Is the search for universals incompatible with the study of cultural specificity?

Abstract

What it was called " the anthropology of music " finds its roots in two found-ing papers: The Anthropology of Music by Alan Merriam (1964) and How Musical is Man? by John Blacking (1973). In these two books, the musical structures are designed as a product of the culture. The methodological consequence is: the ethnomusicological investigation should begin from the study of the cul-tural context. The consequence of this position, quite widely used in the field, was to emphasize the music environment, rather than analyse its structure, with a few notable exceptions (the work of Simha Arom and his team). A for-tiori, the research of universals, considered ethnocentric, was regarded in the field as inadmissible. After having proposed a setting up of this situation, the author examines the manner in which the issue of Blacking approaches the link between culture and musical structures, then reconsiders his positions with regard to universals, and possible biological foundations of music. The article ends with a plea for reconciliation, with a view to the ethnomusicology of tomorrow, from the point of view of the anthropology, taking into ac-count the cultural determinations, the comparative study of the musical struc-tures, and the search for universal Keywords Ethnomusicologty, Anthropology of music, Music universals, Blacking It might seem surprising to have written this paper in the context of an hommage to John Blacking, one of the leading figures of the anthropolog-ical approach to music, since I have long been considered a structuralist or formalist, as one who leaves by the wayside the cultural dimension of the Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/3/16 7:19 AM Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Search of Universals HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 67-94 68 music studied by ethnomusicology. In point of fact, I have never ceased to reflect on the relationship between music and culture, and as such, Black-ing's book, How Musical is Man (Blacking, 1973), has always been useful to me, perhaps not as a reference book whose orientation had to be adopted to the letter, but rather as a constant subject of reflection and discussion. It is no doubt for this reason that I did not hesitate, when the possibility arose, to have it published in French (Blacking, 1980). What's more, one may found in Blacking's writings contain some positions which are a di-rect or indirect response to my own (cf. Blacking, 1995, chap. V). It might then seem like a provocation on my part, or worse, to present a paper on the subject of universals that pays tribute to someone who wrote the fol-lowing: " Unless the formal analysis begins as an analysis of the social situa-tion that generates the music, it is meaningless " (Blacking, 1973: 71). This methodological proposition was an extension of Alan Merriam's, which is the basis of the anthropological approach to music: Music is a product of man and has structure, but its structure cannot have an existence of its own divorced from the behavior which produces it. In order to understand why a music structure exists as it does, we must also understand how and why the behavior which produces it is as it is, and how and why the concepts which underlie that behavior are ordered in such a way as to produce the particularly desired form of organized sound. (Merriam, 1964: 7)