Since coming to New York City, world music has begun to take off as a central movement in the traditional art music scene. It is interesting because of how long it took to arrive at this point. Back in the early and mid-nineties was when the seeds for the now adolescent world music scene came to be. Classical music was a wreck, orchestras folding and interest in it declining. I can point out why the car wreck of the art form I love most occurred, but that’s another post for a day when I have lots of time. World music had been around before, I can point to Hetor Villa-Lobos, some of Bela Bartok’s more musicological works, or even Philip Glass’ Satyagraha from 1980. Still, these tendencies weren’t what I would say constituted the singular movement it is now. These were disparate threads reflecting parts of the composers’ lives, which they thought would be interesting to explore.
Back to the 1990’s. Osvaldo Golijov, the prominent Argentinian composer, had his first “major” recorded work on a Kronos quartet CD in 1994, while Zhou Long, a composer who writes music reflecting his ethnic Chinese background, didn’t have his career take off until the mid to late nineties. Still, the movement really didn’t make a ton of noise until the early 2000’s when Golijov started scoring big hits in the classical scene, Yo-Yo Ma recorded his first Silk Road Album, or when Philip Glass revisited world music, this time more thoroughly, with Orion.
Now, when I go listen to a new music concert, there is at least one work that is world music. I am currently playing with the Manhattan Camerata which has programmed (essentially) an entire concert of world music. Here, the heads of the organization, Lucia Caruso, Pedro de Silva and Ramon Catalan have built (are building) their classical careers on world music.
I think that world music is exciting and a ton of fun to listen to, but I have a hard time feeling profound ideas expressed by the music. This may be my orientalist view of the world as an American, or it could just be my ontological distance from what the music might mean. But, I feel that world music, no matter how much it has resurrected the classical genre, cannot replace the serious European art music style in expressing the chilling or profound. I hope to be proven wrong on this though.
“I have a hard time feeling profound ideas expressed by the music.”
Perhaps the problem stems from the fact that World Music, as a genre, doesn’t distinguish between folk music, popular music, and art music. Most of what we hear on the Putomayo World Music Hour or find on Calabash Records or CD baby, even what is taught in college World Music Courses falls in the first two categories.
I find the music of Astor Piazzolla to be both chilling and profound. Maybe this will help! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbdakZjHTys
Thanks for the recommendation. It’s interesting how different cultural styles can communicate the same feelings in totally different fashions. I hear the link you posted as contemplative and lonely (in a romantic kind of way), just like some of Schumann’s works. Still, in a way, I’m having a ton of trouble escaping a referential idea:
A film noir movie set in Italy, or spain.
Listen again with this in mind and the cliche will make itself apparent. In this way, for this listener, my cultural background set in Hollywood’s garbage films trumps whatever Piazzolla is really communicating. Since I am not the only person, or even westerner(!) who has been ontologically carved in this manner, it scares me to think that (as I said before) the salvation of new classical music might be a dead end.