This is not directly about music, though I suppose it is music-adjacent. The CBC reports that two prominent plazas in Vancouver, the one on the north side of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the one adjacent to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, are going to be renamed. The former will now be known as šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl'e7énḵ Square and the latter as šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl'a7shn. Say it with me! Well, ok, they have a little video clip showing how each is pronounced:
Best of luck with the voiceless velar fricatives! This is just another in a long line of examples of multicultural virtue-signalling, but a particularly striking example. These names are from the Indigenous languages of the region from the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Indigenous groups are no longer referred to as "tribes" but as "nations." It always seems to come down to labels, names, designations. Perhaps we can next look forward to the theatre also being re-named. A while back they re-named the Queen Charlotte Islands "Haida Gwaii." Rather hilariously, Wikipedia says that the "nickname" for the islands is the Queen Charlottes. Perhaps the whole province of British Columbia needs to be re-named, referring as it does to the hated imperialist oppressors, the British, and that other hated oppressor Christopher Columbus.
I think that this kind of thing is just a symptom of the hollowing out of culture. First history and culture are either emptied of meaning or reinterpreted according to cultural Marxist theory. Then the fragments are re-labeled giving place to designated oppressed groups. I'm beyond being surprised at how long this can go on before everyone rises up en masse and says "hell, no!" But I hope it is soon. As a small act of personal rebellion I will not be using the designated names for the two public spaces. Instead I will just refer to them as "Plaza of the Hated Oppressor Number One" and "Plaza of the Hated Oppressor Number Two."
As suitable envoi, let's have some music of the Indigenous peoples of the region. This is "Victory Song" from the album Nootka: Indian Music of the Pacific North-West Coast, collected by Ida Halpern.
I just ran across something that I find a bit puzzling. There was an article in a Canadian newspaper the other day, the Times/Colonist of Victoria, BC, where I used to live, about a collection of Indigenous music being nominated for a UNESCO program. That is excellent news, of course. The person who collected this was the Austrian-Canadian musicologist Ida Halpern who specialized in the music of the Indigenous peoples of the coast of British Columbia. Here is an excerpt from the article:
Her life was steeped in classical music, but Ida Halpern was passionate about the songs of British Columbia's Indigenous people, music she set out to prove was equal to that of Bach and Mozart.
See, that is the part that puzzles me. I'm very fond of the classic music of north India and the music of the Balinese and Javanese gamelan and have heard interesting music from Ghana and Zimbabwe, the traditional music of Japan and other places. Some of it is quite sophisticated, but in terms of structure and aesthetic power, these musics have limits that I suspect come from the lack of really good systems of notation. In the absence of that, what tends to happen is that a small core of traditions is preserved instead of the radical advances of individual composers--call it an inherent difference between "folk" music and "art" music. That is just a private theory and, yes, it would take a great deal of research to flesh it out. Call it an informed intuition.
The music of the Indigenous peoples of Canada that I have heard is particularly limited in its techniques and devices. There is not much rhythmic interest and even less harmonic interest. The vocal lines tend to focus on just a very few intervals, seconds and thirds mostly, and the impression one gets is of a single chanting tone, with a small amount of variation. In the absence of notation, of any kind of formal training for musicians and of the largely ritual function of the music, this is not surprising. If you want to sample a few fragments, you can go to Amazon and listen to the clips from this album:
Now why would someone with a PhD in musicology from the University of Vienna think that this was equal to the music of Bach and Mozart? Even for a second? And how would she go about proving it? That's what puzzles me.
I can only find one significant article on her work, by Kenneth Chen, and I can't find any original articles or books authored by her. Chen comments that most of her written scholarship was in the form of liner notes to the albums of field recordings. This passage from his paper reveals a bit of her approach:
Halpern did, however, do more than instantiate Kulturkreis concepts even in her early scholarship. Notably, in comparing West Coast First Nations and Euro-Western art musics, she reasoned that:
"The [former] may be considered melogenic [my emphasis]. Sometimes it is logogenic (world-bound, logos-word) as when the chief sings his potlatch song and recites some parts. Sometimes it can be pathogenic (pathos-full of emotion) as in a medicine man's song. Often, however, it passes these two primitive stages, blending already into the melogenic style which is the style of our western culture."
This argument downplays the "primitive" (logo- and pathogenic) features of First Nations musics in favor of the more "progressive" (melogenic) style found also in Euro-Western art music—a disconcerting move logically insofar as Halpern's inference (underlined) does not flow from what her evidence actually supports. From a phatic point of view, though, her rationale betrays her eagerness to present First Nations music-making as developmentally "like" Euro- Western art music-making: advanced rather than backward.
It is worth reading all of Mr. Chen's paper as it outlines some of the reasons why Halpern's pioneering work has received such little attention over the years. Perhaps one of the reasons why she worked so hard to record and preserve this music and also why she wanted to give a high aesthetic valuation to the music was a kind of collective guilt over the very harsh way that Indigenous culture was treated in the 19th and well into the 20sh centuries:
Halpern began and conducted much of her fieldwork during a period when it was actually illegal for First Nations cultures to be celebrated, much less preserved. From 1880 until 1951, the Indian Act forbade First Nations Peoples to partake of their own cultural activities, and Section 140(1) of its 1927 version specifically decreed that: "Every Indian or other person who engages in, assists in celebrating or encourages either directly or indirectly another to celebrate any Indian festival, dance or other ceremony ... is guilty of an offence and is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months and not less than two months." Halpern herself acknowledged: "all of us could have been jailed and fined because of strict Canadian laws proscribing native culture at that time."
Institutionally, the Department of Indian Affairs, the Board of Education as well as the Church enforced a policy of cultural assimilation professedly with the honourable intention of "saving the Indians" by "civilizing" them—à la Western standards of civilization.
I am quoting from the Chen article. It is astonishing how severe these policies were and how we have swung to virtually the opposite policies today! If you will recall my series of posts on Stravinsky and the road to the Rite of Spring, it seems that the Soviet Union, where similar projects to record and preserve the folk music of Russia were being undertaken around this time as portable recording equipment became available, was far more "enlightened" than the colonial administrators in British North America and the subsequent Canadian government.
My conclusion is that, while Halpern certainly wanted to attribute aesthetic value to the music of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, she likely never said anything like that she regarded it as "equal to that of Bach or Mozart." For that we can likely blame an ideologically-blindered journalist.
I have ordered the album pictured above in CD form so that I can study Halpern's liner notes, so I may have more to add later on.
Ethan Hein seems to be an example of where the "new" musicology is going these days. No longer content with just singling out the odd composer for punishment as Susan McClary did with Beethoven, or offering blanket dismissals of all "dead, white, males" now it seems that a truly "woke" musicologist needs to get on board with the more extreme position that:
I have nothing against European classical music as music.
But it’s time to stop teaching it as if it’s in any way superior to or more fundamental than any other musical tradition.
Otherwise we’re giving intellectual and cultural validation to those assholes with the swastika flags.
This is from Slipped Disc where the item has garnered 83 comments to date. Traditionally we classical musicians have felt little need to either defend or apologize for our music as its quality speaks for itself. But I am beginning to think that those days are gone. I was at a musical gathering this past weekend where about equal numbers of classical and non-classical musicians were present and it turned, inevitably, into a blues jam session. That was preceded, however, by a shakuhachi player, who exalts in his inability to read music, offering a "two minutes hate" on those musicians who are literate. No-one offered to disagree with him. All I did was leave, but I regret not standing up and telling him he was wrong, in no uncertain terms.
Hey, if you want to turn all musical gatherings into blues jam sessions then count me out. And I am using that as a metaphor. A musicologist who states that he has nothing against European classical music as music is really in the wrong job and belongs to the wrong tribe (because the unstated subtext is that there is lots to condemn European classical music for in moral, social and cultural terms). The task of a musicologist is to understand and teach European classical music. Sure, there have grown up sub-disciplines that study blues, jazz and world music, but they are founded on the basic training and methods developed for use with European derived classical music. Honestly, you don't need to do Schenkerian analysis of Duke Ellington or Riemannian examination of West African drumming. The study of pop music can be quite interesting, but I think that anyone who approaches it with serious intent recognizes that the study of a Beatles' song and the study of, say, the Rite of Spring or a Bruckner symphony lie in rather different places on the aesthetic spectrum--and it's not just because of the length.
So yes, European classical music is IN FACT more fundamental than any other musical tradition for two reasons: first, because it is OUR musical tradition and second, because most of the highly developed techniques for writing music, including the ability to WRITE it were developed in Western Europe over the last thousand years. Basic history. These include, counterpoint, harmony, formal structure, development and a host of other things. Other cultures have used music in different ways, but with few exceptions the music has been limited to a small range of traditional elements and techniques due to the inability or disinterest in writing music down.
Now this has nothing whatsoever to do with those assholes with the swastika flags, nor those other assholes dressed in black with the anarchist flags. Frankly, it is astonishing that anyone with a scrap of education in music would even say things like this.
But we live in very strange times...
Since many of the comments reference the Symphony No. 3, "Eroica" by that notorious rapist, Beethoven, let's listen to a performance. This is the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Christian Thielemann:
Here is an intriguing little clip from the film I, Robot:
I'm pretty sure Will Smith can't (not that he's tried), but a few of us can. I have written a few, but I make no claims whatsoever as to their worth. But the meme of writing a symphony standing in for the idea of being able to do something highly creative and complex is widely disseminated. If you want some background, the Wikipedia article is a pretty good place to start.
I bring this up because of an opinion piece in the Washington Post reacting to Trump's speech in Warsaw in which he said:
The world has never known anything like our community of nations.
We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.
We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression. (Applause.)
We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves. (Applause.)
Ok, you could complain that this is a bit too rah-rah, I suppose, but the Polish audience seemed to like it. But Jonathan Capeheart at the Washington Post went a bit ballistic:
“We write symphonies.” What on Earth does that have to do with anything? It’s bad enough Trump is doing the one thing his predecessors studiously avoided: engaging in the battle-of-civilizations talk that inflames anger and tensions with Muslims, particularly in the Middle East. In that one line, taken in context with everything else Trump said, what I heard was the loudest of dog whistles. A familiar boast that swells the chests of white nationalists everywhere.
It’s right out of the hymnal of white nationalism favored by folks who believe the world begins and ends with them.
This is the same crowd that brays about the superiority of “Western civilization” and its contributions in the history of the world conveniently ignores (or perhaps is just plain ignorant about) what we’ve adopted from Muslims and the Middle East. Those symphonies Trump says “We write” (ahem) would be real lame without the influence of the Middle East and Muslims. According to Salim al-Hassani, chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization and editor of “1001 Inventions,” which chronicles “the enduring legacy of Muslim civilization,” told CNN years ago that the lute, musical scales and the ancestor of the violin are all part of that legacy.
Sidestepping the politics entirely, I just want to comment on the assertions about music. As a matter of fact, mentioning symphonies was an excellent example to choose if you wanted to say something about the strength of Western Civilization because the symphony, along with opera perhaps the most developed and powerful musical form ever created, is entirely the creation of generations of musicians of Western Europe over the last three centuries and has now spread, if not worldwide, then certainly anywhere that classical music is regularly performed. Go back and read the Wikipedia article to refresh your memory.
So what about those mysterious musical things we have "adopted from Muslims and the Middle East"? The lute? Well, yes, the lute does come from al-oud, a North African instrument that probably predates Islam. Intriguingly, the one place in Europe that completely avoided its use was Spain, where they had just won the long reconquista to rid themselves of Muslim rule. As for musical scales, sorry, the Muslims, along with Western Europeans, simply inherited them from the ancient Greeks who actually invented them. According to Wikipedia, the ancestor of the violin originated in Central Asia long before Islam:
Two-stringed, bowed instruments, played upright and strung and bowed with horsehair, may have originated in the nomadic equestrian cultures of Central Asia, in forms closely resembling the modern-day Mongolian Morin huur and the Kazakh Kobyz. Similar and variant types were probably disseminated along East-West trading routes from Asia into the Middle East, and the Byzantine Empire.
But any idea that any other civilization contributed to the development of the symphony is simply ludicrous. Probably the greatest formative contribution was that of Joseph Haydn, stuck out on the Esterházy estate in Hungary month after month with a music-hungry nobleman to amuse. That is where the symphony came from!
I don't have a "cultural appropriation" tag and I hope I won't ever need one. Canada, in the last couple of weeks, has been in a frenzy over supposed "cultural appropriation" from native people, or as we are to refer to them now, as indigenous people or "First Nations." The latest in a series of news stories and opinion pieces was published yesterday in the Globe and Mail, written by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, who is, according to the blurb, "an Anishinaabe writer and editor from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation, Saugeen Ojibway Nation. She is the founder and managing editor of Kegedonce Press, a publishing house devoted to Indigenous writers." Ok, so obviously someone with skin in the game. Her livelihood depends on both retail sales of writing by indigenous writers (why should that word be capitalized?) and on government and other grants and funding. But that is a poor argument, of course. We are all motivated by our own interests. Let's take a few quotes from her essay to get the idea:
This controversy continued into 2017, a year that, for Indigenous people, marks 150 years of colonial oppression. As the Canadian government unrolled its Canada 150 budget and agenda, Indigenous people across the country recoiled. Canada “150”? Really? To suggest that this country didn’t exist for us before 1867 is a punch to the gut – a half-billion-dollar, year-long celebration that hammers home the message, over and over again, that Canada depends on our erasure. The reality of our existence does not fit the official national narrative and so it must be dismissed, ignored and forgotten. Whether that erasure is attempted through the Indian Residential School System, the ongoing apprehensions of our children by Child and Family Services, the murder and disappearance of Indigenous women and girls, “starlight tours” conducted by police in Saskatchewan, the wildly disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada’s prison system, the theft of our lands and resources, the stealing of our stories or the inequitable policies of a party on Parliament Hill, the message is persistent – and devastatingly familiar.
Oh yes, all is not sweetness and light up north. Way back in the 1600s the French and later the English actually invaded what is now Canada and conquered the entire continent right across to the Pacific with not a whole lot of resistance by the native peoples. This is the historical fact. Ms Akiwenzie-Damm wants us, at this late date, to regard this historical event as something akin to an illegal act, but since it is not possible for the native peoples to undo it by force of arms, she is going to make us feel really, really bad about it.
Yes, this is Canada's 150th year as a nation and the celebrations have been criticised at great length by various parties. Canada, as a nation and not a mere geographical locale, was the creation of the British by means of an Act of Parliament in 1867, hence the celebration. This act united the remaining British colonies north of the rebellious American states and the nation has done pretty well. So part of the complaint above is simply a category error, mistaking the territory for the sovereign nation. The nation "Canada" did not and does not depend on the "erasure" of native peoples, but yes, it did and does depend on their defeat as sovereign peoples and their absorption into the new nation of Canada. Inasmuch as the writer resists this she is, to some extent, in a state of rebellion against Canada. But this is nothing new: the First Nations have been engaged in more or less open rebellion for decades now. And why? Because they never suffer any consequences, but instead are rewarded by "treaties" giving them resource concessions, funding, and just general looking the other way by the agencies responsible for public order. Viewed objectively, it is a pretty shocking record.
I recommend you read the whole essay and then continue to read the comments. What is very interesting about the comments is that they are 100% opposed to the views of the writer! The Globe and Mail, obviously is taking a position supportive of the notion of cultural appropriation from native writers, even in the face of complete disagreement by their readers. But never mind, they will simply keep pumping out the narrative until a majority of Canadians agree with it, then they will take a poll. That's how we roll in Canada.
Another interesting thing, and the reason for this post, is that we have not, up to now, raised any questions of cultural appropriation in music. That would be a pretty short debate, at least at present, after two or three decades of propaganda in the Globe and Mail, who knows? In music the cultural appropriation of techniques, styles, genres and so on is the basic practice. In pop music it has become the norm, the occasional case of copyright infringement as with the song "Blurred Lines" a couple of years ago, being very much the exception. By the way, the Wikipedia article on "appropriation" in art seems to be lagging behind this latest trend because it simply discusses how art appropriates from other art without getting all political about it.
Even in classical music there is a kind of color and culture-blind constant recycling of musical materials by everyone from everyone. You could write a pretty interesting dissertation on the appropriation of musical ideas and textures from black musicians by white musicians in the 1950s. Then this "rock and roll" was further appropriated by black musicians in Nigeria in the form of "high-life" music by people like King Sunny Adé. Here is an example:
Then, of course, it is appropriated back by other musicians! That's just how music works. It is remarkably immune to a lot of identity politics. If it doesn't sound good, no-one will listen to it anyway.
One thing about the essay by Ms Akiwenzie-Damm is how she ignores the fact that the very act of writing itself is an act of cultural appropriation by native peoples from their colonizing oppressors. Yes, it's true, the native peoples in North America had no form of written language before the French and English invasion. If we were to apply their principles of cultural appropriation, we should really ask for our alphabet back. If you want to get even more pissy about it, I strongly suspect that the flavor and texture of the prose of native writers, not to mention how they handle metaphors and even psychological memes about alienation, oppression, mythology and so on are all based on European models, themselves deriving in part from models taken from literature of the Ancient World.
One wonders when Canada's ruling intelligentsia will shake their heads and recover a sense of reality.
Here is Stravinsky happily appropriating musical ideas from Pergolesi, a couple of centuries earlier:
In my last post on Schegel and Romanticism I ended by saying "we seem to be fast returning to the situation where the tastes of the middle class are once again irrelevant as they are becoming dictated to us from above, with all the correct progressive sentiments. Just how this came to pass I will leave as an exercise for the reader." Let me try and fill in the blanks a bit. And also let me try and link it all to the situation in the music world--because that's why we are all here, right?
OK, very roughly, I think what has happened is that as the repercussions of the French Revolution spread across Europe the old upper class, the ancien régime, gradually lost power to the middle class and those rising up out of the middle class: leaders in business, the arts, the professions and so on. True, after Napoleon was defeated there was an international effort to turn the clock back at the Congress of Vienna, but it was finally unsuccessful. It is my belief that, in most cases, revolutions do away with the old upper class and set the stage for a new upper class. In Russia the tsar and his administration were replaced by the commissars and rulers like Stalin were even more violent and authoritarian than the old tsars. In Western Europe a much more benign state of affairs came to pass where the old aristocracy was replaced by a ruling class, many of whom came to power through democratic elections.
In music what we see (or, rather, hear) is that the crisp classical genres are expanded and transformed into vehicles for the new Romanticism which was really about the exploration and exaltation of ordinary people--the middle class--who were encouraged to delve inside and experience the Romantic trance (that I talked about in this post). At first it was just experienced by small groups in salon concerts, but music became a vehicle for expressing the emotions and aspirations of large groups of people, who listened in the public concert halls built all over Europe. Here is a post where I talk about that.
This is all very well and resulted in a lot of great music that is still quite central to the classical repertoire. But this situation was not entirely satisfactory to the new ruling class. They have a need to shape and monitor the tastes and values of the people they rule, for their own convenience. For one thing it helps to get re-elected and for another, it makes the populace more predictable. Therefore, towards the end of the 19th century we see the development of a host of different kinds of social controls. These include the State Socialism began by Bismarck in Germany in 1883 to appease the working class so they would stop agitating for outright socialism and the philosophy of education of John Dewey that appeared to make education simply better and more effective but that in reality in arguing that school is a social institution through which social reform can and should take place, handed the ruling class the perfect instrument to control public opinion by controlling how students are taught (and what they are taught, of course).
These two channels, the welfare state and the public school system allow the ruling class to control the populace as a whole in two fundamental ways: first of all, if a significant proportion of the public is receiving regular payments from the government, they will be far more compliant than if they were truly independent of the state. Second, the kinds of ideas and values held by most people will be instilled in them through the school system. Mind you, at the level of higher education, the older enlightenment values of truth and independent thought were, for a long time, still the norm.
But as the 20th century progressed, things seem to have gotten out of hand: governments came more and more to rely on methods that were essentially derived from the political ideas of Karl Marx. But we have to be careful here, because Marx's theories are far-reaching and complex. The important aspect for this argument is that they provide ideal tools by which political leaders can manipulate the public for their own benefit. Perhaps the most evident is the practice of singling out a particular group who are then blamed for the ills of the rest. This group might be rich people or others seen as "oppressors". We see this phenomenon again and again in social protests. It is not enough to point out a social failing, someone must be found to blame for it as that is far more effective politically.
Unfortunately all this seems to have metastasized. Progressivism, instead of just being a political convenience, has become like a tiger, preying on the fabric of civilization itself. Higher education, that used to be free of the crude manipulations found in the public schools, has fallen prey to them in an even more virulent form and now there is scarcely a single social or political progressive idea that is not enforced with brutal strictness in colleges and universities. Forget about the independent scholar, pursuing his researches free of political influence. Last week he was fired.
In music some odd things happened as well. There has always been a bifurcation in music between song and dance and the styles associated with them. I talked about how this was present early in the history of Western music in this post. But in the 20th century this division between popular music and concert or classical music became a vast gulf. At this point, it seems as if the classical side is in danger of disappearing entirely! From the point of view of this blog, and aesthetic quality, that would be a Bad Thing.
The apotheosis of popular music came about because of a number of factors. As societies became more democratic and distinct classes in society (apart from the ruling elite) became more and more ambiguous, the tastes of not only the middle class, but the working class, became the norm in society. The rough energy of rock and roll is perhaps the most striking example. The Beatles, working class boys from Manchester, influenced by American popular music, became the most famous people in the world due to their skill at writing and performing energetic and appealing music--appealing to lower and middle class tastes, that is!
At the other end of the spectrum, the intellectual side of music developed to an extreme in the avant-garde complexities of Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, but this music did not appeal to the large audiences that pop music did.
What seems to be happening now is that composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich have, more or less, succeeded in reuniting the two streams of music. And in pop music, the trend is towards it becoming, not a vehicle of protest, but a vehicle for the progressive nostrums that are constantly drummed into the students at public schools and universities alike. Pop music now, when it is not simply a vehicle for narcissism or materialism, is all about reinforcing the progressive agenda: feminism, climate change, Occupy Wall Street, and so on. George Harrison wrote a song about excessively high taxes--I expect some pop star now to write one about raising the minimum wage!
So there is my, extremely simplified, view on the social and musical history of the last two hundred years. Please correct me where necessary!
And let's have an envoi. This is The Desert Music by Steve Reich on poetry by William Carlos Williams:
The ancient Olympic games were not just athletic as they are today. Apart from religious ceremonies, they included artistic competitions in rhetoric, poetry and music and sculptors displayed their work at the games. It was the ambition of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, one of the founders of the modern games, to emulate this aspect, however I haven't been able to discover whether that was realized in the first of the modern games in 1896. What occurs to me though, is that the very idea would be impossible. The games are successful because they are restricted solely to athletic events where who won is easily measured with numbers. Of course, whenever there is an aesthetic or subjective judgement, such as in creative ice-skating routines, then there is always controversy as some judges are obviously biased in one way or another.
But imagine if artistic competition were to be included in the Olympics. First of all, all the prizes in popular music would be won by the US, followed distantly by the UK and with a smattering from Australia and Canada. This is where all styles of popular music have originated for the last century. If the organizers wished to compensate for this somehow the results would probably be as comic as the Eurovision Song Contest. Worse, I'm sure, because that contest is entirely national with each nation-member of the European Broadcasting Union able to submit one (1) song. No individual participants. This, plus excluding places like the US and Canada, enables something like a level playing field.
The other big issue is that while all the participants in the ancient games were Greeks, and participation was limited to Greek speakers, thereby ensuring a cultural unity, the modern games have participants from a myriad of cultures. It is impossible to imagine constructing categories that would be suitable. Poetry? Too many languages to make for anything like an actual competition. There would have to be a competition in each language and even then, the mind boggles at the complexity of the judging. No, including arts in our games would cause a reductio ad absurdum of our notions of multiculturalism. After all, all cultures are equally good, right? So Cambodians should have as fair a chance at winning a medal as the French. But if we set up the categories to enable that, and I have no idea how, then it would just reveal how ridiculous the notion that cultures are equal is.
So that's why the modern games are restricted to athletic competitions only. According to me.
Roaming around the web, I ran across this page which has "Thirteen Notable Traditions" from UNESCO's list of "Intangible Cultural Heritage". Passing by the awkward phrasing of that, there are some really odd things about this list. First and most prominent is that most of these traditions are very tangible indeed. Nothing more tangible than an ox or gingerbread or oil wrestling. Does UNESCO know the meaning of the word 'intangible'? Second, there is a kind of willful blindness to any kind of historical or evaluative sense. I'm sure this is intentional because underlying these kinds of initiatives are either a commercial purpose (increasing tourism to World Heritage sites, for example) or an ideological one. The ideological one is that of multiculturalism. As Wikipedia says, "A common aspect of many [multicultural] policies is that they avoid presenting any specific ethnic, religious, or cultural community values as central." In practice the motivation is often political. The Liberal Party in Canada, for example, attracted most new immigrants to Canada to voting Liberal by means of multicultural policies. There is a heavy price to be paid, however, in that multiculturalism tends to wipe out the historical foundations of a society as they become inconvenient. Politicians in Europe who have in the past been advocates of multiculturalism are starting to tack the other way as the problems become evident.
But forgive me this digression from music as it is essential background to my next point. If you go to the list I link above and click on the one about the duduk you come to this:
Very interesting. You may recognize this as the instrument that has become hugely popular in soundtracks in recent years because of the unusual sound. It was used in a great deal of the Battlestar Galactica series. If you go directly to the YouTube page, you see a lot of related videos, such as this one, also from UNESCO:
The narrator says, "The Aka Pygmies living in the south-west region of the Central African Republic have developed a distinctive vocal musical tradition, which involves a complex type of contrapuntal polyphony based on four voices, mastered by all members of the Aka community." If you listen on, you will hear this described as an "extremely complex type of contrapuntal polyphonic singing" which "unlike polyphonic systems that are written down using notation" this tradition "allows for spontaneous expression and improvisation." So, much better than those silly written systems then!
The only problem I see is that this is a kind of ignorant fraud. The Aka pygmies don't seem to be doing anything I would recognize as polyphony, let alone complex polyphony, let alone complex contrapuntal polyphony. These terms have certain specific meanings in the tradition of Western music, where they were invented, along with the notational system that allows them to be written down. In the Western tradition, what the Aka pygmies are doing would probably be described as primitive heterophony, meaning the different singers tend to go their own way pretty much whenever the mood strikes them. Complex contrapuntal polyphony is actually something like this (and if you read this blog much, you know exactly what I am going to pick):
This is a double fugue with invertible counterpoint at the interval of a tenth. I'm afraid it doesn't allow for improvisation, but I don't think that is a deficiency!
If the Aka music is complex contrapuntal polyphony, I don't think there are words to describe what Bach is doing.
