Music

Cross-Cultural Music Studies and the Nature of Music

With these limitations in mind, it is an ethno-musicological truism that all human societies [Page 1198]engage in behavior that can be described as musical: organized sound in addition to language (although often related to language) that is held to be meaningful and powerful and is often considered aesthetically pleasing. The universal occurrence of humanly organized sound-art that can be called music suggests that it is necessary for human development. However, the adage that music is a universal language has been disproved by ethnomusicologists who have shown that, although musical sounds from cultural traditions unfamiliar to a listener may sound aesthetically pleasing, the meanings and uses of that music are rarely understood without substantial experience. Like language, music is a universal human behavior, and, like language but probably more so, the understanding of music varies greatly depending on one's cultural competency. Furthermore, what a cultural insider might consider to be music sometimes differs from what an outsider hears as musical. For example, in many Islamic societies, the recitation of the Qur'ān is decidedly not considered to be music even though it is melodious and shares many sonic characteristics with some musical practices. Discrepancies about what is and what is not music exist within all substantial cultural formations. For example, in 20th-century western European and American musical composition trends, the boundaries of what we might call music were deliberately challenged and expanded. Similarly, as David Novak's work with Japanese and American vernacular music shows, sound-art genres called “noise” are deliberately created to fall outside of definitions of music.

Another finding of cross-cultural music studies is that, when first encountering an unfamiliar music tradition, the uninitiated listener is often unable to recognize or even hear the features of the sound that are the point of sonic interest and meaning for the initiated listeners. For example, overtone singing as practiced in a number of traditions (i.e., Mongolian, Tuvan, Tibetan) generally involves a low-pitched fundamental vocal drone. The drone is usually the loudest part of the overall sound, is strikingly different than many other vocal sounds cultivated in different traditions, and therefore often becomes the focus of attention by uninitiated listeners. However, the listener familiar with overtone singing knows that the point of interest is the quiet whistle-like melody that emerges as a resultant overtone created and manipulated by the skillful singer producing the drone. Listeners unfamiliar with the tradition are often unable to hear this melody at first and must be instructed on how to hear it. Just as producing musical sounds is historically, socially, and culturally situated, so too is hearing music. Listening to, and hearing, musical sounds is an active practice that requires insider knowledge. Thus, whereas sound-art we might call music is a universal human phenomenon, what constitutes music, what it might mean, and even how to hear it are not universal but highly particular to the thousands of musical practices around the world.

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