A brief Preface explains the concept (and title) of the book and how it differs from existing books on “world music” by (1) encompassing all major categories of music, including Western classical and popular, and (2) following a continuous narrative approach, with an emphasis on explaining how the musical world came to be as it is through cross-cultural connections and interactions, rather than just giving information on separate “music cultures.” Other introductory discussion is kept to a minimum so that we can embark on the main “story” without delay.

The story begins with something very familiar: the drum kit as used in most American popular music. The drum kit is described using terms that may be less familiar, but that will be important for comparing instruments and musical forms across cultures. Through this description, some of the most fundamental concepts and terms that will be used throughout the book are introduced, including the general definition of “music” as a way of organizing sound that is different from speech, the difference between pitched and unpitched sounds, the basics of musical rhythm and meter, the terms used for classifying and comparing musical instruments cross-culturally, the need to avoid “ethnocentric” descriptions and judgments in general, and the challenge of representing musical sound in a visual form that is not ethnocentric. The solution to this challenge that is used throughout the book, a graphic notation based on the “piano roll” system used in much music software nowadays, is explained here. Also introduced is a metaphor around which the book is structured: the image of today’s global popular music style as a “tree” with its trunk in the USA and with roots and branches both reaching around the world. Two of the main “roots” are identified through a specific musical feature: the drum kit’s “backbeat,” which is seen to arise from an interaction of European and African approaches to rhythm in an American historical context.

The African root of American popular music is traced back through the history of slavery to the West African cultures from which most slaves in North America came. Guarding against any assumption that West African musical cultures were the same in the days of the slave trade as they are now (which might represent the ethnocentric view that “other cultures don’t have history”), historical evidence is reviewed to establish that the features relevant to the story were already present at that time. One such feature, shared with most African cultures south of the Sahara, is that music-making is oriented toward communal participation (“joining in”) more than presentation by performers to a passive audience. Musical features that promote participation are discussed in the context of drumming ensembles, including the “polyrhythmic” African approach to musical time that fed into the American “backbeat.” At the same time, stereotypes of African music as consisting only of drumming and repetitive patterns are counteracted by focusing on two types of musician who “stand out” from their communities as highly skilled musical specialists: master drummers and the bard-like griots who sing to the accompaniment of the harp-lute kora. The master drummers with their “talking drums” also challenge our initial definition of music by blurring the distinction between musical sound and speech.

We now build on our knowledge of West African musical practices by examining how they were maintained and developed in America, initially by African Americans but increasingly by Americans in general. We see how the “polyrhythms” of West African drumming, in their interaction with a European rhythmic framework, produced not just the backbeat but the pervasive “syncopation” that has been so prevalent in most American and American-influenced popular music of the last hundred years. We also see how other features of “participatory” African music (the slaves’ “old ways” of making music), including open-ended cyclical forms, call-and-response interactions, dense textures, and rough-edged timbres, have remained an aesthetic preference in the African American tradition and an influence on other styles (“new means”). Meanwhile, the griot tradition of solo singing accompanied by a stringed instrument is considered as a possible source of blues music and its many offshoots. With successive styles being pioneered by African Americans and then adopted by European Americans, the history of American popular music can be seen as a progressive “Africanization,” while even in the folk and classical realms, American music can be differentiated from European music primarily by its African American elements.

One could, of course, also say that American music can be differentiated from African music primarily by its European American elements, and these now provide our entry point to the musical cultures of Europe itself. Although people came to America from all parts of Europe, it was immigrants from Northern and Western Europe (and especially the British Isles) that had the greatest influence initially, even if they brought musical practices that they had themselves acquired from elsewhere. Western European forms and concepts of music have become so familiar worldwide that they are often taken for granted as just “the way music is,” but for that reason, paradoxically, they remain little known at the level of conscious awareness. This chapter approaches the Western European musical heritage as a “stranger” whom we get to know anew as someone with a particular set of habits and idiosyncrasies shaped by particular experiences. Among these characteristics is the view of music as consisting of fixed “pieces” created by individual “composers,” as taking different forms for purposes of “art” and “entertainment,” and as being in a “key” (which, however, may change in the course of a piece). European ways of structuring music, including strophic and verse-refrain song forms, melodic structures with balanced strains and varied contours, and the use of “functional” harmony, are explained both musically—introducing terms for discussing aspects of pitch organization rather than rhythm—and culturally, in relation to the prevalent values and practices that produced them. Classical and popular music are discussed as well as folk, and this categorization itself is shown to be the product of a particular kind of society and history. Particular attention is paid to the role of Jewish musicians in bringing particular European melodic and harmonic techniques to America and combining them with syncopated African American rhythms to create the Tin Pan Alley songwriting tradition whose legacy endures to this day.

The root of the “music tree” that extends from America to Europe does not end there, for the European tradition itself was to a great extent a product of influences from elsewhere. This is demonstrated initially through the history of musical instruments, many of which can be traced to origins in the Islamic cultures of the Middle East. Even the instruments of the drum kit are traced back, via American and European marching bands and the exoticist “Turkish marches” of European classical composers, to ancestors in the military bands of the Ottoman Empire. Once more, having introduced the region through its contribution to music that is widely known around the world, we try to understand the musical culture on its own terms. The rather uneasy relationship between music and Islamic teachings provides a key to the diversity of musical practices in the region and their varying status and prestige. It also provides an example of a different “way of thinking” from European assumptions about music, including the positive connotations of the word “music” itself (as in “music to my ears”). Middle Eastern music also illustrates a different way of organizing both pitch and rhythm from anything we have encountered so far, and our vocabulary for talking about musical features is expanded by looking at Middle Eastern melodic and rhythmic “modes” and the use of “quarter-tones” that lie between the notes of the piano keyboard.

The broader impact of Islamic culture on the world’s music is now considered through the music of those parts of Europe and Africa which historically came under Islamic control or influence. Much of Eastern Europe once belonged to the Ottoman Empire and shares certain musical features with the Islamic Middle East, such as “additive meter,” in which bars are formed by adding units of unequal length. The question of influence here, however, is complicated by the fact that the Middle East itself preserved aspects of ancient Greek musical theory and practice, which appears to have already included additive meter long before Greece came under Ottoman rule. North Africa became part of the Islamic world much earlier, and permanently, and through it Islamic culture reached Spain under the Moors. The “Andalusian” classical music that developed there was eventually brought back to North Africa, while the Islamic influence left its mark on the musical genre that the world most associates with Spain: flamenco. The chapter ends by showing how flamenco, while ostensibly using Western European harmonies and “divisive” meter, is actually founded on a scale type, rhythmic approach, and vocal technique that owe at least as much to the Middle East.

A flamenco-like approach to rhythm (essentially, a 12-beat bar divided up in constantly changing ways, or in different ways simultaneously) is found again in the various former Spanish colonies of the New World, often in combination with polyrhythmic elements deriving from Africa; for Latin America had its slave trade too. To a greater extent than in North America, indigenous peoples also became part of the cultural mix, for instance developing their own distinctive versions of old Spanish traditions and maintaining them in remote regions of the Andes long after they were forgotten in Spain itself. We first sample the music of the Spanish colonial heritage, including its retentions of Spain’s own Middle Eastern influences. Then we see how Spanish and indigenous elements were combined in the Andean ensembles that have become so popular internationally. We then turn to Brazil, historically a Portuguese colony whose slaves came from Portugal’s African possession Angola, bringing with them a musical culture related to, but subtly different from, the West African culture of North America’s slaves. One result was the development of samba, originally a carvinal procession music, which in the 1950s was combined with North American jazz to create bossa nova, or “new beat” music. This in turn became popular in the USA, leading to a transformation of American popular music through the adoption of the samba-based “Latin beat” in a wide range of otherwise dissimilar genres. Slower in tempo than earlier rock and roll but with the fastest notes dividing the beat into four instead of two, the Latin beat remains prevalent in many forms of popular music. Thus Latin America is revealed as another important root of the music tree, one that itself branches out to Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America as well as indigenous South American cultures.

While sharing some of its history and culture with continental Latin America, the Caribbean island chain stands out as an area that has been extraordinarily influential in music relative to its size. Trinidad produced calypso and the steel band, Jamaica gave the world reggae, and Cuba generated a succession of international dance crazes starting with the habanera in the nineteenth century and extending through the son, rumba, and cha cha cha, while salsa music emerged from a nexus of Caribbean culture circulating around Cuba, Puerto Rico, and immigrants in New York. This chapter considers the cultural and historical conditions that made the Caribbean such a powerhouse of popular music styles, primarily (once more) through its particular mixes of European, African, and American influences. It shows how some of these styles exploit the possibilities of the “Latin beat” (including the famous clave pattern) to produce a music of compelling rhythmic complexity, and thus extends our range of concepts for understanding and describing musical rhythm. Finally, we look at the role that music and musicians from the Caribbean played in the formation of American rap and hip hop.

Having covered all the main roots of the American music tree, we now turn to the trunk and branches. American popular music is discussed as a distinctive cultural phenomenon in itself, describing it from an outsider’s perspective (as we have done for other cultures discussed in this book) to show how things that insiders tend to take for granted are actually the product of a specific culture and history. For all its diversity of styles, in comparison with other musical cultures of the world the American popular music culture is shown to be founded on a relatively unified set of musical practices and principles. In summarizing what these are, we reinforce the knowledge of musical terms and concepts that has been built up through previous chapters and pave the way for exploring different musical principles in the rest of the book. We also examine how American popular music has come to be globalized as a shared musical “language” that is understood around the world and spoken with a fascinating variety of local “dialects,” some of which are discussed in later chapters.

A series of chapters on Asian cultures is introduced, once more, through music that will already be familiar to many readers. In this case, our point of entry comes from the Beatles’ song “Love You To,” which uses not just the instruments sitar and tabla but many structural elements of Indian classical music as well. These elements are then studied in their original context, exploring the workings of rag and tal in a way that builds on the earlier discussion of melodic and rhythmic modes in Middle Eastern music. A new theme emerges in the use of the drone, for although drones are present in some musical cultures discussed already (for instance in the bagpipes of Europe), it is arguably in Indian classical music that the drone principle has been exploited most fully, and it was through the exposure of that music to the West in the 1960s that drones became a common device in some kinds of popular music and film scoring. India’s international influence also includes the prestige of North Indian classical music as a high-status tradition in nearby countries like Afghanistan, the spread of “Bollywood” film music to many parts of Asia, and the development of the bhangra genre by South Asians living in the UK. On the other hand, the Indian tradition itself has been partly built on imported elements: to speak only of instruments, the sitar and tabla have ancestors in West Asia while the harmonium, a common instrument for accompanying singers, was derived from European models. Thus, India can be seen as a separate “music tree” with roots and branches of its own, one that has grown more or less independently of the American popular music tree discussed earlier. The same is true of China, as we discover next.

Our entry point to the music of East Asia may seem an unlikely one: the harmonica, which many readers will associate with blues or Bob Dylan. The harmonica is introduced as an example of a family of instruments called “free-reed aerophones” which also includes the harmonium and a wide variety of accordion-type instruments. Free-reed aerophones were taken to the Americas from Europe, where they played an important role in folk music, and the harmonium was also taken to India as we saw in the last chapter, but Europe itself learned the free-reed principle from China in the nineteenth century. After tracing the instrument back to its source, we see how some Chinese musicians in recent times have adopted the Western harmonica and developed a unique and virtuosic music of their own for it. We then use the Chinese free-reed mouth organ as a starting point for exploring traditional Chinese music, including instrumental ensembles, the meditative solo music of the qin zither, and China’s highly developed traditions of musical theater. We note that a feature common to most Chinese music, the “pentatonic” or five-note scale, was long unrecognized by Western scholars (although it was common in European folk music too) because of their ethnocentric preconception that scales must have seven notes. We see how China historically formed another “music tree,” drawing on roots in outlying areas and spreading its branches over neighboring countries like Korea and Japan. These countries are briefly surveyed to reveal how the Chinese influence mainly affected the culture of social elites (for East Asia, like Europe and India, had a stratified social system) while the common people maintained local forms that were often strikingly different. East Asia, like Europe, has a rich historical record including a long history of written music, and claims some of the world’s oldest surviving musical traditions, though in both places we find that these traditions have often been “re-invented” for modern purposes. Also with reference to modern times, we consider how East Asia, once an object of exoticism in Western operas and musicals, has become a new home for Western classical music and also a front-runner in the technologization of popular music through Japanese “noise” music, karaoke, and Vocaloid software.

The theme of Western classical music’s connections with Asia is further explored through the case of the Javanese gamelan orchestra that performed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, inspiring some European composers to write pieces modeled on gamelan textures and scales. Debussy’s piano piece Voiles (Veils) is examined for its use of both pentatonic and “whole-tone” scales, which, taken together, might suggest the Javanese scale slendro with its five roughly equal intervals. Since “equidistant” scales, in which all the intervals are the same size (including the whole-tone scale and the “chromatic” scale of twelve semitones) can have no clear tonal center, the gamelan influence is thus seen to have contributed to the shift in twentieth-century classical music away from functional harmony to the composition of “atonal” music. Gamelan music is then studied in its home context, including its role in a distinctive form of musical theater, wayang kulit shadow puppetry. The Javanese gamelan is briefly compared with other forms of gamelan and other music based on similar principles from different parts of Indonesia, notably Balinese gamelan gong kebyar and the so-called “monkey chant” kecak. The fact that the stories presented in wayang kulit and kecak come from Hindu epics, while Indonesia has a Muslim majority, reflects successive waves of cultural influence from South Asia, yet the musical techniques are uniquely Southeast Asian. The comparison is then extended to other parts of Southeast Asia, such as Thailand and Vietnam, where some similar principles are found (including equidistant scales) while connections to the Chinese cultural sphere are reflected for instance in the use of free-reed mouth organs. The cultural character of Southeast Asia as a meeting place of diverse local and foreign elements is finally stressed by considering some effects of European colonization and the evidence of remote historical connections between Indonesia and distant East Africa, where some similar instruments are found.

In contrast to the far-flung cultural connections of Southeast Asia and the advanced technology required to produce the precisely-tuned metallic instruments of the gamelan, indigenous peoples around the world are often regarded as culturally isolated and technologically simple. This stereotype is dispelled by considering how popular music styles like country and rap have been embraced by Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals, in each case adapting the style to suit their own concerns and identities. Thus we raise a general theme that is crucial for understanding today’s musical world: because the music people value is that which best expresses their sense of who they are, and because people around the world increasingly see themselves as modern and connected to international currents while still rooted in distinctive locales and communities, the music that is more and more in demand is music with both modern (international) and traditional (local) elements. And because these identities are constantly changing, new forms of music are constantly being created to express them, contrary to long-held fears of cultural homogenization. Returning to particular cases, the older elements in the current musical cultures of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals are traced back as far as possible to what they might have been before contact with Europeans, revealing in particular how these musical cultures were related to their living environments and subsistence patterns. Extending that process, we consider whether the music of societies that do remain relatively isolated and technologically simple, for instance in the Amazon rainforest and Papua New Guinea, might have anything to tell us about what the earliest human music was like, on the archaeological principle of “ethnographic analogy.” But we find that even the remotest societies have some music in their repertoire that they recognize as having come from other groups, and the likelihood is that no human society has ever formed an isolated “music culture” like those imagined by some Western writers.

We round off the story by returning to Africa, extending the earlier coverage of West Africa and Angola to other parts of the continent where similar general principles appear in differing local guises. The polyrhythms and other features that help make Sub-Saharan African music “participatory” are encountered again, but in central and southern Africa we find more of an emphasis on harmony, which historically made these cultures receptive to the European harmonies brought by Christian missionaries. This is illustrated through the well-known vocal harmony of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which belongs to the isicathamiya genre from apartheid South Africa. Although the particular chords used in isicathamiya obviously came from European functional harmony, we discover that the general idea of harmonic combination, and even the characteristic structure of a repeating sequence of four chords, was already present in the home-grown music and also in the mbira music of neighboring Zimbabwe. By studying these styles, we learn that the European system of harmony is not the only one, and that even where European chords are used (for instance in blues) they may not be functioning in the European way. We next turn to African popular music, initially through the chimurenga music of Thomas Mapfumo, who adapted the textures and harmonies of mbira music to a modern guitar-based band to create a music that expressed a modern Zimbabwean identity. In similar ways, we find new genres emerging in other parts of Africa where musicians have plucked the fruit from the branches of the American music tree and planted the seeds in their own home ground to cultivate new growths that belong to a common species but are shaped by local nutrients, conditions, and grafting techniques into a crop that meets local needs while also offering something unique to the world. If we had the time and space, we could explore countless examples of the same process worldwide, as musicians learn to speak the global “language” of American-based popular music with local “accents” that express local identities, generating new forms of music that are always fresh and vibrant because they embody people’s sense of who they are today. But that could easily fill another whole book as big as this one. Instead, we keep the focus on Africa, noting how the continent has received a constant influx of American and especially African American popular music ever since the days of slavery, yet in its own popular music (except when directly modeled on African American styles like gospel) it has not on the whole adopted a feature that we began by describing as one of the most pervasive in the American music tree: the backbeat. Bringing the story back to where it started, we remember that the backbeat arose as an African American response to a European rhythmic framework, and conclude that it may have been unnecessary in African popular music because the European framework has not become dominant there—perhaps an emblem of hope for the continuing diversity and self-determination of the world’s musical cultures.

While the story of the world’s music continues to unfold and does not admit of a “conclusion,” we end with some general observations on what we have learned about the big questions of human musicality. Is there, after all, a thing called “music” that we can say is common to all humanity? If there is, why do all human societies seem to need it? What aspects of it are the same or similar in all its manifestations, and how different can it be before it ceases to be music? Do similarities necessarily reflect historical influences, or could different peoples have come up with the same musical ideas independently? Ultimately, why do particular people and groups have the particular forms of music that they do? Such questions may never be answered definitively, but what I hope the story told in this book has shown is that cross-cultural influences in music are nothing new, that “world music” is not just the music of other cultures, and that whatever music we know and love today is in a real sense an outgrowth of all the world’s music.