Tenet 1. Concerted simultaneity and collective identity

• Musical communication can take place between:
• an individual and himself/herself;
• two individuals;
• individuals within the same group;
• an individual and a group;
• a group and an individual;
• members of one group and those of another.
• Particularly musical (and choreographic) types of communication are those involving a concerted simultaneity of sound events or movements, that is, between a group and its members, between a group and an individual or between two groups. While you can sing, play, dance, talk, paint, sculpt and write to or for yourself and for others, it is very rare for several people to simultaneously talk, write, paint or sculpt in time with each other. In fact, as soon as speech is subordinated to temporal organisation of its prosodic elements it becomes intrinsically musical, as is evident from the choral character of rhythmically chanted slogans in street demonstrations or in the role of the choir in Ancient Greek drama. Thanks to this factor of concerted simultaneity, music and dance are particularly suited to expressing collective messages of affective and corporeal identity of individuals in relation to themselves, to each other, and to their social, as well as physical, surroundings.16

Tenet 2. Intra- and extrageneric

• Direct imitations of, or reference to, sound outside the framework of musical discourse are relatively uncommon elements in most Western musics.17 In fact, musical structures often seem to be objectively related to either: [a] their occurrence in similar guise in other music; or [b] their own context within the piece of music in which they (already) occur. At the same time, it is silly to treat music as a self-contained system of sound combinations because changes in musical style are often found in conjunction with (accompanying, preceding, following) change in the society and culture of which the music is part.
• The contradiction between music only refers to music (the intrageneric notion) and music is related to society (extrageneric) is non-antagonistic. A recurrent symptom observed when studying how musics vary inside society and from one society to another in time or place is the way in which new means of musical expression are incorporated into the main body of any given musical tradition from outside the framework of its own discourse. These `intonation crises'18 work in a number of different ways. They can:
• refer to other musical codes, by acting as social connotors of what sort of people use those `other' sounds in which situations, for example an `ethnic' flute in the middle of a piece of mainstream pop or a `pastoral' drone inserted into a Baroque oratorio;19
• reflect changes in sound technology, acoustic conditions, or the soundscape, as well as changes in collective self-perception accompanying these developments, for example, from clavichord to grand piano, from bagpipe to accordion, from rural to urban blues, from rock music to techno pop;
• reflect fluctuations in class structure or other notable demographic change, such as reggae influences on British rock; or the shift in dominance of US popular music (1930s - 1960s) from Broadway shows to the more rock-, blues- and country-based styles from the US South and West;
• act as a combination of any of the three processes just mentioned.

Tenet 3. Musical universals

• Cross-cultural universals of musical code are bio-acoustic. While such relationships between musical sound and the human body are at the physical basis of all music, the majority of musical communication is nevertheless culturally specific. The basic bio-acoustic universals of music can be summarised in the following four relationships:
• between [a] the rate[s] at which notes or groups of notes are presented (pulse, surface rate, accentuations etc.) and [b] rates of heartbeat (pulse) or breathing, or footsteps when walking or running, or other bodily movement (shaking, shivering, waving, pulling, pushing, etc.). Put simply, no-one can musically relax in a hurry, stand still while running and so on;20
• between [a] musical loudness and timbre (attack, envelope, decay, transients) and [b] certain types of physical activity. This means no-one can make gentle or `caressing' kinds of musical statement by striking hard objects sharply and that it is counterproductive to yell jerky lullabies at breakneck speed. Conversely, no-one is likely to use smooth phrasing or soft timbres for hunting or war situations because those involved will be too relaxed to do their job;21
• between [a] speed and loudness of tone beats and [b] the acoustic setting. This means that quick, quiet tone beats are indiscernible if there is a lot of reverberation and that slow, long, loud ones are difficult to sustain if there is little or no reverberation. This is one reason why a dance or pub rock band brings its own adjustable acoustic space, in the form of echo and reverb units, to venues where carpets and clothes absorb the sounds the band produces.
• between [a] musical phrase lengths and [b] the capacity of the human lung. This means that few people can sing or blow and breathe in at the same time. It also implies that musical phrases tend to last between two and ten seconds.22
• The general areas of connotation just mentioned (acoustic situation, movement, speed, energy and non-musical sound) are all in a bio-acoustic relationship to the various musical parameters with which they are associated (pulse, volume, phrase duration, timbre, etc.). These relationships may well be cross-cultural, but that does not mean that evaluation of such phenomena as large spaces (cold and lonely versus free and open), hunting (exhilarating versus cruel), hurrying (exciting versus stressful) will also be the same even inside one and the same culture, let alone between cultures. One reason for such discrepancy is that the musical parameters mentioned in the list of `universals' (pulse, volume, general phrase duration and certain aspects of timbre and pitch) do not include the way in which rhythmic, metric, timbral, tonal, melodic, instrumentational or harmonic parameters are organised in relation to each other inside the musical discourse. Such musical organisation presupposes some sort of social organisation and cultural context before it can be created, understood or otherwise invested with meaning. In other words, only very general bio-acoustic types of connotation can be considered as cross-cultural universals of music. Therefore, even if musical and linguistic boundaries do not necessarily coincide, it is fallacious to regard music as a universal language.
• To clarify this essential point about music's cultural specificity, it is worth mentioning a little experiment I conducted at a symposium on cross-cultural communication.23 I informed thirteen participants, all working in the sphere of immigrant cultures, that they would hear eight short examples of music which were `all connected to one and the same thing: an important event in any culture and something which happens to every human being'. The participants were asked to guess what the common denominator might be and, if they could not think of anything, to jot down on a piece of paper whatever mood, type of action, behaviour, images or thoughts they felt the music communicated to them. All eight examples, each taken from a different `non-Western' music tradition, were connected with death , a universal phenomenon if ever there was because, with the exception of mass casualties in wars, natural disasters etc., the death of virtually every human is marked by some form of ritual in all cultures. Did the thirteen cross-cultural experts manage to spot death in the music they heard?
• Despite the obvious initial hint (`an important event in any culture and something that happens to every human being'), not a single respondent associated death or anything death-related (wake, funeral, mourning etc.) with any of the eight death-related music examples. True, connotations like complaint, wailing, sadness, serious and suffering occurred in response to two of eight extracts, but the most common descriptions of all the examples had to do with either [1] energetic action or excitement, for example work, war, fighting, hunting, agitation, dancing, adventure, gymnastics; or [2] happiness and celebration , including joy, confidence, feasting, abandon, contentment etc. There was even some love and tenderness as well as one wedding . More significant is perhaps that eleven of the thirteen respondents tried to identify the cultural origin of the music: there were two Africa s (plus one jungle ), two Arab s (plus one each for bazaar, desert, camels and Yemen ), as well as one each for China, Greece, India and Turkey . Clearly, the examples presenting music for funerals, burials, etc. were considered foreign and associated with a variety of moods and events, the vast majority of which have no discernible link with anything `death-like' in contemporary urban Western culture.24

Conceptual comparisons

• Another way of understanding the Western concept of music is to compare it to different but related concepts in other cultures. Although no human society of which we have any knowledge has ever been without music in the sense defined on page See In this book, `music' will be understood as that form of interhuman communication in which humanly organised non-verbal sound can, following culturally specific conventions, carry meaning relating to emotional, gestural, tactile, kinetic, spatial and prosodic patterns of cognition., the concept of music is by no means universal. For example, the Tiv nation of West Africa (Keil 1977) and the Ewe of Togo and Eastern Ghana do not appear to have found it necessary to single out music as a phenomenon requiring a special word any more than the British have needed different words for the three basic types of snow that the Inuktitut language conceptually refines into several subcategories. 25 To be fair, the Ewe do actually use the English word `music', but only as an untranslated loan word to denote foreign phenomena like singing church hymns or listening to the radio. The music they make themselves in traditional village life has no equivalent label in the Ewe language. According to Ghanaian musicologist, Klevor Abo:

`Vù really means `drum' and há is the word for club or association. A vù há is the club you belong to in the village... Voice is called bá, so singing is vù bá. Vù is used to signify the whole performance or occasion: the music, singing, drums, drama and so on.'26

• Having no exact verbal equivalent to our `music' clearly does not mean that the culture in question is without music any more than the English language's lack of verbal equivalent to the Hindi notion of rasa or to the German notion of Weltanschauung means that Anglophones cannot conceive of different types of feeling/mood/state-of-mind (rasa) or of different ways of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Nor is a lack of equivalent to our word music connected to village communities in West Africa because the Japanese, with their long-standing traditions of music and theatre in official religion and at feudal courts, did not feel obliged to invent a word equivalent to the European concept of `music' until the nineteenth century. The Japanese translated `music' as ongaku (
), on ( ) meaning sound and gaku ( ) enjoyment, i.e. sounds performed for listening enjoyment or entertainment.27

• In other words, neither the Japanese nor the Ewe needed a word for what we mean by music until confronted by us Europeans and our culture. It must have been strange to come across people like us who treated what we call music as if it could exist independently of a larger whole (drama, poetry, singing, dancing, ritual, etc.), and the Japanese went straight to the heart of the matter with the word ongaku, identifying the European notion of music as referring to the non-verbal sounding bits of what they themselves considered as part of a larger set of symbolic practices. The Ewe reacted similarly, using the untranslated English colonial word music to label European music which was not an integral part of their own traditional culture and which we Europeans conceptualise as distinct from other related cultural practices.28

Both the Ewe (vù) and Japanese (gaku) concepts resemble to some extent that of the ancient Greeks whose term technê mousikê ( texnh mousikÆ or mousikê for short) originally referred to the skills of all the muses: drama, poetry, dancing, etc., not just to playing instruments or singing. The musica of ancient Rome seems to have covered a similar semantic field. However, during the Hellenic merchant period, there seems to have been a shift in the meaning of Greek mousikê and Latin musica in learned circles, so that Saint Augustine (d. 430), worrying about the seductive dangers of music, seems to use `music' (musica) in our contemporary sense of the word.29

• It seems likely that this more restricted use of mousikê and musica prevailed amongst scholars and clerics in Europe from the fifth century onwards.30 Moreover, Arab scholars between the eighth and thirteenth centuries appropriated the Greek word mousikê (as al musiqi) to refer to what we mean by `instrumental music' today, not to the gamut of artistic expressions denoted by the mousikê of Plato or Aristotle.31 It should also be noted that Mohammed is said to have shown interest in music and that the Koran itself contains no directly negative pronouncements against music. However, orthodox clerics of Islam were later to warn, like St. Augustine, against the evils of music, the main controversy being whether the Prophet's judgement of `poets', including musicians, in the Koran's 26th sura referred to music connected to infidel rites or to music in general.32 The main point is that influential ascetic patriarchs of Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern monotheism were worried about the sensual power of the non-verbal aspect of sonic expression and that they needed a concept to isolate and identify it.
• What happens to `music' in the vernacular languages of Western and Central Europe before the twelfth century is anybody's guess. Perhaps, like old Norse or modern Icelandic, there was a blanket term covering what bards, narrators of epic poetry and minstrels all did.33 Certainly, the Northern French trouvères and the Provençal troubadours of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were not only known as singers, players and tunesmiths ( trouver / trobar = find, invent, compose) but also as jugglers and poets.
• Music enters the English language in the thirteenth century via old French, whose musique appears about a century earlier.34 The arrival of the word in the vernacular of both nations denotes more or less what we mean by music today. It also coincides with the granting of charters to merchant boroughs and with the establishment of the first universities. Unfortunately, there is hardly enough evidence to support the idea that the crystallisation of the term music connects ideologically with the ascendancy of a merchant class, even though the Hellenic period, Arab mercantile hegemony in the Mediterranean, and ascendancy of the European bourgeoisie, all seem to feature the new concept. Whatever the case, the European ruling classes were able to use the word music in its current meaning well before the eighteenth century: the semiotic field had been prepared by clerics and ecclesiastical theorists who had, by the eleventh century, established a metaphysical pecking order of musics. This type of hierarchy is, as we shall see the later (p. See Articles of faith, ff.), important to the development of the Romantic notions, cited at the start of this chapter, of music's supposedly transcendental qualities.
• These brief cross-cultural and historical observations about the word music indicate that the concept denotes particular sets of non-verbal sound produced by humans and associated with certain other forms of symbolic representation, sounds which relate enough to physical and emotional aspects of human experience to be considered disconcerting by ascetic clerics. The question is: which `sets of humanly produced sounds' relate to which other forms of symbolic representation? One answer to that question is provided by theories of human evolution.

Animal music?

• The oldest musical instrument discovered to date is a flute made from the femur of the now extinct European bear and found in a Neanderthal burial site in today's Slovenia. The flute, unearthed in 1995, is between 45,000 and 84,000 years old.35 Although (to split the difference) 64,000 years may sound like a long time ago, it is the mere twinkling of an eye in terms of the evolution of our species: the earliest hominid forms evolved from the higher primates at least 3 million years ago.36
• Evolutionist theories of music explain its origins in terms of evolutionary adaptation, by which is meant the ability of a species to find effective strategies for survival by means of adapting to their environment. One rather unlikely theory is that music derives from the synchronous chorusing of higher primates, while another argues more plausibly that `it is in the evolution of affiliative interactions between mothers and infants that we can discover the origins of the competencies and sensitivities that gave rise to human music.'37
• Several other theories stress the importance of what Brown (2000) calls `musilanguage', i.e. that language and music, both sonic and both neurologically intertwined, stem from a common origin, `evolving together as brain size increased during the last two million years in the genus homo' (Falk 2000). Like the mother-and-infant theory, this explanation also seems quite plausible because both Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis had, if our knowledge of the Slovenian bone flute and other early human instruments of music are anything to go by,38 clearly started to treat oral language and music as distinct modes of sonic communication. Although neurologically interrelated, these two sonic systems were used for different functions. This aspect of evolution is important because the separation of music from language is often seen, rightly or wrongly, as a trait distinguishing humans from other animals.

One common objection to the theory of distinction between music and language as a basis for understanding the origins of music as trait of human behaviour argues that if we, as humans, say that birds and whales sing, then we are talking about music, simply because that is how we hear it. The sonic habits of humpback whales provide fuel for this argument. As those great mammals migrate or swim around their breeding grounds, they piece together repeated phrases, singing song after song for up to twenty-four hours at a stretch. Humpback whales have a seven-octave range similar to that covered by the piano keyboard, i.e. a range of fundamental frequencies within the limits of what humans can hear, and much larger than the restricted range of pitches the human voice can produce. As the months go by, whales modify their song patterns and most males end up singing the same new song after a while. Moreover, humpback whale song contain rhythms and phrases which, strung together, build forms of a length comparable to ballads or symphonic movements. It also seems that their songs contain recurrent formulae which end off different phrases in much the same way as we use rhyme in poetry. One theory about rhymes in whale song is that they help in the breeding season when the males have to remember `what comes next': the more elaborate the whale's song pattern, the more likely it is to rhyme.39

All these traits of whale song come across as typically musical to the human ear. But the `music' of the animal kingdom does not stop there: certain insects produce distinct rhythmic patterns which, like those of human music, vary and repeat in longer patterns. Moreover, eleven percent of primate species can produce short strings of notes that, though less musical to our ears than the songs of humpback whales, form a recognisable pattern in time. This behavioural trait, characteristic for most of our own music, is thought to have evolved independently four times within primates. Such evidence suggests that music is not exclusive to the human species.

• One problem with the objections just raised is that they are anthropomorphic in that they interpret non-human behaviour on the basis of human experience, perception and behaviour. The animals make music standpoint assumes, in other words, that the whales, insects and primates just mentioned hear and react to the sounds they make themselves in the same way that we hear and react to them; it also assumes that animals produce those patterns of sound for the same reasons as we make what we hear as comparable patterns of sound in our music.40 For example, although we hear birds as the greatest songsters of the animal kingdom, they do not necessarily make, hear and use their melodies as we make, hear and use our music. Ornithologist Eugene Morton puts it this way:

`Any analogy to human music is not interesting to me. It doesn't explain anything about how the world is, except how humans want to perceive it. Good on 'em, but I want to understand animals... Birdsong constitutes an avian broadcasting network, letting birds minimise the arduous work of flying about during interactions'.41

• If singing can replace the amount of flying around birds would otherwise have to do, it is certainly part of a symbolic system. Instead of physically repelling every potential invader of its own space, a bird can claim its territory by making sounds we call birdsong. Instead of flying round to see if local members of the family are all there before they shut down for the night and that they are all there again in the morning, an individual bird can join in the evening and dawn choruses. Birdsong is in other words a strategy for the survival of individuals within the group, because they all have to have a place to nest, and for the group as a whole, because they may all need to collect for foraging or migration. It seems that singing is just an energy-efficient way for birds to establish these relations essential to their survival.
• It would in a similar way be unrealistic to expect whales, who have to cover huge distances in search of food but reconvene for breeding, to keep visual or tactile underwater checks on the whereabouts of each other, as individuals or as family groups, across vast stretches of ocean. In this sense, whale song, by replacing tactile and visual contact with sonic communication, also acts symbolically to facilitate the social cohesion necessary for the survival of their species. It is also highly probable that the various functions of sonic communication in the animal kingdom are linked with what we humans might qualify as pleasure and pain, tension and relaxation, etc., i.e. with what we think of as emotions and which are essential ingredients in the evolutionary process of most sentient beings.42 If such `emotions' are linked to situations in the animal kingdom where what we hear as their `music' is used to signal messages we might understand verbally in terms like get off my property! or it's OK, we're all here , then it is also probable that the sounds in question are accompanied by patterns of hormone production comparable to those found in humans when stimulated in certain ways by certain sounds in certain situations.43
• If there is any truth in the line of reasoning just presented, it would seem that there may be grounds for calling that animal `music' music. After all, such an argument would go, what we have described tallies quite well with the seventh of our eight axioms about music ( p. See If music involves the human organisation and perception of non-verbal sound (points 1-6, above), and if it is closely associated with touch, gesture, movement and prosodic aspects of speech, it is close to preverbal modes of sensory perception and, consequently, to the mediation of somatic (corporeal) and affective (emotional) aspects of human cognition.), with our observations about `concerted simultaneity and collective identity' ( p. See Tenet 1. Concerted simultaneity and collective identity), and with several other points mentioned under our working definition of music.

Whether or not zoomusicologists can demonstrate a separation between music and other forms of sonic communication produced by non-human animals, the point here is that we humans seem to have done so for at least 100,000 years. One sound-based symbolic system (language) is more suited, though not wholly dedicated, to the denotation of objects and ideas, while the other (music) is more closely, though not entirely, linked to movement, gesture, touch and emotion (see axiom 4, p. See Like the spoken word, music is mediated as sound but, unlike speech, music's sounds do not need to include words, even though one of the most common forms of music making entails the singing, chanting or reciting of words. Another way of understanding the distinction is to remember that while the prosodic, or `musical' aspects of speech --tonal, timbral, durational and metric elements such as inflexion, intonation, accentuation, timbre, speed of delivery, timing, periodicity, etc.,-- are all important to the communication of the spoken word, a wordless utterance consisting only of prosodic elements ceases by definition to be speech because it has no words: it is most likely to be understood as music.). As stated earlier, language and music, both neurologically intertwined and both using the sense of hearing, seem to stem from a common origin, evolving together as brain size increased during the last two million years of evolution in the genus homo. However, even though the oldest musical instrument found so far may be from a Neanderthal burial site, it is after we humans managed, some 50,000 years ago, to wipe out our Neanderthal cousins that we start to leave significant numbers of complex sonic objects behind us.44

• To summarise: the separation of sonic representation into two distinct but related spheres of activity --language and music-- may have started to evolve in our hominid ancestors but seems to have developed dramatically after their demise. Cross (1999) goes as far as to suggest that this distinction between language and music may be the most important thing humans ever did. We will return to this point after the next section which deals with music's importance for another fundamental aspect of human development.

Music and socialisation

• At the age of minus four months most humans start to hear. By the time we enter this world and long before we can focus our eyes on objects at different distances from ourselves, our aural faculties are well developed. Most small humans soon learn to distinguish pleasant from unpleasant sounds and most parents will witness that any tiny human in their household acts like a hyperactive radar of feelings and moods in their environment. You know it's no use telling baby in an irritated voice `Daddy's not angry' because the little human sees straight through such emotional bullshitting and starts to howl.
• But baby's hearing is not what most parents notice first about sound and their own addition to the human race. They are more likely to register the little sonic terrorist's capacity to scream, yell, cry and generally dominate the domestic soundscape. Babies are endowed with non-verbal vocal talents seemingly out of proportion to other aspects of their size, weight and volume: they appear to have inordinate lung power and unfailing vocal chords capable of producing high decibel and transient values, cutting timbres and irregular phrase lengths, all communicating messages that parents interpret as I 'm uncomfortable or I'm irritated or I'm in pain , or I'm hungry , messages demanding action such as change my nappies! or comfort me! or provide immediate nutrition! . Maybe these tiny humans have to yell not just because they can't speak but also because they need to dispel whatever state of adult torpor we happen to be in while watching TV, chatting, reading or, worst of all, sleeping. Babies seem to know in advance that sharp timbres at high pitch and volume carry well, cutting through whatever ambient hum and mumble there may be in the adult world, be it idle conversation, TV in the background, fridges, ventilation, etc. Also, irregular rhythms and intonation by definition avoid the sort of repetition that can gradually transform into ambient (background) sound: a baby's yell is always up front, foreground, urgent, of varying periodicity and quite clearly designed to shatter whatever else mother, father, big sister or big brother is doing. That sonic shattering is designed to provoke immediate response. Desires and needs must be fulfilled now .
• Now is the operative word here. Sonic statements formed as short repetitions of irregularly varying length are also statements of urgency, as well we know from news and documentary jingles -- important, flash, new, the latest update .45 Babies seem to have no conscious past or notion of future: all is present. The baby's lack of adult temporal perspective in relation to self is of course related to its lack of adult senses of social space, which, in its turn, relates to baby's egocentricity, essential for survival in the initial stages of its life.
• Non-verbal sound is essential to humans. We monitor it constantly from inside the womb until death or deafness do us part from its influence. We use our non-verbal voices to communicate all sorts of messages from the time we are born until we die or turn dumb. Together with the sense of touch, non-verbal sound is one of the most important sources of information and contact with social and natural environments at the most formative stages of any human's development. It is vital to senso-motoric and symbolic learning processes at the preverbal stage of development and central to the formation of any individual's personality. Moreover, we have all had to experience the process by which we gradually learn that we are not the centre of others' constant and immediate attention: we have to get used to being just one human subject and social object among many others. We have to have some sort of working relationship with whatever society and culture we belong to and we cannot live in the vain hope of returning to a state where we are the sonically dominant or foreground figures: we can never regain any imagined or real lost paradise, whatever advertisers, drug pedlars or pharmaceutical corporations may want us to believe.
• Different cultures and subcultures develop different norms for what course the process from baby via child to adult should run. The ultimate goal --becoming a fully functioning male or female adult-- depends on whatever the society in question at any given time sees as desirable on account of its material basis and cultural heritage. Assuming we have all been babies and if baby's power over the domestic soundscape in the early development of every human is a biological necessity that must be relinquished for that individual to survive among fellow humans in adulthood, then we ought to gain important insights into how any culture works by studying patterns of socialisation that relate directly to non-verbal sound.
• Humans can emit an enormous variety of non-verbal sounds. We breathe, talk, cry, shout, yell, call, sob, sigh, laugh, giggle, burp, fart, crunch, slurp, gulp, swallow, yawn, groan, moan, growl, cough, splutter, slobber, wheeze, sniffle, sneeze, kiss, hiss, snort, spit, scratch our heads, smack our lips, blow our noses, clear our throats, cough up phlegm, etc. Our hearts beat, tummies rumble and intestines gurgle. We make noise, however weak or strong, whenever we move our bodies --when we sit down or stand up, walk, run, stroll, tiptoe, limp, jump, hop, skip, drag our feet, stumble, fall, etc. We also shudder with fear, tremble with delight, or shiver with cold so that their our chatter. We make sound when we hit, kick, drag, push, cut, tap, pat, clap, caress, chop, saw, hammer, grind, scrape, slap, splash, smash, etc. Some of these sounds are loud, others soft; some are heavy, others light; some are fast, others slow; some are high-pitched, others less so; some are long or ongoing and repetitive, others short and discrete and so on. All these humanly produced sounds are made within a context that is itself full of sound. In urban industrialised societies we have fridges, freezers, computer drives, traffic, aeroplanes, mains hum, air conditioning and all sorts of other machines; elsewhere we may be able to hear wind in the trees, rain, sea swell, animals, birds, insects, running water, thunder, earthquakes, ice breaking, crisp or slushy snow under our feet, waves breaking on the shore, etc.
• Some of these sounds we make ourselves, others we just hear in a wide variety of acoustic settings, including those inside our own heads and bodies. Which (combinations of) sounds are evaluated as pleasant and unpleasant, which ones are deemed to be part of music and which ones not, will largely depend on the culture we belong to and on what sort of motoric and sonic behaviour prove to be generally compatible with the needs of that community, be it a youth subculture in late capitalism or a nomadic people using stone age technology.
• All of us have been babies and all of us have had to learn that we cannot for ever remain at the centre of the world around us, acoustically or otherwise. We have to learn to cooperate, to negotiate social space and uses for ourselves in relation to the community we belong to. Music and dance provide socially constructed sonic and kinetic frameworks for that learning process: most of us learn to sing, hum and whistle in accordance with the norms of what our culture regards as music, rather than just yelling, laughing, mumbling, or bashing objects at will. As we acquire the gift of language we learn to distinguish between humanly organised verbal and non-verbal sound. More importantly, by repeated exposure, within the music culture to which we belong, to the simultaneous occurrence of certain types of musical sound with certain types of action, attitude, behaviour, emotional state, environment, gesture, movement, personality, people, pictures, words, social functions, etc., we construct a vast array of categories combining several of the constituent elements just mentioned into overriding and integral musicogenic `concepts'.
• Many of us also go on to learn how to play an instrument as a way of making sound whose functions are clearly different not only to those of spoken language but also to those we make when chopping wood, hammering nails, ironing clothes, doing the washing up, flushing the toilet, taking a shower, walking upstairs, driving a car, eating food, operating machinery, folding a newspaper, closing the door, etc., etc. It would, from the perspectives just presented, be absurd to regard music as some sort pleasant but parasitic appendage to human life --`auditory cheesecake' as one writer put it.46

Cross-domain representation and synaesthesis

• There are other reasons for understanding music as an essential part of the survival kit for any human society, not as just cultural icing on the socio-economic cake. These reasons are presented by Cross (1999) and can be summarised in the following simplified terms.
• Our capacity as humans to process signals from the world around us via different domains of representation (verbal, visual, motoric, emotional, etc.) seems to have been one of our species' great advantages in the evolutionary struggle, in that we can sort out abstractions of cause and effect by distinguishing between visual, verbal, sonic and motoric impulses. Those domains of representation are even located in different parts of the brain so that what we hear at a particular time (a sonic event) does not have to represent the same phenomenon as a movement or emotion we may experience at that same time. Put crudely, having to rush up in a panic as the alarm clock goes off does not make us think the alarm clock is stressed out.
• Of course, such domain-specific signal processing in no way prevents humans from making connections between several simultaneous domain-specific signals if they co-occur on a regular basis. For example, when a loving parent talks in a sing-song voice to a baby while holding and rocking it, the little one receives signals that are at the same time specific to the sonic, motoric and emotional domains of representation. As these combinations of domain-specific signals are repeated, the infant learns to make connections between them so that another, overriding or `embodying' type of representation comes into play. Such combinations of sonic, motoric and emotional signals are sometimes called proto-musical.47 They also relate to synaesthetic patterns of cognition.

Domains of representation and the `embodying' cross-domain level48

• The specific domains relating to (proto-) musical representation, shown in figure 1-See Domains of representation and the `embodying' cross-domain level, partially overlap and need some explanation.

The physical domain covers the ballistics, trajectory and kinetic relationship of a body (or bodies, including one's own) to the type of space through which it travels or in which it is motionless. Fast or slow, jerky or smooth, regular or irregular movement, or no movement at all, in an open or closed space; movement which arrives or leaves within that space, towards or away from a point inside or outside it, movement which waits or passes over or under, up or down, to the left or right, to the back or front, to and fro or in one direction, suddenly or gradually: these aspects of movement and space, when enacted by a human, are all part of the physical domain of representation. It also includes the enactment of some aspects of heaviness or darkness and lightness, of density and sparsity, as well as of multitude and singularity.

The gross motoric domain of representation involves the movement of arms, legs, head, etc., e.g. walking, running, jumping, dancing, pushing, pulling, thrusting, dragging, waving, rolling, hitting.

The fine motoric domain of representation involves the movement of fingers, eyes, lips, mouth, throat, etc. Blinking, glittering, shimmering, rustling, babbling, clicking, tapping, fiddling, dripping, spitting, swallowing, gurgling, etc. all exemplify movement requiring fine motoric representation.

The linguistic domain is mainly concerned with prosodic patterning, with the `musical' elements of speech, i.e. with intonation, timbre, accentuation, rhythm, dynamics, etc., including the sonic characteristics of vowels and consonants.

The social domain involves the representation of patterns of human interaction, for example of individuals to a group or vice versa. As we shall see later, particular strategies for structuring musical parts or voices can correspond to particular socialisation patterns.

The emotional domain is self-evident. It involves evaluating a situation in response to different body states such as posture, muscular tension or relaxation, hormonal stimulation, adrenalin count, etc. It includes evaluation of experience whose verbal conceptualisation is often formulated in polarities like pleasing/painful, happy/sad, beautiful/ugly, love/hate, security/threat, etc.

It should be clear that these six domains of representation are in no way mutually exclusive. For instance, it is impossible to imagine a gross motoric activity like dragging (domain 2) without considering bodily movement in space and aspects of heaviness (physical domain 1). Moreover, any aspect of the emotional domain needs to be qualified by aspects from other domains. For example, is the expression of pain sharp and sudden? Is it relentless, throbbing and ongoing, or is it stifled in the background? Does the pain come in gradual waves or as violent shocks? Does it make you quiver, shudder, jump, fall over, fall apart, yell, scream, groan or grumble? Or does it hit, stab, pierce or poison you? Or does it make you depressed and apathetic? Is the pain repressed and under control, or is it up front and violent? Perhaps it paralyses or silences you altogether? Is it the pain of a solitary individual or does it more closely resemble a community of suffering?

Proto-music's six domains of representation also overlap in terms of synaesthesis.49 For example, some onomatopoeic pairs, like babble and bubble or rumble and tumble, are normally, though not exclusively, associated with the sonic and visual/kinetic aspects respectively of the same basic type of movement, as, indeed, are rustle and glisten. Other sonically similar words like bustle, hustle and hassle not only lend themselves to expression in visual or sonic terms: they also include aspects of social interaction and emotional evaluation. It is the combination of all these aspects that makes such concepts particularly musicogenic.

Before going any further in this explanation of cross-domain representation, it is necessary to clarify that we are using the noun synaesthesis, not synaesthesia, to denote any use of two or more modes of perception at the same time. While synaesthesia is generally used as a clinical term denoting a specific neurological condition involving the disturbance of normal perception by the involuntary intrusion of impulses from more than one sensory mode, synaesthesis is no more than a transliteration of synaisthêsis ( sunaisyhsiw ), aisthêsis meaning `perception' and syn = `[along] with', `accompanying', i.e. simultaneous perception in more than one sensory mode.50 Synaesthesis is therefore not a pathological condition but a normal and essential part of human cognition. The only terminological trouble here is that synaesthesis and synaesthesia both give rise to the adjective synaesthetic. To avoid further confusion, then, synaesthetic will in this book qualify any type of perception using more than one sensory mode at the same time. In more concrete terms, we shall qualify, for example, the combined tactile, kinetic, visual and sonic aspects of babble, bubble, bumble, rumble, crumble, tumble, rustle, bustle, hustle or hassle as synaesthetic because they constitute instances of normally functioning synaesthesis .51

To summarise the argument so far, music can, as we have defined it (p. See In this book, `music' will be understood as that form of interhuman communication in which humanly organised non-verbal sound can, following culturally specific conventions, carry meaning relating to emotional, gestural, tactile, kinetic, spatial and prosodic patterns of cognition.), be understood as a specifically human type of activity which lets us mix elements from any of the six domains of representation (p. See Domains of representation and the `embodying' cross-domain level) into an integral whole. It is an activity allowing us to represent combinations of signals from its constituent domains in one symbolic package rather than in merely linguistic, social or corporeal terms. As a meaningful system of non-verbal sound, music lets us engage in interpersonal activity on many levels simultaneously, either by making the music or by responding to it individually or together with others. To express ourselves on all these levels at the same time, humans do not always need to confront each other with verbal outbursts, bodily display or physical interaction: we can use music instead. In other words, music provides relatively risk-free action to members of the culture producing and using it because it provides socio-culturally regulated forms of potentially risky interaction between humans. But music does more than that in that it can also help avoid confusion. Avoid confusion? How can that be when music is so often thought of as `polysemic'? We had better explain (see also p. See Polysemy and connotative precision, ff.).

Imagine, for example, the not uncommon state of mind characterised by a mixture of, say, irritation or resentment and the feeling that is nevertheless a nice day and good to be alive. Using the linguistic domain, you could express this single dynamic state of mind directly to a friend, partner, child, parent, or to the authorities, telling them first how strongly you disapprove of their behaviour: you could start by speaking with sharp timbre and choppy delivery, then switch to a smooth, mellifluous voice. Using the fine motoric domain, you could frown then smile, tap your fingers nervously then flutter your eyelids encouragingly, grit your teeth then relax your mouth. Socially, you might want to avoid the people causing the irritation and then make efforts to welcome them into your company. Using the physical and gross motoric domains of representation to communicate your state of mind, you'd almost have to first beat up the person or people concerned, then caress or hug them. Emotionally, you'd probably want to first yell and stamp your feet, then sit down and relax; or perhaps you'd first tense your shoulders and clench your fists, then lean back, open your arms and show the palms of your hands.

Although feeling irritation on a basically good day is hardly a symptom of emotional instability, expressing that dynamic using just one of music's constituent domains of representation, as described in the previous paragraph, would at best come across as contradictory and confused. It would more likely cause offence, perhaps even provoke a diagnosis of manic depression. However, thanks to its character of cross-domain representation, music is able to mediate that same sort of dynamic as a unified single experience in a socially negotiated and culturally specific sonic form. After all, we seem to readily accept that the single linguistic concept of love involves feelings of vulnerable anxiety and the fear of loss in addition to the occasional, indescribably powerful bout of euphoria. Similarly, it is totally impossible for us mortals to entertain the notion of human life without considering death.52

These platitudes about love and life serve merely to illustrate the fact that while language only occasionally lets us conceptualise dynamic states of being as integral experiences, music almost always does so. Feeling angry on a good day , or desperately troubled in the midst of calm and beauty , or totally sick of the world and feeling alive because of that disgust -- these are no more than pale verbal hints of just part of three of the innumerable kinds of dynamic mood categories that music can create.53 We should therefore not be surprised that respected critics can describe the same piece of music --in this case the first movement of Mozart's 40th symphony-- in terms of both `deepest sadness' and `highest elation'.54 Was Mozart confused when he wrote the music? Probably no more so than usual. Does the music make a confused or contradictory impression? Certainly not to modern European ears: it's one of the most well-known, highly valued and widely covered pieces in the Viennese classical repertoire. Were the critics confused when they wrote about sadness and elation in the same breath about the same music? No again: they, too, were just giving pallid verbal hints of what they felt the music to be expressing.

By combining input from its constituent domains of representation, music forms integral categories of cognition that, from a logocentric viewpoint, would be qualified as contradictory, confused or polysemic, even though those categories seem to correspond more accurately with what we actually feel or imagine on a daily basis: angry on a good day, troubled in beautiful surroundings, sad and elated, vulnerable and euphoric, etc. This holistic aspect of musical cognition may well be one reason for music's ability to move us so deeply, sometimes even to occupy our whole sensory being. It may also be one reason for music's therapeutic usefulness. Furthermore, music helps cognitive flexibility, i.e. the ability to mix, switch and correlate across different domains of representation. Viewed from these perspectives, music may indeed be, as Cross (1999) concludes, `the most important thing that we humans ever did'.

Musical power agendas: a historical excursion

• One recurrent trait in documents about music from ancient `high' cultures (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, etc.), is its link to official religious doctrine or to ostensibly indisputable physical phenomena.57 In ancient Mesopotamia (3,000-600 BP), for example, music theory was connected to astrology and mathematics. The idea was that if you knew the motions of the stars, if you believed in their sway over human destiny, then you understood the harmony of the universe. You could theoretically be at one with the universe by making music which abided by the rules of its harmony. Music of the court and of official religion was held to conform to such rules; that of other classes and peoples did not. It was through such metaphysical links that an oppressive political system could be identified with a system of musical organisation which was in its turn aligned with the immutable system of the universe. Like the deification of the worldly system's kings, metaphysical connections between the ruling classes, their music and the heavenly spheres created the illusion that their unjust political system was as great, as divine, as eternal, as unquestionable and as unchangeable as the universe.58
• Written records from ancient China are even more explicit. The tonal system of imperial music, based on observations about the relation of rising fifths to the perfect ratio 3:2, was put into a cosmic perspective. According to documents from around 450 BP, `[s]ince 3 is the numeral of Heaven and 2 that of the Earth, sounds in the ratio 3:2 harmonise as Heaven and Earth.'59 The importance of official music in ancient China and its connection with irrefutable truths is also demonstrated by the establishment of a Music Bureau (Yuefu
)) under the Imperial Office of Weights and Measures (141-87 BP). The Bureau's brief was to standardise pitch, supervise music and build up musical archives.60 More importantly, for over 2000 years of Chinese imperial history (221 BP - 1911), one set of musical practices was identified by ruling-class ideologues as the `right music'. Ya-yue ( `elegant music'), as it was called, refers both to court music of that long period and, more particularly, to court music associated with Confucian philosophy.61

The music of imperial Chinese courts, especially ya-yue (`elegant music'), was, as we just saw, related to the cosmic values of the numerals 2 and 3 which, in their turn, were related to notions of heaven and earth, male and female, Yang ( ) and Yin ( ), etc. Ya-yue was certainly regulated by strict rules of performance, not only in terms of detailed stage positions for instrumentalists and dancers, but also with regard to tonal norms. Intricate division and subdivision of genres in terms of both musical style and audience type illustrate further aspects of complex codification, as do the number of ancient texts setting out the history, aesthetics and metaphysics of imperial music-making. These sources also imply that knowledge of such intricacies was important for those producing and consuming the `elegant' music, whose history could be traced back to what was, even then, the distant past of an ancient dynasty.62 Moreover, imperial Chinese music could be reproduced quite consistently from one performance or generation to another, not only because of the many treatises codifying its aesthetics and practice, but also because certain types of notation were used. Although such notation, either as ideograms indicating pitch or as tabulature for string instruments, was probably used less prescriptively than the sheet music followed by classical musicians in the West, it at least helped ensure that singers and musicians could make the music they composed or performed conform adequately to prescribed patterns.

Similar hierarchies of music are found in written sources from other `high' cultures. For example, to qualify as art music (i.e. as belonging to the `Great Tradition'), Indian performing art, be it from the North or South, must, as Powers (1995:72) points out, satisfy two main criteria.

`Firstly it must establish a claim to be governed by authoritative theoretical doctrine; secondly, its practitioners must be able to authenticate a disciplined oral tradition of performance extending back over several generations.'

The important concept here is doctrine ( ~stra ), more specifically sangÿta-~stra (musical doctrine). For Indian music to qualify as doctrinally correct, it must adhere to at least one canonical point: melodic construction should be governed by one of the tradition's raga s .63 This rule is so important that the proper term for correct musical practices, astriya-sangit (`doctrinal music'), is less frequently used than r~gdar-sangit (music based on a raga). Indians also often use the English word `classical' when distinguishing raga traditions from popular music practices. The Oxford Concise English Dictionary (1995) defines `classical', qualifying the arts, as:

'serious or conventional; following traditional principles and intended to be of permanent rather than ephemeral value... representing an exemplary standard; having a long-established worth.'

• Calling astriya-sangit or r~gdar-sangit `classical music' is in other words quite appropriate because not only do buzzwords of higher and lasting value occur in the connotative spheres of both terms: astriya-sangit and `classical music' also both allude to notions of tradition, doctrine, convention and learning. Besides, astriya-sangit 's qualification as scientific or knowledgeable rhymes well with European-language equivalents of classical music, like musique savante , musica colta , música culta , música erudita, E-Musik , serious music and art music'.64 Unlike most types of `popular' and `folk' music, the musical practices qualified by such epithets as classical are all associated with doctrinal texts codifying the philosophy, aesthetics, performance, interpretation, understanding and structural basis of the music in question.
• To cut a long story short, the division of music in Western culture into categories of art or classical and folk or popular has numerous parallels and forerunners. It is even possible that elements of Mesopotamian theory passed via Greek and Arabic scholars into the metamusical mindset of medieval clerics and their trichotomy of musics.65 This trichotomy consisted of musica mundana (the music of the heavens, of spheres in the universe), musica humana (music providing equilibrium of soul and body and instilled by liturgical song) and musica instrumentalis (the singing and the playing of instruments that were at the service of the devil as well as of God). As Ling (1983: 97) explains:

'[I]n the world of heavenly light, the harmonious and well-tuned music of eternity is heard. Its opposite is the unbearable noise and dissonant, discordant music of hell. Both heaven and hell exist on earth: the music of heaven is reflected in liturgical chant --it is organised, well-measured and based on science and reason. All other music is of the devil, being chaotic, ill-measured and uneducated.'

• Since musica mundana was an entirely metaphysical idea (the music of the spheres, of heaven, of God's perfect creation, etc.), the real world contained only two sorts of music according to the aesthetic and religious precepts of the church fathers: (1) musica humana as the uplifting liturgical song of Mother Church and of God's representatives on earth and (2) musica instrumentalis as all other music, be it of the devil or of God. This basic dualism of musics changes character quite radically as part of the lengthy and complex process by which the value systems of feudal and ecclesiastical élites are supeseded by those of the ascendant bourgeoisie. It is important to understand these bourgeois music values because they have been at the basis of much discourse about music in Western institutions of education and research since the mid nineteenth century. These values of the musically Good, Beautiful and True still hold sway in many of our musical institutions and still exert a strong influence on what sort of meanings, if any, those of us who see ourselves as educated think that music can carry.

`Music is music'

• The notion of absolute music and of its superiority is probably the most striking feature of institutional music aesthetics in the Western world. Hegel, for example, made the following distinction between the musical values of the initiated and those of the average punter.

'[W]hat the layman (Laie) likes in music is the comprehensible expression of emotions and ideas, something substantial, its content, for which reason he prefers accompanimental music (Begleitmusik); the connoisseur (Kenner), on the other hand, who has access to the inner musical relation of tones and instruments, likes instrumental music for its artistic use of harmonies and of melodic intricacy as well as for its changing forms; he can be quite fulfilled by the music on its own.'66

• The most famous absolute music aphorism was formulated in 1854 by Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick who, in his treatise On Musical Beauty (1854), wrote: `Music's complete content and total subject matter is nothing other than tonal forms in movement.'67 Since then, similar views of music have ruled the roost in Western art music circles to such an extent that some composers whose `tonal forms in movement' clearly relate to `other subject matter' have denied any such relation. Stravinsky (1882-1971), for example, once quipped that his music expressed nothing but itself, implying that stage works of his (Petrushka, The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, for example) were `pure' music.68 It may be true that Stravinsky, like David Bowie, frequently recast his public persona but the very fact that he saw fit, even just once, to do so from the standpoint of musical absolutism suggests that adopting that view may have advanced his artistic credibility in influential circles. This is certainly what Mahler (1860-1911) once felt compelled to do: having already written programme notes to his first three symphonies, he is reported to have raised his glass at a meeting with Munich illuminati in 1900 and to have exclaimed `death to all programme music'.69
• The pressure on composers to conform to the notion of absolute music throughout the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. For example, famous film composers like Korngold (1897-1957) and Rózsa (1907-1995) lived double lives: they felt compelled to separate their `music for music's sake' from their work for the movies.70 Similarly, until quite recently Morricone sometimes expressed disappointment at the scant recognition he received for his concert music, however widely acclaimed he may have been as a musical pioneer because of his work for the cinema .71 The point is: if the institutional dominance of absolutist aesthetics can affect the lives of widely acclaimed figures like Mahler, Korngold, Rózsa and Morricone, then such a view of music will have exerted just as much influence on lesser figures in conservatories and departments of music(ology).
• For example, when Francès (1958) conducted his pioneering research into the perception of music, he received several indignant responses from his music student informants in which they expressed strong absolutist views, for example:

`No, no and no again. Music is music, I cannot conceive of it as a source of emotional or literary ramblings.'72

• I still (2007) occasionally meet individuals who take unmistakeable offence at the mere suggestion that music can relate to anything except itself. Musical absolutism, it seems, still exerts a strong influence on what many consider music to be capable or incapable of communicating. Obviously, in order to understand the effects of such influence, a prerequisite for presenting viable methods of music analysis, we will need first to examine the notion of absolute music and to explain the reasons for its tenacity.