I just read Brad Miller's wonderful piece at TPM, "Does McCain Understand The Music?", in which he points out that our diplomacy is built around a very narrow set of interests and perceptions:
...Anne Applebaum observed that we usually place our trust in world leaders for "their excellent English or their preference for Scotch whiskey, their interest in 'doing business with us' (in the Saudi case), or in liberalizing--even democratizing--their countries (as in the case of Bhutto)," when those very "western" qualities "are precisely what some of their countrymen hate most about them."
He goes on:
We've made enormous misjudgments because we acted on our estimation of leaders, not an understanding of the societies over which they presided. Norman Mailer claimed, perhaps obnoxiously, to have asked President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, "Don't you understand the enormity of your mistake--you invade a country without understanding its music?"
It's true. I want to talk about this for several different reasons. Follow me below the flip...
A culture's music tells us things about the way that culture understands the world. It tells us things about the way that culture handles meaning, narrative, and ambiguity. It tells us things about the way that culture relates to time, to hierarchy, to history. Similarities in musical organization can give us important clues to diasporic history, can help us recognize relationships that are obscured by political boundaries. When colonial powers failed to understand the music of the countries they occupied, they doomed themselves, and when occupying armies cannot listen to and join the songs of those they occupy, they remain forever hated.
I teach a course on multiculturalism in education at New England Conservatory of Music. I'm pretty far down the academic food chain, so it's unlikely I'll make David Horowitz' list of dangerous professors (although goodness knows I crave the honor!), but I work hard every semester to make my students aware of ethnocentrism in all its forms. Part of this is making sure they are aware of the ethnocentric fallacy, which wiktionary nicely defines as:
the belief that the behavior and beliefs of those in other cultures can be judged from the perspective of one's own culture, thus suggesting that one's own culture is superior to the other.
If we believe that our culture is superior, then it follows that all other cultures aspire to be like us in every way. If "our" music is naturally superior, then other cultures want their music to be just like ours. Since it obviously isn't just like ours, there is only one conclusion to draw: they're trying to be like us, but failing. That is to say, they're inept and incompetent, therefore inferior.
Which is why "understanding the music" is important. We grow up hearing music all around us, and for the most part, it is exclusively the music of the dominant culture. Embedded in the music are all the concepts of time, beginnings, endings, meaning and beauty; embedded in the music are all the historical and geographical connections that work to make cultural depth and resonance. None of these concepts and connections are available for examination; they are "governing assumptions" which do not (indeed, cannot) rise to the surface of our consciousness. Every so often at the Conservatory, I'll get a student who decides early in my class that I am "hostile to Western tradition;" this invariably turns out to be a consequence of my bringing Western tradition's governing assumptions to the surface, asking my class to deconstruct the hidden agendas and values they practice, learn and propagate. Now, I'm not hostile to Western music (as my old mentor Bob Rutman used to say, "I'm not saying Beethoven wasn't great. Sure he was great. But so what?"), but I don't think it deserves any more special a place in world culture than any other heavily subsidized high-art music created by courtly elites (and there are a lot of those, by the way -- there have been many courtly elites). But I digress.
When I am asked what I do for a living, I describe myself, variously, as a teacher, a musician, an ethnomusicologist, a composer, and occasionally as a "retail epistemologist." It doesn't matter what you call me; I do the same thing, regardless of labels. I help people understand the music of another culture, in this case India. Despite being born in the Boston suburbs without a trace of Indian ancestry, my life path led me to immerse myself in the traditions of Hindustani music. I lived in India for six years, and I have studied, taught and performed its music for thirty-one. My wife is Indian (from Tamil Nadu, in South India), and the two of us studied side by side with a master teacher (of whom more in a moment); our daughter, now three and a half, is a paradigmatically crosscultural child.
So I'm an expert on Indian music. But I didn't grow up in India, and none of the cultural connections of its music were osmotically transmitted to me in my childhood in Lincoln, Massachusetts. I had to learn it -- not just repertoire, not just performance practice, but all of the music's "back-story." And this "back-story" includes a lot that is not explicitly musical: the relationships of the mythical and historical characters referenced in song texts, the complex interplay of Hindu and Muslim traditions which gives the music its unique melodic/ rhythmic/ structural character, the cosmology and teleology of Indian culture which are reflected in the music's arc.
By the way, if you think that last one is a bit of a stretch, consider this: Hindu cosmology is cyclical:
In Puranic Hindu tradition, the world goes through a continuous cycle of epochs. Each ascending phase of the cycle from the Kali Yuga to Satya Yuga is followed by a descending phase of equal length back to the Kali Yuga, then another ascending phase which begins it again... Alternatively, it is sometimes supposed that at the end of the descending Kali Yuga, the world will return to the Satya Yuga and begin a new decline.
And Hindustani musical performances are cyclical, beginning with a few soft notes intoned against a sounding drone...and ending with those same notes, fading back into the drone.
Conversely, the crashing final cadences of European symphonic music could only have been conceived by a culture whose underlying teleology and eschatology were built around the notion of a biblical armageddon.
But again I digress. In some ways this is a diary about education. In order to learn Indian music, I not only had to learn about India, I also had to learn an entirely different way of learning. The things I needed to internalize were only occasionally available in books, but more often had to be learned through direct observation, through practice, through nonverbal processes, and through approaches to learning and teaching that were totally at odds with the ways I had previously learned. The core knowledge of this music isn't artifactualized; it is dynamic, a verb, not a noun. A musician in India doesn't "know a raga" in the same way that a Western classical musician "knows a sonata." The two nouns don't match, of course: a raga is not a sonata. But the two verbs don't match either; "knowing" music in India is not the same thing as "knowing" music in the West. Even a catch-phrase like "it's all taught and learned by oral tradition" is misleading, suggesting that a richly complex set of human behaviors can be reified down into a two-word descriptor.
When we say that Indian music is taught through "oral tradition," what do we mean? What do we think we mean? It turns out that oral tradition cannot be understood using the tools of written knowledge; reading a book or an article on oral tradition won't help understand it in any meaningful way. You've got to do it to learn it, and there's no substitute.
I was fortunate. Our teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali, was not just a great singer, but a genuine master of oral tradition. I do not have time or space in this diary to tell the story of how we met and how I began learning from him, but I will say that he taught me to learn, taught me to sing, and taught me to teach. The songs that fill my imagination, the songs I sing in the shower, the way I teach my students -- all of these things are part of a transmission from my guru.
Indignant aside: "Guru" -- there's a word that gets misused a lot. There are "internet gurus" and "marketing gurus" and Karl-Goddamned-Rove is called "Bush's political guru." Let me tell you something: no, he is not. He's just an extremely bad man.
I have a Guru, and he taught me steadily for years. My wife and I are part of something that Indians know as the Guru-Shishya Parampara, the tradition of teacher-to-student transmission; I can trace my musical ancestry back several hundred years, naming names as I go. That's part of the basic training, y'see (not what I was expecting, growing up in the Boston suburbs, I must say). In the first years we worked together, he gave us daily lessons lasting four hours each, and categorically refused to accept any payment whatsoever. When my wife and I brought the subject up, Pandit Devasthali said, "In our culture, the only way we can achieve moksha (liberation) is to teach everything we know to another person. How can I accept money from you?"
Think of all the aspects of worldview, morality, economics and human values that are exemplified in that quote. Now it's obvious that not everyone in India thinks like that...but it should also be obvious that good relationships between cultures, as between individuals, must be built on a willingness to learn and a foundation of respect for differences. America is not alone in its ethnocentrism, but it has the least excuse for its bad behavior and hypocrisy. In my own small way I have tried to combat this through my life and work.
Here's Brad Miller again:
No president understands the music of Cuba, Pakistan, Kenya and on and on. The question is whether they are willing to listen to people who do. Will Senator McCain listen?
Well, we know the answer to that one. Of course not. And despite his craven lapse on FISA, and despite his backhanded treatment of his Islamic followers, I have confidence that Senator Obama will. For what it's worth, if he needs someone who understands the music of India, I'm available.
This diary's a bit disjointed, perhaps, but it reflects some of my thinking on the themes of ethnocentrism, cultural respect, and the possibilities that emerge when we really learn something about other cultures and their ways of doing things. I am not rich in monetary terms, but I have gained a treasure that is literally priceless: I've been blessed with a fantastic teacher and a fantastic partner in learning, and it has made my life's work possible, allowing me to do my bit for understanding between cultures.
I'm grateful to Brad Miller's piece, because it gave me the stimulus I needed to write this in time to publish it today.
Because it was six years ago today that my Guru, Pandit Shreeram Govind Devasthali, died. In his memory, I offer this short glimpse of a master of oral tradition at work, along with an atheist's prayer that the world's people's and their leaders can more deeply and genuinely understand one another's music: