HOW MUSICAL IS MAN ? by John Blacking. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1973. $6-95.

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REVIEWS 101
HO W MUSICAL IS MAN ? by Joh n Blacking. University of W ashington Press, Seattle, 1973. $6-95.
It is hard to know exactly what this book is trying to do. Is it a vindication of ethnic music? An
enquiry into the musicality of m an? A theory about the social importance of music? An argument
against the view that cultural simplicity implies inferiority? A theory about the foundations of music?
An attack on systematic musicology? Certainly the bo ok — w hich originated as the John Dana Lectures
at the University o f Washington in Seattle — attempts to o much too quickly. There are nevertheless a
number of valuable ideas in it, and these it is necessary to recognize.
The best parts o f the bo ok are those where Professor Blacking restricts himself to concrete analyses
of his own fieldwork o r to discussions of the aims and methods of ethnomusicology. Most — possibly
all — of this material has been presented by the author elsewhere, in his book Ve nda Chil dren ’s Son gs,
in a series o f articles for A fr ic an St udi es (1969), in articles for A fr ic an M u sic and other journals. And there
the material was presented more fully; here the arguments are usually set ou t too briefly to do them proper
justice; and to anybody who has no t encountered them before they will seem at times unnecessarily
cryptic (one thinks particularly of the many diagrams and musical examples which have been simply
lifted from those othe r writings and reproduced here without really adequate elucidation). Despite this
weakness, enough is communicated to remind one th at Blacking has many valuable things to say about
the relationship between musical and social structures. There is, for example, the discussion of the
way “ the various styles of Venda music reflect the variety of its social groups and the degree of their
assimilation into the body politic” ; there is the analysis of the music and dance of the domba initiation
school, w hich well illustrates how “ formal and expressive elements may be combined to portray
symbolically in music the essential themes of a culture” ; and we are reminded that the relationship
between the music o f domba and that of ishikona, the national dance, reflects the function of th e two
types o f music in Venda society.
For anybody involved in the business of musicological explanation the basic point at issue here is a
vitally im portant one, and if Blacking’s book serves to popularize it one will forgive it many of its
shortcomings. The point might be elaborated as follows. Mere (orthodox) empirical musical analysis
remains shackled to the phenomena immediately given to it in the surface structures. From this follow
two consequences. First, such analysis can never hope to explain adequately the process by which those
structures come into being. And second, the analyst can therefore never know whether the ‘facts’ with
which he deals are truly significant or whether they are merely the invention of his own theoretical
myopia. For, as Blacking shows, “the principles of the creative process cannot always be found in the
surface structures o f the music, and many of the generative factors are no t musical” (p. 97). These
factors, says Blacking, may be sociological, or cultural, or biological, or psychological, or purely
musical — which o f these, or which combination of them, is not to be assumed, but is in each case to be
discovered anew. (Incidentally, the status of these various factors as distinct and separate entities is not
wholly satisfactory; can we speak meaningfully o f ‘psychological’ and ‘cultural’ factors a pa rt fro m
‘sociological’ ones? A nd what, in the light o f the present argument itself, migh t ‘purely musical’
factors be?)
Blacking’s hope for the discipline o f ethnomusicology is that if it can succeed in the task o f analyzing
ethnic music as the tonal expression o f different kinds o f social and cultural experience, then the
explanatory richness of this approach m ight convince musicologists o f the desirability o f analyzing all
music in the same way. It is thus “a discipline that holds out hop e for a deeper understanding of all
music” . Clearly this remark is directed not simply at ethnomusicologists; it is aimed also a t most o f the
academies of Western musical scholarship, w ho for all their historical awareness usually analyze musical
works as things-in-themselves, existing outside of any historical context except an ‘intrinsically musical’
one. This procedure, the author suggests, may be one reason why the journals of European music are
so full o f contradictory explanations of the same music. Blacking also takes the best-known attempt in
English to come to grips w ith the question of meaning in Western music—Deryck Cooke’s T he L anguag e
o f M us ic — and neatly shows it to be spurious because “it is not sufficiently context-sensitive”. No
musical meaning is absolute even within the same European musical tradition. “Tonal music between
1400 and 1953 cannot be isolated as a thing-in-itself, especially if it is to be related to hum an emotions.
The aesthetic conventions of the eighteenth century cannot be considered apart from the experience o f
the social groups who were or were not involved in them” (p. 72). The m inuet, fo r instance, has
“entirely different social and em otional associations before and after the French Revolution”. Arguments
such as these are so fundamental, and yet so seldom made and even less frequently understood, that
anybody who is prepared to express them is to be congratulated. But it is precisely because they are a
minority view that their articulation m ust be characterized by rigo ur, lucidity, and impeccable
scholarship. Unhappily these are not the virtues of Blacking’s book. Most o f the argumentation is so
lacking in precision of any kind, an d so circular, that reading the book is an exhausting rather than an
exhilarating experience. To an alarm ing degree the discourse proceeds by means of words and phrases
such as ‘may’, ‘seems’, ‘suggests’, ‘apparently’, ‘perhaps’, ‘in a sense’, ‘it is possible that’, ‘it seems to me’,
‘it is tempting to see’, ‘I do not see’, ‘I doubt if’, ‘I regard’, ‘I believe’, ‘I do not believe’. Then by
sleight-of-hand the tentative (‘may’) is frequently read as th e absolute (‘is’) and leads w ithout m ore ado
to a conclusion (‘therefore’). An example at random: “Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes

102 AFRICAN MUSIC SOCIETY JOURNAL
may be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in
society. Thus all music is . . (p. x). Key words are used in a somewhat promiscuous fashion: “An
African ‘folk’ song is n ot necessarily less intellectual than a symphony . . (p. 113) — one knows what
he means (that the process of generation may be very complex), but ‘intellectual’ is patently not the right
word.
One consequence of the lack of rigour is that the argument tends toward inconsistency. On the one
hand Blacking takes the trouble to show that music cannot meaningfully be understood abstractly, apart
fro m its social and historical situation; on the other hand, he treats certain musical and othe r categories
as abstractly as possible, by simply removing them from their historical and social context and regarding
them (in the absence of any declared evidence) as thoug h they were universals. Thus, for example, all
music is ‘a metaphorical expression of feelings’; all music is made by ‘the composer’, and always the
feelings relate to his ‘experience of his environment’. And evidently it is permissible to speak of “the
complexity of the m ind of man” , as something in itself, apart fro m society (p. 35). Thro ughout the book,
too, there is a harping on a somewhat mysterious ‘biology’; music has ‘biological’ foundations, and
‘biological’ processes are at work in its creation. An d so there may be; but Blacking is never explicit
enough abo ut what these are, or what his evidence is, to enable us to decide.
A bibliography w ould have been an advantage. Christ oph er Ba llan tine
DA NCES O F S OUTH ERN AFRICA. Produced and filmed by Gei Zantzinger, edited Conley Benfield,
sound Ruth Zantzinger. 16 mm. colour, 53 minutes, commentary Dr. Hugh Tracey, interview
with Andrew Tracey. Distributed through Pennsylvania State Psychological Cinema Register,
Audio-Visual Department.
The film offers a program of recreational dances performed by groups of people who work on the
South African and Rhodesian mines. Nearly all of the dozen or more dances are performed principally
by men who represent various tribes. In a brief introductory conversation with Zantzinger, Andrew
Tracey states that his interest in record ing dances and their accompanying songs includes revealing their
meaning to Africans and to the Western world. While this film does not in any ostensible way deal
with interpretation o f the dance phenomena, there is much in this film to recommend. The dances are
inventive, varied and enthusiastically performed. Particularly spell-binding are the intriguing Xhosa
shaking dances, sensational high kicking Ndlamu dance of the Zingili Zulu and somewhat hum orous
tumbling dance of the Ndau.
Primarily, the film is important fo r two reasons. First it contributes strong evidence of the abundance,
variety and distinctiveness of African dances. Secondly, for the dance ethnologist, it is a resource for
the study o f social change as reflected in choreographic transformations. While most o f the dances appear
to be based o n o r related to stamping as a main choreographic motif, there is much evidence o f group
and individual style and structure change partly due to th e use of Western dress, shoes and modified
traditional costumes (many of them provided by the mine authorities). Compared to the high energy
level in the vigorous stamping G umboot Dance o f the Baca, the Yao tribe’s Malipenga featured an almost
dream-like restraint in the gentle tapping of the foot, almost a touching of the foot to the groun d
without transference of weight. Th e Bakumba step dance of the Shona/Karanga dancers presented
another version o f stamping dances. In this dance, especially as performed by a young woman, an
intricate audible rhythm beaten out by the shoes, as the dancer moved tow ard and away from her dance
companions, formed a main theme over which a kinetic harmony in the whole body flowed. Sometimes,
it seemed unm indful of the music b ut always somehow belonging to it.
In making this film H r. Zantzinger was concerned with reporting each dance as completely as possible
so beginnings and choreographic continuities could be studied. It is appropriate, therefore, to
com ment on the filming of continuous sequences of movement uninterru pted by non-choreographic
close-ups. The sequences are o f sufficient duration to facilitate recognition of recurring themes as
distinguished from chance improvisations. Ground patterns, kinetic shapes, space patterns, effort flow
and rhythmic configurations are clearly discernible to choreologists who wish to transcribe the dances
into Labanotation or into another system of movem ent notation. This kind of motion picture might
well help to fill a gap in the archives of available transcriptions and analyses of African dance music
which so often record tonal and rhythmic structures in the music but neglect the very essential role of
the dancing body as a prim e instrum ent in the total music performance.
Certainly contraposition of polykinetic elements in the choreography and polyrhythmic configurations
in the music can provide some new insights into the dances of African people. It may also help to
illuminate the uniquely African-American phenom enon called Jazz Dance.
Nadia C hilk ovsk y N ah umck
Phila de lph ia D a nce A cademy