Drury 340: "Given a decision to work primarily with pitches and secondarily with rhythms, as in Western art music, counterpoint as a value becomes nearly inevitable at a certain stage of music's evolution. In circumstances not conducive to the creation of instruments of fixed and stable pitch (for example, in sub-Saharan Africa), rhythm assumes a much more dominant role, turning the mind's tendency to fuse two elements into one away from the pitch-oriented counterpoint of Bach and toward the repetitive rhythmic cycles of tribal drumming."
This has "something to do with the very structure of the perceptual appartaus as a whole" (a "paradigm of human perception," which a culture "develops, nurtures, and strengthens" or "causes [...] to evolve, change, and even reverse [its] original meaning")
For instance: "Fast, loud music in a major key means one thing in Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and quite another in The Clash's 'I'm So Bored with the USA," but this is not merely attributable to "the habits of taste to which radical contingency calls our attention"