Music can be situated in anthropological analysis in two distinct ways. First, music can be defined as any communicational practice which organizes sound in terms of pitch, duration, timbre and loudness. A wide range of practices can be included in this definition, extending from the human to the natural world (for example, bird-song, the ‘languages’ of dolphins and whales). This approach permits analysis of the social uses of sound in highly structured communicational and expressive systems in ways that are often ignored by anthropologists, but has the disadvantages of foisting a culture-bound definition of music on areas of activity in which it is not necessarily appropriate, and of concealing indigenous definitions and explanations which might be of more analytical use. In this sense, the problems faced by an anthropology of music are similar to those faced by an anthropology of *art or *aesthetics. Whilst a category such as ‘music’ is a useful way of focusing on aspects of performance and ideas which are of great cultural significance, it encourages the application of musicological concepts whose scope is limited outside of the practice of Western European art music, and also divides experiences (through defining ‘music’ in opposition to ‘speech’ or *‘dance’) which other people might not consider divisible.
A second approach, therefore, is to look for indigenous terms that cover roughly the same areas of experience as those covered by the term ‘music’.
This approach roots any analysis firmly in the social and cultural worlds being discussed, and reveals the connections that are made by the people involved between performance and the socio-cultural domain. It also allows one to see the ways in which ‘musical’ practice is involved in the reproduction or transformation of other social and cultural practices without imposing an alien and inappropriate analytic framework. The problems inherent in this approach are, typically, that terms corresponding to ‘music’ do not exist, and that performances that we might readily consider to be ‘musical’, on account of qualities that we might translate as ‘melody’ and ‘rhythm’, are not classified as such in indigenous discourse. In many Middle Eastern contexts the chanting of the Koran and certain kinds of poetic declamation are classified as ‘recitation’, since the terms for ‘music’ or ‘song’ connote immorality. Therefore, if the contours of indigenous discourse are respected, it might be inappropriate to think of the object of analysis as ‘music’ at all. Any anthropological approach to music has to confront this dilemma at some point.
This is the complete article, containing 408 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
