Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music

4 On Cultures and Their Fusion

Chapter 4 ON CULTURES AND THEIR FUSION There are in most societies legends and theories concerning the origin of music, ofwhich western 'scientific' theories are in the main the least interesting or illuminating. T.H. Huxley, for example, suggested that music might be a factor in sexual selection, in which the ability to make sweet sounds helps in obtaining a mate; this banal conjecture may look at first sight attractive in view of the proverbial sexual attractiveness of musicians from Orpheus onwards (probably more to do with the musician's presumed personality and lifestyle than with his actual music) but it leaves us where we were, with any number of questions begged, including that of why we should find such sounds attractive. This is especially true since, as Harry Partch was not the first to point out, there is no sound that is enjoyed in one culture that is not thought of as a horrible noise in another (that two or more cultures may find themselves coexisting in a single British or American household is a well-known source of friction). The trouble with virtuallyall scientific speculation on music, I suspect, lies in the fact that it is the work of people whose habits of thought militate against their having the faintest idea of the real function of music in human life. Much more interesting and valuable are those myths and legends which tell how music arose, often conveying profound insights into the matter; myth, as we have already noted, is not only descriptive but prescriptive, since in telling how things came to be it tells how things are, or should be. In that sense we could saythat scientific theories in general partake also of the nature and function of myth, pretty impoverished myth much of it, if we think in terms of its usefulness in guiding 118 Music of the Common Tongue human thought and action. One remarkably consistent feature of these stories of how music came into the lives of human beings is the idea that it happened in response to a desperate need; thus, in Hindu mythology, the god Brahma, after meditating for a hundred thousand years, finally decided to give music to the human race when they begged him for something to relieve their sorrow and hardships. David Reck, who retells the story, comments: 'Music, most people of the world say, originated somewhere other than in man. It came some time in the past from gods or other supernatural beings who, perhaps when man needed it or asked for it, perhaps even at the moment of man's creation, gave music as a gift'.1 The psychological truth of this would no doubt have been recognized by the black slaves in the Americas who found in musicking a tool for spiritual survival;it must have seemed as if the art were given as a gift in a time of desperate need. Itwas not just any music; neither the old musical art of Africa nor that of their new masters would do, but an art of their own creating, a music that seemed to be created anew (as indeed the art does seem to be created anew with each new social situation), and it took from the two sides what was needed, no less and no more, to make a new musical art which partook of the nature of both but was not the same as either. It spoke of and to them in their particular predicament, and it came into being, not by deliberately willing it, but as a spontaneous generation which must have seemed like a divine gift of relief in their need. It must have been by no means the first time that a people has found itself in such a desperate situation during the turbulent history of the human race. We gain a hint of the same feeling when the captive Children of Israel asked how they could sing the Lord's song in a strange land. The era of written historyis only a minute fragment of the whole human adventure so far, and that of written music even smaller, and there isno reason to supposethat the humans who painted the caves of Ahamira and Lascaux twelve thousand or so years ago, themselves the product of more than a hundred thousand years of recognizably human history, should not have been engaging in equally sophisticated musicking and dancing. The practice, common among present-dayclassical [18.116.51.117] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11...