Session 4(a): Interculturalism in Music, Art and Literature

Session 4a: Interculturalism in Music, Art and Literature
Chair: Nicole Ridgway

Music: In Search of a Universal Meaning
Jessica Wiskus
School of Music, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Music in Islam, through the concept of sama’ (“listening”), is primarily held to be a phenomenon that is experienced, rather than produced. Such a concept of music recognizes the essential physicality of sound: a listener is filled with sound. In music, there is no alienation [Gadamer] through aesthetic reflection; there is only habitation. Thus music distinguishes itself from language-as-communication (which is caught within the mirror of self-reflection) and discloses itself as meaning [Merleau-Ponty], generated through the exchange of experience and expression.
Ancient civilizations from the Confucians to the Pythagorians understood music as meaning: as sonorous embodiment of the universe, as audible expression of numeric ratios underlying the governance of planets, the formation of matter, and the consonance of the human soul. Through the Medieval ages in the West, the influential writings of Boethius continued to designate music as representative of the physical expression of the universe (musica mundana). Similarly, the Ikhwan al-Sfa, a 10th-century group of Islamic scholars, held cosmic truth to be manifest within the ratios of music harmony. Thus music offered a shared foundation for interaction between Eastern and Western cultures.
With the advent of humanism in the West, music became a servant to language, shifting from the quadrivium to the trivium. Music, so conceived, communicated lingual expression (e.g. the Doctrine of the Affects); thus it became entangled within the machinations of Babel . From the Renaissance through the 20 th-century, music in at least one hemisphere of the globe acquired the title, “Western Art Music.” Music-as-communication promoted monoculturalism; and such a (mis)conception effectively prohibited musical discussion with the East.
Let us reclaim music in the West as audible number, opening our listening to music across cultural boundaries. Music thus discloses itself not as a universal language, but as universal meaning.

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Interculturalism and Visual Art Education: Seeking for “Spaces in Between”
Beatriz Tomsic Cerkez and Tonka Tacol
Department of Art Education, Faculty of Pedagogy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Interculturalism in art education refers to pedagogic strategies that support positive attitudes regarding the cultural plurality of our societies, understanding diversity as a source of knowledge. Actually, it also deals with the effects of western art canons’ dominance in the majority of the world’s formal art education systems. The optimal intercultural encounter (considered as an individual experience using the products of another culture) facilitates individuation. It deals with »the ideal/virtual« word of images and ideas promoted by media and »the social/individual« position considering the unaccepted issues of (social) ego resulting in a subject projected on Others. Following these ideas, it is obvious that »intercultural attitudes« are unconscious, the moment they become conscious, they fall into a »decontextuated cultural tourism«, that does not fit educational aims. In this context, a relevant question is, should interculturalism be imposed as learning content by the curriculum (ignoring subject and context specifities)? Many authors characterize this as the implementation of new forms of racism or ethnic determinism. It is also questionable considering the different situations in »actual classes«.
Departing from the results of a research on identity and art education, we sustain that interculturalism at school should stand in the realm of competences and not of learning contents. In the paper we present didactic strategies, that mean a turn from a narrow structuralistic to a phenomenological/heuristic/experiential approach, in order to promote the holistic development of pupil’s personality (affective/social/moral, cognitive, pyshomotoric), encouraging a meaningful concept of the self and discouraging negative projections.
However, concerns about ideology as a set of ideas proposed by the dominant educational system and the teacher as its »realizator« make it necessary to seek for a »space in between« in which (educational) ideology should function as an (invisible) instrument of (spiral) »reproduction of society« engaged with interculturalism in a more organic way.

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The Paradox of Intercultural Shakespeare Theatre
Yeeyon Im
Kings College, London, United Kingdom

This paper proposes to examine the meaning of Shakespeare in intercultural performance. Shakespeare has been one of the most important sources for intercultural theatre worldwide, featured in the productions of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Yukio Ninagawa, Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson to name a few. There have been active attempts to theorise intercultural theatre in general, debates as to whether interculturalism is actually a step forward to mutual understanding, or just a new name for cultural imperialism. The fact is, there are different types of intercultural theatres depending on their socio-political and ideological context; I categorise intercultural theatre into three kinds, anthropological, aesthetical and nationalistic, according to its attitude towards universality and cultural specificity.
The categorisation can be beneficial in reading ‘historically’ the Shakespearean productions dubbed equally ‘intercultural’. While each intercultural theatre bears a different position towards the universality of the various cultural traditions it employs, it entertains a strikingly similar notion of Shakespearean universality. The irony is that Shakespeare is seldom regarded as a participant in intercultural exchange as a cultural tradition of early modern England; Shakespeare provides the basis for the various cultures to encounter, offering Brookian ‘empty space’ and guaranteeing the universal meaning.
This holds true both to ‘straight’ Shakespeare productions and to those ‘deconstructed’. With the intercultural productions faithful to the Shakespearean original, the paradigm has been the combination of the content by Shakespeare and the form by non-Western theatrical traditions. For the productions where Shakespeare appears only as fragments, the contribution of Shakespeare is also thematic. Little attention has been given to such bias in the division of theatrical signs east and west assume, while most intercultural debates have centred on the authenticity of foreign cultural traditions. Admittedly western logocentrism is in decline, and contemporary theatre is moving towards ‘performance’ above a mere realisation of the dramatic text. However, the hegemony of logocentrism still persists, particularly with Shakespeare, whose essence has been constructed as his words and themes. Thus the paradox of intercultural Shakespeare theatre: Shakespeare should cease to be ‘Shakespeare’ to be genuinely intercultural.