Different Sounds

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

“The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs.” Thus begins Horace Miner’s satirical 1956 essay, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which details a culture rife with magic, superstitions, and exotic routines. Their foundational belief is that the human body is ugly and prone to disease. Extreme measures are taken to ameliorate this natural state. Bathing and excretory acts are performed in household shrines adorned with hanging chests filled with elixirs and charms. Men scrape and lacerate the surface of their faces with sharp instruments. Teeth are ritualistically cleansed with a bundle of hog hairs lathered with magical powders. Bewitched people hire witch-doctors to exorcise demons from their heads.

At some point, the reader realizes that Nacirema is American spelled backwards. The shrine is a bathroom, the hanging chest is a medicine cabinet, the face-scraping is a shave, the mouth-cleaner is a toothbrush, the witch-doctor is a therapist. Miner’s subtle wit sensitizes us to our own ethnocentricity. “Primitiveness” is less a matter of the practices themselves than our assumptions about them. Outsider interpretations often conflict with insider understandings.

The wider our view of humanity becomes, the more we recognize its sundry shapes and forms. Music was once widely conceived as a “universal language” in the literal sense: the same sounds touch the same emotions and mean the same things the world over. Nineteenth-century Euro-American musicologists perpetuated this assumption, even as fieldwork mounted showing drastic variations between social structures, spoken languages, dress, food, and belief systems of far-flung cultures.

Berthold Seemann, a German botanist, was among the first to criticize this ignorant stance. His remarks, delivered at the 1870 meeting of the Anthropological Society of London, are noteworthy both for their clarity and their honesty. He doubted whether Western European nations, connected by frequent cultural exchange, possessed music that could be interpreted the same way across borders. As his observation extended eastward, conventional associations were turned on their head: songs of joy were sung in modes closely resembling the minor. Looking further east, music became increasingly less intelligible. With considerable self-awareness, he confessed that the songs of “the great Mongolian races,” while surely pleasant for them, were “positively painful” to his ears.

Ethnomusicology, the study of music in cultural context, traces its lineage to Seemann and other late-nineteenth-century mold-breakers. As ethnomusicology has evolved, so has its nomenclature. Distinctions between primitive and advanced, esoteric and exoteric have fallen out of favor. Researchers strive to appreciate music on its own terms, and rely upon insider knowledge. Yet, as much as the scholar tries to step back, the discipline—like all others—requires theory, method, and interpretation. As such, the Nacirema remains a cautionary tale.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Art Everywhere

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Some assert that it is a fallacy to compare cultural elements cross-culturally. Sometimes called the “incommensurability thesis,” this position posits that because objects, concepts and behaviors tend to have very specific meanings for the groups that produce them, they must therefore be utterly unique. Variety negates universality. Basically a version of cultural relativism, this attitude emanates from three circles (or, rather, minorities within three circles): philosophers who attack commonalities in human experience; critics who over-emphasize outlier phenomena in order to challenge conventional assumptions; and ethnographers who argue for the absolute uniqueness of the populations they study, in part to elevate their own stature as privileged experts. Yet, just because human activities take heterogeneous forms does not eliminate the possibility of shared motivations.

Steven Pinker argues this point as it relates to the human capacity for language. He concludes in The Language Instinct: “Knowing about the ubiquity of complex language across individuals and cultures and the single mental design underlying them all, no speech seems foreign to me, even if I cannot understand a word.” This observation seems indisputable: language is a biological characteristic of the human species.

Philosopher of art Denis Dutton expands on Pinker’s claim in The Art Instinct. He asks: “Is it also true that, even though we might not receive a pleasurable, or even immediately intelligible, experience from art of other cultures, still, beneath the vast surface variety, all human beings have essentially the same art?” Dutton contends that, like language, artistic behaviors have spontaneously appeared throughout recorded human history. Almost always, observers across cultures recognize these behaviors as artistic, and there is enough commonality between them that they can be placed within tidy categories: painting, jewelry, dance, sculpture, music, drama, architecture, etc. To Dutton, this suggests that the arts, again like language, possess a general omnipresent structure beneath the varied grammar and vocabulary.

It should be noted that Pinker himself has elsewhere challenged this assumption. Most famously, he dubbed music “auditory cheesecake,” or a non-adaptive by-product (of language, pattern recognition, emotional calls, etc.) that serves no fundamental role in human evolution. It is not my intention here to place that hypothesis under a microscope or investigate the many arguments against it. (Perhaps, being a linguist, Pinker sees language as a sort of holy ground that mustn’t be stepped on by “lesser” human activities.) Wherever the evolutionary debates travel and whatever clues or counter-clues they accumulate, one thing is convincing: art appears rooted in universal human psychology.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

 

Creativity Within

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Western music history attempts a straight line connecting the “greats,” whose biographies demarcate the beginnings and endings of musical periods (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, Contemporary). Like any effort to construct a palatable narrative from multitudinous ingredients, this image of music’s march through the ages sweeps over outliers, ignores “lesser lights,” overlooks ambiguities, excludes styles, and defines and focuses on centers rather than peripheries. Sniffing out deficiencies in this approach is nothing new. Ethnomusicologists, for instance, strive for an inclusive and holistic appreciation of “music as culture,” which embraces music of all sorts (and of all sorts of people) as group-specific repositories of information, identification, social cues, symbolism, and so on.

The Western outline of music history also presumes that creativity “progresses” or “improves” with time. For example, it is held that Medieval music was harmonically inferior to the complex techniques of later centuries. But it can just as well be claimed that intricate harmonies simply didn’t work in medieval social and spatial contexts. Similarly, the excessive orchestration and emotionalism of the Romantics are regarded as more evolved than the refinement and gentility of Classical composers. But, again, music that works in one setting typically doesn’t work in another. The same applies to folk and popular musics, which should be recognized as group-centric and purpose-serving cultural containers, rather than artifacts to be placed on an evolutionary continuum.

This revised conception resonates with the work of Ellen Dissanayake, who puts aesthetic creativity in anthropological perspective. In her convincing analysis, presented in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, Dissanayake argues that an artistic drive was key to the emergence, survival and adaptation of early humans. Departing from the dominant view of the aesthetic as a tangential feature, Dissanayake illustrates how art grew from an innate impulse to mark certain objects and activities as “special,” thereby ensuring their perpetuation.

It is no coincidence that art—in the form of song, dance, poetry, jewelry, painting, sculpture, engraving, costume, piercing, decoration, etc.—developed around occasions and practices crucial for group survival. These include but are not limited to: birth, rites of passage, marriage, mourning, hunting, food production, warfare, peacemaking, and religious ceremonials. Art can thus be understood as both a behavioral predisposition and a human necessity (like language and lovemaking).

This view puts into question the notion of creative progress. Creativity is an innate human trait, part and parcel of the artistic drive. Cultural conditions, social expectations, and technological advancements steer this tendency into diverse manifestations, all of which satisfy basic human needs. To be sure, some individuals are encouraged and excel in this tendency more than others; but it is present in us all. If artistic displays observable across cultures and throughout history tell us anything, it is this: creativity is a constant.

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The Invention of “Art”

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Marxist philosopher Paul Mattick, Jr. once remarked that “art” has only been around since the eighteenth century. On the surface, this audacious claim seems to dismiss the creative impulse evident in hominids since the cave-painting days and probably before. But, really, the idea of art as something abstract or “for itself” is a Western construct with roots in the Enlightenment. That era gave rise to the notion of “the aesthetic” as a stand-alone experience, as well as individuals and institutions that actively removed artistic creation from organic contexts: critics, art dealers, academics, galleries, museums, journals, etc. Terms previously used in other areas, like “creativity,” “self-expression,” “genius” and “imagination,” were re-designated almost exclusively as “art words.”

Prior to this period (and still today in most non-European cultures) art was not a thing apart, but an integral and integrated aspect of human life. Sculpture, painting, ceramics, woodwork, weaving, poetry, music, dance, and other expressive mediums were more than mere aesthetic excursions. They beautified utensils, adorned abodes, demarcated rituals, told stories, and generally made things special. Skill and ornamentation were not valued for their own sake, but for their ability to draw attention to and enhance extra-artistic objects and activities.

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed the extraction of art from its functionalistic origins. It was segregated from everyday life and displayed as something of intrinsic worth. With this program came the panoply of now-familiar buzzwords: commodity, ownership, property, specialization, high culture, popular culture, entertainment, etc.

In the world of music, the contrivance of “absolute art” is even more recent. As New Yorker music critic Alex Ross explains, the “atmosphere of high seriousness” that characterizes classical concerts—with the expectation of attentive listening and quiet between movements—did not take hold until the early twentieth century. When public concerts first became widespread, sometime after 1800, they were eclectic events featuring a sloppy mix of excerpts from larger works and a miscellany of styles. Attendees chatted, shouted, scuffled, moseyed about, clanked dishes, and yes, even applauded (or booed) between (or during) movements. The performance was less a centerpiece than an excuse for a social happening.

As concert going morphed into a refined, bourgeoisie affair, the rigid format we are now acquainted with became the norm. Hushed and immobilized audiences sat in specially designed symphony halls and opera houses, which allowed composers to explore dynamic extremes hitherto impossible. “When Beethoven began his Ninth Symphony [1824] with ten bars of otherworldly pianissimo,” writes Ross, “he was defying the norms of his time, essentially imagining a new world in which the audience would await the music in an expectant hush. Soon enough, that world came into being.”

The impact of this development was wide-ranging. In no small way, it signaled the birth of music as an attraction in and of itself—a brand-new conception in the history of human culture. Like other artistic tendencies filtered through the Western consciousness, music was artificially detached from activities with which it had always co-existed. The radical break paved the way for the more general phenomenon of “music as entertainment” (highbrow, lowbrow and in between), and the commercialization and professionalization that came with it.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

The Rudiments of Music

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Alfred Einstein (1880-1952), one of the twentieth century’s most respected musicologists (and possible fifth cousin of Albert), wrote a daring and enduring book at the age of thirty-seven. A Short History of Music first appeared in print in his native German in 1917. The preface to later English editions includes this admission: “[The book] was written in a few weeks, at a time and place that precluded resort to any books of reference.” In Einstein’s view, this was a help rather than a hindrance. Rather than drown himself (and the reader) in a swamp of names and dates, he attempted a through-composed picture of the development of (Western) music as a whole. Some specialists have pounced on this approach, but the book’s resonance among lay readers is attested in the abundance of revised printings in German and English, each amended to include recent data (the last edition I’m aware of was published in 1954).

Naturally, Einstein gave greater attention to the area for which he was the primary authority: sixteenth-century music, especially of Italy. But no period up to his day was overlooked entirely. An intriguing case in point is the first chapter, which summarizes what was then known about “primitive” music. Aside from employing that now distasteful term, Einstein’s offerings remain the general hypotheses of the field. Indeed, while contemporary interest in the origins of music has produced fascinating details and possibilities, current research mostly complies with broad assumptions made during the first half of the twentieth century.

Einstein included seven hypotheses: (1) Singing has deeper historical roots than speaking (pre-linguistic music); (2) After singing came rhythm and percussion, which were explored in ritual dance (devotional music); (3) Song and rhythm combined to accompany labor (work songs); (4) Notes of definite pitch were used as signals in war (war songs); (5) The “easy” intervals of the fourth and fifth were the first preferred pitches (early scales); (6) Ancient songs were comprised of repeated patterns of a few notes (monotony); (7) The rudiments of harmony began with the “unintentional polyphony” of heterophony—what Einstein describes as the “arbitrary ornamentation of the same melody by several performers at the same time” (group song).

As mentioned, these premises are still foundational. Where contemporary studies have expanded upon them is in the aspect of motivation. Advances in anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology and other fields have added deeper perspectives regarding why our species began making music—the dominant theories being mating and cohesion (with variations of the two, like fitness displays, preparing for the hunt, and bonding between mother and child).

Such evolutionary theories, combined with Einstein’s strictly musical concerns of many decades ago, help us to ponder not only how the earliest music sounded, but why it was sounded at all. Fortunately, these central questions are currently on the front burners of researchers possessing great skill and imagination. And the more the topic is explored, the more interesting it becomes.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.