6 December 2007

6 December 2007
Mark Twain
United States of America

Dear Mark,

It’s time to be blatant: this language is killing me…I’m really trying to figure out why I have so many issues remembering things in Russian. It could be a number of factors, really. Maybe it’s the lack of cognates between Russian and Western European languages-one can really understand what’s going on in Western Europe if you have at least one Latin and one Germanic language under decent control-throw in Greek and you’ve got it made-you can pretty much so understand just about anything thrown at you-I’ve survived this way thus far, anything else that I needed to figure out, I could use something from my ‘language bank’; “why yes, that English word has Greek root”, or “that word in French comes from the Latin”, or some such.

No such luck here, I’m afraid…

I don’t know, it could be age…I grew up speaking Greek and English, added marginal Italian through music and worked on French in college for research purposes…but now, it seems, things are harder to remember…heck, they’re harder to grasp in the first place. Not to mention pronunciation. Oh, yeah, THIS is where I’m really screwed. Granted, my French pronunciation is rather poor, too, but at least I can imagine what it is supposed to sound like. I’ve got some things in Russian that I just don’t know to begin to form sounds on. The one that really gets me is this bizarre little letter at the end of the alphabet, it’s actually two letters next to each other (at least it looks that way) but they consider it one; it’s the bI. Yes, the bI…the pronunciation of this is something like Tuval throat singing, at least that’s what it feels like. It’s really quite unpleasant…the worst thing is that I can’t tell when it’s being used in conversation. I think the native speakers gloss over it quickly-I can’t prove this yet, but I will…

The other thing is that the Russian alphabet seems to have this fetish with letters that look like b or 6. I don’t understand this…not just letters, but hard and soft signs (whatever THOSE are…)…they even got rid of some letters after the Revolution that also looked like this…to SIMPLIFY things. I can only imagine what it was like before.

Now, the interesting thing is that I have had numerous performances and rehearsals here that language skills, at least competent language skills, were not necessary. In fact, in the last couple of days, I worked with an improv dance group, laptop artists, and a dijeredoo player. With basic language skills and a common goal, we were perfectly able to work together.

It must be what they say: “music is the universal language”.

Since this is print, you can not tell that my last statement was seething with sarcasm. That statement is probably the most obnoxious generalization about any art form that I have ever heard.

Music is NOT a universal language by any stretch of the imagination. You’re trying to tell me that an oud player from Bukara is going to use the same musical language as an oboist from Berlin? Not a chance! Heck, if you got that oud player from Bukara together with an oud player from Marakesh, THEY wouldn’t use the same musical language. Sure, the instrument is the same, but the tradition and concept is completely different.

In the West, with our music education systems, everyone uses the same, for lack of a better word, ‘language group’ for notated music. Western folk musics fall out of this realm, by the way, since many traditional instruments and styles are unable to be notated in our system. So let’s look at classical, jazz, and popular. Jazz is pretty much is out for two reasons: one, the sense of improvisation which uses a system of chords and modes that are not so much in the language of classical and pop, and two, the folk sense of playing notes and lines that can not really be notated in the Western system properly-here, jazz is much closer to folk music and really belongs in this category. Plus, try getting a jazz-only player in a room with a classical-only player or a pop-only player and see what happens. They’re from the same language tree, but divergent branches. Like the Germanic and Latin branches-there are similarities, enough to have plenty of common ground and relationships, but true communication doesn’t happen with native-only speakers.

So let’s look at classical and pop music. These two are closer, even though pop came from blues and folk, the many years since have made the music in essence closer to classical in concept and form. Many classical musicians also play pop and rock nowadays, but do not crossover into jazz; too much of a stretch. So here we have maybe two languages that branch a little further out, like, oh, Spanish and Italian-close enough to have somewhat of a conversation and a general cultural understanding, but still not universal.

Now, of course, in the last 20 or so years with the advent of both the Internet and also the interest in native cultures, the general knowledge about musics from other geographical areas has become more commonplace. Now we can hear an oud player from Bukara without ever going there. This enhances our own language considerably: we may not be able to speak it, but we can recognize it.

This is the true communication, be it language or music. We have a human identity with cultural patterns that occur if you’re from Senegal or Seattle. This way, even with completely different languages, we have reference points that we can agree on. Music functions the same way: we have reference points that are universal (because we’re human) but true communication happens with much greater study and in depth cultural learning. Musicians from different cultures can play together if they have a reference, a goal, that everyone understands. Just like language. With a goal or reference points, you can get your message across, maybe not so eloquently as in your native tongue, but direct and to the point.

As I was looking out my window yesterday over St. Petersburg, there was this very amazing sight. There were three groups of birds: seagulls, crows, and pigeons. The seagulls and crows were going at it-yelling and screaming at each other and even occasional fisticuffs. The pigeons were sitting on a roof watching the display. I wonder how much they understood of each other’s intentions. They were not speaking the same language (as far as I could tell), but they were most certainly communicating.

Until next time,

Demetrius