Some of us have pondered for years the relationship between music and language. Our intuition tells us that the relationship is close. If so, surely it is amazing that in recent years so many Asian performers, whose native languages are so different from ours, have overcome this handicap and excelled at interpreting western music.
Should we trust our intuition, which says that a person who speaks Chinese would have trouble interpreting Mozart for linguistic reasons, that the phrasing of, say, a Mozartian theme, with its built-in questions and answers, its repetitions and variations, its tensions and resolutions, in some way echoes the way he spoke, which was as remote as a Mozart opera is from a Peking opera? It would follow that a Chinese performer is seriously handicapped.
One would certainly think so.
But one might be wrong.
According to Chomsky, we are born with an innate capacity to master any of the world’s languages. Our brain – not surprisingly – does not know before we are born which language we will be exposed to. After birth, it copes, whatever the language it has to learn. We may also have an innate capacity to grasp any of the world’s music. The question posed by the excellence of Asian performers of western music is whether linguistic and musical capacities are related.
In his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks refers to The Singing Neanderthals: The Origin of Music, Language, Mind and Body, by Steven Mithen. He suggests that music and language have a common origin and that a “singing language of meanings” without individual words as we understand them was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind. Mithen speculates that they had “a conglomeration of isolated skills, including mimetic abilities and absolute pitch.”
Absolute pitch – that may be one key towards answering our question. People with absolute pitch can immediately, unthinkingly tell the pitch of any note, without reflection or comparison with an external standard such as a piano or a tuning fork. Many people have it who have nothing to do with music. We are told it has nothing to do with being musical. But that is not entirely convincing because the incidence of people with absolute pitch is higher among musicians than among non-musicians and higher among musicians who have had musical training at an early age than those who haven’t. For both it is not necessarily an advantage. They suffer whenever a piano is out of tune or if somebody sings off key.
Not only is the incidence of absolute pitch higher among musicians than among non-musicians, but – this is what is so amazing – it is dramatically higher among Asian musicians than among western musicians. Diana Deutsch studied first-year students at the Eastman School of Music at Rochester, NY, and at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. For students who had musical training between the ages of four and five, she wrote, “approximately sixty percent of the Chinese students while only fourteen percent of the U.S. students met the criterion of absolute pitch.”
Why?
Because they have had to learn Chinese. That is not what Diana Deutsch says but it seems a logical conclusion.
Chinese is a tonal language that contains a crucial musical element western languages lack. A tonal language is one in which the pitch of a syllable is crucial for distinguishing meaning. For example, in Chinese “ma” has all kinds of totally unrelated meanings, depending on whether it’s pronounced with a high, low, rising or falling tone.
To Asian performers of western music their native languages may not be a handicap at all but an advantage.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
That makes a lot of sense. It would apply mostly to Chinese, not to Japanese. As far as I know, Japanese is not a tonal language, although Japanese also excel in Western music, like Midori and others. At the Chamber Orchestra of the South Bay the concert master is named Watanabe, obviously Japanese. And very good. She has also been a soloist. Can you comment ? RK
I don’t know what to say. Perhaps Monica has a comment.
Japanese has pitch accent as opposed to stress accent, for what it’s worth: stress is indicated by pitch rather than emphasis. But aside from that it’s not a tone language.
The majority of the world’s tone languages are in Africa. A great many African languages have two-tone systems, and some even have three-tone systems, I believe. These are systems with level tones — and sometimes complex tone shifts depending on the morphology of the word. Asian tone languages are more likely to have contour tones.
There are tone languages in Europe, too: Swedish and Norwegian both have distinctions between double and single tone, but in that case it’s a matter of contour and stress, and the pitch doesn’t really come in much.
There may be a relation between genes of a population and the presence or absence of tone in their languages. See http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~s0340638/tonegenes/tonegenessummary.html . Further relations between that and musical details would make interesting study.
One thing I note, though, is that Japanese and Chinese musical systems have had generally fewer notes per “octave” — five or six — while the pre-modern system I’m aware of having the most differentiated intervals is the Indian classical system, with 22 srutis per “octave” (not really an octave if there are other than eight notes, eh! but everyone can recognize a perfect 2:1 pitch ratio).
Very helpful and enlightening. What do YOU think is the reason for the ease with which Asian performers have overcome the linguistic barrier and excelled in performing western music?
Or do you think the linguistic difference is not really a barrier?
I don’t think linguistics differences are a barrier. Various kinds of music are played by people speaking a wide variety of languages. Cultural differences — habituation to different kinds of music and different tonal systems — are likely to have an important effect. But the main cultural difference in this case is that, for instance, practically every Chinese kid in North America (certainly every Chinese girl I’ve ever known) has to learn piano, violin, or occasionally flute or something else growing up. And they have to practice hard. It’s a culture that really values excellence in music. And the music they learn is classical music. I think that such valuation of music and of achievement also holds true in China, and in Japan.