Against cultural isolationism …

… Face the Music | The Smart Set. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  In my more recent research on the history of love songs, I’ve identified a number of surprising and inexplicable patterns that haven’t been addressed in the existing scholarly literature. These involve the mirroring of the musical traditions of European love lyrics in locations where geographical diffusion seems impossible — for example, an inexplicable congruence between historical aspects of the love songs of Sappho in ancient Greece and the Confucian tradition of folk songs in China. I’ve found similar enigmas in studying the origins of the lullaby, the lament, the fight song, and other music categories. As noted below, there are methodological tools for probing into these matters, but many of these tools — for example, multivariate statistical analysis — are not always found in the toolkits of musicologists.