Working with an Iranian colleague I like to talk a lot and we got along well. I did have the impression we were both educated moderates.  I do get excited about music. On the way into work I was listening to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and unsatisfied about not hearing the whole thing the first person I came across was him. “This is some of the greatest music ever written!,” I enthused. We had talked about Persian poetry and culture and history I have read and admire, so I gave him the Also Sprach CD. I have long wondered if music is a universal language, noting how different are the musics of other cultures. While I personally can hear and understand different musical traditions, none moves me like serious Western music.  Anyway I gave him the CD but I never heard anything back.

I didn’t bring myself to ask how he liked it either.  I berated myself.  That is not a good first piece of classical music. It may well sound to him, like a lot of loud noise. Why did I give him that of all pieces? Recently I saw at our professional meeting out of town,  another colleague from Bangladesh who was educated at the Friends School in Moscow. The Soviets took students from poor countries to inculcate them with Communism but also other aspects of Western culture.   I happened to mention I was on my way to an Opera that night. He thought that was absurd and told how the Russians would send the students to ballets. All he did was fall asleep, apparently thinking it was all such foppish nonsense. Why was I going there?

Well, but it still fails to answer the question. These two fellows were not musically inclined. The majority of people I meet in my own culture are deaf to the musical message. They like other things.  Is music a universal language or isn’t it?

Two stories I recently saw on CBS’s 60 Minutes help answer that question. One was about an orchestra in Kinchasa, Congo, a poor city of 10 million souls billed as the poorest country in the world. This orchestra was the brainchild of a former airline pilot, also their conductor. As they had nothing, no exposure to Western music, no instruments, they could only improvise. Eventually some professionals heard about their dedication and helped to train them. Incredibly they took to the music like gangbusters as if waiting for something to help express what was hiding inside of them.  They would travel from their impoverished hovels over waste and garbage strewn streets and countrysides to get to lessons and rehearsals. And they found themselves transfigured by the music. Vocalists and instrumentalists alike took to the music as if flowing from some inner wellspring. One could only conclude that some human universal was waiting to be released. When they played or sang they were in heaven as you could see from their expression. Thereby they were transported out of this world. If you want to see what I mean there are YouTube videos and a documentary.

And then 60 Minutes aired a similar story about a poor town near Asuncion, Paraguay.   Cateura was built over a garbage dump receiving tons of refuse every day.  The families living there are mostly illiterate garbage sorters whose children have been transformed by Western Music played on instruments fashioned out of recycled garbage. They don’t sound half bad but aside from that it has given these kids purpose as one child said, “My life would be worthless without music.”  These kids, like the Kinchasans, had never been exposed to Bach or Mozart.  Yet music speaks to them as it does to myself except they are truly transfigured.  So there has to be a universal human spirit inside  us all that transports us to another world.