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The
Universal Language of Mankind
We're all
probably familiar with the sentimental quotation from
the poet Longfellow in which he gives voice to the
conviction that "Music is the universal language of
mankind." It is still popular in some quarters, as it
was in the 19th century, to speak of music as a
universal language. But what does that mean?
It doesn't have to mean anything,
really. In fact, it's a lot easier for something to be
universal if it doesn't really mean anything. That way,
everybody can inject their own, equally valid, meaning,
and nobody gets hurt. That isn't exactly what Longfellow
had in mind, I imagine. But that's one of the problems
with the statement. Among several others.
My take on the issue? Well, I see it
this way: Music is every bit as universal as
kick-boxing.
I mean, think about it.
Anybody who wants to can learn
something about kick-boxing. If you look hard enough,
you can probably find an instructor and begin lessons.
You don't have to directly participate, though, to enjoy
the sport. There is always the good old tradition of
sitting on the couch and watching it on television. Now,
there kick-boxing has a bit of a problem, because it is
one of the few sports that don't seem to generally be on
television these days. Maybe if it were repackaged as
"Xtreme" kick-boxing it would have a leg up.
While some of you are running off to
email your neighborhood network executive about righting
this ancient wrong, the rest of you can complain about
the taste of an American public that doesn't appreciate
the finer things in life. Or, you can try a more
grass-roots approach to stirring up appreciation in your
own hometown.
Now, it doesn't matter if you are
black or white, rich or poor, large or small, young or
old, athletically-challenged or athletically
scintillating. You can still connect with the sport. You
can learn its rules, its rich history, its customs,
maybe even ways to innovate it at the cost of
infuriating purists. You can get into arguments in
bars about the best kick-boxer of all time, look forward
to the next tournament, even place bets on your
favorites.
Maybe that's classical music's
problem. Maybe it needs an over-under.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter what
language you speak (it does for purposes of reading this
essay) or what country you're from. Provided the
people who run the sport don't bar you from their
company. Notwithstanding the very human presence
of discrimination you basically have the opportunity to
make the sport your own, internalize its edicts, glory
in the aesthetic beauty of the movements, sharpen your
intellectual teeth on the strategy involved, and relive
the greatest moments in matches from the past.
Somehow, I don't think
Longfellow had that in mind, either, when our
opening citation gushed from his pen.
The problem, I think, is that the word
"universal" is butted right up against the word
"language". Now, a language is something that must
be learned. I didn't just happen to be able to
understand English my first day on the planet. All of
those miserable rules about i before e had to be
learned. Syntax, grammar, the fact that even with
650,000 odd words you still can't just randomly create
your own by throwing together any motley assortment of
letters you want and expecting anyone else in the known
world to be able to figure it out. That, in fact, is the
catch. If you are creating your own private language you
can get the constituent parts to mean anything you want,
by fiat. If you are sharing it with anybody, there will
have to be some underlying logic, even if, as with
English, it seems severely compromised in places. This,
of course, is where custom comes in. The part where
anyone who is part of the English speaking club has to
know that by common convention certain compilations of
words added together mean, in their totality, certain
things. These are figures of speech, or expressions.
Start with a bit of logic, no doubt
inherited in part from the ancestors of your language,
throw in the miracles that happen under common usage and
general agreement to fill in the cracks that no logical
system could account for by itself, and you have a
language, ever evolving as necessary to incorporate the
thoughts, emotions, unique styles, sentiments,
convictions, daily necessities, and urgent text messages
of the people using it. People can pretty much take what
they want from communications in that language; no two
understandings have to be identical, but as long as most
people come to a vaguely similar interpretation, we can
credit that effect as a natural consequence of the way
the medium is used.
There is no particular reason that a
language like Spanish couldn't become a universal
language; provided everyone in the universe began
speaking it.
But what Longfellow hopes to describe,
by calling music a "universal" language, is a situation
where that language is understood automatically--no
effort required. Any language could be universal if
everyone used it in approximately the same way.
But if you are a gooey-hearted Romantic you want to
believe that there is an intimate connection between all
people everywhere and that it can somehow be expressed
in a way that all people everywhere can acknowledge by
instant enthusiastic response. Instant world
peace: Just add music.
Music does seem to have an
advantage over other languages in that respect.
Certain properties of music are responded to in
similar manners by people apparently around the world.
One of the things Longfellow (and he has had plenty of
company) probably liked about music was that it seemed
to obviate pesky grammar. A single tone, unlike a
single letter of the alphabet, can inspire a feeling
in a person: of awe, gentleness, or anxiety, before it
is joined to anything else that might give it a
context. You don't have to study music in a
conservatory in order to appreciate that. While
Longfellow was writing, his fellow Europeans were
writing music that had a rather complex grammar and
syntax. Ironically, it may be one of the obstacles to
appreciating music on this level that a musical sound
itself gives such a reward that it doesn't seem
necessary to investigate further. Then there is
the thinking that harmony itself is a fundamental
reflection of scientifically supported processes; the
overtone series
has been used to justify what seems pleasant to ears
long pacified by custom and tradition. This can lead
to theories that certain musical processes are
intrinsically right; harmonic progressions or whole
formal designs can be justified that way. This
sometimes leads to a great deal of quasi-scientific
"proof" in the form of elaborate and sometimes
convoluted analysis. The obvious exceptions have to be
explained away, of course.
In the nineteenth century, a lot
of people spent a lot of time trying to convince
everyone that what they valued should be universally
acknowledged, and that meaning meant the same thing to everybody.
Some ethnomusicologists take great
pride in debunking the thoughts of dead white European
males that their music must appeal to everybody. When I
was studying for my doctorate, I read an essay which
included an anecdote about a tribe of African bushmen
for whose benefit, no doubt, a piano was hauled in at
great expense so that some Bach could be played on it.
The Europeans expected the Africans to feel edified. It
apparently came as an enormous surprise when the
tribesmen, whose own music is not polyphonic--that is,
there are not several melodies running
simultaneously--found the music to be a bunch of noise.
I won't go all the way with some
of our academics who think that, based on such a
story, it is the height of indecency to believe that
Bach was a great artist whose music ought to be
appreciated even by people outside Bach's own culture.
Just because some bushmen didn't happen to like Bach
immediately does not invalidate his music. A lot of
Europeans don't take to it right away either. If at
all. I also think that, if the bushmen were exposed to
the music more than once, taught something about it,
encouraged to listen to it with eager ears, that they
would be more than capable of coming to terms with it
on some level, if not downright enjoying it. Of
course, if I were among the bushmen, I would want to
know something about their music, too. It is
arrogant to assume that Bach should always get the
last word.
This implies having to learn, which is
ultimately what makes any music comprehensible. If it is
something you grew up with, the learning was done by
osmosis, or was replaced by familiarity. If not, you
will have to make a conscious decision to try to come to
terms with the music in some way by patient study. This
is not, apparently, one of mankind's strongest drives.
Which is why the idea of instantaneous
universal appeal is so attractive. The idea of all of
us, even all of nature, being charmed by the same tune.
"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast", right?
Well, not really. The original reads
"charms to soothe the savage breast"--in other words,
humans, not animals. I don't know where the quote got
misquoted but it wouldn't surprise me if it was during
the 19th century. On the other hand, before we accuse
William Congreeve, the quote's author, of too much 18th
century rationalism, let's peruse the rest of the
sentence:
"'Music hath charms to soothe the
savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."
OK, maybe we are being a bit
figurative here. A friend of mine, incidentally, had an
experience in Italy where he played his pipe for some
sheep and they came from some distance to listen. When
he switched from a pastoral melody to some Bach, the
sheep left in a hurry. I guess their musical taste needs
some refinement.
In any case, if we take the approach
that universality must precede any attempts to
understand, we get a nice warm feeling of being on the
same page with everybody. But the minute somebody
doesn't get something, we have to give up on our
pleasant dream. Who are we to impose anything on anybody
else?
The other side of the coin is learning
to decode the languages of others. Some of those others,
particularly in the animal kingdom, will just assume you
know what they are talking about--almost as though they
thought they were speaking a universal language. I don't
know about you, but If I'm stuck in the desert, and I
hear a rattlesnake rattle its tail, I'm getting out of
there. If some rogue rattlesnake decides to blink three
times instead, I could miss the chance to save my skin.
Somewhere along the route, this snake must have learned
that the rattle signifies ready-to-strike capability,
not "mom, I want a drink of water." If I'm into
survival, so did I. The snake might fare better if it
changed up its signals. They might even let it play for
the Mets. But it opted for uniformity instead, either
through laziness, or because it just seemed right
somehow. I'm no naturalist, so I could be wrong about
this. But why let facts get in the way of a good theory?
In other words, languages have to be
founded on some kind of common bonds in which things
mean roughly the same thing no matter who is doing the
talking. There are millions of these little languages
out there, spoken and unspoken, some spoken by a few and
some by many. And the episode with the snake suggests
that they don't have to be learned at the university
level. My cat has a language of tail twitching and
eye-closing. Most of it's pretty obvious, though I have
yet to decode everything. That doesn't mean the certain
movements don't consistently signify certain things to
my cat--in other words, there is a language being used.
It also doesn't mean I will immediately understand
everything it is trying to communicate without the
patience to learn it.
During the nineteenth century, a
German musicologist named Eduard Hanslick decided that
music didn't--in fact, couldn't--mean anything at all.
His reason? Not everybody could agree on what it
expressed, and therefore, without universal agreement,
there could be no meaning.
I'd like to see Eduard get along in a
Democracy.
What Hanslick's determination leaves
out, of course, is the chance that many people will
roughly agree on how a piece of music makes them feel
without being able to settle on the same specific
adjectives, or the same intellectual constructions. His
analysis leaves aside the possibility that there can be
a series of meanings, or one that can't be pinned down
like a butterfly on cardboard, every last quark of
meaning mined to exhaustion. Music has no chance to be a
symbolic language under his scheme. But then, how far do
we want to go in this direction? If it is all symbols,
all mystery, aren't we back to everybody deciding for
himself what a piece of music is hiding in its tones?
This kind of thing didn't really
bother our nineteenth century brethren. It is the
heritage of the 20th and 21st centuries to worry about
diversity and plurality to an unprecedented extent, and
to wonder if indeed, "things [will] fly apart, the
center cannot hold."
Longfellow did not even begin to be
bothered by this. In fact, if we look at the rest of the
sentence, still woefully ripped from its context, we see
poetry accorded a ubiquitous status as well:
"Music
is the universal language of mankind -- poetry
their universal pastime and delight."
In other words, everybody's doin' it.
And since Longfellow was a poet, after all, I'm sure it
did his ego good to think that what he valued could be,
even would be, appreciated by everybody. It sure
is nice, sometimes, to feel that the entire universe has
slipped into the same key, a nice, cozy G major with no
dissonance and no criticisms.
And if you want to feel that way for
about five minutes, I'll look the other way and whistle
Brahms or something.
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