Is Music Truly Cross-Cultural?
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
For those of you who’ve followed my original stories and philosophies, what I’m about to discuss will be a shift in the mood of the articles I’ve posted so far. However, it’s important to note that my short stories and discussions are not purely fiction and imagination but imaginative perceptions drawn from nonfiction.
As I progress in fiction writing, truth must interweave my fictitious realms with objective realities. Reality emboldens fiction. But the facts are not the glue, they’re merely the fragments to be woven.
The adhesive element is Jesus.
Before some of you flip over this page, consider how less resistant you might’ve been had I mentioned Dhammapda scriptures or the Upanishads. I would invite you to open your mind, as I once did, to the truth of God as He is written and His timeless wisdom. He is love, and He is light but most essentially, He is everything and within us all. To study our world and ourselves is to know Him and His way more deeply. And that is a marvelously inspirational source.
This article, however, is not a discussion about the Holy Spirit. Instead, I wish to reveal some of the sources of my musical imagination and their parameters, clearly put into place.
I hope you enjoy what wonders have filled my mind and inspired my creations. And, they may excite your imaginations as they have mine.
What Is It That We Translate?
“In music, there is both meaning and logical sequence, but in a musical sense; it is a language we speak and understand, but which we are unable to translate.”
— Eduard Hanslick, On The Musically Beautiful
The discussion of translation presupposes a definition of meaning, meaning that will be transferred from one system to another. In terms of language, we may translate Amharic ideas into English, but, since mental representations differ between each language of orientation, not without the potential loss of meaning along the way.
That is the art of translation—to resolve the discrepancies that naturally arise, such as when one word that can express an entire concept doesn’t exist in the target language (the one receiving meaning from the original language).
Language can be translated into another language, but music cannot be translated into language. Music also doesn’t necessarily “translate” into other music either.
We can transcribe tribal music into an orchestra, much as Débussy famously did by interpreting elusive Javanese traditional meters into his music compositions, but will we truly translate anything? What new information do we learn? What was the message that was transferred from one song to the next?
The thing that we translate, then, is meaning.
What Do We Mean When We Say Meaning?
Some experts claim that meaning is an inherent quality of human language and language alone. Referential and abstract concepts and ideas are readily expressible within our maternal, mental lexicon (word bank).
In linguistics, meaning is divided into two categories: Semantics and pragmatics.
Semantics is a term with which you’re most likely familiar. Semanticists study the explicit mental representation of the world. Think, mental mapping, entailment, and truth conditions. These are all akin to logic in the realm of philosophy. For example, all pit bulls are dogs but not all dogs are pit bulls. If I say tree, what’s the first image that comes to your mind? Palm, pine, or oak? The natural follow-up is, why?
Semantics, then, deals with concrete and referential meaning—how our minds reference things that exist in the world.
Pragmatics is concerned with contextualized information, implications, and their inferences, and all things implicit. It’s not so much of what’s been said but how it’s been said.
Pragmatics, therefore, deals with the abstract and implied meaning: “Gee, it’s sure getting late, Tommy,” she says as she looks at his lips and back into his eyes again.
Where language can express concrete (dog) and abstract (misogynist) meaning, music seeminWhere language can express concrete (dog) and abstract (misogynist) meaning, music seemingly does not. Music does, however, translate culture. It expresses the essence of a cultural group. The spirit of a people flows along melodic contours and vivacious beats on a drum.
Three Prevailing Hypotheses About Music and Cultural Translation
So, now that we’ve grasped the two principles by which we perceive linguistic meaning, let’s explore three prevailing hypotheses about musical meaning, and how we interpret it in music foreign to us:
Music appreciation
Cross-cultural relatability
Native-level fluency
These hypotheses, and their conclusions, will be derived from the collection of case studies and the peer-reviewed research reports comprised and commentated in Anirudh Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain. These hypotheses comment primarily on first exposure to foreign musical traditions. The examples I use, and the reactions I depict, will all be concerning a music listener's first time hearing the foreign music. Then I will conclude on prolonged exposure and engagement.
Unlike watching a film or reading in a language we’ve never studied and do not comprehend, we derive pleasure even when listening to music from varying cultures and rhythmic diversity. When we listen to foreign music, however, can we truly understand their music the same way that natives do? And before you answer that question affirmatively, pause.
Now hold on to your answer while we climb up the hierarchy of cross-cultural, musical exploration.
Music Appreciation Driven By Our Senses
We’ve all organically developed, or fused, musical styles that represent us, culturally speaking. These musical timbres and diverse rhythms are swiftly recognizable by most people in our post-modern era.
When we hear the offbeat, jumpy, palm-muted staccatos on an electric guitar and a heavy horn-centric melody, we know we’re listening to Jamaican ska. Their unique rhythms precede them. We’re apt to appreciate them with the sounds of Jamaica.
When we hear the twang of pitch bends on strings and arpeggios picked in a meter that sends us into a pensive dreamscape and fantasy, we know that we’re listening to Japanese koto. Their unique timbre precedes them. Thus, we’re inclined to appreciate them with the sounds of Japan.
Though we recognize countries of origin by their musical elements, do we hear the same thing that people native to those countries of origin hear?
In the first view, Patel surmises that the foreign music we hear can simply be “experienced as a pleasant and somewhat evocative sonic goulash.”
This would mean that although we may enjoy what we’re listening to, this would by no means indicate that we hear the same structural relations within a song that a native listener inherently understands.
So, maybe I like the novelty of offbeat palm-mutes on a guitar. But I have no clue or pay attention to what’s happening elsewhere and how that guitar is incorporated with the other instruments in the music track. Say, as an English speaker, I don’t comprehend spoken French. Does this mean I can’t still appreciate the uniqueness of the sounds? No. Many English speakers appreciate the sonic richness of French and its pleasing cadence.
After a few first listens, my comprehension could be tested by being asked to reproduce an existing ska song or, even better, compose my own. I would need to have a deep appreciation for each musical element that creates the “ska effect.” I need to understand what I’m hearing. Veteran musicians are often well-equipped to mimic what they hear, whereas non-musicians may not know where to start.
Of course, there are plenty of bands (and film composers) that replicate musical styles across the globe and continue to do this. Among the most notable American “ska” bands, and first of its class, was Sublime. But ask yourself, does Sublime sound authentic to traditional ska music, or is their music classified under its interpretive style? (We all know the answer to this question.)
The latter ponderance leads us quite nicely up the next step of the hierarchy of musical interpretation: Relatablity.
We Hear In Novelty What We’ve Heard Before
“Whoa, I’ve never heard someone play it like that before!”
Guitars have become universal in the global, musical atmosphere. Everyone’s got ’em. By everyone, I mean that a predominant amount of countries have adopted the versatile six-string—from Spain to Mozambique, Japan to Brazil, Mali to Sweden.
We all possess a similar element, but we’ve interpreted the instrument in different ways that are a direct reflection of the culture, like pouring our ancestral essence into a global tithe. We’ve all contributed to it.
Although the element is the same, the musical styles are not.
When I sit to watch a bossa nova player, as a musician, I hear what’s accessible to me through my musical memory, and what about the sonic structures are familiar to me through my years of playing the instrument. The rest of what makes bossa nova bossa nova might be lost to me, but not to my friend Pãolo here. He was born and raised in Brazil. He grew up hearing troubadours perform it on the streets. His brothers purchased their first beater guitar so they could play along with the greats on the radio. They took lessons at one of the local guitar instructors who taught Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim. His childhood spent in Brazil fills his spirit with nostalgia as he revisits his love for bossa nova.
Is this what I experienced? Most likely not.
I can still relate, of course, with the sonic relationships of bossa nova “based on [my] own culture-specific listening habits.” Through enough exposure and practice, I can “hear rhythmic groups and melodic motives,” but those groups and motives have a good chance of not being the same experienced by a native, like Pãolo.
For example, what I might parse as the end of a melodic line, Pãolo may know as only the second call and response of four. What’s essential, though, is that I don’t translate the notes being played as random. I enjoy the musical patterns even if I misinterpret their place in the song. I can still appreciate and relate to the music based on the knowledge I’ve gained from my music listening habits.
But Timothy, you might say, I’m a classically trained musician and have studied bossa nova arrangements in detail and can follow along just fine.
I have something to say back to you: Cool beans.
After studying Portuguese, you are closer to the culture. Although you’re not fluent, you’re conversational. So, naturally, you have more access to a Portuguese speaker’s worldview. You travel to Italy, thinking, “Italian is close enough to Portuguese to fill in the gaps.” To your surprise, you can, in fact, relate some of the Italian phrases to Portuguese. But do you experience the fullness of the new language? Partially, but not completely.
So until we immerse ourselves in all musical traditions, we’ll inevitably experience the joy of puzzling together something we’ve never listened to before with things we have. But the more we expose ourselves, the wider our referential power.
Is it possible, though, to analyze new musical styles the same as a native listener? Perhaps some of us have this gift, right?
Music Is Inherently Cross-Cultural
The third hypothesis posits that “one may actually perceive musical relations in a manner resembling that of a native listener.”
I will not spend much time on this point since it’s the equivalent of professing our propensity for fluency in foreign tongues upon first listening. If the new tongue resembles frequential qualities similar to our native tongue, we may learn the new tongue with relative ease. We’re susceptible to acquiring it because it shares similarities with our mother tongue.
But it does not mean that we will understand the new tongue at the native level. We merely recognize patterns that are already close to us. The cultural and traditional attitudes do not come with it. That part requires immersion and years spent using the new tongue. Over time, we develop a relationship that blossoms into a deeper understanding and empathy for the new culture and their tongue. But we’re always a foreigner to it—knowledgeable, but an observer always.
The same researchers who proposed the idea even concluded that it seemed “unlikely that naïve listening will yield results similar to culturally informed listening.”
If we consider the complexity of centuries-old musical developments and “the cultural significance of musical phenomena,” claiming native-level access is arrogant. It’s ignorant and potentially offensive since it either implicates the superiority of the person’s musical intelligence or the shallowness and lack of substantial depth of the music that the person assumes total understanding over.
“Feeling it” or “vibing out to it” is a sensation other than native fluency. In my opinion and experience, it’s best to exercise cultural sensitivity and playful humility.
Is Music Cross-Cultural?
So it would seem that music is untranslatable yet readily appreciated. Music is a medium to interpret each other’s cultures, but not without mistranslations and exchanges for native ideas. For our faults, the native embellishments we add mark the beauty of cultural exchange.
Let’s not deafen ourselves to the clear metaphor: Music appreciation is cultural appreciation. We may not fully understand what we’re exposed to, but we can still derive pleasure from the new experiences.
The key is that music isn’t meant to be the same everywhere, it’s a cultivation of the same element of humanity, of the soul. Musical traditions are not cross-cultural, but the capacity for musical expression (or conversation) is. The openness for musical dialogue is widely impressed on the hearts and minds of musicians and humans everywhere. It remains an essential power to understand each other’s spirits.
Music, therefore, is an innate human function.
Music itself is universal, not its cultural expressions. But, since music is universal, we may appreciate and find ways to relate to each other’s cultural interpretations of musicality nonetheless.
Just like learning a language, with focused effort and the proper motivation, we can learn to communicate with one another. Even if we only learn a few phrases, it’s the mindfulness for others that bridges us all together. Music, then, is the medium by which we cross cultures.
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References
Patel, Aniruddh D. Music, Language, and the Brain. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. Pages 300 - 305.
