1 CHAPTER 10 CONTESTED CONTEXTUALIZATION: THE HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF EAST ASIAN MUSIC KEITH HOWARD In a footnote to his 1987 article that I cited in the Foreword to this volume, Tim- othy Rice noted the “remarkable reversal” 1 of the usual way of conducting his- torical construction in what was then a recent synchronic study of the historical continuum by Kay Kaufmann Shelemay (1980). Shelemay had written about Falasha liturgical history, and Rice’s remark elicited a response from her (1987, 489), which in turn was taken up by Richard Widdess (1992, 228–9) as a de- fense of the historical approach adopted by the Cambridge scholar Laurence Picken (1909–2007) and his students and associates. My intention in the follow- ing pages is to situate Picken’s legacy against the “historical turn” in ethnomusi- cology, but my account is in equal measure a personal reflection. The perspec- tives of Picken, his students and his associates have become grouped together as the “Picken school,” and are particularly pertinent to accounts of East Asian music history. Who it was that first referred to the “Picken school” is unclear, although David Hughes notes that he heard the phrase used at an international conference in the late 1980s, and that Picken was delighted when Hughes re- ported back (2010, 233). By then, I was using the phrase, not knowing where it came from, since in my early days as an ethnomusicologist I wanted to distance my anthropologically oriented research on Korean music from Picken. I was well aware of the antipathy between Picken and my doctoral supervisor, the late John Blacking (1928–1990), which became immutable after Blacking’s critical review of Picken’s Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey. 2 But, my need to estab- lish distance also came because the Korean musicology I encountered was also largely historical. The three other non-Koreans who were writing about Korean music were also known primarily for their historical orientation: Picken’s stu- dent Jonathan Condit, and, though with no direct connection to Picken, the Uni- versity of Durham faculty members Robert C. Provine and Keith Pratt. 3 Why, I was frequently asked by Korean colleagues, did I want to leave the safety of Seoul for fieldwork on contemporary “folk” traditions in the rural extremities of the Korean peninsula when I ought to be spending my time in the capital’s abundant libraries and archives studying historical sources? 4 Shelemay had opened her 1980 study with the observation that historical ethnomusicology meant a number of different things, but that she would be ex- ploring the “potential that a synchronic study holds for illuminating the histori-