The most potent assumptions about the world are those we take for granted and don’t even know we are doing it. But once we see what we once failed to see, we are changed for ever, and so is our world. For example, the assumptions we make about musical tuning when we listen to music provide a helpful analogy for the recent debates about ‘woke’ culture and the defenders of a traditional ‘white male’ view of history.
‘Western’ minds hear music with a smudged sense of tuning that we absorb during our childhoods. This tuning system was only invented in the late seventeenth century, and popularised by J.S.Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. What is this ‘smudged’ sense of tuning? Well, string players such as violinists and cellists do not tune their strings to perfect fifths – that is, following the Pythagorean wavelength ratios of exactly 2/3 going up in pitch (or 3/2 going down). If they did, their highest or lowest strings would be out of tune with the equally-tempered keyboard and woodwind instruments that they play with. Instead string-players tune to narrow fifths to avoid the accumulated consequences of the ‘Pythagorean comma’. No wonder Gregorian chant, Elizabethan madrigals, Indian ragas, Balinese Gamelan music and Chinese theatre music feel as though they belong to different worlds – in terms of tuning, they do.
Once pointed out, the inherited perceptions of equal temperament – and the assumptions that come with it – become a tool of consciousness and a means to encounter different types of music with liberation and open-mindedness.
The same applies to history. There is no going back, once we realise the Anglo-centric assumptions of ‘1066 And All That’ history – King John was a ‘bad king’, and the British Empire was a ‘good thing’. This is a history of false binaries, the ‘good’ versus the ‘bad’, in which historical figures are one thing or the other. There is no room for examining the questionable decisions of heroes like Winston Churchill, or to note attitudes that would not be acceptable today. It becomes obvious that there are many perspectives to human history, none of which has any legitimate claim to have more significance than any other. The perceptions of UK residents who are of the Windrush generation, or of those who came with the Ugandan Gujurati immigration in the 1970s will be very different, and different again from the perceptions of UK residents of white English ‘stock’.
So how do we characterise the current British government’s ludicrous defence of statues of slave-traders, and insistence that British schools teach the story of white kings and queens irrelevant to many school children? Is this a problem of perception among intelligent white males, brought up in predominantly white society, educated in white schools and universities, who cannot see what they cannot see? Or is it a fear that once you give an inch, it is impossible to justify any new borderlines? Or is it a cynical appeal to a highly prejudiced and fearful sector of the electorate for self-interested political motives?
Whatever the motives of conservative politicians, the reflex appeal to values of law and order, or to the Union Jack, cannot succeed long-term in creating a community spirit.
And it is tone deaf.
(For a straight-forward introduction to equal temperament, see Howard Goodall’s Channel 4 Big Bangs of Music series of documentaries, episode 2, posted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41g2fSYZ4Sc )
