A substantial portion of the work of ethnomusicologists has been to show the relationship of music and culture, by treating music as an object defined by notes, transcriptions, recordings, etc., and culture as the object's context, settings, customs, social structure and so on. A series of equations and arrows drawn between elements of these two entities is then presented in order to show that they are related. I contend that is not possible to isolate something called music from something else called culture. Musical knowledge is cultural knowledge. Furthermore, the way in which a person knows music is not different from the way he knows in general. That is, musical knowledge is based on the same which underlies and pervades the entire culture. By epistemology I mean a set of about information and about the nature of knowing applicable in a given situation. All human interaction-having a conversation, playing tennis, making music-requires knowledge. It requires that we make assumptions about how we get information, what sort of stuff information is, and so forth (Bateson 1972:478). When we think and act in accordance with such assumptions, we are, in fact, agreeing to certain propositions about the nature of knowing and the nature of the universe in which we live and how we know about it (Bateson 1972:478). Without such we could not interact, we could not function as human beings. For example, the reason such a thing as a lecture can take place is that everyone involved shares certain about what is happening in the room: the speaker is expected to stand in front and speak, the audience to sit quietly and listen. Because a group of people understand the encapsuled in the word lecture, interaction can take place, meaning can be communicated. In the same way, Beethoven's writing his fifth symphony, an orchestra's playing of it, and our listening to and understanding are made possible by a set of shared about what music is and how we know about it, that is, a particular musical epistemology. This view of music as another manifestation of the patterns for perceiving and imposing order on the phenomenal world, which are culture, which are meaning, forced itself upon me over a period of four years of playing and studying Javanese music in Ann Arbor. Like many Americans, I became fascinated by the sounds of a music so unfamiliar, so beautiful, and so (pardon the expression) exotic. Almost at once I began to apply analytical