Toward a model for the evaluation of the cultural strength of various musics
Application of the model (cont.)
Determining the cultural strength of a music
Cultural strength is the potency of the homorganic bond between songs composed in a music and the culture in which they occur. Thus, if a music has high cultural strength, it will have high functional and psychological weight within the culture, high levels of integration with stable cultural domains, and will have little susceptibility to changes removing its function within the culture; the music is an essential thread in the fabric of the culture. If a music has low cultural strength, it will fill only peripheral functions and will not be part of the central tapestry of the culture.
I propose four criteria by which the cultural strength of a music may be judged: emotional involvement, communicational clarity, social group identity and cohesion, and musical integrity.
Four criteria
These criteria suggest a small number of parameters which can be used to define the level of integration of a music in a culture. They correlate somewhat with anthropological categories of the functions of music in culture,4 but include psychological concepts as well. These criteria are meant to be applied singly to each relevant music or musical style, as experienced by a subcultural grouping, occurring in the context of one cultural domain of a defined culture (or superculture). In this article, the subculture under scrutiny is that of Protestant churchgoers within the Ubangi, and the cultural domain is their religious life. When a music or music style is referred to, it implies the most widely or most often used songs within it, exemplars of a prototype of the music or style.
Emotional involvement
This criterion describes the capacity of a style to foster emotional involvement of participants. The degree of emotion can be measured by observing the physical involvement of participants while the music is occurring and by interviewing those involved for descriptions of their feelings.
Communicational clarity
Relying on the notion of relevance as described by Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Gutt (1992), this criterion describes the capacity of a style to communicate clearly to participants what was intended by the composer's words. That is, not only must the words themselves be heard and understood, but they must exploit the full context of the hearers so that the inferences drawn by the hearers coincide with those intended by the composer. It includes transfer of propositional information and the relevance of that propositional information to the life of the culture. Measures of communication include the level of comprehension of the texts of songs and the correlation of relevant sociolinguistic data. For example, if linguistic surveys show that only 20 percent of a language group understand the LWC, it can be hypothesized that ma ny people singing a song performed in the LWC will probably have low comprehension of the verbal content.
Social group identity and cohesion
This criterion describes the capacity of a style to engender a sense of belonging and predictability within a cultural domain. This measure carries most of the weight of functional integration into cultural structures.4 It can be measured by interviews with participants, and historical, sociolinguistic and anthropological studies of the musical style. In the African American church community, as an example of one aspect of this measure, the songs used during the civil rights movement still evoke a strong sense of community and belonging; songs such as "We shall overcome" evoke memories and emotions of a defining period in that culture's history.
Musical integrity
This criterion describes the level of skill involved in composing and performing songs in the style. This level is measured by interviews with music experts within the culture, interviews with listeners determining if they like the sound of the songs, comparisons with performance of the music in the originating culture (if this music has been recently adopted), and evaluating the number of new compositions produced in the style. The most important measure is how prolific music experts within the culture are at composing new songs. If there is much new composition, then the composers have necessarily internalized the structures of the music.
4The four criteria posited here can be associated with the following functions of music posited by Merriam (219-227):
|
Cultural strength measure |
Merriam's anthropological functions |
|---|---|
|
Emotional involvement |
Emotional expression, physical response |
|
Linguistic clarity |
Communication |
|
Social group identity and cohesion |
Validation of social institutions and religious rituals, contribution to the continuity and stability of culture, enforcing conformity to social norms, symbolic representation, contribution to the integration of society |
|
Musical integrity |
Entertainment |