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Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not MozartBy Fjordman
Fjordman - 6/12/2009
I have had some interesting discussions with my good friend Ohmyrus,
who is an ethnic Chinese man but appreciates some aspects of Western
civilization that many Westerners themselves appear to have forgotten,
or rejected. He is not unique in this regard. One of the best books
about European culture published in recent years is Defending the
West, written by the former Muslim Ibn Warraq who was born in the
Indian subcontinent, not in the Western world. Essentially, according
to modern Multiculturalism, every culture has the right to exist -
except the Western one. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces
Multiculturalism for precisely this reason in his book Understanding
Muhammad, which I have reviewed online:
`If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western,
Helleno-Christian culture. It is this culture that is facing
extinction. It is to this culture alone that we owe the
Enlightenment, Renaissance, and democracy. These are the
foundations of our modern world. It would be a terrible
mistake not to preserve this culture. If we do nothing, we
face a future where democracy and tolerance will fade and
Islam's more primitive instincts will subjugate humanity. All
cultures are not made equal - We owe our freedom and modern
civilization to Western culture. It is this culture that is
now under attack and needs protection.'
As a native European, it is strange to notice how many (non-Muslim)
Asians apparently appreciate my civilization more these days than
so-called intellectuals in my own country do. It is challenging to
explain how the West could make so many advances in the past and yet
be as stupid as it currently is. The question of what went wrong with
the West is far more interesting than what went wrong with the Islamic
world. The best answer I can come up with is that maybe our current
flaws are related to our past virtues, at least indirectly. For
instance, being stubborn can be a strength or a weakness, depending
upon the situation. The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We
have unquestionably made advances that no other civilization has done
before us, despite what some critics claim, but perhaps the price we
pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before
us. Organized science is a Western invention. Organized national
suicide, too, is a Western invention. The Western university system
once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-Ã -vis
other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the very
civilization that gave birth to it.
Since European civilization is so far the only civilization to have
had a truly global impact, this means that all other civilizations
have to face the challenge of dealing with a layer of impulses and
ideas which are not their own. There is no doubt that this has been a
disruptive process in many cases, but it is also true that different
non-Western cultures deal very differently with the Western challenge
and appropriate very different parts of its heritage.
The Arabs had no significant pictorial tradition of their own even
before Islam. The Islamic ban on pictorial arts was not always
enforced, just like the ban on alcoholic beverages was not always
strictly enforced, but pictorial arts were discouraged and
consequently never occupied a prominent place in that culture. Some
Muslim rulers could interpret the religious rules regarding the
depiction of human figures quite liberally. A tradition for book
illustration and miniature painting did develop, but it is important
to remember that even the paintings that did exist were intended as
illustrations of a text and were almost never designed for exhibition
on a wall or in a gallery. Historian Bernard Lewis explains in his
book What Went Wrong?:
`One of the attractions of Western art and particularly of
Western portraiture must surely have been the use of
perspective, which made possible a degree of realism and
accuracy unattainable in the stylized and rather formal art of
the traditional miniature - In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, Western influence becomes very clear, both
in the structure of buildings and in their interior
decoration. By the nineteenth century it is almost universal,
to such a degree that the older artistic traditions were dying
and being replaced by this new art from Europe. As the
perception and measurement of space affected the visual arts,
so too did the perception and measurement of time affect music
- though to a much lesser extent - A distinguishing
characteristic of Western music is polyphony, by harmony or
counterpoint - Different performers play together, from
different scores, producing a result that is greater than the
sum of its parts. With a little imagination one may discern
the same feature in other aspects of Western culture - in
democratic politics and in team games, both of which require
the cooperation, in harmony if not in unison, of different
performers playing different parts in a common purpose.'
In contrast, here is what Lewis writes in The Middle East: A Brief
History of the Last 2,000 Years:
`Since Muslim worship, with the limited exception of some
dervish orders, makes no use of music, musicians in the
Islamic lands lacked the immense advantage enjoyed by
Christian musicians through the patronage of the Church and of
its high dignitaries. The patronage of the court and of the
great houses, though no doubt useful, was intermittent and
episodic, and dangerously subject to the whims of the
mighty. Muslim musicians devised no standard system of
notation, and their compositions are therefore known only by
the fallible and variable medium of memory. There is no
preserved corpus of classical Islamic music comparable with
that of the European musical tradition. All that remains is a
quite extensive theoretical literature on music, some
descriptions and portrayals of musicians and musical occasions
by writers and artists, a number of old instruments in various
stages of preservation, and of course the living memory of
long-past performances.'
There are those who are critical of Mr. Lewis as a scholar and
consequently believe that he shouldn't be quoted as an authority. You
should always maintain a healthy criticism of any scholar, but I know
from other sources that the above mentioned quotes are largely
correct.
Many forms of music are banned in Islam. The Reliance of the Traveller
by Ahmad Ibn Lulu Ibn Al-Naqib and Noah Ha Mim Keller has been
formally approved by al-Azhar in Egypt, the highest institution of
religious learning among Sunni Muslims. It quotes a number of ahadith,
authoritative sayings of Muhammad and his companions which form the
core Islamic texts next to the Koran, among them one which says that
`There will be peoples of my Community who will hold fornication,
silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful - Another quote says
that: `On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into
the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress.' The scholarly
conclusion is that `All of this is explicit and compelling textual
evidence that musical instruments of all types are unlawful.' Another
legal ruling says that `It is unlawful to use musical instruments -
such as those which drinkers are known for, like the mandolin, lute,
cymbals, and flute - or to listen to them. It is permissible to play
the tambourine at weddings, circumcisions, and other times, even if it
has bells on its sides. Beating the kuba, a long drum with a narrow
middle, is unlawful.'
Moreover, while I do disagree with Mr. Lewis sometimes, in my
experience he occasionally errs by being too positive when writing
about Islamic culture, not too negative. If you believe Lewis, `The
earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East
occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced
back to European originals.' This view fits well with the
anti-European, Multicultural bias of modern media and academia, yet it
is completely and utterly wrong, as Dr. Andrew G. Bostom has
conclusively demonstrated in his extremely well-researched book The
Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
Dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes and pigs (Koran
5:60) has been common throughout Islamic history, more than 1300 years
before the establishment of the state of Israel. Muhammad himself
referred to the Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as `apes' before
orchestrating the slaughter of all of their men. As one Muslim living
in Germany said, `Jews are the enemy of Allah.' Referring to Adolf
Hitler he stated: `The man was a hero, almost a Muslim. I'm one of his
fans.' A disproportionate amount of Europeans who convert to Islam are
neo-Nazis or Communists.
In 2005, Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf was among the top
bestsellers in Turkey, behind a book about a Turkish national hero
detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C. Adolf Hitler remains
widely popular in many other Islamic countries, too. At the same time,
Turkish PM Erdogan stressed that Islamophobia must be treated as `a
crime against humanity.' It is banned by law to discuss the Armenian
genocide in Turkey, a genocide that allegedly inspired the Nazis in
their Holocaust against Jews. Would a country the size of Germany,
with a history of a thousand years of continuous warfare against its
neighbors and where Adolf Hitler is a bestselling author, be hailed as
a moderate, Christian country?
The earliest evidence we have of musical instruments dates back to the
Old Stone Age. We know that there were rich musical traditions in
ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and elsewhere. Indirectly, it
is possible that some aspects of Babylonian musical theory and
practice influenced the Greek, and by extension European, musical
tradition. The ancient Greeks had a number of musical instruments such
as harps, horns, lyres, drums, cymbals etc. Greek music theory evolved
continually from Pythagoras before 500 BC to Aristides Quintilianus in
the late third century AD, whose treatise De musica (On Music) is an
important source of knowledge of the Greek musical tradition.
Music was closely connected to astronomy in Pythagorean thought; the
great astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote on music. Mathematical laws
and proportions were considered the underpinnings of both musical
intervals and the heavenly bodies. Plato and Aristotle both argued
that education should stress gymnastics to discipline the body and
music to discipline the mind. Plato was, as usual, the stricter of the
two and would only allow certain types of music for limited purposes,
lest it could distort the mind. He asserted that musical conventions
must not be changed, since lawlessness in art leads to
anarchy. Aristotle was less restrictive and argued that music could be
used for enjoyment as well as for education. For the Romans, music was
a part of most public ceremonies and was featured in entertainment and
education.
The Christian Church was the dominant social institution in post-Roman
Europe and deeply affected the future development of European
music. The ancient Greek system of notation had apparently been
forgotten by the seventh century AD, when Isidore of Seville
(ca. 560-636) wrote that `Unless sounds are remembered by man, they
perish, for they cannot be written down.' But with the development of
complex chants, what was needed to stabilize them was notation, a way
to write down the music. The earliest surviving European books of
chant with music notation date from the ninth century. During the
early Christian era, the Classical legacy was used, but modified. From
the Jews came the practices of singing psalms and chanting
Scripture. Church leaders drew on Greek musical theory but rejected
pagan customs, and elevated worship over entertainment and singing
over instrumental music.
It is instructive to consider the fact that Middle Eastern Muslims,
too, had access to Greek musical theory, yet they decided not use it,
just like they did not utilize the Greek artistic legacy. Both music
and pictorial arts were integrated into religious worship in Christian
Europe in a way that never happened in the Islamic world. In fact, it
was Gregorian chant and the growth of polyphonic music in medieval
European monasteries and cathedrals which established the musical
tradition that would eventually culminate in the works of Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven centuries later. There was no
Mozart or Beethoven in the Islamic world, just like there was no
Copernicus, Galileo or Newton.
The invention of musical notation enabled musicians to build upon the
work of the past. It may have been a necessary condition for the
expansion and development of musical expression, but it is not alone
sufficient to explain later advances. The discovery of the connection
between mathematical ratios and musical intervals attributed to
Pythagoras - and independently the Chinese - was important, but not as
important as polyphony. According to Charles Murray, `Just as linear
perspective added depth to the length and breadth of painting,
polyphony added, metaphorically, a vertical dimension to the
horizontal line of melody.'
China had a well-developed musical tradition at least as far back as
the Zhou period (1122-256 BC). Chinese opera is generally familiar to
outsiders is, but this art form dates from the early centuries of the
current era, especially from early medieval times (the Tang
Dynasty). Music played a central role in the Chinese court life during
the sixth and fifth centuries BC, at the time of Confucius. It was
believed by early thinkers to have great moral powers, although some
forms of music were better than others for promoting harmony. The word
`music' was written with the same character as `enjoyment.'
According to The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia
Buckley Ebrey, `Archaeologists have unearthed quite a few sets of
instruments used in court performances in Zhou times. Key instruments
were stone chimes, bronze drums, stringed lute-like instruments,
bamboo flutes, and sets of bells, struck from the outside. The biggest
cache of instruments was discovered in the tomb (c. 433 BC) of Marquis
Yi of Zeng, ruler of a petty state in modern Hubei just north of the
great state of Chu. In the tomb were 124 instruments, including drums,
flutes, mouth organs, pan pipes, zithers, a 32-chime lithophone, and a
64-piece bell set. The zithers have from five to twenty-five strings
and vary in details of their construction; they may have come from
different regions and been used for performances of regional
music. The bells bear inscriptions that indicate their pitches and
reveal that they were gifts from the king of Chu. The precision with
which the bells were cast indicates that the art of bell-making had
reached a very advanced state.'
There is no direct equivalent to Mozart or Beethoven in Asia, but
perhaps the fact that they have such an ancient and deeply-rooted
native tradition makes in easier for the Chinese to appreciate the
fruits of other musical cultures. Many East Asians are at the turn of
the twenty-first century eagerly appropriating the best traditions of
European Classical music.
David P. Goldman writes under the pen name `Spengler' as a columnist
for the Asia Times Online. He thinks that `The present shift in
intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world
history.' According to him, European Classical music `produces better
minds, and promotes success in other fields.' This is because `Western
classical music does something that mathematics and physics cannot: it
allows us to play with time itself.'
There is some basis for these statements. Albert Einstein received a
thorough philosophical education by studying the thoughts of Kant,
Schopenhauer and Spinoza in addition to the physical theories of Isaac
Newton, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell. It taught him how to think
abstractly about space and time. `The independence created by
philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction
between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth,'
Einstein once wrote. He was an accomplished amateur musician as well,
and would furiously play his violin as a way of thinking through a
difficult physics problem.
A strikingly high proportion of the students at top Western musical
schools are now Asians, followed by Eastern Europeans. For some
reason, there are comparatively few North Americans or Western
Europeans among the best instrumentalists, in Spengler's view because
many of them simply don't have the discipline to practice eight hours
a day. One of China's most famous musicians at the moment is the
pianist Lang Lang (born 1982).
According to Spengler, `the Chinese nation that looks to Lang Lang as
one of its heroes is learning the high culture of the West with a
collective sense of wonder. Something more than the mental mechanics
of classical music makes this decisive for China. In classical music,
China has embraced the least Chinese, and the most explicitly Western,
of all art forms. Even the best Chinese musicians still depend on
Western mentors. Lang Lang may be a star, but in some respects he
remains an apprentice in the pantheon of Western musicians. The
Chinese, in some ways the most arrogant of peoples, can elicit a
deadly kind of humility in matters of learning. Their eclecticism
befits an empire that is determined to succeed, as opposed to a mere
nation that needs to console itself by sticking to its supposed
cultural roots. Great empires transcend national culture and
naturalize the culture they require'.Except in a vague way, one cannot
explain the uniqueness of Western classical music to non-musicians,
and America is governed not by musicians, but by sports fans.'
Other civilizations most easily appropriate that in Western culture
which speaks to them and which resonates with their own
heritage. Westerners have virtually nothing in common with
Muslims. While different, we can find common ground with Hindus,
Buddhists and Christian Asians when it comes to pictorial arts, for
instance, while we share absolutely nothing in this field with Muslims
since Islam is rather hostile to many forms of music and most forms of
art.
I don't think it's bigotry to state that Beethoven and Mozart
represent a peak in the world history of music, not just in the
European tradition. But the great European composers lived in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when Europe clearly was the leading region on the planet in science
and technology. There appears to be a close correlation between the
sciences and the arts. Perhaps it has something to do with cultural
confidence and sense of purpose, or lack of such. In the early
twenty-first century, not only do Europeans not produce composers that
are anywhere near the stature of a Mozart or a Beethoven; many of us
do not even listen to the works of great composers we once produced.
Very few young people in Western Europe seriously study European
Classical music these days. Asians thus adopt the highest cultural
achievements of European civilization at a time when many people of
European descent themselves appear to be on the verge of forgetting
them, which is symbolic on many levels. On the other hand, Asians are
more or less immune to the self-loathing of the contemporary West. I
see this as a sign that they appropriate the best aspects of the
Western traditions but stay away from the worst ones, which makes
sense.
It is sad that people from other cultures sometimes copy our bad ideas
such as Communism more readily than our good ones, of which we do have
many. I don't by that mean to imply that Europeans alone `invented'
totalitarianism. The Incas practiced something resembling Communism in
South America. While I may be critical of aspects of Confucianism, I
don't think it can properly be called totalitarian. Totalitarianism in
the true sense of the word does, however, have a native Chinese
precedent in the ideology of Legalism, which was supported by the
state of China's brutal First Emperor. There is a reason why the
Communist dictator Mao Zedong (1893-1976) personally identified with
the First Emperor, not with Confucius.
Despotism comes quite natural to Islamic culture. When confronted with
the European tradition, many Muslims freely prefer Adolf Hitler to
Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Beethoven. Westerners don't force them to
study Mein Kampf more passionately than Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
or Goethe's Faust; they choose to do so themselves. Millions of
(non-Muslim) Asians now study Mozart's piano pieces. Muslims, on the
other hand, like Mr. Hitler more, although he represents one of the
most evil ideologies that have ever existed in Europe. The fact that
they usually like the Austrian Mr. Hitler more than the Austrian
Mr. Mozart speaks volumes about their culture. Koreans, Japanese,
Chinese and Middle Eastern Muslims have been confronted with the same
body of ideas, yet choose to appropriate radically different elements
from it, based upon what is compatible with their own culture.
One of these cultures has a future, the other one does not.
Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many
conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the
past, but it is no longer active.
Courtesy:Globalpolitican.com
Fjordman - 6/12/2009
I have had some interesting discussions with my good friend Ohmyrus,
who is an ethnic Chinese man but appreciates some aspects of Western
civilization that many Westerners themselves appear to have forgotten,
or rejected. He is not unique in this regard. One of the best books
about European culture published in recent years is Defending the
West, written by the former Muslim Ibn Warraq who was born in the
Indian subcontinent, not in the Western world. Essentially, according
to modern Multiculturalism, every culture has the right to exist -
except the Western one. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces
Multiculturalism for precisely this reason in his book Understanding
Muhammad, which I have reviewed online:
`If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western,
Helleno-Christian culture. It is this culture that is facing
extinction. It is to this culture alone that we owe the
Enlightenment, Renaissance, and democracy. These are the
foundations of our modern world. It would be a terrible
mistake not to preserve this culture. If we do nothing, we
face a future where democracy and tolerance will fade and
Islam's more primitive instincts will subjugate humanity. All
cultures are not made equal - We owe our freedom and modern
civilization to Western culture. It is this culture that is
now under attack and needs protection.'
As a native European, it is strange to notice how many (non-Muslim)
Asians apparently appreciate my civilization more these days than
so-called intellectuals in my own country do. It is challenging to
explain how the West could make so many advances in the past and yet
be as stupid as it currently is. The question of what went wrong with
the West is far more interesting than what went wrong with the Islamic
world. The best answer I can come up with is that maybe our current
flaws are related to our past virtues, at least indirectly. For
instance, being stubborn can be a strength or a weakness, depending
upon the situation. The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We
have unquestionably made advances that no other civilization has done
before us, despite what some critics claim, but perhaps the price we
pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before
us. Organized science is a Western invention. Organized national
suicide, too, is a Western invention. The Western university system
once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-Ã -vis
other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the very
civilization that gave birth to it.
Since European civilization is so far the only civilization to have
had a truly global impact, this means that all other civilizations
have to face the challenge of dealing with a layer of impulses and
ideas which are not their own. There is no doubt that this has been a
disruptive process in many cases, but it is also true that different
non-Western cultures deal very differently with the Western challenge
and appropriate very different parts of its heritage.
The Arabs had no significant pictorial tradition of their own even
before Islam. The Islamic ban on pictorial arts was not always
enforced, just like the ban on alcoholic beverages was not always
strictly enforced, but pictorial arts were discouraged and
consequently never occupied a prominent place in that culture. Some
Muslim rulers could interpret the religious rules regarding the
depiction of human figures quite liberally. A tradition for book
illustration and miniature painting did develop, but it is important
to remember that even the paintings that did exist were intended as
illustrations of a text and were almost never designed for exhibition
on a wall or in a gallery. Historian Bernard Lewis explains in his
book What Went Wrong?:
`One of the attractions of Western art and particularly of
Western portraiture must surely have been the use of
perspective, which made possible a degree of realism and
accuracy unattainable in the stylized and rather formal art of
the traditional miniature - In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, Western influence becomes very clear, both
in the structure of buildings and in their interior
decoration. By the nineteenth century it is almost universal,
to such a degree that the older artistic traditions were dying
and being replaced by this new art from Europe. As the
perception and measurement of space affected the visual arts,
so too did the perception and measurement of time affect music
- though to a much lesser extent - A distinguishing
characteristic of Western music is polyphony, by harmony or
counterpoint - Different performers play together, from
different scores, producing a result that is greater than the
sum of its parts. With a little imagination one may discern
the same feature in other aspects of Western culture - in
democratic politics and in team games, both of which require
the cooperation, in harmony if not in unison, of different
performers playing different parts in a common purpose.'
In contrast, here is what Lewis writes in The Middle East: A Brief
History of the Last 2,000 Years:
`Since Muslim worship, with the limited exception of some
dervish orders, makes no use of music, musicians in the
Islamic lands lacked the immense advantage enjoyed by
Christian musicians through the patronage of the Church and of
its high dignitaries. The patronage of the court and of the
great houses, though no doubt useful, was intermittent and
episodic, and dangerously subject to the whims of the
mighty. Muslim musicians devised no standard system of
notation, and their compositions are therefore known only by
the fallible and variable medium of memory. There is no
preserved corpus of classical Islamic music comparable with
that of the European musical tradition. All that remains is a
quite extensive theoretical literature on music, some
descriptions and portrayals of musicians and musical occasions
by writers and artists, a number of old instruments in various
stages of preservation, and of course the living memory of
long-past performances.'
There are those who are critical of Mr. Lewis as a scholar and
consequently believe that he shouldn't be quoted as an authority. You
should always maintain a healthy criticism of any scholar, but I know
from other sources that the above mentioned quotes are largely
correct.
Many forms of music are banned in Islam. The Reliance of the Traveller
by Ahmad Ibn Lulu Ibn Al-Naqib and Noah Ha Mim Keller has been
formally approved by al-Azhar in Egypt, the highest institution of
religious learning among Sunni Muslims. It quotes a number of ahadith,
authoritative sayings of Muhammad and his companions which form the
core Islamic texts next to the Koran, among them one which says that
`There will be peoples of my Community who will hold fornication,
silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful - Another quote says
that: `On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into
the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress.' The scholarly
conclusion is that `All of this is explicit and compelling textual
evidence that musical instruments of all types are unlawful.' Another
legal ruling says that `It is unlawful to use musical instruments -
such as those which drinkers are known for, like the mandolin, lute,
cymbals, and flute - or to listen to them. It is permissible to play
the tambourine at weddings, circumcisions, and other times, even if it
has bells on its sides. Beating the kuba, a long drum with a narrow
middle, is unlawful.'
Moreover, while I do disagree with Mr. Lewis sometimes, in my
experience he occasionally errs by being too positive when writing
about Islamic culture, not too negative. If you believe Lewis, `The
earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East
occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced
back to European originals.' This view fits well with the
anti-European, Multicultural bias of modern media and academia, yet it
is completely and utterly wrong, as Dr. Andrew G. Bostom has
conclusively demonstrated in his extremely well-researched book The
Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
Dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes and pigs (Koran
5:60) has been common throughout Islamic history, more than 1300 years
before the establishment of the state of Israel. Muhammad himself
referred to the Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as `apes' before
orchestrating the slaughter of all of their men. As one Muslim living
in Germany said, `Jews are the enemy of Allah.' Referring to Adolf
Hitler he stated: `The man was a hero, almost a Muslim. I'm one of his
fans.' A disproportionate amount of Europeans who convert to Islam are
neo-Nazis or Communists.
In 2005, Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf was among the top
bestsellers in Turkey, behind a book about a Turkish national hero
detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C. Adolf Hitler remains
widely popular in many other Islamic countries, too. At the same time,
Turkish PM Erdogan stressed that Islamophobia must be treated as `a
crime against humanity.' It is banned by law to discuss the Armenian
genocide in Turkey, a genocide that allegedly inspired the Nazis in
their Holocaust against Jews. Would a country the size of Germany,
with a history of a thousand years of continuous warfare against its
neighbors and where Adolf Hitler is a bestselling author, be hailed as
a moderate, Christian country?
The earliest evidence we have of musical instruments dates back to the
Old Stone Age. We know that there were rich musical traditions in
ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and elsewhere. Indirectly, it
is possible that some aspects of Babylonian musical theory and
practice influenced the Greek, and by extension European, musical
tradition. The ancient Greeks had a number of musical instruments such
as harps, horns, lyres, drums, cymbals etc. Greek music theory evolved
continually from Pythagoras before 500 BC to Aristides Quintilianus in
the late third century AD, whose treatise De musica (On Music) is an
important source of knowledge of the Greek musical tradition.
Music was closely connected to astronomy in Pythagorean thought; the
great astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote on music. Mathematical laws
and proportions were considered the underpinnings of both musical
intervals and the heavenly bodies. Plato and Aristotle both argued
that education should stress gymnastics to discipline the body and
music to discipline the mind. Plato was, as usual, the stricter of the
two and would only allow certain types of music for limited purposes,
lest it could distort the mind. He asserted that musical conventions
must not be changed, since lawlessness in art leads to
anarchy. Aristotle was less restrictive and argued that music could be
used for enjoyment as well as for education. For the Romans, music was
a part of most public ceremonies and was featured in entertainment and
education.
The Christian Church was the dominant social institution in post-Roman
Europe and deeply affected the future development of European
music. The ancient Greek system of notation had apparently been
forgotten by the seventh century AD, when Isidore of Seville
(ca. 560-636) wrote that `Unless sounds are remembered by man, they
perish, for they cannot be written down.' But with the development of
complex chants, what was needed to stabilize them was notation, a way
to write down the music. The earliest surviving European books of
chant with music notation date from the ninth century. During the
early Christian era, the Classical legacy was used, but modified. From
the Jews came the practices of singing psalms and chanting
Scripture. Church leaders drew on Greek musical theory but rejected
pagan customs, and elevated worship over entertainment and singing
over instrumental music.
It is instructive to consider the fact that Middle Eastern Muslims,
too, had access to Greek musical theory, yet they decided not use it,
just like they did not utilize the Greek artistic legacy. Both music
and pictorial arts were integrated into religious worship in Christian
Europe in a way that never happened in the Islamic world. In fact, it
was Gregorian chant and the growth of polyphonic music in medieval
European monasteries and cathedrals which established the musical
tradition that would eventually culminate in the works of Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven centuries later. There was no
Mozart or Beethoven in the Islamic world, just like there was no
Copernicus, Galileo or Newton.
The invention of musical notation enabled musicians to build upon the
work of the past. It may have been a necessary condition for the
expansion and development of musical expression, but it is not alone
sufficient to explain later advances. The discovery of the connection
between mathematical ratios and musical intervals attributed to
Pythagoras - and independently the Chinese - was important, but not as
important as polyphony. According to Charles Murray, `Just as linear
perspective added depth to the length and breadth of painting,
polyphony added, metaphorically, a vertical dimension to the
horizontal line of melody.'
China had a well-developed musical tradition at least as far back as
the Zhou period (1122-256 BC). Chinese opera is generally familiar to
outsiders is, but this art form dates from the early centuries of the
current era, especially from early medieval times (the Tang
Dynasty). Music played a central role in the Chinese court life during
the sixth and fifth centuries BC, at the time of Confucius. It was
believed by early thinkers to have great moral powers, although some
forms of music were better than others for promoting harmony. The word
`music' was written with the same character as `enjoyment.'
According to The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia
Buckley Ebrey, `Archaeologists have unearthed quite a few sets of
instruments used in court performances in Zhou times. Key instruments
were stone chimes, bronze drums, stringed lute-like instruments,
bamboo flutes, and sets of bells, struck from the outside. The biggest
cache of instruments was discovered in the tomb (c. 433 BC) of Marquis
Yi of Zeng, ruler of a petty state in modern Hubei just north of the
great state of Chu. In the tomb were 124 instruments, including drums,
flutes, mouth organs, pan pipes, zithers, a 32-chime lithophone, and a
64-piece bell set. The zithers have from five to twenty-five strings
and vary in details of their construction; they may have come from
different regions and been used for performances of regional
music. The bells bear inscriptions that indicate their pitches and
reveal that they were gifts from the king of Chu. The precision with
which the bells were cast indicates that the art of bell-making had
reached a very advanced state.'
There is no direct equivalent to Mozart or Beethoven in Asia, but
perhaps the fact that they have such an ancient and deeply-rooted
native tradition makes in easier for the Chinese to appreciate the
fruits of other musical cultures. Many East Asians are at the turn of
the twenty-first century eagerly appropriating the best traditions of
European Classical music.
David P. Goldman writes under the pen name `Spengler' as a columnist
for the Asia Times Online. He thinks that `The present shift in
intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world
history.' According to him, European Classical music `produces better
minds, and promotes success in other fields.' This is because `Western
classical music does something that mathematics and physics cannot: it
allows us to play with time itself.'
There is some basis for these statements. Albert Einstein received a
thorough philosophical education by studying the thoughts of Kant,
Schopenhauer and Spinoza in addition to the physical theories of Isaac
Newton, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell. It taught him how to think
abstractly about space and time. `The independence created by
philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction
between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth,'
Einstein once wrote. He was an accomplished amateur musician as well,
and would furiously play his violin as a way of thinking through a
difficult physics problem.
A strikingly high proportion of the students at top Western musical
schools are now Asians, followed by Eastern Europeans. For some
reason, there are comparatively few North Americans or Western
Europeans among the best instrumentalists, in Spengler's view because
many of them simply don't have the discipline to practice eight hours
a day. One of China's most famous musicians at the moment is the
pianist Lang Lang (born 1982).
According to Spengler, `the Chinese nation that looks to Lang Lang as
one of its heroes is learning the high culture of the West with a
collective sense of wonder. Something more than the mental mechanics
of classical music makes this decisive for China. In classical music,
China has embraced the least Chinese, and the most explicitly Western,
of all art forms. Even the best Chinese musicians still depend on
Western mentors. Lang Lang may be a star, but in some respects he
remains an apprentice in the pantheon of Western musicians. The
Chinese, in some ways the most arrogant of peoples, can elicit a
deadly kind of humility in matters of learning. Their eclecticism
befits an empire that is determined to succeed, as opposed to a mere
nation that needs to console itself by sticking to its supposed
cultural roots. Great empires transcend national culture and
naturalize the culture they require'.Except in a vague way, one cannot
explain the uniqueness of Western classical music to non-musicians,
and America is governed not by musicians, but by sports fans.'
Other civilizations most easily appropriate that in Western culture
which speaks to them and which resonates with their own
heritage. Westerners have virtually nothing in common with
Muslims. While different, we can find common ground with Hindus,
Buddhists and Christian Asians when it comes to pictorial arts, for
instance, while we share absolutely nothing in this field with Muslims
since Islam is rather hostile to many forms of music and most forms of
art.
I don't think it's bigotry to state that Beethoven and Mozart
represent a peak in the world history of music, not just in the
European tradition. But the great European composers lived in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when Europe clearly was the leading region on the planet in science
and technology. There appears to be a close correlation between the
sciences and the arts. Perhaps it has something to do with cultural
confidence and sense of purpose, or lack of such. In the early
twenty-first century, not only do Europeans not produce composers that
are anywhere near the stature of a Mozart or a Beethoven; many of us
do not even listen to the works of great composers we once produced.
Very few young people in Western Europe seriously study European
Classical music these days. Asians thus adopt the highest cultural
achievements of European civilization at a time when many people of
European descent themselves appear to be on the verge of forgetting
them, which is symbolic on many levels. On the other hand, Asians are
more or less immune to the self-loathing of the contemporary West. I
see this as a sign that they appropriate the best aspects of the
Western traditions but stay away from the worst ones, which makes
sense.
It is sad that people from other cultures sometimes copy our bad ideas
such as Communism more readily than our good ones, of which we do have
many. I don't by that mean to imply that Europeans alone `invented'
totalitarianism. The Incas practiced something resembling Communism in
South America. While I may be critical of aspects of Confucianism, I
don't think it can properly be called totalitarian. Totalitarianism in
the true sense of the word does, however, have a native Chinese
precedent in the ideology of Legalism, which was supported by the
state of China's brutal First Emperor. There is a reason why the
Communist dictator Mao Zedong (1893-1976) personally identified with
the First Emperor, not with Confucius.
Despotism comes quite natural to Islamic culture. When confronted with
the European tradition, many Muslims freely prefer Adolf Hitler to
Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Beethoven. Westerners don't force them to
study Mein Kampf more passionately than Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
or Goethe's Faust; they choose to do so themselves. Millions of
(non-Muslim) Asians now study Mozart's piano pieces. Muslims, on the
other hand, like Mr. Hitler more, although he represents one of the
most evil ideologies that have ever existed in Europe. The fact that
they usually like the Austrian Mr. Hitler more than the Austrian
Mr. Mozart speaks volumes about their culture. Koreans, Japanese,
Chinese and Middle Eastern Muslims have been confronted with the same
body of ideas, yet choose to appropriate radically different elements
from it, based upon what is compatible with their own culture.
One of these cultures has a future, the other one does not.
Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many
conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the
past, but it is no longer active.
Courtesy:Globalpolitican.com