Robert Murrell Stevenson's Music(ethno)logical Enquiry: In Memoriam (1916-2012)

Memorial paper given by Dr. Susan Campos Fonseca, Casa de las Americas Musicology Award 2012

Who is Robert Murrell Stevenson? What can justify the study of his person and works? These questions warn us about an expectation: that we are going to speak about a physical person, but this we abandon, and, instead, we are going to deal with a certain musicological problem, because only this way we will be able to offer the adequate possibility of presenting Robert M. Stevenson in the extension and authority of his person and works.

Our intention is to begin with the development of an enquiry on a musicological problem, approaching this way to the way a real person elaborated and oriented his questions and determined certain answers, in this case, Dr. Robert Murrell Stevenson.

***

Both previous paragraphs parody somewhat the introduction by Martin Heidegger to his polemic text “What is Metaphysics?” (1929)[ii]; we used it to present the problem for our study, because Robert Murrell Stevenson, in his sixty years of musicological work, and an impressive number of publications[iii], is an authoritative reference for a contemporary musicological enquiry.

Another way of asking Heidegger's question, and in the boundaries for our study’s aims brings, with itself a fundamental polemic matter: what is Musicology for Robert M. Stevenson? As the first step before such a question, it is necessary to set the boundaries for a perspective of the state-of-the art, and with this purpose, we chose Juan Orrego-Salas's words in his Redescubriendo mi América, which clearly present the problem that is our concern:

“It was in another America than the one where I was born, where they speak another language than that my parents spoke to me and called “football” another sport than the one in our stadiums, where I was struck by a deepening interest in the music, composers, songs and dances of our people, their history and traditions. Forty-two years I lived in Chile, twenty dedicated to teaching music, and I never knew about courses dedicated to the music of Latin America, or that could be collected for our libraries…, and only a small proportion came in public concerts.”[iv]

Orrego-Salas presents the historical context in which Robert M. Stevenson developed his musicological enquiry. He was pioneering in many aspects, as much methodological as epistemological and with hermeneutical aspects, an enquiry that posed the problem of Music in America, and later, in the Iberian Peninsula, which does not imply that in America and in the Iberian Peninsula there was nobody asking the same questions. Other scholars, such as Francisco Curt Langue, Alejo Carpentier, Segundo Luis Moreno, Carlos Vega, Andrés Pardo Tovar, Otto Mayer Serra, Argeliers León Perez, Vicente Gesualdo, Samuel Claro Valdés, Felip Pedrell, Miguel Querol, Samuel Rubio, Santiago Kastner or José López Calo, also have done research about our musical cultures and heritage.

But, it was in this "America" about Orrego-Salas speaks, where this research turned into an institutional “area of study” for the first time. In the sixties and seventies of the last 20^th century, three figures in the United States were to become mentors of research groups devoted to Latin American music: Robert M. Stevenson (University of California - Los Angeles, UCLA), Gérard Béhague (University of Texas-Austin), and Juan Orrego-Salas (Indiana University - Latin American Music Center).    

But Robert M. Stevenson will be - in opinion of the musicologist Luis Merino - the one who will delimit “the contribution of Latin America to European music” and reveal “to the world of musicology many of the treasures of the New World, forgotten for centuries. He is the maximum authority in the field of the Iberian and Latino American music.”[v] Is this way, in words of his colleague Gérard Béhague, Dr. Stevenson is “one of the most prolific American musicologists of the 20^th century” dedicated to American, Iberian and Latin American musical studies[vi].

The musicological enquiry that Stevenson has developed in this respect supposes an approximate 93% of his total works (excluding 7%, concerning Central Europe studies[vii]). 93% devoted to music in the American continent and Spain, which includes the research of indigenous music and musical production during the Spanish, Portuguese and British colonial periods, up to contemporary times.

For the scientific and artistic community, his publications are a fundamental reference in current musicological studies. He wrote for prestigious dictionaries and encyclopedias such as The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and New Catholic Encyclopedia and published in the journals Heterofonía, Revista Musical Chilena, Etnomusicology, Fontes Artis Magazine, Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR), Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Musical Quarterly, and Notes, among others. Likewise, many of his works (available in English and Spanish) are translated into Portuguese[viii], French[ix], German[x], and Russian[xi].

For this reason, I consider a systematic study of his legacy essential, beyond the tributes and articles that describe his work and life. My research is only a first consideration of his bibliographic production for the past sixty years, including his compositions, piano and organ performance, recognizing in them the dialogue between the creator and the scientist, coexisting in productive symbiosis[xii].

1. The challenge: a music(ethno)logical enquiry

The greatest challenge of my study was the interdisciplinary academic work of Dr. Stevenson, which I propose to describe as a “music(ethno)logical enquiry” opened over decades, founded on a solid training in musicological and philosophical terms, musical performance and composition. The term “music(ethno)logical enquiry” begins with a basic problem, because Dr. Stevenson is an “American musicologist.” It reveals a primary fact from which he built his musicological consideration.

His work needs to be analyzed from the perspective of Musicology as a political institution inside the western culture, where musicological matters, and the profession of the musicologist "mean" in relation to the organizations which they serve, and in them, to the arguments, canons, and paradigms that dominate the institutional interests, especially what concerns the relationship between the historical Musicology and Ethnomusicology[xiii].

Stevenson’s “music(ethno)logical enquiry” can be understood as a holistic musicology, a philosophy of music history with the addition of the approaches given by ethnomusicology[xiv], and where ethnomusicology is understood as a perspective of transcultural studies, identifying an intellectual motion around troublesome borders[xv].

This concept of "border" is fundamental for our study, for it locates and highlights a "bordering," a "frontier" condition of Dr. Stevenson’s studies, between serving an Institution - “Anglo” American in this case - and exploring "different" cultures beyond its borders from a “Latin” American. We return to our first germinal questions: Who is Robert Murrell Stevenson? What justifies a study on his person and work? What is Musicology for Robert M. Stevenson? What has been Robert M. Stevenson´s musical enquiry?

2. Between “the Americas” and their "Others"

How does this theory relate to the work of Robert M. Stevenson? To approach this question, we refer to the first article on the opinion of Dr. Stevenson's work in Latin America, written by the musicologist Samuel Claro Valdés. This article, published in 1977, is entitled “Veinticinco años de labor iberoamericana del doctor Robert Stevenson.” Claro Valdés informs us about the pioneering work, training, and methodological impact of Dr. Stevenson’s scholarly research in the musicological state-of-the-art:

“Since Dr. Robert Stevenson, from the University of California in Los Angeles, published his Music in Mexico: A Historical Survey (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell) in 1952, fifty years have passed in which this eminent North American musicologist has contributed tirelessly, and with ever greater collections of previously unpublished information, to the growth of our continent and its past and musical present. The magnitude of his work is such that he has managed to project a universal light for the study of our music. On the way, he transformed himself into the major sponsor of musicological projects in Latin America, and a generous and stimulant guide for those who are working in this discipline.”[xvi]

Claro Valdés, Orrego-Salas, Luis Merino, and Gérard Béhague agree on one fundamental point that relates to that “other America”: Robert Stevenson is an “eminent North American musicologist”[xvii], who contributed “with unpublished information, to the growth of our continent and of its past and musical present.”

This is not incidental, but as Orrego-Salas indicates, it was this other America, the “Anglo-America,” that was making Latin American heritage "more visible" for the international scientific community and, as Claro Valdés indicates, “the magnitude of Stevenson’s work…projects on the study of our music a universal light.” Stevenson published in the English language, the common scientific language of our age, a crucial factor in the diffusion of his works. Dr. Stevenson used his native language as a space of empowerment for a heritage that was of special interest. One example was his speech upon receiving, in 1985, the Gabriela Mistral Inter-American Cultural Award:

“The American achievements are as nothing unless somebody writes on them, and they are remembered. My mission has been to rescue the musical past of the Americas. The current composers are too busy with writing their own music to worry about that of their predecessors. The result is that every new generation of composers believes that they are the first ones in discovering Mount Olympus. It is not like that. The past is a succession of musical and artistic glories.”

“In the year that the world honors Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Händel, Domenico Scarlatti and Heinrich Schütz, let's remember also Hernando Franco, from Guatemala and Mexico, who died in Mexico City four hundred years ago, in 1585. Let's remember and let's esteem all the rest of musical pillars of America. On having honored their works, the Americas reveal to the world some musical monuments that are equally impressive to Sacsayhuamán's walls, Teotihuacán's pyramids, Chichén Itzá's temples, Cuzco, Puebla and Mexico City cathedrals, and the palaces of the current presidents.”[xviii]

Thus, memory and legitimacy appear as a major concern in Dr. Stevenson's philosophy of music history. Nine years later (1994), he affirmed that one of the motivations for his labor was “the scorn with which the very American musical institutions treat colonial music, as well as its creators”[xix]. This position had not changed in 1996 (in this case in relation to the music in Mexico), when he wrote:

“ … there is an urgent need for a major diffusion of Mexican music and culture in the whole world, especially in Europe and the United States, where they are still not sufficiently known. It will not be easy to overcome my compatriots' prejudices and the ones of the Europeans. We have to fight and overcome the ignorance about Mexico…, the tourist vision of Mexico.”[xx]

Thus another unique aspect of Stevenson's philosophy of music history becomes evident: the divided America. Stevenson raised not only the problem of a “tourist vision” of Latin America, but also the consideration of others as "peripheral" populations. Moreover, he indicated that inside this "periphery" there is a vision of "otherness.” We can see a series of historical, political, and philosophical ideas present in Stevenson’s considerations of Heritage. In this respect, we agree with Nicolas Cook's judgment when he indicates: "What we hear as the music of the past is, in this sense, a reflection of our present-day understanding of it. Apart from that understanding, there is no music of the past."[xxi]

This is an aspect that Dr. Stevenson discussed in his lecture “Philosophies of American Music History,"[xxii] offered in 1969 in The Whittall Pavilion-Library of Congress (one of the more prestigious groups of music scholars in the United States)[xxiii]. In this lecture, he questioned directly the “Anglo-American” historiography of his time, and presented the need to articulate a philosophy of music history including other views on equal terms. Revealing in his speech a Continental America as an ideological territory, he reflected on the problem of identity in North and South America as a black hole towards which musical expression and musicological theory converge ineluctably.[xxiv]

When we come to Stevenson as an educator, his legacy continues through developing experimental editions, cataloguing and transcription methods[xxv], writing entries for dictionaries and encyclopedias, writing specialized articles, and promoting the recording and edition of unpublished and even unknown works, for example the recorded series by the “A Cappella Choir of UCLA” between 1975 and 1983, under Roger Wagner's direction[xxvi].

And his educational legacy continues through the Robert M. Stevenson Award granted by the American Musicology Society, the Robert Stevenson Lecture Series of UCLA, and the “Cathedra Robert Stevenson” in the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, supported also by the Fundación Carolina and la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Spain.

To all this, we must add the Inter-American Music Review[xxvii] founded by Stevenson in 1978 and followed, in 1980, by the creation of the Latin American Music Review, edited by Gerard Béhague. Nor can we forget the Inter-American Music Bulletin published by the Pan American Union (UP), with twenty issues in 1960, the Yearbook of Tulane's Inter-American Institute published since 1965, and the Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research published since 1970, both founded by Gilbert Chase.

In the words of Walter A. Clark[xxviii], we can speak of a Inter American and Spanish Musicology in "the Age of Robert Stevenson.” His legacy is in his attempt to invert the manifested relationships of power in this “tourist vision” that also has been applied to the Iberian cultures. His pioneering works are widely known: Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus (1960), Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age (1961), and Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (1970). Lesser known works include his article “Spanish Musical Impact Beyond the Pyrenees (1250-1500)”, published in 1987, in the collection España en la música de occidente[xxix]. And another: an article that represents an open critique to the historical Central European Musicology, whose title makes a puns on the French phrase: Avant la France, L'Afrique Commence.

To summarize my previous points: in Robert Stevenson's work can be recognized a voice demonstrating a constant and open critical philosophy of music history, as a socio-political and ideological problem, with a clear position from the Anglo-American Musicology, but also, as a criticizer of the musicological matter in itself.

2.1. An "American" musicologist.

Yet, we return again to our search for Dr. Stevenson's “musico-logical enquiry” based in his situation of "bordering" and "peripheral" discourse built on the “Anglo-German Musicology”, because his research does not come from the periphery, he investigates on it. Dr. Stevenson enquires from “the point of view of the American musicologist,” understood with the sense of the Anglo-American people.

This border issue should be seriously considered. Robert Stevenson was born in New Mexico and grew up there, to the north of the Rio Bravo. This geographical limit is specially meaningful, as his work reflects the north-south tension from the point of view of music. From the north of the Rio Bravo, Stevenson built a musicology devoted to exploring the “others” from the south of the river. This aspect plays an important role in the architecture of my study, because Dr. Stevenson's “music(ethno)logical enquiry” move in this "border" or “bordering space” between an institutional Ethics, and a geographical, territorial, economical, and socio-political Ethnics.

Dr. Stevenson's work revealed to us a fundamental paradigm: his "bordersome" nature. These aspects of "action" and "judgment " will support argumentations devoted to the legitimization of what he considers to be "displaced" by the musicological studies in this “Anglo-America,” in which the vision of the periphery became institutionalized in the sixties, creating the so-called “Latin American Music Studies.”

2.2. The horizons and the analytical western monologue

Dr. Stevenson's works thus involves "rethinking" music, opening it from a "bordering" condition “between two Americas,” whose limits are increasingly blurry in light of population circulation and continuous migration, as can be observed in his first book Mexico: An Historical Survey (1952). The title “Historical Survey” proposes the richest reading, understanding survey as a measurement, inspection, and taking of accounts across borderlines.

According to this portrait, Robert M. Stevenson appears going out the doors of the citadel, waiting for the day that “the barbarians” are welcome inside. He stands in the middle of both spaces lays a bridge between the guardians and the barbarians. But as a bridge, in the processes of "understanding", his “music(ethno)logical enquiry” show two levels of historical interpretation, two dialectical poles: 1) the Archaeological (anthropological - epistemological) and 2) the Hermeneutic (understood as a cultural history and a history of ideas). 

Both aspects are revealed in the genealogical and teleological consideration that Stevenson builds across the bridge of his “music(ethno)logical” discourse; a genealogy with a fundamental problem: the unidirectional of the bridge.

Stevenson builds “from the doors of the citadel” toward the "Others." His work reveals a comparative structure towards a "genesis" whose historiographic parameters  establish a mutual understanding across a legitimacy in relation to the paradigm of “Great Culture,” understood with the sense of “those who are in the citadel.” The aim is to demonstrate that these "Others" also share this paradigm through "diversity" or "disagreement," highlighting the imposition of his "horizon" as a legitimate case.

Dr. Stevenson systematize these "Others" from the other side of the border, creating for their "legitimacy" a teleology that puts them in communion with his horizon (the one of the citadel), building a historical "coetaneity" from the West, following the way of music across the Americas and Europe, applying historiographical models designed to study European musical cultures to another pre or post "colonized."

For this reason his work reveals a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontvershmelzung) in Gadamer's sense[xxx], something constant in his works, especially his devotion to the study of musical movement during the colonial period and the Central European musical reception of both the Iberian Peninsula and the United States, understood as "Others" to Europe[xxxi].

This “analytical monologue” on the Dr. Stevenson's discourse reveals fundamental aspects of his border thinking, where the historical survey provided a critical and ideological perspective. For this reason, my study found in Dr. Stevenson's legacy a “music(ethno)logically enquiry” demonstrating a confrontation of horizons.

In this sense, my study might be thought of as a historical survey about Robert Murrell Stevenson, in his position as a bridge between the “analytical monologue” of the Great Culture paradigm and its "Others," surveying the limits and moving towards his own Finisterre.

Photo: Members of the UCLA Deparment of Musicology pose next to Dr. Robert M. Stevenson and Dr. Alejandro Planchart at the 2009 Stevenson Lecture. © Jorge Molinera

References

BÉHAGUE, Gérard: "Stevenson, Robert M(urrell)", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy <http://www.grovemusic.com>  

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