[vikramkr]

More directly the stuff about ranking different cultures on a scale of musical sophistication that ends in western harmonic music and dismissing obvious counterexamples as cultures that just haven't gotten there yet or just use other feature as ornamentation or just happened to not stumble on things because they were at the lowest level of musical sophistication is almost comically ethnocentric. Its an easy hammer to reach for when your counterarguments are not European (though in this case you're having to ignore an awful lot of European music and the huge influence of Greek music on the middle East) but yeesh