Appropriation (music)
Encyclopedia
In music
, appropriation is the use of borrowed elements (aspects
or techniques
) in the creation of a new piece
, and is an example of cultural appropriation
.
Appropriation may be thought of as one of the placement of elements in new context, as for Gino Stefani who "makes appropriation the chief criterion for his 'popular' definition of melody
(Stefani 1987a). Melody, he argues, is music 'at hand'; it is that dimension which the common musical competence extracts (often with little respect for the integrity of the source), appropriates and uses for a variety of purposes: singing, whistling, dancing, and so on." (Middleton, p. 96) Thus elements may be placed in a different form
, placed with new elements, or varied
.
Thus musical genres may be distinguished by both elements and context. "János Maróthy defines the 'folkloric
' itself in terms of appropriation: the making, from whatever materials, of 'a music [or other folk art] of your own' (Maróthy 1981)." (Middleton, p. 139)
. This is particularly evident among indigenous peoples and their musical genres, such as the Urarina
of Peru
vian Amazonia who face many challenges in the face of globalization
and the forces propelling cultural appropriation
.
Since at least the Renaissance
, musicians, composers, music publishers (and, in the 20th century, radio stations and recording companies) have been part of a wide-ranging and continuous process of cultural appropriation
that developed in the wake of the European colonisation of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. In this process, styles, forms and influences from non-Western music—especially novel melodies, rhythmic patterns or harmonic structures—were discovered, appropriated, adapted and incorporated into mainstream Western popular music.
This appropriation process has a long history in European art music, which bears numerous traces of the adoption of fashionable European popular and folk dances into the classical genre. Dance styles like the allemande
, the pavane
, the galliard
and the gavotte
—often derived from popular folk dances—were just four among scores of "dance crazes" that swept the courts of Europe during the Renaissance
and early Baroque
,
However, by the time Bach
and Händel
were writing their great instrumental works during the late Baroque, the rhythm
s and timings of these dances had already been appropriated, formalised and incorporated into the structure of elite European 'art' music. This trend continued in 18th and 19th century with folk-dance crazes like the mazurka
, the waltz
and the polka
.
One well-known example of cultural appropriation into the European classical music genre arose from the 18th century fad
known as "Orientalism
", in which music, architecture
, costume
and visual arts
from "Oriental" cultures (including the Ottoman empire
, India
, China
and Japan
) became highly fashionable. One of the most enduring artifacts of this fad is the third movement of Mozart
's popular Piano Sonata No. 11
in A major, K. 331, known as the Rondo alla turca ("rondo in the Turkish style"). Another example is the enduringly popular Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera
The Mikado
, which grew out of the craze for all things Japanese that was prevalent in the 1870s and 1880s.
One of the earliest examples of crossover music is the music of French composer Claude Debussy
. In 1889 the French government staged the great Paris Exposition
, an event that was to have profound effects on many areas of Western art and music. Debussy visited the exposition and it was here that he first heard gamelan
music performed by Sunda
nese musicians. He was transfixed by the hypnotic, layered sound of the gamelan orchestra and reportedly returned to the Dutch East Indies
pavilion over several days to listen to the Indonesian musicians perform and to study the structure and tuning of this novel musical form. His exposure to gamelan music had a direct influence on the composition of his famous Nocturnes
for orchestra
.
In the case of Debussy, some of this long process of appropriation also had an educative effect, and by the 1960s Western audiences were beginning to move beyond the confines of the Western musical tradition and explore traditional music from other countries and continents. As Eurocentric cultural and social biases began to be broken down during the 1960s, music from other cultures gained increasingly broad acceptance.
The key factor in this transition was the invention of sound recording, but it was also greatly influenced by the wide-ranging program of collection of European traditional folk music by 19th and early 20th century European classical composers and musicologists. This process was, at first, simply one facet of the multifocal 19th century passion for collection and classification, but it was given greater impetus by the growing awareness that the devastating impact of Western urban-industrial culture was decimating traditional cultures.
This collection activity took on some aspects of a crusade, as musicologists raced to preserve vanishing musical artefacts before they were lost to history. This view was a key motivation for the ethnologists who collected and preserved examples of Australian Aboriginal music, since it was widely believed at the time that the Aboriginal "race" and Aboriginal culture would eventually die out.
Musicologists and leading composers like Antonín Dvořák
, Zoltán Kodály
, Béla Bartók
and Percy Grainger
made strenuous efforts to collect and record local forms of European folk music and folk song, and many folk music melodies and other musical features were absorbed into the mainstream classical tradition. A good example of this process was the enduringly popular suites of Hungarian dance
s by Dvořák and Johannes Brahms
.
During the 19th century this collection program was necessarily restricted to the written notation of melodies, lyrics and arrangements, but it was transformed in the early 20th century by the invention of sound recording and the development of portable cylinder
and disc recording
equipment, enabling musicologists for the first time to capture this music in actual performance, and the new technology was eagerly adopted by musicologists in Europe
and America
.
This growing archive of "folkloric" recordings remained largely within the confines of academia until after World War II
. But in America, these collection programs—notably those sponsored by the Library of Congress
—were to have an immense influence on the development of the international popular music industry.
Folk-music collectors like the great Alan Lomax
worked assiduously for decades to find and record examples of almost every facet of native American, African-American and European-American folk music, and the work of these many scholars, enthusiasts and collectors preserved the sound of many "folk" performers and thousands of hours of priceless song and music from the American folk music tradition.
This musicological program was again revolutionised in the early 1950s by the new technology of magnetic tape
recording, which for the first time allowed music collectors to make very stable, long-duration, high-fidelity studio and field recordings. The concurrent introduction of the LP
audio disc format, which could hold as much as thirty minutes of continuous music per side, allowed many such "folk music" recordings to be released into the consumer market for the first time.
The availability of high-quality portable tape recorders was the key innovation that led to the inception of the two keystone labels in the world music genre. Folkways Records
' extensive archive of folk and indigenous music was launched in the 1950s. It was followed in 1967 by Elektra Records
' influential Nonesuch
Explorer Series.
These "folk" LPs—notably those of early 20th century blues
music—were to bring about a radical change in the style and direction of late 20th century popular music. This process is exemplified by the huge directional change in rock music
that came about when young British and American musicians (like Eric Clapton
) heard the recordings of an obscure Mississippi
blues musician called Robert Johnson.
Another fascinating aspect of the changes in the cultural appropriation process can be found on the music of Dvořák
, which itself was greatly influenced by his collection and study of the folk music of his native Bohemia
. In the 1892 Dvořák was invited to become the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City
; the period he spent in America, and especially his exposure to native American and African-American music, led to the creation of his most famous and popular symphonic work, the Symphony No. 9
, subtitled "From the New World".
This is arguably another very early example of the so-called crossover music genre, but interestingly, it also had an influence on the development of American popular music. Part of the symphony's enduring appeal is due to the nostalgic main melody in the second movement, which is said to have expressed Dvořák's homesickness for Bohemia. Remarkably, this melody was later appropriated into the formative bluegrass music
genre as the basis for the song "Goin' Home" (attributed to William Arms Fisher
); it soon became a bluegrass standard and was later adapted into a popular spiritual
-style song.
Simultaneous with this process, two emerging streams of non-Western music—African-American music and Latin music—were discovered by American and European audiences, and they were rapidly appropriated by the mainstream music industry. Over the next hundred years these two broad genres were to have a massive transformative effect on the structure of popular music and the direction of the music industry.
In the 1890s working-class dancers, composers and musicians in the La Boca
area of Buenos Aires
in Argentina
invented a daring and sensual new dance style which was dubbed the tango
. It took Argentina by storm and after reaching New York
during World War I
it became an international sensation, aided by a plethora of tango recordings and crystallised by the famously steamy tango scene in Rudolph Valentino
's legend-making 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
More or less simultaneous with the tango craze, a novel African-American style known as ragtime
emerged in the United States
, epitomised by the music of virtuoso pianist-composers Scott Joplin
and Eubie Blake
. Ragtime introduced African-derived syncopated
("ragged") rhythms into Western music and enjoyed a tremendous international vogue over the next twenty years, as well as exerted a huge influence on the subsequent development of jazz
.
Ragtime and then early jazz transformed American popular music—the work of songwriters like George Gershwin
and Irving Berlin
was crucially shaped by their appropriation of influences from African-American music—and these genres also strongly influenced many European classical composers, especially the French composers Erik Satie
, Claude Debussy
and Maurice Ravel
.
In terms of their influence on almost every facet of 20th century popular music, the successive historical genres of African-American music have, as a group, been the most significant of all the "exotic" genres appropriated into Western music. Just as they influenced each other, gospel music
, ragtime
, blues
, jazz
, R&B and rock'n'roll were also successively appropriated into mainstream Western popular music—usually almost as soon as each became known as a definable genre. It is undeniable that the various genres of African-American music have, collectively, exerted a greater influence over the development and direction of Western mass-market popular recorded music than any other force.
Alongside the emergence of jazz, beginning around 1915, Hawaiian music
reached the mainstream pop market in the United States. The Hawaiian style (or, more often, Western imitations of it) became a major music fad, retaining a significant audience following from the 1930s to the 1950s. Hawaiian music was itself a complex mixture of European, native Hawaiian and other Polynesia
n influences. This is well demonstrated by the work of one of the founders of the genre, Queen Lili'uokalani (1838–1917), the last Queen of Hawaii before the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown. A musician and composer, she is credited as the composer of the unofficial Hawaiian anthem "Aloha 'Oe". Lili'uokalani indeed wrote the lyrics and arranged the music but in fact she appropriated the tune from a Croatia
n folk song called "Sidi Mara na kamen studencu".
Beginning in the late 1920s, a series of concerts under the aegis of the Pan-American Association of Composers, founded by Henry Cowell
, brought the African-influenced music of Cuban composers Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán
and the work of Carlos Chávez
, much of it rooted in Mexican folk music
, to the United States.
In the 1930s, the "Latin invasion" that had begun with the tango took off again when American jazz, dance music, and popular song were revolutionized by the "discovery" of other music forms of the Caribbean
, Central
and South America
, a process that was triggered by a significant influx of migrants to the United States from Cuba
, Puerto Rico
and other Caribbean islands in the 1940s.
The blending of Latin rhythms and instrumental jazz was pioneered by established American musicians like Duke Ellington
and Dizzy Gillespie
and by recently-arrived 'Latin' musicians like Machito
and others, some of whom soon became stars in their own right. Latin beats rapidly became an essential part of the rhythmical vocabulary of American popular music, providing composers and musicians with a vastly enhanced repertoire of beats and meters. During the 1930s and 1940s, newly appropriated Latin music genres created a series of music movements and dance crazes, including the merengue, the samba
, and the rumba
.
In 1944 The Andrews Sisters
appropriated the song "Rum and Coca-Cola
", which had originally been recorded by Trinidad
ian musician Lord Invader
in the 1930s. The Andrews Sisters' version sparked a new fad for this infectious new style, calypso
. The craze reached its apex of popularity in the mid-1950s with the release of the hugely successful Harry Belafonte
single "Banana Boat Song
" and Belafonte's million-selling 1956 LP
Calypso
. Calypso also had a strong influence on the mainstream folk music boom of the late fifties and early sixties, which in turn became one of the major springboards for the development of world music as a commercial genre.
In the late 1950s, repeating the impact of the tango, a seductive new music style called bossa nova
emerged from Brazil
and it soon swept the world, exerting a huge effect over the course of Western pop and jazz over the next decade and beyond. Nothing better illustrates the lasting impact of this hugely popular genre than the archetypical bossa song, "The Girl From Ipanema
", written in 1962 and best known via the languid bilingual crossover version recorded by Stan Getz
, João Gilberto
and Astrud Gilberto
in 1963. Thanks largely to the enormous worldwide popularity of this single, "The Girl From Ipanema" now ranks as the second most-recorded song of all time, surpassed only by Paul McCartney
's "Yesterday".
Bossa nova was also an important influence on two innovative streams of popular music in the early 1960s. One was the short-lived but very popular British-originated music craze known as Merseybeat
, the pop style epitomised by the early songs of The Beatles
, which combined popular song structures and rock'n'roll instrumentation with rhythmic inflections taken from bossa nova.
New York was one of the epicentres of the Latin-jazz crossover, so it is not surprising that the other major pop style to show a strong influence from bossa nova was the so-called "Brill Building
Sound", exemplified by the work of the New York-based songwriter teams like Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Gerry Goffin
& Carole King
, Neil Sedaka
& Howard Greenfield
, Jeff Barry
& Ellie Greenwich
and especially Burt Bacharach
and Hal David
.
Influences from African music also began to appear in the 1950s. This process included one of the more controversial examples of cultural appropriation process, exemplified by the pop song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight
". A version of this song was an American #1 hit for pop band The Tokens
in 1961, and it was credited to American writers, but in fact "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was actually an unacknowledged rewrite of the song "Mbube", written and recorded by South Africa
n musician and composer, Solomon Linda
, in 1939.
"Mbube" had been a major local hit for Linda and his band, The Evening Birds, reputedly selling 100,000 copies there, but its success at the time was entirely confined to South Africa. Some years later, a copy of Linda's recording reached the American musicologist Alan Lomax
; he passed it on to his friend Pete Seeger
, who fell in love with it, and it was Seeger who was mainly responsible for popularising the song in the West.
Seeger recorded a version of the song with his noted folk group The Weavers
in 1952, retitling it "Wimoweh" (an inaccurate transliteration of the song's original Zulu
refrain, "uyimbube"). The Weavers scored a US Top 20 hit with their studio version, and had further success with a live version of the song included on their influential 1957 live album, recorded at Carnegie Hall
, which led to it being covered by The Kingston Trio
in 1959.
The Weavers' Carnegie Hall version of "Wimoweh" became a favourite song of The Tokens
—they used it as their audition piece when they were offered a contract with RCA Records
—and this led to them recording it as their first RCA single. However, it was at this point that the lyrics were re-written by the band's producers—who took full credit for the song—and it would be several decades more before the full story of the appropriation of Solomon Linda's work became widely known. Sadly, by then Linda had long since died in poverty.
, Elektra Records
and Nonesuch Records
in the USA
and, European labels such as Disques Cellier in Switzerland
and the state-run recording labels operated by eastern European governments, such as Melodiya
(USSR). In the West these labels were often small "boutique" operations or minor specialist imprints of larger companies, releasing albums of non-Western traditional classical music, folk songs and indigenous "ethnic" music.
This market expanded enormously during the 1950s thanks to the so-called "folk boom" of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which artists and groups like Pete Seeger
, The New Lost City Ramblers and The Weavers
explored the traditional songs and sounds of American folk music and reinterpreted them for a mass audience. In America, this process was massively influenced by the 'discovery' of the treasure-trove of recordings of European, English, American and African-American music folk musics that had been made over preceding decades. One of the key audio artifacts of this process was the Anthology of American Folk Music
, the landmark six-album set compiled by the musicologist Harry Smith
from his own collection of 78s and cylinder recordings, originally released in 1952.
This exploratory process also led musicians to begin investigating music from non-Western cultures — as in the case of Solomon Linda
's "Mbube". In each case, these processes of discovery and appropriation were made considerably easier by the increasing availability of LP recordings of "ethnic" music from non-Western countries.
This process had a definite cumulative effect, but it is fair to say that, until the late 1960s, "ethnic"/"folkloric" music remained more or less a specialist interest. Some "exotic" influences inevitably filtered through to the mass market
—as in the case of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight
" — but in general these were mostly Western reinterpretations, and very little original music produced outside of the mainstream Western popular music recording industry managed to break into the mainstream pop music market or achieve significant sales until the late 1960s.
Similarly, prior to the 60s, numerous classical musicians and composers wrote and/or performed music that showed the influence of novel non-Western styles (e.g. the influence of gamelan
music on French composer Claude Debussy
) or attempted to explicitly combine traditional Western musical styles with influences from non-Western traditions, although this too remained largely an elite 'art' activity, and it gained relatively little mass recognition when compared to major popular genres like swing music, jazz
or rock'n'roll.
Mass-market acceptance of what is now termed "world music" grew dramatically as a result of the pop music
explosion of the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, the more adventurous pop, rock, progressive and jazz musicians and producers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to create a 'fusion' style that combined conventional English-language popular music forms and structures with instrumental and compositional influences from exotic musical genres. The interest in these "ethnic" musics by groups like The Beatles
and The Rolling Stones
, combined with their worldwide popularity, encouraged other performers and a growing number of record buyers to seek out recordings of non-Western music.
A prototype for this fusion
of pop and world music in the late 60's can be seen in the folk rock
phenomenon of the mid-1960s. Underlying this development was the fact that many leading American and English pop-rock musicians of the period—Roger McGuinn
, Bob Dylan
, Jerry Garcia
, Donovan
—started their musical careers on the folk scene.
Interestingly, although the core of the "folk" genre at this time was traditional Anglo-American folk song, mainstream folk music was still appropriating new "non-Anglo" influences like calypso
, black South African popular music and even the Middle East (e.g. the pioneering music of noted UK guitarist Davey Graham
). Another notable feature is that many performers and fans came to acknowledge African-American music—especially blues and gospel—as a vital element of folk, ultimately contributing to the breakdown of entrenched industry prejudices that had for decades divided the record market into separate 'pop' (white) and 'race' (black) markets, and this connection led to the folk music movement playing an important part in the accelerating civil rights
movement of the 1950s and '60s. On stage, many African American 'folk' performers like Leadbelly
and Odetta
were able for the first time to perform side-by-side and as equal attractions with white performers like Dylan and Pete Seeger
, as evidenced by the multiracial lineups at American folk scene's peak annual peak event, the Newport Folk Festival
.
Folk rock
can be seen an attempt to broaden the language of mainstream pop by incorporating the more "serious" lyrical approach and political awareness of postwar acoustic folk with the mass-market appeal of pop-rock instrumentation and production. Folk rock emerged as a genre in 1964-65, sparked by the release of two landmark pop singles. In late 1964 The Byrds
recorded an electrified cover version of Bob Dylan
's "Mr Tambourine Man", in which The Byrds combined the pop-rock instrumentation and close harmonies made popular by The Beatles
and The Beach Boys
with the earnest lyrical approach of the Anglo-American folk genre. The huge commercial success of The Byrds' version of "Mr Tambourine Man" spawned scores of imitations, and folk rock continued to expand and diversify over the next few years.
Another major folk-rock landmark was the Simon & Garfunkel single "The Sounds of Silence". The song was originally recorded as a simple acoustic ballad and included on the duo's 1964 debut album, but the LP flopped and the duo split soon after, and Simon left for the UK. The following year, inspired by the success of "Mr Tambourine Man" (and immediately after producing the historic Bob Dylan
single "Like a Rolling Stone
", Columbia Records house producer Tom Wilson took the original track and (without even consulting Simon and Garfunkel) overdubbed an electric rhythm section, creating a new version. This was released as a single (as "The Sound of Silence") in late 1965 and by early 1966 it had become a major pop hit, relaunching the duo's career.
Inspired by these developments, UK acts such as Donovan
, Fairport Convention
and Steeleye Span
took a similar approach, combining pop-rock arrangements with songs, stylings and instruments drawn from traditional English and Celtic folk music, creating a hybrid style that applied the Byrds' folk-rock approach to the vast repertoire of English folk songs; like so many other English acts, all these performers were also heavily influenced by Dylan. Alan Stivell
(Brittany) began working in a similar vein in the mid 1960s.
Solo guitarist Davey Graham
was a notable figure on the British folk scene whose innovative work exerted a strong influence on other musicians. Graham's complex finder-picking style (epitomised by his landmark composition "Anji"), his reputed introduction of the "Open D" tuning to British folk guitarists and his groundbreaking incorporations of Arabic and Indian inflections into his playing influenced many of his contemporaries, including Bert Jansch
, Jimmy Page
, Donovan
and Ray Davies
, all of whom have acknowledged him as an important influence.
Graham's mercurial American counterpart John Fahey
also made many remarkably innovative solo guitar recordings during this period, incorporating influences from traditional American folk, blues, Hawaiian music, Arabic and Indian music as well as exploring unusual production effects.
In America (and also in Australasia
and Canada
) in the late Sixties, pop-rock acts including The Grateful Dead, The Byrds
and The Flying Burrito Brothers
then moved their music in a different direction. Drawing on their folk roots, and inspired by the hugely influential late '60's albums by Bob Dylan
and The Band
, these bands began creating a new hybrid style that fused pop and rock with American country music
and bluegrass music
, creating the genre now termed country rock
.
This ongoing process of exploration and experimentation by popular musicians, and the availability of recorded collections of "authentic" performances of English and American folk music, began to lead more and more curious listeners to explore these genres. This in turn would pave the way for the development of the "world music" concept in later years.
" were sometimes risible, it proved to be the most influential fusion of pop and "folk" music of the entire period, specifically because it was the first widely accepted attempt to mix Western popular music with a completely non-Western musical tradition.
Although they were by no means the only people at that time who were following this course, much of the credit for the creation of the world music genre, and for the rapid expansion of Western mass-audience interest in non-Western music, must be accorded to The Beatles
, and especially to their lead guitarist, George Harrison
.
Interest in Indian music increased rapidly in the mid-1960s. By 1965 a number of British and American pop musicians were discovering Indian music and instruments; in early 1965, during a tour of America, David Crosby
of The Byrds
introduced Harrison to the sitar and the traditional classical music of India. Harrison was captivated by the sound of the instrument; he soon developed a profound interested in Indian music, culture and spirituality, and sparked a trend by taking sitar lessons from Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, whom Harrison continued to regard as the "best musician on the planet" long after the 1960s and who, coincidentally, had also recorded for The Beatles' label, EMI
.
Harrison's background in popular British and American music forms had given him a grounding in the techniques of jazz-blues improvisation
that are central to the genre. Like jazz and blues, the largely improvised nature of Hindustani classical music, its strong reliance on rhythm and percussion, and the extended nature of the raga
form were all features that Harrison was able to recognise, appreciate and begin to explore in the context of pop's ongoing quest for "the new sound".
In October 1965 Harrison made pop history when he played a sitar
on the Beatles' recording of the John Lennon song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
", included their 1965 LP Rubber Soul
. Other musicians were attempting similar fusions at the time—Brian Wilson, for example, used a koto
on one of the songs on The Beach Boys' classic Pet Sounds
LP, recorded , and Donovan was recording and performing with pioneering American sitarist Shawn Phillips
—but arguably no other single recording had the instant and worldwide impact of "Norwegian Wood
".
It was the first time a Western pop song had used a sitar in its arrangement, and for many Western listeners it was undoubtedly the first time they ever heard the instrument. In the wake of the song's release, the sitar became the new "in" sound for pop recordings, and an American guitar company even manufactured an electric sitar
-guitar designed to simulate the sound of the sitar.
More importantly, "Norwegian Wood" sparked a major craze for the classical music of India
in general and for the work of Ravi Shankar in particular, with the direct result that recordings by Shankar and other Indian classical musicians began to sell in large quantities outside India for the first time and Shankar himself quickly became one of the world's most sought-after concert performers. The availability of tape recording and the LP were also crucial to the popularization of this particular genre of music—since a typical raga
performance could last twenty minutes or more, popular appreciation of this music would have been impossible without the longer duration and high fidelity provided by the LP format.
In 1966 Harrison took his "Indi-psych-pop" synthesis a step further with the highly original song "Love You To
" (from the seminal Revolver
LP), which featured a sinuous Indian-influenced melody and an innovative arrangement consisting solely of Indian instruments, performed by expatriate Indian musicians living in London. The peak of Harrison's Indian synthesis project was the epic track "Within You Without You
" (1967) from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, recorded at Studio Two, Abbey Road by Harrison and an ensemble of musicians from the Asian Music Circle in London.
Another obvious trace of Harrison's immersion in Indian music was the fact that "Within You Without You
" also broke new ground on the pop scene by clocking in at over five minutes. Harrison also recorded in India with Indian instruments and musicians when producing the soundtrack music for the 1968 film Wonderwall
; he was given a free rein by the film's director and the music he created was explicitly intended as a sort of "primer" of the styles of Indian instrumental music that he was exploring, but the film did not have a wide release at the time and Harrison's soundtrack remains little known outside the realm of Beatles aficionados.
Although by no means as influential as "Norwegian Wood", the 1965 song "See My Friends
" by The Kinks
is another significant Western pop song of the period that shows the unmistakable influence of Indian music. In this case, according to writer Ray Davies
, the song's arrangement was inspired by a stopover in India during the band's first trip to Australia
in 1965, when during an early-morning walk, he heard local fisherman singing a traditional chant, part of which he incorporated into the song's sinuous melody line; Davies' exposure to Hindustani raga music is also evident in the sitar-like quality of the guitar accompaniment. Another early use of the sitar in pop was on The Rolling Stones
' hit single "Paint It, Black
", released in May 1966.
1967 proved to be a pivotal year for the development of the world music genre. In June the three-day Monterey International Pop Festival, the world's first rock festival
, was held in California, and it was attended by approximately 200,000 people. Alongside English and American pop and rock acts, the bill also featured black South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela
as well as a performance by Ravi Shankar, who opened the climactic Sunday concert (and whose presence at the festival was almost entirely due to the influence of George Harrison). Shankar's performance at Monterey was without question the most important concert of his entire career in the West—it was seen by tens of thousands of people that day, and thanks to the fact that the entire festival was recorded and filmed, millions more around the world heard it on record and/or saw it on film in the years that followed.
The other major landmark that year was the launch of the hugely influential Nonesuch
Explorer Series by the American Elektra Records
label. This first Explorer LP, a collection of Bali
nese folk music entitled Music from the Morning of the World, launched a growing catalogue of high-fidelity field recordings of the music of other cultures. The Nonesuch Explorer series is now recognised as one of the most important commercial collections of world music and several excerpts from Nonesuch recordings were included on the Voyager Golden Record
that was sent into deep space aboard the Voyager 1
and Voyager 2
space probes in 1977.
n ska
(sometimes called bluebeat, rocksteady
and reggae
). Little Millie Small
scored what is probably the first bluebeat hit, "My Boy Lollipop
" in 1964, and these styles gained a considerable following in the United Kingdom
, especially in the mod and skinhead
subculture
s, thanks to artists such as Prince Buster
, Desmond Dekker
and Laurel Aitken
. In 1968, The Beatles
enjoyed a major crossover success with Paul McCartney
's ska-influenced "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
", while Desmond Dekker
became the first Jamaican musician to score a #1 hit in the UK with the 1968 reggae song "Israelites
". In 1972, Johnny Nash
scored a major international hit with the reggae-styled "I Can See Clearly Now
" (with The Wailers as his backup band). His follow-up single "Stir It Up
" was penned by Bob Marley
. The style gained wider popularity that year with the cult success of the Jamaican movie The Harder They Come
, which starred reggae musician Jimmy Cliff
, who also wrote and performed much of the soundtrack album.
Reggae was a distinctive local style that evolved in Jamaica, although its development had been strongly influenced by earlier American soul
and R&B
. Reggae became widely popular in the UK mostly thanks to Jamaican-born singer-songwriter Bob Marley, who was one of the genre's main founders and one of its most prolific and consistent songwriters. Reggae's popularity in Britain was greatly assisted by the fact that a large number of black
immigrants from the Caribbean
had settled in England
since the end of World War II
. Reggae also became very popular with the new generation of musicians in the punk rock
and New Wave music
genres of the late 1970s. Bands such as The Clash
and The Slits
became enthusiastic champions of the style, as well as appropriating it for their own music.
Internationally, the most successful appropriators of reggae for mainstream pop audiences was the hugely successful British band The Police, who scored a string of hit singles and hit LPs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with finely crafted pop
songs played in a reggae style, such as "Walking on the Moon
".
recorded the Master Musicians of Jajouka in the village of Jajouka
in northern Morocco
. Jones died the following year but the LP was released in 1971 on Rolling Stones Records
. Although there was some criticism of the electronic treatments Jones applied to the recordings in post-production, the LP was one of the first recordings released in the pop market that showcased traditional Moroccan music.
The electric folk
movement in which Western popular music
appropriated the English and Celtic traditional music
also began in the late 1960s, with the work of groups like Fairport Convention
. This movement continued well into the 1970s.
", taken from their multi-platinum selling Bridge Over Troubled Water
LP. The theme was endlessly copied and used all over the world, for instance in parody about downed F117a plane El kondor pada
, and many other. Like Harrison's use of sitar, Paul Simon's use of Andean folk instruments (including the pan flute
) was a pop music "first". His evocative English-language adaptation of a traditional 18th century Peruvian folk melody by Jorge Michelberg gave many listeners their first taste of the flavour of Peruvian folk music, and when the song was released as a single it became a hit in many countries, earning a Top Twenty placing (#18) on the American charts.
Also in 1970, Breton singer and musician Alan Stivell
(having already played the Celtic Breton harp on stage as a child, and toured since the mid-sixties) recorded his first professional album, Reflets
("Reflections"), a fusion of Celtic musics with different new experiments and influences. The originality of this is also Alan Stivell's awareness, prefacing the record as a manifesto of what he called first "ethno-modern" music, meaning exactly what world music has now come to mean for many people.
His instrumental album Renaissance of the Celtic Harp
increased the popularity of that instrument, and promoted the fusion of Celtic music with other musics, as did the European best-selling live album recorded at the Paris Olympia (1972). His 1979 Symphonie Celtique
mixed Celtic musics with different ethnic cultures, rock, and jazz-rock, and especially with a symphonic orchestra and choirs. He continues to experiment with different combinations of these and more electronic elements, especially on 1 Douar ("One Earth") (1998) and Explore (2006).
In 1973 Cameroon
ian jazz musician Manu Dibango
scored a worldwide hit with the single "Soul Makossa
", a piece considered one of the forerunners of disco
. Although Dibango came from a jazz background, the single contained elements drawn from the Cameroonian folk music style known as makossa
, and Dibango became one of the very first African musicians to achieve significant success in the mainstream Western pop market. "Soul Makossa" also became an example of cultural appropriation when Michael Jackson
"borrowed" 77 seconds of music from Dibango's single and incorporated it into his song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
", from the Thriller
album, leading Dibango to take legal action against Jackson.
In 1975 there were several important "popular" releases that gained wide recognition and exposed pop audiences to new musical influences. In February, Led Zeppelin
released an ambitious "Arab-pop fusion" song, the ten-minute epic
"Kashmir
", from their Physical Graffiti
LP. The song was strongly influenced by composer Jimmy Page
's interest in Arabic music. Although its length made it an unlikely hit, the song became a firm favorite on American FM radio stations and was even played on Australian pop radio.
In November that year, Joni Mitchell
released her LP The Hissing of Summer Lawns
, featuring the track "The Jungle Line", which mixed traditional African drumming and synthesiser. For this recording, Mitchell was accompanied by the musical group The Warrior Drums of Burundi
, who were visiting America at the time.
Two other musical events in 1975 which had a significant impact on the development of world music can both be largely credited to Marcel Cellier
, owner of the Swiss record label Disques Cellier.
That year Cellier released Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares
, the first volume of an eventual three-album series of recordings of Bulgarian vocal folk music, performed by the Bulgarian State Radio Choir and Trio Bulgarka
. In the years that followed, particularly after the album's re-release through the British 4AD Records label, the Bulgarian Voices album became a significant cult hit in many countries and created a huge groundswell of interest in this form of eastern European folk music, leading to the 1980s collaboration between Trio Bulgarka
and British singer-songwriter Kate Bush
on her 1989 album The Sensual World
.
Cellier's other big hit of 1975 was Flutes De Pan et Orgue ("Pan Flute and Organ"), a 1971 recording of traditional Romanian pan flute
music, performed by Romanian
pan flautist Gheorge Zamfir, and accompanied by Cellier himself on organ. The international vogue for Zamfir
's music is largely due to Australian film director Peter Weir
. His 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock
, one of the most successful Australian feature films of the period, featured evocative music from the Cellier disc on the soundtrack, and the film's success created widespread interest in Zamfir and his music.
Weir had been introduced to Zamfir's music a few years earlier, and when he began production on Picnic he decided to use pan flute music on the soundtrack
; he approached Zamfir to compose original music in the same style, but Zamfir declined, so Weir was returned to the music he had originally heard and licenced some of the tracks from the Cellier LP.
In 1978, Matthew Montfort
formed Ancient Future, an ensemble of 28 members having musical masters of a song traditional to the master's country play the song along with them. Ancient Future blended rhythms, harmonies, and melodies from all across the world and mixed them together along with jazz
, rock
and other genres of music to combine what became world fusion music.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the English film director Jeremy Marre
travelled the world for his Beats of the Heart series, shown first on the UK's national Channel 4
, recording and interviewing so-called world music artists.
re-emerged as a catalytic figure when he revisited the world music / pop fusion concept he had first used on "El Cóndor Pasa" in 1970. His influential, multi-million-selling Graceland
album bore the unmistakable stamp of Simon's recent discovery of South Africa
n township music, and he recorded the album with leading South African session musicians and the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo
. These musicians performed on the subsequent concert tours, as did two other special guests, exiled South African music legends Miriam Makeba
and Hugh Masekela
. Simon received some criticism for his decision to record in South Africa (which was being economically boycotted by most Western nations for its Apartheid
policies).
Many other British and American artists contributed to the growing exploitation of "world music" during this period. After establishing his solo career in the late 1970s and early 1980s, former Genesis
lead singer Peter Gabriel
was heavily influenced by African and Middle Eastern music; he became a key figure in the founding of the WOMAD organisation and later established his own "world music" label, Real World
, which recorded and released successful albums by artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. Gabriel featured Senegal
ese mbalax
singer Youssou N'Dour
in a song on his hit album So
in 1986, paving the way for N'Dour's success as one of the biggest "world music" stars in the West. The later music of American New Wave
band Talking Heads
drew heavily on influences from African and Afro-Cuban music, notably on their album Remain in Light
. The album was among several experimental post-punk
recordings directly inspired by the Afrobeat
of bandleader Fela Kuti
. Kuti's style itself began as an appropriation—a merger between the traditional styles of Kuti's home Nigeria and the R&B and funk music of African American
artists like James Brown
. Many other African musicians, as well as those from other regions of the world, also drew influence from African American music, Afro-Cuban music and other music from the West, ensuring that appropriation was continuous in many directions.
In the early 1980s, Talking Heads
' main writer and lead singer David Byrne
also recorded a significant album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, in collaboration with the band's producer of the time, Brian Eno
. It was strongly influenced by musical styles outside the standard "rock" genre, employing African-style percussion and Afro-American funk rhythms. It is also notable as one of the first rock albums to make extensive use of the then novel technology of sampling
, incorporating vocal and musical samples from a wide range of sources including Arabic music. Dub music
, a more atmospheric offshoot of reggae, was also appropriated as a rhythmic and production influence by many electronic musicians and underground rock bands of the era, particularly in the United Kingdom, where reggae had achieved mainstream success.
Sampling came into wider use among hip hop
DJs, who appropriated rhythms, vocal parts or backing music from existing songs and pieces and combined and manipulated them, usually to serve as backing for rap
vocals by an MC. Hip hop music began as an underground urban phenomenon in the 1970s, achieved mass popular success by the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by the end of the century it had become dominant over rock as the largest selling style of pop music and the primary musical export of the United States. The importance of musical appropriation to hip hop culture has often been controversial, with many legal challenges to uncredited samples, and heavy criticism for instances where paid samples simply copied the sound of the original song (for example, Puff Daddy's sampling of a hit by The Police); however, many hip hop musicians and others have argued that sampling in hip hop is no different from the often uncredited appropriation white classical and rock musicians made of earlier black music styles such as jazz and blues, and that the DJ's creativity, as well as that of the rapper, allows the song to depart significantly from the original sources. Samples in hip hop are typically only brief snippets of the original, though they often utilize the most recognizable riff or hook of the song. Many hip hop songs sample other forms of African American music, as well. Hank Shocklee of the influential hip hop group Public Enemy has publicly debated the practice with funk bandleader George Clinton
, who sued Public Enemy for sampling one of his songs without permission.
As of the 2000s, sampling has become a common form of appropriation in pop music, which has drawn increased influence from hip hop. For example, Barbadian
dancehall
/pop singer Rihanna
's 2006 hit "SOS" drew directly from the song "Tainted Love" by 1980s English
synth pop band Soft Cell
. Although both were successful on the Western pop charts, the two acts may have been seen to reflect very different cultures before the appropriation.
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, appropriation is the use of borrowed elements (aspects
Aspect of music
An aspect of music is any characteristic, dimension, or element taken as a part or component of music.-European music:The traditional musicological or European-influenced aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music, so 7 basic elements of...
or techniques
Musical technique
Musical technique is the ability of instrumental and vocal musicians to exert optimal control of the their instrument or vocal cords in order to produce the precise musical effects they desire. Improving one's technique generally entails practicing exercises that improve one's muscular sensitivity...
) in the creation of a new piece
Musical composition
Musical composition can refer to an original piece of music, the structure of a musical piece, or the process of creating a new piece of music. People who practice composition are called composers.- Musical compositions :...
, and is an example of cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of...
.
Appropriation may be thought of as one of the placement of elements in new context, as for Gino Stefani who "makes appropriation the chief criterion for his 'popular' definition of melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
(Stefani 1987a). Melody, he argues, is music 'at hand'; it is that dimension which the common musical competence extracts (often with little respect for the integrity of the source), appropriates and uses for a variety of purposes: singing, whistling, dancing, and so on." (Middleton, p. 96) Thus elements may be placed in a different form
Musical form
The term musical form refers to the overall structure or plan of a piece of music, and it describes the layout of a composition as divided into sections...
, placed with new elements, or varied
Variation (music)
In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve harmony, melody, counterpoint, rhythm, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these.-Variation form:...
.
Thus musical genres may be distinguished by both elements and context. "János Maróthy defines the 'folkloric
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
' itself in terms of appropriation: the making, from whatever materials, of 'a music [or other folk art] of your own' (Maróthy 1981)." (Middleton, p. 139)
History of appropriation in Western music
Cultural appropriation in Western music as a cultural/economic phenomenon is inextricably linked with the invention of sound recording and the development of the international recording industry, but the background to its emergence covers the whole span of modern Western musical history, and what some analysts have deemed the digital revolutionDigital Revolution
The Digital Revolution is the change from analog mechanical and electronic technology to digital technology that has taken place since c. 1980 and continues to the present day. Implicitly, the term also refers to the sweeping changes brought about by digital computing and communication technology...
. This is particularly evident among indigenous peoples and their musical genres, such as the Urarina
Urarina
The Urarina are an indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Basin who inhabit the Chambira, Urituyacu, and Corrientes Rivers. According to both archaeological and historical sources, they have resided in the Chambira Basin of contemporary northeastern Peru for centuries. The Urarina refer to...
of Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
vian Amazonia who face many challenges in the face of globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
and the forces propelling cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of...
.
Since at least the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, musicians, composers, music publishers (and, in the 20th century, radio stations and recording companies) have been part of a wide-ranging and continuous process of cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of...
that developed in the wake of the European colonisation of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. In this process, styles, forms and influences from non-Western music—especially novel melodies, rhythmic patterns or harmonic structures—were discovered, appropriated, adapted and incorporated into mainstream Western popular music.
This appropriation process has a long history in European art music, which bears numerous traces of the adoption of fashionable European popular and folk dances into the classical genre. Dance styles like the allemande
Allemande
An allemande is one of the most popular instrumental dance forms in Baroque music, and a standard element of a suite...
, the pavane
Pavane
The pavane, pavan, paven, pavin, pavian, pavine, or pavyn is a slow processional dance common in Europe during the 16th century .A pavane is a slow piece of music which is danced to in pairs....
, the galliard
Galliard
The galliard was a form of Renaissance dance and music popular all over Europe in the 16th century. It is mentioned in dance manuals from England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy, among others....
and the gavotte
Gavotte
The gavotte originated as a French folk dance, taking its name from the Gavot people of the Pays de Gap region of Dauphiné, where the dance originated. It is notated in 4/4 or 2/2 time and is of moderate tempo...
—often derived from popular folk dances—were just four among scores of "dance crazes" that swept the courts of Europe during the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
and early Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
,
However, by the time Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
and Händel
George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Handel was born in 1685, in a family indifferent to music...
were writing their great instrumental works during the late Baroque, the rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
s and timings of these dances had already been appropriated, formalised and incorporated into the structure of elite European 'art' music. This trend continued in 18th and 19th century with folk-dance crazes like the mazurka
Mazurka
The mazurka is a Polish folk dance in triple meter, usually at a lively tempo, and with accent on the third or second beat.-History:The folk origins of the mazurek are two other Polish musical forms—the slow machine...
, the waltz
Waltz
The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...
and the polka
Polka
The polka is a Central European dance and also a genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. It originated in the middle of the 19th century in Bohemia...
.
One well-known example of cultural appropriation into the European classical music genre arose from the 18th century fad
FAD
In biochemistry, flavin adenine dinucleotide is a redox cofactor involved in several important reactions in metabolism. FAD can exist in two different redox states, which it converts between by accepting or donating electrons. The molecule consists of a riboflavin moiety bound to the phosphate...
known as "Orientalism
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
", in which music, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, costume
Costume
The term costume can refer to wardrobe and dress in general, or to the distinctive style of dress of a particular people, class, or period. Costume may also refer to the artistic arrangement of accessories in a picture, statue, poem, or play, appropriate to the time, place, or other circumstances...
and visual arts
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
from "Oriental" cultures (including the Ottoman empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
and Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
) became highly fashionable. One of the most enduring artifacts of this fad is the third movement of Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
's popular Piano Sonata No. 11
Piano Sonata No. 11 (Mozart)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K 331 is a sonata in three movements:#Andante grazioso — a theme with six variations#Menuetto — a minuet and trio#Alla Turca: Allegretto in A minor and major....
in A major, K. 331, known as the Rondo alla turca ("rondo in the Turkish style"). Another example is the enduringly popular Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera
Comic opera
Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
The Mikado
The Mikado
The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, their ninth of fourteen operatic collaborations...
, which grew out of the craze for all things Japanese that was prevalent in the 1870s and 1880s.
One of the earliest examples of crossover music is the music of French composer Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
. In 1889 the French government staged the great Paris Exposition
Exposition Universelle (1889)
The Exposition Universelle of 1889 was a World's Fair held in Paris, France from 6 May to 31 October 1889.It was held during the year of the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, an event traditionally considered as the symbol for the beginning of the French Revolution...
, an event that was to have profound effects on many areas of Western art and music. Debussy visited the exposition and it was here that he first heard gamelan
Gamelan
A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....
music performed by Sunda
Sundanese people
The Sundanese are an ethnic group native to the western part of the Indonesian island of Java. They number approximately 31 million, and are the second most populous of all the nation's ethncities. The Sundanese are predominantly Muslim...
nese musicians. He was transfixed by the hypnotic, layered sound of the gamelan orchestra and reportedly returned to the Dutch East Indies
Dutch East Indies
The Dutch East Indies was a Dutch colony that became modern Indonesia following World War II. It was formed from the nationalised colonies of the Dutch East India Company, which came under the administration of the Netherlands government in 1800....
pavilion over several days to listen to the Indonesian musicians perform and to study the structure and tuning of this novel musical form. His exposure to gamelan music had a direct influence on the composition of his famous Nocturnes
Nocturnes
Nocturnes is an orchestral composition in three movements by the French composer Claude Debussy. It was completed on 15 December 1899.-Movements:The three movements are:* I. Nuages * II. Fêtes * III...
for orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
.
In the case of Debussy, some of this long process of appropriation also had an educative effect, and by the 1960s Western audiences were beginning to move beyond the confines of the Western musical tradition and explore traditional music from other countries and continents. As Eurocentric cultural and social biases began to be broken down during the 1960s, music from other cultures gained increasingly broad acceptance.
The key factor in this transition was the invention of sound recording, but it was also greatly influenced by the wide-ranging program of collection of European traditional folk music by 19th and early 20th century European classical composers and musicologists. This process was, at first, simply one facet of the multifocal 19th century passion for collection and classification, but it was given greater impetus by the growing awareness that the devastating impact of Western urban-industrial culture was decimating traditional cultures.
Musicologists and leading composers like Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Dvorák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...
, Zoltán Kodály
Zoltán Kodály
Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is best known internationally as the creator of the Kodály Method.-Life:Born in Kecskemét, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child....
, Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
and Percy Grainger
Percy Grainger
George Percy Aldridge Grainger , known as Percy Grainger, was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. He also made many...
made strenuous efforts to collect and record local forms of European folk music and folk song, and many folk music melodies and other musical features were absorbed into the mainstream classical tradition. A good example of this process was the enduringly popular suites of Hungarian dance
Hungarian dance
Hungarian dance is a set of Hungarian folkloric dances.According to György Martin, a prominent folklore expert, Hungarian dances can be divided into two categories. The first refers to dances performed in the middle ages while the second relates to the 18th and 19th century.Improvisation is often...
s by Dvořák and Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...
.
During the 19th century this collection program was necessarily restricted to the written notation of melodies, lyrics and arrangements, but it was transformed in the early 20th century by the invention of sound recording and the development of portable cylinder
Phonograph
The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...
and disc recording
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical or mechanical inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording...
equipment, enabling musicologists for the first time to capture this music in actual performance, and the new technology was eagerly adopted by musicologists in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
.
This growing archive of "folkloric" recordings remained largely within the confines of academia until after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. But in America, these collection programs—notably those sponsored by the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
—were to have an immense influence on the development of the international popular music industry.
Folk-music collectors like the great Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
worked assiduously for decades to find and record examples of almost every facet of native American, African-American and European-American folk music, and the work of these many scholars, enthusiasts and collectors preserved the sound of many "folk" performers and thousands of hours of priceless song and music from the American folk music tradition.
This musicological program was again revolutionised in the early 1950s by the new technology of magnetic tape
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...
recording, which for the first time allowed music collectors to make very stable, long-duration, high-fidelity studio and field recordings. The concurrent introduction of the LP
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
audio disc format, which could hold as much as thirty minutes of continuous music per side, allowed many such "folk music" recordings to be released into the consumer market for the first time.
The availability of high-quality portable tape recorders was the key innovation that led to the inception of the two keystone labels in the world music genre. Folkways Records
Folkways Records
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.-History:...
' extensive archive of folk and indigenous music was launched in the 1950s. It was followed in 1967 by Elektra Records
Elektra Records
Elektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
' influential Nonesuch
Nonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
Explorer Series.
These "folk" LPs—notably those of early 20th century blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
music—were to bring about a radical change in the style and direction of late 20th century popular music. This process is exemplified by the huge directional change in rock music
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
that came about when young British and American musicians (like Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...
) heard the recordings of an obscure Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
blues musician called Robert Johnson.
Another fascinating aspect of the changes in the cultural appropriation process can be found on the music of Dvořák
Antonín Dvorák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...
, which itself was greatly influenced by his collection and study of the folk music of his native Bohemia
Bohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
. In the 1892 Dvořák was invited to become the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
; the period he spent in America, and especially his exposure to native American and African-American music, led to the creation of his most famous and popular symphonic work, the Symphony No. 9
Symphony No. 9 (Dvorák)
The Symphony No. 9 in E Minor "From the New World", Op. 95, B. 178 , popularly known as the New World Symphony, was composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893 during his visit to the United States from 1892 to 1895. It is by far his most popular symphony, and one of the most popular in the modern repertoire...
, subtitled "From the New World".
This is arguably another very early example of the so-called crossover music genre, but interestingly, it also had an influence on the development of American popular music. Part of the symphony's enduring appeal is due to the nostalgic main melody in the second movement, which is said to have expressed Dvořák's homesickness for Bohemia. Remarkably, this melody was later appropriated into the formative bluegrass music
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...
genre as the basis for the song "Goin' Home" (attributed to William Arms Fisher
William Arms Fisher
William Arms Fisher was an American composer, music historian and writer.-Personal life:Fisher was born in San Francisco, California on April 27, 1861...
); it soon became a bluegrass standard and was later adapted into a popular spiritual
Spiritual (music)
Spirituals are religious songs which were created by enslaved African people in America.-Terminology and origin:...
-style song.
1900s
Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, the invention of sound recording and motion pictures enabled American mass-entertainment culture to begin to develop into a major global economic and cultural force.Simultaneous with this process, two emerging streams of non-Western music—African-American music and Latin music—were discovered by American and European audiences, and they were rapidly appropriated by the mainstream music industry. Over the next hundred years these two broad genres were to have a massive transformative effect on the structure of popular music and the direction of the music industry.
In the 1890s working-class dancers, composers and musicians in the La Boca
La Boca
La Boca is a neighborhood, or barrio of the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. It retains a strong European flavour, with many of its early settlers being from the Italian city of Genoa. In fact the name has a strong assonance with the Genoese neighborhood of Boccadasse , and some people believe that...
area of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
in Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
invented a daring and sensual new dance style which was dubbed the tango
Tango (dance)
Tango dance originated in the area of the Rio de la Plata , and spread to the rest of the world soon after....
. It took Argentina by storm and after reaching New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
it became an international sensation, aided by a plethora of tango recordings and crystallised by the famously steamy tango scene in Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik...
's legend-making 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
More or less simultaneous with the tango craze, a novel African-American style known as ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
emerged in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, epitomised by the music of virtuoso pianist-composers Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions, and was later dubbed "The King of Ragtime". During his brief career, Joplin wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas...
and Eubie Blake
Eubie Blake
James Hubert Blake was an American composer, lyricist, and pianist of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, Blake and long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, one of the first Broadway musicals to be written and directed by African Americans...
. Ragtime introduced African-derived syncopated
Syncopation
In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...
("ragged") rhythms into Western music and enjoyed a tremendous international vogue over the next twenty years, as well as exerted a huge influence on the subsequent development of jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
.
Ragtime and then early jazz transformed American popular music—the work of songwriters like George Gershwin
George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known...
and Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history.His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous...
was crucially shaped by their appropriation of influences from African-American music—and these genres also strongly influenced many European classical composers, especially the French composers Erik Satie
Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
, Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
and Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
.
In terms of their influence on almost every facet of 20th century popular music, the successive historical genres of African-American music have, as a group, been the most significant of all the "exotic" genres appropriated into Western music. Just as they influenced each other, gospel music
Gospel music
Gospel music is music that is written to express either personal, spiritual or a communal belief regarding Christian life, as well as to give a Christian alternative to mainstream secular music....
, ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
, blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, R&B and rock'n'roll were also successively appropriated into mainstream Western popular music—usually almost as soon as each became known as a definable genre. It is undeniable that the various genres of African-American music have, collectively, exerted a greater influence over the development and direction of Western mass-market popular recorded music than any other force.
Alongside the emergence of jazz, beginning around 1915, Hawaiian music
Music of Hawaii
The music of Hawaii includes an array of traditional and popular styles, ranging from native Hawaiian folk music to modern rock and hip hop. Hawaii's musical contributions to the music of the United States are out of proportion to the state's small size. Styles like slack-key guitar are well-known...
reached the mainstream pop market in the United States. The Hawaiian style (or, more often, Western imitations of it) became a major music fad, retaining a significant audience following from the 1930s to the 1950s. Hawaiian music was itself a complex mixture of European, native Hawaiian and other Polynesia
Polynesia
Polynesia is a subregion of Oceania, made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are termed Polynesians and they share many similar traits including language, culture and beliefs...
n influences. This is well demonstrated by the work of one of the founders of the genre, Queen Lili'uokalani (1838–1917), the last Queen of Hawaii before the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown. A musician and composer, she is credited as the composer of the unofficial Hawaiian anthem "Aloha 'Oe". Lili'uokalani indeed wrote the lyrics and arranged the music but in fact she appropriated the tune from a Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n folk song called "Sidi Mara na kamen studencu".
Beginning in the late 1920s, a series of concerts under the aegis of the Pan-American Association of Composers, founded by Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
, brought the African-influenced music of Cuban composers Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán
Amadeo Roldán
Amadeo Roldán y Gardes was a Cuban composer and violinist. Roldán was born in Paris to a Cuban mulatta and a Spanish father...
and the work of Carlos Chávez
Carlos Chávez
Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was a Mexican composer, conductor, music theorist, educator, journalist, and founder and director of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra. He was influenced by native Mexican cultures. Of his six Symphonies, his Symphony No...
, much of it rooted in Mexican folk music
Music of Mexico
The music of Mexico is very diverse and features a wide range of different musical styles. It has been influenced by a variety of cultures, most notably indigenous Mexican and European, since the Late Middle Ages...
, to the United States.
In the 1930s, the "Latin invasion" that had begun with the tango took off again when American jazz, dance music, and popular song were revolutionized by the "discovery" of other music forms of the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
, Central
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
and South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, a process that was triggered by a significant influx of migrants to the United States from Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
and other Caribbean islands in the 1940s.
The blending of Latin rhythms and instrumental jazz was pioneered by established American musicians like Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...
and Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpet player, bandleader, singer, and composer dubbed "the sound of surprise".Together with Charlie Parker, he was a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz...
and by recently-arrived 'Latin' musicians like Machito
Machito
Machito , born as Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo, was an influential Latin jazz musician who helped refine Afro-Cuban jazz and create both Cubop and salsa music...
and others, some of whom soon became stars in their own right. Latin beats rapidly became an essential part of the rhythmical vocabulary of American popular music, providing composers and musicians with a vastly enhanced repertoire of beats and meters. During the 1930s and 1940s, newly appropriated Latin music genres created a series of music movements and dance crazes, including the merengue, the samba
Samba
Samba is a Brazilian dance and musical genre originating in Bahia and with its roots in Brazil and Africa via the West African slave trade and African religious traditions. It is recognized around the world as a symbol of Brazil and the Brazilian Carnival...
, and the rumba
Cuban Rumba
In Cuban music, Rumba is a generic term covering a variety of musical rhythms and associated dances. The rumba has its influences in the music brought to Cuba by Africans brought to Cuba as slaves as well as Spanish colonizers...
.
In 1944 The Andrews Sisters
The Andrews Sisters
The Andrews Sisters were a highly successful close harmony singing group of the swing and boogie-woogie eras. The group consisted of three sisters: contralto LaVerne Sophia Andrews , soprano Maxene Angelyn Andrews , and mezzo-soprano Patricia Marie "Patty" Andrews...
appropriated the song "Rum and Coca-Cola
Rum and Coca-Cola
“Rum and Coca-Cola” is the title of a popular calypso. Originally composed by Lord Invader and Lionel Belasco, it was copyrighted in the United States by entertainer Morey Amsterdam and became a huge hit in 1945 for the Andrews Sisters, spending ten weeks at the top of Billboard's U.S...
", which had originally been recorded by Trinidad
Trinidad
Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...
ian musician Lord Invader
Lord Invader
Lord Invader was a prominent calypsonian with a very distinctive, gravelly voice....
in the 1930s. The Andrews Sisters' version sparked a new fad for this infectious new style, calypso
Calypso music
Calypso is a style of Afro-Caribbean music that originated in Trinidad and Tobago from African and European roots. The roots of the genre lay in the arrival of enslaved Africans, who, not being allowed to speak with each other, communicated through song...
. The craze reached its apex of popularity in the mid-1950s with the release of the hugely successful Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte
Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s...
single "Banana Boat Song
Banana Boat Song
"Day-O " is a traditional Jamaican mento folk song, the best-known version of which was sung by Harry Belafonte. Although it is really Jamaican mento, the song is widely known as an example of calypso music. It is a song from the point of view of dock workers working the night shift loading bananas...
" and Belafonte's million-selling 1956 LP
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
Calypso
Calypso (album)
Calypso is the 3rd album by Harry Belafonte, released by RCA Victor in 1956. The CD was released on April 28, 1992 . It is the first full-length gramophone LP to sell over one million copies...
. Calypso also had a strong influence on the mainstream folk music boom of the late fifties and early sixties, which in turn became one of the major springboards for the development of world music as a commercial genre.
In the late 1950s, repeating the impact of the tango, a seductive new music style called bossa nova
Bossa nova
Bossa nova is a style of Brazilian music. Bossa nova acquired a large following in the 1960s, initially consisting of young musicians and college students...
emerged from Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
and it soon swept the world, exerting a huge effect over the course of Western pop and jazz over the next decade and beyond. Nothing better illustrates the lasting impact of this hugely popular genre than the archetypical bossa song, "The Girl From Ipanema
The Girl from Ipanema
"Garota de Ipanema" is a well-known bossa nova song, a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s that won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.The...
", written in 1962 and best known via the languid bilingual crossover version recorded by Stan Getz
Stan Getz
Stanley Getz was an American jazz saxophone player. Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone, his prime influence being the wispy, mellow timbre of his idol, Lester Young. Coming to prominence in the late 1940s with Woody Herman's big band, Getz is described by critic Scott...
, João Gilberto
João Gilberto
João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, known as João Gilberto , is a Brazilian singer and guitarist. His seminal recordings, including many songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, established the new musical genre of Bossa nova in the late 1950s.-Biography:From an early age, music...
and Astrud Gilberto
Astrud Gilberto
Astrud Gilberto is a Brazilian samba and bossa nova singer. She is well known for the Grammy Award-winning song "The Girl from Ipanema".-Biography:...
in 1963. Thanks largely to the enormous worldwide popularity of this single, "The Girl From Ipanema" now ranks as the second most-recorded song of all time, surpassed only by Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings , McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100...
's "Yesterday".
Bossa nova was also an important influence on two innovative streams of popular music in the early 1960s. One was the short-lived but very popular British-originated music craze known as Merseybeat
Beat music
Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat is a pop and rock music genre that developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll, doo wop, skiffle, R&B and soul...
, the pop style epitomised by the early songs of The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, which combined popular song structures and rock'n'roll instrumentation with rhythmic inflections taken from bossa nova.
New York was one of the epicentres of the Latin-jazz crossover, so it is not surprising that the other major pop style to show a strong influence from bossa nova was the so-called "Brill Building
Brill Building
The Brill Building is an office building located at 1619 Broadway on 49th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, just north of Times Square and further uptown from the historic musical Tin Pan Alley neighborhood...
Sound", exemplified by the work of the New York-based songwriter teams like Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Gerry Goffin
Gerry Goffin
Gerry Goffin is an American lyricist. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 with former songwriting partner and first wife, Carole King. he has co-written six Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers.-Career:Goffin enlisted with the Marine Corps Reserve after graduating from...
& Carole King
Carole King
Carole King is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s, many of which have become standards. As a singer, King had an album, Tapestry, top the U.S...
, Neil Sedaka
Neil Sedaka
Neil Sedaka is an American pop/rock singer, pianist, and composer. His career has spanned nearly 55 years, during which time he has sold millions of records as an artist and has written or co-written over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard...
& Howard Greenfield
Howard Greenfield
Howard Greenfield was an American lyricist and songwriter, who for several years in the 1960s worked out of the famous Brill Building...
, Jeff Barry
Jeff Barry
Jeff Barry is an American pop music songwriter, singer, and record producer.-Early career:...
& Ellie Greenwich
Ellie Greenwich
Eleanor Louise "Ellie" Greenwich was an American pop music singer, songwriter, and record producer. She wrote or co-wrote "Be My Baby", "Christmas ", "Da Doo Ron Ron", "Leader of the Pack", "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", and "River Deep, Mountain High", among many others...
and especially Burt Bacharach
Burt Bacharach
Burt F. Bacharach is an American pianist, composer and music producer. He is known for his popular hit songs and compositions from the mid-1950s through the 1980s, with lyrics written by Hal David. Many of their hits were produced specifically for, and performed by, Dionne Warwick...
and Hal David
Hal David
Harold Lane "Hal" David is an American lyricist. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. David is best known for his collaborations with composer Burt Bacharach.-Career:...
.
Influences from African music also began to appear in the 1950s. This process included one of the more controversial examples of cultural appropriation process, exemplified by the pop song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight", also known as "Wimoweh" and originally as "Mbube", is a song recorded by Solomon Linda and his group The Evening Birds for the South African Gallo Record Company in 1939. It was covered internationally by many 1950s pop and folk revival artists, including The Weavers,...
". A version of this song was an American #1 hit for pop band The Tokens
The Tokens
The Tokens are an American male doo-wop-style vocal group from Brooklyn, New York. They are known best for their chart-scoring 1961 single, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" .-Career:...
in 1961, and it was credited to American writers, but in fact "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was actually an unacknowledged rewrite of the song "Mbube", written and recorded by South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
n musician and composer, Solomon Linda
Solomon Linda
Solomon Popoli Linda , also known as Solomon Ntsele , was a South African Zulu musician, singer and composer who wrote the song "Mbube" which later became the popular music success "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and gave its name to the Mbube style of isicathamiya a cappella popularized later by...
, in 1939.
"Mbube" had been a major local hit for Linda and his band, The Evening Birds, reputedly selling 100,000 copies there, but its success at the time was entirely confined to South Africa. Some years later, a copy of Linda's recording reached the American musicologist Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
; he passed it on to his friend Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...
, who fell in love with it, and it was Seeger who was mainly responsible for popularising the song in the West.
Seeger recorded a version of the song with his noted folk group The Weavers
The Weavers
The Weavers were an American folk music quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. They sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, gospel music, children's songs, labor songs, and American ballads, and selling millions of records at the height of their...
in 1952, retitling it "Wimoweh" (an inaccurate transliteration of the song's original Zulu
Zulu language
Zulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
refrain, "uyimbube"). The Weavers scored a US Top 20 hit with their studio version, and had further success with a live version of the song included on their influential 1957 live album, recorded at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
, which led to it being covered by The Kingston Trio
The Kingston Trio
The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to late 1960s. The group started as a San Francisco Bay Area nightclub act with an original lineup of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds...
in 1959.
The Weavers' Carnegie Hall version of "Wimoweh" became a favourite song of The Tokens
The Tokens
The Tokens are an American male doo-wop-style vocal group from Brooklyn, New York. They are known best for their chart-scoring 1961 single, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" .-Career:...
—they used it as their audition piece when they were offered a contract with RCA Records
RCA Records
RCA Records is one of the flagship labels of Sony Music Entertainment. The RCA initials stand for Radio Corporation of America , which was the parent corporation from 1929 to 1985 and a partner from 1985 to 1986.RCA's Canadian unit is Sony's oldest label...
—and this led to them recording it as their first RCA single. However, it was at this point that the lyrics were re-written by the band's producers—who took full credit for the song—and it would be several decades more before the full story of the appropriation of Solomon Linda's work became widely known. Sadly, by then Linda had long since died in poverty.
1950–1970
After World War II a small but growing market developed for Western folk music and recordings of non-Western music, and this was supplied by specialist record labels such as Folkways RecordsFolkways Records
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.-History:...
, Elektra Records
Elektra Records
Elektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
and Nonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
in the USA
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and, European labels such as Disques Cellier in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
and the state-run recording labels operated by eastern European governments, such as Melodiya
Melodiya
Melodiya is a Russian record label. It was the state-owned major record company/label of the Soviet Union.-History:It was established in 1964 as the "All-Union Gramophone Record Firm of the USSR Ministry of Culture Melodiya"...
(USSR). In the West these labels were often small "boutique" operations or minor specialist imprints of larger companies, releasing albums of non-Western traditional classical music, folk songs and indigenous "ethnic" music.
This market expanded enormously during the 1950s thanks to the so-called "folk boom" of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which artists and groups like Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...
, The New Lost City Ramblers and The Weavers
The Weavers
The Weavers were an American folk music quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. They sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, gospel music, children's songs, labor songs, and American ballads, and selling millions of records at the height of their...
explored the traditional songs and sounds of American folk music and reinterpreted them for a mass audience. In America, this process was massively influenced by the 'discovery' of the treasure-trove of recordings of European, English, American and African-American music folk musics that had been made over preceding decades. One of the key audio artifacts of this process was the Anthology of American Folk Music
Anthology of American Folk Music
The Anthology of American Folk Music is a six-album compilation released in 1952 by Folkways Records , comprising eighty-four American folk, blues and country music recordings that were originally issued from 1927 to 1932.Experimental filmmaker and notable eccentric Harry Smith compiled the music...
, the landmark six-album set compiled by the musicologist Harry Smith
Harry Everett Smith
Harry Everett Smith was an American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and mystic...
from his own collection of 78s and cylinder recordings, originally released in 1952.
This exploratory process also led musicians to begin investigating music from non-Western cultures — as in the case of Solomon Linda
Solomon Linda
Solomon Popoli Linda , also known as Solomon Ntsele , was a South African Zulu musician, singer and composer who wrote the song "Mbube" which later became the popular music success "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and gave its name to the Mbube style of isicathamiya a cappella popularized later by...
's "Mbube". In each case, these processes of discovery and appropriation were made considerably easier by the increasing availability of LP recordings of "ethnic" music from non-Western countries.
This process had a definite cumulative effect, but it is fair to say that, until the late 1960s, "ethnic"/"folkloric" music remained more or less a specialist interest. Some "exotic" influences inevitably filtered through to the mass market
Mass market
The mass market is a general business term describing the largest group of consumers for a specified industry product. It is the opposite extreme of the term niche market.-General:...
—as in the case of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight", also known as "Wimoweh" and originally as "Mbube", is a song recorded by Solomon Linda and his group The Evening Birds for the South African Gallo Record Company in 1939. It was covered internationally by many 1950s pop and folk revival artists, including The Weavers,...
" — but in general these were mostly Western reinterpretations, and very little original music produced outside of the mainstream Western popular music recording industry managed to break into the mainstream pop music market or achieve significant sales until the late 1960s.
Similarly, prior to the 60s, numerous classical musicians and composers wrote and/or performed music that showed the influence of novel non-Western styles (e.g. the influence of gamelan
Gamelan
A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....
music on French composer Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
) or attempted to explicitly combine traditional Western musical styles with influences from non-Western traditions, although this too remained largely an elite 'art' activity, and it gained relatively little mass recognition when compared to major popular genres like swing music, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
or rock'n'roll.
Mass-market acceptance of what is now termed "world music" grew dramatically as a result of the pop music
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
explosion of the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, the more adventurous pop, rock, progressive and jazz musicians and producers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to create a 'fusion' style that combined conventional English-language popular music forms and structures with instrumental and compositional influences from exotic musical genres. The interest in these "ethnic" musics by groups like The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band, formed in London in April 1962 by Brian Jones , Ian Stewart , Mick Jagger , and Keith Richards . Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts completed the early line-up...
, combined with their worldwide popularity, encouraged other performers and a growing number of record buyers to seek out recordings of non-Western music.
A prototype for this fusion
Fusion (music)
A fusion genre is music that combines two or more styles. For example, rock and roll originally developed as a fusion of blues, gospel and country music. The main characteristics of fusion genres are variations in tempo, rhythm, i a sometimes the use of long musical "journeys" that can be divided...
of pop and world music in the late 60's can be seen in the folk rock
Folk rock
Folk rock is a musical genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term referred to a genre that arose in the United States and the UK around the mid-1960s...
phenomenon of the mid-1960s. Underlying this development was the fact that many leading American and English pop-rock musicians of the period—Roger McGuinn
Roger McGuinn
James Roger McGuinn is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He is best known for being the lead singer and lead guitarist on many of The Byrds' records...
, Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia was an American musician best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead...
, Donovan
Donovan
Donovan Donovan Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch (born 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. Emerging from the British folk scene, he developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music...
—started their musical careers on the folk scene.
Interestingly, although the core of the "folk" genre at this time was traditional Anglo-American folk song, mainstream folk music was still appropriating new "non-Anglo" influences like calypso
Calypso music
Calypso is a style of Afro-Caribbean music that originated in Trinidad and Tobago from African and European roots. The roots of the genre lay in the arrival of enslaved Africans, who, not being allowed to speak with each other, communicated through song...
, black South African popular music and even the Middle East (e.g. the pioneering music of noted UK guitarist Davey Graham
Davey Graham
David Michael Gordon "Davey" Graham, originally spelled Davy Graham, , was a British guitarist and one of the most influential figures in the 1960s British folk revival...
). Another notable feature is that many performers and fans came to acknowledge African-American music—especially blues and gospel—as a vital element of folk, ultimately contributing to the breakdown of entrenched industry prejudices that had for decades divided the record market into separate 'pop' (white) and 'race' (black) markets, and this connection led to the folk music movement playing an important part in the accelerating civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
movement of the 1950s and '60s. On stage, many African American 'folk' performers like Leadbelly
Leadbelly
Huddie William Ledbetter was an iconic American folk and blues musician, notable for his strong vocals, his virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the songbook of folk standards he introduced....
and Odetta
Odetta
Odetta Holmes, known as Odetta, was an American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, often referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement". Her musical repertoire consisted largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals...
were able for the first time to perform side-by-side and as equal attractions with white performers like Dylan and Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...
, as evidenced by the multiracial lineups at American folk scene's peak annual peak event, the Newport Folk Festival
Newport Folk Festival
The Newport Folk Festival is an American annual folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the previously established Newport Jazz Festival...
.
Folk rock
Folk rock
Folk rock is a musical genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term referred to a genre that arose in the United States and the UK around the mid-1960s...
can be seen an attempt to broaden the language of mainstream pop by incorporating the more "serious" lyrical approach and political awareness of postwar acoustic folk with the mass-market appeal of pop-rock instrumentation and production. Folk rock emerged as a genre in 1964-65, sparked by the release of two landmark pop singles. In late 1964 The Byrds
The Byrds
The Byrds were an American rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1964. The band underwent multiple line-up changes throughout its existence, with frontman Roger McGuinn remaining the sole consistent member until the group disbanded in 1973...
recorded an electrified cover version of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
's "Mr Tambourine Man", in which The Byrds combined the pop-rock instrumentation and close harmonies made popular by The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are an American rock band, formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California. The group was initially composed of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, The Beach Boys signed to Capitol Records in 1962...
with the earnest lyrical approach of the Anglo-American folk genre. The huge commercial success of The Byrds' version of "Mr Tambourine Man" spawned scores of imitations, and folk rock continued to expand and diversify over the next few years.
Another major folk-rock landmark was the Simon & Garfunkel single "The Sounds of Silence". The song was originally recorded as a simple acoustic ballad and included on the duo's 1964 debut album, but the LP flopped and the duo split soon after, and Simon left for the UK. The following year, inspired by the success of "Mr Tambourine Man" (and immediately after producing the historic Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
single "Like a Rolling Stone
Like a Rolling Stone
"Like a Rolling Stone" is a 1965 song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Its confrontational lyrics originate in an extended piece of verse Dylan wrote in June 1965, when he returned exhausted from a grueling tour of England...
", Columbia Records house producer Tom Wilson took the original track and (without even consulting Simon and Garfunkel) overdubbed an electric rhythm section, creating a new version. This was released as a single (as "The Sound of Silence") in late 1965 and by early 1966 it had become a major pop hit, relaunching the duo's career.
Inspired by these developments, UK acts such as Donovan
Donovan
Donovan Donovan Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch (born 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. Emerging from the British folk scene, he developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music...
, Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock and later electric folk band, formed in 1967 who are still recording and touring today. They are widely regarded as the most important single group in the English folk rock movement...
and Steeleye Span
Steeleye Span
Steeleye Span are an English folk-rock band, formed in 1969 and remaining active today. Along with Fairport Convention they are amongst the best known acts of the British folk revival, and were among the most commercially successful, thanks to their hit singles "Gaudete" and "All Around My Hat"....
took a similar approach, combining pop-rock arrangements with songs, stylings and instruments drawn from traditional English and Celtic folk music, creating a hybrid style that applied the Byrds' folk-rock approach to the vast repertoire of English folk songs; like so many other English acts, all these performers were also heavily influenced by Dylan. Alan Stivell
Alan Stivell
Alan Stivell is a Breton musician and singer, recording artist and master of the celtic harp who from the early 1970s revived global interest in the Celtic harp and Celtic music as part of world music.- Background: learning Breton music and culture :Alan was born in the Auvergnat town of Riom...
(Brittany) began working in a similar vein in the mid 1960s.
Solo guitarist Davey Graham
Davey Graham
David Michael Gordon "Davey" Graham, originally spelled Davy Graham, , was a British guitarist and one of the most influential figures in the 1960s British folk revival...
was a notable figure on the British folk scene whose innovative work exerted a strong influence on other musicians. Graham's complex finder-picking style (epitomised by his landmark composition "Anji"), his reputed introduction of the "Open D" tuning to British folk guitarists and his groundbreaking incorporations of Arabic and Indian inflections into his playing influenced many of his contemporaries, including Bert Jansch
Bert Jansch
Herbert "Bert" Jansch was a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s, as an acoustic guitarist, as well as a singer-songwriter...
, Jimmy Page
Jimmy Page
James Patrick "Jimmy" Page, OBE is an English multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin.Jimmy Page...
, Donovan
Donovan
Donovan Donovan Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch (born 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. Emerging from the British folk scene, he developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music...
and Ray Davies
Ray Davies
Ray Davies, CBE is an English rock musician. He is best known as lead singer and songwriter for the Kinks, which he led with his younger brother, Dave...
, all of whom have acknowledged him as an important influence.
Graham's mercurial American counterpart John Fahey
John Fahey (musician)
John Fahey was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitivism, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the...
also made many remarkably innovative solo guitar recordings during this period, incorporating influences from traditional American folk, blues, Hawaiian music, Arabic and Indian music as well as exploring unusual production effects.
In America (and also in Australasia
Australasia
Australasia is a region of Oceania comprising Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term was coined by Charles de Brosses in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes...
and Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
) in the late Sixties, pop-rock acts including The Grateful Dead, The Byrds
The Byrds
The Byrds were an American rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1964. The band underwent multiple line-up changes throughout its existence, with frontman Roger McGuinn remaining the sole consistent member until the group disbanded in 1973...
and The Flying Burrito Brothers
The Flying Burrito Brothers
The Flying Burrito Brothers was an early country rock band, best known for its influential debut album,The Gilded Palace of Sin . Although the group is most often mentioned in connection with country rock legends Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, the group underwent many personnel changes.-Original...
then moved their music in a different direction. Drawing on their folk roots, and inspired by the hugely influential late '60's albums by Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
and The Band
The Band
The Band was an acclaimed and influential roots rock group. The original group consisted of Rick Danko , Garth Hudson , Richard Manuel , and Robbie Robertson , and Levon Helm...
, these bands began creating a new hybrid style that fused pop and rock with American country music
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...
and bluegrass music
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...
, creating the genre now termed country rock
Country rock
Country rock is sub-genre of popular music, formed from the fusion of rock with country. The term is generally used to refer to the wave of rock musicians who began to record country-flavored records in the late 1960s and early 1970s, beginning with Bob Dylan and The Byrds; reaching its greatest...
.
This ongoing process of exploration and experimentation by popular musicians, and the availability of recorded collections of "authentic" performances of English and American folk music, began to lead more and more curious listeners to explore these genres. This in turn would pave the way for the development of the "world music" concept in later years.
Mid-1960s
Western pop musicians first began to explore the music of other cultures in the mid-sixties, when they began to mix Western electric pop with influences taken from the traditional music of India. Although the resulting artefacts of "raga rockRaga rock
Raga rock is a term used to describe rock or pop music with a heavy Indian influence, either in its construction, its timbre, or its use of instrumentation, such as the sitar and tabla...
" were sometimes risible, it proved to be the most influential fusion of pop and "folk" music of the entire period, specifically because it was the first widely accepted attempt to mix Western popular music with a completely non-Western musical tradition.
Although they were by no means the only people at that time who were following this course, much of the credit for the creation of the world music genre, and for the rapid expansion of Western mass-audience interest in non-Western music, must be accorded to The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, and especially to their lead guitarist, George Harrison
George Harrison
George Harrison, MBE was an English musician, guitarist, singer-songwriter, actor and film producer who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian mysticism, and introduced it to the other...
.
Interest in Indian music increased rapidly in the mid-1960s. By 1965 a number of British and American pop musicians were discovering Indian music and instruments; in early 1965, during a tour of America, David Crosby
David Crosby
David Van Cortlandt Crosby is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. In addition to his solo career, he was a founding member of three bands: The Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash , and CPR...
of The Byrds
The Byrds
The Byrds were an American rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1964. The band underwent multiple line-up changes throughout its existence, with frontman Roger McGuinn remaining the sole consistent member until the group disbanded in 1973...
introduced Harrison to the sitar and the traditional classical music of India. Harrison was captivated by the sound of the instrument; he soon developed a profound interested in Indian music, culture and spirituality, and sparked a trend by taking sitar lessons from Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, whom Harrison continued to regard as the "best musician on the planet" long after the 1960s and who, coincidentally, had also recorded for The Beatles' label, EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
.
Harrison's background in popular British and American music forms had given him a grounding in the techniques of jazz-blues improvisation
Improvisation
Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...
that are central to the genre. Like jazz and blues, the largely improvised nature of Hindustani classical music, its strong reliance on rhythm and percussion, and the extended nature of the raga
Raga
A raga is one of the melodic modes used in Indian classical music.It is a series of five or more musical notes upon which a melody is made...
form were all features that Harrison was able to recognise, appreciate and begin to explore in the context of pop's ongoing quest for "the new sound".
In October 1965 Harrison made pop history when he played a sitar
Sitar
The 'Tablaman' is a plucked stringed instrument predominantly used in Hindustani classical music, where it has been ubiquitous since the Middle Ages...
on the Beatles' recording of the John Lennon song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
"Norwegian Wood " is a song by The Beatles, first released on the 1965 album Rubber Soul....
", included their 1965 LP Rubber Soul
Rubber Soul
Rubber Soul is the sixth studio album by the English rock group The Beatles, released in December 1965. Produced by George Martin, Rubber Soul had been recorded in just over four weeks to make the Christmas market...
. Other musicians were attempting similar fusions at the time—Brian Wilson, for example, used a koto
Koto (musical instrument)
The koto is a traditional Japanese stringed musical instrument, similar to the Chinese guzheng, the Mongolian yatga, the Korean gayageum and the Vietnamese đàn tranh. The koto is the national instrument of Japan. Koto are about length, and made from kiri wood...
on one of the songs on The Beach Boys' classic Pet Sounds
Pet Sounds
Pet Sounds is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band The Beach Boys, released May 16, 1966, on Capitol Records. It has since been recognized as one of the most influential records in the history of popular music and one of the best albums of the 1960s, including songs such as "Wouldn't...
LP, recorded , and Donovan was recording and performing with pioneering American sitarist Shawn Phillips
Shawn Phillips
Shawn Phillips is a folk-rock musician, primarily influential in the 1960s and 1970s.Phillips has recorded twenty albums and worked with musicians including Donovan, Paul Buckmaster, J. Peter Robinson, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bernie Taupin, and many others...
—but arguably no other single recording had the instant and worldwide impact of "Norwegian Wood
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
"Norwegian Wood " is a song by The Beatles, first released on the 1965 album Rubber Soul....
".
It was the first time a Western pop song had used a sitar in its arrangement, and for many Western listeners it was undoubtedly the first time they ever heard the instrument. In the wake of the song's release, the sitar became the new "in" sound for pop recordings, and an American guitar company even manufactured an electric sitar
Electric sitar
An electric sitar is a kind of electric guitar designed to mimic the sound of the traditional Indian instrument, the sitar. Depending on the manufacturer and model, these instruments bear varying degrees of resemblance to the traditional sitar...
-guitar designed to simulate the sound of the sitar.
More importantly, "Norwegian Wood" sparked a major craze for the classical music of India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
in general and for the work of Ravi Shankar in particular, with the direct result that recordings by Shankar and other Indian classical musicians began to sell in large quantities outside India for the first time and Shankar himself quickly became one of the world's most sought-after concert performers. The availability of tape recording and the LP were also crucial to the popularization of this particular genre of music—since a typical raga
Raga
A raga is one of the melodic modes used in Indian classical music.It is a series of five or more musical notes upon which a melody is made...
performance could last twenty minutes or more, popular appreciation of this music would have been impossible without the longer duration and high fidelity provided by the LP format.
In 1966 Harrison took his "Indi-psych-pop" synthesis a step further with the highly original song "Love You To
Love You To
"Love You To" is a song by The Beatles from the album Revolver. It is sung and written by George Harrison and features North Indian classical instrumentation; tabla, a pair of hand-drums, sitar and a tambura providing a drone...
" (from the seminal Revolver
Revolver (album)
Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock group The Beatles, released on 5 August 1966 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin. Many of the tracks on Revolver are marked by an electric guitar-rock sound, in contrast with their previous LP, the folk rock inspired Rubber...
LP), which featured a sinuous Indian-influenced melody and an innovative arrangement consisting solely of Indian instruments, performed by expatriate Indian musicians living in London. The peak of Harrison's Indian synthesis project was the epic track "Within You Without You
Within You Without You
"Within You Without You" is a song written by George Harrison, released on The Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.-Composition:...
" (1967) from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band The Beatles, released on 1 June 1967 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin...
, recorded at Studio Two, Abbey Road by Harrison and an ensemble of musicians from the Asian Music Circle in London.
Another obvious trace of Harrison's immersion in Indian music was the fact that "Within You Without You
Within You Without You
"Within You Without You" is a song written by George Harrison, released on The Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.-Composition:...
" also broke new ground on the pop scene by clocking in at over five minutes. Harrison also recorded in India with Indian instruments and musicians when producing the soundtrack music for the 1968 film Wonderwall
Wonderwall (film)
Wonderwall is the title of a 1968 film by first-time director Joe Massot that starred Jack MacGowran, Jane Birkin, Richard Wattis, Irene Handl, and Iain Quarrier, and featured cameos by Anita Pallenberg and Dutch designers The Fool...
; he was given a free rein by the film's director and the music he created was explicitly intended as a sort of "primer" of the styles of Indian instrumental music that he was exploring, but the film did not have a wide release at the time and Harrison's soundtrack remains little known outside the realm of Beatles aficionados.
Although by no means as influential as "Norwegian Wood", the 1965 song "See My Friends
See My Friends
"See My Friends" is a song by The Kinks, written by the group's singer and guitarist, Ray Davies. Released in 1965, it reached #10 on the UK Singles Chart...
" by The Kinks
The Kinks
The Kinks were an English rock band formed in Muswell Hill, North London, by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1964. Categorised in the United States as a British Invasion band, The Kinks are recognised as one of the most important and influential rock acts of the era. Their music was influenced by a...
is another significant Western pop song of the period that shows the unmistakable influence of Indian music. In this case, according to writer Ray Davies
Ray Davies
Ray Davies, CBE is an English rock musician. He is best known as lead singer and songwriter for the Kinks, which he led with his younger brother, Dave...
, the song's arrangement was inspired by a stopover in India during the band's first trip to Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
in 1965, when during an early-morning walk, he heard local fisherman singing a traditional chant, part of which he incorporated into the song's sinuous melody line; Davies' exposure to Hindustani raga music is also evident in the sitar-like quality of the guitar accompaniment. Another early use of the sitar in pop was on The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band, formed in London in April 1962 by Brian Jones , Ian Stewart , Mick Jagger , and Keith Richards . Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts completed the early line-up...
' hit single "Paint It, Black
Paint It, Black
"Paint It, Black" is a song released by The Rolling Stones on 13 May 1966 as the first single from their fourth album Aftermath. It was originally titled "Paint It Black" without a comma. Keith Richards has stated that the comma was added by the record label, Decca.The song was written by Mick...
", released in May 1966.
1967 proved to be a pivotal year for the development of the world music genre. In June the three-day Monterey International Pop Festival, the world's first rock festival
Rock festival
A rock festival, or a rock fest, is a large-scale rock music concert, featuring multiple acts.The first rock festivals were put on in the late 1960s and were important socio-cultural milestones. In the 1980s a minor resurgence of festivals occurred with charity as the goal.Today, they are often...
, was held in California, and it was attended by approximately 200,000 people. Alongside English and American pop and rock acts, the bill also featured black South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela
Hugh Masekela
Hugh Ramopolo Masekela is a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer.-Early life:Masekela was born in Kwa-Guqa Township, Witbank, South Africa. He began singing and playing piano as a child...
as well as a performance by Ravi Shankar, who opened the climactic Sunday concert (and whose presence at the festival was almost entirely due to the influence of George Harrison). Shankar's performance at Monterey was without question the most important concert of his entire career in the West—it was seen by tens of thousands of people that day, and thanks to the fact that the entire festival was recorded and filmed, millions more around the world heard it on record and/or saw it on film in the years that followed.
The other major landmark that year was the launch of the hugely influential Nonesuch
Nonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed by Warner Bros. Records.-Company history:Nonesuch was founded in 1964 by Jac Holzman to produce "fine records at the same price as a trade paperback", which would be half the price of a normal LP...
Explorer Series by the American Elektra Records
Elektra Records
Elektra Records is an American record label owned by Warner Music Group. In 2004, it was consolidated into WMG's Atlantic Records Group. After five years of dormancy, the label was revived by Atlantic in 2009....
label. This first Explorer LP, a collection of Bali
Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...
nese folk music entitled Music from the Morning of the World, launched a growing catalogue of high-fidelity field recordings of the music of other cultures. The Nonesuch Explorer series is now recognised as one of the most important commercial collections of world music and several excerpts from Nonesuch recordings were included on the Voyager Golden Record
Voyager Golden Record
The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for...
that was sent into deep space aboard the Voyager 1
Voyager 1
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram space probe launched by NASA in 1977, to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space. Operating for as of today , the spacecraft receives routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network. At a distance of as of...
and Voyager 2
Voyager 2
The Voyager 2 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram space probe launched by NASA on August 20, 1977 to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space...
space probes in 1977.
Jamaican music
Another very significant world/pop crossover style that emerged in the 1960s was JamaicaJamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
n ska
Ska
Ska |Jamaican]] ) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s, and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. Ska combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues...
(sometimes called bluebeat, rocksteady
Rocksteady
Rocksteady is a music genre that originated in Jamaica around 1966. A successor to ska and a precursor to reggae, rocksteady was performed by Jamaican vocal harmony groups such as The Gaylads, The Maytals and The Paragons. The term rocksteady comes from a dance style that was mentioned in the Alton...
and reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
). Little Millie Small
Millie (singer)
Millie is a Jamaican singer-songwriter, often known as "Little Millie Small", and in the United States as "Millie Small", and is best known as the singer of the 1964 hit, "My Boy Lollipop".-Career:...
scored what is probably the first bluebeat hit, "My Boy Lollipop
My Boy Lollipop
"My Boy Lollipop" is a song written in the mid-1950s by Robert Spencer of the doo-wop group The Cadillacs, and usually credited to Spencer, Morris Levy, and Johnny Roberts. It was first recorded in New York in 1956 by Barbie Gaye...
" in 1964, and these styles gained a considerable following in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, especially in the mod and skinhead
Skinhead
A skinhead is a member of a subculture that originated among working class youths in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and then spread to other parts of the world. Named for their close-cropped or shaven heads, the first skinheads were greatly influenced by West Indian rude boys and British mods,...
subculture
Subculture
In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...
s, thanks to artists such as Prince Buster
Prince Buster
Cecil Bustamente Campbell, O.D. , better known as Prince Buster, and also known by his Muslim name Muhammed Yusef Ali, is a musician from Kingston, Jamaica. He is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of ska and rocksteady music...
, Desmond Dekker
Desmond Dekker
Desmond Dekker was a Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae singer-songwriter and musician. Together with his backing group, The Aces , he had one of the first international Jamaican hits with "Israelites". Other hits include "007 " and "It Miek"...
and Laurel Aitken
Laurel Aitken
Lorenzo Aitken , better known as Laurel Aitken, was a singer and one of the originators of Jamaican ska music. He is often referred to as the "Godfather of ska".-Career:...
. In 1968, The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
enjoyed a major crossover success with Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings , McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100...
's ska-influenced "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is a song credited to Lennon–McCartney, but written by Paul McCartney and released by The Beatles on their 1968 album The Beatles...
", while Desmond Dekker
Desmond Dekker
Desmond Dekker was a Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae singer-songwriter and musician. Together with his backing group, The Aces , he had one of the first international Jamaican hits with "Israelites". Other hits include "007 " and "It Miek"...
became the first Jamaican musician to score a #1 hit in the UK with the 1968 reggae song "Israelites
Israelites (song)
"Israelites" is a song written by Desmond Dekker and Leslie Kong that became a hit for Dekker's group, Desmond Dekker & The Aces. Although few could understand all the lyrics, the single was the first UK reggae number one and the first to reach the US top ten...
". In 1972, Johnny Nash
Johnny Nash
John Lester "Johnny" Nash, Jr. is an American pop singer-songwriter, best known in the US for his 1972 hit, "I Can See Clearly Now". He was also the first non-Jamaican to record reggae music in Kingston, Jamaica.-Life and career:...
scored a major international hit with the reggae-styled "I Can See Clearly Now
I Can See Clearly Now
-Certifications:-Charts:-Other covers:The song also appears in various other films, such as Grosse Pointe Blank, The Break-up, Thelma & Louise, Antz, Deep Blue Sea, Envy, Hitch, Shrek 2s Far Far Away Idol, Viktor Vogel – Commercial Man and Jennifer's Body, as well in a 2009 advertisement for Lipton...
" (with The Wailers as his backup band). His follow-up single "Stir It Up
Stir It Up
"Stir It Up" is a song composed by Bob Marley in 1967, written for his wife Rita, and first made popular by Johnny Nash. Nash's recording hit the top 15 in both Britain and America in 1972....
" was penned by Bob Marley
Bob Marley
Robert Nesta "Bob" Marley, OM was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae band Bob Marley & The Wailers...
. The style gained wider popularity that year with the cult success of the Jamaican movie The Harder They Come
The Harder They Come
The Harder They Come is a 1972 Jamaican crime film directed by Perry Henzell.The film stars reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, who plays Ivanhoe Martin, a character based on Rhyging, a real-life Jamaican criminal who achieved fame in the 1940s...
, which starred reggae musician Jimmy Cliff
Jimmy Cliff
Jimmy Cliff, OM is a Jamaican musician, singer and actor. He is the only currently living musician to hold the Order of Merit, the highest honour that can be granted by the Jamaican government for achievement in the arts and sciences...
, who also wrote and performed much of the soundtrack album.
Reggae was a distinctive local style that evolved in Jamaica, although its development had been strongly influenced by earlier American soul
Soul music
Soul music is a music genre originating in the United States combining elements of gospel music and rhythm and blues. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, soul is "music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of...
and R&B
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a...
. Reggae became widely popular in the UK mostly thanks to Jamaican-born singer-songwriter Bob Marley, who was one of the genre's main founders and one of its most prolific and consistent songwriters. Reggae's popularity in Britain was greatly assisted by the fact that a large number of black
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
immigrants from the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
had settled in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
since the end of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Reggae also became very popular with the new generation of musicians in the punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
and New Wave music
New Wave music
New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...
genres of the late 1970s. Bands such as The Clash
The Clash
The Clash were an English punk rock band that formed in 1976 as part of the original wave of British punk. Along with punk, their music incorporated elements of reggae, ska, dub, funk, rap, dance, and rockabilly...
and The Slits
The Slits
The Slits were a British punk rock band. The quartet was formed in 1976 by members of the bands The Flowers of Romance and The Castrators. The members were Ari Up , who died of cancer in October 2010, and Palmolive , with Viv Albertine and Tessa Pollitt replacing founding members, Kate Korus and...
became enthusiastic champions of the style, as well as appropriating it for their own music.
Internationally, the most successful appropriators of reggae for mainstream pop audiences was the hugely successful British band The Police, who scored a string of hit singles and hit LPs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with finely crafted pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
songs played in a reggae style, such as "Walking on the Moon
Walking on the Moon
"Walking on the Moon" is a 1979 song by The Police, from their second album, Reggatta de Blanc. The song was The Police's second number-one hit single in the United Kingdom. It reached number nine in Australia but did not chart in the United States...
".
Late 1960s
In 1968, Rolling Stones guitarist Brian JonesBrian Jones
Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones , known as Brian Jones, was an English musician and a founding member of the Rolling Stones....
recorded the Master Musicians of Jajouka in the village of Jajouka
Jajouka
Jajouka, Joujouka or Zahjoukah is a village in the Ahl-Srif mountains in the southern Rif, Morocco. The mountains are named after the Ahl-Srif tribe who populate the region.-The musical heritage:...
in northern Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
. Jones died the following year but the LP was released in 1971 on Rolling Stones Records
Rolling Stones Records
Rolling Stones Records is the record label formed by The Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman in 1970, after their recording contract with Decca Records expired. They were first distributed in the United States by Atlantic Records subsidiary...
. Although there was some criticism of the electronic treatments Jones applied to the recordings in post-production, the LP was one of the first recordings released in the pop market that showcased traditional Moroccan music.
The electric folk
Electric folk
Electric folk is the name given to the form of folk rock pioneered in England from the late 1960s, and most significant in the 1970s, which then was taken up and developed in the surrounding Celtic cultures of Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, to produce Celtic rock and its...
movement in which Western popular music
Popular music
Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...
appropriated the English and Celtic traditional music
Traditional music
Traditional music is the term increasingly used for folk music that is not contemporary folk music. More on this is at the terminology section of the World music article...
also began in the late 1960s, with the work of groups like Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock and later electric folk band, formed in 1967 who are still recording and touring today. They are widely regarded as the most important single group in the English folk rock movement...
. This movement continued well into the 1970s.
1970s
Another important landmark in the growth of the world music genre, and one which is often overlooked, came in 1970 with the popular Simon & Garfunkel single "El Cóndor PasaEl Cóndor Pasa (song)
El Cóndor Pasa is a song from the zarzuela El Cóndor Pasa by the Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles, written in 1913 and based on traditional Andean folk tunes....
", taken from their multi-platinum selling Bridge Over Troubled Water
Bridge over Troubled Water
Bridge Over Troubled Water is the fifth and final studio album by Simon & Garfunkel. Released on January 26, 1970 on both Quadraphonic and Stereo formats, it reached No. 1 on Billboard Music Charts pop albums list...
LP. The theme was endlessly copied and used all over the world, for instance in parody about downed F117a plane El kondor pada
El kondor pada
"El kondor pada" is a satirical song performed by the Serbian theatre troupe Indexovo radio pozorište. It was recorded in 1999 during the war in Kosovo...
, and many other. Like Harrison's use of sitar, Paul Simon's use of Andean folk instruments (including the pan flute
Pan flute
The pan flute or pan pipe is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting usually of five or more pipes of gradually increasing length...
) was a pop music "first". His evocative English-language adaptation of a traditional 18th century Peruvian folk melody by Jorge Michelberg gave many listeners their first taste of the flavour of Peruvian folk music, and when the song was released as a single it became a hit in many countries, earning a Top Twenty placing (#18) on the American charts.
Also in 1970, Breton singer and musician Alan Stivell
Alan Stivell
Alan Stivell is a Breton musician and singer, recording artist and master of the celtic harp who from the early 1970s revived global interest in the Celtic harp and Celtic music as part of world music.- Background: learning Breton music and culture :Alan was born in the Auvergnat town of Riom...
(having already played the Celtic Breton harp on stage as a child, and toured since the mid-sixties) recorded his first professional album, Reflets
Reflets
-Track listing:# La Première Fois # Step Back # Tout Est Dit # Faut Recommencer # Garde Tout # Ma Peur...
("Reflections"), a fusion of Celtic musics with different new experiments and influences. The originality of this is also Alan Stivell's awareness, prefacing the record as a manifesto of what he called first "ethno-modern" music, meaning exactly what world music has now come to mean for many people.
His instrumental album Renaissance of the Celtic Harp
Renaissance of the Celtic Harp
Renaissance de la Harpe Celtique or Renaissance of the Celtic Harp is a 1971 record album by the Breton master of the celtic harp Alan Stivell that revolutionised the connection between traditional folk music, modern rock music and world music....
increased the popularity of that instrument, and promoted the fusion of Celtic music with other musics, as did the European best-selling live album recorded at the Paris Olympia (1972). His 1979 Symphonie Celtique
Symphonie Celtique
Symphonie Celtique, subtitled "Tir na nOg", a folk-rock album by Alan Stivell, originally released as a double LP in 1980 by CBS France, catalogue number CBS 88487...
mixed Celtic musics with different ethnic cultures, rock, and jazz-rock, and especially with a symphonic orchestra and choirs. He continues to experiment with different combinations of these and more electronic elements, especially on 1 Douar ("One Earth") (1998) and Explore (2006).
In 1973 Cameroon
Cameroon
Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the...
ian jazz musician Manu Dibango
Manu Dibango
-External links:*...
scored a worldwide hit with the single "Soul Makossa
Soul Makossa
"Soul Makossa" is a 1972 single by Cameroonian makossa saxophonist Manu Dibango. It is often cited as one of the first disco records. In 1972 David Mancuso found a copy in a Brooklyn West Indian record store and often played it at his Loft parties. The response was so positive that the few copies...
", a piece considered one of the forerunners of disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...
. Although Dibango came from a jazz background, the single contained elements drawn from the Cameroonian folk music style known as makossa
Makossa
Makossa is a type of music that is most popular in urban areas in Cameroon. It is similar to soukous, except that it includes strong bass rhythm and a prominent horn section. Makossa, which means " dance" in Duala, originated from a type of Duala dance called kossa, with significant influences...
, and Dibango became one of the very first African musicians to achieve significant success in the mainstream Western pop market. "Soul Makossa" also became an example of cultural appropriation when Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records...
"borrowed" 77 seconds of music from Dibango's single and incorporated it into his song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin" is a song by American songwriter and recording artist Michael Jackson. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" was released on May 8, 1983, by Epic Records as the fourth single from Jackson's sixth studio album Thriller in 1982. It is the first song on Thriller...
", from the Thriller
Thriller (album)
Thriller is the sixth studio album by American recording artist Michael Jackson. It was released on November 30, 1982, by Epic Records as the follow-up to Jackson's critically and commercially successful 1979 album Off the Wall...
album, leading Dibango to take legal action against Jackson.
In 1975 there were several important "popular" releases that gained wide recognition and exposed pop audiences to new musical influences. In February, Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Formed in 1968, they consisted of guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham...
released an ambitious "Arab-pop fusion" song, the ten-minute epic
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
"Kashmir
Kashmir (song)
"Kashmir" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin from their sixth album Physical Graffiti, released in 1975. It was written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant over a period of three years, with the lyrics dating back to 1973.-Overview:The song centres around a signature chord progression...
", from their Physical Graffiti
Physical Graffiti
Physical Graffiti is the sixth studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, released on 24 February 1975 as a double album. Recording sessions for the album were initially disrupted when bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones considered leaving the band...
LP. The song was strongly influenced by composer Jimmy Page
Jimmy Page
James Patrick "Jimmy" Page, OBE is an English multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin.Jimmy Page...
's interest in Arabic music. Although its length made it an unlikely hit, the song became a firm favorite on American FM radio stations and was even played on Australian pop radio.
In November that year, Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...
released her LP The Hissing of Summer Lawns
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a studio album by Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell.-Reception:The album was not as radio-friendly as Mitchell's earlier work, and although the album achieved initial commercial success, reaching number four on the charts and quickly going gold, contemporary reviewers...
, featuring the track "The Jungle Line", which mixed traditional African drumming and synthesiser. For this recording, Mitchell was accompanied by the musical group The Warrior Drums of Burundi
Burundi
Burundi , officially the Republic of Burundi , is a landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa bordered by Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and south, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Its capital is Bujumbura...
, who were visiting America at the time.
Two other musical events in 1975 which had a significant impact on the development of world music can both be largely credited to Marcel Cellier
Marcel Cellier
Marcel Cellier is a Swiss organist, ethnomusicologist and music producer, internationally known for his Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares project presenting Bulgarian traditional music and his work with Gheorghe Zamfir....
, owner of the Swiss record label Disques Cellier.
That year Cellier released Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares
The Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir is an internationally renowned World Music ensemble that blends traditional six-part a cappella repertoire with modern arrangements. It is most recognized under their contribution to Marcel Cellier's Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares project...
, the first volume of an eventual three-album series of recordings of Bulgarian vocal folk music, performed by the Bulgarian State Radio Choir and Trio Bulgarka
Trio Bulgarka
Trio Bulgarka is a Bulgarian vocal ensemble.They gained international prominence through their contributions to the groundbreaking 1975 world music album Balkana: The music of Bulgaria, originally released on the now defunct Hannibal label.The trio comprises Stoyanka Boneva from Pirin, Yanka Rupkina...
. In the years that followed, particularly after the album's re-release through the British 4AD Records label, the Bulgarian Voices album became a significant cult hit in many countries and created a huge groundswell of interest in this form of eastern European folk music, leading to the 1980s collaboration between Trio Bulgarka
Trio Bulgarka
Trio Bulgarka is a Bulgarian vocal ensemble.They gained international prominence through their contributions to the groundbreaking 1975 world music album Balkana: The music of Bulgaria, originally released on the now defunct Hannibal label.The trio comprises Stoyanka Boneva from Pirin, Yanka Rupkina...
and British singer-songwriter Kate Bush
Kate Bush
Kate Bush is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic vocal style have made her one of the United Kingdom's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years.In 1978, at the age of 19, Bush topped the UK Singles Chart...
on her 1989 album The Sensual World
The Sensual World
-Personnel:*Haydn Bendall: engineer*Andrew Boland: engineer*Stoyanka Boneva: vocals*Kate Bush: piano, keyboards, vocals, background vocals, producer*Paddy Bush: mandolin, background vocals, valiha, whip, tupan*Clare Connors: violin...
.
Cellier's other big hit of 1975 was Flutes De Pan et Orgue ("Pan Flute and Organ"), a 1971 recording of traditional Romanian pan flute
Pan flute
The pan flute or pan pipe is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting usually of five or more pipes of gradually increasing length...
music, performed by Romanian
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
pan flautist Gheorge Zamfir, and accompanied by Cellier himself on organ. The international vogue for Zamfir
Zamfir
Zamfir as a placename:* Zamfir, Bulgaria, a village in BulgariaZamfir as a name:* Zamfir Dumitrescu , Romanian painter* Gheorghe Zamfir , Romanian musician * Mircea Zamfir , Romanian gymnast...
's music is largely due to Australian film director Peter Weir
Peter Weir
Peter Lindsay Weir, AM is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave cinema with his films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir directed a diverse group of American and international films—many of them major box office...
. His 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock
Picnic at Hanging Rock (film)
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1975 Australian feature film directed by Peter Weir and starring Anne-Louise Lambert, Helen Morse, Rachel Roberts and Vivean Gray. The film is adapted from the novel of the same name, by author Joan Lindsay....
, one of the most successful Australian feature films of the period, featured evocative music from the Cellier disc on the soundtrack, and the film's success created widespread interest in Zamfir and his music.
Weir had been introduced to Zamfir's music a few years earlier, and when he began production on Picnic he decided to use pan flute music on the soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
; he approached Zamfir to compose original music in the same style, but Zamfir declined, so Weir was returned to the music he had originally heard and licenced some of the tracks from the Cellier LP.
In 1978, Matthew Montfort
Matthew Montfort
Matthew Montfort is the leader of the world music ensemble Ancient Future. An award-winning guitarist , he is a pioneer of the scalloped fretboard guitar .-Career As A Musician:Montfort spent three months in intensive study with...
formed Ancient Future, an ensemble of 28 members having musical masters of a song traditional to the master's country play the song along with them. Ancient Future blended rhythms, harmonies, and melodies from all across the world and mixed them together along with jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
and other genres of music to combine what became world fusion music.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the English film director Jeremy Marre
Jeremy Marre
Jeremy Marre is a television director, writer and producer who founded Harcourt Films and has worked extensively around the world. Many of his films are on musical subjects....
travelled the world for his Beats of the Heart series, shown first on the UK's national Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
, recording and interviewing so-called world music artists.
1980s to present
In 1986, Paul SimonPaul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.Simon is best known for his success, beginning in 1965, as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached number one on the US singles...
re-emerged as a catalytic figure when he revisited the world music / pop fusion concept he had first used on "El Cóndor Pasa" in 1970. His influential, multi-million-selling Graceland
Graceland (album)
Graceland was Paul Simon's highest charting album in the U.S. in over a decade, reaching #3 in the national Billboard charts, receiving a certification of 5× Platinum by the RIAA and eventually selling over 14 million copies, making it Simon's most commercially successful album...
album bore the unmistakable stamp of Simon's recent discovery of South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
n township music, and he recorded the album with leading South African session musicians and the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Ladysmith Black Mambazo is a male choral group from South Africa that sings in the vocal styles of isicathamiya and mbube. They rose to worldwide prominence as a result of singing with Paul Simon on his album, Graceland and have won multiple awards, including three Grammy Awards...
. These musicians performed on the subsequent concert tours, as did two other special guests, exiled South African music legends Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba , nicknamed Mama Africa, was a Grammy Award winning South African singer and civil rights activist....
and Hugh Masekela
Hugh Masekela
Hugh Ramopolo Masekela is a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer.-Early life:Masekela was born in Kwa-Guqa Township, Witbank, South Africa. He began singing and playing piano as a child...
. Simon received some criticism for his decision to record in South Africa (which was being economically boycotted by most Western nations for its Apartheid
History of South Africa in the apartheid era
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced by the National Party governments of South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority 'non-white' inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white supremacy and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained...
policies).
Many other British and American artists contributed to the growing exploitation of "world music" during this period. After establishing his solo career in the late 1970s and early 1980s, former Genesis
Genesis (band)
Genesis are an English rock band that formed in 1967. The band currently comprises the longest-tenured members Tony Banks , Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins . Past members Peter Gabriel , Steve Hackett and Anthony Phillips , also played major roles in the band in its early years...
lead singer Peter Gabriel
Peter Gabriel
Peter Brian Gabriel is an English singer, musician, and songwriter who rose to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career...
was heavily influenced by African and Middle Eastern music; he became a key figure in the founding of the WOMAD organisation and later established his own "world music" label, Real World
Real World Records
Real World Records is a record label started in 1989 by Peter Gabriel to record and produce world music.-Overview:The label grew up alongside the success of the WOMAD festivals and Peter Gabriel's exploration of music from other cultures, and helped push world music into the general public's...
, which recorded and released successful albums by artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. Gabriel featured Senegal
Senegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
ese mbalax
Mbalax
Mbalax is the national popular dance music of Senegal and The Gambia. Mbalax is a fusion of popular Western music and dance such as jazz, soul, Latin, and rock blended with sabar, the traditional drumming and dance music of Senegal...
singer Youssou N'Dour
Youssou N'Dour
Youssou N'Dour is a Senegalese singer, percussionist and occasional actor. In 2004, Rolling Stone described him as, in Senegal and much of Africa, "perhaps the most famous singer alive." He helped develop a style of popular music in Senegal, known in the Serer language as mbalax, a type of music...
in a song on his hit album So
So (album)
So is the fifth studio album by British rock musician Peter Gabriel, released in 1986. Many of its songs reflect a more conventional pop-writing style and became radio hits, while others still retain Gabriel's dark, brooding sense of experimentalism.It is Peter Gabriel's second album produced by...
in 1986, paving the way for N'Dour's success as one of the biggest "world music" stars in the West. The later music of American New Wave
New Wave music
New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...
band Talking Heads
Talking Heads
Talking Heads were an American New Wave and avant-garde band formed in 1975 in New York City and active until 1991. The band comprised David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison...
drew heavily on influences from African and Afro-Cuban music, notably on their album Remain in Light
Remain in Light
Remain in Light is the fourth studio album by American New Wave band Talking Heads, released on 8 October 1980 on Sire Records. It was recorded at locations in the Bahamas and the United States between July and August 1980 and was produced by the quartet's long-time collaborator...
. The album was among several experimental post-punk
Post-punk
Post-punk is a rock music movement with its roots in the late 1970s, following on the heels of the initial punk rock explosion of the mid-1970s. The genre retains its roots in the punk movement but is more introverted, complex and experimental...
recordings directly inspired by the Afrobeat
Afrobeat
Afrobeat is a combination of traditional Yoruba music, jazz, highlife, funk and chanted vocals, fused with percussion and vocal styles, popularised in Africa in the 1970s. Its main creator was the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Fela Kuti, who gave it its name, who used it to...
of bandleader Fela Kuti
Fela Kuti
Fela Anikulapo Kuti , or simply Fela , was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, pioneer of Afrobeat music, human rights activist, and political maverick.-Biography:...
. Kuti's style itself began as an appropriation—a merger between the traditional styles of Kuti's home Nigeria and the R&B and funk music of African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
artists like James Brown
James Brown
James Joseph Brown was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist. He is the originator of Funk and is recognized as a major figure in the 20th century popular music for both his vocals and dancing. He has been referred to as "The Godfather of Soul," "Mr...
. Many other African musicians, as well as those from other regions of the world, also drew influence from African American music, Afro-Cuban music and other music from the West, ensuring that appropriation was continuous in many directions.
In the early 1980s, Talking Heads
Talking Heads
Talking Heads were an American New Wave and avant-garde band formed in 1975 in New York City and active until 1991. The band comprised David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison...
' main writer and lead singer David Byrne
David Byrne (musician)
David Byrne is a musician and artist, best known as a founding member and principal songwriter of the American new wave band Talking Heads, which was active between 1975 and 1991. Since then, Byrne has released his own solo recordings and worked with various media including film, photography,...
also recorded a significant album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (album)
The album was recorded entirely with analogue technology, before the advent of digital sequencing and MIDI. The sampled voices were synchronized with the instrumental tracks via trial and error, a practice that was often frustrating, but which also produced several happy accidents.Also according to...
, in collaboration with the band's producer of the time, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
. It was strongly influenced by musical styles outside the standard "rock" genre, employing African-style percussion and Afro-American funk rhythms. It is also notable as one of the first rock albums to make extensive use of the then novel technology of sampling
Sampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...
, incorporating vocal and musical samples from a wide range of sources including Arabic music. Dub music
Dub music
Dub is a genre of music which grew out of reggae music in the 1960s, and is commonly considered a subgenre, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae...
, a more atmospheric offshoot of reggae, was also appropriated as a rhythmic and production influence by many electronic musicians and underground rock bands of the era, particularly in the United Kingdom, where reggae had achieved mainstream success.
Sampling came into wider use among hip hop
Hip hop
Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic culture that originated in African-American and Latino communities during the 1970s in New York City, specifically the Bronx. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of hip hop culture: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti writing...
DJs, who appropriated rhythms, vocal parts or backing music from existing songs and pieces and combined and manipulated them, usually to serve as backing for rap
Rapping
Rapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The art form can be broken down into different components, as in the book How to Rap where it is separated into “content”, “flow” , and “delivery”...
vocals by an MC. Hip hop music began as an underground urban phenomenon in the 1970s, achieved mass popular success by the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by the end of the century it had become dominant over rock as the largest selling style of pop music and the primary musical export of the United States. The importance of musical appropriation to hip hop culture has often been controversial, with many legal challenges to uncredited samples, and heavy criticism for instances where paid samples simply copied the sound of the original song (for example, Puff Daddy's sampling of a hit by The Police); however, many hip hop musicians and others have argued that sampling in hip hop is no different from the often uncredited appropriation white classical and rock musicians made of earlier black music styles such as jazz and blues, and that the DJ's creativity, as well as that of the rapper, allows the song to depart significantly from the original sources. Samples in hip hop are typically only brief snippets of the original, though they often utilize the most recognizable riff or hook of the song. Many hip hop songs sample other forms of African American music, as well. Hank Shocklee of the influential hip hop group Public Enemy has publicly debated the practice with funk bandleader George Clinton
George Clinton (funk musician)
George Clinton is an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and music producer and the principal architect of P-Funk. He was the mastermind of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic during the 1970s and early 1980s, and launched a solo career in 1981. He has been cited as one of the foremost...
, who sued Public Enemy for sampling one of his songs without permission.
As of the 2000s, sampling has become a common form of appropriation in pop music, which has drawn increased influence from hip hop. For example, Barbadian
Barbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...
dancehall
Dancehall
Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably,...
/pop singer Rihanna
Rihanna
Robyn Rihanna Fenty , better known as simply Rihanna, is a Barbadian recording artist. Born in Saint Michael, Barbados, Rihanna moved to the United States at the age of 16 to pursue a recording career under the guidance of record producer Evan Rogers...
's 2006 hit "SOS" drew directly from the song "Tainted Love" by 1980s English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
synth pop band Soft Cell
Soft Cell
Soft Cell are an English synthpop duo who came to prominence in the early 1980s. They consist of vocalist Marc Almond and instrumentalist David Ball. The duo is most widely known for their 1981 worldwide hit version of "Tainted Love" and platinum debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret...
. Although both were successful on the Western pop charts, the two acts may have been seen to reflect very different cultures before the appropriation.
Sources
- Michalis Pichler : Statements on Appropriation
- Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
- Maróthy (1981). Cited in Middleton (2002).
- Stefani (1987). Cited in Middleton (2002).