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Blacking, Professor John – How musical is man?

In any society, cultural behavior is learned; although the introduction of new skills may represent an intellectual breakthrough, the learning of accumulated skills does not present essentially different or more difficult tasks to the members of different cultures. If there is a pattern to the difference, it is that Americans have to learn more about less. This means that they must learn less than the Bushmen about some things.

Problems in human societies begin when people learn less about love, because love is the basis of our existence as human beings. ……………

The hard task is to love, and music is a skill that prepares man for this most difficult task. Because in this respect every generation has to begin again from the beginning, many composers feel that their task is to write new music not as if they were designing a new model of automobile, but as if they were assessing the human situation in which new automobiles are made and used. The task of designing new automobiles is basically a technical and commercial problem that may be compared to writing incidental music in the style of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, or Debussy. Provided a person is brought up in a certain social class, with adequate emotional opportunities, writing music in the style of Tchaikovsky could be learned without great effort and carried on from one generation to another, like many other cultural skills.

Although a composer might have the greatest respect for Tchaikovsky's music, if he were aware of and concerned with the contemporary task of being human and wanted to say something about it in his music, he could not reproduce that sort of music in a society whose tasks are different from Tchaikovsky's. (Stravinsky's Le Baiser de la Fee may have begun as a rehash of Tchaikovsky, but it turns out as pure Stravinsky, and essentially a new work.) Thus if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so: it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

Music is not a language that describes the way society seems to be, but a metaphorical expression of feelings associated with the way society really is. It is a reflection of and response to social forces, and particularly to the consequences of the division of labour in society.