Benin bronzes and African music

A parallel to the west's culture-centric response to the Benin bronzes can be found in the history of our appreciation of jazz and African music. Jazz was originally seen as primitive, as “natural” for the kind of people who had a natural sense of rhythm. Any sophistication in it was simply missed to begin with. It was particularly difficult for western students of music as it challenged the resources of traditional notation, as well as traditional ways of playing instruments. If you can't write something down, in our western research tradition, it is very difficult to study it.

The same problem was evident with African music. Western musical notation did not deal well with the “complicated polyphonies of African ensemble music, in which often each of twelve of more voices will go its separate way, weaving and interweaving.... nor could European ears catch the small rhythmic differences that were crucial to the correct notation of African song, as intervals of a twelfth of a second or less were routinely deployed by the African performer. European music simply did not operate with such small rhythmic intervals, so European-trained notators made errors.” Quote from Nussbaum, M (1998), Cultivating Humanity, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p 163.