‘Progress’?

Abstract

The picture this book has endeavored to draw is strange enough. All over the world, from the Eskimo to the Fuegians, from the Lapps to the Bushmen, people sing and shout and bleat with voices wild or monotonous; they scream and mumble, nasalize and yodel; they squeak and howl; they rattle, clapper, and drum. Their tonal range is limited, their intervals are foreign, their forms short-winded, their inventive capacaties, it seems, rather deficient, their traditional shackles all powerful. Is it permissible to call these noises music, if the word denotes the sacred art of Bach and of Mozart?