Ideas of Culture and the Challenge of Music by John Chernoff

This article provided a very comprehensive overview of how past anthropological studies have dealt with music (musicians, music-making, etc) in different cultures. First, Chernoff observes that in Western civilization, “culture” occupies its own territory within society instead of permeating the whole. “Culture is seen as a refinement of human experience…Culture is often associated and appropriated by people of means and power, those seemingly least affected by life’s bodily struggles...” (pg.222)
Because music is the least materialistic of the arts, it is harder for people to grasp the meaning of it. Chernoff makes an important point that music is rarely studied as “music”, but as an expression of culture. Anthropologists, in a sense, use a culture’s music in order to find out about other aspects of their lives. “An effort to ground music in a cultural context does not merely reflect a social scientific inclination to the abandonment of musicological analysis, nor does it merely reflect the belief that issues of musical meaning should be addressed with regard to the references and associations of indigenous people.” (pg.227)
Chernoff also briefly cites the Dagbamba of Northern Ghana, whose musical institutions offer a key to understanding the depth of their cultural life. The Dagbamba display their familial ancestry (back to around 600 years) through performance, drumming, and singing. The society embodies their personal relationship to history by dancing in musical contexts.
It is evident that music is not given the right sort of attention that it deserves. The emotions and sensitivities that are evoked from music are not looked upon effects of the music, but as clues to other parts of the particular culture. I do not think that music from another culture should be labeled as non-Western because it automatically creates a scale to which different music is compared.