Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Nolte, Eckhard and Weyer, Reinhold. Musikalische Unterweisung im Altertum. Mesopotamien – China – Griechenland. Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2011. 330pp. ISBN 9783631610039 Hardback £52.00
Reviewed by
City College, Norwich
Nolte and Weyer’s volume on musical instruction in antiquity will prove a very useful resource for students as well as for academic professionals requiring a quick reference point for primary sources and secondary bibliography. It provides a much-needed addition to the literature – a concise treatment of three major civilizations, with separate bibliographies. Footnotes are refreshingly brief, with comprehensive reference to sources. Weyer’s contribution on Greece, the third part of this volume, having music pedagogy as its centre, provides a slightly different focus to that of the first two parts, on musical instruction, which are by Nolte. The theoretical difference is that musical instruction refers to the concrete circumstances of the transmission of musical skill and the formation of practitioners, whereas music pedagogy refers more particularly to the capacity of music itself, on the one hand, and ideas, on the other, to educate. In the third part, therefore, Weyer begins with the philosophers. He rightly sees Plato’s writings as among the most important for music pedagogy. For Plato, of course, musical skill is divinely given and is intrinsically bound up with being educated (Laws 653d-e). So the very fabric of our thinking is musical. Weyer’s analysis in general is both critical and informative, proceeding from the more abstract level of philosophical ideas to how these ideas functioned in practice.
Nolte, though with more focus on musical instruction per se, also follows this layout to some degree. In each of the first two parts he precedes the main body of the discussion, on musical instruction, with a consideration of music’s cultural functions. In the case of China, Nolte’s categorizations ‘ethical, characteristic, social and political’ (p. 75) are perhaps less close to Chinese thought than an analysis of that culture requires. The holism of Chinese philosophy is perhaps instead best captured by the oriental tendency to think in terms of completing circles rather than in terms of generating linear structures. This, however, is my only query in the context of what is Nolte’s fascinating and learned exploration of the context of a musical culture little studied in the Western academy. Nolte’s treatment of Mesopotamian musical culture is equally illuminating in all these respects.
Nolte and Weyer’s work in this comprehensive project, though critical, is essentially documentary and, as they point out, necessarily treats each culture more or less in isolation (p. 10). The book is therefore a clarion call for the enlargement of the scope and modelling of current research on the musical cultures of antiquity, not just in terms of their music-pedagogical foundations but also the aesthetics and compositional practices towards which these gesture. It also demonstrates very clearly that the study of any musical culture should not be undertaken without some regard to the pedagogies by which we come to know about it in the first place. A systematic and thoughtful exposition of unfamiliar but essential music histories, Musikalische Unterweisung im Altertum. Mesopotamien – China – Griechenland should be on the shelf of every teacher and researcher engaged with the debates and problems of early music and with the instruction of others in the same.