From: ca_ac@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
Subject: Re:Development of musical understanding
Organization: 
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 19:29:46 GMT

In article <CB.92Aug19152119@tamarack13.timbuk>, cb@tamarack13.timbuk (Chris Brewster) writes:
> Jon Conrad writes:
> 
>    [A Bach piece] takes us on a certain journey of harmonic
>    tension-relaxation-release, which you won't get if you have no
>    experience of how European harmony accomplishes this (it isn't
>    innate, you have to have experienced some of the music)...
               {Stuff Deleted}
>    ALL of this, and more, is culturally conditioned; to someone from
>    another musical background, it might sound totally shapeless or
>    meaningless.
> 
> Regarding the "training" that Jon mentions: I've raised two kids through
> toddlerhood, which involves, among other things, teaching them to talk.
> Linguists have described a "caretaker dialect" that exists in all
> languages: a simplified, exaggerated style of speech that adults use
> when talking to little kids, which conveys the underlying structure of
> language during the learning phase.  At this same age, kids (in our
> culture) LOVE songs like Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday.  They sing
> these over and over and take real delight in them.  I wonder if such
> songs serve a similar purpose in establishing the primitive structure of
> our music.... If my analogy is valid, the real content of, say,
> Indian classical music might be almost as inaccessible to me as that of
> Urdu speech, since I haven't developed through the stages of Indian
> music (and in fact, Indian classical music goes over my head).  I'd like
> to know what kind of music appeals to kids in cultures with musical
> structures very different from ours.
> 
> Chris Brewster

	I am no expert on a topic such as this. However, since I happened to 
grow up in India - Indian children's songs and all (Bengali to be 
precise)- and trained in Indian Classical Music I will share my perspective.
I guess I was also fortunate to have a father who listened to a lot of Western
Music (of the kind we discuss on this newsgroup) and so my exposure was not
just limited to  Indian music as I was growing up.  
	You have an interesting point here. I just went over a few children's 
songs that I know in Bengali in my head and compared them to the two that you
have mentioned. While there are many similarities in general (simple tunes 
using only a few notes, repeated rythms etc.) given that the Western major 
scale and the Indian basic scale are almost identical, the differences are 
illuminating. (Now there are some Bengali children's songs which are clearly 
based on Western tunes, not surprising given the colonial influence, and I
avoided these in the comparison, of course.) One thing that stands out is
how clearly the tunes Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday emphasize important 
harmonic intervals of W.Music - major thirds, major fourths, fifths,
sixths, the octave, major triad etc. In contrast the Bengali tunes tend much
more to have an adjacent note to adjacent note progression. As you may know
Indian C.M. does not have a concept of harmonic intervals in the Western sense, 
rather the relation of one note to another within a particular "mode" is what
drives the melody (this is a very vague description, I admit, but the best
I can do in one line). 
	The other noticeable difference is the rythmic structure - Jingle Bells
and Happy Birthday are in simple 2/4 and 3/4, respectively, with the slight
emphasis on the first beat of each 2/4 (or 3/4) measure as in much W.Music.
While the Bengali songs do also have simple rythms, the first beat of each
"cycle" is very much emphasized, much like some beats are emphasized 
in rock music. (Somebody I know who once listened to some Bengali nursery
rhymes commented that it sounded a lot like rap music to them. This, to me, is
not very accurate but gives somewhat of a hint.) Again, this first beat emphasis
is very important in Indian C.M. even though the beat cycles are much more
complex.
        What you mean by the statement about these children's songs
"establishing the primitive structure" of the music is not quite clear to me.
It's quite likely that children's songs reflect at a primitive level the more 
sophisticated music that exists in a given culture. (I'm sure that the
children's songs that existed during the rennaissance didn't sound quite like 
the ones that exist in the west today.) An exposure to such songs when you are
young may well make it easier to learn the sophisticated music of the culture,
but I think far less significantly than in the case of language. I think that
the learning of a musical "grammar" needs a much more conscious effort as com-
pared to the case of a language where one sort of automatically imbibes the
rules of grammar as a child. I speak only from personal experience (i.e. it
may be different for other people, I suppose) but it took me approximately the
same effort to learn the rudiments of Western C.M as it did to learn the basics 
of Indian C.M. It is possible I had some troubles in learning Western C.M that
somebody growing up on a diet of "Here we go round the Mulberry Bush" may not 
have had but it is not de-bilitating in any permanent manner. You may have 
trouble understanding Indian Classical Music but it's most likely because you 
are listening for the wrong things - the time scale is expanded as far melodic
patterns go, the rythms are ones are not used to, there are no harmonic 
progressions etc., the scales may be quite different from the usual major or
minor modes of Western music - but none of it is anything that you should not 
be able to imbibe at some level in quite a short period of time with a good
teacher and some careful listening on your part, given that you are reasonably
well trained in Western Music.

						Alak Chakravorty
  
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical