Music Universals, Cultural Diversity, and the Search for Similarity in Music History

The case for connecting diversity and similarity in music history

Our starting point is a conviction: musicology has not thought deeply enough about historiographical challenges. Although a strand within the discipline has long aimed to construct historical narratives, the fact remains that historical musicology lacks a sufficiently robust body of academic positions and theoretical stances on the core questions of historiography — at least when it comes to explaining what has happened in Western music.

Developing a suggestion made by Leo Treitler (1995), we can hypothesize that the main strength of historical musicology — its ability to engage with other fields — has paradoxically produced a deficit of internal self-examination. Treitler describes the situation bluntly:

Musicology has always been a parasitic discipline of sorts, dependent from the beginning on art history for its historiographic paradigms and on literary studies for its paleographic and philological principles. (…) Our borrowing from other disciplines certainly helped to get us going, but it has tended to keep musicology the least reflective of the three fields, the most resistant to theory.

This imbalance is glaringly evident when we compare the sheer volume of published studies on the history of Western music with the number of works devoted to music historiography itself. The scales tip heavily toward the former. Libraries are stacked with hundreds of books that recount what occurred in Western music—they contextualize events within historical frameworks and sometimes even take interpretive positions on the past. Yet these same volumes rarely include a historiographical reflection that lays bare the assumptions guiding their research.

The central gap that our work directly confronts, then, is the absence of visible and clear historiographical positions beneath the surface of historical narration. Filling this gap requires a shift in focus: less attention to questions like “what happened earlier?” and more attention to questions like “how is history told?” or “whose history is the history of music, anyway?”

One fundamental concept in history as a social science is time. Human beings experience time as something profoundly complex, and that complexity reverberates in the cognitive mechanisms we use to think about it — above all, metaphor. By metaphor we do not mean a merely linguistic figure, but rather an imaginative structure of understanding that shapes the way we think. In plain terms, we have a powerful tendency to conceive of time in spatial terms.

We focus on two images in particular: the line of time and the river of time.

Why has the river become such a favored metaphor for time? Some historians argue that the river, as both an image and a metaphor, connects naturally to the Principle of Change because of its constant motion. Time never stops, nor does a river, and the events that now lie in the past once floated downstream before our eyes.

On a deeper level, however, these two explanatory resources share certain fundamental features. The line traces its origin to geometry, the river to an experience provided by nature, but both signify movement, change, and transformation.

No wonder, then, that History makes extensive use of both line and river. The discipline’s main object is what happened in the past, visible through the cleavages — the great changes and transformations — that mark and direct the course of human culture. The trouble is that metaphors are not harmless turns of phrase. They exert a direct influence on the very thing they describe. By choosing certain words to articulate time, we actually reshape our own conception of it.

When we envision historical time as a line or a river, we unwittingly assign every property of these spatial objects to time itself. As a result, the history of Western music has selected from time only those characteristics that fit the river and the line: movement, change, transformation. We have grown accustomed to a History of Western Music made of narratives that explain time as a chain of causes linking great musical works (objects) and great composers (subjects).

Our project aims to complement this dominant picture. We firmly believe that movement, change, and transformation do not exhaust everything that belongs to historical time. Human past, present, and future also include aspects that do not move, that do not change, and that do not transform. Historiography has essentially ignored these dimensions, or brushed them aside as non-historical — echoes of the Hegelian philosophy of History.

What remains stable across geographic and temporal distances? We look for these intercultural constants through the lens of music universals, taking into account how such universals derive from the universals present in every human being.

The debate about universals has been lively in anthropology. We recall the work of Donald Brown, whose influential book Human Universals (1991) provides a useful definition: “Consist of those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that, so far as the record has been examined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history” (Brown, 2004, p. 1).

When we turn to music, we can assert confidently that music exists as a universal human practice. Because we are human, we tend to live collectively, and one expression of that collectivity is making music together. Every musical activity involves an alteration of ordinary experience — an alteration that operates universally. This happens because our human condition is fundamentally communicative and symbolic, shaped by evolution. Among the things we wish to communicate and express (since evolution makes this pleasurable) are emotions, and here music plays a crucial role. We can observe that musical manifestations around the world share some emotional components, because these components correspond to the physiological reactions that human organisms have to such emotions. The forms these emotional expressions take are intimately linked to the capacities of our cognitive apparatus, which directly influences how we perceive sound categorically. That is why universals in music exist: composers and performers apply them intuitively, often without realizing it.

The twentieth century witnessed growing interest in understanding diverse cultures across the planet, drawing on anthropology, psychology, ethnography, sociology, and linguistics. John Blacking (1976) noted that all human cultures possess music, language, and religion as distinctive qualities of being human. From a similar angle, Steven Mithen (2005) maintained that rites, music, and religion are universal elements worldwide. More precisely, Bruno Nettl (1999) argued that all societies have vocal music, and virtually all societies possess some kind of musical instrument.

The number of articles and books on human and music universals continues to grow. Some investigations search for universals in the evolutionary origins of music; others explore the relationship between music-and-language universals, since Noam Chomsky’s theories inspired major research on universal grammar. The cognitive psychology of music has also considered universals each time it questions whether its perceptual findings hold cross-culturally. Providing a summary of the enormous volume of results and debates is beyond the scope of this article and our current efforts.

So what can music universals contribute to music history? Following our project’s methodology, we now bring universals directly into the history classroom. After careful analysis, we highlight three contributions: the first two were fairly predictable, while the third opened avenues we could not have anticipated — especially regarding the cultural and musical diversity of our students.

1. When we read in Plato or Aristotle that certain musical elements altered the behavior of guests at a banquet, or when we read that Giulio Caccini in the late sixteenth century disliked his teachers’ music because he could not understand anything, or when we read that adding a choir to a symphony sparked fierce debate — we confront historical events that, in light of music universals, we could still experience today. The experience would not be identical, but neither would it be radically opposed. We share something with Viennese audiences of the nineteenth century, with Florentine listeners from the 1500s, and with Greek audiences of 400 BC.
2. Traditional music history builds itself upon differences between periods and styles. A student taking a Western Music History course might reasonably conclude that music from the fourteenth century and the music they hear today share nothing. Yet this is clearly false. They share a great deal — even a lot — but the standard history simply does not recognize these commonalities. By integrating music universals, the prior knowledge that any student brings to class can become part of the history lesson and serve a double purpose. Knowledge of rock, for instance, enables a more balanced understanding of fourteenth-century music; understanding of fourteenth-century music, in turn, enriches how a student hears and evaluates rock.
3. Given the vast multiculturalism found throughout Latin American countries, music universals present themselves less as a choice and more as a necessity. The underlying argument is straightforward: different kinds of music are not as distinct as they may appear, because the cultures that produced them are not that different either.

Our continent is home to many musical traditions. Performers, composers, educators, and promoters have reached a certain consensus: we must recognize the existence and validity of different musics, without judging them according to criteria drawn exclusively from the European tradition. These positions have been vital in our context and remain necessary in today’s globalized world.

Colombia, for example, has not only promoted a horizontal appreciation of its various musical traditions but has tried to turn diversity into a strength in its own right. The Colombian government’s Department of Culture launched the National Plan for Music Education (for living together), an initiative designed to guide policies that support music throughout the country. In the document establishing the plan’s principles we read:

The diversity of musical expressions in Colombia is testimony to the long process of miscegenation of the people and the rich variety of geographic regions. (…) This musical diversity needs to be made visible, valued and encouraged so that it can maintain its ability to express and identify the generations of today and tomorrow. (PNMC, p. 2)

This cultural policy naturally reflects the political foundations of the country. Article 7 of Colombia’s constitution states: “The State recognizes and protects the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Colombian nation.” In this context, the principle guiding intercultural relations is cultural relativism — the call to respect, tolerate, and value differences.

Cultural relativism has provided an appropriate response to centuries of colonialism and Eurocentrism. Yet it may now be time to seek more balanced approaches. What concept can complement cultural relativism? Human and music universals could well supply that balance. Here the ideas of Leonard Meyer prove helpful. Meyer writes:

My premise is simple: one cannot comprehend and explain the variability of human cultures unless one has some sense of the constancies involved in their shaping. (Meyer, 1998, p. 3)

François-Bernard Mâche soon after directed this perspective toward music:

Despite a period of excessive cultural relativism, the search for musical universals now seeks to understand on which bases different musical cultures can communicate and interact. (Mâche, 1999, p. 473)

Intercultural music education is an excellent arena for bringing together two complementary positions: change and permanence, diversity and unity, cultural relativism and human universals. Huib Schippers, reflecting on his wide experience in this area, notes that “Music from other cultures can be recontextualized and taught quite successfully in Western institutions, if we find settings and modes of communication that truly connect worlds of sound and perception” (Schippers, 2010, p. 7). Based on our own experience, music universals — approached via psychology, the evolutionary origins of music, anthropology, or linguistics — can function precisely as those modes of communication that bridge the different worlds Schippers mentions. Over the last few years, our Western music history class has become a kind of laboratory, searching for the connections between various worlds of sound and perception, grounded in music and human universals.

To summarize, music history has strongly emphasized constructing narratives around the principle of change, which becomes the main axis connecting distinct works and different composers. As a counterweight, permanence — orbiting the debate about universals in human beings and music — can enrich historical frameworks by including musical experience itself as a legitimate, epistemologically valid agent. Doing so creates active links between the musicians of antiquity and those of us studying the history of music today.

Interrogating universals may also foster communication between different musical cultures, not simply on the basis of mutual respect for differences but by paying close attention to similarities — uniformities that can now be identified within the growing field of music universals. This topic began inside our project as a historiographical meditation on the problem of time, and it is becoming a domain in which we hope to continue exploring: the different ways that cultural similarities can complement cultural diversity.

The implications of this perspective seem to reach beyond music historiography alone. They touch intercultural relations inside and outside music education, conflict resolution, and the formation of a more humane vantage point on today’s globalized planet.