World music

World music is, most generally, all the music in the world. More specifically, the term is currently used to classify the many genres of non-Western music which were previously described as "folk music" or "ethnic music". However, "world music" does not have to mean traditional folk music, it may refer to the indigenous classical forms of various regions of the world, and to modern, cutting edge pop music styles as well. Succinctly, it can be described as "local music from out there", or "someone else's local music".

Music from around the world exerts wide cross-cultural influence as styles naturally influence one another, and in recent years "world music" has also been marketed as a successful genre in itself. Academic study of world music, as well as the musical genres and individual artists with which it has been associated, can be found in such disciplines as anthropology, Folkloristics, Performance Studies and ethnomusicology.

Terminology

In essence, the term "world music" refers to any form of music that is not part of modern mainstream Western commercial popular music or classical music traditions, and which typically originates from outside the cultural sphere of Western Europe and the English-speaking nations. The term became current in the 1980s as a marketing/classificatory device in the media and the music industry, and it is generally used to classify any kind of "foreign" (i.e. non-Western) music.

In musical terms, "world music" can be roughly defined as music which uses distinctive ethnic scales, modes and musical inflections, and which is usually (though not always) performed on or accompanied by distinctive traditional ethnic instruments, such as the kora (West African lute), the steel drum, the sitar or the digeridoo.

Most typically, the term "world music" has now replaced "folk music" as a shorthand description for the very broad range of recordings of traditional indigenous music and song from the so-called Third World countries.

Although it primarily describes traditional music, the world music genre also includes popular music from non-Western urban communities (e.g. South African "township" music) and non-European music forms that have been influenced by other "third world" musics (e.g. Afro-Cuban music), although Western-style popular song sourced from non-English-speaking countries in Western Europe (e.g. French pop music) would not generally be considered world music.

Examples of popular forms of world music include the various forms of non-European classical music (e.g. Japanese koto music, Hindustani raga music, Tibetan chants), eastern European folk music (e.g. the village music of Bulgaria) and the many forms of folk and tribal music of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Central and South America.

World music is generally agreed to be traditional, folk or roots musics of any culture that are created and played by indigenous musicians or that are "closely informed or guided by indigenous music of the regions of their origin".

The broad category of "world music" includes isolated forms of ethnic music from diverse geographical regions. These dissimilar strains of ethnic music are commonly categorized together by virtue of their indigenous roots. Over the 20th century, the invention of sound recording, low-cost international air travel and common access to global communication among artists and the general public has given rise to a related phenomenon called "cross-over" music. Musicians from diverse cultures and locations could readily access recorded music from around the world, see and hear visiting musicians from other cultures and visit other countries to play their own music, creating a melting pot of stylistic influences.

While communication technology allows greater access to obscure forms of music, the pressures of commercialisation also present the risk of increasing musical homogeny, the blurring of regional identities, and the gradual extinction of traditional local music-making practices.

Cultural appropriation in western music

World music as a cultural/economic phenomenon is inextricably linked with the invention of sound recording and the development of the international recording industry, but the background to its emergence covers the whole span of modern Western musical history, and what some analysts have deemed the digital revolution. This is particularly evident among indigenous peoples and their musical genres, such as the Urarina of Peruvian Amazonia who face many challenges in the face of globalization and the forces propelling cultural appropriation.

Since at least the Renaissance, musicians, composers, music publishers (and, in the 20th century, radio stations and recording companies) have been part of a wide-ranging and continuous process of cultural appropriation that developed in the wake of the European colonisation of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. In this process, styles, forms and influences from non-Western music—especially novel melodies, rhythmic patterns or harmonic structures—were discovered, appropriated, adapted and incorporated into mainstream Western popular music.

This appropriation process has a long history in European art music, which bears numerous traces of the adoption of fashionable European popular and folk dances into the classical genre. Dance styles like the allemande, the pavane, the galliard and the gavotte—often derived from popular folk dances—were just four among scores of "dance crazes" that swept the courts of Europe during the Renaissance and early Baroque,

However, by the time Bach and Händel were writing their great instrumental works during the late Baroque, the rhythms and timings of these dances had been already been appropriated, formalised and incorporated into the structure of elite European 'art' music. This trend continued in 18th and 19th century with folk-dance crazes like the mazurka, the waltz and the polka.

One well-known example of cultural appropriation into the European classical music genre arose from the 18th century fad known as "Orientalism", in which music, architecture, costume and visual arts from "Oriental" cultures (including the Ottoman empire, India, China and Japan) became highly fashionable. One of the most enduring artefacts of this fad is the third movement of Mozart's popular Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331, known as the Rondo alla turca ("rondo in the Turkish style").

One of the earliest examples of crossover music is the music of French composer Claude Debussy. In 1889 the French government staged the great Paris Exposition, an event that was to have profound effects on many areas of western art and music. Debussy visited the exposition and it was here that he first heard gamelan music performed by Sundanese musicians. He was transfixed by the hypnotic, layered sound of the gamelan orchestra and reportedly returned to the Dutch East Indies pavilion over several days to listen to the Indonesian musicians perform and to study the structure and tuning of this novel musical form. His exposure to gamelan music had a direct influence on the composition of his famous Nocturnes for piano.

In the case of Debussy, some of this long process of appropriation also had an educative effect, and by the 1960s Western audiences were beginning to move beyond the confines of the Western musical tradition and explore traditional music from other countries and continents, and as Eurocentric cultural and social biases began to be broken down during the 1960s, music from other cultures gained increasingly broad acceptance.

The key factor in this transition was the invention of sound recording, but it was also greatly influenced by the wide-ranging program of collection of European traditional folk music by 19th and early 20th century European classical composers and musicologists. This process was, at first, simply one facet of the multifocal 19th century passion for collection and classification, but it was given greater impetus by the growing awareness that the devastating impact of Western urban-industrial culture was decimating traditional cultures.

The Didgeridoo instrument of the Indigenous Australians

This collection activity took on some aspects of a crusade, as musicologists raced to preserve vanishing musical artefacts before they were lost to history. This view was a key motivation for the ethnologists who collected and preserved examples of Australian Aboriginal music, since it was widely believed at the time that the Aboriginal "race" and Aboriginal culture would eventually die out.

Musicologists and leading composers like Antonín Dvořák, Zoltán Kodály, Béla Bartók and Percy Grainger made strenuous efforts to collect and record local forms of European folk music and folk song, and many folk music melodies and other musical features were absorbed into the mainstream classical tradition. A good example of this process was the enduringly popular suites of Hungarian dances by Dvořák and Johannes Brahms.

During the 19th century this collection program was necessarily restricted to the written notation of melodies, lyrics and arrangements, but it was transformed in the early 20th century by the invention of sound recording and the development of portable cylinder and disc recording equipment, enabling musicologists for the first time to capture this music in actual performance, and the new technology was eagerly adopted by musicologists in Europe and America.

This growing archive of "folkloric" recordings remained largely within the confines of academia until after World War II. But in America, these collection programs -— notably those sponsored by the Library of Congress -— were to have an immense influence on the development of the international popular music industry.

Folk-music collectors like the great Alan Lomax worked assiduously for decades to find and record examples of almost every facet of native American, African-American and European-American folk music, and the work of these many scholars, enthusiasts and collectors preserved the sound of many legendary "folk" performers and thousands of hours of priceless song and music from the American folk music tradition.

This musicological program was again revolutionised in the early 1950s by the new technology of magnetic tape recording, which for the first time allowed music collectors to make very stable, long-duration, high-fidelity studio and field recordings. The concurrent introduction of the LP audio disc format, which could hold as much as thirty minutes of continuous music per side, allowed many such "folk music" recordings to be released into the consumer market for the first time.

The availability of high-quality portable tape recorders was the key innovation that led to the inception of the two keystone labels in the world music genre. Folkways Records extensive archive of folk and indigenous music was launched in the 1950s. It was followed in 1967 by Elektra Records' influential Nonesuch Explorer Series.

These "folk" LPs—notably those of early 20th century blues music—were to bring about a radical change in the style and direction of late 20th century popular music. This process is exemplified by the huge directional change in rock music that came about when young British and American musicians (like Eric Clapton) heard the now-legendary recordings of an obscure Mississippi blues musician called Robert Johnson.

Another fascinating aspect of the changes in the cultural appropriation process can be found on the music of Dvořák, which itself was greatly influenced by his collection and study of the folk music of his native Bohemia. In the 1892 Dvořák was invited to become the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City; the period he spent in America, and especially his exposure to native American and African-American music, led to the creation of his most famous and popular symphonic work, the Symphony No. 9, subtitled "From the New World".

This is arguably another very early example of the so-called crossover music genre, but interestingly, it also had an influence on the development of American popular music. Part of the symphony's enduring appeal is due to the nostalgic main melody in the second movement, which is said to have expressed Dvořák's homesickness for Bohemia. Remarkably, this melody was later appropriated into the formative bluegrass music genre as the basis for the song "Goin' Home" (attributed to William Arms Fisher); it soon became a bluegrass standard and was later adapted into a popular spiritual-style song.

The 1900s

Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, the invention of sound recording and motion pictures enabled American mass-entertainment culture to begin to develop into a major global economic and cultural force.

Simultaneous with this process, two emerging streams of non-Western music—African-American music and Latin music—were discovered by American and European audiences, and they were rapidly appropriated by the mainstream music industry. Over the next hundred years these two broad genres were to have a massive transformative effect on the structure of popular music and the direction of the music industry.

In the 1890s working-class dancers, composers and musicians in the La Boca area of Buenos Aires in Argentina invented a daring and sensual new dance style which was dubbed the tango. It took Argentina by storm and after reaching New York during World War I it became an international sensation, aided by a plethora of tango recordings and crystallised by the famously steamy tango scene in Rudolph Valentino's legend-making 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

More or less simultaneous with the tango craze, a novel African-American style known as ragtime emerged in the United States, epitomised by the music of virtuoso pianist-composers Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake. Ragtime introduced African-derived syncopated ("ragged") rhythms into Western music and enjoyed a tremendous international vogue over the next twenty years, as well as exerted a huge influence on the subsequent development of jazz.

Ragtime and then early jazz transformed American popular music—the work of songwriters like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin was crucially shaped by their appropriation of influences from African-American music—and these genres also strongly influenced many European classical composers, especially the French composers Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

In terms of their influence on almost every facet of 20th century popular music, the successive historical genres of African-American music have, as a group, been the most significant of all the "exotic" genres appropriated into Western music. Just as they influenced each other, gospel music, ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B and rock'n'roll were also successively appropriated into mainstream Western popular music—usually almost as soon as each became known as a definable genre. It is undeniable that the various genres of African-American music have, collectively, exerted a greater influence over the development and direction of Western mass-market popular recorded music than any other force.

Alongside the emergence of jazz, beginning around 1915, Hawaiian music reached the mainstream pop market in the United States. The Hawaiian style (or, more often, western imitations of it) became a major music fad, retaining a signiicant audience following from the 1930s to the 1950s. Hawaiian music was itself a complex mixture of European, native Hawaiian and other Polynesian influences. This is well demonstrated by the work of one of the founders of the genre, Queen Lili'uokalani (1838-1917), the last Queen of Hawaii before the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown. A musician and composer, she is credited as the composer of the unofficial Hawaiian anthem "Aloha 'Oe". Lili'uokalani indeed wrote the lyrics and arranged the music but in fact she appropriated the tune from a Croatian folk song called "Sidi Mara na kamen studencu".

Beginning in the late 1920s, a series of concerts under the aegis of the Pan-American Association of Composers, founded by Henry Cowell, brought the African-influenced music of Cuban composers Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán and the work of Carlos Chávez, much of it rooted in Mexican folk music, to the United States.

In the 1930s, the "Latin invasion" that had begun with the tango took off again when American jazz, dance music, and popular song were revolutionized by the "discovery" of other music forms of the Caribbean, Central and South America, a process that was triggered by a significant influx of migrants to the United States from Cuba, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands in the 1940s.

The blending of Latin rhythms and instrumental jazz was pioneered by established American musicians like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie and by recently-arrived 'Latin' musicians like Machito and others, some of whom soon became stars in their own right. Latin beats rapidly became an essential part of the rhythmical vocabulary of American popular music, providing composers and musicians with a vastly enhanced repertoire of beats and meters. During the 1930s and 1940s, newly appropriated Latin music genres created a series of music movements and dance crazes, including the merengue, the samba, and the rumba.

In 1944 The Andrews Sisters appropriated the song "Rum and Coca-Cola", which had originally been recorded by Jamaican musician Lord Invader in the 1930s. The Andrews Sisters' version sparked a new fad for this infectious new style, calypso. The craze reached its apex of popularity in the mid-1950s with the release of the hugely successful Harry Belafonte single Banana Boat Song and Belafonte's million-selling 1956 LP Calypso. Calypso also had a strong influence on the mainstream folk music boom of the late Fifties and early Sixties, which in turn became one of the major springboards for the development of world music as a genre.

In the late 1950s, repeating the impact of the tango, a seductive new music style called bossa nova emerged from Brazil and it soon swept the world, exerting a huge effect over the course of Western pop and jazz over the next decade and beyond. Nothing better illustrates the lasting impact of this hugely popular genre than the archetypical bossa song, "The Girl From Ipanema", written in 1962 and best known via the languid bilingual crossover version recorded by Stan Getz, João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto in 1963. Thanks largely to the enormous worldwide popularity of this single, "The Girl From Ipanema" now ranks as the second most-recorded song of all time, surpassed only by Paul McCartney's "Yesterday".

Bossa nova was also an important influence on two innovative streams of popular music in the early 1960s. One was the shortlived but very popular British-originated music craze known as Merseybeat, the pop style epitomised by the early songs of The Beatles, which combined popular song structures and rock'n'roll instrumentation with rhythmic inflections taken from bossa nova.

New York was one of the epicentres of the Latin-jazz crossover, so it is not surprising that the other major pop style to show a strong influence from bossa nova was the so-called "Brill Building Sound", exemplified by the work of the New York-based songwriter teams like Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich and especially Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

Influences from African music also began to appear in the 1950s. This process included one of the more controversial examples of cultural appropriation process, exemplified by the pop song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". A version of this song was an American #1 hit for pop band The Tokens in 1961, and it was credited to American writers, but in fact "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was actually an unacknowledged rewrite of the song "Mbube", written and recorded by South African musician and composer, Solomon Linda, in 1939.

"Mbube" had been a major local hit for Linda and his band, The Evening Birds, reputedly selling 100,000 copies there, but its success at the time was entirely confined to South Africa. Some years later, a copy of Linda's recording reached the renowned American musicologist Alan Lomax; he passed it on to his friend Pete Seeger, who fell in love with it, and it was Seeger who was mainly responsible for popularising the song in the West.

Seeger recorded a version of the song with his noted folk group The Weavers in 1952, retitling it "Wimoweh" (an inaccurate transliteration of the song's original Zulu refrain, "uyimbube"), although at this point it should be noted that the politically-aware Seeger did give Linda a partial credit in the Weavers' arrangement of the song. The Weavers scored a US Top 20 hit with their studio version, and had further success with a live version of the song included on their influential 1957 live album, recorded at Carnegie Hall, which led to it being covered by The Kingston Trio in 1959.

The Weavers' Carnegie Hall version of "Wimoweh" became a favourite song of The Tokens—they used it as their audition piece when they were offered a contract with RCA Records—and this led to them recording it as their first RCA single. However, it was at this point that the lyrics were re-written by the band's producers—who took full credit for the song—and it would be several decades more before the full story of the appropriation of Linda's work became widely known. Sadly, by then Linda had long since died in poverty.

The early Sixties: Folk meets Pop

After World War II a small but growing market developed for Western folk music and recordings of non-Western music, and this was supplied by specialist record labels such as Folkways Records, Elektra Records and Nonesuch Records in the USA and, later, Disques Cellier in Switzerland. Such labels were typically small "boutique" operations or minor specialist imprints of large companies, which released albums of non-Western traditional classical music, folk songs and indigenous music.

This market was fostered by the co-called "folk boom" of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which artists and groups like Pete Seeger and The Weavers explored the traditional songs and sounds of English-language folk music and re-interpreted them for the mass audience. In America, this process was massively influenced by the "discovery" of the treasure-trove of recordings of African-American music that had been made over the previous decades. Another more overtly political factor, and one that should not be overlooked in this case, is that many folk musicians were deeply involved in the struggle for civil rights for black Americans, and their championing of black music to white audiences was an integral and hugely influential part of this campaign.

This exploratory process also led many musicians to begin investigating folk music from non-Western cultures—as in the case of Solomon Linda's "Mbube". In each case, these processes of discovery and appropriation were made considerably easier by the increasing availability of LP recordings of "ethnic" music.

This process had a definite cumulative effect, but it is fair to say that, until the late 1960s, "ethnic"/"folkloric" music remained more or less a specialist interest. Some "exotic" influences inevitably filtered through to the mass market—as in the case of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"—but in general these were mostly Western re-interpretations, and very little original music produced outside of the mainstream Western popular music recording industry managed to break into the pop music market or achieve significant sales until the late 1960s.

As noted above, prior to the 60s, many classical musicians and composers had also written and/or performed music that experimented with combining western musical styles and influences from non-Western musical traditions, but this too was essentially an elite 'art' activity and gained little mass recognition.

Mass market acceptance of what we now call "world music" grew dramatically as a result of the pop music explosion of the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, adventurous pop, rock, progressive and jazz musicians and producers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to create fusions of conventional English-language popular music with instrumental and compositional influences from exotic musical genres. Their interest in these "ethnic" musics, combined with their enormous personal popularity, encouraged a growing number of record buyers to seek out recordings of non-Western music.

A prototype of this fusion of pop and world music in the late 60's can be seen in the folk rock phenomenon of the mid-1960s. Underlying this development was the fact that many leading American and English pop-rock musicians of the period—Roger McGuinn, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Donovan—had begun their musical careers on the folk scene.

Intrerestingly, although the core of the "folk" genre at this time was traditional Anglo-American folk song, maintream folk music was still appropriating new "non-Anglo" influences like calypso, black South African popular music and even Arabic music. Another notable feature of the folk scene at this time was that it was also common to include African-American music as part of the broader folk genre, and as a result many legendary black American performers like Leadbelly were able to perform side-by-side with white performers like Dylan and Pete Seeger at American folk scene's peak annual event, the Newport Folk Festival.

Folk rock was in part an attempt to broaden the language of mainstream pop by incorporating the more "serious" lyrical approach and political awareness of postwar folk. Folk rock as a genre effectively began in 1964 with the release of The Byrds' electrified cover version of Bob Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man", in which The Byrds cleverly combined the pop-rock instrumentation and close harmonies made popular by The Beatles with elements of the Anglo-American folk genre. The huge commercial success of The Byrds' version of "Mr Tambourine Man" spawned scores of cash-in imitations, but folk rock continued to expand and diversify over the next few years.

English acts such as Donovan, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span combined pop-rock arrangements with songs, stylings and instruments drawn from traditional English and Celtic folk music, but all were also heavily influenced by Dylan. Alan Stivell (Brittany) began the same work in the mid 60's.

Solo guitarist Davey Graham was a notable figure on the British scene; his finger-picking style, his introduction of the so-called "Open D" tuning to British fol guitarists and his groundbreaking incorporations of Arabic and Indian inflexions into his playing influenced many of his contemporaries, including Bert Jansch, Jimmy Page, Donovan and Ray Davies.

Graham's mercurial American counterpart John Fahey also made many innovative solo guitar recordings during this period, which incorporated influences from traditional folk, Hawaiian music, Arabic and Indian music.

In America (and also in Australasia and Canada), pop-rock acts like The Grateful Dead, The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers moved folk rock in a different direction. Drawing on their folk roots, and inspired by the hugely influential late 60's albums by Bob Dylan and The Band, they fused pop and rock with American country music and bluegrass music, creating the genre known as country rock.

Although these trends in what might be termed "folk-pop-fusion" were all significant in their own way, and they were clearly part of the process of cultural appropriation, such experiments by popular musicians, and the availability of recorded collections of "authentic" performances of English and American folk music, began to lead many curious listeners to explore these genres. This in turn would pave the way for the development of the "world music" concept in later years.

1965–1967: from "Norwegian Wood" to Monterey Pop

Pop musicians first began to move outside the Western tradition in the mid-Sixties, when they started mixing Western electric pop with influences taken from the traditional music of India. Although the results were sometimes risible, this proved to be the most influential fusion of pop and "folk" music of the entire period, specifically because it was the first significant attempt to mix Western popular music with a completely non-Western musical tradition.

Although they were by no means the only people at that time who were following this course, much of the credit for the creation of the World Music genre, and for the rapid expansion of Western mass-audience interest in non-Western music, must be accorded to The Beatles, and especially to their lead guitarist, George Harrison.

In early 1965, during a tour of America, David Crosby of The Byrds introduced Harrison to the sitar and the traditional classical music of India. Harrison was captivated by the sound of the instrument; he soon became profoundly interested in Indian music, culture and spirituality, and he began taking sitar lessons from renowned Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, whom Harrison continued to regard as the "best musician on the planet" long after the 1960s.

Harrison's background in African-American music forms had given him a solid grounding in the techniques of improvisation that are central to the genre. Like jazz and blues, the largely improvised nature of Hindustani classical music, its strong reliance on rhythm and percussion, and the extended nature of the raga form were all features that Harrison was able to recognise, appreciate and begin to explore.

In October 1965 Harrison broke new musical ground when he played a sitar on the Beatles' recording of the John Lennon song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", from their 1965 LP Rubber Soul. Other musicians were attempting similar fusions at the time—Brian Wilson, for example, used a koto on one of the songs on his classic Pet Sounds LP, recorded at around the same time—but no other single recording had the instant and worldwide impact of "Norwegian Wood".

It was the first time a western pop song had used a sitar in its arrangement, and for many Western listeners it was undoubtedly the first time they ever heard the instrument. In the wake of the song's release, the sitar became the new "in" sound for pop recordings, and an American guitar company even manufactured an electric sitar-guitar designed to simulate the sound of the sitar.

More importantly, "Norwegian Wood" sparked a major craze for the classical music of India in general and for the work of Ravi Shankar in particular, with the direct result that recordings by Shankar and other Indian classical musicians began to sell in large quantities outside India for the first time. The availability of tape recording and the LP were crucial to the popularisation of this particular genre of music, since a typical raga performance could last twenty minutes or more, and popular appreciation of this music would have been impossible without the longer duration and high fidelity provided by the LP format.

In 1966 Harrison took his "Indi-psych-pop" synthesis a step further with the highly original song "Love You To" (from the seminal Revolver LP), which featured a sinuous Indian-influenced melody and an innovative arrangement consisting solely of Indian instruments, performed by expatriate Indian musicians living in London. The peak of Harrison's Indian synthesis project was the track "Within You Without You" (1967) from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, recorded at Studio Two, Abbey Road by Harrison and an ensemble of musicians from the Asian Music Circle in London.

Another obvious trace of Harrison's immersion in Indian music was the fact that "Within You, Without You" also broke new ground (at least in the pop scene) with its length, clocking in at over five minutes. Harrison also recorded in India with Indian instruments and musicians when producing the soundtrack music for the 1968 film Wonderwall; he was given a free reign by the film's director and the music he created was explicitly intended as a sort of "primer" of the styles of Indian instrumental music that Harrison was exploring, but the film did not have a wide release at the time and Harrison's soundtrack remains little known outside the realm of Beatles aficionados.

Although not quite as influential as "Norwegian Wood", the 1965 song "See My Friends" by The Kinks is another significant Western pop song of the period that shows the unmistakable influence of Indian music. In this case, according to writer Ray Davies, the song's arrangement was inspired by a stopover in India during the band's first trip to Australia in 1965, when during an early-morning walk, he heard local fisherman singing a traditional chant, part of which he incorporated into the song's sinuous melody line; Davies' exposure to Hindustani raga music is also evident in the sitar-like quality of the guitar accompaniment.

1967 was a pivotal year for the development of the genre. In June the three-day Monterey International Pop Festival, the world's first rock festival, was held in California, and it was attended by approximately 200,000 people. Alongside the legendary English and American pop and rock acts, the bill also featured black South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela as well as a performance by Ravi Shankar, who opened the climactic Sunday concert (and whose presence at the festival was almost entirely due to the influence of George Harrison). Shankar's performance at Monterey was without question the most important concert of his entire career in the West—it was seen by tens of thousands of people that day, and thanks to the fact that the entire festival was recorded and filmed, millions more around the world heard it on record and/or saw it on film in the years that followed.

The other major landmark that year was the launch of the hugely influential Nonesuch Explorer Series by the American Elektra Records label. This first Explorer LP, a collection of Balinese folk music entitled Music From the Morning of the World, launched a growing catalogue of high-fidelity field recordings of the music of other cultures. The Nonesuch Explorer series is now recognised as one of the most important commercial collections of world music and several excerpts from Nonesuch recordings were included on the Voyager Golden Record that was sent into deep space aboard the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes in 1977.

1968–1986: Jajouka to Graceland

File:PipesofPancdcover.jpg

Brian Jones produced Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Jajouka in 1969 a month before his death

In 1968 Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones recorded the Master Musicians of Jajouka in the village of Jajouka in northern Morocco. Jones died the following year but the LP was released in 1971 on Rolling Stones Records. Although there was some criticism of the electronic treatments Jones applied to the recordings in post-production, the LP was one of the first recordings released in the pop market that showcased traditional Moroccan music.

Another important landmark in the growth of the world music genre, and one which is often overlooked, came in 1970 with the popular Simon & Garfunkel single "El Cóndor Pasa", taken from their multi-platinum selling Bridge Over Troubled Waters LP. The theme was endlessly copied and used all over the world, for instance in parody about downed F117a plane El kondor pada, and many other. Like Harrison's use of sitar, Paul Simon's use of Andean folk instruments (including the pan flute) was a pop music "first". His evocative English-language adaptation of a traditional 18th century Peruvian folk melody by Jorge Michelberg gave many listeners their first taste of the flavour of Peruvian folk music, and when the song was released as a single it became a hit in many countries, earning a Top Twenty placing (#18) on the American charts.

Also in 1970, Breton singer and musician Alan Stivell (having already played the Celtic Breton harp on stage as a child, and toured since the mid-sixties) recorded his first professional album ( Reflets ("Reflections"), a fusion of Celtic musics with different new experiments and influences. The originality of this is also Alan Stivell's awareness, prefacing the record as a manifesto of what he called first "Ethno-modern" music, meaning exactly what World Music means for many people since it became fashionable. His instrumental album Renaissance of the Celtic Harp increased the popularity of that instrument, and promoted the fusion of Celtic music with other musics, as did the European best-selling live album recorded at the Paris Olympia (1972). His 1979 Symphonie Celtique mixed Celtic musics with different ethnic cultures, rock, jazz-rock, and especially with a symphonic orchestra and choirs. He continues to experiment with different combinations of these and more electronic elements, especially on 1 Douar ("One Earth") (1998) and Explore (2006).

In 1973 Cameroonian jazz musician Manu Dibango scored a surprise worldwide hit with the single "Soul Makossa", a piece considered one of the forerunners of disco. Although Dibango came from a jazz background, the single contained elements drawn from the Cameroonian folk music style known as makossa, and Dibango became one of the very first African musicians to achieve significant success in the mainstream western pop market. "Soul Makossa" also became a prominent example of cultural appropriation, when Michael Jackson "borrowed" 77 seconds of music from Dibango's single and incorporated it into his song "You Gotta Be Starting Something", from the Thriller album, forcing Dibango to take legal action against Jackson.

In 1975 there were several important "popular" releases that gained wide recognition and exposed pop audiences to new musical influences. In February, Led Zeppelin released an ambitious "Arab-pop fusion" song, the ten-minute epic "Kashmir", from their Physical Graffiti LP. The song was strongly influenced by composer Jimmy Page's interest in Arabic music. Although its length made it an unlikely hit, the song became a firm favorite on American FM radio stations and was even played on Australian pop radio. Although Led Zeppelin has quite fairly been criticized for their repeated uncredited appropriations of the work of black American blues musicians like Willie Dixon, and while "Kashmir" is a clear example of cultural appropriation, like "El Cóndor Pasa" it did have the positive effect of opening the ears of many fans to a previously unknown realm of non-Western music.

In November that year Joni Mitchell released her LP The Hissing of Summer Lawns, featuring the innovative track "The Jungle Line", which mixed traditional African drumming and synthesiser. For this recording, Mitchell was accompanied by the musical group The Warrior Drums of Burundi, who were visiting America at the time.

Two other musical events in 1975 which had a significant impact on the development of World Music can both be largely credited to Marcel Cellier, owner of the Swiss record label Disques Cellier.

That year Cellier released the dazzling Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, the first volume of an eventual three-album series of recordings of Bulgarian vocal folk music, performed by the Bulgarian State Radio Choir and Trio Bulgarka. In the years that followed, particularly after the album's re-release through the British 4AD Records label, the Bulgarian Voices album became a significant cult hit in many countries and created a huge groundswell of interest in this thrilling form of eastern European folk music, leading to the 1980s collaboration between Trio Bulgarka and acclaimed British singer-songwriter Kate Bush on her 1989 album The Sensual World.

Cellier's other big hit of 1975 was Flutes De Pan et Orgue ("Pan Flute and Organ"), a 1971 recording of traditional Romanian pan flute music, performed by virtuoso Romanian pan flautist Gheorge Zamfir, and accompanied by Cellier himself on organ. The international vogue for Zamfir's music is largely due to Australian film director Peter Weir. His 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of the most successful Australian feature films of the period, featured evocative music from the Cellier disc on the soundtrack, and the film's success created widespread interest in Zamfir and his music.

The popularization of the album was, ironically, the inadvertent outcome of a frustrated plan. Weir had been introduced to Zamfir's music a few years earlier, and when he began production on Picnic he decided to use pan flute music on the soundtrack; he approached Zamfir to compose original music in the same style, but Zamfir declined, so Weir was obliged to return to the music he had originally heard and licence some of the tracks from the Cellier LP. The irony is that, although it made him internationally famous, Zamfir would have made far more money from the publishing rights if he had composed the original music Weir wanted—since all but one of the tracks on the Cellier LP were credited to the ubiquitous "trad. arr. ...".

In 1978, Matthew Montfort formed Ancient Future, an ensemble of 28 members having musical masters of a song traditional to the master's country play the song along with them. Ancient Future blended rhythms, harmonies, and melodies from all across the world and mixed them together along with jazz, rock and other genres of music to combine what became world fusion music.

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the English film director, Jeremy Marre, travelled the world for his Beats of the Heart series, shown first on the UK's national Channel 4, recording and interviewing so-called world music artists.

Leading up to 1987, another very significant world/pop crossover style that emerged in the 1960s was Jamaican reggae. Several Jamaican music styles that led to reggae, notably blue beat and ska, gained increasing exposure in the pop market in the 1960s. Little Millie Small scored what is probably the first blue beat hit, "My Boy Lollipop" in 1964, and these styles gained a considerable following in the UK, especially in themod and skinhead scenes, thanks to artists like Prince Buster.

In the late 1960s, there were several other notable hits that presaged the later popularity of reggae. In 1968, The Beatles enjoyed a major crossover success with Paul McCartney's ska-influenced "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da", while Desmond Dekker became the first Jamaican musician to score a #1 hit in the UK with the early reggae classic "The Israelites" (1968). In 1972, Johnny Nash scored a major international hit with the reggae-styled "I Can See Clearly Now" (which featured backing by The Wailers) and his follow-up single "Stir It Up" was penned by Bob Marley. The style gained wider popularity that year with the cult success of the Jamaican movie The Harder They Come, which starred reggae musician Jimmy Cliff, who also wrote and performed the soundtrack album.

Reggae is a fascinating example of "crossover" music since it was a distinctive local style that evolved in Jamaica, although its development had been strongly inlfuenced by earlier American soul and R&B. Reggae first became widely popular in the UK thanks to Jamaican-born singer-songwriter Bob Marley, who was one of the genre's main founders and one of its most prolific and consistent songwriters. Its popularity in Britain was greatly assisted by the fact that a large number of black immigrants from the Caribbean had settled in England since the end of World War II, but reggae also became very popular with the new generation of musicians in the punk rock and mew wave music genres of the late 1970s. Bands such as The Clash became enthusiastic champions of the style, as well as appropriating it for their own music.

Internationally, the most successful appropriator-adaptors of reggae for mainstream pop audiences was the hugely successful British pop band The Police, who scored a string of hit singles and LPs in the late 1970s and early 1980s with finely-crafted pop songs played in a reggae style, such as "Walking on the Moon".

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Graceland - Paul Simon featuring South African artists opposed to apartheid

In 1986, Paul Simon re-emerged as a catalytic figure when he revisited the world music / pop fusion concept he had first used on "El Cóndor Pasa" in 1970. His influential, multi-million-selling Graceland album album bore the unmistakable stamp of Simon's recent discovery of South African township music, and he recorded the album with leading South African session musicians and the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. These musicians performed on the subsequent concert tours, as did two other special guests, exiled South African music legends Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

Simon received some criticism for his decision to record in South Africa (which was being economically boycotted by most Western nations for its Apartheid policies) but his championing of township music focussed enormous attention on South Africa and its indigenous musical traditions, as well as the struggle against Apartheid. The success of Graceland was likely directly responsible for a massive upsurge of western interest in the music of southern Africa, as well as making Ladysmith Black Mambazo (whom Simon had first seen on Jeremy Marre's film, Spirits of Resistance) into international stars.

Many other British and American artists contributed to the growing popular awareness of "world music" during this period. After establishing his solo career in the late 1970s and early 1980s, former Genesis lead singer Peter Gabriel was heavily influenced by African and Middle Eastern music; he became a key figure in the founding of the WOMAD organisation and later established his own "world music" label, Real World, which recorded and released successful albums by artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. The later music of American New Wave band Talking Heads drew on influences from African and Afro-Cuban music, notably on their album Remain In Light. The band's main writer and lead singer David Byrne also released a significant album in collaboration with the band's producer of the time, Brian Eno, called My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts; it was strongly inlfuenced by non-Western musical styles, and was one of the first rock albums to feature extensive use of the then novel technology of sampling, incorporating vocal and musical samples from a wide range of sources. Since the demise of Talking Heads, the music Byrne has recorded in his solo career has been heavily influenced by his passion for Afro-Cuban music.

After 1987: WOMAD and beyond

The origins of the term World Music in relation to the selling of this type of music began in 1982 when World Music Day (Fête de la Musique) was initiated in France. World Music Day is celebrated on 21 June every year since then. On Monday 29 June 1987 a meeting of interested parties gathered to capitalise on the marketing of this genre. Arguably popular interest was sparked with the release in 1986 of Paul Simon's Graceland album. The concept behind the album was to express his own sensibilities using the sounds which he had fallen in love with listening to artists from Southern Africa, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Savuka. But this project and the work of Peter Gabriel and Johnny Clegg amongst others had to some degree introduced non-western music to a wider audience and this was an opportunity which could not be ignored.

Before 1987, although World Music undoubtedly had a following and with this potential market opening up, it was difficult for interested parties to sell their music to the larger music stores; although specialist music stores had been important in developing the genre over many years, the record companies, broadcasters and journalists had been finding it difficult to build a following because the music itself seemed too scarce. They were eyeing the Jazz and Classic markets, watching them develop a cross-over audience and decided that the best way forward would be to collective strategy to bring the music to a wider audience.

At the outset of the 1987 meeting, the musician Roger Armstrong advised why something needed to be done; "(He) felt that the main problem in selling our kind of material lay with the UK retail outlets and specifically the fact that they did not know how to rack it coherently. This discouraged them from stocking the material in any depth and made it more difficult for the record buyers to become acquainted with our catalogues."

The first concern of the meetings was to select the umbrella name that this 'new' music would be listed under. Suggestions included 'World Beat' and prefixing words such as 'Hot' or 'Tropical' to existing genre titles, but 'World Music' won after a show of hands, but initially it was not meant to be the title for a whole new genre, rather something which all of the record labels could place on the sleeves of records in order to distinguish them during the forthcoming campaign. It only became a title for the genre after an agreement that despite the publicity campaign, this wasn't an exclusive club and that for the good of all, any label which was selling this type of music would be able to take advantage.

Another issue which needed to be addressed was the distribution methods which existed at the time. Most of the main labels were unhappy with the lack of specialist knowledge displayed by sales persons which led to poor service; there was also a reluctance amongst many of the larger outlets to carry the music, because they understandably liked larger releases which could be promoted within store. It was difficult to justify a large presentation expense if the stock going into stores was limited.

One of the marketing strategies used in the vinyl market at the time was the use of browser cards, which would appear in the record racks. As part of the World Music campaign it was decided that these would be a two colour affair designed to carry a special offer package; to aid the retailer a selection of labels would also be included

In an unprecedented move, all of the World Music labels co-ordinated together and developed a compilation cassette for the cover of the music magazine NME. The overall running time was ninety minutes, each package containing a mini-catalogue showing the other releases on offer. This was a smart move as NME reader are often seen as discerning listeners and it was important step to get them on board.

By the time of that second meeting it was becoming clear that in order for the campaign to be successful, it should have its own dedicated press officer. They would be able to juggle the various deadlines and also be able to sell the music as a concept to not just the national stations but also regional DJs who were keen to expand the variety of music they could offer. They were seen as a key resource as it was important for 'World Music' to be seen as something which could be important to people outside London - most regions after all had a similarly rich folk heritage which could be tapped into. A cost effective way of achieving all this would be a leafleting campaign.

The next step was to develop a World Music chart, gathering together selling information from around fifty shops, so that it would finally be possible to see which were big sellers in the genre - allowing new listeners to see what was particularly popular. It was agreed that the NME could again be involved in printing the chart and also Music Week and the London listings magazine City Limits. It was also suggested that Andy Kershaw might be persuaded to do a run down of this chart on his show regularly.

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WOMAD logo

And so October of 1987 was designated 'World Music' month. A music festival, 'Crossing the Border' was held at the Town & Country Club, London and it was the start of the winter season for both WOMAD and Arts Worldwide. The main press release stressed the issues inherent in the campaign:

"Since the early Eighties the enthusiasm for music from 'outside' Western pop culture has been steadily mounting. More and more international artists, many of whom are big stars in their own countries, are coming here on tour. They started off, like The Bhundu Boys, playing small clubs and pubs, but now many acts are so popular that they are packing out larger venues.

"The excitement and word-of-mouth appeal is backed up by radio - World of Music on Voice of America, Transpacific Sound Paradise on WFMU, The Planet on Australia's ABC Radio National, DJ Edu presenting D.N.A: DestiNation Africa on BBC Radio 1Xtra, Adil Ray on the BBC Asian Network, Andy Kershaw's show on BBC Radio 3 and Charlie Gillett's show on the BBC World Service to name but seven... and the demand for recordings of non-Western artists is surely growing. This is where the problems can start for the potential buyer of 'World Music' albums - the High Street record shop hasn't got the particular record, or even a readily identifiable section to browse through, it doesn't show in any of the published charts, and at this point all but the most tenacious give up - and who can blame them?"

Another factor to raise the profile of world music was the founding of the Real World Records label by Peter Gabriel in 1988. His well-known name brought attention of the artists whose work he released, such as Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Today, mainstream music has adopted many of the features of world music, and artists such as Shakira and the members of the Buena Vista Social Club have reached a much wider audience. At the same time world music has been influenced by hip hop, pop and jazz. Even heavy metal bands such as Tool and Nile have incorporated world music into their own. Some entertainers who cross over to recording from film and television will often start with World music; Steven Seagal is a recent example.

World music radio programs these days will often be playing African hip hop or reggae artists, crossover Bhangra and Latin American jazz groups, etc. Public radio and webcasting are an important way for music enthusiasts all over the world to hear the enormous diversity of sounds and styles which, collectively, amount to World Music. The BBC, NPR, and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) are rich sources for World Music where it is possible to listen online as well as read about the artists and history of this genre.

Criticisms of the term

Some musicians and curators of music have come to dislike the term "world music". To these critics, "world music" is a parochial, catchall marketing term for non-western music of all genres. On October 3, 1999, David Byrne, the founder of the Luaka Bop music label, wrote an editorial in The New York Times entitled I Hate World Music explaining his objections to the term. Byrne argued that the labeling and categorization of other cultures as "exotic" serves to attract an insincere consumership and deter other potential consumers. Some critics of the term propose eliminating the category and integrating the records into existing "western" genres, such as folk, pop, jazz, classical, or hip hop.

Awards for World Music 2005

Main article: World music (Awards)

World music awards are awards presented by broadcasting organizations such as the BBC and others to World music artists. The BBC presents awards every year. The hosts for the Awards for World Music 2005 Poll Winners' Concert were Eliza Carthy and Benjamin Zephaniah.

Festivals

There are many World Music festivals and jazz/folk/roots/new age crossover events. A small selection is represented here:

• The California World Music Festival is held each July at the Nevada County Fairgrounds.
• FloydFest in Floyd, Virginia, USA. Has featured artists from a wide diversity of styles including Ani DiFranco, Geno Delafose & French Rockin' Boogie, Trumystic, Nickel Creek and Akoya Afrobeat Enemble.
• The Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg, New York, USA. Has featured artists from a variety of world and ethnic music genres including Tinariwen, Thomas Mapfumo, Michael Franti, D'Gary, Boubacar Traore, Mamadou Diabate, and many more from around the world.
• The WOMAD Foundation puts on festivals in different countries all around the world and which have last year included artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Robert Plant and Jaojoby[2].
• The Festival in the Desert takes place every year at Essakane, near Timbuktu, in Mali, West Africa and has achieved international status in spite of the difficulties of reaching its location. [3] [4]
• Stern Grove festival is a San Francisco celebration of musical and cultural diversity. Examples: Lucinda Williams, John Doe, Ojos de Brujo, O-Maya, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Funk Brothers and also symphony orchestras and operatic stars.
• The German World Music Festival der Klangfreunde takes place every first weekend of August, at Schlosspark Loshausen. Klangfreunde e. V. is a Non-profit organization
• The Starwood Festival has been held in July every year since 1981. Now situated in Sherman, NY, it has featured such world music acts as Amampondo, Babatunde Olatunji, Badal Roy, Sikiru Adepoju, the Prodigals, Yaya Diallo, Merl Saunders and the Rainforest Band, Baka Beyond, Stephen Kent, Cyro Baptista, Airto Moreira, Muruga Booker, Gaelic Storm, and Halim El-Dabh.

Music labels

• Luaka Bop, David Byrne's music label
• New Earth Records
• Putumayo World Music
• Real World Records, Peter Gabriel's music label
• Dancing Turtle Records
• Rough Guide releases, produced by World Music Network
• Folkways series
• UNESCO Collection
• Nonesuch Explorer series
• Globe Style, sub-label of Ace Records (UK)
• Primary Music
• Crammed Discs
• Rootsy Records
• KZN (record label)

See also

• List of cultural and regional genres of music
• RootsWorld
• Crossover (music)
• New age music
• Ethnic electronica
• Global Rhythm
• Deep Forest

Bibliography

• Bohlman, Philip (2002). World Music: A Very Short Introduction, "Preface". ISBN 0-19-285429-1.
• Manuel, Peter (1988). Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505342-7.
• N'Dour, Youssou. "Foreward" to Nickson, Chris (2004). The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to World Music. ISBN 0-399-53032-0.
• Nidel, Richard (2004). World Music: The Basics. ISBN 0-415-96801-1.

External links

• RootsWorld World music news, reviews, and interviews.
• World Music Central News, reviews, calendar and many resources.
• Regional and Ethnic Music at Curlie
• Jacaranda Ensemble
• World Music at About.com
• Afropop Worldwide
• BBC 1Xtra audio documentaries
• National Geographic World Music
• Thai-Maori Musical Exchange Project
• Cora Connection West African music resource & band
• Review of Nettl's 2005 revised edition of "The Study of Ethnomusicology"
• Caravan - weekly online World Music journey via Radio Tilos
• Streaming World music World, Celtic, Afro-Latin and Latin Jazz