The dominant paradigm in the music American children learn has been informed mostly by European classical tradition, in which music is written by a composer in order to be performed by meticulously trained performers who have devoted themselves to learning the extreme ranges of the instruments they play (and here I include the human voice as an instrument). These performers are required to perform the music exactly as written. Any attempt at personalizing a performance is strictly regulated by an unwritten code known to an elite who recognize the boundaries of the narrow band of permissible deviation, which is usually limited to speed, volume, or nuance. Improvisation is virtually unheard of—if you want to improvise, I hear there’s room in the jazz world, but you have to memorize a land-mine map there, too.
As a result, there has come to be a division between those who “perform” music and those who “listen to” music, and furthermore, there has come to be a “right” way and a “wrong” way to perform music. And those who listen to the music have come to be expected to discern when it is being done rightly or wrongly.
And so we have this kind of story:
A adolescent male has been dragged to the symphony by his parents. Unaccustomed to the dynamics and complexities of symphonic music and feeling both trapped and assaulted, he sits in the audience none too happily, complaining about the music loudly enough to be heard by the patrons around him. Finally, a man behind him leans forward and says to him, “Young man, it is not the music that is on trial here; it is you.”
Because of the music that has become our standard of excellence, our culture tolerates the opinion by some who have taken upon themselves the role of judge that it is okay to put our young on trial for its tastes. It is a foregone conclusion that the music in the western canon is above reproach, and God help those, especially the still-impressionable, who do not wish to forego the conclusion. Creativity seems to have little to do with “genius” in some circles.
And because we have self-appointed arbiters of who is and is not a repository of talent, people such as my old boyfriend Ken (who would not sing so much as a note in front of any living person) and my friend Marge (who, after raising a family of five to adulthood, finally decided, despite the scoffing of her parents, to learn to dance and sing and play) have been told by teachers who have deemed themselves fit to judge, “You have no musical talent, and you shouldn’t sing.”
Pacifist that I am, I believe that any music teacher who has ever told any student such a thing should be taken out and flogged. They are guilty of assault—and sometimes murder—of spirits of children, and I, for one, have the lowest contempt for them.
For all of its ability to evoke sounds from the rapturous to the heartbreaking, from the most thunderous crescendos to the barest of whispers out of pieces of brass and wood and string and stretched hide, western classical tradition has empowered people to take it upon themselves to judge young people as unfit to perform one of the basic needs of the soul.
Western European-based culture, because it has the products of “masters” and “virtuosos” to which to compare the output of its learners, is particularly prone to such arrogance. (A classical singer recently told me that she sang “legit” music. What did that make the music that we sing?)
But other cultural traditions, though sometimes less “civilized,” are far less barbarous. Let alone that they have no performing elite, they have no “performers” at all, for all perform. There is no “audience,” for all must listen to one another. In such places, the product is far less important than the process.
Monoculturalism, in western culture, perpetuates elitism. Multiculturalism exposes people not only to music from non-western sources (indeed, grammar-school textbooks on my shelf make it clear that such music was already plentiful in our curricula back in the 1920s) but to inclusive ways of presenting and performing music, so that all learners have a role and none are ascribed the curse of talentlessness.
There is an adage popularly understood to come from Zimbabwe which says, “If you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing.” As a linguistics major, I learned that there is no substantive difference, physiologically, between what is happening when we talk and when we sing; it’s basically a matter of sustaining pitch and monitoring tone color. If we embrace this truth and then add to it the rich heritage of western repertoire as we educate ourselves about the musical world, then we are no longer being monocultural about our approach to music, and our “world view” will truly embrace the world.
It is then, after we have transcended elitist thinking, that it finally becomes meaningful if we add to our canon selections from the repertoires of other cultural traditions, and the prefix in “multiculturalism” becomes not only literally true for us, but, more importantly, spiritually true.
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