World Music Silos

Teaching journal.

The teaching of musics tends to be siloed into neat compartments in courses such as Western Music History, World Music, or Popular Music. In my Aesthetics of Music course (which extends beyond Western art music), I created a structure which deconstructed these genre boundaries by pairing specific works with folk music from the continent that composers such as Tchaikovsky and Hans Werner Henze originated from. The collection of folk music in the course included music of Germany, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Romania, and Turkey. Of these, only the first two countries are linked directly to composers of Western art music (in my syllabus), but I was able to make draw a line on the map from Russia to Eastern Europe, circling around the Black Sea, and passing through Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, and Romania, and then through to Germany. This musical map revealed the sonic diversity which exists in or just adjacent to the region that is construed as “Western” in art music, including countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, Turkey which straddles Europe and Asia, and Romania which is connected to the gypsy topos in the music of Liszt and others in Western Europe. My musical map elucidated the co-existence of multiple musics, an important point which can be overlooked if students hear only Western art music in Western Music History courses and encounter only the music of Africa or Asia in World Music courses. It needs hardly be emphasized that world music is not the music of the other.

When faced with world musics, students have the tendency to regard the collection of musics as a cultural mosaic in which each tile is regarded narrowly as a symbol of each nation—thus Ottoman classical music represents Turkey, and Dobruja dance music represents Romania. As a corrective to this mode of thinking, I emphasized broad themes and connections, such as the important topic of dance in Romanian music and the kochari dance of the Armenian highlands. Other connections: Georgian choral polyphony shares a harmonic and textural genealogy with the sacred music of Europe, but also departs from the latter in important ways (e.g. parallel thirds in folk polyphony over drones); religious music is found in Turkey and in Europe; work songs are found in Russia and in China; the music of Germany spans the joyous polka and the post-tonality of Henze. These lateral links across genres and geography create a web which disrupts the parceling of music by country, promoting thinking in terms of the shared social functions and sonic features of music across a diversity of genres. We can disrupt conceptual silos by emphasizing connections in both the horizontal axis (shared sounds and social functions) and the vertical axis (many musics in the same country or region).