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Sounding Decolonial Futures: Decentering Ethnomusicology's Colonialist Legacies

Video"Zuni: Rain Dance", from "Music of the American Indians of the Southwest"

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Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852-1933)
Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852-1933) was an American psychologist whose nascent work in studying “primitive music”, as the West called it, developed into the modern field of musicology. The historical moment in which he worked allowed for him to contribute to and exist within a particular intellectual ferment in a number of developing or fast-approaching fields, including psychology and, eventually, ethnomusicology and museum theory. While his work is no longer at the forefront of any field of study, Gilman’s legacy of colonial and racial subjugation is one that remains imbued in present-day practice, and understanding the overlap across these disciplines provides a clear perception of how profusely harmful Gilman’s work truly was.

The tight quarters that these fields occupied during their development in the late 19th century certainly influenced Gilman’s career trajectory. Prior to working with music, Gilman had pursued studies in philosophy, logic, and aesthetics, learning with such notable intellectuals as C.S. Peirce and William James, the latter of whom is considered the father of American psychology. Following his education, Gilman offered a course at Clark University on the psychology of pleasure and pain, in which he only consulted music briefly but felt comfortable asserting that European music was the only kind of “developed [musical] art” due to being based on Western scales (Gilman 1893, 50). His later work with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, somewhat separate from his musicological and psychological studies altogether, involves his background in aesthetics. His 1904 report to the museum’s trustees about what he felt was necessary for a museum to center their audience’s experiences is so formative that many historians consider it “the birth certificate of the modern American art museum” (Lubar 2017). Gilman’s skiascope exemplifies his ideas behind this developing museum theory, as the tool’s rigid and limiting frame isolates a museum object or exhibition from outside influence, for better or for worse.
As his treatment of music in the psychology course implies, though, Gilman held an expertise in what he called “developed” musics from his ethnological study, and the significance of that research supersedes his other academic pursuits. In 1890, prior to teaching, Gilman and ethnologist Jesse Walter Fewkes were commissioned by philanthropist Mary Hemenway to research the music of Indigenous Puebloans in the southwestern United States. This project, known as the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, focused predominantly on recording the music of the Hopi and Zuñi tribes and drawing analyses and transcriptions from wax cylinder recordings. The novelty of both new recording technology and the beginnings of the field of music ethnology (to become musicology) itself means that Gilman’s work in the expedition set a precedent for the developing discipline. This precedent cemented the glaring ethical and moral flaws involved in his research methods as acceptable practice. For example, Gilman’s research of Hopi music correctly asserts that it functions separately from Western temperament and form, but he comes away feeling that because the Hopi music he heard will never “submit to a trammels of a system”, such music is “unhistoric rather than … prehistoric” +. Gilman’s experimental research in psychology, aesthetics, and the study of music beyond the American Southwest reflects similarly bigoted and racist justification: an 1892 article on the psychology behind “specimens of Chinese music” reduces a wealth of Chinese scalar function to a monolith, one supposedly belonging to a “time immemorial” despite making comparisons to prior knowledge of Greek and Western structures (Gilman 1892a, 55;59).

In summary, the disconnect between the nature of Gilman’s research and his academic distillations is obvious and astounding. How can so-called “primitive” musics, “inexplicable by interpolation and transcription”, be dissected with analysis that forcibly compresses musics outside of Western art music into the Euro-American mold (Gilman 1909a, 11)? Gilman’s lack of respect for Indigenous communities, as well as his desires to divulge their musical cultures by and for the academy, dehumanized groups like the Hopi and Zuñi through scientific abstraction rather than by social Darwinism alone. As a result, the foundation of the music ethnology discipline was tempered by its self-fulfilling desire to hold court with already established disciplines, reducing vibrant musical cultures to wax cylinders and transcriptions that hold no value to the communities whose sonic and ceremonial practices were poached for intellectual commodification.

Below are some additional publications by and about Gilman for further reading:
Gilman, Alexander William. 1895. “Search Into the History of the Gillman or Gilman Family” (London: E. Stock) 257-9. https://archive.org/details/searchesintohist00gill/page/724/mode/2up.
Gilman, Benjamin Ives. 1892b. “Report on an Experimental Test of Musical Expressiveness” The American Journal of Psychology. Vol. 4, no. 4: 558-576. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1410803?seq=2.
GIlman, Benjamin Ives. 1909b. “The Science of Exotic Music” Science. Vol. 30, no. 772: 532-5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1635211.pdf .
Gilman, Benjamin Ives. 1891. “Zuñi Melodies” A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology. Vol. 1, sec. II: 63-91. https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/0/0b/IMSLP665127-PMLP1067374-A_Journal_of_American_Ethnology_and_Arch.pdf.