DE LOS DELITOS CONTRA LA HACIENDA PUBLICA Y CONTRA LA SEGURIDAD SOCIAL

The class listens once or twice to a short instrumental piece or excerpt in several contrasting sections such as the theme and first few variations from Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Wagner’s ‘Prelude’ to Act I of Die

Meistersinger von Nürnberg or Debussy’s ‘Minstrels’ (Préludes Book 1, No.

12). No information concerning the title, programme or composer of the music should be given. Each pupil sketches out a possible programme for the music. During the following lesson, a number of the most varied programmes can be read out and the music listened to again. Without some kind of linguistic clue like a title or programme, or some musical hint such as a theme we already know or an instrument we associate with a particular situation—the organ with Church music, say—even members of the same culture and age-group are likely to produce individual musical interpretations.

Because music can be meaningful, but isn’t exactly the same as a language, it seems probable that we cannot always expect to be able to ‘translate’ music or musical meaning from one situation to another. This is another reason why we need to understand something about the culture of the people who have created the music we are listening to. If we wish to understand an unfamiliar form of music as one of its creators might, we have to be aware of any extra-musical associations that imbue the sounds with special meaning. Sometimes these can be quite the opposite of our own stereotypes. For example, in many western operas of the last two centuries, younger male roles have been acted by tenor singers, older men by basses. Similarly, lower-pitched instruments are often used to depict male characters in music. Which of us would say a bassoon, trombone or double bass was naturally lady-like? But, in at least one African culture, the higher-sounding of a set of drums or horns is believed to represent male characteristics. To us, the pitch of a low sound is similar to that of a grown man’s voice; to them, the louder, more assertive sound of a higher instrument is like the stronger, more assertive speech of a man. Lower sounds, they say, are more like women murmuring softly in the background. Whether or not this is an accurate reflection of gender stereotyping in the culture in question, or a more theoretical abstraction used to explain musical practice would lead beyond the scope of this discussion. The point is that this isn’t a case of one analogy being more fitting than the other: both systems have their own logic, and are decoded as such by accustomed listeners.

A second association many of us may share is that, in general, the busiest, more active instrumental parts are the most important. Instruments with slower- moving parts, often those lower in pitch, usually provide the accompaniment. So, in the symphony orchestra, the first violins more often play the tune above a slower-moving double bass accompaniment than the double basses perform with a violin accompaniment. This may seem perfectly obvious to us, but it is not a feature found in music all over the world. A well known exception is provided by Indonesian gamelan music. Gamelan is the name of many kinds of orchestra or ensemble made up principally of tuned metal chime bars and gongs. Very crudely speaking, the higher the pitch of the instrument, the more notes it plays. But every instrumentalist is deemed to be following the progress of a single underlying melody, and the lowest gong is the most important instrument in the ensemble. The occasional tones of the gong structure and underpin the whole performance. Players of the higher instruments decorate the underlying melody by embellishing each step with cleverly thought-out layers of interlocking patterns, and some of them may perform more than twohundred different notes to each note of the lowest gong (Sorrell, 1990:109–19). Listening to gamelan music as to symphonic music, or concentrating on the details of the fast-moving upper instruments, it would be easy to miss the melody at the performance’s heart.

So far then, the necessarily inconclusive discussion of what music is, that is, different things to different people at different times, has led to the proposals that we cannot necessarily apply our own, familiar, definitions of music to foreign

musical sounds, and that basic, fundamental principles which we take for granted in our own music may not be reflected in other kinds of music. Musical communication, it has been suggested, functions unlike linguistic communication. The agent which allows these perhaps uncomfortably negative discoveries to become aids to musical appraisal and understanding is the incorporation of cultural and historical material along with the musical sounds of foreign peoples. If we know what the members of a musical tradition themselves regard as important, what associations their music carries, how they define music, what their instruments are like and what function their music has, we have a better chance of making sense of the sounds we hear.