THE COMPOSITION OF MUSICS FOR MAN Or Decoding From Primitive Cultures The Scores For Human Behavior

Abstract

PRIMITIVE MAN has attracted the imagination, curiosity, and romanticism of men of Western culture for centuries—even millennia. Herodotus and Xenophon were compelled to report their brief contacts with him and his cultures, and centuries of explorers, travelers, adventurers, and poets have marveled at and enthusiastically recounted their experiences in uncivilized societies. Civilized man may see in the surviving remnants of primitive cultures his own origins and realize intuitively in observing them that other solutions to the problem of society and communal life are possible than those which historical events have selected to be his own lot, or condition humaine. The South Pacific, particularly, has been the source of romantic yearnings, and a large number of gifted artists and scientists have voyaged there from Europe and America in search of Rousseau's Noble Savage. The Elysium which men of the romantic Western world have seen in the homeland, and the idyll they see in the lives of the South Sea Islanders, especially of the Polynesians, have preserved to this day their mysterious attraction. Pierre Loti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Paul Gauguin, our Americans, Henry Adams and Herman Melville, and, more recently, Somerset Maugham and James Michener, have told the tales of the South Pacific with brush and pen more dramatically, if less exactly, than Bronislav Malinowsky, Alfred Russell Wallace, Charles Darwin, and Captain Cook. I think that I need no further defense or excuse of my concentration upon, and my prolonged sojourns in, the South Pacific region during the past decade than this list of illustrious predecessors.