CHAPTER 9

Beyond Ethnocentrism

THE PROBLEM OF SECTARIAN MUSIC

Thus far I have been presenting my grounds for optimism about music as a means of promoting cross-cultural understanding and a palpable sense of our common humanity. However, an obvious problem is that music can reinforce ethnic and sectarian divisions. It does this, moreover, through exactly the mechanisms that make it a vehicle for forging bonds of sympathy. The entrainment that gives us a physical sense of connection with the larger musical audience can also reinforce sectarian bonds when that audience is circumscribed. The thrill of sharing life with an open-ended throng of fellow human beings can secure the political solidarity of groups with hostile regard for those who do not share the same hallowed cause, and the physically inciting power of music can be channeled into violence. One of the most disturbing moments in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 is an interview with a United States soldier in Iraq who describes the way he and other soldiers would get themselves psyched for battle: “You know you’re going into the fight to begin with, and you got a good song behind you.”¹ The lyrics of the soldier’s preferred song urge a blazing roof to keep burning. That and the strong beat are presumably enough to prime him to kill.

Musical complexity and lyrical wit are hardly necessary for a song to be effective in mobilizing forces or rallying the party. The kitsch song sung by a young Nazi in the movie Cabaret, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” with its easy singability and its cliché references to nature and the new day ahead, typifies the propaganda song.² Such songs are catchy, easy to entrain to. With the right context and/or lyrics, entrainment is directed toward defending one’s side against all comers.

The facile ways in which political “spin” can be applied to music should come as no surprise in light of the features of music that we have just considered. Security achieved through redundancy, pleasure attained through entrainment, a musically provoked sense of membership in a larger social group, and the sense of movement toward the future can all be harnessed to achieve sectarian ends.

Music’s connection with feelings of security, considered in the previous chapter, also suggests challenges for the idea that the universal features of music can help us to develop a greater sense of human affinity. Ontological security—the secure conviction that we share a world with other beings like ourselves—and existential security—the sense that we are at home in the world—are both quite compatible with feeling our kinship with people who are unlike ourselves. In fact, it would seem that one would feel vastly more secure if one felt such affinity. However, music’s ability to facilitate such feelings of security depends on one’s comfort with the music. Music that is too startling or alien sounding is not likely to encourage a sense that one is at home, or even the sense that one is encountering beings like oneself.

Music’s promotion of a sense of belonging, more disturbingly, reinforces the splintering of the human world into separate groups, often groups who stand in enmity with each other. One defining feature of group identification is that it establishes a clear delineation between those who are inside the group and those who are not. Political identities depend on securing boundaries. Martin Stokes makes this point when he characterizes ethnicity, one of the most common bases for sectarian identification in our contemporary world.

Ethnicities are to be understood in terms of the construction, maintenance and negotiation of boundaries, and not on the “putative” social essences which fill the gaps within them. Ethnic boundaries define and maintain social identities, which can only exist in “a context of opposition and relativities.”³

Music’s role in fortifying one’s secure sense of membership in a society, accordingly, involves implicit reference to groups that are excluded.

Are we left in the ironical position that the upshot of music’s universal character is that music promotes ethnocentricity? Some uses of music do exactly that. Fortunately, music also affords opportunities for the development of mutual sympathy among strangers who do not necessarily share any ethnic or sectarian affiliation. I will describe a situation within my own musical culture that I found very moving in this connection and then consider ways that members of different cultures might similarly share a sense of connection through music, building on the universal features and potential uses that I have been discussing in this book.

THE FLASH MOB

While recently visiting my family in Kansas City in December, I had planned with my sister Jeanine to attend the annual performance of Handel’s Messiah presented by the high school we had attended. The concert was at 3:00 p.m. the Sunday before Christmas, but Jeanine suggested that she pick me up an hour early so we could participate in a musical “flash mob” that was in the works. A flash mob is a bit like a surprise party, except that the participants are mostly strangers and the surprise is not aimed at any one individual. The participants come together as a group only for this particular occasion with the aim of jointly bursting into song (or some other specific activity).⁴ A member of a church choir in Kansas City had heard of such events in a few other cities where sudden choral renditions of the Hallelujah Chorus had startled the unaware, and she wanted to try such an event locally. The appointed time was 2:00 p.m. and the designated place was Crown Center, a popular mall that brims with shoppers during the Christmas season. The organizer sent messages to alert the grapevine via e-mail and Facebook, and these were passed along in various ways. Jeanine was among those who had learned of the plans through e-mail, and she wanted to be involved. I was game.

As it turned out, between flash mob enthusiasts and the Christmas shoppers, the traffic around the shopping center was at an impasse. Jeanine, who was driving, urged me to go on in. “There’s no point in both of us missing it,” she said. So I went in without her. A few minutes later Jeanine called me on my cell phone to say that the parking situation was hopeless, but she asked me to keep the line open so she could hear what transpired.

At 2:00, the pianist who had been playing background Christmas music paused, the cue for the flash mob to begin. About four hundred people joined in—and maybe Jeanine wasn’t the only one who was singing along in a car. The sound of the Chorus resonated through the large atrium, while the shopping center’s multistory escalators were rather comically packed with people going up and down and belting out “King of kings! And Lord of lords!” Even if you weren’t entirely sure which part you were singing (first soprano? second soprano?), it was no disaster. All of the parts were there in strength, carrying along anyone who lost track.

After the last “Hallelujah” had finished resonating, I walked out of the mall to the street. When Jeanine, who had been circling, picked me up, I felt a little as though I were jumping into a getaway car. And yet I was thoroughly refreshed, part of me still mentally thundering, “Hal–le–lu–jah!”

For many reasons, the flash mob story is likely to seem inappropriate to my purposes. It involves a song that many people within Kansas City—and the United States as a whole—probably could not sing in such circumstances, despite their familiarity with how it sounds, because they have never done so previously. The Chorus is sectarian in that it celebrates the birth of Jesus, an event of unique importance to Christians. The Kansas City flash mob was probably relatively homogenous, in that word spread largely from members of one church choir to those of others. I only knew about it because my sister told me about it, and she heard because she is herself a church musician. The Chorus is in Western tonality and epitomizes Western functional harmony. The whole event is a far cry from an encounter between mutually foreign musical cultures.

All of this is true, and yet I think the impact of the event was to spread joy and mirth throughout an open-ended public, including not only those at Crown Center, but also those who have been “present” after the fact via YouTube videos. Moreover, the potential for joining in is not all or nothing. The Hallelujah Chorus, while many people have never performed it, is widely familiar. After all, it has been used in advertisements promoting pain relief products.⁵ As for its cultural narrowness, the Hallelujah Chorus is a great work in the Western classical repertoire, the sectarian associations largely submerged in popular imagination.⁶ Possibly some other work would have done as well and been less associated with a particular religion. The “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony comes to mind, though that would have made serious musical demands on some particular singer with a strong baritone voice.

Of course, a surprise performance of the Hallelujah Chorus is not a case of cultural encounter, but several features of this event suggest some desiderata for live musical encounters among strangers, some of them characteristic of participatory music of the sort that Thomas Turino describes. First, the flash mob was a participatory event open to anyone who cared to participate. The aim was to encourage participation by as many people as possible. The dense texture cloaked any fumblings in individual contributions. Because one could drop in and out of the singing, it made room for performers with varying degrees of skill. I have no way of knowing whether anyone surprised by the singing joined in, but everyone was welcome to take part. To sing the whole chorus required knowing one’s part from beginning to end, but I can imagine someone who only knew the final volley of hallelujahs joining in at that last stage, or someone singing bits of the work, shifting parts from time to time to stay in one’s vocal range.

Second, again in keeping with Turino’s characterization of participatory music, the event created a powerful physical impact. The redundant rhythm provided a steady impetus that synchronized the throng. The ambient sounds ensured a buzzy quality to the environment; the videos of the event posted on YouTube pick up sounds of cutlery being used at the food court on the edge of the atrium. The effect was perhaps not a wall of sound—the dispersion of participants through the extended space was more like an arena of sound, with the loudness characteristic of participatory music-making. Awareness of one’s whole body resonating in tandem with an untold number of others and of the palpable vibrations emanating from those who were physically proximate was exhilarating.

Third, not surprisingly the event was conducive to a feeling of social bonding. The organizer, interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, said that some people wanted to continue singing together when it was all over, although no one had figured out how to coordinate this, so the group eventually dispersed. The reluctance for the event to end strikes me as evidence of group bonding. In my own case, I was proud to hear the segment on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered about “our” flash mob. If Hume is right that we take pride only in what we associate with our own identity, this feeling demonstrates my sense of identification, perhaps more striking in that I was a happenstance participant who had not resided in Kansas City for over thirty years.

Participants in the flash mob, like other music-making experiences, would have experienced the release of the neurotransmitter oxytocin, which has been linked to heightened states of trust and the reduction of fear.⁷ My suggestion that such experiences are humanizing in the sense of encouraging feelings of affinity toward other participants is to this extent supported by contemporary neuroscience.

Fourth, the flash mob achieved its apparent purpose—to spread joy by means of emotional contagion. Simply to be present in a context in which so many people engaged in the display of energy required to sing the Hallelujah Chorus would, I suspect, be enough to produce affective arousal. The aptness of the music for the joyous sentiment the words convey is one of the reasons the Hallelujah Chorus is so popular. In this situation, the obvious enjoyment the singers were taking in the experience would likely prompt emotional mirroring on the part of those who witnessed it. Online reactions to Hallelujah Chorus flash mobs suggest that those who have been present—and even those who observed them online—have typically found them extremely moving. According to Steve Jalsevac, in an article about the YouTube video of the flash mob in Ontario, Canada, on November 17, 2001 (the flash mob that inspired others in a number of cities, including Kansas City), by December 17 the video had been seen 22,500,000 times, and posts of positive comments vastly outweighed posts of negative ones, 48,868 to 1,075. One comment notes, “You can clearly see people crying. . . . This is the most intense video I’ve ever seen on YouTube.”⁸

Fifth, the flash mob was evocative because it was a case of large-scale cooperation that was completely voluntary. Every participant could take pleasure in his or her own contribution to the event in part because it was uncoerced, an act of one’s own will. In that sense, each person could “own” the event in a way that one cannot in the case of more obligatory efforts. This situation encouraged a feeling of optimism about what human beings can do if they set their minds to it, even without some compelling authority.

Granted, someone did conduct in the case of the Kansas City flash mob, but this conducting role was completely facilitative. Most people were in no position to see the conductor anyway. In other words, even if Western orchestras with conductors embody Western society’s tendency toward top-down organization, in this case, the conductor was just another participant, directing traffic for those who cared to pay attention, but hardly in control of the situation. The scene was relatively egalitarian. One of the pleasures of the flash mob was the breakdown in usual social roles (particular jobs and socioeconomic status) that rendered everyone a fellow singer.⁹ The idea that the conductor was just one more participant was echoed in the behavior of one of the food court patrons, visible in one of the videos, who “conducted” at his table for his own amusement as his own way of participating.

THE VALUE OF CROSS-CULTURAL MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS

One might ask at this point how the experience of the flash mob has anything to do with cross-cultural contact through music. If one can get the humanizing benefits that I have been touting through music from our own culture, why should we think we have anything to gain from encounters with startlingly foreign music? And how could encounters with alien music result in anything like the musical camaraderie of a mob of midwestern choir members singing one of their all-time favorites?

Encounter with foreign music is important, I think, because it extends our feelings of sympathy and relatedness toward those we perceive as alien. In this sense, it is valuable for one of the educational desiderata that Richard Rorty describes, that of acquainting “people of different kinds with one another so that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human.”¹⁰ Familiar music can expand our sense of human connectedness, of course, as I argued in the last chapter. Singing in the flash mob inspired feelings of solidarity among a large number of strangers. Nevertheless, the strangers were in many ways homogenous, to the point of sharing certain repertoire. While it is certainly desirable to have occasions that arouse feelings of kinship and deflate suspicion among social classes within one society, a felt recognition of common humanity across cultural boundaries would be even more striking and might help to mitigate the hostilities that are driving forces in global politics.

At least, cross-cultural musical exchange can make inroads against prejudice that will not be accomplished by musical solidarity that remains narrowly intracultural.¹¹ While I think that events such as the flash mob do promote a sense of general goodwill, not limited to other participants or members of a single religion, there is some danger that the generalized sense of connection will subtly reinforce ethnocentrism. Probably many Westerners are moved in a positive way by the fact that many East Asians, in particular, have taken up and achieved virtuosity in Western music; and likely this does enhance these Westerners’ feeling of a generalized kinship with these musicians, a sense that “they are like us.” But how many Westerners give East Asians the opportunity for similar reactions because they have sought virtuosity in a traditional Asian music? More worrisomely, I fear there may be others like the bigot I once met on a plane who told me that he had seen an African dance performance and asked himself, “Are these human beings?”

Encounters with music beyond our own cultural comfort zone can, I am convinced, lead to exactly the opposite of this man’s reaction. Instead of disparaging difference with racist rationalizations about how it seems more instinct than art, or simply ignoring musical achievements from other cultures because they aren’t accomplishments we’re accustomed to, there are other possibilities. We might instead be impressed, even humbled by the music of other cultures, and still recognize that we are of the same sort as they are. Of course this requires that we have real encounters with foreign music, and avoid knee-jerk tendencies to dismiss it because it “sounds like noise” to us.

Gaining some appreciation of significantly foreign music can have other benefits for us in addition to a sense of closer connection with people from other cultures. As one is learning how to make sense of a particular type of music, one reenters the stance of a child getting oriented toward the world. The mental operation of dropping one’s habitual musical schemata because they are unusable can be a refreshing experience. The relaxation of expectations in the musical case and the positive results of gaining greater understanding encourages more general willingness to adopt an open stance, which in turn may translate into a lessening of a guardedness toward people we don’t know.

In any case, exploring new patterns in music amounts to investigating alternative ways to navigate. Learning new music is learning new ways to move as well as hitherto unexplored ways of charting a course. As Charles Nussbaum tells us, we engage our capacity to represent space when we are finding our way in music. Gaining our bearings in alien music amounts quite literally to expanding our horizons. Some of our discoveries might be merely enjoyable excursions. But at times the impact of our adventures may be a whole new perspective on what music can mean in our lives. The recognition, for Westerners, that there are whole cultures who see music as primarily participatory, who see serious music-making as a “natural” part of life, and who do not think of music-making as a special skill or the province of experts, can reorient their attitude toward music and its place in their lives. John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man? is testimony to such a revolution in his musical outlook as a consequence of spending time among the Venda people of Africa.

Even if the discovery of other musical possibilities does not change our musical behavior, learning new music has an impact on our sense of identity, as any learning does. As we develop new abilities, we attach them to our sense of self. As we widen the circle of those we care about, our extended relational network becomes part of our identity, too. If we care about music makers whose cultures are alien, we’ve expanded this network and our sense of relatedness somewhat further. If this seems too abstract or far-fetched, reflect on the role that music played in improving the status of African Americans in the United States since World War II. Participatory songs, in particular “We Shall Overcome,” were vital to making the civil rights movement a movement.¹² But even before that, the growing enthusiasm of white audiences for music by black music makers had an impact on the way African Americans were perceived by the white population. Musical appreciation entailed empathy. My suggestion here is that empathy through music can happen again. All we need is love, and perhaps open-minded attention to foreign music can be a start.

To some degree, these benefits of making cultural contact through music are available with only a bit of individual determination and a little steady effort. This is not to say that we will warm up to seriously foreign music as quickly as white Americans developed a taste for Nat King Cole’s singing style. However, as I have been arguing, the universals of musical perception and the common musical techniques that have grown out of them represent a starting point for approaching other cultures’ music; we learn statistically (i.e., through exposure and pattern recognition) to form new musical schemata. The fact that people communicate verbally, too, can help us understand what is happening in unfamiliar music. Those initiated in another musical vernacular can help us make sense of what is happening, and ethnomusicologists have devoted entire careers to assisting comprehension across musical cultures.

Of course, the fact that accustomed musical schemata can make our experience of some music more jarring at first is bound to be a hindrance if not an outright deterrent. For this reason I think it would be highly desirable on a societal scale to forestall discouragement by exposing children early on to a wide variety of music and musical sounds. The best way to facilitate understanding foreign music is to educate children in a wide range of the world’s musical styles. If children hear diverse music from an early age, they will quite naturally develop schemata for many types, much as children can develop templates for multiple languages if early in life they are exposed to them on a regular basis. Children who learn several languages in this way do not get confused about which language is which—they learn which terms and utterances belong to which language. Similarly, children who hear many types of music early in life are able to distinguish which tones and structural possibilities are appropriate for each. Exposing children to the sounds of various instruments, vocal styles, and idioms early in life would preempt their developing perceptual biases that impede appreciation of music from outside their native cultures. If I am right in thinking that music can encourage feelings of security, and if general psychological security makes it easier to move outside one’s comfort zone, even a modest degree of familiarity with diverse musical possibilities in childhood should enable deeper appreciation of multiple musical systems than is experienced by those of us who encounter music from foreign musical cultures later in life.

One objection to my contention that we would benefit by even a little bit of attention to foreign music is likely to be that I am encouraging dilettantism toward foreign music. It may sound as though I am encouraging people to rest content if they can make a little headway in orienting themselves in music they find initially incomprehensible. This is not my intention, although I do think that we should resist the idea that we have to be experts or be assimilated into a culture to gain anything of value from its music. I do think that at the beginning of one’s exposure to significantly foreign music, one should not be frustrated if one has only minimal awareness of what is going on, but my point is not that one should stay there. In suggesting that we should learn more about the music of other cultures, I am proposing an ongoing project, though one that is recreational, need not be systematic, and probably would be more a pastime than a focused undertaking. I have argued that the results are likely to be beneficial and enjoyable, and I suspect those who set out to explore foreign music will find the effort worthwhile.

The difference between making some sense of significantly foreign music and understanding original work in one’s own musical vernacular is in many ways a matter of degree. In both cases one attempts to relate the music to a schema one has already assimilated, and if that effort fails, one sets to work looking for patterns that may become basic to a new schema. Usually we don’t have to learn a new schema for original works in our own culture’s music, but some music pushes the boundaries of what its audience is prepared for. We may think that the perceptual demands of music from outside one’s cultural framework are unlike any that are met with inside one’s musical culture (particularly when different tuning systems are involved), but I suspect that isn’t always true. I have met a person who was well educated in music of the Western classical tradition who nevertheless had trouble following “early” music, such as music of the Renaissance, because it didn’t have the kind of chordal harmonic structure to which she was accustomed. The innovations in music history have all made intellectual demands on the part of those who engaged with it.

Distinctive musical styles within what we think of as a “culture”—jazz and rock being two that are part of American music culture—may also be unfamiliar to many of its members, and may thus require them to develop new schemata. And even if one develops schemata for musical subcultures, new works can still render them inapplicable. John Coltrane’s “Ascension” is an example of jazz that even jazz aficionados of the era might have found hard to comprehend.¹³

No doubt it is true that we will never have the same understanding of another culture’s music as would a member of that culture. We will also never have the same understanding of a work of music as the person who composed or improvised it, or have an identical musical autobiography with that of anyone else. This means that the commonality of musical background we share with anyone is always a matter of degree. The fact that we share some aspects of our processing of music with all other members of our species means that we always approach another culture’s music with something in common.¹⁴

How do we go about having a real encounter with other cultures’ music? In comparing the sense of greater empathy ideally occasioned by cross-cultural musical encounter to the sense of goodwill encouraged by the flash mob, I am contending that live music-making, especially when it involves elements of participation and inclusiveness, can be an effective means for creating a feeling of mutuality. The physical immediacy of the flash mob is rare enough within American musical culture(s) and subculture(s). The circumstances in which one can attend performances by music-makers from other societies who present music from their own cultures are for most of us uncommon, and participatory activity in connection with such an event rarer still. This does not mitigate the value and importance of such experiences, however. The physical intensity of mutually resonating (whether one’s own participation is overt or inward), the emotional communication (in which behavioral cues of performers supplement those that may be suggested by the music itself), the bonding that shared music in general facilitates, the fun that music and sharing enjoyment typically involves, the noncoercive character of the typical musical situation—all of these features of live musical performance or participatory music are conducive to strong feelings of affinity.

Nevertheless, many other kinds of cross-cultural musical encounters can also be worthwhile. Some of these are:

• music-making by members of multiple musical cultures, where the different cultures’ performance styles blend in the production of music;

• performances that include works from various cultures, whether in authentic or in culturally adapted performance styles;

• music-making that fuses stylistic features of different musical cultures together (Ravi Shankar’s Symphony, performed with the London Philharmonic, is an example);

• participatory music-making in a style that is endemic to a particular musical culture but includes participants from outside it;

• participatory music-making that invites contributions in multiple musical styles;

• one or more persons listening to recordings of music from a musical culture of which they are not members;

• people from a different musical culture appropriating a musical style or aspects of a musical style foreign to all of them;

• and listening to recordings or watching video presentations of such appropriations.

I want to stress the importance of experiences with recorded music, for recordings are the primary means through which most of us experience foreign music.¹⁵ I am convinced that while recordings offer the impression of human connection less palpably than live music, encountering music through recordings still fosters a sense of human kinship. Listeners in the contemporary world, it is true, may assert their membership in one musical audience as opposed to another, as was evident in the music skirmishes between generations in many households before iPods and ear buds were common implements for listening. Nevertheless, even in the privacy that iPods afford, recorded music produces a sense of being connected with others, at the very least with the musicians who made the recordings. As we have observed, we tend to mirror emotions that we take to be expressed in the music. Even if we don’t directly mirror emotion, we tend to identify with the aurally perceived physical gestures and the impression of effort.

In the case of music with lyrics, the range of those with whom one consciously identifies can be restricted, and not only because lyrics are always in some language, and perhaps not a familiar one. A listener who has been let down in love might identify very directly with the imagined character (the persona, strictly speaking) in a blues ballad singing that his wife has done him wrong, and not feel very close to anyone who might fall into the category of betrayers.¹⁶ Identification with the personae of songs, however, is not restricted to those whose alleged circumstances resemble a position one has occupied. Probably everyone who has ever been unhappy in love can feel sympathy for the blues persona just described. One can feel empathy for the persona of Cher’s 1973 hit “Half-Breed” even if one is not of mixed ethnicity or has never been picked on for such a reason.

As we have noted, our imaginations are relatively free to play while listening to music, given the fact that when we engage with music we are typically less tied to particular roles than we are in most circumstances in everyday life. We can imaginatively take on the perspective expressed in the lyrics, lamenting, bragging, or triumphing along with the persona. Even if the music is connected with our situation in some sense (as marching songs may be for a soldier or religious songs may be for a worshipper), commonly songs offer room for some imaginative play, not stipulating the details of a situation in an inflexible way.¹⁷

In addition to the persona of the lyrics to a song (who is fictional or, minimally, stylized), I think we often feel connected to a much larger swath of humanity while listening to singing. We sometimes sing along, and sometimes do this with others. A student in one of my aesthetics classes told the charming story of singing along with a song while she was driving and pulling up to a stoplight next to another person singing along with the same song. They smiled at each other and kept singing. Although most of us do not have such serendipitous experiences while singing with recordings, I suspect that we often have a half-conscious feeling of singing along with the rest of the world.¹⁸

Recorded music can help us to hear what the rest of the world is singing; recorded music can also enable us to hear the same musical patterns and articulations again and again, which can help us to develop schemata appropriate to what has been hitherto incomprehensible. At this point in history recordings are indispensable if we are to get better acquainted with music from outside our culture. Best of all—if music is to further a sense being kin to music-makers from distant parts of the globe—would be to experience both recorded music, which assists familiarity, and live encounters with music-makers, whose vitality we can hear and feel and see.

Music is a relatively nonthreatening mode of cultural encounter whereby we can extend the sense of fellow feeling beyond our usual imaginative boundaries. The other arts also offer opportunities for being touched by a sense of our common humanity, all the more piquant when the source is temporally and spatially distant. A love poem from antiquity, a tale of war and passion from one of humanity’s great epics, or a vignette from Sei Shonagon’s pillow book touchingly reminds us of our kinship, psychologically, with people who lived a millennium or longer ago. In this sense literature is like music, but music’s immediacy is singular. It neither requires nor allows for translation, and it communicates with urgency because it is so direct. Its physical impact is massive, and we feel its rhythms entraining ours. Quite literally, music gets under our skin. It should be no surprise, then, that it can make us feel like blood brothers of those with whom we share it.

CONCLUSION

When we reflect on some of the conclusions reached in this exploration of musical universality, irony may seem to abound. We share perceptual mechanisms and processes, but the result is that we develop mental schemata that make some foreign music sound strange. We share some universal preferences, but most are not on the surface, and their compatibility with many structural possibilities results in musical diversity, not similarity. Music’s impact on our sense of security and its power to create group cohesion makes it serviceable for sectarian purposes.

Yet it takes only an antique tune in a pentatonic scale—the Sumerian melody described in chapter 3, for example—to remind us what fragile, transient things we are and how close we are to ancestors remote in time and space. “What a piece of work is man,” marvels Hamlet, “how infinite in faculties . . . in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!¹⁹ And how amazing is our music, as vast as human possibility, yet addressed to our peculiarities. As varied as our music is, as varied as we are, we all sound human. If anything about music is universal, that certainly is.