Appropriation (music) - History of Appropriation in Western Music

History of Appropriation in Western Music

Cultural appropriation in Western music as a cultural/economic phenomenon is inextricably linked with the invention of sound recording and the development of the international recording industry, but the background to its emergence covers the whole span of modern Western musical history, and what some analysts have deemed the digital revolution. This is particularly evident among indigenous peoples and their musical genres, such as the Urarina of Peruvian Amazonia who face many challenges in the face of globalization and the forces propelling cultural appropriation.

Since at least the Renaissance, musicians, composers, music publishers (and, in the 20th century, radio stations and recording companies) have been part of a wide-ranging and continuous process of cultural appropriation that developed in the wake of the European colonisation of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. In this process, styles, forms and influences from non-Western music—especially novel melodies, rhythmic patterns or harmonic structures—were discovered, appropriated, adapted and incorporated into mainstream Western popular music.

This appropriation process has a long history in European art music, which bears numerous traces of the adoption of fashionable European popular and folk dances into the classical genre. Dance styles like the allemande, the pavane, the galliard and the gavotte—often derived from popular folk dances—were just four among scores of "dance crazes" that swept the courts of Europe during the Renaissance and early Baroque,

However, by the time Bach and Händel were writing their great instrumental works during the late Baroque, the rhythms and timings of these dances had already been appropriated, formalised and incorporated into the structure of elite European 'art' music. This trend continued in 18th and 19th century with folk-dance crazes like the mazurka, the waltz and the polka.

One well-known example of cultural appropriation into the European classical music genre arose from the 18th century fad known as "Orientalism", in which music, architecture, costume and visual arts from "Oriental" cultures (including the Ottoman empire, India, China and Japan) became highly fashionable. One of the most enduring artifacts of this fad is the third movement of Mozart's popular Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331, known as the Rondo alla turca ("rondo in the Turkish style"). Another example is the enduringly popular Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera The Mikado, which grew out of the craze for all things Japanese that was prevalent in the 1870s and 1880s.

One of the earliest examples of crossover music is the music of French composer Claude Debussy. In 1889 the French government staged the great Paris Exposition, an event that was to have profound effects on many areas of Western art and music. Debussy visited the exposition and it was here that he first heard gamelan music performed by Sundanese musicians. He was transfixed by the hypnotic, layered sound of the gamelan orchestra and reportedly returned to the Dutch East Indies pavilion over several days to listen to the Indonesian musicians perform and to study the structure and tuning of this novel musical form. His exposure to gamelan music had a direct influence on the composition of his famous Nocturnes for orchestra.

In the case of Debussy, some of this long process of appropriation also had an educative effect, and by the 1960s Western audiences were beginning to move beyond the confines of the Western musical tradition and explore traditional music from other countries and continents. As Eurocentric cultural and social biases began to be broken down during the 1960s, music from other cultures gained increasingly broad acceptance.

The key factor in this transition was the invention of sound recording, but it was also greatly influenced by the wide-ranging program of collection of European traditional folk music by 19th and early 20th century European classical composers and musicologists. This process was, at first, simply one facet of the multifocal 19th century passion for collection and classification, but it was given greater impetus by the growing awareness that the devastating impact of Western urban-industrial culture was decimating traditional cultures.

This collection activity took on some aspects of a crusade, as musicologists raced to preserve vanishing musical artefacts before they were lost to history. This view was a key motivation for the ethnologists who collected and preserved examples of Australian Aboriginal music, since it was widely believed at the time that the Aboriginal "race" and Aboriginal culture would eventually die out.

Musicologists and leading composers like Antonín Dvořák, Zoltán Kodály, Béla Bartók and Percy Grainger made strenuous efforts to collect and record local forms of European folk music and folk song, and many folk music melodies and other musical features were absorbed into the mainstream classical tradition. A good example of this process was the enduringly popular suites of Hungarian dances by Dvořák and Johannes Brahms.

During the 19th century this collection program was necessarily restricted to the written notation of melodies, lyrics and arrangements, but it was transformed in the early 20th century by the invention of sound recording and the development of portable cylinder and disc recording equipment, enabling musicologists for the first time to capture this music in actual performance, and the new technology was eagerly adopted by musicologists in Europe and America.

This growing archive of "folkloric" recordings remained largely within the confines of academia until after World War II. But in America, these collection programs—notably those sponsored by the Library of Congress—were to have an immense influence on the development of the international popular music industry.

Folk-music collectors like the great Alan Lomax worked assiduously for decades to find and record examples of almost every facet of native American, African-American and European-American folk music, and the work of these many scholars, enthusiasts and collectors preserved the sound of many "folk" performers and thousands of hours of priceless song and music from the American folk music tradition.

This musicological program was again revolutionised in the early 1950s by the new technology of magnetic tape recording, which for the first time allowed music collectors to make very stable, long-duration, high-fidelity studio and field recordings. The concurrent introduction of the LP audio disc format, which could hold as much as thirty minutes of continuous music per side, allowed many such "folk music" recordings to be released into the consumer market for the first time.

The availability of high-quality portable tape recorders was the key innovation that led to the inception of the two keystone labels in the world music genre. Folkways Records' extensive archive of folk and indigenous music was launched in the 1950s. It was followed in 1967 by Elektra Records' influential Nonesuch Explorer Series.

These "folk" LPs—notably those of early 20th century blues music—were to bring about a radical change in the style and direction of late 20th century popular music. This process is exemplified by the huge directional change in rock music that came about when young British and American musicians (like Eric Clapton) heard the recordings of an obscure Mississippi blues musician called Robert Johnson.

Another fascinating aspect of the changes in the cultural appropriation process can be found on the music of Dvořák, which itself was greatly influenced by his collection and study of the folk music of his native Bohemia. In the 1892 Dvořák was invited to become the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City; the period he spent in America, and especially his exposure to native American and African-American music, led to the creation of his most famous and popular symphonic work, the Symphony No. 9, subtitled "From the New World".

This is arguably another very early example of the so-called crossover music genre, but interestingly, it also had an influence on the development of American popular music. Part of the symphony's enduring appeal is due to the nostalgic main melody in the second movement, which is said to have expressed Dvořák's homesickness for Bohemia. Remarkably, this melody was later appropriated into the formative bluegrass music genre as the basis for the song "Goin' Home" (attributed to William Arms Fisher); it soon became a bluegrass standard and was later adapted into a popular spiritual-style song.