Music
A music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity, and may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region. The world may be divided into three large music areas, each containing a "cultivated" or classical musics "that are obviously its most complex musical forms," with, nearby, folk styles which interact with the cultivated, and, on the perimeter, primitive styles:
- Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa
- based on shared isometric materials, diatonic scales, and polyphony based on parallel thirds, fourths, and fifths.
- North Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, and Indonesia.
- based on shared small intervals in scales, melodies, and polyphony.
- American Indian, East Asia, Northern Siberian, and Finno-Ugric music
- based on shared large steps in pentatonic and tetratonic scales.
However, he then adds that "the world-wide development of music must have been a unified process in which all peoples participated," and that one finds similar tunes and traits in puzzlingly isolated or separated locations throughout the world.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Area
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“In benevolent natures the impulse to pity is so sudden, that like instruments of music which obey the touch ... you would think the will was scarce concerned, and that the mind was altogether passive in the sympathy which her own goodness has excited. The truth is,—the soul is [so] ... wholly engrossed by the object of pity, that she does not ... take leisure to examine the principles upon which she acts.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
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“Let music sound while he doth make his choice;
Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)