Before you start reading, I'd just like to say I'm personally very excited to welcome J. Holder Benett to our staff as the KMA Music Historian. There haven't been a lot of chances for us at Knightengale to show off our academic ideas, so this is going to be a lot of fun as it opens up a whole new direction we can take our articles into. - Nick Mangieri (KMA Owner)
Global Music: Not as New as You Think
In today’s music world, artists can be known around the globe overnight, in some cases literally via YouTube or after a few years of solid work as with the trans-Atlantic group Mumford and Sons.[1] This is a good thing for both the music business and for music fans in that having a global marketplace, with relative freedom of exchange of music and information about it, has always proven to provide more options. It also forces bands to work to be genuinely good rather than simply marketable while still allowing them to be true to the niche they want to embody in their work. It’s the ultimate mix of what has become known as glocal; a mixture of local origins and influence on the music scene while maintaining access to a global fandom.
Words like globalism and globalization have entered the English language and become rather common. However, they’ve done so in a way that makes people think of these phenomena as if they were somehow new. They are not. [2] If you put Old and New World together, these things have been happening since Columbus screwed up his math, but he did the math using Greek records and Indian numbers transmitted to Europe by Arabian traders in hopes of meeting the Great Khan in China.[3] If you want to be entirely Old School Old World, Genghis Khan sent an ambassador to England in the late thirteenth century, ninth-century Muslim coins have been found in Scandinavia, Herodotus told of the sources of the Nile, and Buddhist sutras informed early Christian debates. [4] All through these records, the one thing that stands out is that information, people, culture, goods, and music followed well-established trade routes. Today’s major physical trade routes follow patterns established at the beginning of the Renaissance, and the internet finally functions as the virtual superhighway it was described as in the 1990s.
Trade as a human occupation has been evidenced since at least the first division of labor at the beginning of the agricultural era some five thousand years ago. [5] The initial practice grew up in Mesopotamia as the need for organization and communal effort to control annual floods became ever more important as the settled population grew. [6] At first an almost purely local phenomenon, within the first millennium of civilization, trade networks had sprung up all across the Near East in a fashion reminiscent of today’s global trade routes. Trade and migration were virtual synonyms in this period as is evinced by the functions and interactions performed by Abraham and the other Biblical patriarchs as they began their wandering period by leaving Ur and eventually settling down in the Egyptian territory of Goshen. [7] Through those early wanderings, there is ample evidence of the uniformity of contract and obligation throughout the Near East as can be found in the Code of Hammurabi and in Abraham’s negotiations to purchase the Cave of Machpelah with standardized currency and through formal, public negotiation. [8] This is evidence that people were sharing ideas and cultural products, ranging from law to music, as they moved around and interacted with other groups.
Map 1: Early Mesopotamian Trade Routes [9]
It can easily be shown that in the first century CE that the Old World community was effectively interconnected and that the Middle East was the axis upon which it turned. The four major Eurasian powers were roughly equal in terms of economic, cultural, and technological power with music and other cultural products coursing along routes of communication ranging from China to Britain by land and by sea. [10]
Map 2: Trade Routes and Great Empires of the First Century AD. [11]
Depending on how you look at it, the region was either the gateway to the east or the gateway to the west. It was here that the great schisms and heresies, as well as innovations and new formulations that energized late paganism, the early Church, and eventually the Muslim Ulema originated, each undoubtedly influenced by the region’s connections to other parts of Eurasia, India in particular through its ancient trade connections with Arabia and Egypt. [12] Each group developed its own musical tradition which spread out into the world, interacted with other strains and adapting to new conditions and new social needs in different places and times. Even today’s death metal is affected by these early forms because it began as a rebellion against dominant strains of society and music, beginning in many ways with Venom’s 1982 album Black Metal. [13]
Today, the Western world benefits from these centuries of interaction. Our society, encompassing North America, Western Europe, and Australia, has elements which are both creative and assimilative. [14] This cultural strength has provided access to cultural products from all eras and societies. [15] Music is but one field of endeavor in which the West has profited from its gregarious nature. The end result is that commerce of all forms became “an evolving process of interaction and reciprocity which is simultaneously facilitated by and leads to an evolving system of” sharing information and cultural products. [16] Music was possibly the most adaptable because all cultures had vocal components to their productions and instruments can frequently be adapted to new, unintended uses.
Some instances occasioned adoption and adaptation, as when slave owners danced African dances without realizing it or when the famous medieval-styled Gregorian and Benedictine monks’ chants, which incorporated elements from India, became chart toppers. [17] In fact, the Benedictines’ sound was so unlike other forms in American pop culture of the early 1990s, that their music was used for a group of aliens in an episode of Babylon 5. [18] Others were wholesale importation as with the music found in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series which has elements from Celtic, Indic, and Japanese traditions mixed in with music one might have found on the American frontier. [19] The only major changes in how all these peoples moved around and took their music and ideas with them were a move from land-based transport to oceanic and the constant inclusion of ever more nodes of communication which functioned as points of origin, destinations, and intermediaries for cultural connections. [20] Air transport has increased this trend still further and helps to integrate the old fashioned land routes with the newer oceanic avenues.
Map 3: Workers of the World on the Move, 2008 [21]
In all, this makes for a richer, more varied musical library from which an artist can draw creative elements and to which a fan can go for new experiences. The internet and modern globalizing phenomena did not create this situation. They merely sped up a trend literally older than the pyramids and made it easier to participate in a global network. [22] Our modern world has been not merely connected but ever more interdependent since the end of the Second World War. [23] The worldview moved from a Europe-centered one, which was a view that lasted only between about 1750 and 1950, a short time in the grand scope of human history, and began to return to the traditional global setting. The whole Cold War is best seen as very different opinions on how this return to customary patterns should take place. The eventual winner was the American model, but its final form evolved with significant changes and borrowings from other cultures around the world.
Perhaps the best recent example of this model, which borrows from many cultures and incorporates many aspects of audience participation, was seen at the 2009 World Science Festival.[24] In that case, Bobby McFerrin effectively created an improvisational music piece on the fly using audience participation and no instruments beyond vocal repertoire. His work combined elements found in African tribal music, New York street performance, and classical European rhythm structure, all while noting the universality of the scale used and how audiences integrate themselves into the musical performance. The experiment worked because all human beings, whether with standard language or with music, communicate in essentially the same ways. [25] McFerrin’s work in music theory is helping to revolutionize cognitive and linguistic studies, but the wide application of music in other fields is a topic for another day.
The globalization of music has been a good thing in that it helped connect cultures and produced new art forms and the internet has made this easier. But don’t try to call the global music scene new.
– J. Holder Bennett, Associate Professor of History, Collin College, McKinney, TX
Sources:
[1] Cameron Adams, “Mumford and Sons Have Taken Australia by Storm,” Herald Sun, 25 March 2010, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/music/mumford-sons-have-taken-australia-by-storm/story-e6frf9hf-1225845393954.
[2] William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community; With a Retrospective Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 316 – 360; Andre Gunder Frank,ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 52 – 62; Peter Hulme, “Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent: Moreau de Jonnès’s Carib Ethnography,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 189.
[3] V. Frederick Rickey, “How Columbus Encountered America,” Mathematics Magazine 65, no. 4 (October 1992): 222 – 224; Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 253 – 254.
[4] Weatherford, 218 – 219; Rabban bar-Sauma, The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China(London: Religious Tracts Society, 1928), 27; Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings, Rev. Ed. (Oxford: University Press, 1984), 267; Herodotus, The Histories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 139; Origen,Contra Celsum, 2:63, PG 11, col. 863 – 866.
Robert McCormick Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico(Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1966), 96.
[5] Robert McCormick Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1966), 96.
[6] McNeill, 20.
[7] Gen. 11:31, 46:34.
[8] Gen. 23:1 – 20, 25:5 – 6, 35:28 – 29, 47:28, 50:1 – 14; Josh. 24:32; Gen. Rabba 79.7.
[9] Penn Museum, “Map: Early Mesopotamian Routes,” Iraq’s Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur’s Royal Cemetery, http://www.penn.museum/sites/iraq/?page_id=52.
[10] McNeill, 297; E. H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and China(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 1 – 34.
[11] C. F. Ford, “Map: Trade Routes and Great Empires of the First Century A.D.,” Early World History: Indo-Europeans to the Middle Ages, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfford/342worldhistoryearly.html.
[12] Jean Fillozat, Les relations extérieurs de l’Inde (Pondicherry: Institut Français d’Indologie, 1956), 27 – 30, 51 – 58.
[13] Venom, Black Metal, LP record, Impulse Studios, ℗ and © 1982.
[14] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), 26 – 27.
[15] McNeill, 539.
[16] Bruce L. Benson, “The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law,” Southern Economic Journal55, no. 3 (January 1989), 644.
[17] Christopher Morris, “The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (December 1998), 986; Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, Chant, Angel Records, B000002SKX, compact disc, ℗ and © 1994; Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, Gregorian Chant: The Definitive Collection, Milan Records, B001BWQABO, compact disc, ℗ and © 2008; David Hiley, “Recent Research on the Origins of Western Chant,” Early Music 16, no. 2 (May 1988), 207.
[18] Peter David (writer) and Mike Vejar (director), “There All the Honor Lies,” Babylon 5, 26 April 1995. The scene can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jli3ruqWYlc.
[19] Bear McCreary, et al., Battlestar Galactica: Season One [Soundtrack], La-La-Land Records, B0009Q0F5U, compact disc, ℗ and © 2005; Bear McCreary, et al., Battlestar Galactica: Season Two [Soundtrack], La-La-Land Records, B000FCUYKO, compact disc, ℗ and © 2006; Bear McCreary, et al.,Battlestar Galactica: Season Three [Soundtrack], La-La-Land Records, B000UZ4C4A, compact disc, ℗ and © 2007; Bear McCreary, et al., Battlestar Galactica: Season Four [Soundtrack], La-La-Land Records, B0028ERCMU, ℗ and © 2009.
[20] Russell King, Richard Black, Michael Collyer, Anthony Fielding, and Ronald Skeldon, The Atlas of Human Migration: Global Patterns of People on the Move (Oxford, UK: Earthscan, 2010).
[21] Andrew Taylor, “Workers of the World on the Move,” Slovak British Business Council, 24 June 2008, http://www.sbbc.org.uk/node/595.
[22] “Atlas of the Human Journey,” National Geographic, 2012, https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html.
[23] Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, 5th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002), 349 – 443.
[24] WorldScienceFestival, “World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale,” YouTube, 23 July 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk&feature=youtu.be. McFerrin is best known for “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” According to some reports, there were Nobel Prize winners in the WSF audience. Many thanks to my former student, Brandt Hughes, for suggesting this example.
[25] Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Boston: MIT Press, 1965). The jury is still out on some aspects of Chomsky’s work, recursion in particular, but his work is the overall foundation for modern linguistics and communication theory.
