World Music or Regionality? A Fundamental Question for Music Historiography

The term “world music” is still relatively new. It came into use around the end of the twentieth century and denotes a new musical genre, one which links European-American pop music to folk and non-European music cultures. It can be seen in a larger context as a phenomenon of postmodernism in that the challenge to the strict laws and boundaries of modernism allowed for a connection between regionality and global meaning to be established. Music in the German-speaking world had previously been strictly divided into the categories of “entertainment music” (U-Musik) and “serious music” (E-Musik), the latter functioning as art-religion in the framework of modernism and thus adhering to its principles. Once these principles of modernism became more uncertain, this rigorous divide began to dissolve. For example, the “serious music” broadcast consisting of classical music, previously a staple of public radio, gradually disappeared as an institution from radio programming. A colourful mixture of various low-key, popular music was combined with shorter classical pieces, so that the phenomenon known as “crossover”, a familiar term in popular music since the middle of the twentieth century, then spread to the realm of classical music. This situation differs fundamentally from the circumstances that once dominated the public consciousness from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century and that indeed remain influential in certain parts of the population to this day. Historical-critical musicology must adapt to this transformed state of consciousness. Doing so will allow for a number of promising perspectives to unfold.