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Introduction
- Wesleyan University Press
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INTRODUCTION It is generally acknowledged that the musical tradition of postRenaissance Europe and her offshoots is one of the most brilliant and astonishing cultural phenomena of human history. In its range and power it is perhaps to be matched by only one other intellectual achievement - the science of post-Renaissance Europe. It is understandable, therefore, if those of us who are its heirs (which includes not only the Americas and many late and present colonies of Europe but also by now a large portion of the non-western world as well) are inclined to find in the European musical tradition the norm and ideal for all musical experience, just as they find in the attitudes of western science the paradigm for the acquisition of all knowledge, and to view all other musical cultures as at best exotic and odd. It is in fact precisely this inbuilt certainty of the superiority of European culture to all others that has given Europeans, and latterly their American heirs, the confidence to undertake the cultural colonization of the world and the imposition of European values and habits of thought on the whole human race. We should not, however, allow the brilliance of the western musical tradition to blind us to its limitations and even areas of downright impoverishment. We may be reluctant to think of our musical life, with its great symphony orchestras, its Bach, its Beethoven, its mighty concert halls and opera houses, as in any way impoverished, and yet we must admit that we have nothing to compare with the rhythmic sophistication of Indian, or what we are inclined to dismiss as 'primitive' African music, that our ears are deaf to the subtleties of pitch inflection of Indian raga or Byzantine church music, that the cultivation of bel canto as the ideal of the singing voice has shut us off from all but a very small part of the human voice's sound possibilities or expressive potential, such as are part of the everyday resources of a Balkan folk singer or an Eskimo, and that the smooth mellifluous sound of the romantic symphony orchestra drowns out the fascinating buzzes and distortions cultivated alike by African and medieval European musicians. 2 Music • Society • Education It is only comparatively recently that Europeans have developed sufficient interest in these and other musical cultures to hear in them anything more .than quaintness or cacophony; we were in the position of the fish in Albert Einstein's metaphor, not aware of the water because it knows nothing of any other medium. Today, partly through our increasing knowledge of other musical cultures, we have the opportunity to become aware of our own tradition as a medium surrounding and supporting us and shaping our perceptions and attitudes as the needs of hydrodynamics shape the fish's body; this book is in part an attempt to examine the western musical tradition through this experience as well as in itself, to see it through the mirror of these other musics as it were from the outside, and in so doing to learn something of the inner unspoken nature of western culture as a whole. We shall try to look beneath the surface of the music, beneath the 'message', if any, which the composer consciously intended (and even the fact that a message is intended may be in itself significant), to its basic technical means, its assumptions, which we usually accept unawares, on such matters as the nature of sound, the manner of listening, the passing of time, as well as its social situation and relations, to see what lies hidden there. For it is in the arts of our, or indeed of any, culture, that we see not only a metaphor for, but also a way of transcending, its otherwise unspoken and unexamined assumptions. Art can reveal to us new modes of perception and feeling which jolt us out of our habitual ways; it can make us aware of possibilities of alternative societies whose existence is not yet. Many writers and critics have undertaken, in the visual and plastic arts and in literature, to make plain the social implications of their chosen arts; it is to me perpetually surprising that so few writers have made any comparable attempt in music, whose criticism and appreciation exists for the most part in a social vacuum. Perhaps it is the lack of explicit subject matter in music that frightens people off. I make the attempt here with much trepidation, but feel it imperative, not...