The English East India Company was as old as modern science itself. Founded in 1600, the Company shared its early years with the Scientific Revolution, and by 1662, when the Royal Society of London was founded, was already a flourishing concern with trading bases at Surat, Madras and Masulipatam. The sciences prominent in early colonial India – botany, geology, to a lesser extent zoology – were still at a formative stage when the Company embarked on its career of territorial expansionism in the mid-eighteenth century. The first volume of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle appeared in 1749, as Anglo-French rivalry in the Carnatic was reaching its peak; Linnaeus’s Species plantarum, which established the binomial system of nomenclature, was published in 1753, four years before the battle of Plassey opened the floodgates to British ascendancy in Bengal. By the time the Geological Society of London, model for a new generation of metropolitan scientific societies, was founded in 1807, British power had been extended over vast tracts of northern and peninsular India and was poised for the final defeat of the Marathas. The publication in 1830 of the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, one of the foundational texts of modern geology, came three years before the Company lost its vestigial trading rights; and Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in November 1859, twelve months after the East India Company had finally been declared extinct.

Although there was no clear ideological or professional break between the science of the Company period and the science that followed under the Crown after 1858, there was a steady move away from the earlier modes of exploratory and observational science, in which the Company had taken an erratic interest, to a more confident alliance between science and the state. In the late nineteenth century the colonial regime employed science as both a means of self-legitimation and an aid to more effective government. While exploiting the authority and utility of Victorian science, the state remained none the less committed to a largely instrumentalist view of science: science existed to serve the empire, not to constitute an alternative source of authority or to dictate imperial priorities. However, from the 1890s through to the First World War there was unprecedented Indian interest in, and engagement with, Western science. With the growth of an Indian scientific community, India participated in international science in ways that belied any narrow definition of colonial science. The combination of these two elements – imperial science and an emergent Indian scientific community – did much to advance science in India in the critical decades of the 1890s–1900s to a position of intellectual and political prominence but also to fuel its inner tensions and contradictions.

SCIENCE AND THE SERVICES

Science played little part in the education and training of Indian Civil Service officers and, though a recreational interest in natural history often developed in the course of a career in India, there was always a suspicion of the professional scientist and a greater regard for the practical exercise of administrative authority. The ICS valued first-hand experience in the districts above the cosmopolitanism and intellectualism of science and regarded a close acquaintance with the villages and peoples of rural India and a grounding in the vernacular languages as a superior basis for knowing and ruling India.

Medicine occupied a central place in Western scientific thought and activity in nineteenth-century India. There were many reasons for this. Firstly, the Colonial Medical Service was one of the principal scientific agencies in India during the Company period and for several decades thereafter. Company surgeons and their successors under the Crown provided a large share of the botanists, geologists, zoologists, meteorologists, foresters and other specialists. Secondly, partly because of their wide-ranging scientific brief, medical personnel had a vital role in the European investigation of the Indian environment (including its topography, climate and diseases), and hence in understanding how nature fashioned the human condition in India. Thirdly, to a degree unparalleled in other scientific fields and matched by few aspects of technological change, medicine represented direct intervention in, and interaction with, the social, cultural and material lives of the Indian people. This dual engagement — with the environment and with culture — helped fashion not only the distinctive character and preoccupations of India’s colonial medicine, but also the manner of its Indian reception and assimilation. Although medical and sanitary intervention was initially driven by the scientific interests of the colonial state, over the course of the century medicine began to serve other agendas and to inform a wider cultural and political dialogue.

From the perspective of medical history, the demise of the East India Company in 1858 was not in itself particularly momentous, and it is more appropriate to see the nineteenth century as a whole. Some developments can usefully be traced through to the 1910s and 1920s, but this chapter is mainly concerned with the period up to the mid-1890s, when, in the wake of Robert Koch’s identification of the cholera bacillus and Ronald Ross’s discovery of the mode of malaria transmission and the outbreak of bubonic plague in India, there was a shift away from the environmental paradigm that had dominated nineteenth-century medical thought and the emergence of new scientific ideas, institutions and practices.

Singing moves and excites people, often in very large numbers. Thousands turn out for the Three Tenors or rock concerts, millions mourned Frank Sinatra and the Berber singer Lounès Matoub; every week in Europe millions more sing their hearts out at football matches. We are born into a babble of voices and the clamour continues, if we're lucky, for the rest of our lives: our voices are us, directly expressive of our personalities and emotions. A voice is not like an oboe or violin, something you can take out of its case and put away, an instrument with hundreds of years of technical development behind it. You don'st have to be a virtuoso to express your own emotions. Everyone can speak, and everyone can sing, so we all have our own idea of what singing actually is. This is one reason that the Cambridge Companion to Singing is different from its instrumental predecessors: in the end a choice has to be made about which aspects of singing can be usefully explored in the space available. Like the other Companions, this one deals almost exclusively with the music we experience in the industrialised West. At the beginning of a new century, with artistic ideas and activities expanding in all directions, it seems appropriate to begin with ‘world music’. The term is a Western concept, involving the incorporation of singing outside the Western tradition into the stream of possibilities that are available to us today.

Rossini's Guillaume Tell, first performed in 1829, defined the new genre of Parisian grand opera. This was grand indeed. Divided as a rule into five acts, with a ballet spatchcocked into at least two acts; on a historical subject, freely interpreted for maximum spectacle (in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini of 1838 the Pope and the College of Cardinals enter Cellini's studio just as the furnace explodes and the brand-new statue of Perseus rises from the smoke); educative intent built into the plot so as to show great historical forces arrayed in conflict – it all suited a bourgeois audience that welcomed notions of liberty and progress. Tyranny might win for the moment, yet the march of civilisation would prevail, helped on its way by sacrificial love: Halévy's La Juive (1835), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849) hinted at freedom of worship, Tell and Verdi's Les Vêpres siciliennes (1855) at national independence, Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) at political liberty; each gave one plenty to look at, ballerinas' legs included. The whole thing took five hours or more and called for months of rehearsal to drill the hundred-strong chorus and get the vast, historically accurate sets right.

Rossini had carefully led up to Tell by adapting for Paris three of his Italian operas. Though his music had already taken Europe by storm, he altered it to meet French taste: he cut down ornamentation, allowed for more dramatic singing, and brought forward the chorus. The outcome each time was a great success.

The field and the evidence

The performance practice of the twentieth century's singing entertainers is a vital component of the mass culture of its period, and it cries out to be analysed and interpreted. How should it be categorised alongside other types of singing, and how and why has it undergone such enormous changes? There is almost no literature on the subject. Pleasants deals with the rise of modern popular singing from one particular standpoint, that of its opposition to classical singing, and Osborne takes a sustained critical look at the Broadway ‘belt’, again from the same viewpoint, though, unlike Pleasants, with negative rather than positive intent. Yet neither author has the opportunity to develop a more neutral historical investigation comprehensively based on evidence from primary and secondary source material, in other words in the ‘early music’ terms that Robert Philip pioneered for classical orchestral music of the first half of the twentieth century.

Three types of source material constitute the evidence for performance practice, its identity and changes. The first and most important is recordings. The second is film (plus TV and video footage), for although the musical content of a film can be isolated as its soundtrack recording, the visual element is also significant in analysing a singer's performance practice (though this is beyond the scope of this chapter). The third type of evidence is that of written and spoken documentation: correspondence, production files and promptbooks, published and unpublished memoirs and other monographs, interviews, press reviews, song manuscripts and dance plots.

Introduction

The idea of rationality has a central place in Max Weber's Economy and Society. In the years since it was written, rationality has also come to be one of the most important concepts in the social sciences – not only in economics, but also in political science and increasingly in sociology. In the present article I confront some central arguments in Economy and Society, notably from the first two chapters of Part I (“Basic Sociological Terms” and “Sociological Categories of Economic Action”), with what I believe to be the standard contemporary approach. Because I know much more about the modern theories than about Weber's writings – I am not a Weber scholar – my procedure will have to be somewhat schematic. In examining passages from Weber out of their historical context and without regard for the vast secondary literature, I obviously run the risk of anachronism, oversimplification, or worse. I can only hope that the analytical arguments will be useful to those with a better knowledge of the Weberian corpus.

The article is a personal essay, in the sense that it is colored by my own interests and preoccupations. For many readers of Economy and Society, the emphasis I give to emotions and social norms will come as a surprise. Yet although Weber's discussions of these topics are brief and often extremely condensed, I believe his treatment is very acute and worth highlighting. Also, as already indicated, I shall confront Weber’s views about instrumental rationality with modern ideas from cognitive psychology and game theory that he could not possibly have anticipated.

There are certain basic, practical things we can do with children which will enable the vast majority to sing pleasantly and tunefully in a group, and to improve individually. In the description of these ideas, the focus will be on how to convey them in a group situation – a choir, or in the classroom – within a wider context of a general understanding of children's actual musical and vocal possibilities, and the assumption that (barring exceptional physiological impediment): all children can sing, learn to sing better, and have the right to do both.

Each child, being unique, has also a unique voice, with its own special colour, and dynamic and vocal range, as with adults, although usually a lighter instrument than a fully formed adult voice, and lacking its power. As children grow, so does the strength of their voices. Many investigations of children's vocal range give a general picture of about c1–c2 at five to six years, increasing to a–g2 by nine to ten years, and further to a–c3 by eleven to twelve years. However, most studies omit any mention of head or chest register, when in fact each is available even to tiny children, as confirmed by observation of very young children's spontaneous, improvised singing, which shows that they can manifest a very high voice. Each register yields its own vocal range, and while the lower chest-voice range tends to be very limited in small children, many of whom find it difficult to reach tones below c1, the head-voice range extends in most children rather higher than indicated in conventional studies and than commonly believed. Some singing teachers differentiate between the range where children can comfortably sing a melody and where they can do singing exercises.

Max Weber was initially trained in both law and history and he drew extensively on examples from legal history in constructing his later sociological works. Yet he was not, properly speaking, a legal historian. In fact, as we shall show, the superimposition upon legal history of his sociological categories of “ideal types” of legal authority resulted in serious distortions at the same time that it led to some important insights. His sharp separation of “fact” from “value,” and his relegation of law to the realm of “fact,” led him to overlook entirely the importance of legal values in two of his best known socio-historical studies, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The City. In the background of his entire sociology of law was an oversimplified historiography in which the history of law in the West was viewed as a progression from a “feudal,” “traditional,” “personal” type to a “capitalist,” “formal-rational,” and “bureaucratic” type, with the prospect of an emerging “socialist,” “substantively rational” type.

Weber's background in the law

Max Weber was born into a family that “was steeped in the intellectual culture of the law.” His father was a lawyer as well as a politician, who served as a member of the National Liberal Party in the German Reichstag from 1872 to 1884. The son pursued a legal education from the time he first matriculated at Heidelberg University in 1882, where, in his first semester, he enrolled in a course entitled Roman Law: Pandects and Institutes. He later continued his law studies at the University of Berlin, under the tutelage of some of the leading lights of the late nineteenth-century German legal academy.

What was it that drove Weber, arguably even to this day the foremost theoretician of modern western society and its historical evolution, to embark on a far-reaching series of investigations of non-western cultures? The question arises inevitably when one considers the sheer scale of Weber's writings on the world religions, all but encyclopedic in scope and displaying an extraordinary capacity of the part of their author in ordering and synthesizing the detailed historical materials involved (a task made all the more impressive given the technical difficulties arising from the undeveloped state of the documentary and scholarly sources at the time). Was all this effort required to establish the correctness of the Protestant ethic thesis? Or, was something further involved that went beyond the earlier problematic and transformed it?

In what follows we shall assume that Weber's studies of the orient, along with his Ancient Judaism, constitute key parts of what was a major expansion and enhancement of the Protestant ethic thesis and concerned the daunting task of grasping the rationalization of the modern world in the context of universal history. Whilst the original umbrella title of the monographs he began to publish in 1915, The Economic Ethic of the World Religions, suggests Weber remained preoccupied with demonstrating via counter-factual comparisons the validity of the Protestant ethic thesis, the contents of the writings subsequently presented as well as the inclusion of several crucial linking essays indicate the problematic had been modified in important ways.

Basic approaches

For the singer of today, especially when starting out on a career, finding the right teacher, or the perfect ‘method’, can be fraught with difficulty. One teacher may seem to have some secret that will perfect the student's breathing technique, another may claim to have found the secret of the old Italian bel canto. Add to this the vagaries of what or who is fashionable and it is not surprising that many singers prefer to rely on their own instincts. Many mainly self-taught singers have considerable success in working out an approach that works for them, while others may embark on a career harbouring a sense of insecurity caused by unsolved problems. I hope that this overview of teaching precepts, past and present, will provide an objective framework for the singer, whatever his or her particular needs, thus helping him or her to contribute his own informed input to the complex process involved in the study of singing.

Every singing teacher brings his own individual personality, a different cultural and intellectual background, and different tastes to the teaching/ learning situation. In a sense therefore, one could say that there are as many ways to teach singing as there are teachers and students. However, one can locate most approaches on a scale that ranges from the ‘non-technical’ to the overtly scientific. The existence of a ‘non-technical’ approach demonstrates the unusual nature of the singing voice, compared with other musical instruments. Although the finest instrumental teachers show an understanding of psychology and the importance of motivation, inspiration and so on, it is not possible to avoid some actual discussion of the physical nature of the skill being taught.

INTRODUCTION

The Gulf Coast lowlands form one of Mesoamerica’s richest and most diverse regions. The equally rich and distinctive precolumbian societies that occupied the region played a crucial role in the development of the Mesoamerican cultural tradition. During three millennia preceding the Spanish conquest the region oscillated between epochs of cultural leadership when Gulf Coast societies occupied a strategic position in the pan- Mesoamerican world and periods of stagnation, isolation, and even foreign intrusions when outsiders, generally from highlands of central Mexico, dominated its people and resources. Much of the region’s history reflects dynamic processes in which local innovation and growth alternated with foreign infringement. Thus, the Spaniards’ use of the region as a staging area for their conquest of Mexico was merely the one act in a saga of cultural interaction that began when maize and other highland plants were first taken to the lowlands five thousand years ago and that still continues today.

The key to this history lies in the region’s wealth and resources, specifically land, food, exotic luxury goods, and trade routes. The Aztecs understood this clearly when they made conquest of the region a top priority early in their imperial history. Their vision of the region’s wealth is reflected in their names for it: Tamoanchan (an untranslatable name suggestive of a mythical Utopia or earthly paradise), Tonacatlalpan “Land of Food,” and Tlalocan “Place of Wealth” (Sahagun Book 2: 208-9, 226). Fray Bernardino de Sahagun’s Aztec informants described the inhabitants of the southern Gulf Coast lowlands as follows: “These were rich, their home, their land, was really a land of riches, a land of flowers, a land of abundance. There was all manner of food; there grew the cacao bean, and the ‘divine ear’ spice, and wild cacao, and liquid rubber” (Sahagun Book 10: 187). Adjacent lowland zones were described in equally glowing terms. Thus, the outstanding cultural developments of the region’s cultures and the desires of its neighbors to control its wealth are not surprising, and these two recurrent themes account for the area’s tremendous importance in precolumbian times.

THE REGION AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS

Mesoamerican’s Gulf Coast lowlands extend southeast from Mexico’s border with the United States to the Yucatan Peninsula, but this chapter deals only with the region between the Soto la Marina River, approximately 200 kilometers north of modern Tampico, and the swampy floodplain of western Tabasco (Map 4.1).

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we refer to the Maya highlands and Pacific coastal plain collectively as the southern Maya Area (see Map IO.I). We follow the chronological framework most commonly used by Mesoamerican scholars, beginning with the Preclassic era (c. 2000 B.C. to A.D. 250; for earlier developments, see Zeitland and Zeitland, Chap. 2, this volume), subdivided into the Early Preclassic (c. 2000–1000 B.C.), Middle Preclassic (c. 1000–400 B.C.), and Late Preclassic (c. 400 B.C.–A.D. 100); a transitional Terminal Preclassic (c. A.D. 100–250), the subsequent Classic period (c. A.D. 250–800), subdivided into two eras, the Early Classic (c. A.D. 250–600), and Late Classic (c. A.D. 600–800); and ending with the Postclassic (c. A.D. 900–1500), subdivided into the Early Postclassic (c. 900–1200) and Late Postclassic (c. 1200–1500).

Archaeological research in the southern Maya Area has long lagged behind that conducted in the Maya lowlands to the north. Over the past two decades, however, research and publications dealing with the southern area have begun to correct this disparity. Nonetheless, spatial and temporal coverage remains inconsistent. Most of the work on the Early and Middle Preclassic has been concentrated along the Pacific Coast (especially in the western sector). Research on the Late Preclassic period has received more attention, and there is a broader coverage, most notably focusing on the regional developments in the southern highlands (especially Kaminaljuyu), the southeast, and along the Pacific coastal plain. For the Classic era most of our knowledge is based on work at Kaminaljuyu and adjacent basins of the southern highlands, and the central region of the Pacific coastal plain. Archaeological research on the Postclassic era has focused on sites and regions associated with the Con quest-era highland states, with varying reliance on the rich but often contradictory ethnohistoric sources that illuminate this period. Overall, therefore, inconsistent coverage makes any synthesis unbalanced and provisional at best.

ENVIRONMENT

The Pacific plain is composed of recent (quaternary) sediments extending from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, across southern Chiapas (Mexico), through Guatemala, and into western El Salvador. It has long provided rich resources for human existence and has been an avenue for both migration and commerce. Some of the earliest traces of permanent settlement in Mesoamerica have been found along the margins of the mangrove swamps, coastal lagoons, and meandering river mouths that lie behind the Pacific beaches.

INTRODUCTION

Although the scholarly investigations of Classic Maya civilization in the lowlands of Guatemala and Yucatan began more than a century ago, similar work in the southeastern Mesoamerican frontier of El Salvador and Honduras began only three or four decades ago. The serious investigation of the social dynamics of intersocietal contact in prehistory began in the past two decades. Although data are not ample for El Salvador and Honduras, they are sufficient to consider the countries as a frontier in prehistory, and explore how that frontier changed. Many theoretical models have been employed, including diffusion, acculturation, conquest, religion, trade, emulation, interaction spheres, frontiers and boundaries, dependency theory, and world system approaches among others.

The frontier model is emphasized in this chapter. Although it is in common usage, I try to avoid the term periphery because of its pejorative connotations. Viewing the area as peripheral to Mesoamerica or the Maya tends to discount autochthonous achievements. Scholars in southeastern Mesoamerica are beginning to separate indigenous traditions in architecture, artifacts, settlement patterns, and society from the effects of external groups. The use of the plural in the title is deliberate, as there are different kinds of frontiers (e.g., political, economic, ethnic, and religious), and frontiers change their location and nature through time.

A boundary or border is a line, while a frontier is a zone. A boundary such as the U.S.-Canadian boundary, may be static for long periods of time. A frontier usually is more dynamic, with internal ethnic or adaptive differentiation, and assumes contact of at least two different societies. That contact could occur when a more complex society expands into the territory of a less complex one, such as the western U.S. frontier in the nineteenth century, or it could be the contact between religious groups, as in the frontier between Christians and Moslems in the Near East. This frontier contrasts with the religious boundary that was the “Green Line” in Beirut. Likewise, it can be an economic frontier where a more centralized economy expands to exploit a resource in the territory of a decentralized economy, as illustrated by Brazilians exploiting Amazonian resources in the territories of native peoples. Occasionally, less complex societies expand into the territories of more complex societies, as with the Visigoths into Rome or the Mongols into China.