioned in Art musical (18 June 1874). Chouquet notes that his name was associated with the emancipation of people in the French colonies in 1848 (Le Musée du Conservatoire National de Musique, 205).Google Scholar

29 The most important purchases by and donations to the Conservatoire were made before 1889 and many of the Western instruments displayed today in the museum at La Villette date from this period. In 1873 the museum purchased 105 instruments from outside Western Europe, including an American banjo, a Russian balalaika, a Burmese harp and a Chinese lute. Then, in 1879, Sourindro Mohun Tagore donated 98 more instruments, including 87 from India of which 17 were vinas. (Tagore (1814–1914) also sent 98 instruments to the Brussels Conservatoire, leading to the creation of their instrument museum, and 76 to London in 1884–5.) In the 1880s the Paris Conservatoire also collected a Greek lyre and Persian drums, but most of their acquisitions and donations focused on the Chinese diaspora. These included a Japanese tam-tam, a Chinese gong, a Javanese puppet theatre in 1886, a Javanese gamelan in 1887, four Cambodian instruments from Schoelcher in 1889, and 81 more Indian ones from Tagore in 1889. In 1893 they also added 21 Persian instruments, in 1900 16 Korean ones from Prince Min Lung Chou, and in 1909 61 instruments from Pauline Tarn. Most of these were transferred to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1933. Very few African instruments were added in the 1880s, apart from a xylophone donated in 1888 and some Arab instruments. On the 1886 Indonesian gifts, see Art musical (30 April 1886) and Le ménestrel (3 July 1887). See also the discussion in Gétreau, Les collections instrumentales du Conservatoire de Paris, 380–2, 395–6.Google Scholar

30 Gustave Chouquet, Rapport du jury international: Les instruments de musique et les éditions (Paris, 1880), 61. In Indo-China, Annam, whose capital was Hué, lies between Tonkin, whose capital was Hanoi, and Cochin China, whose capital was Saigon. See Map 1.Google Scholar

31 Ibid.Google Scholar

32 As early as 1845, in an extended study of Javanese instruments recently brought to Paris, a French scholar found in Javanese music ‘the character of a true art’ that ‘carried it to a degree of perfection that few oriental nations had attained’. See Édouard Dulaurier, ‘Musique javanaise: Notice sur un gamelan, ou collection d'instruments de musique javanaise rapportée de l'île de Java à Paris en 1845’, Revue de l'Orient et de l'Algérie: Bulletin de la Société Orientale (February 1859), 81–94.Google Scholar

33 Léon Pillaut, ‘Le Musée Instrumental du Conservatoire National de Musique: Le gamelan javanais’, Le ménestrel (3 July 1887), 245.Google Scholar

34 Sue Carole De Vale pointed out to me that, besides this ensemble, there were two such gamelans in Holland and two in England by this time. Similar instruments were reported at the London Aquarium as early as 1882.Google Scholar

35 Eugène Spuller, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l'Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts, Séance publique du 4 août 1887 (Paris, 1887), 6; Léon Pillaut, ‘Conservatoire de Musique: Dons faits au musée instrumental’, Le ménestrel (27 February 1887), 101. For a recent perspective on this, see Conklin, Alice, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, 1997).Google Scholar

36 Léon Pillaut, ‘Section II, Arts libéraux, 4: Musique’, Exposition Internationale de 1889: Catalogue général officiel (Lille, 1889), 74.Google Scholar

37 See note 29 above. I am grateful to Allyn Miner for this information.Google Scholar

38 L'illustration (4 March 1843), 2.Google Scholar

39 Pierre-Jean Foulon, L'illustration du livre en France de 1870 à 1918 (Morlanweltz, 1999), 22.Google Scholar

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41 L'illustration was founded in 1843, a year after the Illustrated London News. See also Le monde illustré.Google Scholar

42 In his An Empire for the Masses, Schneider explains that anything happening within Europe could be reported with pictorial representations within ten days, the time for photographs or drawings to be sent by train to Paris and an engraving made. Communications from Africa took far longer, from several weeks to months (pp. 79, 87–92).Google Scholar

43 The substantial space L'illustration devoted to culture in reporting on French imperialism in Africa may have also been influenced by the personal interests of Lucien Marc, the magazine's editor from the late 1880s. While his politics are unclear, he later wrote a monograph on the Mossi people from West Africa.Google Scholar

44 Ryan, Picturing Empire.Google Scholar

45 H. Robert Cohen, Les gravures musicales dans L'illustration, 1843–1899, 2 vols. (Quebec, 1982–3). The numbers cited in this article refer to those in Cohen's catalogue.Google Scholar

46 Foulon, L'illustration du livre, 38.Google Scholar

47 See Evans, ‘The Illustrators of Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires‘, and Edward Henry Gordon Craig, Woodcuts and Some Words (London, 1924).Google Scholar

48 In his Picturing Empire, Ryan reproduces an 1889 photograph and the manner in which it was retouched and altered when published in 1897, with characters and objects added and the background completely recomposed, thereby changing the focus and meaning of the image (pp. 220–1).Google Scholar

49 See discussions about photography's capacity for becoming an art form in Alfred de Lostalo, ‘Exposition d'art photographique’, L'illustration (30 March 1895), 251, and the annual amateur photographic competition reported each October in the family magazine Lectures pour tous between 1899 and 1901.Google Scholar

50 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 18, 28. See also Joan M. Schwartz, ‘The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22 (January 1996), 29–35, and Joanna Cohan Scherer, ‘Historical Photographs as Anthropological Documents: A Retrospect’, Journal of Historical Geography, 3 (1990), 133–55.Google Scholar

51 Foulon, L'illustration du livre, 61.Google Scholar

52 For more on the use of images to serve imperialist propaganda, see Thomas G. August, The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890–1940 (Westport, 1985).Google Scholar

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54 In his The Burden of Representation (Amherst, 1988), John Tagg notes that photography emerged as a technique of representation to assist in new practices of observation in the late nineteenth century, with the knowledge it produced leading to new forms of power. The assumption that the truths of photographs are transparent, however, can be problematic. ‘As with any other discursive system’, he writes, ‘the question we must ask is not, “What does this discourse reveal of something else?” but, “what does it do, what are its conditions of existence, how does it inflect its context rather than reflect it; how does it animate meaning rather than discover it; where must we be positioned to accept it as real or true, and what are the consequences of doing so?”‘ (p. 119).Google Scholar

55 In her Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), Vanessa Schwartz argues for the power of the press to use representation to ‘construct common ground’ among its diverse audiences (p. 39).Google Scholar

56 Cited in Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 18, 28.Google Scholar

57 Saussure, Psychologie de la colonisation française, 54.Google Scholar

58 Some of the language on realist representations in this paragraph comes from Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 10–11; Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 99; and Wlad Godzich, ‘Foreword: The Further Possibility of Knowledge’, Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1986), vii–xxi (pp. xiii, xix).Google Scholar

59 Louis Pagnerre, ‘La musique dans l'Afrique centrale (d'après Stanley)’, Art musical (15 September 1890), 130. The author cites Stanley as noting that such instruments were also played by enormous chimpanzees, who stole them and could often be heard hitting them in the silence of the night. At the same time, he ends his essay by pointing to the importance of rhythm in ‘the most barbarous nations’ as a tacit criticism of ‘civilized Europe that today is seeking to dissolve and even destroy rhythm’.Google Scholar

60 This lack of interest may possibly be explained by an attitude expressed by a French anthropologist in describing Dahomeans exhibited in Paris the following year. He called their physiognomies ‘uniformly ugly from the point of view of European aesthetics’. ‘Séance du 18 mai 1893‘, Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (1893), 330.Google Scholar

61 Jacques Thobie and Gilbert Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale, ii: L'apogée (Paris, 1991), 154. A second extended campaign in Dahomey began that autumn when, with 4,000 men, Colonel Dodds took Abomey and Béhanzin fled.Google Scholar

62 See Schneider, An Empire for the Masses, 97–109.Google Scholar

63 Chouquet, Rapport du jury international, 4.Google Scholar

64 Even Saussure, who criticized this idea in his Psychologie de la colonisation française (p. 31), sees assimilation as based on this belief. Ironically perhaps, the tambour exemplifies the French assimilation of a foreign instrument. As E.-M. de Lyden explains in ‘Le tambour’, Le ménestrel (4 July 1880), 241–3, it may have come from India, carried by the Moors through Spain, or more likely have been ‘appropriated from Oriental customs’ during the Crusades ‘to excite troops on the battlefield’ (p. 241).Google Scholar

65 Cohen reproduces only a few such images, referring to most clairons in his appendix.Google Scholar

66 I am grateful to the anonymous readers for observations about this image.Google Scholar

67 Pagnerre, ‘La musique dans l'Afrique centrale’.Google Scholar

68 In Histoire de la France coloniale, Thobie and Meynier note that the French troops began their conquest of the Niger in 1890 with 742 soldiers and ‘several hundred indigenous auxiliaries’ (ii, p. 150).Google Scholar

69 In L'illustration (19 November 1892), after a two-page drawing of the Sudanese going off with the French, there is a map of the French military operations in Dahomey in which they were being brought to participate (between pp. 412 and 413).Google Scholar

70 Thobie and Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale, ii, 120. Cochin China had proved itself prosperous and some French envisaged it as the ‘nucleus of an empire’, ideally the French equivalent of England's India. See Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (2nd edn), vi.Google Scholar

71 Julien Tiersot, ‘Ethnographie musicale: Notes prises à l'Exposition Universelle de 1900, iii: Le théâtre japonais’, Le ménestrel (2 December 1900), 380. Since a treaty in 1874, there was a direct link between Annam and China, and the prince of Tonkin was invested by the emperor of China.Google Scholar

72 Edmond Bailly, ‘Ethnographie musicale: Le balafo’, La musique des familles (5 January 1889), 93. A subsequent image on the cover of La musique des familles (9 March 1889) features an engraving of a ‘Boschjesman [Bushman] playing a gorah’, taken from L'univers pittoresque, Afrique Australe, this time with two lines of music transcribed under him. Again the soloist is in nature, here on a rock and scantily clothed (though wearing sandals). He is blowing a tiny feather attached to a string on a short bow. Despite the simplicity of the instrument and the man's attire, Bailly's narrative, as in his discussion of the balafon, attempts to be serious. He cites heavily from publications by explorers, noting contradictions where he finds them. One explains that this music, which would ‘easily please pigs’, consists of a 70-second pattern repeated without variation; another said it was ‘impossible to follow any tune on this instrument whose tones are a product of chance and the quality of the feather’. Bailly concludes with perhaps the reason his journal published such images: this instrument ‘from the most distant antiquity’ offers a glimpse of ‘the oldest race’ and the most ‘primitive’ of Africa, the Bushmen wanderers. Bailly, ‘Ethnographie musicale: Le gorah’, La musique des familles (9 March 1889), 162–3.Google Scholar

73 A short ethnographic film made in 1905 and shown in the Tate Modern's opening exhibition in summer 2000 featured a performer resembling this one.Google Scholar

74 Raoul de Rocheblanche, ‘Un tour dans la Guinée portugaise’, L'illustration (24 January 1891), 83.Google Scholar

75 Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 400–9.Google Scholar

76 Part of the anti-colonialist sentiment came from the great losses the French had suffered in Madagascar in the 1890s – 40% of their troops, as compared with 6.1% in Tunisia, 7.5% in Tonkin and 22.5% in the Sudan, the last two in 1885. See Thobie and Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale, ii, 175–6.Google Scholar

77 See Rowbotham, A History of Music, i, 151ff., on ‘the lyre stage’ and its association with the Aryan race.Google Scholar

78 Report on the Amsterdam Universal Exhibition, L'illustration (1 September 1883), 143.Google Scholar

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81 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas (Manchester, 1988), 97.Google Scholar

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85 Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 14.Google Scholar

86 For more on them, see Jean-Benoit Scherer, Annales de la Petite Russie, ou Histoire des Cosaques-Saporogues et des Cosaques de l'Ukraine, ou de Petite-Russie (Paris, 1788).Google Scholar

87 This image, which took up two full pages, was followed by a two-page minuet for piano. The event took place in the Mexican ambassador's salon and was published to signal a return to interest in eighteenth-century fashions among the Parisian elite. See my forthcoming study of this emerging taste.Google Scholar

88 This upholding of the piano as an advanced instrument is interesting to remember when writers in L'illustration describe the Javanese gamelan as a piano. See above, note 78.Google Scholar

89 Later examples of composers who did incorporate non-Western instruments are Igor Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring (1913) and, of those who tried to imitate non-Western instruments using Western means, Maurice Delage in Quatre poèmes hindous (1912). For a study of the latter, see my ‘Reinterpreting Indian Music: Maurice Delage and Albert Roussel’, Music-Cultures in Contact, ed. Margaret Kartomi and Stephen Blum (Basle, 1994), 122–57, and ‘Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the Yellow Peril’, Western Music and its Others, ed. Georgina Born and Dave Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, 2000), 86–118.Google Scholar

90 Henri Quittard, ‘L'orientalisme musical: Saint-Saëns orientaliste’, Revue musicale (1 March 1906), 9. For more recent writing on this topic, see Ralph P. Locke, ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”: Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 3 (November 1991), 261–302, and The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston, MA, 1998).Google Scholar

91 Durkheim, writing in the Revue de Paris (1902), is cited in Raoul Girardet, L'idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris, 1972), 158.Google Scholar

92 Jean Marcel, ‘Variétés, musique d'Extrême-Orient’, written from Vinh in January 1901, Le courrier musical (1 March 1901), 58.Google Scholar

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94 According to the Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris (Paris, 1900), ticket sales indicate that, among the exotic performances, the Egyptian theatre was most popular. It earned 94,000 francs, followed by exotic theatre (92,000), Indonesian theatre (48,000), Algerian street theatre (40,000), French Indies theatre (32,000), oriental dances (32,000), Moorish dances (31,000), Algerian dances (11,000) and an Indian concert (20,000), with a total of approximately 400,000 francs for all exotic performances. The most popular events, in order, were: Swiss village (2,160,284), Costume pavilion (1,322,475), Optical pavilion (970,834), Old Paris (936,155), Panorama of the World Tour (692,245), Maréorama (588,000), Loïe Fuller (349,162) and the Paris Aquarium (305,549).Google Scholar

95 Arthur Pougin, ‘Le théâtre et les spectacles à l'Exposition Universelle de 1900‘, Le ménestrel (24 February 1901), 60.Google Scholar

96 In his review, ‘Ethnographie musicale: Notes prises à l'Exposition Universelle de 1900, (Suite)’, Le ménestrel (14 October 1900), Julien Tiersot agreed that this Exhibition was ‘very inferior’ to the 1889 one, for most of the presentations lasted only 15–20 minutes, passing by ‘as if on a film screen’, and effects replaced mystery. He too questioned the authenticity of some of the performers, referring to an ‘exoticism of the Batignolles’ (a Parisian suburb), and admitted that within a tune embellished by a Negro playing in the Madagascar exhibit he recognized a Spanish dance theme he had learnt on the piano in his youth (pp. 323–4). Apparently even the cuisine served at the various exotic restaurants within the Exhibition was a sham.Google Scholar

97 Thobie and Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale, ii, 171.Google Scholar

98 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 11.Google Scholar

99 Tiersot, ‘Ethnographie musicale … Suite’, 324. A selection of these essays that appeared in subsequent issues of Le ménestrel was published together in his Notes d'ethnographie musicale (Paris, 1905). Its main chapters concern Japanese dance and theatre as well as Chinese, Indo-Chinese and Indian music. The Revue musicale early that decade also published studies of non-Western musical traditions based much less on old explorer accounts and reflecting higher standards of scholarship.Google Scholar

100 Julien Tiersot, ‘Notes d'ethnologie musicale: La musique au Dahomey’, Le ménestrel (25 January 1903), 25–6; (1 February 1903), 33–5; (8 February 1903), 41–2. These articles also include tunes Tiersot notated during various visits of Dahomeans to Paris as well as notes on their manner of performance.Google Scholar