Integrating Music

Abstract

The act of cross-cultural musical comparison itself is fraught and in many ways forbidding due to the bewildering complexity of linking aspects of our inner selves with seemingly untranslatable and disparate musical experiences. After honing in on some of the challenges raised by these issues the chapter engages in analytical juxtaposition of outwardly dissimilar works that have been extensively primed for comparison in the author’s own inner life: two compositions in the Balinese gamelan’s lelambatan repertoire, and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in Eb Major. Methodology and a suitable structural context for analysis are first established, and then the works are examined side-by-side for synonymous as well as mutually incompatible features. In the conclusion, the results of the comparison are set in relief against the analyst’s own cultural and historical milieu, viewed at several orders of magnitude.

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