Culturally determined?

A couple of months ago I was in a gathering of academics when the subject of music came up: they all agreed that responses to music are culturally determined, i.e. the way a piece of music makes you feel depends on where you’re from and how you were raised.  (And this although most of them were Wagner fans!)  I was disagreeing quite strongly in my head, but they were all lovely people, all knowledgeable and senior to me, and in any case the conversation moved on so I didn’t get round to saying anything.  However, I felt they were so obviously wrong that, unfortunately, ideological motives must have been involved – cultural relativism, of course: the strong taboo that educated Westerners tend to feel against saying anything that might claim a wider appeal, let alone superiority, for Western culture – the reflexive urge to be apologetic for it.

I believe one can easily prove that a high proportion of anyone’s response to music is determined by simple mathematics and biology.  Vibrations that cause ‘harmonious’ chords are evenly proportioned in their frequency, and thus sound restful; those that cause ‘discords’ are uneven and sound, well, discordant.  It doesn’t need me to say this, others have said it far better.  Few would disagree, either, that responses to certain basic musical gambits are physical.  Coming back to the same key you started in sounds predictable, moving to an unrelated one causes surprise; ratcheting the notes or harmonies upwards sounds like effort, bringing them swooping down sounds like relaxation, etc. – to say nothing of the obvious relationship of rhythm to a heartbeat, relaxed or stimulated.  Surely one doesn’t need much cultural training to recognise that the repeated incomplete downward scales in the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony sound like heartbreak, or, to stay with Tchaikovsky, that the upwardly striving chord sequence in the Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker, followed by the complete scale plunging downwards, is a musical orgasm.  All one needs, I would suggest, is a working pair of ears that hasn’t been deafened to natural stimuli by the exceedingly limited (but excessively loud) repertoire of techniques to be found in contemporary pop music.

I think Western classical music, like Western science and art, became increasingly ‘naturalistic’ from the Renaissance onwards while most musical traditions remained more stylized.  While most art styles of the world have worked by encoding a viewpoint or message about the object being depicted, Graeco-Roman and Renaissance art approaches more closely to depicting the subject simply as it is.  While the Greek theory of the humours and planetary influences, and the Chinese theory of the elements, developed a highly theoretical model of how the human body worked based on a limited number of observations, modern Western medical science multiplied the observations and brought the theories much more into line with physical fact.  In the same way, the supposed differences in ‘mood’ between the different modes of ancient Greek music (whereby the Dorian mode was supposed to be martial, the Lydian mode lascivious), or between Indian ragas, really are culturally determined: you have to be immersed in that culture’s way of hearing to appreciate them, and the palette of visceral emotions they express is subtle and quite limited.   The system of keys and modulations in western classical music, on the other hand, has allowed music to ‘play’ on the instrument of the listening body in ways that are much more blatantly stimulating as well as subtle.

This is not to say that other musical traditions are inferior or deserve to be taken over.  Good art is good art wherever it comes from.  But the idea that you can only ever appreciate a piece of music if you are fully conversant with the culture it comes from is unnecessarily defeatist about the ability of music to be an ‘international language’ bringing peoples together – and quite condescending, for instance, to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean musicians who have become some of the foremost practitioners of Western classical music.

Am I being controversial, or stating the bleeding obvious?