18Music Hath Charms:

Uses and Functions

Bend a Knotted Oak

Much of the literature on the study of music in culture involves the ways inwhich humans use music, which is therefore said to carry out certain func-tions in human society. It may be reasonable to believe that people everywherehave used music to do certain things, and at the same time that they thoughtthat music, acting on its own, as it were, was capable of doing something tothem. The early literature of ethnomusicology often dwells on the presump-tion that in prehistoric, folk, or indigenous cultures people used music prin-cipally to accomplish certain essential things for them, and that therefore thismusic is functional. Herzog (1950: 1034) cautiously said that folk song is oftensaid to be more functional in its use or application than cultivated poetry ormusic. This statement implies that the songs used to accompany turningpoints in a persons life and in the course of the year are more functionalthan those pieces used for performance in concerts, that a work song is morefunctional than Billy Joels Piano Man or Handels Messiah. The focus onthis special characteristic of the music of folk and tribal societies is no doubtrelated to the earlier ethnomusicologists felt need to justify the concern withsimple, unsophisticated, andin the academic musicians athletically judg-mental view of musicinferior products.

But when Congreve said, Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak, he probably did not mean folk orindigenous music. If modern American academic tradition (depending onmisspelling as a major creative force) often nds music soothing the savage

beast instead, this recalls the various settings of the Orpheus myth and TheMagic Flute, all hardly folk music. It depends how one denes use and func-tionality; and ethnomusicology, gradually discarding the distinction betweenfolk and art, has come to admit that the concept of function is applica-ble to all music in the analysis of the complex whole.

It stands to reason. If most of the songs of the Blackfoot were used as partsof religious ceremonies, to accompany social dances, and to keep gamblersfrom revealing the location of a hidden object, religious services in eighteenth-century Leipzig or twentieth-century New York were and are hardly con-ceivable without music, social events such as dances and parties in modernAmerica are inevitably musical events of a sort, a proper football game in-cludes a marching band at half time, and a major league baseball game at leasta hugely amplied electric organ swelling to glorify the Mudville teams homerun. One may reply that this is true, but the complex cultures also have eventssuch as concerts, whose purpose is to exhibit their best music. Yet, whethera Bach cantata or a Blackfoot Sun Dance song is religious or entertainmentdepends on the identity of the listener (at a powwow or a church service).By contrast, many American concertgoers conceive of concerts as social eventsor secular rituals, as their typical program structures, their obligatory formsof dress, their standard length, the ever-present intermission, printed pro-grams, and so on all show us. We in academia often accord to art music anedifying, educational role, believing that important things of value can belearned from hearing Bach and Mozart. But it has also been said (R. Water-man 1956) that the function of music among the people of Yirkalla is essen-tially educational, and that they, like the North American Plains Indians,learned their culture gradually, accompanying each step with appropriatemusic. Thus, when we teach our children to go to concerts in order to learnimportant values in their own culture, we are doing essentially what the tech-nologically simpler people of Yirkalla and the Plains also did with their music.

These are just a few examples to illustrate the usefulness of leaving humancultures undivided when it comes to looking at the functions of music.Ethnomusicologists agree that people everywhere use music to accomplishsomething. The old issue, whether music in certain types of cultures was usedmore for certain kinds of things, has been submerged by a concern for waysof looking at these uses. Ethnomusicologists have been concerned, rather,with the difference between what they called uses and functions, and the dif-ference between the function of music in human society at large as opposedto individual societies, and beyond that, the specic function of individualsegments of repertories, styles, genres, of change in function and context.

uses and functions . 245

Response to Alan P. Merriam

The early literature of ethnomusicology deals with the concepts of use andfunction as if they were more or less the same. Later, in a very direct state-ment on the subject, Alan P. Merriam (1964: 20928) denitively separatedthem: When we speak of the uses of music, we are referring to the ways inwhich music is employed in human society, to the habitual practice or cus-tomary exercise of music either as a thing in itself or in conjunction with otheractivities (210). But: Music is used in certain situations and becomes a partof them, but it may or may not also have a deeper function (210). Using thework of Siegfried Nadel and following widely accepted denitions suggestedby Ralph Linton, Merriam took function to mean the specic effectivenessof [music] whereby it fullls the requirement of the situation, that is, answersa purpose objectively dened; this is the equation of function with purpose(218). Merriam went on to list ten major and overall functions, as opposed touses, of music (219): emotional expression, aesthetic enjoyment, entertain-ment, communication, symbolic representation, physical response, enforc-ing conformity to social norms, validation of social institutions and religiousrituals, contribution to the continuity and stability of culture, and contribu-tion to the integration of society.

A formidable list. To soothe the savage breast is perhaps hidden in it.Without being able to do better, I confess to a bit of uneasiness. The line be-tween uses and functions is clear when we observe that a particular NativeAmerican song is used to accompany a Grass Dance, but it also has the func-tion of contributing to the integration of society. But in the case of music forentertainment, use and function may instead be identical. Then, too, Mer-riams list, intended to characterize music, is not specic to music but couldapply to all of the arts, admittedly to different degrees, and possibly to otheractivities not normally classed as arts (although they might well be), suchas religious ritual and speech.

But music, I would assert, is functionally different from the other arts.More than any, it is a product of human ingenuity alone. It is the most dis-tant from nature, not normally speaking directly of or reproducing visuallywhat the artist sees. It is likewise the most distant from the rest of culture.Unlike the other arts, it rarely depicts or deals directly with what humansdo or think. Of the many domains of culture, music would perhaps seemto be one of the least necessary; yet we know of no culture that does not

246 . in human culture

have it. Should one therefore not be able to articulate for it a unique func-tion?

As a matter of fact, the distinguishing of function from use has not reallybeen a major issue in ethnomusicological literature for some time. In theearly stages of ethnomusicology it somehow seemed necessary to make a spe-cial point of saying that ones main purpose was to learn how music wasused. The idea of identifying use/function was almost tantamount to the ideaof studying music in its cultural context. At one point in the 1970s, ethno-musicologists divided themselves informally into musicians and func-tionalists or contextualists, but except for matters of emphasis and ap-proach this issue has long been settled, as we had all confessed, by the 1980s,to an interest in what the music was like, and what humans used it to do forthem, and what it could accomplish for humans.

In contrast to Merriam, several authors who shared a broad acquaintancewith a number of musical cultures converged in their belief that music has oneprincipal function. Blacking (1973) continually stressed the belief that thereought to be a relationship between patterns of human organization and thepatterns of sound produced as a result of human interaction (26). Lomaxmaintained that the principal discovery of his analysis of world music is thata cultures favorite song style reects and reinforces the kind of behavior es-sential to its main subsistence effort and to its central and controlling socialinstitutions (1968: 133). Christopher Small looks at it a bit more narrowly;music is a kind of weapon to defend the central expressive interests of a soci-ety. Thus, a symphony concert is a celebration of the sacred history of theWestern middle classes, and an afrmation of their values as the abiding stuffof life (Small 1987: 19). Those who have recently returned to contemplationof the origins of music as a source of insight (e.g., in Wallin, Merker, and Brown2000) also focus on a single and thus fundamental function of music. In-creasingly, in the history of ethnomusicology after around 1970, the issue ofidentityor should I say identity, it can mean so many thingstakes on sig-nicance as the main function of music. To be sure, the interest in looking ata multiplicity of functions continued, and one reads of it also in literature onother performing arts, as wrote Anya Royce (1977: 8384): A multiplicity offunctions tends to be the rule rather than the exception. Functions may beregarded as either overt or covert and either manifest or latent . . . any danceevent, moreover, may have multiple functions at both levels. But, if pushedto the wall, we can perhaps still go no further than to say that music hathcharms, that it does the inexplicable, but that, as Merriam concludes, it is

uses and functions . 247

clearly indispensable to the proper promulgation of the activities that consti-tute a society (1964: 227).

The Coin and the Pyramid

For some time, ethnomusicology deemphasized its interest in functions anduses, at least stated overtly. It was sometimes there under the surface, whereJohn Baily, for example (in Stokes 1994: 4648), seemed obliged to tease func-tionalist viewpoints from publications concerned with identity, ethnicity, andmusical change. More typically (after 1990), the relationship of music to thesignicant social and political trends and events of the postcolonial era pushedscholars to look at function again more seriously. Various models speaking tothe heterogeneity of perspectives (see, e.g., Killick 2003; Rice 2003; Slobin1992b) have been promulgated, but I take the liberty of suggesting that twomodels, proposed a quarter century ago, labeled the coin and the pyramidfor convenience, juxtaposing the diversity of insider and outsider view-points and the contrast between functions and uses, may still be helpful foranalysis of individual cultures or communities. Maybe unnecessarily, I remindthe reader that all of this involves more the comparison of theoretical con-structs than the establishment of veriable fact. Borrowing from Burlings(1964) early insight into the need for the gingerly handling of theory, it oftenthreatens to be more hocus-pocus than Gods truth.

The pyramid model has layers: a base, a tip, and something in between,moving gradually from uses to functions. The base is comprised of the overtuses of music, the activities that music accompanies, the many things thatinformants will tell you are associated with music, what they tell you musicdoes, what they use music to do, or the things one sees music doing on thesurface. In any one society, there are literally hundreds of these: entertain-ment, accompaniment of ritual, dance, concerts, military marching, and soon. In the middle there is increased abstraction of these uses. Here perhapsone might place Merriams ten functions. Eventually, near the top, there isa statement of single, overriding, major function for any one society. Onemight here include statements such as McAllesters to the effect that inNavajo culture many of the usual functions of music . . . are subordinatedto an all-important function of supernatural control (1954: 88), or Mer-riams that among the Flathead Indians music functions as a means for ex-pressing the fact that they remain Flathead no matter what changes in theirways of life have occurred (1967a: 158). At the top of the pyramid there is a

248 . in human culture

single, overriding function of music for all humanity under which all oth-ers are subsumed. The top and the bottom are ideals. We may look for a wayto articulate with extreme precision unique functions of music, but it is prob-ably beyond us; and we will never get all uses of music onto one list.

But lets concentrate for the moment on the coin model, which impor-tantly takes into account the differences between insider and outsider views,perhaps more aptly called the peoples and the anthropologists analyses, andsubsumed under the proverbial two sides of a coin. The situation is morecomplicated, and we have questioned the concepts of insider and outsideras well as the role of reexivity, and still, I would maintain that the contrastbetween these two views continues to impinge on all ethnomusicologicalproblems related to eld research. Merriam (1964: 20910) spoke to it, ap-pearing to believe that an accounting of the uses of music strikes more closelyto the cultures own expression of itself. Music may be used in a given soci-ety in a certain way, and this may be expressed directly as a part of folk eval-uation. The function, however, may be something quite different as assessedthrough analytical evaluations stemming from the folk evaluation. The ex-tremes of these stances seem out of reach. Ethnomusicologists, claiming to beempirical scholars, always use the cultures own analysis or evaluation, at leastto a degree. Nor can they eliminate their own cultural background completely.

Which side of the coin is up? One is tempted to associate the uses-functionsdyad with the emic-etic distinction, but correlations end up being unclear.Merriams view lends itself to extrapolation of uses as emic, functions as etic.But this contradicts some of the other implications of the emic-etic contrast.Etic is also the down-to-earth, the detailed description of specic events ob-served; emic is the generalization and structuring of the etic. Referring tothe linguistic roots of these terms, in one sense, phonetics involves actualsounds made by people speaking, and phonemics structures them in abstractunits that indicate functions used, identied, though not always easily statedby the speakers. On the other hand, it is phonemic distinctions that nativespeakers use to teach foreigners their language, create alphabets, keep lin-guistic categories separate, while phonetics is a highly complex characteriza-tion of sounds and their physical bases, and native speakers may not reallyknow what to do with this kind of knowledge.

Emics and etics are related to the insider-outsider continuum, but the cat-egories are not congruent, and the partial abandonment of emic-etic in an-thropology has to do with this problem. In eld research it is obvious thatconsultants are quite capable of making etic statements, that is, of describ-ing their own culture objectively and comparing their description with the

uses and functions . 249

cultures primary evaluations. Thus, if the theory (i.e., emics) of Persian clas-sical music is that improvisors do not repeat themselves, Persian musiciansare nevertheless quite aware of the fact that repetition does occur. The emicstatement may be an expression of the ideal, and the real is presented by theculture itself in subordinate, etic statements.

Despite the weaknesses of emic-etic analysis, it seems useful to present amodel along these lines, but in order to avoid confusion, it seems advisable tospeak simply of the cultures and the analysts statements. If I may subject you,dear reader, once more to a brief, very compressed comparative exercise in-tended to illustrate approaches rather than to present denitive data and in-terpretations, let me try the coin and the pyramid using my own cultural mi-lieu: rst the coin, applied to urban Western society, as viewed through the eyesof the academic profession. These are some of the kinds of statements sub-sumed under each of the categories. Whether the model works, helps to giveinsight, is a question left to the reader.

analysts statement of uses Music is associated with a plethora ofactivities. Mostly it is used for listening, with the audience passive and thedegree to which it pays attention varying greatly. Rituals of all sorts are ac-companied by music, which is also used as background sound for many typesof activity. Here we might present a list of all the activities that involve music,from concert, church, parade, football game to obligatory background (inthe case of teenagers, foreground, at least in terms of volume) at parties, insupermarkets, on elevators, for traveling in cars.

analysts statement of functions From the items on Merriams list,entertainment seems most prominent. Emotional expression and group orsubgroup integration are also factors.

cultures statement of uses Music must be available for listeningmost of the time. It is something one must hear daily. Almost no activity canproperly be pursued without the presence of music. It is an indispensableavoring that makes other activities or inactivity tolerable.

cultures statement of functions Music does something to a per-son, something not done by anything else; nothing can be substituted forit. As McAllester (1971: 380) suggests, and as Gilbert Rouget (1985) brilliantlyillustrates, music transforms experience, a major function of Western music.We (modern members of Western society) do not consider music to have a

250 . in human culture

single main function except that, being music, it has powers in the realm ofthe abstract and emotional, though not in the concrete world, and we feelwe cannot live without it. To my culture group, indeed, music hathcharmsto soothe the savage breast but not to bend a knotted oak.

In contrast to the coin model, the pyramid avoids directly confronting thedifference between analysts and cultures interpretations. The analysts in-terpretation, which in the coin model is justied as a device for compara-tive study, is replaced in the pyramid by the overarching view that music isan expression or reection or direct result of a central cultural core. Uses andfunctions are presented not as contrasting halves of a dichotomy but, rather,as the opposite ends of a continuum that moves from the absolutely down-to-earth and factual to the most vitally interpretive and thus perhaps un-provable. Let me continue the exercise, using data from the city of Tehran.

We must take a large number of musical styles, types, and genres into ac-count: the most traditional Iranian, including some folk music of rural ori-gin as well as the classical music originating in the courts, as well as religiousand ceremonial material, and popular music distributed mainly through massmedia, using styles that mix traditional, Western, and other non-Iranian el-ements in various ways. This list is a combination of Iranian and Western tax-onomies of the music, historical categories, and geographical venues, from alarge and complex community. We ought to add to the complexity by in-cluding Western music also heard in Tehran, but for the purposes of this ex-ercise, I deal only with categories accepted by Tehranis as Iranian music. Thepresent is around 1970.

overt uses Most music is used for listening and entertainment. Thereare relatively few concerts but many musical occasions in night clubs andmusic halls, whose patrons listen and watch but rarely, as a matter of fact,dance. Radio listening is common, more among adults and less among chil-dren than is the case in the United States. Records are readily available, andsome listening takes place in lightly ritualized formats: parties, concerts,music halls each patronized by members of one occupation group. Therecords have a use beyond simple entertainment, contributing to solidarityof special groups and allegiance to a particular view of Iranian culture. Be-yond this there is religious chanting, which is not regarded as belongingproperly to the sphere of music. Music is used to accompany traditional gym-nastic exercises, dance performances as well as social dancing, military ac-tivity, public ceremonial events such as parades of labor guilds, and as back-ground for poetry readings. Needless to say, it is impossible to list all, but

uses and functions . 251

they correspond moderately well to those of Western urban culture and notwell to those of the Flathead. In Herzogs terms, Iranian music would haveto be regarded as not highly functional. Most activities can be carried outwithout music, and people do not seem to feel that music must be hearddaily, frequently, constantly, as do many in the United States. That one couldeven consider the outlawing of music in 1979 is a case in point.

abstracted uses If we apply Merriams list of ten general functions, wend all of them relevant to Tehran but would have to emphasize particularlythose of entertainment and symbolic representation (both by presence andabsence of music), as well as contributions to religious ritual, continuity andstability of culture, and integration of society. But since many kinds of musicare involved, diversity in religious observance, change as well as continuityof culture, and integration of a number of subcultures are the rst-line func-tions of music. Different repertories within the culture can be interpreted ashaving specic functions. The religious music, chanting the Koran, calls toprayer, are in this case not ways of communicating with God but, rather, de-vices to remind humans of their religious duty. The music accompanying las-civious dancing in traditional night clubs has as its use the facilitation ofdance. But beyond that, it functions as a force mediating between the humanobserver and the forbidden; it throws a cloak of formality over an otherwiseunacceptable situation, a function of music noted as well for African culturesby Rhodes (1962) and for American folk culture by Greenway (1953) and oth-ers. The modernized and partially Westernized popular music had a functionof symbolizing the process of Westernization; years later, when Westerniza-tion came under a special sort of re, it was this kind of music that was rstand foremost singled out for proscription.

Let me digress and point to a contrasting situation in South America. An-thony Seeger provides a parallel illustration of abstracted musical uses or overtfunctions among the Suya of Brazil (1979). Examining two genres of song verydifferent in style and use, he concluded that the function of akia involves theintention of the singer to be heard as an individual by certain female rela-tives, while the ngere functions as a way of expressing the existence andunity of name-based ceremonial groups (391). But the overt use of the musicis ritualistic, and these functions do not emerge until uses are analyzed andinterpreted. From a further analysis of this level of functionality there mightemerge a single, more culture-specic function of music. Seeger gives morethan a hint: Musical events actually create aspects of the social organization,in this case, dualism (392). If generalized, this would be a far cry from Tehran,

252 . in human culture

where one can hardly claim that music has a dominant effect over other as-pects of culture. Perhaps this has to do with the value of music, ambiguousin Tehran and high, Seeger maintains, among the Suya.

top of the pyramid Time to show my colors. The fundamental func-tion of music in human society, what music ultimately does, is twofold: tocontrol humanitys relationship to the supernatural, mediating betweenhuman and other beings, and to support the integrity of individual socialgroups. It does this by expressing the relevant central values of culture in ab-stracted form. If we accept this, we nd a kind of interdependence betweenthe highest two layers of the pyramid model that does not exist among theother layers. In each culture music will function to express a particular set ofvalues in a particular way.

As Alan Lomax famously argued (1968: 15559), and as Blacking contin-ued to suggest (1987: 133), music can abstract and distill the relatively unclearand obscure character of culture. Its ability to abstract values helps us in re-turning to 1970s Tehran, where we ask how the music of its society functionsto mediate between humans and the supernatural, and to help integrate so-ciety. As in the vast majority of religious systems, music in Islam is a cere-monial device, a way of formalizing a religious statement. We must take intoaccount that much of this music is not classed as music, which in its ex-treme (most musical) form has low esteem in the society. Much has beenpublished about the Muslim attitude toward music, so let me add yet an-other hypothesis. Islam is characterized by its insistence that humans maypray, speak directly, to God, without mediation. Understanding the impor-tance of music as a mediator in other religious systems, particularly thosethat have priestly intercessors, adherents of Islam give it a role of low im-portance because, for them, this kind of mediation is not needed. Its there,but technically its not recognized as music.

The role of music in integrating as complex a society as that of Tehran issignicant in a number of ways. On the one hand, its classical system servedin the 1960s as a unifying device for the nation, bringing together its diverseelements and setting it off from its Arabic and Turkish neighbors. Musiciansand the cultural politics establishment emphasized a classical system thatwas intended to be perfect, to which nothing need or may be added, a sym-bol of the perfect society that was being claimed by the elite of Tehran. At thesame time various rural traditions, symbolizing the nations diversity, werebrought together in the mass media, as was a repertory of Westernized ver-nacular music to suggest the desired ties to the outside, and to the modern

uses and functions . 253

world. A number of interrelated but separate musical systems ourished,some of them distinguished by their degree of Westernization. Many socialgroups identied themselves with a particular music. But for the nation atlarge, I suggest that the classical tradition in particular expresses some spe-cic shared social values.

The main thing about the pyramid is that the insider-outsider dyad isplayed down. But still, the top of the pyramid turns out again to contrast ob-server and observed. I think I saw, in the 1970s, what it was that music didfor Tehran society, but musicians, as well as others in Iran, did not nd muchto which they could respond in my direct questioning. They were, for instance,more concerned with liking or disliking music and its various subtypes. Theysometimes exhibited a certain guilty tendency to defend their liking of music,and as individuals or as members of particular groups of the populationSus, the Westernized elite, members of minorities such as Armenians andJewsthey used their identication with music as a way of underscoring in-dividualism or specialness. When asked what it is that music does, Iranianswould surely not have said directly that it reected their social and culturalvalues, although educated consultants declared that the classical music wasparticularly Persian, tied to the culture and the soil, while the popular musicwas there partly to show how Iranians could and did interact with other cul-tures, taking from them what they needed to become modern. To Iranians,the statement Music hath charms would mean something quite differentfrom what it means to Americans or Europeans. But in the end, even theymight agree with some of its implications.

Various Identities

Things are very different now. Thats what a Blackfoot friend said when Ivisited Browning in 2002 after having stayed away for years. But who in theworld wouldnt have been tempted to say this, after the fall of the Berlin wall,the political realignments of the world in the 1990s, the growing contrast be-tween the living standards of rich and poor nations, the dominance of globalcorporations, the revolutions in gender relations and sexual orientation, thegrowth of international religious fundamentalism, and the developments inthe world of communication, the Internet, and digitalization. In the worldof music, geography still matters, but we are getting used to a situation inwhich what you hear or see, and with whom you communicate, has little todo with where you are. The notionnot on very solid ground even in 1950

254 . in human culture

that the world contains a lot of isolated villages and indigenous societies witha participatory musical life of agricultural and ritual music is now totally un-realistic. Most people in the world experience music largely in broadcast orrecorded form. Most people also have access to a vast variety of musicalsounds and styles, which, since so many people from different continents whocame out of different musical milieus share in experiencing them, begin in-creasingly to resemble each other. Musicians of all kinds around the world aremore into providing entertainment, performing on stage and in clubs andrecording studios, and they speak increasingly to a world audience. To musicmainly directed to the community and to the deities has been added the con-cept of music as expressing and communicating messages towell, maybeall humans.

Ethnomusicologists around 1950 werent very good at developing a realis-tic perspective. We were visiting Native American reservations, wishing thatthe tribal and cultural integrity of their peoples were still valid, looking nos-talgically to an imagined past, and describing music and culture in thoseterms. Fifty years later, ethnomusicologists have become more up to date,promptly paying attention to many of the musical developments of the re-cent past and the present. As the worldand musical culturehave changed,so has the typical ethnomusicological literature. The books of the nineties andlater increasingly emphasize various kinds of relationships among groups ofpeoplegender issues, power relations, interaction of socio-economic classes,music in political movements, all perhaps related to the matter of identitynational, ethnic, class, gender, personal. So we ask whether the primary func-tion of music has changed, and whether humankind has turned a totally un-precedented corner. Maybe; I wont deny that the good old days are goneforever, or argue that their return is just around the (next) corner; or thatthe old interpretations of, say, Merriam still work if we just adapt them, andinstead admit that maybe they were way off the mark in the rst place. But Isuggest that a very signicant group of functions of musicwhether theyhave always done so or notrevolve around the concept of identity. At leastthat is what much of our recent literature suggests, and how it looks to mein Blackfoot country.

National identity was a matter of concern to European musicians andscholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when small nationsworked hard to free themselves from political empires and the German-Austrian-dominated musical empire. In a way, and maybe signicantly, therise of ethnomusicology went hand in hand with that move. But the purposein politics was to establish culturally and linguistically homogeneous nation-

uses and functions . 255

states, in the end with compromised results, such as Czechoslovakia, Yu-goslavia, Poland. In the midnineteenth century, the development of nationalopera in Prague, the inclusion of nationalistic tropes from musical motifs tofolk dance genres, as well as the beginning of large-scale collecting of folksongs in the Czech lands had been major factors in the national culture warsof that people. In the second, postcolonial wave of nationalism, following thepolitical liberations in the wake of World War II from the late 1940s to the1970s, one of the issues was the integration of culturally and linguistically in-dependent ethnic groups that had been articially shoehorned into colonialborders mainly in the mid- and late-nineteenth century by European colo-nial powers. In the large literature on political and cultural nationalism, theworks of Benedict Anderson (1991) and Chatterjee (1986) have had a partic-ular inuence on ethnomusicological thought.

The creation of explicitly national musics was a factor in the political na-tionalism in nineteenth-century Europe, but it was mainly art music thatfunctioned as a kind of weapon in the international culture wars. Over 100years later, the expression of nationalism could be considered an importantfunction of music in the postcolonial era, but we are now talking mainly aboutmusic in the realm of popular culture. The issues are helpfully discussed andcarefully explained in the introductory essay in Stokes (1994: 127), while ex-amples of highly contrastive national situations are provided for Zimbabweby Turino (2000) and for Finland by Ramnarine (2003). The usefulness of theconcept of ethnicitydiscussed, with its difculties analyzed, by Stokes (6)seems to have the function of allowing a group of people to erect boundariesof language, custom, art; but an ethnic group is harder to dene and identi-fy than a nation. The function of music as expression of ethnicity is, however,an older subject in ethnomusicology than is nationalism, as it began to playa role when the signicance of culturally heterogeneous societies such as mod-ern cities began to arouse interest. The function of music as expression ofclasscriteria might be reading music and understanding certain technical-ities for upper classes, knowledge of the political signicance of populargenres by economically lower classeshas been discussed by ethnomusi-cologists, with considerable attention to the work of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g.,1984), for example by Chopyak (1987) and Capwell (1991).

If music expresses personal or group identity, it plays a role in negotiat-ing relationships between unequals, as a way for a dominant group to rein-force its hegemony, or for a subordinate population to ght back at somelevel. The domination of Western culture everywhere is expressed, for ex-ample, by the international adoption of some version of functional harmony.

256 . in human culture

The counterpart is the tendency for colonized peoples such as Native Amer-icans to use music and dance as a principal way of continuing to assert theiridentity. The role of national anthems in identity, which drew upon nationaland ethnic concepts with the purpose of social integration, has been exam-ined after 1985 by several ethnomusicologistsfor example, Capwell (1986),Guy (2002), and Daughtry (2003)in the context of establishing the na-tional identity of a society.

The idea that one makes or listens to music to show who one is, in national,ethnic, class, personal contexts, has been around for a long time, but iden-tity hasnt been recognized until the last two decades as a major function ofmusic. Is musical life also all that different, as Blackfoot people told me? It cer-tainly is easy to interpret Blackfoot musical activities as major expressionsof various kinds of identity. The major midsummer powwow, North Amer-ican Indian Days, is a kind of event that would not have been conceivable inearlier Blackfoot history and even in the rst part of the twentieth century.It is polysemic, overtly and subtly expressing (1) Blackfoot national identitythe M.C. says so, and occasionally speaks Blackfoot; (2) Native American eth-nic identity (or is Blackfoot the ethnic group, and are Native Americans thenation?)again, the M.C. tells us, the Drums, the singing groups, come frommany reservations in the United States and Canada, and the dancers performa widely intertribal repertory; (3) U.S. national identitymuch is made ofthe presentation of the colors by military veterans; (4) age identitythere aredance contests for different age groups; (5) personal identitytheres the in-credible variety of costumes. There is plenty of white music going on intown at the time of the powwow; country music and rock at dances for olderand younger folks, respectively; U.S. patriotic song recordings at an Indianrodeo. But at North American Indian Days, while all kinds of appurtenancesfrom white culture are in evidence, from ags to tape recorders, the musicis totally Indian. Even for the presentation of the military guard. The as-sociation of music with identity is very strong here.

Musical life otherwise is also dominated by Blackfoot traditions. Shopspatronized by Native Americans have tapes and CDs by Blackfoot and othersingers. Teenagers whiz by in their pickup trucks, Native American songswafting out the window from their tape decks. Sometimes, though, it is coun-try music, rock, or rap. There are lots of levels of identity, but its possibleto interpret all of these as ways for individuals to show that they are Black-footBlackfoot as members of wider North American society, of NativeAmerican society at large, of the Blackfoot nation; and to show that there isa Blackfoot way to be a member of your age group and to have your own

uses and functions . 257

identity. Conversations support these interpretationspeople in 2002 talkedmore about their Blackfootness than their other group associations. Mu-sical life is indeed very different in 2002 from 1966, but have the functionsof music changed all that much? In 1967, speaking of the Flathead just acrossthe continental divide from Blackfoot territory, Alan Merriam (1967a: 158)wrote: In music and dance, especially on occasions of [the large intertribalpowwow] kind, but in individual expression as well, the people reafrm thatthey are, indeed, Flathead.

258 . in human culture