The Universal Language: Universals of Music Ethnomusicologist’s Backlash “Music is the universal language of mankind,” Longfellow had written. But when | asked a new graduate student “What do you expect to doas an ethno- musicologist?” and she said, without hesitation, “To study universals,” I was a bit dumbfounded—not only because I had always questioned whether there was such a thing as universals, but more because it hadn’t occurred to me ever to give them pride of place in our discipline. [n 1970, this student’s statement sounded anachronistic, for in my college years, about 1950, the idea that there was much that all cultures shared was presented as ancient and abandoned history. If universals were here again, rearing their heads, anthropology and ethnomusicology must have come full circle. Belief in universal traits of music was characteristic of nineteenth-century scholarship. Wilhelm Wundt, one of the last to have tried his hand at a com- plete culture history of the world, said that all “primitive” peoples have mono- phonic singing and use intervals rather like those of nineteenth-century West- ern music, major and minor seconds and thirds, singing that came from speech in which the duration of unwavering pitch, the note, became suffi- ciently long to be perceived and repeated (1911: 4:464-66). Most musicians of Wundt’s time and later, too, were probably attracted to such a view, and even some teachers of music appreciation in North America as late as the 1980s might have been quite prone to consider music as a “universal lan- guage.” In contrast to the languages of the world, which were mutually un- intelligible, musics of all kinds were thought intelligible to anyone. So, in the46 THE MUSICS OF THE WORLD ances. A musical utterance always consists of more than one minimal unit. ‘These are examples; others would no doubt be equally general. But this sec- ond category of universals still does not tell us how humanity has chosen to like the first type, it mainly tells us simply shar humans structure its musi have music. Fora third and somewhat more realistic approach, we ask whether there is anything that is found in each musical system, in the music of each soci ety; whether, thus, there is a way in which all musics are (rather than saying that all music is) in some way alike, whether there are any characteristics or traits present somewhere in all of them. First the sound of music, with the caveat of incomplete data. All cultures have singing, and some (if sometimes very rudimentary) instrumental music. In the vast majority of vocal musics, the chief melodic interval appears to be something in the very general range of a major second, Intervals of that gen- eral scope, including anything from three to five quarter tones, surely make up the bulk of the world’s melodic progressions. Progressing consistently by half or quarter tones is exceedingly rare, as is progression mainly by thirds and fourths (found, though, here and there, as in some Andean musics). In the vast majority of cultures most musical utterances tend to descend at the end, but they are not similarly uniform at their beginnings. All cul- tures make some use of internal repetition and variation in their musical ut- terances, and all have a rhythmic structure based on distinction among note lengths and among dynamic stresses. All of the mentioned features are uni- versals in the sense that they exist practically everywhere, but significant uni- versals also in another sense: They would not have to be present in order for music to exist, and thus are not simply a part of the definition of music. It would, for example, be conceivable for a musical system to use only perfect fourths, or only notes of equal length, but actually such a music doesn’t exist. Evidently humanity has decided not only to make music but, despite the vast amount of variation among the musics of the world, to make music in a par- ticular set of ways. There is, in other words, some kind of a universal gram- mar or syntax of music, perhaps somewhat like that of language. Universals in the conceptualization of music and in musical behavior are harder to isolate, but let me try a short list. Surely significant among them must be the association of music with the supernatural. All known cultures accompany religious activity with music. McAllester (1971: 380) sounded a similar note when he said that everywhere “music transforms experience.” Further, there is the conception of music as an art that consists of distinct units of creativity, which can be identified, by place in ritual, by creator or per-