Is 'World Music' the 'Classic Music' of Our Time?

Author(s): Jan Ling

Source: Popular Music , May, 2003, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 235-240
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3877612

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Popular Music (2003) Volume 22/2 Copyright ? 2003 Cambridge University Press, pp 235-240
DOI 10 1017/S0261143003003143 Printed in the United Kingdom

Middle
Eight
Is 'world music' the 'classic music' of our time?

Jan Ling

On the way to my library there is a little shop named 'World Music. The Oasis of
Music from Asia, Africa'. One morning I stopped my bike and went in just curious
to see what world music could be in my little town. In the racks even the smallest
country from Asia or Africa was represented with one or two CDs, most of them
produced in Paris or London. The other customers were half my age (around thirty
to thirty-five, nobody over fifty or under twenty). The owner, an immigrant who
has lived in Sweden for more than ten years, had this to say:
The youngsters do not come here, all my customers are between twenty-five and forty. There
is a growing interest in world music: people with money are visiting foreign countries as
tourists and when they come home they come to me, asking for artists or groups they have
heard. Most of them have an academic background and speak English fluently.

Much of the shop owner's talk reminded me of what I was studying at the library:
how English, French, German, Russian and Swedish noblemen in the eighteenth
century visited Italy on their Grand Tour and brought music home from the sou-
thern parts of Europe. If you look around the Globe today, the percentage of human
beings who have the economic resources to make tourist trips or buy new records
is more or less equivalent to the percentage of noblemen in the eighteenth century
relative to their farming and working countrymen. This inspired me to think further
about the parallels between the two musical labels: 'classic music' and 'world
music'.

Classic music'

One of our first great musical tourists, Charles Burney (1726-1814), made a jo
from London to Italy in 1770 and another to Germany and the Netherlands in
He found that the prerequisite for developing a musical language over borde
to establish a concept of music that accepts the fact that different kinds of
have equal merits. We can still learn from the introduction of his music his
from 1789:

The love of lengthened tones and modulated sounds, different from those of speech, and
regulated by a stated measure, seems a passion implanted in human nature throughout the
globe; for we hear of no people, however wild and savage in other particulars, who have
not music of some kind or other, with which we may suppose them to be greatly delighted,
by their constant use of it upon occasions the most opposite: in the temple, and the theatre;
at funerals, and at weddings: to give dignity and solemnity to festivals, and to excite mirth,
cheerfulness, and activity, in the frolicsome dance. Music, indeed, like vegetation, flourishes
differently in different climates; and in proportion to the culture and encouragement it
receives. (Burney 1789, p. I)

235

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236 Jan Ling

His argument is an example of the Enlightenment ideas which gave the musical
world at the end of the eighteenth century a new concept. This new awareness of
musical styles and expressions by a growing number of listeners led to a new listen-
ing attitude. Music became an art, isolated from daily life, given an aesthetic dimen-
sion for a virtual life besides the stream of real life, a refuge with its own sense of
time.

Burney was one of the first to understand that classic music carried the con-
cept of a new musical language which would conquer 'the civilised world', that is
to say 'Europe' in his time. Classic music became a kind of common 'world music'
for its time, a time when the world outside Europe did not exist for the vast majority
of people living in our small continent. Let us take a look into this eighteenth-
century musical life just to remind us what was going on.
In the eighteenth century the musical life of the European upper class devel-
oped into a social and musical unit. The same Italian opera was played in London,
Paris, St Petersburg or Munich, the same type of pianoforte was played by the
music-loving women in Madrid, Bologna, Vienna, Prague and St Petersburg. One
of the prerequisites for this development was a new and better system of communi-
cation. At the end of the eighteenth century it was easier to travel than fifty years
earlier, easier to send and to get letters, easier to publish journals, books, even to
print and send music. The new music was also advertised in catalogues and could
reach the big cities in Europe a week after it was printed. All Europe was influenced
by popular Italian music, easy to grasp, easy to form in national variants, not unlike
twentieth-century rock music. A common musical language emerged as a result of
communication and competition.
The new composition technique was to take interesting musical ideas from
different musical surroundings and put them in forms which were very loose in
structure but with sufficient boundaries to be recognised by the ordinary listener.
But perhaps more important than the common musical form structures (sonata,
symphony, opera, etc.) was the new attitude of attentive listening to music that
was now considered as an art. Intensive music listening stopped the earlier constant
conversation, reading or eating in the salon, theatre and concert hall. The public
became more and more sophisticated: the early eighteenth-century 'snob' or 'galant
homme' who told the ladies what was bad or good music was substituted by pro-
fessional critics who in journals and papers tried to separate the musical wheat
from the husk. We are in a time and a stage where professional musicians are
recruited from a broad mass of very talented boys and girls, pressed by their par-
ents (if they themselves were musicians) or by their surroundings (cloisters,
hospitals) to be good enough to earn their living by their art. Interesting is the
change from 'classical' to 'Viennese classic', due to the rising interest in the music
of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The musical institutions and the growing share
of writers on music all considered these three composers as the most important in
the world, and their popularity became greater and greater in an ever wider, more
socially diverse public. That is something that so far has not happened in the 'world
music' of today, but perhaps it will emerge, sooner or later. And it is very likely
that the centre will be somewhere in Africa or Asia.
Eighteenth-century writers were aware of the creation of a new musical para-
digm: they distinguished between what they called 'the modern style' and the
music that went before. The prerequisite was, however, not only the synthesis
between these modern styles, the so-called galant style and the new Empfindsamkeit,

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 Middle Eight 237

but how these two new musical styles were connected with the previous tradition,
the old knowledge of counterpoint. This merging of the modern and the old style
was the starting point for a musical world language, later defined as classical, later
as the Viennese classic idiom. Part of the development was the increasing technical
ability needed to play different instruments of a new construction, which, in turn,
changed the sonority of the musical landscape. Also, the music theatre began to
mix opera seria and buffa as part of the new musical style. At the same time, a new
attitude to the public was established, due to the composer's social transmutation
from musical servant of the nobility to a seller of music on the international market
with professional agents, managers and special concert halls and concert organis-
ations as intermediaries. This wider public exerted an immense influence, for
example, on Haydn's musical style during his London period. Haydn paved the
way for Mozart's universality by giving the public what they expected and what
their ears accepted: the listeners became acquainted with the new musical language
and became prepared to appreciate more sophisticated and original musical struc-
tures and expressions. In this process, impresarios like Johann Peter Salomon
played a very important role. It is not difficult to find parallels to this development
in today's world music.
Carl Dahlhaus has explained how the fusion of different musical styles from
different social layers was a prerequisite for 'the Viennese classic' style:
The situation in Vienna was not the same as in Paris, London and Berlin, apparently because
there was an incommensurable number of musical layers in Vienna from which the classical
style of Haydn and Mozart could develop to a sublime mixture of styles ... Music created a
social bridge and music played a more important role in the social life than in other metrop-
olis. (Dahlhaus 1985, p. 236)

Let us stay a moment and take a look at the different layers Dahlhaus mentions
with the help of Leonard G. Ratner's 'classical' book of classic music from 1980.
According to Ratner, the musical language was very much built on the popular
music of its time: dances like the minuet, allemande, saraband passepied, polonaise,
bourre, gigue, gavotte, contra dance, etc., military or hunting marches, ceremonial
music like the French Overture, exotic music like Turkish Music, but also different
singing styles, collected from opera seria, opera buffa, folk songs, herding calls, etc.
All these topics and different style elements were incorporated by the composer
in a given two-reprise form, a framework later called the 'sonata'-form, based on
combinations of symmetrical grouping of periods following simple harmonic
schemes and ending with cadences. Many of these ideas were taken, adapted and
transformed from the rhetoric of language.
Let us sum up some of the characteristics of Viennese classic music as it
emerged in music history:

(1) It was built on music from different social classes, collected from different parts of Europe.
(2) It had a new public, an intellectual, progressive, middle-class public, interested in inno-
vation.
(3) New methods of communication created the possibility for spreading the interest in
modern styles, combined with advertising and selling handwritten and printed music to
the urbanised parts of Europe.
(4) A new type of listening required an increase in the qualities of, and innovations in, the
music.
(5) Melody, rhythm and harmony were subordinated to loose musical forms, which were
easy to recognise.
(6) It was advertised and sold according to new economic laws.

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238 Jan Ling

World music

According to Timothy Rice in the article 'World Music in Europe', we can

world music back to the 1980s when older labels such as ethnic, folk and inter
national gave way to newer ones: worldbeat, ethnopop, wordfusion, etc. Rice f
that this terminological change signals changes in production, reception and a
thetics:

... Apparently believing that the plethora of old and new terms for this kind of popu
neotraditional music hurt efforts to market it, twenty-five representatives of indepen
labels met in Britain in the summer of 1987 and agreed to substitute the term world music
these old and new terms. Some record companies in the United States followed suit, a
1990 Billboard magazine introduced a world-music chart (Taylor 1997). By 1987, the t
world music was in use by some ethnomusicologists to describe their objects of study, al
world's music, not just its neo-traditional, mass-mediated popular forms. Independent
developments in the music business, these scholars had used the term world music to r
the term non-Western music ... (Rice 2000, p. 224)
Simon Frith tried in his article 'The discourse of world music' to unmask the
myth of this story about the label 'world music', revealing it as a conscious attem
from the record companies to link together a community of enthusiasts. The la
acted as a way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff:
The record companies involved were in the business of persuading consumers to distingui
themselves from the mainstream of rock and pop purchasers, to be different themselv
World music wasn't a sales category like any other; these record labels claimed a particu
kind of engagement with the music they traded and promised a particular kind of experie
to their consumers. (Frith 2000, p.306)

Frith suggests that there is a close link between rock music and the concept
so-called 'world music', which reminds me of the close relation between folk and
Viennese classic music:

World music, in short, might have come from elsewhere but it was sold in a familiar pac
age - not as global pop but as roots rock, as music like that made by British and Ameri
bands who have remained true to rock and roll's original spirit. This was music for grown
ups not adolescents, unashamedly functional (for dancing, courting), expressive of local co
munity, emotionally robust. (op. cit., p. 306ff)

Frith's social definition 'for grown-up' is given another interpretation in a

Danish book, Mon farven har en anden lyd?(Perhaps colour has another sound). T
youngsters interviewed did not use the label 'world music' at all. The author, Ev
Fock concludes that

world music is the middle-aged middle class harmless flirtation with the strange, the part o
the surrounding world which is popular for the moment (Fock 2000, p. 26ff).

Fock's definition of the social strata interested in world music is correct accordin
to what I have seen in the little shop in my hometown. It can be transferred to
the eighteenth-century public. The public interested in the new classic music wer
middle-aged and from the wealthy class, who also harmlessly flirted with th
strange, for example the Turkish taste in Mozart's Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail.
Is the world music of today perhaps in its first stage of becoming a new con-
cept of music like classic music? Yes, I think so. And the starting point is the chang
of musical concept in the middle of the twentieth century. Until then, Viennese
classic music was the officially dominant concept of music to the middle of the
1950s at least in Europe, USA and countries under colonialism. New musical styles

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 Middle Eight 239

had challenged the tradition, but they were, like jazz, more or less assimilated into
the classical 'tradition'. But in the middle of the twentieth century a real paradig-
matic break in music happened. Salman Rushdie has explained in his novel The
Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) how rock music crossed all frontiers and belonged
equally to everyone, but to Rushdie's generation most of all. A Swedish professor
of theology, Jan Hjirpe (2003), an expert on Islam, has analysed Rushdie's novel.
He argues that Rushdie's presentation of rock music gives it a deeper meaning:
The phenomenon of global popular music is that it gives the interpretational patterns for our
existential experiences, feelings, spirituality, the new form of mystical cults, the vehicle of
perception and meaning. The mythology and rituals of our time. (Hjarpe 2003)

This new conception of rock music, together with an interest in music from
different parts of the world, seems to be the starting point for a new musical era.
After 1980 there has been an increasing fusion of different styles, from commercials
trying to be exotic to a serious attempt to create new musical worlds out of different
cultural and aesthetic traditions.

Concluding thoughts
'World music' as a common definition cannot be based on musical material or on
musical function. No, it refers to a form of music which is enjoyed by a very so
ticated young middle-class public, who combine their musical interest of
sounds from different parts of the world with a progressive interest in what's
on in politics, economics, etc., many of whom are engaged in the peace movem
environment movements, etc. It is similar to the ideology of the Enlightenmen
the end of the eighteenth century.
All music called 'world music' was from the beginning promoted by acade
expertise which was very much involved in marketing. The CD covers an
catalogues of world music are of a high scientific standard. World music in th
sense is not 'music for the people', i.e. the ordinary music fan of MTV, etc. T
experts are the equivalent to the galant homme in the eighteenth century tellin
middle class what is good and what is bad music, what is worth listening to a
what to close your ears to!
And now back to the points I set up as characteristic of classic music. Can
find the equivalent in world music?

(1) World music is built on music from different social classes, collected not from diff
parts of Europe but from different parts of the world.
(2) The public is the same: 'an intellectual, progressive, middle-class public, interested
innovation' and most of them from the richest parts of the world.
(3) The ways of communication have also given world music 'the possibility for sprea
the interest in modern styles'.
(4) We can also establish that 'new type of listening, requiring rising quality of, and
vations in, music'.
(5) Melody, rhythm and harmony are subordinated to the medialisation of musi
recorded sound being equivalent to the form structures of the eighteenth century.
(6) Classic music was launched from the newly born capitalistic market, world music
linked to the global economy and global distribution of products.

The close link between research, music-making and marketing is perhaps the ex
nation for the success of this label in the global society. The Swedish musician
Moller has established what he calls a 'world music laboratory', starting with

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240 Jan Ling

multicultural music ensemble Stockholm, Folk Big Band. I think we will see more of
this kind of ensemble in the future when world music will be more clearly defined
and crystallised into a core of works and composers, established by musicians and
the public in the same way as Viennese classic music in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries.
We can see that world music today has taken a place besides the classical
heritage, new art music, etc., on the global scene. In the ongoing fight to be heard
and to seen, world music has taken a leading position perhaps because of its open-
ness to rock music as a worldwide basic musical language on the one hand, and
through its ambition to make aesthetic new combinations of different musical lan-
guages with different ethnic backgrounds on the other.
The generation interested in how the world sounds, trying to understand but
also to change the world to something better, are perhaps the equivalent to the
women and men of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, who created and sup-
ported classical music. At least I would like to believe so.
The institutional acceptance of world music is also increasing. For example,
today it is part of the official education system in Sweden in the same way as
Viennese classic music was accepted in the school curriculum two hundred years
ago.

Endnote

1. The term 'classic music' is taken from Leonard different waves of classicism from the middle
G. Ratner, Classic Music, Expression, Form, and
of the eighteenth century to the so-called 'Vien-
nese Classic music' composed by Haydn,
Style. 1980 (Schirmer Books, a division of Mac-
Mozart
millan Publishing Co. Inc). It incorporates the and Beethoven

References

Burney, C. 1989. A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, vol I, second edi
(London)
Dahlhaus, C. 1985. 'Haydn, Mozart und der Begriff der Wiener Klassik', Neues Handbuch der Musikwiss
schaft herausgeben von Carl Dahlhaus, Band 5: Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Carl Dahhaus (Hg
(Wiesbaden), pp. 232-9
Fock, E. 2000. Mon farven har en anden lyd? Streiftog i 90ernes musikliv og ungdomskultuur i Danm
(Copenhagen)
Frith, S. 2000. 'The discourse of world music', in Western Music and its Others. Difference, Representatio
and Appropriation in Music, ed. G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (Los Angeles, London- Berkeley)
Hjarpe, J. 2003. Entangled Music (in press, next issue of Orientala Suecana)
Ratner, L.G. 1980. Classic Music. Expression, Form, and Style (New York)
Rice, T 2000. 'World music in Europe', in The Garland Encyclopedia of Music, volume 'Europe', ed
Rice, J. Proter and C. Goertzen (New York and London). Garland Reference Library of the Humanities
Volume 1169, pp. 224-30
Rushdie, S. 1999. The Ground Beneath her Feet (London)

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