Some of the greatest ethnomusicologists of all time were Christian missionaries. They needed a way to spread the Gospel to many different kinds of people around the world, so learning language and music of other cultures was an important part of the process, and they would often write hymns for other nationalities once they became familiar with the music and language of the culture they were immersed in. I attended East Texas Baptist University and studied world music in depth, and now hold a degree in World Music. One of the things that bothers me is that there are people who lay claim to their cultures music and say that it is in their blood, so to speak, and give off a sort of territorial attitude toward their music with regard to people of another skin color or ethnicity. As you know, everyones blood has the same DNA structure, and the mtDNA sequence in your blood could have you close relatives with a person of another skin color on another continent - a scientific fact. All humans are predisposed to language and musical expression. These tribal-cultural traits develop in parallel as there are hundreds of thousands of combinations possible with regard to syllables, rhythms, tones, etc. There is a misconception that certain people of certain skin color cannot express musical aptitude in the same manner as another person of a different skin color. This is highly incorrect, as it is the intellectual makeup of the person that determines the ability, not the pigmentation of the dermis. There are also frequent misconceptions about where certain styles of music came from. Be careful before you lay claim to a particular style of music that didnt come from your country or ethnicity, instead, lay claim to music in the form of picking up a musical instrument instead of pressing play. I digress: there is no one culture that owns music, because it is our universal language of human expression.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 17:57:20 +0000
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