Musicologists have long pondered the existence of universals in music. Despite the trope of music being a “universal language”, we have yet to find anyone that can indisputably point out concrete characteristics that all types of music have in common. If one were to ascertain one or multiple universals found in music, it would create a basis for which all music is defined on, which would drastically change the way that music study is conducted or regarded.
Ethnomusicologists initially started to question the possibility of universals because they were searching for a new approach to explain musicology that differed from Guido Adler's. Ethnomusicologists worldwide have realized that culture has an important role in shaping aesthetic responses to music. This realization sparked controversy in the community, with debates questioning what people consider music, and whether perceptions of consonance and dissonance have a biological or cultural basis. Belief in universal traits of music was characteristic of nineteenth-century scholarship. Musicologists like Longfellow had written that Music is the universal language of mankind. The search for musical universalities has remained a topic amongst ethnomusicologists since Wilhelm Wundt, who tried to prove that "all 'primitive' peoples have monophonic singing and use intervals. Most musicians and even some teachers of Wundt's time believed that music was a universal language, resulting in the development of scholarship that dealt with only one kind of music and treated all other kinds as true relatives if distant of the Western canon. The assumption seemed to be that the basic principles of Western music were universally valid because it was the only "true" music. Later, by the 1990s it had become increasingly difficult to view the world of music without including some discussion about the notion of universals. Charles Seeger, for instance, categorized his interpretation of musical universals by using inclusion-exclusion styled Venn-diagrams to create five types universals, or absolute truths, of music. Universals in music are as hard to come by as universals in language since both potentially have a universal grammar or syntax. Dane Harwood noted that looking for causality relationships and "deep structure" (as postulated by Chomsky) is a relatively fruitless way to look for universals in music. In "The Universal Language." In The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts Bruno Nettl asserts that music is not a universal language and is more of a dialect because of the influence of culture on its creation and interpretation. Nettl shares the belief with his colleagues that trying to find a universal in music is unproductive because there will always be at least one instance proving that there is no musical universals. Nettl asserts that music is not the universal language, but musics are not as mutually unintelligible as languages. One should study the music of each society in its own terms and learn it individually, referred to as music's dialects rather than music's languages. Nettl concludes his writing by stating that despite the wide variety of musics, the ways in which people everywhere have chosen to sing and play are more alike than the boundaries of the imaginable might suggest. There are other ethnomusicologists that note the invailidity of music as a universal language. For example, George List writes, "I once knew a missionary who assured me that the Indians to whom he had ministered on the west coast of Mexico neither sang nor whistled." and ethnomusicologist David P. McAllester writes, "Any student of man must know that somewhere, someone is doing something that he calls music but nobody else would give it that name. That one exception would be enough to eliminate the possibility of a real universal." As a result of this gamesmanship of ethnomusicologists to poke holes in universals, focus shifted from trying to find a universal to trying to find near-universals, or qualities that may unite the majority of the world's musics.
In Some Thoughts on "Universals" in World Music, McAllester claims there are no absolute universals in music, but there are plenty near-universals in that all music has some tonal center, and establishes a tendency that emits a feeling and the performers of that music influences the way in which that tendency is felt or realized. Music transforms experience and each person feels something when they hear it. Music is the actualization of the mystical experience for everybody. The universality of music exists in its ability to effect the human-mind. McAllester was a believer in near universals, he wrote, "I will be satisfied if nearly everybody does it," which is why he postulated that nearly all music has a tonal center, has a tendency to go somewhere, and also has an ending. However McAllester's main point is that music transforms the everyday humdrum into something else, bringing about a heightened experience. He likens music to having an out of body experience, religion, and sex. It is music's ability to transport people mentally, that is in his opinion a near universal that almost all musics share.
In response to McAllester's Universal Perspectives on Music, Klaus P. Wachsmann counters that even a near universal is hard to come by because there are many variables when considering a very subjective topic like music and music should not be removed from culture as a singular variable. There is a universal understanding that music is not the same everywhere, and a conversation of the universality of music can only be held when omitting the word "music", or "universals", or both. Wachsmann thinks that resemblance may be the main influencer of what we call music and what we don't. His approach, instead of finding a universal, was to create an amalgam of relations for sound and psyche: "(1) the physical properties of the sounds, (2) the physiological response to the acoustic stimuli, (3) the perception of sounds as selected by the human mind that is programmed by previous experiences, and (4) the response to the environmental pressures of the moment. In this tetradic schema lies an exhaustive model of the universals in music." However, Wachsmann does allow that they all had some influenced experience and this belief is echoed by another ethnomusicologist who shares the belief that the universal lies in the specific way music reaches the listener. "Whatever it communicates is communicated to the members of the in-group only, whoever they may be. This is as true of in-groups in our own society as in any other. Does "classical" music communicate to every American? Does rock and roll communicate to every parent?" This relativity goes to prove that people are used to thinking of a certain phenomenon that marries indescribable components that we resemble to what we know as music from our reference. It is also here that Wachsmann acknowledges that part of the problem of identifying universals in music is that it requires a set definition of music, but he doesn’t think that the lack of a definition does not need to “disturb us unduly because usage will decide whether the emphasis is on primarily utilitarian speech or on speech that creates "special time" in a culture. And in any case, phenomena do have a way of belonging to more than one kind of continuum at the same time”.
Folklore specializing ethnomusicologist George List, in his book "On the Non-universality of Musical Perspectives", is in agreement with all within the discussion by saying that there is something unique that music produces, arguing that it always possesses significance to the group that it is produced by/around: “ Whatever communicates is communicated to the members of the in-group only, whoever they may be. This is as true of in-groups in our own society as in any other”. However, List deviates from McAllister, however, in saying that the “weakness” in his idea regarding music as a producer of “heightened experience” is that “it applies equally well to other arts, not only to music”, and therefore cannot be a universality of music, since it can’t be defined as a sole characteristic of music. List takes this thinking to Mcallister’s notion of music possessing tendency as well, stating that “all art forms, one might say every human activity, are patterned and show some form of organization, show ‘tendencies’.” Additionally, List acknowledges the problem of talking about universality in music while there isn’t an objective definition of music itself: “But words, as the [common definition suggests, are lexically meaningful while music is not. Since music is abstract how do we study and assess its production of ‘heightened experience’.”
Dane Harwood, in response to this debate, approached the question of universality in music in his article “Universals in Music: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology”, years after the initial debate, from a psychology perspective. His view is that universals in music are not a matter of specific musical structure or function—but of basic human cognitive and social processes construing and adapting to the real world. He calls this the “information processing approach”, and argues that one must “examine music as a complex auditory stimulus which is somehow perceived, structured, and made meaningful by the human perceptual and cognitive system. From this point of view, we can search for perceptual and cognitive processes which all human beings apply to musical sound, and thus identify some processing universal”. He argues that this would adjust for the differences in context with which music is defined, produced, and observed, which would lead to insight into. “if there are universal cultural processes operating on musical information”. It is here that he takes a more technical turn and points to different musical phenomena and their relation to the way that humans process what they’re listening to. He argues that music is both a cultural and individual phenomenon, yet culture is something individuals learn about their worlds which is shared with others in the group.
One aspect of music is tuning, and recent work has shown that many musical traditions' tuning's notes align with their dominant instrument's timbre's partials and fall on the tuning continuum of the syntonic temperament, suggesting that tunings of the syntonic temperament (and closely related temperaments) may be a potential universal, thus explaining some of the variation among musical cultures (specifically and exclusively with regard to tuning and timbre) and possible limits on that variation.
Ethical concerns
Heightened awareness of the need to approach fieldwork in an ethical manner arose in the 1970s in response to a similar movement within the field of anthropology. Mark Slobin writes in detail about the application of ethics to fieldwork. Several potential ethical problems that arise during fieldwork relate to the rights of the music performers. To respect the rights of performers, fieldwork often includes attaining complete permission from the group or individual who is performing the music, as well as being sensitive to the rights and obligations related to the music in the context of the host society.
Another ethical dilemma of ethnomusicological fieldwork is the inherent ethnocentrism (more commonly, eurocentrism) of ethnomusicology. Anthony Seeger, Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, has done seminal work on the notion of ethics within fieldwork, emphasizing the need to avoid ethnocentric remarks during or after the field work process. Emblematic of his ethical theories is a 1983 piece that describes the fundamental complexities of fieldwork through his relationship with the Suyá Indians of Brazil. To avoid ethnocentrism in his research, Seeger does not explore how singing has come to exist within Suyá culture, instead explaining how singing creates culture presently, and how aspects of Suyá social life can be seen through both a musical and performative lens. Seeger's analysis exemplifies the inherent complexity of ethical practices in ethnomusicological fieldwork, implicating the importance for the continual development of effective fieldwork in the study of ethnomusicology.
In recent decades, ethnomusicologists have paid greater attention to ensuring that their fieldwork is both ethically conducted and provides a holistic sense of the community or culture under study. As the demographic makeup of ethnomusicologists conducting research grows more diverse, the field has placed a renewed emphasis on a respectful approach to fieldwork that avoids stereotyping or assumptions about a particular culture. Rather than using European music as a baseline against which music from all other cultures is compared, researchers in the field often aim to place the music of a certain society in the context only of the culture under study, without comparing it to European models. In this way, the field aims to avoid an "us vs. them" approach to music.
Nettl and other scholars hope to avoid the perception of the "ugly ethnomusicologist," which carries with it the same negative connotations as the "ugly American" traveler. Many scholars, from Ravi Shankar to V. Kofi Agawu, have criticized ethnomusicology for, as Nettl puts it, "dealing with non-European music in a condescending way, treating it as something quaint or exotic." Nettl recalls an angry young man from Nigeria who asked the researcher how he could rationalize the study of other cultures' music. Nettl couldn't come up with an easy answer, and posits that ethnomusicologists need to be careful to respect the cultures they study and avoid treating valuable pieces of culture and music as just one of many artifacts they study.
Part of the problem, Nettl notes, is that the vast majority of ethnomusicologists are "members of Western society who study non-Western music," contributing to the perception that wealthy, white individuals are taking advantage of their privilege and resources. Researchers want to avoid the perception - accurate or exaggerated - that they're entering poorer and less technologically advanced communities, treating residents like test subjects, gleaning all they can, and then penning condescending reports about the quaintness of native music.
Researchers are optimistic that increased diversity within the field of ethnomusicology will help alleviate some ethical concerns. With more fieldwork of Western music and societies being conducted by researchers from underrepresented cultures - a reversal from the norm - some believe the field will reach a happy equilibrium. Author Charles Keil suggests that as "more of 'them' may want to study 'us,' a more interested anthropology will emerge ... in the sense of intersubjective, intercultural ... critical, revolutionary." American ethnomusicologist and Wesleyan University professor Mark Slobin notes that most ethical concerns stem from interactions that occur during fieldwork between the researcher and the informant, or member of the community being studied. Nettl, in a 2005 paper, described the feeling of being an outsider approaching a community - in this case, Native American - that he wanted to study. He said ethnomusicologists often face feelings of trepidation as they attempt to get to know the local populace and culture while attempting to avoid being exploitative. Researchers have different methods, but Nettl's is to be patient, as he obeys a Native American man's instruction to "come back and see me next Tuesday," even though the man has plenty of free time and could sing to Nettl in the moment.
Another way to ensure ethnomusicologists gain a complete understanding of the community they're studying is simply to spend more time in it. In 1927, George Herzog spent two months with the Pima tribe in Arizona, an amount of time that would be considered short by today's standards - where periods of fieldwork can often last longer than a year. But Herzog recorded several hundred songs during that time, establishing a precedent for increasingly long field studies that have yielded more and more recordings. A lengthy period of fieldwork isn't useful, though, without proper techniques for ensuring the researcher gets a representative sampling of the music in a community. When he worked with the Blackfoot people, Nettl said he wasn't too concerned with whether the singer teaching him about Blackfoot music was good or bad, but did assume he would be representative of all Blackfoot singers. But Nettl soon gained a new perspective, and "no longer assumed that all informants in an indigenous society would tell me the same thing; I had discarded the idea of essential homogeneity." Despite discarding this assumption, Nettl acknowledges that by only interviewing one person, he is relying heavily on that person's ability to articulate a whole society's culture and musical traditions.
There are myriad other ethical considerations that arise in the field, and Slobin attempts to summarize and explain some that he's come across or heard about. Ethnomusicologists may face dilemmas related to their roles as archivists and historians, such as whether to purchase a rare, one-of-a-kind instrument and preserve it, or leave it with musicians who created it. They may encounter controversy over whether they are allowed to watch, participate in, or record various songs or dances, or over who should be allowed to view videos or other products of fieldwork after the researcher has returned home.
There is a broad discussion of ethical discourses and practices in the study of world music by ethnomusicologists. In recent ethnomusicological literature, the term “cosmopolitan” has been invoked to refer to “cultural formations that are… always simultaneously local and translocal”. In the present chapter we give attention to ethical issues surrounding the study of music in an increasingly cosmopolitan age, one in which both people and the music they transmit are simultaneously local and translocal. Ethnomusicological engagement with musics in a cosmopolitan age has transposed long-standing ethical issues into increasingly complex contexts as well as raising new considerations altogether. Philosopher K. Anthony Appiah has proposed that two moral strands intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism: One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences… There will be times when these two ideals - universal concern and respect for legitimate difference - clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.
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