World Music Traditions

World music encompasses the vast diversity of musical traditions outside the Western classical and pop mainstream — gamelan (Indonesian bronze percussion orchestras with interlocking rhythmic patterns up to 10 simultaneous parts), West African griot tradition (hereditary musician-historians who preserve oral history through song), Carnatic music (South Indian classical with intricate rhythmic cycles and improvisation), Andean panpipes (siku), Middle Eastern maqam (modal scales with quarter-tone intervals), Balkan brass, Celtic music, flamenco, blues (African American Southern tradition that became the foundation of rock, jazz, and soul), and hundreds more. The 'world music' label (coined by Western record industry in 1987) is itself controversial — grouping together enormously diverse traditions under a marketing umbrella that implicitly centers Western music as the default. Paul Simon's Graceland (1986, using South African mbaqanga and isicathamiya music) and Peter Gabriel's WOMAD festival have introduced global audiences to non-Western traditions — sometimes enabling cultural appreciation, sometimes criticized as cultural appropriation. The blues is the most globally influential non-Western tradition: its structure (12-bar blues, blue notes, call-and-response) underlies jazz, rock, R&B, soul, and most contemporary popular music.