In the chapter from Deloria's book titled "The Hills are Alive . . . With the Sound of Indian" appears the following notation about Alice Fletcher:
Alice Fletcher clearly had aims beyond the ethnographic salvage of Indian music. As a young woman, she had expressed an early desire for the creation of a particularly American form of music. Taken with the decidedly avian sounds of nature produced by the flutist Sidney Lanier, she wrote in 1873: "Your flute gave me that for which I had ceased to hope, true American music, and awakened in my heart a feeling of patriotism that I never knew before" (195).
This passage nudged at my consciousness when I first read it, and I found myself returning to it multiple times, mulling over possible reasons for its impact on me. I believe the reason for its insistent tug on my thoughts has to do with a notion that actually appears shortly after this passage above, when Deloria explores the ideas of John Comfort Fillmore and his assertion that there is a universal natural harmony. In her declaration of patriotism relative to identifying "true American music," Fletcher seems to be invoking a sense of universalism herself, one that argues for a musical harmony that is discrete--"American"--yet is functionally representative of "all" America, all Americans, America itself. That this is a bit of an idealized stretch goes without saying, and it perhaps isn't particularly productive to nit-pick Fletcher's moment of patriotic epiphany.
However, this accretion of a universalized Americanness becomes more problematic when seen through the lens of the Fillmore material. Deloria notes that Fillmore invokes a sense of "universal harmonic commensurability"(203), although there is no indication in the essay whether Fillmore literally invokes the term "commensurability" or if the word instead is a reflection of Deloria's sense of Fillmore's concepts. Either way, it's a powerful word when applied to any diasporic or displaced population. In the contemporary era, the terms “paradigm” and “incommensurability” most often refer to the theories put forth by Thomas Kuhn in 1962. Although Kuhn went on to postulate a number of other theories (primarily within the fields of philosophy of science and history of science), the original theories set forth in his landmark publication, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, are most relevant to Deloria’s chapter. In the essay, Kuhn theorizes that normal science is “dependent upon some set of received beliefs, a paradigm, which marks out what the acceptable research problems are and what acceptable solutions to these problem (sic) must look like” (Andersen 20). Kuhn adds to this the idea that “some of the scientific problems defined by a paradigm may turn out to be unsolvable within the framework of the paradigm, that is, turn into anomalies” (Andersen 20). When anomalies are separated from the “normal” within a paradigm, this creates a crisis that only a revolution in accepted paradigm can fully resolve. Kuhn referred to this point of conflict between competing belief systems or sets as “incommensurability.” According to Kuhn, the problem with incommensurate paradigms is that they are not so much incomparable as they are incompatible (Hung 63). To put this into context for our discussion, consider this: A belief that the earth is round is completely different from a belief in a flat world. The two beliefs are comparable, in that they both address the essential questions of “What is the Earth? What is its shape?” However, there are no reasonable points of compatibility between the two viewpoints, as each must disprove and obliterate the other in order to be accepted as the norm, or the “correct” viewpoint—that is, the current paradigm (Hung 63). (On a side note, my paper for this semester will explore anomalies in the sense of incommensurability and paradigm structures of culture--stay tuned!)
Using these concepts of competing paradigms and the problems raised by incompatible, opposing norms, it is possible to understand why Fillmore and Fletcher ultimately encountered many unresolveable problems in defining (and thereby limiting, particularly in a Western-centric sense) Indian musical forms. Fillmore’s position rests on the assumption that there are identifiable points of commensurability—that is, universalities. If this position were provable, then his points would perhaps stand on firmer ground. However, in the process of asserting universality, Fillmore fails to account for points of error or contention; or, to put it into Kuhnian terms, he fails to recognize that such “universal” paradigms are not “natural”; rather, they are constructs that depend upon the agreement of all interested parties in their continuance. The moment that a point of contention develops, there arises the very real potential for incommensurability, in the short term, and outright paradigm shift, in the long term. For these reasons, I find Fillmore’s work interesting and thought-provoking, but also inherently flawed.
Which brings me back to Fletcher’s notions of “patriotism” and “true American music.” As with Fillmore, I find her position to be interesting and not unlikeable (after all, I can very much appreciate the power of the flute to change the world around us, as happens every time I listen to James Galway’s The Enchanted Forest). However, as with Fillmore, Fletcher does not seem aware that her position, at least as she framed it in that moment in time, rests on the assumption that there is “a” true American music that one can clearly identify, and that there is “an” America that provokes patriotism. The problem with each of these things is similar to the problems laid out in the paragraph above—commensurability implies universal acceptance, a thing which all human cultures (and all human beings, I would argue) seem to dispute on a regular basis. As for me, I’m a paradigm shift kinda girl. My sort of universal is that which is universally changeable and transformative—viva la universal difference!
Connie
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