“I’d now like to go back to where it is that music comes from. In the past 20 years there’s been a lot of interest in so-called ethnic music and anthropologists have been going out searching down various tribes in Africa, playing them Wagner and wondering why they don’t react very favourably to it. But have courteously asked them where music comes from. There are a number of answers. One answer is that it comes from musicians; you go to a master musician to learn...or one can make mistakes. And there is a third; the spirits teach you melodies. In North America there is a tradition in some amongst some Indian tribes that the person in the village who has the role of dealing with music, when it’s time for the village to have another tune, another song, the musician goes off into the hills to wait until the spirits give them the tune. Then they go back and they have the song which invigorates the tribe and so on.”
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