International Council For Traditional Music

Some Problems of Theory and Method in the Study of Musical Change
Author(s): John Blacking

Source: Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 9 (1977), pp. 1-26
Published by: International Council for Traditional Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/767289
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SOME PROBLEMS
OF THEORY AND METHOD IN THE

STUDY OF MUSICAL CHANGE
by John Blacking
Music, music-making, and musical change

The main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the need for a
comprehensive theory of music and music-making, and for studies that
seek to distinguish musical change analytically from other kinds of
change, and radical change from variation and innovation within a
flexible system.
The chief problem in developing a theory of music is to find out if it is
possible to identify an area of "musical" behaviour that differs qualitatively from other kinds of social behaviour. The common-sense view in
many different societies is that music-making is a special kind of behaviour, and that it is more likely to be emotionally rewarding, and even
transcendental (cf. McAllester 1971), than many other social activities.
Ethnomusicological method requires that all "ethnic" perceptions be
taken seriously in defining the parameters of music in any theory of
music making, and so the special qualities assigned to music-making and
musical experience make its symbol systems sociologically and anthropologically problematic. It is therefore inappropriate either to
analyse musical structures independently of the fact that some sets of
musical symbols are more emotionally effective than others, or to
analyse their use in society without attention to the patterns of the
symbols chosen in the course of social interaction. Analysis of the social
situations in which music is effective or not is crucial for understanding
the properties of musical symbols, because it is in these contexts that the
non-musical elements of creation and appreciation can be separated
from the essentially musical; and an adequate theory of music and
music-making must be based on data that cannot be reduced beyond the
'-musical'.
Although there is not yet conclusive proof that there are special kinds
of behaviour that are "musical", it is a useful assumption to adopt in
examining musical change. Music-making should be treated as problematic, and we should resist attempts either to reduce it to a purely
sociological phenomenon or to regard it as an autonomous cultural
sub-system. Music is a social fact; but it is not necessarily like any other
set of social facts. On the other hand, the operation of purely "musical"
socio-cultural processes could not be expected to explain completely
the various activities and products that musicologists and people in
many different societies describe as "musical" or "music" because of
their association with special uses of rhythm, tonality, melody, and
timbre of sound as symbols in communication. Political, religious, or
social meanings may be assigned to musical codes, in such a way that
they cease to have musical significance and can be analysed in much the
same way as any other social activity.
2 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL
What is strictly musical about musical change cannot be treated in

exactly the same way as other kinds of socio-cultural change, and
current sociological and anthropological theories of change cannot be
freely adopted and adapted. Inevitably, 'musical' activities overlap
non-"musical" activities, but they are not wholly interchangeable. If
they were, and if all "musical" activities could be reduced to sociological principles, there would be little point in musicology and ethnomusicology, let alone the study of musical change. We must start with
the assumption that music involves certain unique characteristics at the
level of intentional social action, if not at the level of motor behaviour.
That is, even if it is not accepted that there are specific musical
capabilities common to all normal members of the species, at least we
should look for special kinds of action that are distinguished by members
of different societies as "musical".
Many analyses of so-called musical change are really about social
change and minor variations in musical style, if viewed in terms of the
system affected. If, for example, features of a society's musical system
are that every sect or corporate group has its own associated music and
that novelty of any kind is welcomed, then the addition of new styles and
items through social contacts cannot be regarded as cases of musical
acculturation. They may have no more significance than the introduction of foreign words into a language. Admittedly, the social change may
eventually be followed by changes in the musical system, but they would
have to be demonstrated by more than an accumulation of new sounds.
In my analyses of Venda music, I did not treat the incorporation of
some new styles of music as examples of acculturation or musical
change, because they are regarded by the Venda as parts of their musical
system. There were changes in the Venda social system, but no radical
changes in their musical system, when they adopted girls' and boys'
initiation schools and possession dance cults from their neighbours
(Blacking 1971). On the other hand, there were musical changes when
some Venda adopted Christianity: drums and sounds associated with
traditional religion became taboo to a section of the population, who
adopted a new musical system. Imported European music was regarded
as different and was not fully incorporated in the same way as earlier
styles. As result of this, there has been a significant musical change in
Venda society resulting in the production of at least three concurrent
musical traditions, which might be called "traditional", "syncretic",
and "modern". Any analysis of musical change in Venda society must
consider all three traditions together, because the lives of their practitioners overlap in many respects, both within and outside the context
of music-making.
The study of musical change must be concerned ultimately with
significant innovations in music sound, but innovations in music sound
are not necessarily evidence of musical change. If the concept of musical
change is to have any heuristic value, it must denote significant changes
that are peculiar to musical systems, and not simply the musical consequences of social, political, economic, or other changes.
Major political changes, such as the revolutions in Russia and Cuba
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THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 3
and the independence of African states, seem not to have been accompanied by significant musical change. On the other hand, a new idea
about music, or a new social formation, may have profound consequences on musical structures, if attitudes to music and social formations
involved in its performance are an integral part of the musical process in
a society. Thus Wachsmann (1958) showed that the introduction of the
bugle in the 1860s and of a band of European instruments about 1884 did
not 'start a musical revolution' in Buganda as might have been expected;
and the lyre, which was introduced from Busoga at about the same time
as the band, and the tube-fiddle, which appeared in 1907, were incorporated into the musical system. The influence of Western music became
felt, not directly through its sounds, but through the Churches' view
"that music itself must be spiritual in order to be suitable for things
eternal", and Wachsmann suggested that this attitude to music influenced African musicians and "has continued to affect the development
of their music ever since (Wachsmann 1958: 55)."
A crucial problem in the study of musical change, therefore, and one
that reinforces its claim to be a special category of action, is that changes
in music do not necessarily accompany the changes of mind that affect
institutions related to music-making. Truly musical change should signify a change of heart as well as mind, since music is a "metaphorical
expression of feeling (Ferguson 1960: 88)", which can explore the
structures of emotion and express values that transcend and inform the
passing scene of social events. Since "affects are the primary motives of
man" (Tomkins and Izard 1966: vii)", musical composition and performance are intricately linked to motivation and patterns of decisionmaking. Musical change may epitomize the changing conditions and
concerns of social groups, perhaps even before they are crystallized and
articulated in words and corporate action; but it may also reflect an
affection for novelty and changing intellectual fashion. Conversely, an
absence of musical change may reflect a retreat from challenging social
issues, or a determination to face them and adapt to them, while maintaining essential social and cultural values.
The retention of traditional music can be enlightening and positively
adaptive as it can be maladaptive and stultifying: the meaning of musical
change or non-change depends on their structural and functional characteristics in the particular context under review. There is some justification in the traditionalists' argument that musical non-change can signify
a successful adaptation to the threat of anarchy by the retention of
essential cultural values, as there is to the opposing view that musical
change expresses a vigorous adaptation of musical styles to the challenge of changing social conditions. But the traditionalists (or "purists",
as I call them in the next section) have neglected the dead weight of
traditional routines, as the modernists (or "syncretists") have seemed
unaware of the superficiality of merely fashionable changes, and both
have failed to distinguish the varieties of musical change and the levels at
which they operate, or to relate them to other changes that are taking
place in the society, especially changing relationships between classes
and changing patterns in the allocation of power. It can, in fact, be
argued that all evaluations of musical change tell us more about the class
and interests of the evaluators than about the real nature of musical
change. This objection can certainly be made to my own arguments, as
well as the work of the "purists" and the "syncretists", and to the
efforts of Ministries of Culture and other agencies to promote the performance of traditional music. In so far as music is in itself nonreferential, almost any meaning or value can be assigned to it, and
because it can easily be internalized through participatory movements
of the body, these meanings and values can become invested with
special value through pleasurable association. Music can be, and is,
used in society for all kinds of purposes, good and bad; and so the
ultimate decisions about what to do with it rest with performers and
audiences, and not even with indigenous music researchers, who are
scarcely less biased than foreigners.
The processes of music-making and their musical products are consequences of individual decision-making about how, when, and where to
act, and what cultural knowledge to incorporate in the sequences of
action. But in music-making there are behavioural consequences of
action that cannot be dismissed analytically as "happenings", because
they have an effect on subsequent action. Performers and audiences do
not, in fact, have complete control over musical situations and their
interpretation. Although in theory, any pattern of movement could have
any meaning, and there could be an infinite number of permutations and
combinations of signifier and signified, as in language, in the movements
of music-making there are important differences. Once people have
agreed to participate in a musical event, they must suspend a range of
personal choice until they have reached the end of the sequence of
action that was determined by their original decision. Whatever the
meaning of that decision was to the participants when they made it,
whatever meaning they attributed generally to the music they decided to
perform, and whatever meanings attach to isolated movements to parts
of the music in other contexts, once the performance is under way the
intrinsic meaning of the music as form in tonal motion may affect the
participants. Many sequences of body movement are not entirely
neutral, in that they have physiological consequences and evoke a
specific range of somatic states, feelings, and corresponding thoughts. It
is for this reason that a number of composers have emphasized that the
nonverbal communication of music can be more precise than language,
and Susanne Langer (1948:191) has written that "music can reveal the
nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach." Moreover, because of the basic biological and psychic unity of
the species, a decision to perform music can lead people to share
emotion through the link of their common participation in sequences of
movement and its relation to what Manfred Clynes calls "essentic
forms." "The emotional gestures .. .have precise representations in
the brain (Clynes 1974:52)." In this way the collective movements of
musical performance can generate collective feelings and collective
thought, which is the basis of cultural communication. But music is not
only adaptive through its power to link the biological and cultural
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aspects of human experience and reinforce the affective bases of social

life: by releasing the brain from the task of immediate attention to
environmental stimuli, it stimulates creative thinking by allowing the
"memory-surface" of the brain to deal with information for its own sake
(De Bono 1969:130, Blacking 1976b:7).
These two complementary and adaptive functions of music, conservative of basic human values but creative in their cultural application,
are epitomized in the approaches of the "purists" and the "syncretists", and appear to be represented to a greater or lesser extent in
most societies. That is, there is music that must be performed in the
same way on every occasion, and there is music whose performance is
expected to vary from one occasion to another. The former is particularly true of ritual music, but even within a corpus of ritual music, the
same distinction may be made. For instance, in the music of the domba
rites, the Venda distinguish between Ngoma songs, which ought to be
performed in exactly the same way at every initiation, and Mitambo
songs, which vary from one initiation to another according to the tastes
of the master of initiation and the performers. At all events, the most
important decision made in musical situations are the decisions to make
music, because the music itself may generate experiences and thoughts
that transcend the extra-musical features of the situation.
Musical change must be given a special status in studies of social and
cultural change, because music's role as mediator between the nature
and the culture in man combines cognitive and affective elements in a
unique way. The only other comparable human activities are dance and
ritual. Music is the best-equipped of the performing arts to express both
the ever-changing realities of biological and social life and the continuity
of the concepts on which human societies depend for their existence. (It
can be more specifically "real" than dance, because it can incorporate
verbal language, which is the most widely used and readily understood
form of cultural communication. It is more "super-real" than drama,
because it can transcend the restrictions of dialogue in time and space:
for example, musical communication is declamatory and does not expect direct answers from participants, but drama generally requires
some nexus of communication; call-response and antiphonal structures
in music are not like conversations.)
The laws of nature require that an organism, to survive, should
constantly adapt to its changing environment, and determine that almost
every human being is genetically unique; and music obeys these laws, in
that it has to be re-made at every performance and it is felt anew inside
each individual body. The laws of human nature lay down that man can
only become human through association with fellowman (Blacking
1974) and that the human organism's basic adaptive tool is culture,
which is possible only in so far as genetically unique organisms can
transcend individual sensations and share sentiments and concepts.
Essential features of culture are the repetition, replication, and transmission of ideas and sequences of action, as seen in the widespread
uniformity of the Acheulean material culture of the Stone Age. The
extension of the capacity for culture and the development of technologi-
cal mastery have depended on man's ability to halt or control natural

change. Music therefore obeys the laws of culture, and so through
bodily experiences enables man to come to terms with the natural and
cultural grounds of his being: it is a kind of adaptive ritual behaviour that
by the special nature of its means of production combines the creative
conditions of objective technological mastery and subjective human
experience.
In so far as music-making is a technique of the body (cf. M. Mauss
1936) that by repetition can halt change in a predictable way and transcend time and place, but only for as long as its makers are involved and
experiencing it, it has special expressive power that routine technological processes lack. This is why musical changes cannot be properly
related to technological developments, even though they may give a
superficial impression of being progressive. Each apparently new idea in
music "does not really grow out of previously expressed ideas, though it
may well be limited by them. It is a new emphasis that grows out of a
composer's experience of his environment, a realization of certain aspects of the experience common to all human beings which seem to him
to be particularly relevant in the light of contemporary events and
personal experiences (Blacking 1973: 72-73)." A bridge or a Jumbo Jet
cannot be built with the emotional freedom of a performance of a Mahler
symphony, and yet the symphonic performance requires similar precision and expertise. In this respect music is more true to life than
technology: it expresses the fact that although cultural artifacts can
provide permanent adaptations to the external world, the organism
cannot halt its own propensity to change and decay. Music halts change
temporarily by harnessing time through the non-utilitarian repetition of
events.
We should not be surprised by innovation, acculturation, and superficial changes in musical performance. They are to be expected, given the
adaptive nature of the organism. The most interesting and characteristically human features of music are not stylistic change and individual
variation in performance, but non- change and the repetition of carefully
rehearsed passages of music. (It should not be necessary to emphasize
that rehearsal and accuracy of performance are features of orally transmitted "folk" music as well as of written "art" music.) This is why truly
musical changes are not common and why they reveal the essence of
music in a society. What is constantly changing in music is that which is
least musical about it; and yet these micro-changes are the raw material
out of which the changes are made, and in the context of performance
they are evidence of the meanings that participants attach to the music.
For example, the meanings that the sounds of different drum-row compositions have for Igbo audiences vary according to the social context
that generates them (Nzewi 1977).
Studies of musical change should focus on change that is specifically
musical, and change that really is change. The kinds of music that are
made are an obvious focus of musicological interest, but they are the
products of processes in the behaviour of the species and the action of
groups and individuals. In my view, musical changes can only be use-
BLACKING
fully defined as radical changes in the organization of these primary

elements. That is why the reasons for some of the heated exchanges in
"folk" music circles have been sound, but the categories over which the
battles have been fought are essentially social, rather than musical.
"Purists" and "Syncretists" in "folk" music studies
Studies of "folk" music have invariably been concerned with musical
change, but have attended to musical products more than musical processes. Even if they have not been motivated by the explicit aim to
record music that is disappearing or being "contaminated", they implicitly invoke the notion of historically ancient, pre-industrial or preurban musical traditions. Classifications such as "folk", "art" and
"popular" reflect the concern with identifiable musical products, rather
than similar or contrasting musical processes. Changes of musical process have been generally taken for granted as a concomitant of changes
in the product, and discussion has focussed on non-musical processes.
Thus, both "purists" and "syncretists" among folk music researchers have attributed non-musical significance to musical sounds. The
"purists" assume that radical changes in the sounds of orally transmitted music reflect some sort of moral decay, and that restoration and
promotion of the "authentic" music of the people will help to re-animate
the life of the community, but they do not explain how this could be so,
or whether music has any more significance in the process than gymnastics or the Boy Scouts. Nor do they explain why "folk" music is
supposed to be preserved without change, but a twentieth-century composer, whose music sounds like Tchaikovsky, is dismissed as unoriginal
and irrelevant.
The "syncretists" do not seem to have questioned the moral state of
the community, except in cases where the immorality of their exploiters
or oppressors may be a stimulus to musical production: they assume that
the vigorous production of new sounds indicates that the community is
adapting successfully to changing circumstances. Like the "purists",
they may be correct in their deductions, but they do not explain the
connection between musical creativity and social welfare, or consider
the possibility that an increase in musical creativity may accompany a
decrease in political status. How, for instance, do we compare the moral
value of the syncretic South African Freedom Songs and Jurry Mfusi's
Shaka with the equally syncretic "all-Black" musical Ipitombi, which
White South African promoters brought to London in 1976? Ifjudged by
its music, it was not unreasonable of a London critic to write, "Happiness is a musical called Ipitombi." The music alone, or even the story as
presented in the theatre performance, does not disclose that Ipitombi is
a monstrous piece of propaganda for South African racist policies and a
source of great profit for its white promoters.
The "purists" have been curiously ambivalent in their attitudes to
continuity and change in music. They have lamented departure from
what they conceive to be traditional practices and have invoked concepts such as authenticity to distinguish between what is and what is not
good and worthy of study; but they have also applauded the creative
musicianship of outstanding individual performers, whose originality
must, by definition, threaten the stability of any "authentic" tradition.
These contradictions are partly the result of a legitimately sentimental
attachment to the good things of the past and a sense of outrage at the
widespread social and cultural destruction that follows political, religious and commercial exploitation; and partly a consequence of some
muddled thinking about the nature of culture (in the anthropological
sense of the word) in general, and of music and music-making in particular: for unchanging cultural tradition is dead and of no use to man except
perhaps as an inspiration to do something else, and music without social
situations, which by definition can never be identical, ceases to be music
as a performing art. The evidence of anthropological field research
shows clearly that even in those societies that were once thought to be
survivals of our prehistoric past, customs were changing before the
arrival of missionaries, traders, colonial administrators and settlers, and
people were flexible in their use of social and cultural systems. Inflexibility is more noticeably a characteristic of technologically advanced
societies, in which a highly developed division of labour enables elites
and closed groups to wield authoritarian power and reinforce it with
religious and ideological dogma (Blacking 1970:238).
The "syncretists" have emphasized that in many "folk" music traditions innovation and change are valued and applauded, but they have
not followed up the logic of their approach and considered in their
analyses all that is heard by the groups whose music they study, on
television, radio, and in films, as well as in live performance. Modern
listening habits have been the concern only of radio stations and a very
few sociologists, but they are an essential feature of any orally transmitted music tradition, particularly if music is consciously and systematically excluded from consideration for musical and/or political reasons.
If Mozart, Gershwin, the Beatles, Ellington, Indian classical music,
Country and Western, and Lutheran hymns, are all available for listening, we cannot ignore the positive or negative influence on "folk" music
of Mozart because his is "art" music, or of Gershwin because his is not
"ethnic" music.
A sociology of music may legitimately confine itself to studying the
groups that use music and the different meanings that they assign to it,
without analysing music structures. But musicology cannot account for
the logic of musical systems without considering the patterns of culture
and of social interaction of the music-makers. Even if music is treated as
an autonomous activity with its own rules, systems of tonal and rhythmic organization are cultural products, and sound structures are perceived and selected by individuals interacting in social contexts. The
forms and functions of music cannot be entirely reduced and explained
as extensions of social phenomena; but a musicologist's legitimate concern for the music in musical activity cannot ignore the fact that, if it is to
belong to a tradition at all, even the most original musical invention will
to a greater or lesser extent draw on remembered sounds. It is therefore
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essential to take into consideration the range of sounds available to any

musician, whether or not the social context of hearing them is considered significant (i.e., whether or not one regards music as an autonomous activity).
What both the "purists" and "syncretists" in folk music research
have in common is a central concern for certain types of music, and for
certain moral values that are associated with the music and its uses and
functions. Paradoxically, the "purists" are more concerned with the
morality and the "syncretists" with the music, while both make assumptions about relationships between musical and non-musical structures which they seldom state or explain. There may indeed be relationships between the state of music and the state of society; but how shall
foreign or indigenous folk music researchers be able to judge this without either more precise evidence of the connections between musical
and non-musical structures, or a coherent theory of man as musicmaker? Unless music in itself has more than the often arbitrary significance assigned to it by the social groups that perform it and listen to it, it
must be treated as morally neutral, and musical change can be neither
deplored nor welcomed: it can only be described and related to other
changes in the society of the music-makers and consumers. As Nattiez
(1975) has argued, the music is the "niveau neutre", and its morality is
essentially the morality of who and what goes with it, of its performers
and of its listeners. Evaluations of musical change cannot be made
independently of a point of view or a theory that takes into account more
than the musical structures, and so they must always be accompanied by
a clear statement of their epistemology.
Culture-based approaches to the study of musical change
Early writers on musical change, and especially Hornbostel and
Sachs, worked with a theory of music that flowed logically from the
origins of their discipline, comparative musicology. Broadly speaking,
they saw musical changes as the results of discoveries and inventions in
the realm of sound, and of the diffusion of styles brought about by the
contact of different cultures. They paid some attention to the cultural
context of music, and they thought of the world history of music in much
the same way as the evolution of culture and technology, but they rarely
pursued the implications of Alexander J. Ellis's original dictum (1885)
and sought explanations of musical change in terms of changes in the
organization of societies and in ideas not primarily concerned with
music.
A global, culture-based theory of musical change has been pursued in
detail by Alan Lomax (1968, 1972), but although the basic idea underlying his correlations between folksong style and culture is acceptable, his
method of analysis and some of his conclusions are open to question (see
Maranda 1970). Lomax's theory of musical change is based on the
assumption that musical variations are related to variations in culture,
and that there are correlations between musical and cultural change.
10/ 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL
The chief difficulties in applying the theory arise from (a) the notion that
musical changes reflect changes in culture, and (b) a somewhat restricted concept of cultural evolution. Lomax compares the surface
structures of music without questioning whether the same musical
sounds always have the same "deep structure" and the same meaning:
thus an apparent correlation between a particular folksong style and a
particular pattern of culture in a number of societies may not be valid.
Moreover, a correlation does not necessarily mean that the music reflects the ethos or eidos of the culture; it may well be counteracting
social trends, and this could be especially important in calculating the
significance of musical changes.
This leads into the second main difficulty about Lomax's scheme: it
does not allow for flexibility in estimating what kinds of social and
cultural change are the most significant as catalysts for musical change.
There seems to be too much emphasis on the means of production and
largely technological changes, and too little on the modes of production,
which are concerned ultimately with the structures and quality of human
relationships. Moreover, even the mode of production is not always in
itself the decisive factor in shaping the pattern of change: institutional
interadjustments and social change can rarely, if ever, be attributed to a
single source, as Marx and Weber are said to have claimed, and "no
single form of social behaviour can be conceived to be ultimate or basic
(Martindale 1962:38)." Although "only the individual can initiate or
stop change and . . . any individual is a potential source of change,
social conditions often place the primary burden on a special stratum of
individuals, turning them into the innovators or conservers of their times
(op. cit.:2)." Inventiveness therefore flowers in certain sections of
societies according to the "requirements" of the time, and whether or
not music is affected at a particular period may depend upon its place in
the sociology of the knowledge of the society.
Lomax's scheme (1968:/ passim) does not allow for variations in
patterns of social and cultural change such as occurred in ancient China,
India, Palestine, and Greece. It also raises, but does not address, a
crucial issue in the study of music and musical change: the status of
music in biological and cultural evolution. Is music a conscious human
invention, with a determined (though inevitably unknown) time span,
arising out of certain social and economic conditions and utilizing
biologically given capabilities that had originally evolved for other purposes? Or is it a species-specific behaviour, partly like language, based
on certain irreducible biological capabilities that have evolved specially
for music (whatever that may be) and present in every normal human
organism? In either case, music-making can be seen as adaptive behaviour in an evolutionary context, though clearly in the latter, no
society would really have the option of including music in its culture: to
exclude the development of musical capabilities would be the same as
not using language, and would restrict the full development of human
potential.
If music is a human invention rather than a discovery, a product of
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cultural evolution as Lomax implies, it could be an action autonomous

with its own independent rules (cf. Nadel 1951:87-90), like the rules of a
game or an action system whose rules are consciously and unconsciously influenced by other action systems within the society of the
music-maker(s). This distinction could be crucial for estimating the
motivation for and significance of musical changes at any given time and
place, but it is not an absolute distinction that has to be made for all
music. In some societies music, or at least the music of certain groups,
may be assigned the status of a game, with arbitrary rules, while in
others it may be inextricably bound up with extra-musical factors.
Again, there may be periods in a society's history when music is treated
like a game, alternating with periods when its structure is supposed to
express and evoke extra-musical rules and meanings. This raises the
problem of interpreting one musical style in a period when different
canons apply, as well as problems for the student of musical change: if
performers and critics reinterpret the music of a former era, is it legitimate to talk of musical change, even though there may be little apparent
change in the sounds produced? Furthermore, could there really be no
change in the sounds produced, if there were a radical change of approach to the music?
Whatever view is taken of the status of music in biological and cultural
evolution, neither Lomax's scheme nor the earlier theories of comparative musicologists consider the full range of behaviour that can be
described as "musical change". Furthermore, they do not always distinguish between behaviour, or motor events that happen to individuals,
and action, events that are intended to have consequences: it is particularly important to distinguish changes in musical composition or performance that are not labelled or intended as such by musicians, from
changes that are intentional and recognized. Finally, they do not provide
a satisfactory explanation, except in terms of cultural diffusion, commercial simplification, or the emulation of technical proficiency, of the
concurrent phenomena of so-called "folk", "popular" and "art"
musics, and the crucial role of oral transmission of performance practice
even in traditions of written music.
In contrast to Lomax's global approach, other writers have described
processes of musical change that are less clear-cut. In a paper on the
variety of music in a North Indian village, Edward 0. Henry (1976)
questions some of Lomax's general conclusions and shows, for example: "that the groupy, antiphonal style is as important as the elaborate
solo style in India, and that the non-participatory music, although encompassing the elaborate solo style, is much more diverse than that
characterization suggests (op. cit.:62)"; "the stylistic diversity of the
region's music has resulted from a cultural or subcultural admixture,
and . . . understanding the diversity in song style of the region requires
reference to the temporal processes of immigration, diffusion and retention (op. cit. :64)." He concludes that the coexistence of integrated and
individualized styles in India and in many other parts of the world
emphasizes "that song sessions may be organized along quite different
lines than economic or political relations (ibid.)"; but in spite of such

inconsistencies, the relationship between music structure and nonmusical aspects of culture remains a basic problem in ethnomusicology.
Decision-making in musical change
Music structures cannot be explained with reference to other cultural
phenomena, however, unless it is understood that the relations between
them are not causal. Musical change, for example, is not "caused" by
"contact among people and cultures" or the "movement of populations" (Nettl 1964:232): it is brought about by decisions made by individuals about music-making and music on the basis of their experiences
of music and attitudes to it in different social contexts. The importance
of intentionality in group expression is well illustrated by Ruth Katz's
(1970) careful analysis of the singing of Aleppo Jews in Israel, where the
younger generation developed "mannerisms" in their performance of
traditional music: "dedicated to the preservation of a minority tradition" and "resistance to acceptance of majority group culture", they
exaggerated and embellished "those elements of traditional culture by
means of which the majority [identified] the minority and the minority
[came] to identify itself (Katz 1970:469)."
Similarly, because of the variety and complexity of situations in which
people make decisions about what and how they will sing, several
assumptions about innovation and acculturation must be questioned.
For example, it cannot be assumed that the more complex styles generally influence the simpler ones. Not only may factors of political domination and social resistance be critical, but the notion of "complex" and
"simple" in the assessment of musical styles is meaningless unless we
know what and who exactly has been involved in their production
(Blacking 1973:33 ff. and 116). Again, if Helen Roberts found the
greatest internal variation in melody in one culture, whilst Kolinski
found that melodic changes are most striking in a situation of culture
contact (Merriam 1964:309-310), we have no grounds to assume that
melody is less resistant to change than, say, tempo and pitch, unless we
know the social contexts in which those decisions were made. Melody is
a product of human decisions about the selection and use of acoustic and
physiological elements, and the significance of the musical variations
cannot be assessed without knowledge of their conceptual base: "different" melodies may be regarded by singers as the same, or their
differences may arise from non-musical factors, such as changes in
words or social function, and their intervals be selected according to
their relationship with other music in the society (Blacking 1967). But
knowledge of the conceptual base alone is not enough to explain the
choice of melodies in a given number of performances: the knowledge is
relevant only in so far as it is used in the course of social interaction, in
which different goals and values are brought into play.
Because every case of musical change presupposes a critical moment
of cognitive change, it becomes necessary to locate when the change
takes place. This poses a special problem for the analyst, because the
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moment of conscious change, in which individuals make a decision to

move in a different direction, may have been preceded by a period of
latency, in which there is a gradual feeling towards change, and so it may
be necessary to study musical events over a considerable period of time,
in order to get the right perspective. From a purely practical point of
view, there are conflicting needs to study a musical system both intensively in its social context and at various stages of its evolution.
This is well illustrated by Irvine and Sapir's excellent article (1976) on
"Musical Style and Social Change among the Kujamaat Diola." I am not
sure whether or not this is an example of musical change or a description
of part of a period of latency, especially as the authors state that changes
in scales and voice range "are only quantitative changes in statistical
frequencies, rather than qualitative changes (op. cit. :77)," and that one
musical form discussed is so "susceptible to fashion and innovation"
that "a new rhythmic line" may become "popular for a month or two,
but never for more than a year (op. cit.:69)." But for the sake of
argument I shall take it as a case of musical change and ignore a number
of other problems that arise from their analysis, in order to focus on the
problem of locating the change in musical decision-making. The authors
describe how "informants" notions of "old-fashioned" and "new"
song styles correspond to actual musical changes perceptible to the
analyst (op. cit. :81)" in a series of recordings made in 1960 and 1964-65:
"these musical changes are similar in kind, indicating a consistent trend
toward differentiation and individual display," and "this trend can be
related to ongoing changes in Kujamaat social structure (ibid.)," and in
particular to changes in the relationships between participants in a
musical event. If there was musical change, how can the analyst find out
precisely when and how the crucial decisions were made? Might it only
have been possible by continuous fieldwork between 1960 and 1965?
Were they, in fact, made before 1960 and only beginning to take effect in
that year? Or had they not even been made by 1965, so that any changes
were at the level of behaviour, rather than action? This last possibility is
not ruled out by the informants' statements, because their concepts of
"new" and "old-fashioned" may have been a function of a particular
time-perspective in relation to ideas about fashion in music: what might
their judgements of the same or similar music have been in, say, 1956
and 1969?
The problems inherent in the study by Irvine and Sapir recall that any
analysis of musical change depends on hindsight and historical perspective. (As soon as the "purists" were able to perceive a lamentable
change in a music tradition, there was really nothing they could do about
it!) Wachsmann's understanding (1958) of the processes of musical
change over a hundred years in Uganda, depended on a careful analysis
of past events as much as Rhodes's study (1958) on the diffusion of the
opening peyote song and B6hague's account (1973) of twenty-five years
of "change" in Brazilian urban popular music, though Behague's study
is primarily concerned with variations of text and timbre within a broad
musical style. The initiation of the process, however, can be described
as a musical change and given a date: bossa nova emerged in 1958-59, it
"revolutionized" the Brazilian popular music scene (Behague 1973:211)

by transforming the samba, and the release of the first major bossa nova
album, Joao Gilberto's "Chega de Saudade", in March 1959, set in
motion a chain of musical, social and literary events. The significance of
some of these events was not always clear at the time even to the
participants, but a distance of nearly a decade allows Behague to put
them in perspective (op. cit.:214).
The year or two that is normally allowed for fieldwork in ethnomusicology rarely provides opportunities for observing musical
change and the sequences of decision-making that lead to it, and yet
studies of music history can be misleading without the microscopic data
that can only be obtained by intensive study of the cultural and social
context of music-making. Frank Harrison (1972), explores the implications of this dilemma in his wide-ranging essay on "Music and Cult: The
Functions of Music in Social and Religious Systems." He shows how a
long view of musical history can give different estimates of musical
significance and change: for example, Palestrina became the victim "of
an historical dead end", if we think "of what actually happened in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not of the retrospective
evaluations of musicologists and pedagogues (op. cit. :323-4)," who later
used his music to teach counterpoint. At the same time, the long view
can distort analysis of the processes of musical change: thus Harrison
argues:
"At no time in the course of the liturgical controversies of the Reformation and
Counter Reformation were questions of musical usage discussed on the basis of such
criteria as suitability, adaptability, or availability. They were treated only in the light
of nonmusical sanctions of a religious or social character. This raises the question of
the meaning and usefulness of common historical stylistic terms like Renaissance,
mannerist, and Baroque. Are these true entities, or are they merely concepts imposed much later, as the result of incomplete study of behavior whose criteria were
primarily social and religious (op. cit.:310)?"
Non-Musical Factors and Folk Views in Musical Change

We return full circle to the perennial problems, in studies of musical
change, of the analyst's perception of events and the importance of the
non-musical in the search for the essentially musical. There will always
be some distortion of past events-and every case of musical change is
by definition a past event-because they are perceived in the light of the
exigencies of the present. The distortion is legitimate in so far as research into the past is relevant only for the making of the future, and
provided that its ultimate concern is for humanity and not only a limited
section of mankind. Even if the analyst cannot exactly share the experience that he studies, at least he can remember that it is experienced with
the same kind of body that he possesses. Intuitive scientific thinking is
particularly appropriate in matters musical, because music reflects what
Gregory Bateson calls the "algorithms of the heart (Bateson 1973:112;
see also Clynes 1974 and 1977)." It may be possible to tune into an alien
musical expression without having to acquire all the cultural clutter of
which it is a part, and perhaps through the music to gain a deeper
understanding of some of the principles on which the social and cultural
experience of its makers is founded.
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Intensive studies of decision-making and of non-musical factors related to musical performance may reveal more of the processes of
musical continuity and change than historical studies that can only
pinpoint trends and significant dates rather than the antecedent social
processes. Many studies of musical change are not really about music or
change, though they are about aspects of social and musical life that may
ultimately bring about, or have already brought about, musical change.
In a recent number of Ethnomusicology, Douglas Midgett writes on
"Performance Roles and Musical Change in a Caribbean Society." I
agree with his conclusions, but consider that he is not describing musical
change. Nevertheless, this kind of study may lead to a better understanding of musical change. Midgett concludes from his examination of
the La Rose performance
"that the issues of continuity and change in this tradition are not opposed; not
contradictory phenomena requiring some tortured explanation. For when one examines the structure of performance and the role of the shatit,el, it becomes clear that
regular and consistent change, through the inventive integration of various musical
influences, is indicative of the continuation of the tradition (1977:71)."
The innovations reported as changes strike me as being completely

within the traditional structure of the musical system, and therefore not
examples of change but of innovative variation. A "dialectical relationship between continuity and change" (ibid.) is not the characteristic of
musical change, but of music itself. Music is the art of flexible nonchange: when Robert F. Thompson observes that "call-and-response is
a means of putting innovation and tradition, invention and initiation,
into amicable relationships with one another (Thompson 1966:98,
quoted by Midgett, ibid.)," he is not writing about musical change, but
about a feature of African music that epitomizes the essential characteristics of the art as a dynamic link between the biological and cultural
attributes of the species, and apprehends the role of music and dance in
its evolutionary adaption. Judith Hanna is surely making the same point
when she writes of "the continuity of change" in African dance (1973),
as is also Lawrence McCullough, when he concludes that
"style in traditional Irish music, though guided by certain conventions, is not perceived by traditional musicians as a rigid, static set of rules that must be dogmatically
or slavishly followed. It is, instead, a flexible, context-sensitive medium through
which an individual's musical expression can be given a form and substance that will
invest his performance with communicative values (1977:97)."
What Midgett defines as musical change, McCullough describes as

changing features of a style. "Styles of traditional Irish music are
continually undergoing change", but a "new" style, though distinct, is
"never entirely divorced from its predecessors or contemporaries (op.
cit.:96)." Thus, it might be argued that the differences between the
innovations described by Midgett and the changing styles of traditional
Irish music are matters only of degree and not of kind, and in a sense this
is correct. Nevertheless, until we know more about the nature of music,
a line has to be drawn somewhere between continuous change within a
style and a change of style, provided that these distinctions are considered significant by those who participate in the music. It seems that
Midgett's informants consider that the La Rose singing tradition has not
changed significantly for 150-200 years (Midgett 1977:56), whereas Irish

musicians consider that their styles have changed. The difficulty of
reconciling folk views of change with what might be established as a
statistical norm was emphasized to me recently when a distinguished
Irish fiddler insisted that the performance of any traditional music on
electronic instruments was a far more fundamental, and quite unacceptable, change than the introduction of the fiddle in Ireland might have
been over three centuries ago. Such judgements are critically important,
because they reveal concepts of music and of change that make it
possible to distinguish what changes are specifically musical in a society
and how they may be related to other kinds of change.
Folk views can, and should, be compared with the kind of objective
measurements that can be made with melographs (cf. Katz 1970) and
aural transcriptions of tape recordings, particularly when different ethnic groups or classes make different judgements about what seems to be
the same music, or the same judgements about different music. If folk
views are to be taken as primary data in determining the boundaries of
music whose change is said to constitute musical change, then the social
boundaries of the folk who hold the views are as significant as the
musical categories that they are assessing. This dimension is missing
from Mark Slobin's comprehensive study of Music in the Culture of
Northern Afghanistan (1976): although he takes Barth's work on ethnic
boundaries as a point of departure and emphasizes the "ethnic perspective", he does not always accept that folk views represent social or
musical reality. For example, he writes that "a certain confusion about
the identity of Turkestan can be detected among native informants,
some of whom group Turkestan together with Katagan against Badaxsan, while others see Katagan and Badaxsan as a unit distinguished from
Turkestan (1976:18). This is exactly what one would expect, and I
suggest that there may be no "confusion" among the author's informants, that their different responses depend on who they are and in what
situations they are responding to the question, and that "this problem"
is a problem for Slobin and ethnomusicologists, but not his informants
(Blacking 1976a).
Similarly, the boundaries of music traditions must be established if
change is to be assessed in the musics of Ireland and St. Lucia. If we
consider Irish traditional music and its practitioners in the context of
Irish society, they constitute one of a number of classes of music and
music-making, and can then be compared to the La Rose tradition in the
context of St. Lucia society. The different styles of Irish music could be
given the same status as the innovations in the La Rose tradition.
Sociologically, I find this more acceptable, and musicologically it is
supported by the fact that the styles of traditional Irish music share very
much the same repertoire of melodies and may be regarded in the same
way as the dialects of a single language.
The analogy from language may help us to understand the comparative autonomy of musical changes, though I do not suggest that they
operate in the same way as language. New dialects can develop with
remarkable speed, and the mass media have rapidly ironed out many of
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the variations in speech that depended on class or area of origin, but

languages generally change much more slowly than other cultural
phenomena, and there are no necessarily one-to-one relationships between languages and cultures, as is illustrated by the variety of cultures
of English- and German-speaking peoples and the common cultures
shared by the speakers of different Chinese languages. Furthermore, the
analogy of dialect emphasizes the variety that is acceptable within the
boundaries of a single language without resort to the notion of change,
and raises the problem: when does a dialect become a different language? The musics of Bartdk, Sibelius, and Kodaly (who to my ears
often sounds very like Vaughan-Williams) are like local dialects, but
they did not change the musical language to the same extent as Debussy
or Webern. Similarly, the development of the concerto and symphony
involved a number of musical changes, but each of Beethoven's symphonies does not constitute a musical change-though perhaps a good
case can be made for the Ninth. In fact, one of the interesting features of
the "new" works of most composers is that they do not change, so much
as explore and extend ideas with the original set of rules that bore the
stamp of the composer's personal style. Finally, one of the criteria of
language distinction is mutual comprehensibility, as recognized by the
speakers themselves rather than the grammarians, and a similar criterion may be borne in mind for music. In 1959, I found it significant that
rural Zulu farm-workers should respond positively to Venda songs in the
modern idiom, though they did not know the language and had not been
to school, while they were totally indifferent to Venda traditional music.
Similarly, South African Freedom Songs had an appeal to people who
did not understand the words, because the music "spoke" of a new
South African Society. (Cf. the way in which Brazilian popular music
cuts across ethnic lines, as described in Behague 1973:209.)
Towards a Comprehensive and Definitive Study of Musical Change
I hope I have made it clear why musical change deserves serious
attention as a comparatively autonomous area of study. The concept of
change requires further clarification, and we may indeed ask why we
should study a normal and natural process, particularly when the most
remarkable feature of culture is non-change-in fact, a subject for
urgent research in modern industrial societies is the almost lethal conservatism of institutions and retention of discredited ideas. Since there
is no such thing as a truly static society, any model of society, let alone of
change, must of needs be a processual model. Thus if we are going to
distinguish an analytic category of "change", it really must be something more than flexible variation, though a radical change does not
necessarily have to be synonymous with a revolution. To qualify as
musical change, the phenomena described must constitute a change in
the structure of the musical system, and not simply a change within the
system. This does not mean that musical change may be studied only at
the grosser, macro-level. On the contrary, careful attention to the constant micro-variations within the system is essential, because these may
reveal the germs of change. But although the preparations for change
may be gradual and spread over a whole community, the observable
change itself will probably be sudden and must be precipitated by
individual decisions. For example, the first locomotive was considerably slower than a horse-drawn carriage, but its appearance marked a
radical change in transport that had far-reaching implications and could
not be regarded simply as an extension of the carriage.
I hope that it is now clear why I consider that most changes of
repertory, many examples of changes of style, and even cases of acculturation, may not be significant as musical change. It should be apparent
that I want a more restricted concept of musical change than Bruno Nettl
(1964:230-238), but I also want to apply it more widely. I do not wish to
regard change "in traditional music" as "a phenomenon substantially
different from change in a high culture (Nettl 1964:230)," but seek a
theory of musical change that may be universally applied.
Although studies of musical change must inevitably focus on observable phenomena that are regarded as musical by different groups of
people, the aim of such studies must be to understand the musical
processes that generate these music products. Thus we should perhaps
select as areas of study not particular musical styles but the musical and
social experience of communities who make and hear music. Even if
musical styles are selected for study, the social context in which musical
change is being analysed must first be specified. The categories and
intentions of music-makers and audience, and their social groupings,
provide the first clues to discovering whether what the observer hears is
considered musical, and whether it is really changing. The first considerations must be: Who makes the music? With whom and for whom is it
made? What other music do people make and regard as their own? What
do people hear, and what meanings do different individuals and groups
assign to it?
The first stage in any study of musical change, therefore, requires a
synchronic perspective, in which the activities and boundaries of the
musical community are investigated, in order to ascertain the norms of
the practitioners and to determine what aspects of action are regarded as
"musical". The accounts of changes in music in St. Lucia and Ireland
(Midgett 1977 and McCullough 1977, resp.) illustrate the need to consider folk views of the social context of music-making before comparing
different processes of music change, and show how it is possible, by
relating musical variations, innovations and changes to the scale of the
societies in which they occur, to include "folk" and "art" music in a
single theory of musical change. The different styles of Irish music can
be given the same analytical status as the innovations in the La Rose
tradition.
No study of musical change is possible without a diachronic perspective. Every case of musical change presupposes a historical process and
a critical moment of cognitive change, but because the moment of
conscious change, in which individuals decide to move in a different
direction, may have been preceded by a period of latency, in which there
is a gradual feeling towards change, it may be necessary to study events
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related to music over a considerable period of time. From a purely

practical point of view, there are the conflicting needs to study a musical
system both intensively in its social context and at various stages of its
evolution. This problem was illustrated by the work of Irvine and Sapir
(1976) on the influences of social changes on musical style among the
Kujamaat Diola of Senegal.
All cases of musical change must be considered from both synchronic
and diachronic perspectives, and always in their social context. Partly
as a summary of the argument in this paper, and partly as a basis for
further discussion, I propose a list of some situations in which musical
change may be found. This is designed as a focus for investigation, and is
not intended as a series of definitions.
To ascertain whether they are changes of the musical system, or
innovations and acculturations within the system, folk views on the
music must be related to people's definitions of the musical community.
For example, if a young Venda is confronted with two items of "new"
music, one of which is a beer song in Venda and the other an urban song
with Zulu or Sotho words, her categorization of "new" must be correlated with her identification of social context and her own relationship to
it. (It is assumed that by "new" is meant "new in a known context".) If
she regards both items as part of her social world, then the former is an
innovation and the latter a case of musical change. If she regards only
the latter as part of her social world, then it is an innovation.
In order to identify musical change, it is necessary to distinguish
between innovations within a musical system and changes of the system. Such distinctions can only be properly made by relating variations
in musical processes and products to the perceptions and patterns of
interaction of those who use the music. Musical change cannot take
place in a social vacuum.
These provisions apply to all instances listed below:
1. An audible change in the norms of performance that is recognized
as such by performers and audience, and is not merely a variation or a
new item in an established style, or a new style in a tradition that
incorporates stylistic variation. Such changes are precipitated by a
variety of factors, most of which are extra-musical. For example:
a. New music is developed by a member or an associate of a
performing group. (A composer can be described as "an associate" in
that he usually has types of performing groups in mind, if not known
performers.)
b. A new social institution is adopted by members of a group, and
with that institution comes a special style of music associated with and
necessary for the continuation of the institution.
c. New music is borrowed from outside and incorporated in or
adapted for members of a performing group.
d. Social change brings contact with other groups, who have different music. Depending on the nature of the contact situation and/or
responses to the new sounds, music will be borrowed, reproduced, or
syncretized with existing forms, or musicians will be hired to play it.
e. A combination of social factors, such as a tradition of professional musicians, the expansion of radio programmes, and a growth of
national feeling, can precipitate a burst of individual creativity. See, for
example, Baily's account (1977) of the rapid development of the
fourteen-stringed dutar and the increase of musical activity in Herat,
Afghanistan, and Merriam's account of the Flathead ceremonial dancers (Merriam 1967:140-46).
2. An audible change in the norms of performance that is not
categorized as such by performers and audience, and is not classed as an
exceptional variation, but is considered significant by an external observer, chiefly as a result of objective measurement. This may be due to
the performers' wish to classify new sounds in a traditional way, or to
listening habits which make people deaf to changes (as with ethnomusicologists' first transcriptions of an unfamiliar musical idiom).
For example, Venda Christians said they were singing European hymns
in the European way, and the German Lutheran missionaries were
convinced that they were being sung exactly as taught, but in fact the
Venda frequently applied transformations of traditional Venda techniques of harmonization to the German melodies.
3. A technical development in a musical instrument or musicproducing device, which may be made for purely technical or commercial reasons and even without concern for any musical consequences.
4. A change in the technique of producing music that is not heard in
the musical product. As with (5) and (6) below, this may be the first step
towards audible changes in the musical product. For instance, a musician may finger a passage in an unconventional way, and this may
suggest extensions of the same idea to the point of producing new music
and a new performance style. (Wachsmann's case of changed technique
in playing the Sebei lyre [ 1958:54-44]belongs to [ 1] because it is audible.)
5. A change in the conceptualization of existing music which may or
may not be accompanied by a change of technique, but is not necessarily
accompanied by any noticeably audible change. This is most frequently
encountered in the reinterpretation of written scores. I suspect that, on
closer analysis, any change in the conceptualization of music will prove
to be reflected in performance. For example, Horowitz's interpretation
of Liszt's B minor Piano Sonata in 1977 took three minutes longer than
the 1932 version.
6. A change in the social use, but not in techniques of performance, of
a particular musical style or genre, which may or may not be accompanied by changes in attitude to the music and in recruitment of performers and audiences (e.g., Merriam 1967:156-57).
7. A transformation of the music-making process. This is similar to
(5) but goes beyond the realm of action to behaviour, and thus incorporates biological and psychological factors that are not yet fully understood. Thus I can give no concrete examples, but only conjectures.
Supposing certain musical activities involve the right hemisphere of the
brain more than the left (Critchley and Henson 1977, especially Ch. 9), a
change to predominantly left-hemisphere musical activities could either
precipitate or be precipitated by changes in other non-musical activities,
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or by a surfeit of predominantly right-hemisphere musical activities.

Three basic behavioural concepts are assumed: (a) that adaptive behaviour of organisms promotes homeostasis and a balance of parts; (b)
that the innate capabilities available for music-making, which may or
may not be specific to music, are rarely, if ever, fully used; and (c) that
transformations of emphasis and in application of musical abilities are
possible. These three concepts can be reformulated from the level of
action (cf. 5 above), and as such can be used either in conjunction with or
independently of their behavioural analogues. Thus (a) human communities come into being, and survive as communities, by sharing
patterns of thought and interaction (that is, cultures) and striving for
homeostasis and balance between their interrelated institutions and
ideas; (b) the culturally given processes of thought and interaction
available for the production of music are rarely, if ever, fully used in a
single composition or style of music; and (c) the use of music-making
processes, as cognitive sub-systems in a culture, is not necessarily
restricted to making music, and in turn other cognitive sub-systems
more commonly associated with, say, kinship, economics or certain
games, may be used to make music. I prefer to consider the levels of
both behaviour and action, but I appreciate that many researchers may
wish to exclude the behavioural, on the grounds that too many biological
unknowns are involved, and that although music uses the body and often
moves it deeply, it is at the cognitive/conceptual/mental level that it is
given meaning in human society. Examples of transformations of the
music-making process would be: application of the processes of
music-making (as systems of cognitive procedures) to producing poetry,
painting, religious ritual, architecture, or weaving, and vice versa.
This seventh situation invokes a third perspective, which hitherto has
not been considered, and which links analyses of synchronic and diachronic action by seeking the behavioural constraints that may motivate
action, or in relation to which action is taken.
This third perspective is biological.
All musical behaviour and action must be seen in relation to their
adaptive function in an evolutionary context, whether this is limited to
their functions within the adaptive mechanisms of different cultures, or
extended to their functions in biosocial evolution.
I maintain that music comes into being as a situational extension of the
maturational ritualization found in many social animals. It emerged as a
distinctive form of human behaviour when the biological processes
involved in its production were selected because of their superior efficiency as nonverbal communication to promote cooperative and exploratory behaviour. Song and dance preceded speech in the evolution of
homo sapiens by tens of thousands of years, so that musical processes
provided some of the earliest and most basic elements of human systems
of thought and action.
Music is not, therefore, an optional relish that can be afforded only
when there is an economic surplus: it is one of the essential foundations
of human society. Though in many cultures music has been part of the
superstructure of society, and in some sections of modern industrial
societies, its production has become almost entirely mental labour, the
biological foundations of music are always there as part of the infrastructure of society. Thus, the forces of the musical process inherent
in any human provide a basic motivation for both social and musical
change. Music can bridge the gulf between the true state of human being
and the predicament of particular human beings in a given society, and
especially the alienation that springs from the class struggle and human
exploitation. One might therefore expect that musical change would be
best understood in Marxist terms; and indeed, as an object for use and at
the level of action, a Marxist framework provides a useful approach. But
a strictly Marxist analysis cannot penetrate the subjective nature of
music as a special form of nonverbal communication, and of the musical
process as a means of generating special forms of human cooperation
and conceptual thought that are presupposed by cooperation in
economic production (See Blacking 1976b and 1977.)
This is why even in industrialized societies, the changing forms of
music may express the true nature of the predicament of people before
they have begun to express it in words and political action. In South
Africa Black consciousness was expressed in music many years before
it emerged as a serious focus of political activity. The music of the South
African Freedom Songs of the early 1950s, for example, was well ahead
of the political action of the time. The music was black music, and it
resonated with all rural and urban Africans, regardless of ethnic group
and language, but the politics of the time were liberal and multi-racial. It
was not for many years that black South Africans appreciated the fact
that they could not hope for justice from whites, and that to be political
and effective in the South African situation it was necessary to be
anti-white.
Changes in the cognitive and social organization of musical activities
and attitudes may signify or herald far-reaching changes in society that
outweigh the significance of the musical changes. Musical change is
important to watch because, owing to the deep-rooted nature of music, it
may precede and forecast other changes in society. It is like a stage of
feeling towards a new order of things.
Wilfred Owen said that all a poet can do is to warn. Music is the
supreme poetry of the heart, and the algorithms of the heart may tell us
more than any words about the conscience and consciousness of a
nation or a community. People's gropings towards real change happen
first in the arts, provided they are not controlled, and music in particular
(as distinct from and words that may accompany it) can be a most
powerful indication of where a society is going. As language changes
reflect changes in the conscious interaction of people and changing
thoughts about with whom to communicate and about relationships to
the environment, so musical change may both reflect and affect changing areas of collective feeling. Music is a primary adaptation to environment: with music, mankind may feel across boundaries; while with
language, decisions are made about boundaries.
In an article on the diffusion of the opening peyote song, Willard
BLACKING
Rhodes invoked a number of generalizations about music which, though

not yet substantiated, go to the heart of the matter. He claimed:
"2. The ready acceptance and popularity of the songs are in part a result of the
nature of music and man's psycho-physical receptivity to it.
3. This psycho-physical receptivity is associated with what, for lack of more
knowledge, we call an aesthetic impulse and man's curiosity or interest in novelty.
4. The same psychological principles operative in the re-creation of secular music
are found also in the singing of peyote songs . . .
8. Music, though one of the most intangible,fluid and malleable artistic expressions of man, is one of the most persistent elements in his culture and least subject to
change in its basic structure andforms (1958:48; italics mine)."
Most of my paper has been no more than a re-emphasis of these and

other points made by Rhodes over twenty years ago. And yet such
fundamental issues in the study of musical change have not been followed up with detailed analyses of social and musical data. Moreover,
we need much more data on the cognitive processes involved at all levels
in both the social and musical aspects of music-making, before we can
locate the critical moments of cognitive change that constitute musical
change. We have studies of unique cultural processes, such as
Anderson's (1968) analysis of modes in Ganda music. And we have
attempts to understand the universal nature of music as a unique product
of the human mind by Lindblom and Sundberg (1970), Nattiez (1975),
Harwood (1976), Laske (1975 and 1976), and others. Until the particular
and the general can be satisfactorily reconciled in a theory of music and
music-making that identifies the specifically musical processes and their
patterns of interaction with other processes in the production of music,
it will not be possible to understand the nature of musical change. But at
the same time, changes in the patterns of music sounds and people's
perceptions and evaluation of these changes, are vital evidence in developing a theory of music and music-making.
The study of musical change is not only interesting because music
reflects the deeper sources and meanings of social and cultural continuity and change; it is of vital concern to the future of individuals and
societies because, it may reveal not only how people have changed their
music, but also how, through the medium of music, people can change
themselves in unexpected ways.
[Note: I am most grateful to Bruno Nettl and Alexander Ringer, and to colleagues in my
department, for constructive criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. They are in no way
responsible for its failings, but have contributed to any improvements that might be
perceived.]
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Some Problems of Theory and Method in the Study of Musical Change

Author(s): John Blacking

OF THEORY AND METHOD IN THE

Music, music-making, and musical change

2 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

What is strictly musical about musical change cannot be treated in

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 3

4 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 5

aspects of human experience and reinforce the affective bases of social

6 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

cal mastery have depended on man's ability to halt or control natural

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 7

fully defined as radical changes in the organization of these primary

8 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 9

essential to take into consideration the range of sounds available to any

10/ 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 11

cultural evolution as Lomax implies, it could be an action autonomous

12 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

lines than economic or political relations (ibid.)"; but in spite of such

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 13

moment of conscious change, in which individuals make a decision to

14 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

"revolutionized" the Brazilian popular music scene (Behague 1973:211)

Non-Musical Factors and Folk Views in Musical Change

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 15

The innovations reported as changes strike me as being completely

What Midgett defines as musical change, McCullough describes as

16 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

changed significantly for 150-200 years (Midgett 1977:56), whereas Irish

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 17

the variations in speech that depended on class or area of origin, but

18 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 19

related to music over a considerable period of time. From a purely

20 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 21

or by a surfeit of predominantly right-hemisphere musical activities.

22 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 23

Rhodes invoked a number of generalizations about music which, though

Most of my paper has been no more than a re-emphasis of these and

24 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

THEORYAND METHODIN MUSICALCHANGE/ 25

26 / 1977YEARBOOKOF THE INTERNATIONALFOLK MUSICCOUNCIL

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