Ever since Montaigne, Descartes and Montesquieu developed some awareness of how values could be culturally determined, Western thought has been caught between the horns of a dilemma: a "particularist" and a "universalist" view of human cultures.
The first would have that cultures, based as they are on different interpretations of the world, are essentially incapable of communication among themselves. The other stand, on the contrary, stressing what human beings have in common, holds cultural differences to be merely the result of man adapting to circumstances. Thus, each culture would have produced "local" responses (music among them), potentially capable of enriching other cultures, insofar as they all rest on a common denominator shared by all mankind.
The "particularist" position is apparently untenable, at least, in its crude formulation: cultures do in fact communicate, and exchange some of their traits, in several different ways, and always have, so far as we can tell. The "universalist" standpoint, on the contrary, appears self-evident and unproblematic. Still, it largely rests on metaphysical assumptions about human nature: men unmodified by the custom of particular times and places do not exist, have never existed, and could not possibly exist. So, this hypothetical entity, that we call "human nature", cannot be the object of scientific investigation. One is reminded here of Immanuel Kant, who would have called this abstraction a noo£menon (a mental construct of which no direct experience can be gained).
Intrigued as I am by the "universalist" assumption, I am trying to discuss in this paper some considerations about the the problems I have with it, and with its application to the field of music. They relate, in particular, to three issues: 1. Can we, and should we, "accept" all music?; 2. Is all music really worth "preserving"?; and 3. How do we survive in a "multimusical" world?
The universalist point of view was well expressed by the Spanish missionary Bartolom‚ de Las Casas: "All the peoples of mankind are human", he said. The social sciences, however, show that one can be human in many different ways. So much so, that anthropology has learnt how only with a culturally relativistic frame of mind can one hope to understand something about alien cultures. It was Max Weber who first stated in clear terms - in contrast with Durkheim and Pareto - that science seeks to understand the "subjective vision" of the social actor and, as such, needs to be Wertfrei. The scientist, he maintained, can only evaluate to what degree a given social action is "rational" in relation to its scope, or to its reference values. Understanding other people's actions is therefore possible, provided we avoid judgement on the values governing them. We could ourselves, for instance, "understand" Max Weber's opinions about the politics of his time; but we could hardly accept them. Max Weber, a passionate German nationalist, was no democratic in the modern sense. Still, he deserves to be judged by the starndard of his time and culture. So does - for instance - Aristotle, who never wrote a word against slavery. The same privilege we should grant cannibals and human scrifiers.
There we have a thorny point: "universalism" and "cultural relativism" do not easily cohexist because, if a universal human nature exists, it is not concerned with "values". Therefore, a Wertfrei understanding of other cultures cannot translate into acceptance of those viewpoints and practices that we "anthropologically" comprehend. We all know rituals that are highly valued in given culture (bull-fighting in Spain, for instance) that are quite repulsive in other cultures. One might suppose that, at least in the matter of taking human life, all peoples would agree in condemnation. The contrary is true. In a matter of homicide, it may be held that one is blameless if that one kills by custom his first two children, or that a husband has right of life and death over his wife, or that it is the duty of the child to kill his parents before they're old. In contemporary Brazil, for instance, a minority religion, the Guimbanda, still contemplates human sacrifice.
If the concept of homicide is culturally determined, so is that of "peaceful coexistance" among nations. Cultures exist which value conflict and enmity: conflict is part and parcel of some cultural interpretations of the world (Ross 1993). Eliminating conflict, therefore, may also mean altering, and sometimes "disrupting", some of the world cultures as we know them. Of course, encroachments into other cultures the West has perpetrated all the time: I am thinking of the pressure excercised on cannibalistic tribes to give up their practices, I am thinking of the effort to end female circumcision in Africa. Such efforts have often generated arguments about whether Westerners have the right to interfere in traditional practices.
No less complex is the problem arising wherever Western nations host non-Western minorities. Minority rights, there, will very often clash with the fundamental rights of majorities. To be sure, few Britons complain when turbaned Sikhs refuse to wear motorcycle helmets, obligatory for others. But many will indeed object if followers of Islam choose to obey God's law - as interpreted by an unelected ayatollah in a foreign country - in defiance of the law of the land. Likewise, most South Africans will be loth to see Zulus given the right to carry their "traditional" weapons in public. Italians are already having problems with immigrants for whom bigamy is a way of life. To let them have it their own way would entail a drastic redrawing of family right, of inheritance law, of retirement pension regulations, etc.
So, as tides of immigration sweep across the rich world, the receiving nations have a choice. They can assimilate the immigrants, or they can expect a proliferation of sub-cultures within their borders. Early this century, state systems assimilated newcomers and taught them how to fit in. Today the very idea of the "melting pot" appears dubious, coercive - even racist.
Now: does all this have anything to do with music and with ethnomusicology? Very much so, I believe, because here the question comes up, whether music is simply a neutral element more suitable than others for cultural interchange or, on the contrary, it is something linked with the deep-seated cultural attitudes mentioned so far. It is a crucial question. From the answer we give, descends whether or not musical systems (and the aesthetics governing them) are potentially compatible.
Uncompromising universalists would surely say that, aside from style differences (the culture-bound variations imposed upon the universal traits of human musicality), music is in essence always "the same music"; hence unlimited potential for intercultural exchange. One is reminded here of the romantic poet Wackenroder (1773-1798), who maintained that all art styles are equally valuable because art expresses the "absolute" (albeit in forms that are made "relative" by time and circumstance).
On the contrary, I would like to suggest here that musical style (the predominant choices and procedures characteristic of a musical tradition) is very often not "neutral" or Wertfrei. Every ethnomusicologist, drawing on experiences developed in his own area of expertise could easily mention musical genres that in a particular society, at a given time, were subject to more or less strict forms of censorship - because of the ethical connotations they carry. Cultures also have existed, and exist, like that of the Navajos, that believe that music in general should be "handled with care". Everywhere, moreover, hierachies of genres are made on ethic, aesthetic and, ultimately, political grounds.
Even in the history of Western art-music we find awareness of how value-oriented the musical phenomenon can be. I am referring of the so-called moralitas artis musicae reappearing in different forms from the Pithagoreans to Plato, from Aristotle to the Fathers of the Church, from Boethius to the Reformation, from the Trent Council to Tolstoj, from Karl Marx to Adorno. It is no chance that the more authoritarian is a political system (traditional or revolutionary), the more it regulates musical practice. Regimes whose values do not tolerate confrontation, are all aware that music finds a way of relating to value systems; that music concurs to the construction of symbolic frameworks representing idiosyncratic ways of relating to life, people, and one's own self.
Of course, this is not to rule out the possibility that many musical processes operate to some degree in all musics. I am rather suggesting that what is especially meaningful to, say the Inuit of Alaska or the Suya of Brazil, about their own music, might precisely be what makes it different from any other music - and not what it has in common.
In other words: it is worth considering the possibility that those aspects of the musical experience that actually are "transcultural", may be in a way the least significant. It is just like saying that the fact that human beings are all born with two arms and two legs does not help in leading them to the same moral choices. To put it in even wider terms: just like someone's religion may be an abomination for somebody else's religion, someone's music may also speak of things that tell us that it is wrong to be what we are - at least in some instances; it would then be reasonable for us to dislike some repertoires and not care for the survival of the practices, rituals, and values they go along with.
And here I am getting to a second theme, just as controversial I presume, as the one I have just outlined: the issue of "preservation".
In ethnomusicology we have always realized that many cultures are endangered. Hence our ingrained attitude to be suspicious of change, in any form; to see change as disruptive rather than as creative. But how sound are the logical implications of an unmitigated preservative position?
At least two objections can be raised against it. The first, I have already mentioned: music exists that is functional to rituals we are not always ready to accept. The Guimbanda involves human sacrifice, and the Brazilian government is trying to stamp it out. Diregarding cultural-relativistic considerations, here a minority group is deprived from the right of religious expression, here one anhropologically significant minority culture is endangered.
Second objection. We all, as scholars would like to preserve everything; because everything is worthy of scientific investigation. We would love, to have the Latin and the Greek cultures still alive. Of course, if they had survived, the Italian language, and the French, etc., would not have come into existence. We would love to observe a living madrigal practice as well, but the question is then whether Beethoven could have come about in a musical climate permeated by that singing tradition. In a way, preserving the past in its entirety - while living in the present - may indeed seem like wanting to have the cake and eat it. The suspect arises that a number of things eventually might have to die, just in order to make room for other things to be born. Sometimes I even wonder whether there is much reason for jubilation that so much music from the past has survived in the European tradition, possibly a hindrance to a healthy contemporary practice.
Ultimately then, is it really possible to preserve? And if so, do we really want to, in all cases? The fact is, however, that many cultures - for good or worse - do survive and in our contemporary world, no longer can afford to live in isolation. And here I link to my third, and final, theme: "multiculturalism".
Ever since Riemann (1848-1919), Mersmann (1891-1971) and Besseler (1891-1971) began to develop a theory of music listening, music historians have been dealing with that issue - to some degree. Not so much in ethnomusicology. In our field the question of how the music of foreign cultures is heard, and how it fits into one's own mental make-up has, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be investigated. For instance: what does it make to our listening of Mozart and Beethoven, parallel exposure to Balinese Gamelan or Japanese gagaku? It is an intriguing question because, even if music is - as I suggested - strictly bound to the essential aspects of the human worldview, it is nowadays the most accessible feature of forein cultures; the electronic media and the migratory phenomenon are playing a major role in that. As we are confronted with repertoires foreign to our native environment, all we can often do is to recontextualize them in some manner, and try somehow to make sense of the unusual experience. Actually, we are very good at that in this culture. If we were unable to detach music from its original context and give it new meaning, there would be very little for us to listen to (no Bach, no Josquin, no Hildegard von Bingen). Of course, re- contextualizing music inevitably entails some degree of distortion and misunderstanding of its original sense. It is remarkable how, through this intellectual operation, we often end up enjoying our very misunderstanding of other people's music. Harold Bloom, the literary critic, once said that a work of art is nothing but the misrepresentation of previous art-works (Bloom 1975). He referred to Western culture, but perhaps the idea is acceptable in a wider sense. Creative misunderstanding could actually be seen as a cultural sefeguard, screening away those correlates of other people's music that, if appropriately understood, might antagonize our way of being.
But the issue is more complex than that because a multicultural environment, by definition, forces different practices to meet in a context which is equally alien to all of them. If music owes its original meaning to a particular environment, the fear is not to be underrated that music becomes meaningless in a kaleidoscopic context made up by ingredients as heterogeneous as Vivaldi, Youssou n'Dour, Mahler, Ravi Shankar, Josquin, Umm Kulthum, and so forth. Isn't an all-comprehensive context tantamount to no context at all? Worse even, it seems to favor a musical gluttony that strikes me as the exact antithesis of gourmandise.
I do not envy music educators who are supposed to give their students an orientation in this increasingly problematic soundscape. I suppose, once the limits of what can be done are aknowledged, a teacher can go as far as showing his students that musical systems different from our own are by no means "primitive", that they are all sophisticated in their own way, that each one of them embodies a remarkable intellectual achievement of some kind. But I would not expect students to like all musics, even though they will often like some of them - possibly for the wrong reasons.
Even that would be no little achievement in the classroom, as long as students are aware that a lot that has to do with emotions remains to be discovered in those musics. That discovery may not be for everyone, because, once unfair distinctions are avoided, one cannot pretend that there are no distinctions to be made. A Christian Orthodox monk from the monastery of Mount Athos could develop an appreciation for the Buddhist chant of Tibet only at the expense of his own selfness, by restructuring his sense of aesthetics and, implicitly, his own ethics. Music coming from a very remote culture from our own may indeed require, for a competent appreciation, no less than a different experience of "time" and "space". If it were possible to go that far in the classroom students would be left rather "spaced out". It is fortunate one can only offer them a bland form of musical tourism that will harm no one. Because, when conflicting cultures are interiorized gaps may be open that make it difficult to stay confortably within the culture of origin.
This paper has raised questions that reach way beyond the borders of ethnomusicology. They all relate to what is probably the major problem of our time: how to ensure the coexistance of different cultures, large and small, that cannot anymore ignore each other as they often did in the past. My point was to show how the field of ethnomusicology, informed as it has been by a culturally relativistic approach, has resisted the realization of how dramatic the question is. It is that dramatic exactly because music - contrary to what Charles Burney once said - does not appear to be just: "...an innocent luxury".