peoples think they have music? Certainly not all have a term that trans-
lates as “music.”Even European languages do not have all that much
unanimity;look,for example,at the bifurcation of Musikand Tonkunst
in German,or Muzikaand Hudbain Czech.In Persian culture,much of
what we conceive of as music is called Musiqi,a word derived from
Greek by way of Arabic;but much that sounds to us Europeans as music
would not be considered Musiqibut rather Khandan,a word that means
reading,reciting,and singing;and some sounds or genres would be
regarded as somehow between these two extremes.The Blackfoot lan-
guage has as its principal gloss for music the word saapup,which means
something like singing,dancing,and ceremony all rolled into one.Thus
if we are to talk about music as a universal phenomenon,we cannot do
it on the basis of a commonality of cultural conceptions.
As Klaus Wachsmann (1971) suggested,all cultures have something
that sounds to us (he meant Europeans and Euro-Americans,I am sure)
like music.I have heard music lovers and scholars assert that electronic
music,rap,and Native American songs are not music.But can we say
that all societies have a kind of sound communication that they distin-
guish from ordinary speech,and that this could be a kind of baseline for
music? I like to think that we have here a solid universal.But wait:are
the various things that are distinct from speech really at all the same kind
of thing? The Shuar or Canelos Quichua in Ecuador have songs and
speech,and some intermediate forms such as the Auchmartin,stylized
speechlike or songlike sounds exchanged by men who do not know each
other meeting on a jungle path,or the Enermartin,which is used by a
group of men to raise their spirits and courage before a tribal or clan
battle.Where do we draw the line? In any event,the typical anthropo-
logical approach to universals involves the concept of musics,societies,
cultures,all definitely plural.Types of Universals
Let me also suggest that we could look at the issue of universals as a
set of concentric circles (for a more detailed discussion,see Nettl
1983:36–51).At the center is the definition of music—with all the prob-
lems this entails—and the universal in the extreme sense.A theoretical
abstraction,to be sure.The central kind of universal is what is present in
music at all times,in every moment of musical existence,if I may put it
that way.There is little in a practical way that we can do with this kind
of universal,but it ought be to mentioned.When we play a large group
of musical examples for an unsophisticated listener and ask him or her
what they have in common,we probably would not get a positive answer.466 Bruno Nettl