Abstract
Viewed from the West, the topography of late twentieth-century world music presents a teeming array of interlocking traditions and contexts. While the boundaries between musical traditions have never been fixed or impermeable, the political, scientific and social revolutions of this century have catalysed a remarkable process of diffusion and exchange that has fundamentally reshaped the sensibilities of those who make and listen to music everywhere.
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Notes
Boulez does not acknowledge being influenced by specifically musical factors; in ‘Traditional Music — a Lost Paradise?’, The World of Music, ix/2 (1967), 3–10, he remarks that ‘The influence is on my spirit and not on my work. The main points are as follows: the conception of time being different, the idea of anonymity; the idea of a work of art not being admired as a masterpiece but as an element of spiritual life’.
A book on this subject is E. Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York, 1987). Eisenberg coins the term ‘phonography’ to refer to recording technology, an art form he feels deserves special classification; he explores the impact of this technology on our relationship to music in depth.
Verdi, the Man and his Letters, ed. F. Werfel and P. Stefan (New York, 1942).
For more on Verdi’s critique of German music, see J. B. Childs, ‘Rethinking the “Classical”: Giuseppe Verdi and other European Advocates of Cultural Diversity’, New Observations Journal, lxxxvi (Dec 1991), 6–10.
See M. R. Obelkevich, ‘Turkish Affect in the Land of the Sun King’, MQ, lxiii (1977), 367–89.
And if we listen without European prejudice to the charm of their percussion we must confess that our percussion is like primitive noises at a country fair’ (quoted in E. Lockspeiser, Debussy: his Life and Mind (London, 1962), i, 115.
W. W. Austin, Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1966), 39.
Richard Taruskin cites an exception in ‘Russian Folk Melodies in the Rite of Spring’, JAMS, xxxiii (1980), 501–43; a photograph (reproduced in the article) shows Stravinsky at work transcribing a song sung by a blind mendicant in 1914.
Charles Seeger provides an account of the rise of German musical influence in nineteenth-century America in ‘Music and Class Structure in the United States’, Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (Berkeley, 1977), 222–37.
S. Reich, Writings About Music (New York, 1974), 57.
From S. Arom, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm (Cambridge, 1991), p.xvii.
Bibliographical Note
There is little literature on the subjects discussed in this chapter. W. Wiora’s Four Ages of Music (New York, 1965) stands alone in its attempt to place the history of music in global perspective.
Wiora views post-medieval Western music as one of the special outcomes of a process of development that originated in the pre-civilized ancient world and characterizes our contemporary situation as one in which musical cultures are intermingling again after a long period of independence. L. B. Meyer’s Music, the Arts and Ideas (Chicago, 1967) offers an excellent framework for conceptualizing cultural plurality and a good model for examining cross-cultural influence in music. Although Meyer’s analysis (in Chapter 9) is focussed on the use of styles from past ages of Western music, it is easily applied to the current topic.
Bruno Nettl’s writings in ethnomusicology encompass Western music in its contextual roles, especially in The Western Impact on World Music (New York, 1985)
and The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, 1983).
New Observations Journal (Nov 1991), contains a group of brief articles showing a common concern for viewing music in multi-cultural perspective.
A concise article proposing a method for dealing with cross-cultural interaction in music is Nettl, ‘Some Aspects of the History of World Music in the Twentieth Century: Questions, Problems and Concepts’, Ethnomusicology, xx/1 (1978), 123–36.
Other relevant journal articles include K. Wachsmann, ‘Applying Ethnomusicological Methods to Western Art Music’, The World of Music, xxiii/2 (1981), 74–86;
J. Karpati, ‘Non-European Influences on Occidental Music’, The World of Music, xxii/2 (1980), 20–34, and
M.J. Kartomi, ‘The Processes and Results of Music Culture Contact: a Discussion of Terminology and Concept’, Ethnomusicology, xxv/2 (1981), 227–50.
New Music in the Orient, ed. H. Ryker (Buren, 1991), is a unique survey of current compositional trends in east Asia, south-east Asia and Australia/New Zealand; it covers a gamut of styles, ranging from the purely Western to those informed by local traditions.
F. Feliciano, Four Contemporary Asian Composers: the Influence of Tradition in their Works (Quezon City, 1983), is a useful book offering profiles of Chou-Wen Chung, Toru Takemitsu, Isang Yun and Jose Maceda.
Two studies documenting specific Asian influences on Western composers are by R. Mueller: ‘Javanese Influence on Debussy’s Fantaisie and Beyond’, Nineteenth-Century Music, x (1986–7), 157–86,
and ‘Bali, Tabuh-Tabuhan, and Colin McPhee’s Method of Intercultural Composition’, Journal of Musicological Research, xi (1991), 67–92;
see also M. Cooke, ‘Britten and Bali’, Journal of Musicological Research, vii (1987) 307–39.
A more general approach is offered in Chou-Wen Chung, ‘Asian Concepts and Twentieth Century Western Composers’, MQ, lvii (1971), 211–29.
Of special interest are a pair of brief articles by two of the best-known composers of our day: Boulez’s ‘Traditional Music: a Lost Paradise?’, The World of Music, ix/2 (1967),
and Cage’s ‘The East in the West’, Asian Music Journal, i/1 (1968–9), 15–22, which, originally written in 1946, stands out as remarkably full of insight for its time.
Among many books on popular music are J. Marre and H. Charlton, Beats of the Heart (New York, 1985), which is lively but of dubious scholarly import,
and P. Manuel, Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (London, 1988), a broad but useful survey.
The effects of technology are further examined in E. Eisenberg, The Recording Angel (New York, 1987),
and in C. Hamm’s excellent ‘Technology and Music: the Effect of the Phonograph’, in Contemporary Music and Music Cultures, ed. Hamm and others (Englewood Cliffs, 1975), 253–70.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Tenzer, M. (1993). Western Music in the Context of World Music. In: Morgan, R.P. (eds) Modern Times. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11291-3_16
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