Concepts Describing Culture and the Idea of “Musical Geography”

 

Lecture given at University of Melbourne, School of Music,
April 6, 2006

 

Part I: From Napoleon to De Gironcourt

 

I would like to begin by quoting Napoleon who once remarked that “the politics of nations originates in their geography.”

 

Interestingly, a few years later, around the turn of the nineteenth century, an entire school of geographers pursued this idea. In 1897, the German scholar Friedrich Ratzel published Political Geography. Ratzel is considered one of the initiators of cultural diffusionism, and his students later coined the term geopolitics for this area of investigation. In France, too, during the nineteenth century, a school of human geography developed under the guidance of Vidal de la Blache and Jean Brunhes. Though differing in approach from Ratzel, their work similarly sought to link physical geography with cultural patterns — a pursuit not unlike what we today call cultural anthropology.

 

This leads to an intriguing question: can we speak, in a similar fashion, of “musical geography”? While musical geography is not recognized as a formal field and the expression remains largely unused, Georges Reynard de Gironcourt did publish a short book on the subject in 1932, titled Une science nouvelle: la géographie musicale (Nancy: André, 1932). De Gironcourt, a French engineer and agronomist specializing in colonial agriculture, was trained at the Institut National Agronomique and the École d’Agriculture Coloniale de Vincennes. He conducted research in Madagascar, studying coconut cultivation, and later in Morocco, collecting soil samples and cataloguing local flora. In 1908, he undertook his first expedition to West Africa, sponsored by the Ministère des Colonies and the Société de Géographie, to study both the geography and populations of the Niger Bend and to investigate the development of agriculture in French, English, and German colonies. Remarkably, this busy and learned man also took note of the unusual sounds he encountered during his travels.

 

De Gironcourt belongs to an illustrious tradition of educated travelers who, at least since the geographic discoveries of the Renaissance, examined flora, fauna, human habits, and — crucially — the “exotic” musical sounds they encountered. Yet he was an isolated scholar, apparently unaware of the emerging field of musicology in Germany, including research on European folk song and non-Western music. His book attracted few readers and inspired no followers. Nevertheless, students of musical folklore, comparative musicology, and later ethnomusicology, often observed relationships between musical styles and the territory or landscape in which they were performed.

 

Part II: The Kulturhistorische Schule

 

The Kulturhistorische Schule was founded by Fritz Graebner (1877–1934), Wilhelm Schmidt (1864–1954), and Bernard Ankermann (1859–1945), with their theories first appearing in Graebner’s Methode der Ethnologie (1911) and the journal Anthropos.

The school’s central claim was that cultural traits reveal not only past contacts but also layers of cultural history. Each layer, or stratum, constitutes a Kulturkreis: a geographical area, sometimes non-contiguous, characterized by a cluster of cultural traits representing a once-distinct society now embedded as a stratum in cultural history. The Kulturhistorische Schule rejected deterministic ideas, denying that people think or behave similarly under similar conditions, and maintained that history does not repeat itself. Their Kulturkreislehre is a theory of monogenesis.

For instance, alphorn signals, cattle calls, and yodeling were not merely characteristics of the “Alpine culture area,” but rather archaic layers in the history of music, still detectable today in the Alps, the Balkans, and parts of Central Africa. The Kulturkreislehre never gained traction in France, Britain, or North America, and is largely abandoned today even in the German-speaking world — not for being false, but because it is considered unproductive, given the more culture-specific and historically limited focus of contemporary research.

 

Part III: Culture Areas

 

The concept of “culture area”, as developed by anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Alfred Louis Kroeber, and Clark Wissler, serves in anthropology — and by extension in ethnomusicology — a role analogous to that of historical periods in music history: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, etc. Just as historical periods suggest a coherent chronological trajectory in European music — a simplification that often neglects local histories — so culture areas give the impression that cultural traits are neatly distributed across space, as if they could be color-coded like political territories.

 

Indeed, this is precisely what George P. Murdock attempted in his Ethnographic Atlas (1967–1969), in which 565 cultures were classified according to thirty specific traits. Both historical periods and culture areas are conceptual constructs: they privilege central phenomena and marginalize peripheral ones. This is one reason why composers like Sammartini are often considered less significant than Haydn, or why the songs of the Kaluli in New Guinea receive more anthropological attention than urbanized Navajo learning country music.

 

Part IV: Lomax and Cantometrics

 

Alan Lomax (1915–2002), American folksinger, photographer, talent scout, and musicologist, played a central role in cross-cultural study of musical style and behaviour. Best known for his role in the American folk-song revival and for discovering Leadbelly, Lomax developed what remains the most comprehensive comparative effort to date (Folk Song Style and Culture, 1968).

Lomax correlated the musical profiles of 233 cultures with social and technological traits, arguing that musical and dance systems reflect broader societal organization. His Cantometrics project, based on sound recordings rather than transcriptions, evaluated singing style using thirty-seven parameters, including:

 

• Melodic contour
• Vocal range
• Ornamentation
• Accentuation
• Vocal blend
• Nasality
• Words-to-music ratio
• Use of rubato

 

His central conclusion:

 

“Song style symbolizes and reinforces certain important aspects of social structure in all cultures.” (Lomax 1968, p. vii)

 

He also argued that singing style — the “sound” factor — is more stable than melody, rhythm, or textual content, evolving independently of geographic patterns of other musical traits.

 

From his analysis, Lomax identified three broad European musical zones: Mediterranean Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and Northern and Oceanic Europe. While criticisms of his work are well documented — ranging from statistical reductionism to speculative correlations — Cantometrics remains a pioneering effort demonstrating that large musical regions exist across the planet, even if migrant musics complicate the picture.

 

Part V: Gomera, the Alphorn, and the Italian Musical Divide

 

On Gomera, a Canary Island, inhabitants developed a unique whistled language to transmit messages across valleys — a phenomenon unmatched elsewhere. Similarly, the Alphorn in the Alps functions as a long-distance musical signal, though its distribution is uneven, and similar instruments historically existed throughout Eurasia.

 

In Italy, the 19th-century scholar Costantino Nigra identified a clear musical and linguistic division: northern regions with a Celtic substratum favour ballad (narrative, strophic, dramatic), while central-southern regions with an Italic substratum favour lyric monostrophic songs (non-narrative, often improvised, each stanza expressing a complete thought). Northern Italy also absorbed functional harmony, facilitating choral singing, whereas in the south this influence is limited. Remarkably, Italian vocal style remains consistent even when Italians migrate abroad — to the Americas or Australia — illustrating the persistence of geographically rooted musical behaviours despite displacement.

 

Part VI: Conclusions — A Musical Geography in Evolution

 

Finally, it is important to recall R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021), Canadian composer, educator, and social critic, who initiated the first systematic study of acoustic ecology through the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University. Schafer introduced the term soundscape, now widely used to describe the auditory environment.

 

He emphasized how human and natural sounds interact, how this relationship evolves over time, and how music must assert itself against ambient noise. The term soundscape, derived from landscape, is particularly apt, as it includes human modifications of the environment.

 

 

In today’s world, where musical traditions are frequently transplanted, circulated, and transformed, fixed notions of musical geography are increasingly problematic. Yet, it is my conviction that a geographically minded musicology — beginning with the study of soundscapes — remains a fruitful approach for understanding the interplay of place, culture, and “music”. Actually, since “music” is a term and a concept that does not exists in many cultures, I prefer to speak of “social use of sound”.