Music and the Mind. Anthony Storr
communication with other human beings which is prior to the need for conveying objective information or exchanging ideas.
Ethnomusicologists generally emphasize the collective importance of music in the cultures they study. There are a number of cultures which, like that of ancient Greece, do not distinguish music as a separate activity from those which it invariably accompanies. Singing, dancing, the recitation of poetry, and religious chant are so inseparably linked with music that there is no word for music as such. Indeed, it may be difficult for the observer to determine whether a particular activity includes music or does not. Ceremonial speech may, as in the case of Greek poetry, include rhythmic and melodic patterns which are so much part of it that words and music cannot really be differentiated.
The origins of music may be lost in obscurity but, from its earliest beginnings, it seems to have played an essential part in social interaction. Music habitually accompanies religious and other ceremonies. Some anthropologists have speculated that vocal music may have begun as a special way of communicating with the supernatural; a way which shared many of the features of ordinary speech, but which was also distinctive.29
Stravinsky would have agreed with this suggestion. In his Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1939–40 he unequivocally affirms that ‘the profound meaning of music and its essential aim … is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow man and with the Supreme Being.’30
In pre-literate societies the arts are usually intimately connected with rituals and ceremonies which are dissociated from the routines of ordinary day-to-day living. As Ellen Dissanayake has cogently observed, the arts are concerned with ‘making special’; that is, with underlining and rendering ritualized forms of behaviour.31 In ritual, words are used metaphorically and symbolically and often reunited with music, which still further charges them with meaning. Raymond Firth, the anthropologist who wrote with such insight about Tikopia and other Pacific communities, states
Even songs, as a rule, are not composed simply to be listened to for pleasure. They have work to do, to serve as funeral dirges, as accompaniments to dancing, or to serenade a lover.32
Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays an important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest – in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be produced when
twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.33
This description disposes of the notion that the music of rural African societies is less developed or less complex than our own: it is simply different. Tshikona is highly valued. It raises the spirits of everyone who participates. Blacking thinks this is because its performance generates the highest degree of individuality in the largest possible community; a combination of opposites rarely achieved. Playing in a modern Western orchestra or singing in a large choir may be enjoyable and uplifting, but neither activity provides much scope for individuality.
Music contributes both to the continuity and the stability of a culture whether pre-literate or not. That ardent collector of folksongs, Béla Bartók, deploring the changes brought about by the First World War and realizing that the type of music produced by a particular culture is inseparable from the nature of that culture, wrote:
I had the great privilege to be a close observer of an as yet homogeneous, but unfortunately rapidly disappearing social structure, expressing itself in music.34
The triumph of the West and the case of modern communication have caused the disappearance of different musics, as they have also diminished the number of spoken languages.
John A. Sloboda, a psychologist at the University of Keele, argues that pre-literate cultures may have even more need of music than our own.
Society requires organization for its survival. In our own society we have many complex artefacts which help us to externalize and objectify the organizations we need and value. Primitive cultures have few artefacts, and the organization of the society must be expressed to a greater extent through transient actions and the way people interact with each other. Music, perhaps, provides a unique mnemonic framework within which humans can express, by the temporal organization of sound and gesture, the structure of their knowledge and of social relations. Songs and rhythmically organized poems and sayings form the major repository of knowledge in non-literate cultures. This seems to be because such organized sequences are much easier to remember than the type of prose which literate societies use in books.35
Johann Gottfried Herder, supposedly the father of European nationalism, had made a similar observation in the eighteenth century.
All unpolished peoples sing and act; they sing about what they do and thus sing histories. Their songs are the archives of their people, the treasury of their science and religion.36
The music of the Australian aboriginals remained free from outside influences, and unknown to the West, until the arrival of the British two centuries ago.
Since all their knowledge, beliefs, and customs, upon whose strict preservation through exact ritual observance the constant renewal of nature (and hence their own survival) was held to depend, were enshrined in and transmitted by their sacred song-cycles, it is reasonable to think that theirs is the oldest extant, still practised music in the world. Since they had no form of writing or notation, oral tradition was the only means of retaining and inculcating their lore, and music therefore provided the essential mnemonic medium. As such it was invested with the utmost power, secrecy, and value.37
Bruce Chatwin, in his fascinating book The Songlines, demonstrates how songs served to divide up the land, and constituted title-deeds to territory. Each totemic ancestor was believed to have sung as he walked and to have defined the features of the landscape in so doing. Song was the means by which the different aspects of the world were brought into consciousness, and therefore remembered. As Chatwin observed, aboriginals used songs in the same way as birds to affirm territorial boundaries. Each individual inherited some verses of the Ancestor’s song, which also determined the limits of a particular area. The contour of the melody of the song described the contour of the land with which it was associated. As Chatwin’s informant told him: ‘Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.’38
When the tribe met to sing their own song-cycle on ritual occasions, song-owners had to sing their particular verses in the right order. Songs also transcended language barriers and constituted a means of communication between individuals who could not communicate in other ways.
When a culture is under threat, music may become even more significant. Bruno Nettl, Professor of Musicology and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, discussing the music of the Flathead Indians, suggests that
the uses of music in Flathead culture are mainly to accompany other activities, perhaps in order to validate them as done in a properly Flathead fashion … Music supports tribal integrity when many peoples, whites and other Indian tribes, because of the onset of modernization and Westernization, come into a position of influencing the Flathead.39
E. O. Wilson, the Harvard socio-biologist, writes that, in primitive cultures,
Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action.40
One joint action for which sounds produced by musical instruments may help to prepare people is that of warfare. Attacks upon enemies are often initiated by blowing horns and trumpets which both arouses the aggressiveness of the attackers and is supposed to terrify the enemy.
The Muras and other tribes of the Orinoco region performed wild overtures