The enlightened people who seek to promote international understanding through cultural exchanges are up against a greater problem than those who wish to unify the world through political pacts or economic treaties. While the politicians and the economists have to wrestle with factors which can be objectively assessed, the artists and writers have to be capable of an emotional metempsychosis in order to understand the very basis of the art or music of another country. This, it might be pointed out, is not easy to achieve in spite of transoceanic or transcontinental encounters. This is not to dismiss such encounters as the East-West Music conference or the recent Indo-Iranian meet as of no importance, but only to underline the fact that they may be of importance only in the measure in which they grapple with the fundamental issues implied in such encounters.
To the majority of us these encounters mean nothing more than handsome and polite compliments paid to the cultural and artistic traditions of the countries which participate in them or to the artists who have taken up the task of expounding the mysteries of their respective music. It is common, on such occasions, for the exponent of each country to exhort the other countries to witness to the greatness of his country’s music and concede part of that greatness to the other country, if only for the fact that the other country has thought it fit to invite his country to the conference.
Very often the representatives at such conferences do nothing more than talk at each other, without realising that something more is needed for the meeting of minds than an able advocacy of their own system of music or thought or values. In fact, it may be said that international encounters can succeed only to the extent to which the exponents of each system are able to transmigrate into the systems of the others. To do this they do not need to abdicate their traditions or abandon their intellectual positions. All that they need to do is to make the imaginative leap that would transpose the systems of thought of another into the matrix of their own thinking without violence or distortion to either. This is possible; or, this must be possible. We have the efforts of anthropologists to convince us that such imaginative leaps are possible. For, what does an anthropologist do if he does not transpose the beliefs and attitudes of the earlier societies into the structure of his own social attitudes and beliefs without violating either. Hence if a true assessment of international encounters on art or music is to be made, it can be made only by men of an anthropological bent of mind.
It is in this context that one finds the views of the French anthropologist Levi-Strauss particularly absorbing. Levi-Strauss says this to George Steiner who has reported his conversations with the French anthropologist in the ‘Encounter’ of April 1966:
“We all know that music is a means of communication. When we listen to music we communicate with the composer; we communicate with the musicians themselves; and we communicate together in sharing the same emotion between members of the audience. But this kind of language cannot be translated into anything else, except itself. You can translate music into music. You can shape the melody from major to minor. You can even devise a mathematical equation which will permit you to change according to a certain rule the interval between the notes of the melody and it will be a translation of the melody. But you cannot translate music into speech; if you do, you reach the kind of phraseology which does not convey anything of the message of the music itself. This raises, of course, an enormous problem exactly akin to the problem raised by mythology—because there have also been attempts to translate myth into something which is not mythology. But what you arrive at are generally platitudes of the worst kind. Myths are translations of one another, and the only way you can understand a myth is to show how a translation of it is offered by a different myth. So there is something very similar between mythology and music.
The least that the guardians of our tradition and the promoters of international understanding can do is to appreciate the clarity and candour with which Levi-Strauss has stated the problem central to them and to others of their clan. For a start, they could stop talking about the antiquity of their music and its spirituality, and examine the basic intellectual assumptions on which our system of music has been reared. One could only hope that our musical lawgivers would not start at the mention of ‘intellectual assumptions.’ What is meant by ‘intellectual assumptions’ is only the basic matrix of thinking which gives to our music the value we assume that it has. For instance, we assume that our music is valuable only to the extent that it preserves and exploits the tonal penumbra that pertains to each note, and not in its ability to enunciate a note clearly and accurately. In other words, we assume that a note of just intonation is preferable to a note of equal temper. Or, to use the language of Indian musicology, the ‘sruti’ is more important than the ‘swara.’ Now, could we examine the intellectual assumption underlying it?
One of the basic ideas in the Indian attitude to life is the idea of process. Whether as flux or as evolution, this idea persists in all Indian thought. Thus, in metaphysics, the individual soul is supposed to be conditioned by the actions of previous births, and hence its acts are not to be taken as decisive events but as hangover from unremembered acts in a long chain of cause and effect. In ethics, the individual does not act from a knowledge of freedom, but from the compulsions of a process that has prescribed for each his dharma or due conduct. In society, a person functions not as an individual but as a representative of a caste or a social order within a definite social process. Even the gods are not exempt from the operation of this process, whether in the nature of the separate godhead or in the henotheistic organization of the temples. It is therefore no wonder that in music too, this process operates to blur the outlines of a note and make it not a definite event but an ethos.
It would thus be clear that the basic quality of Indian music is connected with the basic attitudes and assumptions of Indian life itself. To expect that the musicians of the West would understand the nature of Indian music without understanding the nature of Indian life is a mistake that only our custodians of tradition and expounders of culture are capable of. It is possible to find out the intellectual positions from which we try to justify or glorify each aspect of Indian music, such as the use of gamakas, the structure of raga, the pattern of the notes etc. etc. This would not mean that our music can be interpreted to the West through a series of intellectual propositions, but that it can be vivified and made significant by such music in the West as has been created from the same intellectual positions. Similarly we should explain to ourselves the intellectual basis of occidental music, before trying to compare it with our music. Would our musicians and musical lawgivers oblige?
AEOLUS, May 1966
Aeolus - Articles and Critiques 