Oddities of Multiculturalism

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.