I’m reading a really interesting and well written article in The Walrus magazine right now about a classical musician and her (second) journey to Rwanda. She hauls around an electric keyboard and plays Bach and other classical music for various populations in Rwanda. The author of the article at one point begins to expound on how music is a reflection of thought and can act as mirror to the ways in which we create and process meaning. By way of example she looks at the way African and Western music compare. Western music is based on resolution, it is structured like a story to create a narrative through melody and rhythm, that almost always resolves satisfactorily (or at least in keeping with the accepted scales and time signatures that define Western music.)
In contrast African music is not structured by way of resolution. It is more or less spontaneous and “organic.” There is no defined ending, no grand scheme, as one might expect in Western music. Similarly, the author postulates, our modes of thinking are structured differently.
She explores this further by taking the daily life of a woman in Kigali who pushes her bicycle up a mountain every day, rain or shine, to carry a load of goods. It is a Sisyphean task she can’t imagine enduring herself, and yet for the Rwandan woman it is a fact of daily life, and not measured in the same terms as it is in Western eyes.
I begin to understand that the reationship to time, to value, to purpose, to ourselves—Our basic existential tooling—is not a god-given inheritence but is, like music, a cultural construction. And this leaves me profoundly confused, dangling between two great fictions of existence: mine, in which there is no meaning without resolution, and hers, in which the idea of resolution has no meaning.
This speaks to the power of music to influence thought, much as it does the power of thought to influence music. I am interested in the idea that a lot of the obsessions and behaviors within our society are controlled by our culture, because we seem to place such a high value on what is inherent (and thus unchangeable) about our actions relative to what is produced by way of culture and perception. Stranger still is the possibility that revolution can really occur within art and music, and new ways of feeling and thinking are far more possible than I have realized before.
Incidentally: I was looking for a picture to go with this post and a shot of Carlos Santana came up. I immediately thought about his performance at Woodstock, which absolutely blew my mind the first time I saw it. It was so unbelievably inspired (and inspiring) to see this young group of musicians jamming out these amazing grooves (the drum solo by the kid who was 16 at the time is monumental). Talk about music that caused a revolution.
3 comments:
Interesting post, but I think your choice of image points out the flaw in the theory put forth by the author. After all, isn't Santana 'western music'?
My point is, even if what she says is true of European-based classical music, I doubt that anyone but the most cloistered, isolated classical players/composers are completely absorbed in that genre to the exclusion of all others, and that there are many more styles of music that are not so tied up in resolution and a story-like framework. Hell, you can remember some of our jams as teenagers in Charleswood - 30 minutes of the same groove going on and on, with very little structure.
I just mean to say that I don't believe so much that people from different places and cultures have different ways of thinking - those different ways are available to all of us, any time, we just have to pay attention.
Classical music aside, today's popular music is awash with simple resolving verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo/chorus narrative structures with lyrics that only reinforce the closed loop cycle. In fact you would be hard pressed to find any Western musician outside of the realm of jazz who has achieved success by challenging this formula.
Jazz is a monumental achievement in Western music precisely because it reaches beyond this pattern and opens our eyes to what else can be expressed through music.
As for jamming, it too is expressive, and arguably more like "African" than "Western" music. Keep in mind that these are labels, and not entirely useful, perhaps there are better words I could use like "structured" vs. "unstructured". But the overall point remains that our (Western) tradition stresses that in the end there is a point to everything. Consequently, we think of life in terms of goals and achievements and milestones rather than as a journey that has no need of purpose beyond the steps we are taking now.
Different ways of thinking are indeed available to us all ergo the Woodstock reference and the nod to Santana whose performance of "Soul Sacrifice" was a Latin/African/American jam out extrodinare. Woodstock defined a generation and expressed the hope they had for peace and freedom.
I didn't say we are incapable of thinking differently, just that our culture has a very big effect on how we program our thoughts. A white man from Denver may become the wisest Buddhist monk, an African from Kigali the most successful capitalist. There are no barriers, only trends and conditions that predispose us to growing up to be good shoppers with an obsession for Disney-like endings.
I know you didn't say that we were incapable of thinking differently, I was just commenting on the author of the article's belief that different cultures (including their music) lead to different kinds of thinking. I would prefer to say different tendencies, which is probably true in that we tend for the most part to reflect what is going on around us, but there is really nothing (totalitarian regimes excepted) to prevent us from stepping outside those expectations and influences. I think we both agree on that point.
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