The musical heritage of the Western world has, over the years, evolved across various countries. However, other musical traditions in Asia, Africa, and Near Eastern regions developed, and there were long-standing music traditions in Japan, India, China, ad Indonesia. For American promoters, British record companies, and distributors, this was foreign music termed world music. The term world music was first developed in 1906 to describe the exotic influences in classical music, referring to the music of different cultures of the world. The term was first used by Georg Capellen, a German musicologist, noting the international influences of music from composers like Stravinsky and Debussy, especially the non-Western influences of the Near East and Indonesia (Klump, 1999). World music began in the late 19th and early 20th century colonialism period when people from the Western world were connected to music from the colonies. This included the different categories of world music from isolated forms of ethnic music from different geographical areas, mainly defined by the local roots. Around 1963, Joachim-Ernst Berendt, a German producer promoter, scholar, and jazz critic, used the term “Weltmusik,” the German equivalent of the term world music, labeling a jazz movement incorporating various types of music from outside America (Klump, 1999). He became the champion of combining non-western music with jazz producing the first world music festival that featured performances from Japan, Africa, India, Brazil, and Java in a jazz context. Thus, according to the definition by Berendt (1992), world music is a unification of ethnic music from different parts of the globe with contemporary jazz.
Originally, the term itself can be credited to Robert E. Brown, an ethnomusicologist who coined it in the early 1960s in America. In the 1980s, the term became prominent as a marketing aspect in the music and media industry. He was inspired to use the phrase based on the late 1950s experiences in the ethnomusicology program at the University of California (Brown, 1991), creating the World Music Program together with David McAllester in 1965 at Wesleyan University. This aspect of world music was a reflection of the philosophy of the program aimed at providing a model of the actual situation of all human music (Brown, 1991). Therefore, western art music was legitimized and proportionately placed alongside other music traditions, making the term inclusive. In this way, the definition of world music instilled a perception of authenticity and distinction between the indigenous traditions of music and those that would be diluted by pop culture eventually, and the contemporary debate over the possibility of maintaining that perception in the ongoing rich diversity of the world music genre (Porter, 1995).
The phrase world music sprouted up all over the United States and other places in the world from the 1970s onward. The term world music was then invented as a marketing term to help sell Asian, Latin American, and African music to audiences in Europe (Hardy, 2001). Nonetheless, it is used to classify music combining popular Western music styles with a genre of non-Western music, described as folk music (Roberts, 1992). The unfamiliar sounds to the West attracted this type of music, with the instruments, played being more authentic, including percussion instruments like the African xylophone, the darbuka from the Middle East, the conga drums, and the West African djembe’. These types of instruments blended with Irish and Scottish ones like the fiddle and bagpipes, and instruments from Spain like the flamenco guitars and the didgeridoos from Australia. Through the musical sounds the instruments produced, the non-Western music incorporated messages of conservation, war, and exploitation of indigenous people. In this way, western companies could sell more foreign music, taking advantage of the awareness of various kinds of music.
In this case, the musical genre incorporates various styles from nonmainstream Western folk sources of the world, developing as a term due to the sudden upsurge of recordings in non-English languages in the 1980s in the United States and Great Britain. In response to the attention that world music was attracting, many new companies adopted the phrase world music, with British Independent labels using it to get better access to record stores and more recognition from the media for the formalization of a generic description (Guilbault, 1993). This involved bringing together a diversity of strands of music from different areas of the world, such as Aia, South and Central America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean (33). “World music” was also used in opposition to local music, in reference to the various local tunes, which, instead of capturing the original connotation of inclusion, permitted the breakdown of cultural and musical barriers. This was indicated by how the insiders of the record industry categorized artists as those of “world music” based on geography and language and not their style of music, how the classification created a marginalized ghetto of artists and their music apart from the mainstream media (Legrand, 1991), and the distinction of artistic because of the new barriers created acknowledging the familiarity, strangeness, and otherness relative to perspectives of individuals (Arnason, 1990).
The meta genre of world music also describes the styles that mix music with performance technology or contemporary studio technology, mainly seen as pop music styles developing to include subgenres such as ethnic fusion and world beat (interchangeably used for world music in reference to fusion music with a danceable beat) (Bishop, 2003). The industries recognized world music in the 1990s when world chart music was introduced by the American trade magazine Billboard. By 1991, the Grammy Awards had been added to a world music category by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (Bishop, 2003). Through this forum, many artists benefited as they got the visibility of the world, including the French pop-flamenco group, the Gypsy Kings, the Chieftains of Ireland, Cesaria Evora of Cape Verde, Enigma of Germany, and Deep Forest of France. Thus, world music became a bonafide musical genre in the 1990s, and the synthetic sounds of Western pop music increased, where popular African music and world music became virtually synonymous. Within the 21st century, world music included Pakistani qawwali (Sufi music), guitar bands of Zimbabwe, Tuvan throat singers, Hawaiian slack-key guitarists, and Cajun fiddlers. The connotations of folk non-American and colonialism aspects in world music led to renaming the term to global music, which was regarded as more inclusive, modern, and relevant.
Analysis of a piece of traditional Arabic music- “Al Atlal” by Umm Kulthoum
Arabic music is from Arab-speaking countries of North Africa and Western Asia based on shared music theories, practices, and instruments. This is evident in the song “Al Atlal” by Umm Kulthoum, a famous Egyptian singer. Regarded as the greatest female singer in Arabic singing history, Umm used poem-based templates to bring into focus a chosen story. The song Al Atlal is a song in which 78% of the text comes from a 1952 poem by Ibrahim Nagy, an Egyptian poet, while 22% comes from the 1934 poem “Al Wadaa” by the same poet. The music composition was done by the musician Riyad Al Sonbati, and then in 1966, Umm Kulthoum sang it. Nonetheless, the text deviates from the song by substituting, adding, deleting, and distributing some words and phrases to create new meanings. Some lines were repositioned, and others were repeated to emphasize the message.
Arabic music’s main characteristics entail having an amelodic style, ideal for expression and complex rhythms incorporating traditional instruments such as violin, qanun, nay, and riq (Frishkoph, 2010). In Al Atlal, string instruments like the Cello, zither, and violin, percussion ones like the tambourine, and brass ones like the flute are used. They played alone, sometimes together, and even interchangeably to create musical preludes that suited the song’s text. At first, the introduction has an unstructured style with longitudinal sounds from the violins, signifying sadness and distress. The soft and slow melodies evoke feelings of sadness. The other instruments get into the mix with the zither in a tonal dialogue, attracting the audience, indicating a conversational tone related to the text of the song, a representation of the story from the poem. The rhythms created also capture the intensity of the singer and the story as they can be captured in real life based on the doctrine in Arab-Islamic culture. In the end, the listeners understand the community and individual levels through the song’s lyrics and the melodies and rhythms created by the instruments, features of traditional Arab music.
References
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Berendt, J. E. (1992). The jazz book: From ragtime to fusion and beyond (Rev. ed.). Trans. H. and B. Bredigkeit, Dan Morgenstern, and Tim Nevill. Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books.
Bishop, J. (2003). What does world music sound like? Identity and authenticity in the world beat. na.
Brown, R. E. (1991). World Music: The Voyager Enigma. Music in the dialogue of cultures: traditional music and cultural policy. Ed. Max Peter Baumann. Wilhelmshaven: Horian Noetzel Verlag.
Frishkopf, M. A. (Ed.). (2010). Music and media in the Arab world (No. 4108-4109). American Univ in Cairo Press.
Guilbault, J. (1993). On redefining the” local” through world music. The World of Music, 35(2), 33-47.
Hardy, P. (2001). The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber
Klump, B. (1999). Origins and Distinctions of the” World Music” and” World Beat” Designations. Canadian university music review, 19(2), 5–15.
Legrand, E. (1991). Paris Meet Maps Out Course of World Music: Anglo Dominance Seen as Limiting Industry’s Scope. Billboard.
Porter, J. (1995). New perspectives in Ethnomusicology: A critical survey. Revista Transcultural de Música, 1.
Roberts, M. (1992). “World music” and the global cultural economy. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 2(2), 229–242.
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