What is Universal about Music?

I've gone on record saying that music is not a universal language. That's a foundational belief for people in my line of work. If I thought that one song could communicate the same thoughts or conjure up similar emotions in each and every culture, then I wouldn't have spent most of my adult life helping people create new worship songs in their own language and musical styles. Indeed, the discipline of ethnomusicology itself has been dedicated to proving that music is meaningful only within its own particular context -- that is, that people understand and give meaning to music (and other art forms) according to their own systems of language and

behavior. Moving a song from one culture to another is like using words from one language and hoping they will communicate the same thing to a different group of people.

The field of ethnodoxology was also built on the principle that music does not communicate universally. Some of the church's worst historical moments happened when worship songs and liturgical practices were thought to carry universal meaning. Songs and rituals were imported to new places under the assumption that if they worked in one place (usually Western Europe or the USA) then they could work just as well in another (usually Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia). Even worse, that mindset was usually coupled with a colonial attitude that missionaries were bringing a better form of music (or art or culture) to replace inferior forms. People who say that music is a universal language are usually implying that their music is so great that everyone in the world should be able to appreciate, enjoy, and understand it. Ethnodoxologists instinctively stay away from the search for universals in music because they don't want to encourage this kind of musical superiority. Western pop music is doing enough to wash out indigenous and traditional music; the worship of the church should not add to the extinction of local songs.

But that's not to say that there are no universals in music. Obviously, for music to be distinguishable from a set of random sounds there has to be some sense of rhythm or pitch and a structure that sets it apart from noises that happen by chance in nature. And the fact that every culture group has some kind of music leads us to wonder if there is something musical that is fundamentally built into humanity. Dear Reader, this may seem obvious to you. But for years this assertion -- that there might be something universal about music -- has been theoretical thin ice in the fields of ethnomusicology and ethnodoxology. Both of these disciplines have been committed to studying a culture or people group on its own terms -- that is, not comparing (or ranking) them to others. This desire to undo the cultural superiority that often lies behind the assertion that "Music is a universal language" has made us very passionate. It has also made it very hard for ethnomusicologists to even want to look for features that all music system have in common. And it makes it nearly impossible for us to have conversations with other scholars who are earnestly searching for ways to compare music across different cultures.

Of those who have attempted to systematically compare music systems, some have relied on dubious methods and assumptions. Alan Lomax, a renowned curator of traditional music, launched a music comparison project that tried to find connections between songs found in different parts of the world. But unfortunately this Cantometrics effort got correlation and causation mixed up. For instance, Lomax determined that people sang with constricted throats (or sang "rough") because they were prudes. These methodological missteps kind of spoiled the whole idea of a doing global music comparisons for a while. But more recently some ethnomusicologists have been trying to use other methods to discover and describe universal features of the world's music systems. This is the hard part. How does one test and prove that anything about music is consistent across all places and culture groups? Some researchers like Judith Becker have tried to use brain scans or changes in the skin (think of the technology behind lie detectors) to measure individual physical responses to hearing music. (See Becker's article "Ethnomusicology and Empiricism in the Twenty-First Century" in the journal Ethnomusicology, Fall 2009 (53.3) edition.) These studies still assume that the physical responses of listeners come from within specific cultural contexts that make the music meaningful.

Others have tried to analyze the musical sounds themselves, attempting to break them down into fundamental building blocks that can be found everywhere. Recently a group of scholars studied 304 different musical samples from around the globe. (See their article "Statistical Universals Reveal the Structures and Functions of Human Music.") The gist of their conclusion is that there are definitely some aspects of music that are in almost every (if not quite all) of the world's music systems. Granted, that claim may not blow your mind, but it is a significant statement that goes against the grain of the very particular and limited studies that ethnomusicologists tend to do. Michael Tenzer, himself an ethnomusicologist, has also proposed that we find new methods for studying and comparing music from different cultures. In a recent article in the journal Ethnomusicology, he called for a reckoning with the wide-spread sense that there is something innate within music that all humans share. (See "Meditation on Objective Aesthetics in World Music" in the journal's Winter 2015 (59.1) edition.) He states that this is probably most evident in the way that humans experience time, since music seems to be a phenomenon primary linked to and defined by the passage of time. He even suggests that music may be, like mathematics, an aspect of the universe that reveals some deeper significance to life itself.

I hope that ethnodoxologists will follow these recent movements in ethnomusicology and open themselves to exploring universals in music. While comparative music studies should never be used to rank some cultures as better than others, I believe that the time has now passed to let this fear dominate the discussion. Today we live in a post-colonial era when any claims of superiority are automatically suspect. Now is the time to engage with others to look for universals in music systems and see if these can reveal something about our shared human experiences. People in other disciplines have already been doing similar work on music as a universal phenomenon. It would be nice to dialogue with them and learn together. Specifically, I would like to see ethnodoxologists engage with theologians like Jeremy Begbie who are critically and carefully examining how music and theology can reveal things about each other.

Music is meaningful in its specific context. This is what ethnomusicology taught me. It's a principle that also guides my work in ethnodoxology. The fact that music is not a universal language should be a bedrock principle for those engaged in global comparisons and the search for universal features in music. If ethnomusicologists and ethnodoxologists don't engage in these studies, then the research will just go on without us. Those searching for the significance of universals in music will be left without the benefit of this wisdom that cultural systems create specific systems of meaning.