Polyphony

Under review in Key Terms in Music Theory for Anti-Racist Scholars, eds. Jade Conlee and Tatiana Koike

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the term polyphony has been a remarkably rich resource for scholars and composers, whether serving descriptive, historiographical, or polemical ends. While definitions of polyphony—and its various calques in other European languages—have varied widely within the last two centuries, consistent across that period is the word’s ability to cleave apart historical periods and genres of music, enacting such binaries as ancient and modern, Christian and infidel, written and oral, European and non-European. The term’s association with European racial exceptionalism reached a high-water mark around the turn of the twentieth century, when scholars like Hugo Riemann claimed polyphony as the unique patrimony of “Germanic” peoples (Rehding 2003), a view echoed in the bogus racial science of composer Percy Grainger (Harris 2000). Even after comparative musicologists and later ethnomusicologists took pains to document polyphonic musical practices outside the Western art tradition (Hornbostel 1909; Arom 1991), a casual Eurocentric chauvinism prevailed long after among historical musicologists and music theorists. More recently, the concept of polyphony—even when acknowledged as a global phenomenon—has been enlisted in various cognitive turns, with polyphonic music serving as a useful metaphor for processes of embodied perception or even consciousness itself (Chagas 2005; Pesic 2017). Whether shorn of musical specificity or narrowly redefined to suit the object of study, the notion of polyphony seems to conjure such an appealing world of multiplicity, interactional possibility, democratic participation, and unfinalizable structure (Bakhtin 1984), that its consistently high status in musical discourse may unintentionally reinscribe a presumption of superiority for the European canon.

Tracing anew polyphony’s historical entanglement with racial and colonial epistemologies of musical form and performance can serve to unsettle this supposedly universal category of musical texture. Whether understood narrowly as a highly specific compositional technique deriving from discrete rules of voice leading, or broadly as any simultaneous sounding of different voices, parts, or pitches—both are operative in different corners of music studies (Huron 2001; Tenzer 2019)—the mere attempt to define polyphony introduces other powerfully charged concepts: independence, difference, hierarchy. In the attribution, say, of freedom or responsiveness (Boulez’s responsabilité [1958]), there is an implicit judgment of which kinds of music are allowed to “speak,” and which ones belong to regimes of subservience or unfreedom. As scholars in postcolonial and Black studies have demonstrated, the universal human subject of post-Enlightenment moral philosophy was tailor-made for the white European male and foreclosed the possibility of personhood for colonized and enslaved people (Spivak 1999; Wynter 2003; Mignolo 2000). So, too, the terms and tools of music theory, while making claims to universality, suit a musical tradition that self-consciously traces its origin to the birth of two-voice organum from monophonic chant. Even the restorative move by many ethnomusicologists to ascribe polyphony to non-Western musics may serve merely to elevate some traditions at the expense of others, an inadvertent perpetuation of the Western yardstick (Macchiarella 2011). Such cultural relativism, as Denise Fereira da Silva argues (2016), while denying the power of race, nevertheless enacts unbridgeable moral divides between social groups by presupposing that difference implies separability. We must reconsider the very separability of voices in polyphony if we are to move beyond its exclusionary legacy.

This chapter surveys a number of moments in the history of music theory, beginning in late-sixteenth-century Italy with the debates that crystallized a distinction between polyphony and monody and constructed an idea of music history developing from a putatively monophonic antiquity. Already by the early eighteenth century, French accounts of non-European music helped establish a notion of European exceptionalism in terms of harmony and polyphony (as in Rousseau), despite the emerging testimony of Polynesian polyphony in the reports of Captain Cook’s voyages (Agnew 2008). The crucial decades for the dominant understanding of polyphony straddle the turn of the twentieth century, encompassing both the consolidation of musicology and music theory as scientific disciplines and the rise of nostalgic cultural movements like the Palestrina Revival and choral singing societies in Germany and beyond. Here polyphony was elevated to the sine qua non of the European musical tradition and cultivated as a metaphor for social cohesion and re-enchantment. Various schools of twentieth-century experimentalism later embraced and modified polyphonic concepts (Boulezian serialism, Ligeti’s micro-polyphony, New Complexity), while, in a parallel track, the early-music revolution in the recording industry kept monuments of the pre–J.S. Bach period alive in the public ear. Again and again, polyphony’s role in a dialectical opposition with other textures or processes advances an argument for polyphonic music as more complex, evolved, or interactive—a characterization that resonates beyond music studies. Indeed, polyphony’s liberal application in disciplines like anthropology (Tsing 2015), literary studies (Said 1993), and cognitive science (Stuart and Thibault 2015)—where it likewise tends to hold a positive valence—speaks to the need for its reevaluation within music theory as something other than an empirically neutral term of description.