Toward a model for the evaluation of the cultural strength of various musics
The interrelated complexity of the world of musics
Slobin (1993:10) asserts that
world music looks like a fluid, interlocking set of styles, repertoires, and practices which can expand or contract across wide or narrow stretches of the landscape. It no longer appears to be a catalogue of bounded entities of single, solid historical and geographical origins....
It is certainly true that music in the world is complex, and interrelations are myriad. However, though each music may not be an independent entity, with "single, solid historical and geographical origins," each music can be studied and defined, just as any language can be analyzed and understood. Each music is not isolated, but it is distinguishable from all other musics by its auditory characteristics, social functions, associations, and meanings within a culture. The musics of the world are mutually unintelligible languages of emotion and association, which influence one another.
Thus, to the end of including both realities of music--it is both discrete and part of larger currents in the world--the working definition of a music2 adopted in this article is as follows: A MUSIC is an idiomatic organization of sound which can be differentiated from all others by its physical properties, structural conventions, and cultural meanings. It can be further understood by describing its relationship with other musics in its larger context; no music is historically or socially isolated. A MUSICAL STYLE here defined as a subset of a music. It has most of the same acoustic and structural characteristics of the music of which it is a part, but is in some ways unique, and may have unique connotations and meanings for one or more aspects of the culture in which it is found.
The first step in the model is to describe the musics of the world in their larger context. This can be done by discussing their varying levels of visibility, modes of transmission, and the different levels of power associated with each.
2The use of the word "music" as a single, definable entity is to avoid the too-specific connotations of "music system" (referring primarily to the acoustic and structural nature of the music), or "micromusic" (defining the music primarily as a part of a larger music). Back to reference