2. The Importance of Music

Is music truly important? Or is it just another aspect of culture, like, say, pottery making, bead stringing, cave painting, hunting, fishing, farming, etc.? To answer my own question: YES, music really is all that important. But you'd never know it from the work of the great majority of ethnomusicologists over the last, say, 25 years. Which may have something to do with their neglect by anthropology -- or every other field, for that matter -- over roughly the same period. I could write a book on how the field for which I had so much enthusiasm in my youth has become so ingrown, so parochial and, very frankly (and with some important exceptions) so irrelevant -- but for now just want to emphasize my main point here, which I suppose could be phrased thusly: music is too important to be entrusted to (most) ethnomusicologists.

To understand why, let's compare music with language. And for the sake of argument, let's assume that linguistics hasn't yet been invented, so anthropologists have no methodology for dealing with the languages of the peoples they study. Thus, every language encountered would have to be treated on an ad hoc basis, with little or no possibility of comparing it with any other language, no way of determining what language family it might belong to, nor any generally agreed upon method for assessing what elements are essential, or what its formal structures, including its "deep structures" might be. Our hypothetical Anthropologists would take note of certain more or less obvious facts: language is found everywhere, among all people; language is an important aspect of day to day life, reflecting many significant aspects of the value system of any given society; language is an important factor in the "construction of identity" and plays a significant role in the "negotiation of gender." The Anthropologists might therefore do things like interview informants to elicit their thoughts on the importance of language in their life, get them to reminisce about their first encounters with language, and through this and similar methods attempt to place language and the use of language in context, arguing that we cannot really understand any language unless we understand the context in which that language takes place. They might also agree that one cannot separate language from the rest of culture, that to do this would be to "reify" it, thus ruling out ahead of time any possible attempt to develop a science of linguistics in the future.What they might also agree on is that it would be a good idea to actually learn the language of whatever group one is studying, so maybe they'd find a "master speaker" to apprentice themselves to and, after a year or so, learn (more or less) to speak that language. They'd then return to their college or university, get a teaching job (hopefully) and teach that language to their students.

While clearly no Anthropologist or Linguist works this way, I think the above is a more or less fair description of the current state of Ethnomusicology. In other words, ethno without the musicology. Or, more accurately, ethno, with some sort of ad hoc musicology, that works differently in each case. This would be roughly equivalent to a situation where, for each language studied, each individual researcher would need to define for him/her-self a unique version of phonology, morphology, syntagmatics, etc. or simply ignore such problems altogether. A situation, also, where little or no attention was paid to whether or not a particular musical practice in a particular place was part of some "musical family," by analogy with the language families that are now (however controversial) so basic a tool of both historical linguistics and anthropology.

There is a history here, that I won't go into much, except to say that once upon a time there was a field known as "Comparative Musicology" that did concern itself with such issues, but is now regarded as hopelessly outdated, ethnocentric, reductive and whatever other fashionably "post-modern" dismissals you can call to mind. Just think of the consequences for anthropology if comparative linguistics were deemed ethnocentric and reductive, and it was no longer considered morally acceptable to place languages into large-scale categories, distinguishing between, say, Bantu and Nilotic or Austronesian and Papuan, Indo-European and Altaic, etc.

What I'm getting at here is that in my view music is NOT, as so many of today's ethnomusicologists seem to think, just one of many cultural practices worth studying, such as fishing, hunting, tool making, basket weaving, pottery making, etc., but, like language, a far more fundamental, if not elemental, cultural FORCE. That shouldn't be so difficult to see, given the fact that, in our own society, the music industry has for many years been among the most profitable on the planet. You won't make anywhere near as much money investing in the pottery, basket, cloth, meat, or even automobile, industry. But even in the most remote tribal societies, music usually would seem to play a necessary role in a host of absolutely central areas, such as religion, ritual, courtship, work, war, the establishment of group identity, sense of community, etc.

Also, music and language would seem to have a great deal in common and may well have developed in tandem. Music operates in many ways like a language, especially if we put the issue of semantics aside and concentrate on structural issues, such as musical "phonology" and syntax. As linguist Roman Jakobson once pointed out, musical notes are very close in function to phonemes -- Charles Seeger called them tonemes and rhythmemes.

Anyone who's ever taken one of those ubiquitous "World Music" classes comes away with some very rough, but real, sense that musical families exist. You may be surprised to learn, however, that musical families are not recognized among todays ethnomusicologists and any attempt to think in such terms is actively discouraged as overly speculative and, again, reductive. In my view, musical families most certainly do exist, and might well be of great use to those ethnographers, archaeologists, geneticists, cognitive scientists, etc., who pay so much attention to linguistics but show so little interest in musicology, ethno- or otherwise. Actually cognitive scientists have, of late, shown a great deal of interest in music and have speculated rather widely (and wildly) regarding the origins of music and its relation to language. In so doing, they have rarely, if ever, made use of ethnomusicological research -- especially since the ethnomusicologists themselves are assuring them that such research would be of no use to them, since, according to the current dogma, we cannot, must not, read any aspect of the distant past into the current musical activities of any peoples alive today. For historical linguists, and the anthropologists who draw on their work, such a practice is routinely accepted. Archaeologists draw on so-called "ethnographic analogy" probably far more often than they'd like to admit. It's a controversial, but nonetheless generally accepted aspect of this field. But for (most) ethnomusicologists it is forbidden territory.