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Music Outside Europe A fish is not aware of the water, since it knows nothing of any other medium. Until quite recently, this has been the position of European culture vis-a-vis the rest of the world; the complete and invincible certainty of the axiomatic superiority of European art to that of the rest of the world ensured that Europe was cut off, for more than three centuries, from the fertilizing influence of other cultures, cultures which to Europeans were at best strange and exotic, at worst primitiveand unworthy of notice. The first obvious break with this attitude came with the great Paris World Exhibition held on the Champ de Mars in 1889 where, for the first time in Europe, the gamelan of Java and the musical theatre of Cochin China were to be heard. The effect of these new sounds was sensational; enthusiasm for their exoticism and mystery was unbounded, yet of those who heard and were excited by the fascinating play of metallophone, gong and drum only one western musician really understood their significance: the twentyseven -year-old Claude Achille Debussy. Many years later, in 1913, he recalled, '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 any arbitrary treatise. Their traditions reside in the old songs, combined with dances, built up over 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 country fair.'1 I shall discuss in a later chapter the direct influence which these wonderful sounds had upon Debussy's music; here we notice only that Debussy was in fact the first western musician to recognize and acknowledge the fact that here was a musical culture that was on its own terms fully the equal of that of the west, a culture from which the west might learn. As we shall see, Debussy's mind was prepared for this new experience, and, alone of the musicians of his time, he was able to incorporate the lessons of this new music into 2 Music Outside Europe 35 his own work with something more than superficial exotic mannerism. And if he did not fully comprehend the deeper significance of the music, of its place in oriental society, this was because he had no opportunity, in those vast exhibition halls under the shadow of the brand-new Eiffel Tower, to hear the music in its natural setting. In later chapters I shall attempt to view our own, western, music against the background of western society and social attitudes, but before doing so it will be instructiveto examine some non-western musics, in so far as we can generalize about them, in order to establish the kinds of music and the kinds of relationship of music to society that are possible in cultures other than our own. The exploration cannot be more than cursory; it is not intended to do more than establish the fact that other attitudes than our own are possible, and that these attitudes are reflected in the technical procedures of the music. We thus give our exploration of western music in its social framework a more solid background against which to work, and become aware of our own tradition as a medium surrounding and supporting us and pervading all our attitudes and perceptions. In becoming aware of the nature of our tradition we can become aware also of the nature and extent of the changes that have taken place in it over the past seventy years or so. I discussed in the previous chapter various features of western classical music that make it unique in the world's musical cultures. We should not allow our familiarity with this music to delude us into thinking that these features represent the only, or even necessarily the most sophisticated, way of making music; each has been bought at great cost in other ways. The modulatory freedom and expressive flexibility of tonal functional harmony, for example, is gained at the expense of a rigidity of pitch and a type of mistuning, the equal temperament scale, that other cultures would find intolerable, and which we can in fact make tolerable only through the use of vibrato to blur the edges of the pitch, and...

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