"Universalism" and "Imperialism" - how does Music "spread"?

[MrGongGong]

Edit: I've moved some posts from the "Music in Schools" Thread as requested, as it was felt that these created a separate and important discussion in its own right. I apologise for the somewhat clumsy title (which I'll adjust when a more inspirational one occurs to me or is suggested) - and to MrGG: the Forum buttons don't allow for me to move posts from one Thread to start a new one without preserving the Forumista's name on the first chosen post as "Thread Originator" on the records - even when they had no idea they were doing so!

The reference to "a small Japanese village in Japan in the 1950s is a hangover from the source Thread, and need not necessarily focus Forumistas' replies on this one. There's probably a much easier way of doing all this, but I'm blessed if I can figure it out! )

Do you think that music is "universal" in it's ability to connect with people?
and if so, which musics ?
What was what Murray Schafer and others would call the "acoustic ecology" of a small village in Japan in the 1950's ?
What other musics were familiar / unfamiliar and how was the unfamiliar introduced?

[doversoul1]

This is terribly personal and does go on, so please don’t bother to read it if you are not prepared to put up with it.

Do you think that music is "universal" in it's ability to connect with people?
and if so, which musics ?

I think music is culture specific. Some music does go beyond the original culture but when this happens, the music is often appreciated as an abstract art. This in itself is not a bad thing but I don’t think the music is said to be shared between the original and the new listeners.

On the other hand, the way in which Western music of almost any kind (let’s say post 1700 ) has become so ubiquitous that it tempts us to say Yes. From the CD jackets of his Bach ‘s cantata series, Sir JEG clearly believes, or likes to have people believe that Music (Bach at least) is Universal. I don’t think the same effect could be excepted if a CD of Noh theatre music had a picture of a blond girl holding a daisy chain. Has anyone ever tried to explain why Western music seems to have far greater ability to appeal to people beyongdits original premises?

What was what Murray Schafer and others would call the "acoustic ecology" of a small village in Japan in the 1950's ?

In the mid-19th century, Japan imported school education, theory and system, from West (mixture of British and American) which included music as an elementally subject. The government set out to create a corpus of songs composed on Western scale to be taught at school. Here are some examples (the instrumental arrangement sounds modern but you’ll get the idea)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPdSbZbvPxY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djNC73V-X0c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IHdXlL569A

These and many more were the stable diet for all children and these songs have become part of the nation’s culture in the similar way as Nursery Rhymes are (used to be) here. Back in the 1950s, even a small village school had a music room with a piano but I don’t remember listening to classical music. I did some at home but for most children, music meant songs both those school songs and popular songs they heard on the radio. But we learned to read music (very basic). At secondary school (12-15), music at school included listening to classical music, history of western music, and some basic music theories. Many children in cities were by then learning the piano or violin. In villages, though music making at home as such was not part of people’s life. On the Jazz in Japan programme, the presenter happily told us that Jazz swept the post-war Japan like a wildfire but that is only if you lived in a city (and if you were 'that sort'). Popular songs back then were like these (television had arrived by the early1960):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3lgQ0stg-E&list=PL8797A61004DF1310

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAYCgC3Ypxw

What other musics were familiar / unfamiliar and how was the unfamiliar introduced?

I can’t remember how I first came across American pop songs but I must have heard them on the radio. I never liked those Japanese popular songs and the early1960’s American popular songs sounded perfectly natural to me. Then I came across the sound of Big Band: Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others and wondered what it was that made this music sounded different from Be My Baby and Blue Velvet. By then I was at school in the town and had made friend with the manager at a record shop where I spent long hours waiting for (missing) the bus to go home. He didn’t talk much but played me any record I asked for and often suggested ‘you may also like’. I think I worked out Jazz as a ‘genre’ by reading the catalogues and leaflets I picked up in the shop. I was too busy learning the music that was new to me to think about classical music other than what I heard at school.

Whist at a glance, Japan is steeped in Western music both popular and classical, I think this is really a small minority that is for some reason much more vocal than the rest of the population who don’t ever listen to anything western. I don’t think they’ll find anything in Bach to ‘connect with’.

[Richard Barrett]

Has anyone ever tried to explain why Western music seems to have far greater ability to appeal to people beyond its original premises?

Imperialism of course - same reason why people in Japan and almost everywhere else wear Western clothes, use the Western calendar and so on. I don't think there's anything inherent to Western music that gives it greater appeal except that through the historical, geographical and colonial position of Europe it's been capable (as your examples show) of assimilating features of any other kind of musical style into itself in a way that Noh theatre music isn't (although the formative period of Noh was contemporary with for example Guillaume de Machaut whose music isn't internationally popular of course!).

[vinteuil]

Whist at a glance, Japan is steeped in Western music both popular and classical, I think this is really a small minority that is for some reason much more vocal than the rest of the population who don’t ever listen to anything western. I don’t think they’ll find anything in Bach to ‘connect with’.

... thank you, doversoul, for these insights : very helpful for those of us who really have no idea about present-day Japan.

I see that wiki reports that only 1% of Japanese identify as Christians. I wonder if the fact that Masaaki Suzuki, a protestant, is so closely identified by many of us in the West as 'Japanese Bach Classical Music Authority' gives actually a totally skewed feeling about Japanese relations with western classical music?

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[vinteuil]

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Has anyone ever tried to explain why Western music seems to have far greater ability to appeal to people beyond its original premises?’.

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Imperialism of course ...

... the easy and obvious answer, and of course I agree.

But perhaps also the fact that the west devised musical notation early on - and also music printing - providing the foundation and armature for a whole world of music to be built up over time in a way unavailable to musics that relied on tradition, leading inevitably to a wider-ranging stock of 'music' to be sampled and appreciated...


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[Richard Barrett]

I see that wiki reports that only 1% of Japanese identify as Christians. I wonder if the fact that Masaaki Suzuki, a protestant, is so closely identified by many of us in the West as 'Japanese Bach Classical Music Authority' gives actually a totally skewed feeling about Japanese relations with western classical music?

Of course very many Japanese classical musicians (and composers) leave Japan to study in the West, as did Suzuki, and a considerable number stay on. I haven't spent much time in Japan (and none outside urban centres, which makes doversoul1's account even more fascinating) but I had the impression that Western classical music has less of a presence there than it does say in the UK. Mind you I didn't see that much evidence of Japanese classical music either.

[MrGongGong]

This is terribly personal and does go on, so please don’t bother to read it if you are not prepared to put up with it.

Fantastic and many thanks
I was aware of some of this but very useful and interesting all the same

[doversoul1]

Imperialism of course - same reason why people in Japan and almost everywhere else wear Western clothes, use the Western calendar and so on. I don't think there's anything inherent to Western music that gives it greater appeal except that through the historical, geographical and colonial position of Europe it's been capable (as your examples show) of assimilating features of any other kind of musical style into itself in a way that Noh theatre music isn't (although the formative period of Noh was contemporary with for example Guillaume de Machaut whose music isn't internationally popular of course!).

If you mean by this that all these Western cultures were imposed upon Japan, you are absolutely, completely, totally WRONG (nothing personal ). Calendar and time may have been formalised by the authority in the early days of westernisation but there was no resistance whatsoever. As for the post-war trend of Western culture, it was entirely the People’s Choice. Of course not everyone ‘embraced’ American music but that was simply the matter of taste and no one was forced into either way.

I know you don’t approve of ‘national psyche’ but the essence of Japanese culture has been importing and adapting since the time when the first texts on Buddhism were given to the emperor by the emperor of China back in 6th century when Japan didn't even have a writing system and the concept of reading hardly existed. Japan has never been colonised. All Western music, art, clothes etc. have stayed because people have chosen to keep them.

All besides, you couldn’t possibly say that The Beatles were imposed upon all those young people round the globe?

I had the impression that Western classical music has less of a presence there than it does say in the UK. Mind you I didn't see that much evidence of Japanese classical music either.

Yes, Western classical music is, although almost everybody knows about it, almost a speciality. As for Japanese classical music, ask Mr GG

That aside, Japanese classical music is not talked about as any kind of a counterpart of Western classical music: they exist in parallel worlds, if you like and as much as maybe even more a speciality than classical music. The word that is generally used to talk about music ongaku 音楽 is a neologism created when Western music first came in. Prior to this, I don’t think there was a word that coverd all ‘music’: each genre (type if you prefer) had its own name

[Richard Barrett]

If you mean by this that all these Western cultures were imposed upon Japan

No I didn't of course mean to suggest any such thing. "Soft power" doesn't work like that!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

As I mentioned, I think that this is a fascinating subject. Is it not important to bear in mind that the dominance of "Western Music" also affected Western Musics that weren't part of the mainstream "Classical" traditions? The ubiquity of the equal-tempered chromatic scale from the 18th Century onwards - and the 19th Century spread in popularity of cheap(er) pianos and harmoniums had as suppressing effect on the "folk" Music traditions of Europe as it had on those of countries ruled by the European powers? (Pabs' book on Butterworth includes a section on how older non-professional Musicians in England were dismayed that their children and grandchildren had little or no interest in "the old songs" as they moved away from farm/country work to the cities - the collecting of folk music by Sharp, RVW, Butterworth and others was fuelled by a sense that a whole body of important Music was being lost) Similarly, the mass availability of recordings, particularly of commercial popular Music in the 20th Century further cemented a somewhat narrow idea of what Music was for the majority of listeners in the West?

In other words, is "Commercial Imperialism" as insiduous as Military Imperialism was blatant in its - possibly more lasting - damage?

[vinteuil]

In other words, is "Commercial Imperialism" as insidious as Military Imperialism was blatant in its - possibly more lasting - damage?

... a one-sided take on a complex issue.

I don't see the promulgation of CDs of Haydn quartets to parts of the world previously deprived of such as 'insidious - lasting damage.. "

Back to the drawing board, and towards a better definition of terms, please...


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[doversoul1]

Thank you ferneyhoughgeliebte

No I didn't of course mean to suggest any such thing. "Soft power" doesn't work like that!

Leaving aside my suspicion that the strategies used by General MacArthur in Japan in 1945 can ever be called Soft power, who do you think have been using classical or any other Western music to manipulate or influence non-Western nations for what purpose? And Masaaki Suzuki and his colleagues have all been cleverly and subtly manipulated into performing Bach? By United Nations of West?

Sorry, Richard. I don’t meant to mock you but I really don’t think that line of thinking (Imperialism) explains the way in which Western music has been valued and enjoyed beyond its original culture.

[Richard Barrett]

In other words, is "Commercial Imperialism" as insiduous as Military Imperialism was blatant in its - possibly more lasting - damage?

In a word: yes.

One of the things that interests me most about Japanese classical music is that it displays various features which might be regarded by many Western listeners as "unnatural", like the way that the tempo of a gagaku piece is always speeding up very slightly, or the coexistence of several sound-layers often without any harmonic or rhythmical connection in Nō theatre - "the very construction of the nōkan flute, causing it to overblow at different intervals between a minor seventh and an octave, generates a structural incommensurability between the music’s different layers"* - or the way the biwa is played using what in Western terms would be called "extended techniques. And yet these traditions have existed with little change for many hundreds of years. No doubt one could say the same sort of thing about the rhythmical sophistication of various African musics, and there would be many other examples, but this is a more familiar area for me. If we're interested in resisting and overcoming the industrialisation of music we need to realise that it's deeply ingrained in the "Western classical tradition"...

* "from my forthcoming book" (it's at the printers now!)

[Richard Barrett]

who do you think have been using classical or any other Western music to manipulate or influence non-Western nations for what purpose? And Masaaki Suzuki and his colleagues have all been cleverly and subtly manipulated into performing Bach? By United Nations of West?

That's another serious misrepresentation of what I was saying.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... a one-sided take on a complex issue.
I don't see the promulgation of CDs of Haydn quartets to parts of the world previously deprived of such as 'insidious - lasting damage.. "
Back to the drawing board, and towards a better definition of terms, please...

Really? Do you consider CDs of Haydn Quartets (or Machaut masses, or Ferneyhough piano works) to be "commercial"? (Or Pab's Butterworth book; or studies of Mediaeval Welsh poetry?) I understand the word "commercialism" to mean "produced to make as much financial profit as it can" - a goal that is ultimately "damaging", in that we all know of deleted recordings that never re-appear simply because they aren't (financially) "profitable". If this is an inaccurate use of the word, then I shall be delighted to adjust the word to whichever you belive to be more accurate, vinty.