Music: Hearing the Spectrum

The universal language of music has many dialects, and most Western peoples understand only their own. Yet, as Western musicians have been proving since the early 19th Century; other musical dialects which at first horrify the ear can educate and even delight it.

One small new recording company in Manhattan is dedicated to that proposition. Last week, the Ethnic Folkways Library issued its fifth album, Music of Indonesia ($7.33)*. Ten more albums will be released in the fall.

The Indonesia album is an aural education in itself. There is a Javanese war dance—written on the seven-tone pelok octave and played on bronze percussion instruments—which has the simple gravity of a Bach sarabande. A Sundanese love lament called Drizzling Rain, accompanied on a zither, carries its grief through a long series of delicate ornamentations. An ancient song of the Batak hill people, accompanied by a wooden xylophone and split cymbal, is strikingly like the melancholy music of Provencal shepherds.

With Folkways Library albums come booklets describing the music and its native performance (e.g., the music-dramas of Java and Bali last all night). The booklets are written by anthropologists and musicologists, edited by Folklorist Harold Courlander, who also decides what selections go into the albums. Says he: "The more you hear of this stuff, the more you get to feel that all music is one. I like to think of it as a spectrum. As you go round the world, one music blends into the next . . . and before you know it you're back where you started, without a break."