ABSTRACT
The stance of this essay is that of the composer of music in Western
culture. Creators in other cultures may; we hope (because diversity is valu
able), have not only other answers, but other questions. Scholars have tradi
tional directions from which to approach questions of value in art, but the
roads they have chosen to travel are not ours. Often scholars ask, Valuable for
what?, responding with some functionally oriented answer. The eminent eth-
nomusicologist Bruno Nettl, writing in a recent book called The Western
Impact on World Music, concludes that in the polyvalent musical culture of
today, where many different musical cultures may coexist in a given time and
place, a music is valuable as an “emblem of ethnicity”— valuable for its social
function of promoting cultural identity and cohesion. The space so revealed
is not in an aesthetic dimension, but an anthropological one. (“ Interpretive”
ethnomusicological approaches derived from Clifford Geertz’s kind of
anthropology escape the toils of functionalism, which is rather vieux jeu in
anthropological circles, without renouncing the tendency to flee from the
aesthetic core of the musical to its cultural causes and effects. However, I had
better not cast such stones too vigorously, lest they invade the anthropolo
gical house of glass that will be built later in this essay.)
Functionalism also underlies less sophisticated views on these questions.
