| Thank you for saying this. I'm not Greek. I'm a typical U.S. mutt with somewhat unknown origins. I'd like to add that the distinction we use now to indicate differences between Eastern and Western culture/art/and music are largely artifacts of how things evolved after a key point in time. I know the most about Music, so I'll speak to that. What we speak of now as "Western Music" is largely tonal or functional harmony, and it has its origins in ancient Greece around the time of Pythagoras. But it was a mixture of the Eastern chant tradition with the applied Mathematical and logical rigor of Hellenistic Greeks that provided the foundation for what would eventually evolve to what we now know it as. For about 1000 years, the early Christians mostly followed in the tradition of Eastern chant traditions with some additional codification and structure in what we now call Gregorian Chant. A guy named Boethius described texts by Pythagoras, Aristoxenus, and Plato, and was reprinted in Renaissance Italy and got some attention there. And--just as that several generations tried to do by superimposing Greek Philosophy onto the Church doctrine of the time--misinterpreted/mistranslated those pieces of information onto what was at the time a developing, but still fairly primitive version of polyphony. What happened from there happened pretty quickly and is well known. [1]Zarlino, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, etc. Pop music took over the mantle of tonal music right about the time that "classical" composers were getting funky and atonal in the mid-20th century, and has largely stuck with it. Everything you hear on the radio that is popular is directly traceable to Bach (and unfortunately much less interesting). The work of Bach himself was the almost-inevitable evolution of what happened when Greek thought met Eastern chant. [1] Before the Boethius reprint in Italy in the late 15th century, the chant style that originated in the Church was, in fact, evolving to certain types of polyphony . . . some of it quite beautiful, and instrumental music was also becoming its own separate thing rather than just an accompaniment to a singer. There was a weird time when a lot of mathematics were applied to the generation of music in the 14th century, and you can find examples of music from this period that are so odd, you could mistake them for mid-20th century art music. But this is a) mostly happening in France and the Netherlands, and b) well before Greek philosophical thought really took fire and spread across a more modern Europe. Also, this is really broad, and I'm leaving a lot out. Bottom line is that we call it Western Music Theory or Wester Music because the mixture of central Asian and Greek traditions evolved in the way that it did and continues to be separate from purely Eastern musical traditions where Greek philosophy did not take a strong hold. It's a label of convenience to describe the result of a long process; it's not intended to reflect some kind of a pure origin. |
Abstraction meant that instead of learning ad hoc practical recipes for art, science, culture, etc, the West has always had an interest in developing symbolic systems of representation that allow formal modelling, manipulation, and prediction.
Universality meant that truth was external to society, and independent of social status. It's the theoretical basis of much Western politics ("All people are equal") but it's also the foundation of much science, which combines abstraction with universality to find reliable invariants.
Asian cultures were very inventive in specifics - sometimes more so than Western culture. But they never aimed for abstraction and universality in the same way. The tendency was more to group knowledge into hierarchies of virtue, and to privilege subjective experiences over objective invariants.
In your example, Western music is what you get when you get both abstraction and universality applied to sound. There's abstraction in that the music is written before it's played, which makes it possible to create complex abstract structures on paper that can be built slowly and expertly for maximum effect.
And there's universality - less successfully, perhaps - in the sense that there's a belief in a primary set of invariant relationships between the elements of sound.
Eastern musics have some different attempts at universality, but so far as I know there was never an interest in abstraction in the same way. E.g. Indian classical music has systems, but they're more like rules for improvisation, not rules for building structures out of notes without actually playing any sounds at all.
The critical thing about abstraction is that it can be a huge amplifier of creativity, because you can prototype ideas, systems and experiences symbolically without having to build/generate/perform them in the real world first.
And the interesting thing is that we're only just getting started with it. Science has mostly been a success, but there's a lot mileage in other areas. Computers are one step along the way, but there's a lot more about abstraction still to be discovered and enjoyed.