The Processes and Results of Musical Culture Contact: A Discussion of Terminology and Concepts

With some recent exceptions, Western writers on have tended to disapprove of musics of mixed Western and non-Western descent, ignoring or dismissing them as objects unworthy of attention. 1 Some Western scholars during first half of this century began to overcome some of ethnocentric musical prejudices held in their social environments, but mostly this was in regard to traditional non-Western musics that were not apparently influenced by West, for example, courtly musics of Southeast Asia. Although exact reasons for disapproval of musics of mixed Western and non-Western descent were not normally explained, vocabulary used by writers to describe them has generally implied that they lacked authenticity or were degenerate and oversentimental, having been influenced only by lowest forms of Western music. Thus, Powne (1968:vii-viii) referred to a debased or Westernized music in Ethopia, and Price (1930a: 16) to the slovenly and immoral called jazz, which he regarded as crude, negroid in form and vulgar (1930b:65). Even sensitive scholar Kunst referred to partially Western-derived genre of Indonesian kroncong as a monotonous and characterless wail (1949:4), listing it as one of causes why native art is either dying away or degenerating (ibid.) Some writers have indulged in a romantic zeal to save traditional everywhere from contamination that was often supposed to result from musical contact between West and non-West.