i'd say no. Of course it is a melody, but. . .
for example, in the gamelan music from Indonesia the melody of a
composition is present yet regarded in a completely different way. The
melody is called the *balungan* or cradle of the melody, meanwhile there
is a whole other thing going on called the cradle of time. It all
interweaves and co-exists in a way that allows the lifelong listener to
appreciate the aesthetics of it differently than you or I would.
Perhaps an analogy would be: even after you become fluent in a language
and even live in the country, you still may not get all of the
subtleties of a joke.
I took a west African drumming class for a few years with a master
drummer from Ghana and he would talk about how it would be very
difficult for the African drummer to just play a rhythm by himself
without the whole drumming ensemble. This was because of the way they
were taught to hear and learn the music; it was heard as an
interconnected whole rather than a bunch of seperate parts in a whole.
brian