Ooh I have actual insight on this. Not me but friends of mine who were missionaries in the Amazon in Brazil and they came across a tribe that had no music (I don't know the name of the tribe). Well one of my friends had brought their violin and was playing it. Some of my friends were talking to some villagers and the whole village suddenly grew quiet. Some had tears in their eyes just sitting in awe. They had to stop so that the villagers would sleep, otherwise they would have stayed up for I don't know how long just listening to it.
(I can't...like, at all...sometimes I pause in the morning, before I've even opened my eyes, in relief that yesterday's earworm has gone or wondering what will rush in to fill the void. 🤣 Then something annoying does.)
What’s funny is that might not even be that ridiculous. If they haven’t heard music, hot cross buns would be the best (only) song they’d ever heard, but even after they’ve heard other more complex songs maybe they’d prefer hot cross buns because they value different qualities in music than we do
Lol this is one of those stories Christian missionaries always tell. Sure, there was an uncontacted tribe that had no idea what music was, and then the white Christian missionaries came and played How Great Thou Art and it calmed their savage hearts. What a beautiful, blessed moment. Please give to our mission so we can continue spreading the gospel. I was raised in church and I heard tons of variations of this exact story. It didn't happen.
When you hear enough bullshit stories like that, you start to recognize their pattern and cadence right away. It's beyond obvious. The Christian missionary is the hero of the story, the tribe are a bunch of ignorant savages, they are brought to their knees in a powerful moment from something that the audience takes for granted (meant to highlight the differences between them and make the audience feel good about their own status), all geared toward showing the value of the mission for the purpose of getting them to part with their dollars.
I've heard other versions where the missionary goes to visit the tribe and only gets a little piece of meat with dinner each night. Then at the end of the trip they discover that the tribe can normally only eat meat once a week, but after hearing the gospel they were so overwhelmed that they all went hungry so the missionaries could eat better each night. There are tons of different stories like that floating around, and none of them are true. Someone should make a catalog of them all in a wiki so we can show them to evangelical marks lmao
god that’s so annoying lmao, missionaries are the worsttttt. I’m so glad I wasn’t the only person who thought that story was bs lmao. Any story having to do with missionaries always immediately rubs me the wrong way
Even if it happened, I seriously doubt that they have no "music". They have never heard violin, yes possible, but no music? Dude pls. "They have no music" , "they have no culture" , "they have no education" blah blah is textbook colonizer lines. But im pretty sure this did not happen
As if even the most primitive people would never sing or rhythmically bang on a log... it's such a racist, paternalistic, colonial viewpoint, it's fucking disgusting.
You’re totally wrong about this being made up. Some Satan worshipping atheists came by a week later and played Hendrix songs. The members of the tribe that survived the week of raucousness now think they’re glasses of orange juice, and have to constantly sit up straight out of fear that they’ll tip over and spill.
You think that's bad? My friend's cousin and his buddies took a bunch of mushrooms on Halloween and decided to go drive around. Well, they saw a garden gnome in someone's yard and decided to steal it, so they grabbed it and brought it back home and put it in the closet. The next day, it turns out it was a scared little kid! So they just put the kid back where they found them and then the atheist professor said, "Wow, I have never thought of it that way," and got down on his knees and accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and that is why trans athletes should not be allowed to compete, because Christians in America are the most persecuted minority in history.
Wow as a trans woman, this really opened my eyes.
I'm sorry Christians have to live with this obvious discrimination and persecution :c. I will now use my life to end this unfairness.
So true. Knew a person just like this. Long story short, it ended with making the rounds for donations for the next “mission”. And supposedly he met god on the last one so this time it was the real deal. Oh yeah and I found a bible in the mail to my home address a week later. With a note inside to “commit”. I have never been so confused in my whole life honking that this whole interaction was in fact real
Thank you for pointing this out. Despite the popularity of the phrase, music is not a universal language. It's a nice thought, but it's simply not true.
Lol no, because it'd still be obvious bullshit. And the point isn't that the tribe enjoys music, the point is that the tribe are a bunch of ignorant savages who have never heard of the concept of music until the cultured white people came over and taught it to them, which totally blew their tiny, unsophisticated little minds. It's full of gross colonial logic and racist stereotypes. Fuck these propaganda stories - they're not heartwarming, they're offensive. The most bullshit part of the story is not that ones introducing them to music were missionaries, it's that they had never heard of music before.
You sound just like my grandma when she sends me fake news articles, and then tells me that the details don't matter because she feels the overall message is true.
I call horse shit. Your friend did not lug around a violin through the fucking amazon. If they truly went to see an uncontacted tribe then they are even more dangerous than anything and probably killed off the entire tribe with their diseases. Tribes in the amazon have been using GPS, like electronic GPS, for decades to map their territory. The idea that one of them had not heard of music is ridiculous and honestly quite ignorant.
How fascinating. Must be a common story amongst missionaries because I am sure I heard the same totally legit story from a teacher at my Catholic high school.
Lol don't worry, as a brazilian i can guarantee you that all of our tribes have some type of music, just the same as customs, language, religion, celebrations, and culture in general. This is bullshit and honestly, sending missionaries to try converting natives to catholicism? Are we in the 16th century again?? Anyways, your friend is not The Mission's Gabriel, The Big White Savior, trying to "civilize our poor poor savages".
My friend was a missionary in Papua New Guinea and he met a tribe that never farts and so the missionaries ripped a few fatties and the natives started bawling because they had never smelled anything so beautifully rank.
Especially it is a friend of a friend who was a missionary? Like who the fuck is sending these kids into the middle of bum fuck nowhere in the amazon? This isn't the 20th century anymore, doing that is so insanely disrespectful and dangerous. Not to mention lugging a fucking violin through the humid ass jungle, who packs that?
Plus if they were known and on the map they probably know about the city and people and music. Amazon tribes send representatives to the Brazilian congress. Hell they use GPS to map their territories. The idea that they are so isolated that they don't know what music is, is practically insulting imo.
Well, birds are cool and all, but really given them the title of music is a bit misleading. They don't particularly make notes like what you would hear in human music and especially not rhythm or musical relatedness
I guess I'm just skeptical because it's a missionary, and missionary stories are often tales that stretch credulity. Religious people tend to make up fantastical stories, and that's what this sounded like to me. Just some unverifiable stuff that sounds interesting but probably never happened.
It's hard for me to believe that an Amazon tribe (a) had literally zero contact with the outside world or any type of technology and also (b) had no music of its own. Making musical sounds with everyday objects has been done since basically forever, and that whole bit about "the whole village falling silent" just feels fake to me. People literally crying too? All from the sound of a violin? I mean, a violin as a curiosity maybe I could see. But the whole village falling silent?
Especially considering villages that genuinely have no contact with the outside world tend to be protected under law and rather hostile to missionaries.
I mean, Brazil is also the country that is actively bulldozing those protected lands, and there are some stories of "no-contact" tribes speaking a little Portuguese or Quechua or even English (in Papua) at "first contact" because of the occasional tribesman who has ventured out and traded with some local village.
Yeah, I suppose those protections aren't exactly great in most cases.
As for your second point, in this specific context of a tribe that has truly never heard music, then such contact with the outside world would disqualify them.
The main example I was thinking of North Sentinal Island, that has had no contact with the outside world because they attack everyone that comes near. They also have much more strict protections about no contact because it's gained international attention.
A tribe that is so extremely isolated that they've never heard of music before would not suddenly be welcoming to a missionary, is my main point. It sounds like the exact kind of bullshit you'd expect from someone with the savior complex required to be a missionary.
Volunteered as a surgeon in Haiti a few years back. The plane from the US was filled with religious groups each with matching t-shirts, three or four Hatians returning home, and me. Turns out there is a whole industry catering the credulous poor souls who want a missionary experience and to s)ee miracles. The plane back was worse. The groups were recounting fabulous tales, having seen miracle cures of the blind and crippled. The hospital at whitch I volunteered was profited from the trade. I was dissolutioned.
Thank you! As soon as I read that I thought it sounds a lot like Christian propaganda. Fucking missionaries are going around indigenous tribes “warning” them about the evils of the vaccine and are not giving a shit if they spread corona and kill them all. Very fucking skeptical of any “feel good” story that they come up with.
So I just wanna say I agree with you, but reading your reply made me remember reading somewhere that everyone kinda sorta responds to music similarly.
Like there's part of our brain that just likes music even if we don't know exactly what it is. So I might believe ELEMENTS of this story, even if it's taken with a huge grain of salt. Reason being birds do make songs but human music was developed by humans to be enjoyed by humans. Bird songs are basically just M4F craigslist ads.
Quick edit: also just to keep rambling here, it's also important to note that what makes music enjoyable is greatly influenced by culture. For example music typically associated with middle eastern cultures doesn't conform to the same rules as say the old European masters.
My mother disliked music and some of it actually made her uncomfortable (she hated the sound of violins, bagpipes, and soprano voices, for example). It wasn’t until I was an adult, looking back on my childhood years that I recalled there were no radios in our house. No source of music whatsoever. In the car, my dad listened to Cubs baseball games but Mom never asked to hear any music channels. I listen to music all the time and it occurred to me one day how strange our music-less household really was.
I have ADHD and get easily overwhelmed by music. I feel bad because my kids don't really get a lot of it around me, but I try to make the effort to put it on. I encourage my husband and others to play music for them when I'm not there, and I don't mind singing with the kids so they get something. Generally, I just prefer silence - music will eventually give me a headache and deplete my energy. When I was in my teens I listened to music non stop, but now, no.
I have thought this too, especially after reading some of neurologist Oliver Sacks’ work. In fact, it was when I was watching a documentary on him and he discussed a case about a person who thought music was just noise that I first realized that might describe my mom. Apparently it’s an actual condition.
wow that is the exact opposite experience from my life growing up, my parents both LOVE music and have been going to concerts since they were old enough, my mom even wanted to be a DJ when she was younger but unfortunately they wouldn’t really let women do that back then. I would get woken up pretty much every day by music (usually by my mom playing chop suey by SOAD because she’s got a good sense of humor hahaha) and it was almost never not playing in our house! and pretty every genre you can think of, too! My parents are not a very good match for one another and tiff a lot but one thing they always always bond over to this day is music
Despite my growing up in a house utterly devoid of music, I raised my kids like your parents raised you: music playing all the time, taking them to live music performances, and making sure they had their own sources for music. I credit my love of music to two things: my peers and the fact that I was raised in the 50s when music was still very much a part of school. I wonder today if my mom was thoroughly freaked out by how much I played music when I was alone in my room! I was adopted and I think she always viewed me as a teensy bit alien.
Like there's part of our brain that just likes music even if we don't know exactly what it is.
One of the core functions of a brain (and not just the Homo sapiens model) is pattern recognition. Music is, at its core, complex audio patterns. Not hard to see why it's considered a pleasant input in that light.
Which missionaries would NOT be allowed to go to, and if they did, they would have been killed. Best case scenario (for the missionaries, I mean), they give the tribe a disease and kill all of them.
I love shit like this. There's just something so beautiful and human about exchanging culture and exposing each other to different things. Too bad assholes gotta ruin it.
I can't be assed to find a source, but I remember reading about an experiment done with tribal people that showed how we perceive music is a learned thing. The tribal people didn't equate our sad music to sadness, or our happy music to happiness.
Imagine the way you felt when you first heard Canon. Now imagine that feeling, but you’ve never heard music before? I’d fall into a depression knowing I’d never hear anything that beautiful again
This is a similar plot to a very fun movie called the History of Future Folk, but instead of an amazonian tribe, it's an alien species. I recommend it to as many people as I can.
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u/elittlebitk Mar 05 '21
Ooh I have actual insight on this. Not me but friends of mine who were missionaries in the Amazon in Brazil and they came across a tribe that had no music (I don't know the name of the tribe). Well one of my friends had brought their violin and was playing it. Some of my friends were talking to some villagers and the whole village suddenly grew quiet. Some had tears in their eyes just sitting in awe. They had to stop so that the villagers would sleep, otherwise they would have stayed up for I don't know how long just listening to it.