High Context In Music

 

Ideally, what you want in music as a player and as a composer is something that's "high context"--where things are tacitly implied and you don't have to specify everything. In my experience, it's those situations that seem to be at a higher level. In jazz, the players have to know the chord changes; that's tacitly implied. It's also tacitly implied that the musicians have a certain degree of skill. For example, say, one of the band members writes a new piece of music and they just write out the chord changes. You should be able to just give that to the guitar player and then they'll work it out. You don't have to specify anything else. It is exformation.

6/7/2021


In the book Beyond Culture by anthropologist Edward Hall, high context is explained as follows:


"Although no culture exists exclusively at one end of the scale, some are high while others are low. American culture, while not on the bottom, is toward the lower end of the scale. We are still considerably above the German- Swiss, the Germans, and the Scandinavians in the amount of contexting needed in everyday life. While complex, multi-institutional cultures (those that are technologically advanced) might be thought of as inevitably LC, this is not always true. China, the possessor of a great and complex culture, is on the high-context end of the scale. One notices this particularly in the written language of China, which is thirty-five hundred years old and has changed very little in the past three thousand years. This common written language is a unifying force tying together half a billion Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and even some of the Vietnamese who speak Chinese. The need for context is experienced when looking up words in a Chinese dictionary. To use a Chinese dictionary, the reader must know the significance of 214 radicals (there are no counterparts for radicals in the Indo-European languages). For example, to find the word for star one must know that it appears under the sun radical. To be literate in Chinese, one has to be conversant with Chinese history." (p. 91)