World music
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"In 1945 The Andrews Sisters appropriated the song "Rum and Coca-Cola", which had originally been recorded by Jamaican musician Lord Invader. 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."--Sholem Stein |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
World music (also called global music or international music) is a musical category encompassing many different styles of music from around the globe, which includes many genres including some forms of Western music represented by folk music, as well as selected forms of ethnic music, indigenous music, neotraditional music, and music where more than one cultural tradition, such as ethnic music and Western popular music, intermingle.
World music's inclusive nature and elasticity as a musical category may pose for some obstacles to a universal definition, but its ethic of interest in the culturally exotic is encapsulated in fRoots magazine's description of the genre as "local music from out there".
The term was popularized in the 1980s as a marketing category for non-Western traditional music. Globalization has facilitated the expansion of world music's audiences and scope. It has grown to include hybrid subgenres such as world fusion, global fusion, ethnic fusion, and worldbeat.
Terminology
The term has been credited to ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown who coined it in the 1960s.
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 non-Western music.
In musical terms, world music can be roughly defined as music that 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 harp), the steel drum, the sitar or the didgeridoo.
There are several conflicting definitions for world music. One is that it consists of "all the music in the world", though such a broad definition renders the word virtually meaningless. The term also is taken as a classification of music that combines western popular music styles with one of many genres of non-Western music that were previously described as folk music or ethnic music. However, world music is not exclusively 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.
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.
See also
- Cultural appropriation in western music
- Folk music
- List of cultural and regional genres of music
- Music and Folklore
- Music industry
- Musicology
- Putumayo World Music
- World cinema
- Sublime Frequencies
- Finders Keepers
