1 - Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music

Summary

Introduction

The theme of this chapter is the encounter with Western musics of other peoples during the past one hundred years. Often only occasional and sporadic at the start of the twentieth century, contact with the music of elsewhere was by the end of that century part of the everyday lives of huge numbers of people worldwide (as much within as outside the Western world). The history of this shift might be written in several ways. From a technological perspective we would discuss the invention of sound recording and broadcasting, for instance, and the dissemination of music notation and certain instruments, including the piano, guitar, accordion, and microphone. As historians of inter-cultural politics, we might instead emphasize the widespread creation through cross-cultural interaction of new genres and ensembles based in some form or other on the emulation of people seen as privileged. An ethnographic approach would look at the changing role of music in the lives of certain individuals, drawing on their own accounts of music-related events as well as on observation of and participation in some of that music-making. Meanwhile, taking the study of social institutions as a starting point, our review of the century would find common ground in the creation in many nations of music-making bodies, including orchestras of revised folk instruments, ministries of culture, competitions and festivals, bodies that regulate copyright, and colleges where music theory and performance are imparted to generations of would-be professionals; from this perspective, a key characteristic of music history in the twentieth century has been the application of similar processes to the organization of music around much of the world, providing, in some cases, pressures that result in the transformation of the musics themselves.