The term 'world music' encompasses both folk and popular music across
the globe, as well as the sounds of cultural encounter and diversity,
sacred voices raised in worship, local sounds, and universal values. It
emerged as an invention of the West from encounters with other cultures,
and holds the power to evoke the exotic and give voice to the voiceless.
Today, in both sound and material it has a greater presence in human
societies than ever before. The politics of which world music are a
part - globalization, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism - play an
increasingly direct role in societies throughout the world, but are at
the same time also becoming increasingly controversial.
In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction, Philip Bohlman
considers questions of meaning and technology in world music, and
responds to the dramatically changing political world in which people
produce and listen to world music. He also addresses the different ways
in which world music is created, disseminated, and consumed, as the full
reach of the internet and technologies that store and spread music
through the exchange of data files spark a revolution in the production
and availability of world music. Finally, Bohlman revises the way we
think of the musician, as an increasingly mobile individual, sometimes
because physical borders have fallen away, at other times because they
are closing.
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