Music is not a Universal Language

Music does NOT communicate in the same way to all people, especially across cultures. Music is indeed like a language -- songs are meaningful because we learn associations from the context in which we are raised. But those meanings are bound up in a culture, just like the words and grammar of a group's particular way of speaking. For instance, many of us assume that songs in a minor key imply sadness. In reality, there is nothing built into the notes of a minor scale that automatically makes the listener sad. Rather, such "sadness" is learned because minor keys are often played at times of disappointment, longing, or fear. Many of us grew up watching movies in which the soundtrack went to minor in order to portray something sad: the hero suffers a setback, or the lovers quarrel. If you took a minor-key song to someone not raised on sad-song movies (which is getting harder to do in the 21st century), she would not necessarily feel sad.

In fact, the opposite thing can happen. Happy and joyful music from some cultures sounds miserable to others. In an earlier post I mentioned a missionary colleague in the Philippines who was helping churches to make recordings of their translated hymns. The church members told her that many of the long-time standards sounded more like funeral music to them. "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" was one of those sad-sounding songs! What a previous missionary assumed was a joyous and triumphant melody did not fit the associations with those emotions in this particular culture.

That's the main danger that ethnodoxologists are trying to avoid. If church leaders assume that music is a universal language, then they may unknowingly introduce songs that miscommunicate. Those who cross cultures need to learn the meanings of a culture's music, just like they have to work at understanding the communication patterns of a new language.

My friend Robin Harris wrote that Longfellow was the first to call music a "universal language" in 1833. (See her article on page 82 in Worship and Mission for the Global Church.) Unfortunately, this assumption has done a lot of unintended damage over the past two hundred years. But the results of this misunderstanding of how music works are not limited to the church. It's all over popular music, too.

Which leads us to ask: What exactly is "perfect" harmony? Is harmony even a universal concept? And, if so, which of the cultures represented in this video sings harmony in a way that should replace the harmonic singing styles of everyone else?