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Essays page
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Ethnic music, Folk music and World music in general
I HATE world music. That's probably one of the perverse reasons
I have been asked to write about it. The term is a catchall that commonly
refers to non-Western music of any and all sorts, popular music, traditional
music and even classical music. It's a marketing as well as a pseudomusical
term -- and a name for a bin in the record store signifying stuff that
doesn't belong anywhere else in the store....
So Why Am I Complaining? In my experience, the use of the term
world music is a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant
to one's own life. It's a way of relegating this "thing" into the realm
of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica
is beautiful but irrelevant; they are, by definition, not like us.
Styles
On October 19, 2000, Heiko Lehmann held a lecture on "Klezmer in Germany/Germans
and Klezmer: Reparation or Contribution" at WOMEX in Berlin, House of World
Cultures. Here is the complete script:
June 1990. Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda Street. I am in Israel for the first
time. It's one month before the German currency was unified, the band is
broke and we are busking. A huge crowd gathers, big applause after every
tune. When we finish our set a young man throws a coin into the violin
case and asks me, "Where are you from?" "Berlin," I answer, and the young
man looks at me doubtfully. "Berlin? Germany?" I nod and he asks, "Are
you guys Jewish?" "None of us, we are Germans," I say. The young man is
in despair and after a while he asks, "Can I take my money back?" I nod
and he takes a coin out of the violin case....
Lehmann is a member of the German Klezmer trio Sukke.