Comparison
Hmm ... let's start someplace a little abstract and work back toward applicability:
"Chinese Music" (Perdurabo). I point it out because there's a blatant analogy in there about the Chinese octave having five notes. In the West, the octave has ... 13 notes? ... in the chromatic scale, eight in a major, six in a minor .... And many cultures regularly employ quarter-tones, whereas classical Western music deals only in half-tones. So we see, using the West as the basis of our examination, that there are musical systems which are both broader and more precise than our own insofar as tone distinction is concerned.
When I was in fourth grade or thereabout, one of the first programs I ever wrote in BASIC (Atari 800) was a FOR/NEXT loop that generated a scale of sound according to the pitch distinctions between 0 and 255. Not all of the sounds that came out of the computer can be described in common notation. I remember a mark in the score that is just an arc coming off the note and falling away; on the trumpet we just droped pitch, scattering the keys almost randomly; we were taught to
attempt to mark the major scale in the key of the piece, but it was unimportant with nine trumpets. We were all hitting actual notes on the way down that we can mark on a score. The trombones, though, fell off in a
glissando that covers tones that are not recognized as standard musical notes, much as the FOR/NEXT loop.
What I'm getting at is that the sounds are there, but we only have notes for so many of them.
Likewise with "God". A child is born and there is nothing but its own development fettering its interaction with the environment. Despite the fact that memory isn't writing at that point, the child is building up a number of electrical and chemical associations. Even before the Pavlovian responses start, the context of that conditioning is being set. From there it becomes teaching the right patterns--essentially limitations.
We already know what the note B-flat sounds like. Somebody has to teach us to call it B-flat. Somebody has to teach us that A is the next note down, while we know that such an assertion is not true. As we develop labels for some things we know, other things get forgotten because they are consistently less relevant to experience. So as the child learns labels and classifications, "the rest" gets sort of forgotten.
A physical image to consider: paint one side of a latticework designed to cover a 100 square-foot wall. You're using less paint than if you were painting all 100 square feet of the wall.
We lose our ability to perceive much in order to begin functioning in the world. It's a trade-off.
A practical effect? Well, one of the secrets of the Beach Boys and their influence over pop music is that Brian Wilson often used a certain C-tuning that, I swear, you can't play a bad chord in. It's the weirdest thing; when you tune the guitar to this tuning, you don't have to actually know any chords. Put your fingers on the fretboard and strum; it will sound okay. About the only thing you can do is put two chords together that people find unaesthetic. The counterpoint is that pop music became very amazingly restricted in its composition, seeking only a few bases for sound. Grunge was successful in part because a lot of it returned to D tunings (Kim Thayil of Soundgarden has an insanely low C tuning that your average $600 guitar can't seem to hold on
any strings). Grunge played on a guitar in open E doesn't sound right. Which is funny because most of the musicians I know make excuses for themselves when composing in D. "It's the songwriter's key," says one sheepishly. And it wasn't that long ago that Sting gave in and released a song (I don't know what it was called) with an Arabic vocalist who knew his quarter tones. At a hunger benefit in Seattle, Eddie Vedder in the height of Afghanistan-related paranoia, flew out the son of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (I can't recall the son's exact name). A lot of the younger audience sort of chuckled when he gave them the stage, but they'd flown thirty-seven hours from Afghanistan and driven straight in from the airport, so people gave them enough respect. In the end, that younger audience that came to see Alanis Morisette and REM as well (skipped them both) were left with their jaws open. It was kind of cool to look around and see the number of people who, in all their lives, had never stopped to think of music outside the half-tones on their guitar or piano keyboard. "Ever try to score half-tones?" asks a friend of mine who formerly served as assistant to the conductor of Seattle's symphony.
In the end, he gave up classical music, and in the six years I've known him, I've never even seen the 'cello. But I'm told he still plays it from time to time, for his son. But the guy can't cope musically without his quarter-tones anymore.
And this is, in the end, one of the most apt analogies I've ever set out blindly after.
Think of it this way:
How many times are you frustrated by an idea in your head that you can't quite explain even to yourself because you lack the words?
To borrow a literary version of it:
When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. You probably did too, you just don't recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are boren with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside of us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in gains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what tehy'd allowed to wither in themselves. (Robert R. McCammon, Boy's Life)
He's not entirely wrong. It's fiction, so you can take it in mythical form, as well. But he's so not entirely wrong that he is, in his context, almost absolutely correct.
:m:,
Tiassa
