Noise and Spirit by Anthony B. Pinn

Author:Anthony B. Pinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2003-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Music: A “Supreme Mystery”

In spite of his primary interest in what is usually termed “Western classical music” and his own lifelong passion for Richard Wagner, the French anthropologist and mythologist Claude Lévi-Strauss offers a helpful orientation for understanding how any music works in our physical and cultural lives. Lévi-Strauss sums up his respect for musical modes of expression by saying it is “the supreme mystery of the sciences of man.” All other disciplines can find in music’s unique expressions a key to progress in all other fields of life.4 Why is this so? A full answer would require that we range across Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume work, Introduction to a Science of Mythology, and other writings in his voluminous corpus. Let us take just two major points that are crucial for understanding the mystery of music.

First, music works on us simultaneously, according to Lévi-Strauss, through two important matrices in which we all live, two kinds of webs or textures. He says that music operates as “two grids” in our lives.5 One of these grids is physical. The rhythm of music works on us by engaging our organic physicality. In utilizing organic rhythms, music is of nature, having to do with our pulsing, pounding, breathing being, exploiting the regularities of bodily existence that are at work during rest, work, or dance. The other grid is cultural. Here, Lévi-Strauss does not mean words and lyrics, but the way musical sounds, along with rhythm, tend to be organized in terms of a scale. From his intercultural perspective on music, he stresses that the intervals between sounds, and the number of those sounds parceled out to various beats, are particularly important, for the number of intervals vary from one culture to another and carry distinctive meanings in different cultures.

When we listen to music—and whatever the lyrics may connote to us—we are caught up in an experience that is simultaneously physical and cultural. Our bodies and minds are played together on these two intersecting grids, and it is part of the power of music to engage and enliven the listener on both. But this is only the first point of Lévi-Strauss’s discussion on the mystery of music. The second point concerns his understanding of “the musical emotion.” Lévi-Strauss’s description of the musical emotion need not be taken as the universally valid one for all peoples and contexts. He reminds us, however, of another trait of music, which will be of special importance for understanding rap music’s power.

Recall that music listeners are being operated on, so to speak, in both their physical and cultural matrices, along those two grids. Musical emotion arises from the way that composers and players of music work those grids, seeking to promote pleasure, beauty, and intrigue in listeners. In particular, composers withhold or add more or less than listeners anticipate on the basis of patterns they think they can guess, but which they are “incapable of wholly divining.”6 There is a tension, in other words, between the expected and the surprising. Sometimes the surprises are minor, other times they are more dramatic.

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