how musical is man?

First let me say that this is a wonderful book by John Blacking -- in fact a landmark ethnomusicological work. I invite you to read it and be inspired by its many insights and quetions. Having said that I do think there are some problem areas. Briefly synopsized, Blacking spent time with a tribe in Africa where there are no distinctions made between musician and non-musician. He then later has difficulty understanding Western music as it clearly delineates between the two (or at least that's his thesis).

I'll offer this analogy: Imagine a tribe where there are no distinctions drawn between doctor and non-doctor -- all are healers of more or less equal ability. We can probably safely assume that there's an upper limit to the kinds of healing that could occur here. In our own society (and in many, many others) there are professional doctors who spend a lot of time in training and in research and consequently give us things like heart transplants, cancer treatments, antibiotics, and so on.

So music can be understood similarly: we have all sorts of musical levels represented in our society, and consequently we get Paganinis, Coltranes, and Steve Vais. And it isn't just a Western phenomenon: if you were to learn koto in Japan you do so from a master player; in India if you were to learn sitar you would do likewise. Whether this dizzying array of talent and subsequent complexity and 'sophistication' is all for the better is hard to assess across cultures, but surely having to ability to paint with many colors is at least as good as painting monochromatically (that depends upon the artist and the viewer, of course).

But I really take issue with the fact that Blacking is so predisposed to seeing our culture's lack of musicians everywhere as a problem of elitism and of class exploitation. Perhaps a concert-goer can be "passive" and happy, but my suspicion is that the more we are musicians the more we can deeply participate in the music being offered us. And I don't know if Blacking has ever given a classical concert/recital or not, but you definitely want people to show up if you do! Perhaps 30 years ago there was some sort of elitist will keeping the masses from attending concerts (though I doubt it) but nowadays I think that classical musicians really want to reach out, which can only be done by better education. And that education would be (from my point of view) not teaching appreciation but teaching everyone to be musical. Or showing people that they have the innate talent of music and leading them toward exploiting it.