Understanding Music

Historically, people in many diverse cultures made independent discoveries about the ordered collections of pitches or scales used in songs. Some scales gradually stopped being used, while others became common standards. Naturally, people living in each part of the world became accustomed to the scale(s) used in their region. The scale(s) used by one culture often sounded exotic to another culture—or grated on the nerves, to put it kindly. When Westerners first heard Chinese music, including the whole-tone scale, they often found it unfamiliar and even disturbing. The complex musical rhythms from many island cultures sounded chaotic to Westerners, too, whose brains were unaccustomed to decoding differing scales and complicated rhythms. Early missionaries to Africa wrote letters home saying that, when the nationals played on their drums, it sounded like they were “not beating in time.” Later it was discovered that African rhythms involved extraordinarily complex polyrhythmic beats (e.g., two beats against three, three against four, and two against three and five). The brains of the missionaries, having never been exposed to such complex rhythms, found the beats too advanced even to follow much less understand and appreciate. The saying that you only know what you know applies to many genres in life—especially to cultural musical forms. When confronted with an unfamiliar style of music, what you dislike or fail to understand might simply be something yet unlearned by your brain.