Comparing musical affect: Java']Java and the West

Comparison across traditions obscures intracultural variation as well as the many mutual influences between cultures - that is, it ignores the heterogeneity found within cultures and the permeability of cultural boundaries. The goal of increasing cross-cultural understanding remains of ethnomusicology's principal raisons d'etre, despite recent critiques of the practice of multiculturalism and of the concept of culture. There are three principal ways we can know what people feel when they listen to music: introspection, observation, and the language used by insiders to describe their musical experience. All of these contribute to an understanding of emotion and music, but they each have their problems. What we feel when we listen to music is very much influenced by words we have heard or overheard; even self-deceptive cliches enter into our musical education and become a part of our experiential reality. The internal structure and connotations of Javanese and Western categories differ, but there are musical features that have the same affective meaning in these two cultures, especially in the areas of tessitura and rhythmic density.