Music is humanly organized sound

The Venda taught me that music can never be a thing in itself, and that all music is folk music, in the sense that music cannot be transmited or have meaning without associations between people. Distinctions between the surface complexity of diferent musical Styles and techniques do not tell us anything useful about the expressive purposes and power of music, or about the intelectual organization involved in this creation. Music is too deeply concerned with human feelings and experiences in society, and its patterns are too often generated by surprising outbursts of unconscious cerebration, for it to be subject to arbitrary rules, like the rules of games. Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes may be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in society. Thus all music is structurally, as well as functionally, folk music. The makers of “art” music are not innately more sensitive or cleverer than “folk” musicians: the structures of their music simply express, by processes similar to those in Venda music, the numerically larger systems of interaction of folk in their societies, the consequences of a more extensive division of labor, and an accumulated technological tradition.