The Music between Us

Is Music a Universal Language?

Kathleen Marie Higgins

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226333274
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In The Music between Us, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience. Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, Higgins's richly researched study showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, Higgins argues, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides. Moving beyond the well-worn takes on music's universality, The Music between Us provides a new understanding of what it means to be musical and, in turn, human.

CHAPTER 1

Other People’s Music

Music itself [is] the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS, The Raw and the Cooked

A few years ago I visited Hong Kong as a member of an evaluation committee for a university humanities program. At one juncture, the committee was taken to a courtyard where students in the program had set up an exhibit and were available to discuss it. In the same courtyard, some music students had set up a stage with an assortment of African drums, occasionally trying them out. We visited for a while with the humanities students and then gathered in preparation to leave. One of the music students called out, “Professors can drum, too!” To my surprise, the professor in charge of us said, “Well, we do have about five minutes.” So we each grabbed a drum. A student musician demonstrated some alternative ways to strike the drums, and we began drumming, our strong beats more or less in tandem, while our music student host drummed counterrhythms. We were refreshed and jovial when we boarded the van that was to take us to our next appointment a few minutes later. There we encountered one of the local members of our committee, who had briefly gone to her office to attend to some business. “Did you hear all that noise?” she asked. “That was us,” one of our group replied. She laughed and said, “No, I mean the drumming.” “That was us,” the same person repeated, and all of us erstwhile drummers burst out laughing.

This scene—academics from Asia, Europe, and North America exhilarated by African drums and rhythms—illustrates one of the central themes of this book: people from around the globe can be brought together by one another’s music. Occasions like this, in which people from various cultures enjoy music, bring to mind the adage that music is a universal language. But this saying has lost its currency, however much music seems to communicate. My purpose in this book is to reassess this idea. Although I will suggest that the notion of music as a language is of limited usefulness, I aim to rehabilitate the notion that music is a significant means of cross-cultural communication. Music, I will contend, is an important part of what makes us human as well as a vehicle for recognizing—and directly experiencing—our common humanity. By enabling us to feel our interconnection as human beings, music can help to make us more humane. But for this impact to affect our cross-cultural inter actions, we need to broaden our musical horizons to encompass music beyond our own culture.

HOW UNIVERSAL IS THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?

Once upon a time, music was said to be a universal language. Verbal languages varied from place to place, so the reasoning went, and speakers of different languages could not usually understand each other; but music moved people across linguistic boundaries. Germans who spoke no Italian could still understand Italian music. In fact, they could do more than understand it. They could embrace it as speaking of their own inner life. They might not understand the words someone sang, but they could feel the emotion expressed. Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledges music’s independent emotional power when he remarks,

With just a little more impertinence, Rossini would have had everyone sing nothing but la-la-la-la—and that would have made good, rational sense. Confronted with the characters in an opera, we are not supposed to take their word for it, but the sound!¹

Over time the idea that music could speak to everyone became a piece of common wisdom. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is credited with the line, “Music is the universal language of mankind”; but others—including Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Batteux, Eduard Hanslick, and E. T. A. Hoffmann—made the same point in similar words. The idea retains currency among musicians, particularly those whose music gets classified as “world music.” Mandawuy Yunupingu, spokesman and founder of the Aborigine group Yothu Yindi claims, “Music is a universal language without prejudice.” Peter Gabriel asserts, “Music is the universal language. There is nothing more powerful, more moving.” ² I could cite many other musicians saying more or less the same thing.

Nevertheless, the maxim is less commonplace than it once was, and skeptics are convinced that they have grounds for their doubts. Not that Germans have ceased to understand Italian music and vice versa. But as Europeans began to encounter music from Asia, they realized that not all music resembled that of their own societies. In fact, some of it seemed unintelligible. What should they make of these strange sounds from distant lands?

European theorists in the nineteenth century commonly held that other people’s music was less advanced than that of Europe. Music everywhere aimed at the same basic organization, even if some nations had yet to attain it. The explanation that some nations lagged behind in musical development served to account for various features of so-called primitive music. Such music was considered redundant, too simplistic, too raucous, or just plain out of tune. Charles Darwin’s characterization of the music of “savage” peoples is fairly typical:

But we must not judge of the tastes of distinct species by a uniform standard; nor must we judge by the standard of man’s taste. Even with man, we should remember what discordant noises, the beating of tom-toms and the shrill notes of reeds, please the ears of savages. Sir S. Baker remarks, that “as the stomach of the Arab prefers the raw meat and reeking liver taken hot from the animal, so does his ear prefer his equally coarse and discordant music to all other.”³

A common nineteenth-century view was that “primitive” music had emerged from societies that had embarked, but gone only some way, on the journey toward tonal music, with all its potential for intricate structure and drama. The tonal system of music, a European discovery, was the apex of musical progress. At least implicitly, it was posited as a universal goal.⁴

Some proponents of the theory of musical progress were at least interested in why some foreign music sounded alien and not just undeveloped. John Pyke Hullah in England recognized that music from other cultures was often organized on different principles than those underlying Western tonality. “How can there be music acceptable to one comparatively civilized people and altogether unacceptable, unintelligible even to another? The answer is to be found in the different nature of their musical system.” Yet he continues:

It is difficult enough for an ear trained in the nineteenth century to reconcile itself to the various modes used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But to reconcile itself to another system seems impossible. Happily it is not in the least necessary. The European system, though the exigencies of practice prevent its being absolutely true, is nearer the truth than any other.⁵

Through the twentieth century, the view that one could reasonably restrict one’s gaze to Western music remained commonplace. As recently as 1977, a graduate student in music at an Ivy League university told me that while other societies of course had music, “there is only one culture in which music became an art.” In 1986 Judith Becker challenged the alleged superiority of Western music in print, suggesting that the position was still seriously held.⁶ A view only slightly less extreme continues to have adherents today, even among the most thoughtful and musically knowledgeable.

Roger Scruton, for example, is well aware that the music of the world operates according to multifarious structural principles. Indeed, he draws attention to structural diversity even within modern Western music. Yet he betrays no qualms about restricting his attention to Western music, and he argues that tonal music as it became formulated in the West is the optimal employment of musical resources.⁷ In his impressive book The Aesthetics of Music, he contends that the superiority of Western musical culture is demonstrated by its discovery of tonality and its development of multivoiced counterpoint. “The distinction between melody and bass is known in many cultures; so too is the distinction between melody and harmony,” he acknowledges. “But how many cultures pay this kind of detailed attention to the inner voice, and attempt to compose harmonies from independent melodic lines?”⁸ “Our tradition,” he concludes, “could fairly claim to be the richest and most fertile that has yet existed.”⁹

Scruton elsewhere comments, “The suspicion of tonality, like Marx’s suspicion of private property . . . should be seen for what it is: an act of rebellion against the only way we have of making sense of things.”¹⁰ Charles Rosen rightly criticizes this remark:

The claim that Western tonality is the only way music can make sense ignores the different ways other civilizations have organized their music. Scruton, however, wants to have nothing to do with non-tonal Oriental systems. “For three hundred years,” he writes, “Japan remained cut off from Western art music, locked in its grisly imitations of the Chinese court orchestras, dutifully producing sounds as cacophonous to local ears as the croaking of jackdaws.” Scruton obviously is not interested in being politically correct, but it is curious that he doesn’t know that when the Japanese first heard Western tonal music in the late sixteenth century (when the Jesuits came to Japan), they were horrified at the unpleasant noise it made. . . . At any rate, he . . . at least admits that experts can make sense of non-tonal music, though even experts cannot understand it from experience but only because they are able to decode it.¹¹

The Western atonal music that Scruton acknowledges (but interprets as implicitly tonal or meaningless) is only one type of music that has been organized on other bases besides tonality. Scruton fails to grant that tonality is only one of the bases on which music can be valued—or that Western tonal music can sound just as alien to those accustomed to their societies’ nontonal music as atonal music sounds to him. This is brought home by James Garson’s anecdotal report of taking Pandit Nikhil Banerjee to a concert in which Mstislav Rostropovich performed Bach’s Cello Suites. When Garson asked afterward how he had liked the concert, Banerjee remarked, “He played out of tune the entire time; he didn’t develop any of the themes; and it sounded almost like the music was written out in advance.”¹² In a similar vein, musicologist Curt Sachs (1881–1959) described the distinguished Albanian folk musician who attended a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and commented, “Fine—but very, very plain.” Sachs attributed this judgment to the Albanian’s expectation of more variegated rhythm than one gets in Beethoven’s evenly metered music.¹³

One might also point to musical cultures that attend much more than the West to the way in which particular tones are articulated in performance. Japanese music exploits the range of possibilities for attacks and releases of individual tones.¹⁴ So does much Chinese music, in particular that involving the qin (or ch’in, pronounced “chin”), an unfretted lute, which is so sensitive that ambient air currents can produce sounds. Even the grain of one’s fingerprints encountering the strings can be heard. To play the qin well the performer must learn a vast number of nuances of touch.¹⁵ In his paeans to the achievements of Western music, Scruton does not acknowledge that other cultures have often had different musical aims, and that their achievements should be judged accordingly.

The view that non-Western music has not achieved the artistic distinction of Western music has declined over time, in part because of more extensive Western encounters with music from outside Europe. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when “world music” is a marketing category for the recording industry, it is difficult for us to remember how recently the West gained its exposure to the rest of the world’s music. Certainly, there was some awareness of non-Western music during the so-called Age of Discovery, when European navigators explored the globe in search of knowledge and riches. Sir Francis Drake, for example, describes in his captain’s log his first encounter with Javanese music in 1580. “Raia Donan coming aboard us . . . presented our Generall with his country musick, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull.”¹⁶ Drake’s report, however, had no immediate consequence on European musical experience, or on Western musical theory. Non-European music was relegated by Western culture to the status of exotica, where it remained until the dawn of the twentieth century.

At the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, the Exposition Universelle, for which the Eiffel Tower was built, Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas (composer of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) attended the concerts of the Javanese gamelan and the musical theater from Cochin, China, presented in the Palais du Trocadéro.¹⁷ The tuning of the Javanese instruments was affected by the long sea voyage, and it is not clear how much the sounds Debussy and Dukas heard actually resembled music heard in Java.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Debussy was so inspired by this exposure to Javanese music that it motivated a new direction in his compositions, the use of a whole-tone scale of six steps. For Debussy, Javanese music was more than a mere novelty. Clearly under the sway of the noble savage myth, he wrote in 1913,

There were, and there still are, despite the evils of civilization, some delightful native peoples for whom music is as natural as breathing. Their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves and the thousand sounds of nature which they understand without consulting an arbitrary treatise. Their traditions reside in old songs, combined with dances, built up throughout the centuries. Yet Javanese music is based on a type of counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child’s play. And if we listen without European prejudice to the charm of their percussion we must confess that our percussion is like primitive noises at a county fair.¹⁹

The romantic view of the “natives” and their music notwithstanding, what strikes me as most interesting in this comment is that Debussy was taking the achievements of Javanese music seriously. The highly developed rhythms and counterpoint not only struck him as remarkable, they also suggested new possibilities for Europeans to explore.

Most of Debussy’s contemporaries among European composers were not as interested as he in the nature of non-Western music on its own terms. But his experiments with musical resources derived from non-Western music exposed his listeners to sounds outside the purview of what they had taken to be music heretofore. If music was the universal language, accordingly, it was a language of which they were to some degree ignorant.

Early twentieth-century composition led some listeners to question the universality of music on other grounds. Experimental forms, such as dodecaphonic music and serial music, were constructed on the basis of different principles from the familiar tonal framework. The formal structures involved in such music were universal in the sense that they did not hail from any particular tradition; but they were far from universal in the sense of being understood by all who heard them. Many Westerners who encountered such music had difficulty understanding it, and they were thus led to doubt their ability to make sense even of some of the music produced in their own societies, let alone music from foreign lands.

Probably the most important development for precipitating widespread awareness of other cultures’ music was the development and widespread dissemination of recording technology. Recordings documenting the diversity of music provided definitive evidence that the world’s music is not all constructed in the same way. The tape recorder, in particular, enabled ethnographers to preserve the sonic impressions of non-Western music and to play it at great distances from its original production. Listeners no longer needed to go to the source, or have the source come to them, in order to hear music vastly different from that of their own culture. Eventually, some elements of non-Western music became not only available but also popular for certain Western audiences. George Harrison’s introduction of a sitar into the Beatles’ and his own solo works and Paul Simon’s collaboration with the South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on his Graceland album are only two of the better known cases of this development becoming mainstream in the West.²⁰ Certainly, the appropriation of features of non-Western music by Western musicians does not establish that cross-c...