dorter

The European Legacy, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 163–172, 2004

The Fusion and Diffusion of Musical Traditions1

�� KENNETH DORTER ��

ABSTRACT The question whether the fusion of the musical traditions of different cultures is a good thing or not

is irrelevant in practical terms, since there is no realistic possibility of preventing it, but the advantages and

disadvantages that the process brings are worth considering nevertheless. The loss of diversity that results when one

tradition is overwhelmed by its contact with a more influential one is not redressed by the increased variety that

comes about within the dominant tradition, since the latter are variations within a tradition rather than traditions

of distinct origins. But the common denominator that allows different traditions to interact meaningfully with one

another points to the ability of music to bring us in touch with our common humanity.

I

Diffusion has a positive and negative side, both of which are evident when a fusion

takes place between different musical traditions. In that event each tradition increases its

extensiveness by becoming diffused (disseminated) throughout a larger territory, but

loses some of its intensity by becoming more diffuse (dissipated) as it is diluted with its

partner’s influence. If the traditions that are combined continued to retain their

independence and original intensity in peaceful coexistence with the new hybrid, and

the dissipation of their force were confined to the hybrid alone, there would be no

reason for concern. There would simply be three separate traditions, each with its own

distinctive characteristics, where there had been two. But the resulting hybrid tends to

absorb the contributing traditions rather than existing side-by-side with them—perhaps

not in the case of hybrid genres within Western music, like jazz and rock, but at least

in the case of different cultural traditions—so the positive and negative senses of

diffusion turn out to be inseparable. The extension into new territory is bought at the

price of a dilution of its indigenous character.

For that reason the accusation of “voice appropriation” levelled against dominant

cultures on behalf of minorities cannot be dismissed as merely the rhetoric of

victimization, for one of the dangers that it points to follows inevitably from the

inseparability of dissemination and dissipation in any cultural fusion. The usual grounds

on which the accusation is made, namely that use of another culture’s voice is

tantamount to the theft of the intellectual property of that culture, are problematic

because of the questionable nature of the concepts of intellectual property and cultural

membership;2 but there is legitimate reason for concern that once cultural boundaries

�•Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/04/020163-10 2004 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

DOI: 10.1080/10848770410001687585

164 �• KENNETH DORTER

are crossed some sort of fusion will eventually result, and if the hybrid that results from

fusion tends to absorb the original pure forms rather than coexisting alongside of them,

then the crossing of boundaries will eventually result in the overwhelming at least of the

smaller tradition, the way a tributary disappears into the mainstream of a river. In

addition to the moral question of whether harm is done by the emulation of other

traditions, there is a technical question of whether it is even possible for an outsider to

competently appropriate the voice of a different culture, or whether such an attempt

will never completely be able to plumb the depths of the art form, for it may be that

each tradition grows out of a distinctive kind of experience that is accessible only to

members of that culture. For both reasons the critics of “voice appropriation” are not

unreasonable to worry whether the advantages gained from the novelty and variety

made possible by assimilating further traditions are purchased at too high a price.

II

Once advances in the technologies of travel and communication brought different

cultures into permanently close contact, it became inevitable that the mouths of one

culture would try to speak in the voice of another, even if they are not entirely able

to avoid speaking (and hearing) it with their own native accent. As the hermeneutical

tradition deriving from Heidegger and Gadamer documents, every act of understanding,

and therefore communication, is an interpretation, and interpretation never takes place

in a vacuum but only within our horizon of understanding. We can understand

something only to the extent that we can relate it to our previous experiences, cultural

paradigms, and concepts (including language). There is never such a thing as pure or

neutral receptivity.3

Our horizon of understanding comprises both our group historical heritage—such

as cultural traditions and conventions, and the language that we think in—and the

personal experiences, upbringing, and inculcation that shape our individual conscious-

ness. Something can become meaningful to us only within our horizon, since it is the

elements of our horizon that confer meaning. Otherwise we perceive music of another

culture as gibberish, barely distinguishable from noise, as Hector Berlioz did when he

said that “The Chinese sing like dogs howling, like a cat screeching when it has

swallowed a toad.”4 Gadamer’s analysis is ultimately an extension of Kant’s claim that

we perceive the world only by translating a thing-in-itself, which is neither spatial nor

temporal, into the spatio-temporal terms by which our perception operates. The

spatio-temporality that we impose on things operates both as the parameter that makes

perception possible, and also as a constraint that prevents us from perceiving things as

they are in themselves, that is, neither spatial nor temporal; even if someone could show

us a thing-in-itself, we would be incapable of perceiving it. Gadamer extends this claim

to culture: there is not only a spatio-temporal horizon within which and because of

which meaning becomes possible; there are also cultural and even personal horizons that

render meaningful whatever can be assimilated to them and leave meaningless what can

not.

When we listen to music of our own culture, it is automatically going to be

meaningful to us because by definition it takes place within our horizon of intelligibil-

ity. Here “culture” means our immediate milieu, our “subculture,” rather than the

Fusion and Diffusion of Musical Traditions �• 165

culture as a whole: even if there is such a thing as North American culture, the

subculture that listens to avant garde classical music is not the same as the one that listens

to country music, although individuals may be members of both groups. The point is

that the music that sounds most meaningful to us does so because it shares in our basic

cultural values, while the music of a completely alien culture, on the other hand, will

on first encounter be incomprehensible because it does not match any of our parameters

of understanding. If, after repeated listenings what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons”

takes place, and our horizon of understanding begins to penetrate that within which the

work was written (we will consider later how that is possible), we may begin to

appreciate the music on its own terms; but we can never discard our own horizon to

hear the music as if we did not begin as outsiders.

We can understand the intractability of the problem in more familiar terms if we

substitute historically separated cultures for geographically separated ones. Leopold

Stokowski transcribed Bach for the modern orchestra in the belief that if we are to

appreciate Bach today we must listen to him in our own musical milieu. Critics replied

that rather than making Bach more accessible Stokowski had buried him under layers

of nineteenth century fat. There is truth on both sides. Anyone who knows Bach only

through Stokowski’s transcriptions knows him only in a limited way, but on the other

hand many people came to know and appreciate Bach through such transcriptions who

would not otherwise have done so at all. Stokowski may have done more than anyone

else to bring Baroque music, and by extension all early music, to the astonishing

popularity it now enjoys (hence the otherwise surprising admiration that the young

ascetic Glenn Gould had for the aging Stokowski and his voluptuous arrangements). But

Stokowski’s critics were right too, and as Baroque music became more popular we

threw away our crutches: performance practices more and more sought to emulate

those of the Baroque period. The same controversy still exists, but now at the opposite

end of the spectrum. On one hand the insistence by proponents of period instruments

that authentic performing practices are the only way to hear the music as it was meant

to be heard, has become so influential that the pianist Stephen Kovacevich complains

that “there seems to be an idea that if you use a modern Steinway [for Beethoven]

you’re a Fascist and want to close all the hospitals.”5 On the other hand period

instruments and practices sound “different” to our ears, a deliberate effort to recapture

the past, whereas in their own day they were heard as state of the art and normal. It

is impossible for all but the specialists among us to hear period instruments in the natural

and innocent way they were heard in their own day; only when we listen to Baroque

music anachronistically on the modern instruments that we take for granted do we hear

it with the same unselfconsciousness that Baroque audiences felt for their own

instruments and practices.

There are gains and losses both ways. The fact that we can understand the product

of an alien culture through a fusion of horizons is, on the one hand, what makes

cross-cultural understanding possible, while on the other hand it is also what makes full

understanding impossible. As we can see in the above example, something always has

to be sacrificed from one horizon or the other, in this case either authenticity of sound

or unselfconscious familiarity. We can never be of the culture in the same way as those

who were born into it, and we have no way of knowing how accurately our period

performances correspond to what was actually done. We know how the instruments


sound, but in the absence of an unbroken tradition of performance we can only guess

at some performance practices that were once taken for granted, such as tempo,

dynamics, vibrato, use of continuo instruments, and in general the intangibles of style.

In any case, we can never fully recapture an earlier period’s sense of adventure when

we play their music—their consciousness of pushing art into an uncharted future.

When we turn to the problem of appreciating the music of a different contemporary

culture, at least we know what performances sound like, but we can no more be of that

culture in the way the people are who are born into it, than we can be of Baroque

culture—except perhaps if we make it our home for an extended period, as writers like

Pearl Buck did in China or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in India. In that case we can greatly

diminish the distorting effects of our own horizon on the horizon that we enter into,

but we can never entirely eradicate them as long as some vestiges of our formation by

a different culture remain.

III

One of the main advantages of eclecticism is that it builds bridges between

traditions. The fusion of horizons is a bridge, and becoming familiar with an alien music

gives us experiential access to its horizon. But bridges also have disadvantages. When a

bridge is planned for an island the islanders complain that they will be overrun by

people from the mainland. As soon as people from dominant cultures cross the bridge

to indigenous cultures they create change, often without knowing or intending it. The

indigenous people become increasingly dependent on commerce with the West and

begin to tailor their art to the tastes of the West. Traditional art forms are gradually

transformed into Westernized styles. Not only do cultures that once found Western

music incomprehensible6 now embrace it, but it is what now sounds normal and

familiar to them while their traditional music sounds alien and alienating. It now needs

no more apology for a Japanese conductor to conduct Beethoven’s symphonies than it

did for an Italian like Toscanini—or, for that matter, than for an Austrian or German.

In fact the Japanese and Koreans are so much more thoroughly educated in Western

classical music than North Americans are, that for the generation after Seiji Ozawa’s,7

Western classical music may have become more a part of their cultural horizon than it

is of North America’s with its European heritage. Since North American schools do not

usually educate their students in classical music, North Americans commonly grow up

thinking of it as a European elitist tradition that is alien to their own culture.

As we saw in Section I, since the hybrid that results from a fusion of cultural

traditions often lives at the expense of its parents, our appreciative imitation of other

cultures may be the kiss of death. As the West becomes the arbiter of local tastes

however unintentionally, the indigenous people lose faith in art that the West shows no

regard for, and embrace Western styles of art instead. Countries like China, Japan, and

Korea make a determined effort to preserve their musical traditions—China actively

promotes the Peking Opera, Korea maintains a radio station that plays nothing but

traditional music, and in Japan, as in the other two, students receive some education in

their traditional music in school—but these efforts do little or nothing to stem the tide

of Westernization. In Japan and Korea students learn far more about Western music

than about their own traditions,8 and in China, despite attempts to insulate that society


from Western culture since the Communist regime came to power in 1949, not only

the popular songs but even the political songs that children learn are Western in style,

using Western melodies, harmony, and instruments. In all these countries, although

traditional music is officially promoted and encouraged, it is all but ignored in practice.

However much the indigenous musical traditions of Korea and Japan, for example, may

be officially protected and promoted by their government, and however much they

may even benefit from periodic revivals, after the demise of the traditional culture that

the music originally expressed, such efforts have come to have something of the

museum about them. The situation in India is somewhat better, but there too the status

of traditional music is gradually being eroded by the influence of Western styles,

especially in the area of popular music (as in China, Western classical music has

comparatively little influence). Traditional Indian music is still held in esteem, but is no

longer as pervasive as it once was.

The trajectory of history is one of decreasing diversity, whether in species of plants

and animals, or species of cultures and languages. Once a dominant culture makes its

presence felt to susceptible cultures it will inevitably dislocate the indigenous music that

it takes an interest in, and doom to marginality that which it neglects. This is not,

however, an argument against multiculturalism. The only alternatives to multicultural-

ism are the intolerance of cultural imperialism, which would hardly be an improvement,

or cultural isolationism, which is no longer a serious possibility. What I want to point

out is that although multicultural toleration and bridge-building arises from respect

rather than from the contempt of colonialism, it too cannot help but dislocate what it

visits. It is unavoidably alien to the cultures it appreciates, and its otherness tends to

become the paradigm by which indigenous cultures judge themselves and realign their

practices. The downside of our appreciative openness to other cultures is the danger of

a homogenizing eclecticism that risks destroying real diversity. It is disconcerting to

think that diversity is disappearing even as (and even because) we embrace it—in a

cultural analogue of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle our attention modifies what we

are attentive to.

On the other hand, one compensation for our excessive influence on indigenous

cultures is that not only do they adapt to our values, but we are influenced by their

values and expand our horizon by enriching our music with theirs. The kind of

incomprehension expressed by Berlioz toward Chinese music apparently began to

change around the 1890s, according to John Dewey’s remark that from that time on,

“the influence of the arts of different cultures has entered intrinsically into artistic

creation.”9 A century later we found ourselves in an eclectic multicultural world where

not only were some of our greatest musicians Asian, including prominent conductors,

but at the same time the selection of international music in Western record stores was

constantly growing. Indigenous music that may cease to exist in its autonomy is

perpetuated as an influence within the constantly developing music of the dominant

world culture.

Is there any reason to believe that this sacrifice of diversity in favor of a globally

eclectic music is a good thing? There is no danger of a complete absence of diversity,

for not only will differing tastes always guarantee differing musical forms, but also the

volatility of modern cultures and the individuality of genius will always lead to perpetual

novelty and variety. New forms of music constantly arise out of old ones, whether by


internal evolution or by fusion with other genres. Western music, enriched by other

traditions, is already divided into classical, jazz, folk, pop, rock, country, Caribbean, and

Latin, among others, and each of these species continues to cross over into different

combinations or subdivide into additional schisms. Nevertheless this kind of variety is

no more equivalent to the diversity that is lost through the gradual synthesis of

independent traditions into a world music, than the schisms within the Christian church

replace the kind of diversity of traditions that was lost when the indigenous religious

beliefs and practices that flourished in their native cultures were obliterated by

missionaries. The difference is that in both cases the modern variety of genres tends to

be comprised of different shoots branching out from the same root—sometimes with

the help of cross-pollination and grafts from other species—whereas traditional diversity

grew from entirely different roots and in very different soils. Every nation, and before

that every local culture and tribal group, expressed a distinctive way of being in the

world. Their customs, their language and dialect, and their art were all distinctive, as

parallel expressions of their character—the Volksgeist that Herder and Hegel described.

The richness of variety within a single tradition can never replace the loss of that kind

of diversity. But there is nothing new about that kind of loss since it already began

when the smallest social units combined into larger ones. What is new is only that for

the first time a conceivable end, a single world culture, appears to be in sight.

IV

If the only benefit of bridge-building were the preservation of indigenous

traditions as influences within the dominant tradition that simultaneously marginalizes

them, then the price we pay for bridge-building could hardly be justified by its benefits.

We might have to bow to historical inevitability but we could not bow with gratitude.

However there is more to it than that. Dewey clearly recognized the value of music in

effecting a merging of our horizons with that of other cultures:

at their best they bring about an organic blending of attitudes characteristic of the

experience of our own age with that of remote peoples. … Barriers are dissolved,

limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian

art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by

reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude. … The power of music in particular

to merge different individualities in a common surrender, loyalty and inspiration, a

power utilized in religion and in warfare alike, testifies to the relative universality of

the language of art.10

How does this come about? It is not clear how it is possible for a fusion of horizons

to occur in an abstract art like music. In the case of literature the explanation is fairly

straightforward. When we read an author who lived in a different world from ours, like

Shakespeare, the fusion of horizons that enables us to understand his plays and poems

can occur because we know the meanings of the words he uses. The meanings

conveyed by the words develop a context—both implicitly and by explicit descrip-

tions—from which we can infer an approximation of his world, and the evoked world

in turn enhances our sensitivity to his words. There is a reciprocal influence between

the parts and the whole—the words and the world—made possible by, but also limited


by, the pre-existing meanings that we bring to the reading from our own world. These

meanings are the medium that enables us to bring our horizon into contact with that

of the author. But since music has no precise meanings, what is the medium that enables

us to appreciate music from another culture? It is obvious that repeated listenings would

make a foreign tradition more familiar, but it is not obvious why they would also make

it more intelligible. Something may sound increasingly familiar and yet continue to be

meaningless: we may listen often enough to people speaking a foreign language that the

sound of the language becomes familiar, without our having any more idea what the

words mean than we did at the beginning.

The reason that our experience of music from another culture can lead to an

understanding of it, even though its elements are not definable in the way that those

of literature are, has to do with the way in which music too functions as a kind of

language. The view of music as a language of the emotions is as old as thinking about

music generally—Plato takes it as the received view, and in China the roughly

contemporaneous Confucian classic, the Record of Music, takes it for granted as well.11

It is reasonable to call music a language of the emotions as long as we interpret

“language” in a sufficiently broad manner: music is a language if language need not have

fixed meanings and is only a medium for communicating inner states however

imprecisely.

We come to appreciate music of other cultures in either of the two ways that we

learn verbal languages: by immersion or by translation. To learn it by immersion is to

learn it as we learned our mother tongue, by experientially associating sounds with

meanings—this can range from nothing more than repeated listenings to actually living

within the new culture. To learn it by translation is to learn it the way we often learn

second languages, by having someone explain to us in our own language how the

grammar works and what the words mean. That is what happens when we acquaint

ourselves with a new kind of music not only by listening to it, but by studying its

theoretical basis and functions. Both these ways of learning alien music must occur

within our pre-existing horizon of meaning, however, and so our understanding and

appreciation of it will never be as uncomplicated as in the case of people whose cultural

horizon already forms the basis for it. To understand something through a fusion of

horizons is not the same as to understand it through the original horizon alone, as we

do with our own music. We will never understand the music of another culture quite

as innocently as people understand the music of their own culture.

Just as verbal languages are most effectively learned not through abstract concepts

but by experiential assimilation, musical language can best be learned by a comparable

process of gradual acclimatization and assimilation (the century and a half since Berlioz

has made all the difference in our acclimatization to music of other cultures). The fact

that we actually can learn to appreciate the music of other cultures directly through

immersion, and not just through conceptual explanations, means that music must

express our inner life according to principles that are constant from one culture to

another, however dissimilar the elements may be by which those principles are

expressed. Moreover the inner life itself must be constant from one culture to another

in some fundamental way, however much it may manifest itself according to different

conventions. When we observe people speaking languages that we do not understand,

we can nevertheless detect emotional signals in the speaker’s changes of manner. Most


obviously, rising pitch and accelerating tempo are signs of excitement, increased volume

a sign of anger, hesitation a sign of uncertainty, slow tempo and low volume a sign of

self-containment. These descriptions are only generally accurate because we make

subtler distinctions within those broad categories to distinguish, say, the self-contain-

ment of sadness from that of thoughtfulness, anger from enthusiasm, or exuberance

from panic. We cannot give conceptually adequate descriptions of all the cues we use

to read the subtle distinctions of emotion in a speaker’s manner, even where they do

not overlap, because they are experiential rather than conceptual. But we are able to

recognize them experientially because they show themselves in similar ways across

different cultures. That is not surprising since the manner of speaking reflects physio-

logical changes attendant on various emotional states, and is therefore rooted in our

common biology. Emotions that are conducive to action (anger, enthusiasm) are

connected with a speeding up of our nervous system, while emotions that conduce to

inaction (sadness, calmness) are connected with a slowing down. The change of manner

when we speak is the middle term between the emotions felt, and the music that is said

to be their language: the affective character of music draws its signals from that of

speech—fast music sounds exciting, slow music calm or sad, and so on.12 These signals

may be better able to reflect the subtle variations of emotional manner than verbal

description can, but they are still too general to capture the finer nuances of emotion,

and even Plato is not optimistic about our ability to grasp the full meaning of music

without words.13 Despite these limitations, what they capture of our cross-cultural

emotional cues is sufficient to account for our ability to empathize with an alien

culture’s music after repeated hearings. They give us a baseline sense of the language

from which we can read the affective modifications.

What is involved here is more than the two cultural horizons between which the

fusion takes place. That fusion is possible only because all cultures share certain constants

between physiology and speech inflections on the one hand, and speech inflections and

music on the other, so the possibility of fusion rests on the existence of something

universal to all cultures. Belief in the existence of a universal dimension in musical

experience does not require belief in an existence of universal a priori principles that we

all bring to bear, as is sometimes supposed,14 for (as philosophers of art from Kant to

Langer have emphasized) aesthetic thinking is based on symbol rather than concept.

Nevertheless the claim that music is capable of conveying something that is both

significant and universal in any sense is a controversial one. In an influential article Dane

Harwood identified five perceptual universals in music: a dual mechanism for pitch

perception, pitch “stretching” in octave generalization, “chunking” of tonal infor-

mation into pitch scales, perceptual “fission” of a melodic line as multiple lines if there

are large intervals between tones, “chunking” of notes into melodic contours.15

Harwood points out that although these perceptual constants cut across cultures, they

combine with specific cultural factors in the actual experience of music, and he does not

believe that any meaningful universality obtains at this cultural level. His research has

been taken one step further, however, by Unyk, Trehub, Trainor, and Schellenberg in

their study of lullabies, and their results support the claim that something universal can

be communicated through music. They note that “infants have had relatively limited

exposure to the musical style of their culture and are therefore unlikely to perceive

musical structures in culture-specific ways. … [T]hey would be better served by music


emphasising universal features and de-emphasising culture-specific features.”16 The

authors’ experiments involved the ability of adults to recognize lullabies cross-culturally,

and they conclude that their “findings imply that listeners have some notion, necessarily

culture free, about what a lullaby should sound like or what features it should

embody.”17

This kind of evidence, limited as it is, may be as much objective confirmation as

we can hope for when what is sought is based on symbolic rather than conceptual

thinking. The more influential kind of evidence, even if it is not objectively

quantifiable, is our inner experience. There will be little reason for us to doubt that

something universal underlies all musical experience if, when we listen to the music of

other cultures, we discover that once we have gotten past its initial strangeness it speaks

to us somehow across cultural boundaries. We will never be able to reduce the cultural

difference to zero but, as the cross-cultural achievements of musicians attests, we can

enter into it with genuine understanding and success.

The ability of music to enable us to understand in the most intimate way the minds

of other cultures means that the loss of diversity, as different cultures imitate or absorb

one another’s music, is balanced by a gain in our appreciation of our common

humanity, and the same forces that lead to the sacrifice of distinctiveness make possible

a growth in mutual understanding and tolerance. The possibility of increased global

understanding may be our compensation for the relentless and inevitable decline of

aesthetic diversity.

NOTES

1. This paper is based on ideas first presented at the 25th Annual Richard Baker University ofDayton Philosophy Colloquium, October 1997. I am grateful to Ajay Heble, Joel Rudi-now, and Howard Spring for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.

2. For detailed discussions of this issue see Joel Rudinow, “Race, Ethnicity, ExpressiveAuthenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(1994): 127–37; James O. Young, “Should White Men Play the Blues?” Journal of ValueInquiry 28 (1994): 415–24; James O. Young, “Against Aesthetic Apartheid,” Rendezvous 30(1997): 67–77; both Rudinow and Young claim that race is no barrier to being able to givea legitimate performance of the blues. Rudinow’s claims are rejected by Paul Taylor, “… SoBlack and Blue: A Response to Rudinow,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995):313–6, and defended by Rudinow, “Reply to Taylor,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism53 (1995): 316–7.

3. Even the supposedly direct communication of mystical experience always takes formaccording to our pre-existing categories. We never hear of devout Hindus or Buddhists,untouched by Western culture, receiving visitations from Jesus or Mary, and when Jesus orMary visit a Westerner they look European, not Middle Eastern.

4. See Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972; orig. 1893), 17.5. “A Return to the Classics,” Gramophone 70(833) (October, 1992): 12.6. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 4.7. In an interview around 1980 Seiji Ozawa, the most successful of the first generation of Asian

conductors of Western music—but who grew up before Japan had assimilated Westernmusic to the present extent—acknowledged that he sometimes wondered whether Westernconductors might not have a special access to Western music that was not available to him.

8. A Japanese friend tells me that in Japan the mix is something like 90% Western and 10%traditional. Even half a century ago the gagaku Japanese imperial court musicians had “rigidtraining since childhood, not only in the Gagaku dances and instrumental techniques, but


also in the performance of Western music of the Classical period. In their capacity as officialcourt musicians, they are required to perform both Gagaku and Western music.” See R.Garfias, Gagaku, The Music and Dances of the Japanese Household (New York: Theatre ArtsBooks, 1959), cited (without page number) in John Baily, “Commentary on RobertWalker,” Psychology of Music 24 (1996): 114–7, 116.

9. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1958, orig. 1934), ch. 14, 333.10. Ibid., 334–5.11. See Plato, Laws 668b–c, and the Chinese Record of Music 1.4 and 3.2: “When the feelings

are moved within, they are manifested in the sounds of the voice; and when these soundsare combined so as to form compositions, we have what are called airs.” “To go to the veryroot (of our feelings) and know the changes (which they undergo) is the province ofmusic.” Yo Ki or Record of Music (The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 28, Delhi: MotilalBanarsidass, 1964), 93 and 114, parenthetic material in original.

12. Thus Plato regards music as directly imitating not so much the emotions themselves but thespeech patterns that accompany them (Republic 399a–400d). Cf. the first quotation from theRecord of Music in the previous note.

13. Laws 669e.14. This charge is made, for example, by Robert Walker in “Can We Understand the Music

of Another Culture?” Psychology of Music 24 (1996): 103–14, 108. His conclusion, that“There is no empirical evidence … that humans are pre-determined towards any particularbehaviours in cultural activities such as music,” and that therefore “Understanding the musicof another culture requires assimilation of the influences affecting musical behaviour asmuch as of the resultant musical products” (113), means that the ethnological study ofcultural influences is a necessary condition for understanding such music. But he appears toundercut his own position when he writes, “There may be some generic principles to thesocially based mechanics of discourse and interactions, but … [they] must bear somerelationship to the content which is possible given the various cultural conditions” (112). AsJohn Baily (“Commentary on Robert Walker,” 114) and Neil Sorrell [“Commentary onRobert Walker,” Psychology of Music 24 (1996): 124–5, 114] point out, there is afundamental ambiguity in Walker’s use of the term “understand.”

15. Dane Harwood, “Universals in Music,” Ethnomusicology 20 (1976): 521–33; 525–7.16. Anna Unyk, Sandra Trehub, Laurel Trainor and E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Lullabies and

Simplicity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Psychology of Music 20 (1992): 15–28; 15. GaryTomlinson appears to admit an underlying unity of human experience when he says thatunderstanding the music of other cultures would result in “a fuller understanding of thehumanity we embody” (362). But in that case he greatly overstates the case when he writes,“The presentist view of art works as transcendent entities fully comprehensible withoutreference to the conditions of their creation … [results in] a solipsistic and ultimatelynarcissistic aestheticism” (358), and that it would “reduce all past musical processes topurveyors of the meanings dear to our own culture” (362). If there is a common humanexperience underlying cultural differences, then the music itself will teach us something ofthe culture from which it comes, even if not the same kind of things as the historicalapproach that Tomlinson advocates. See Gary Tomlinson, “The Web of Culture: AContext for Musicology,” 19th Century Music 7 (1984): 350–62.

17. Ibid., 17.

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