[gnulinux]

I'm very familiar with non-Western music and I studied music theory in abstract, not tainted with Western bias. There are models of music that are universal and found in all cultures, these directly come from the acoustic/physical properties of music. When I said the most fundamental building block in pitch based music is intervals, I didn't mean to say that for Western music, I really did mean "music". "Music" is a universal concept, found in all cultures, anthropologically we don't know of a culture that doesn't have "music". Although "music" is wildly different in each culture, it can still be studied in a generic way. Not all cultures necessarily have pitch based music, but if we do find pitch in music, intervals are the most fundamental tool to understand it. In Western music intervals are 12TET (an octave divided into 12 equal parts) but this doesn't have to be the case, this is merely an arbitrary convention. However, in other cultures we still do see intervallic treatment. These intervals may not be the same (e.g. Balinese Gamelan uses various tuning system, some similar to 9TET and 5TET (i.e. divide octave into 9 or 5 equal intervals).

In short, my comment above applies to Ethiopian music as well, so does it to any music.