World Music article
World Music Subgenres, Explained
The category of world music contains an almost unlimited variety of regional styles, making meaningful world music sub-categorisation genuinely difficult. Any framework is a simplification. What follows groups traditions by broad geographic and stylistic family in a way that is practically useful for a listener who wants to explore more specifically once they have found a sound they respond to. None of the groups below is a fixed world music genre with a rulebook; each is a cluster of related traditions with shared instruments, rhythms, languages or histories.
West African Traditions
The music of the Sahel and sub-Saharan West Africa encompasses an enormous range: the griot praise-singing traditions of Senegal, Mali and Guinea; the kora (a 21-string lute-harp) music of the Mande people; the high-life guitar styles of Ghana and Nigeria; the Afrobeat fusion created by Fela Kuti in Lagos during the 1970s; the desert blues of the Tuareg people, as documented by Tinariwen; and the mbalax dance music of Dakar. Despite their differences, these styles often share pentatonic modal scales, cyclical rhythmic structures and call-and-response vocal techniques.
Latin American and Caribbean Styles
Cuban son, salsa, cumbia, bossa nova, samba, tango and the many regional variants of Andean folk music represent a family of traditions linked by colonial Spanish and Portuguese heritage, African rhythmic influences from the slave trade and indigenous musical practices. Son cubano — a blend of Spanish guitar song forms and African percussion — gave rise to salsa and much of the Cuban popular music that reached international audiences through the Buena Vista Social Club project. Brazilian bossa nova developed from a fusion of samba rhythm with jazz harmony in the late 1950s.
South Asian Classical and Folk Traditions
Indian classical music — both the Hindustani tradition of the north and the Carnatic tradition of the south — is among the most theoretically developed musical systems in the world, based on the concepts of raga (melodic mode) and tala (rhythmic cycle). Pakistani qawwali, the devotional Sufi music most internationally associated with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, uses a related but distinct aesthetic. Bhangra, originally a Punjabi harvest celebration music, has been widely hybridised with Western electronic production and has become an internationally recognised style in its own right.
Celtic and European Folk
The folk traditions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany and Galicia represent a distinct world music family sharing certain instrument families — fiddle, uilleann pipes, bodhrán, tin whistle and variants of bagpipe — and modal scale preferences that distinguish them from mainstream Western pop. These styles have arguably been accessible to UK listeners longer than most other non-Anglo-American traditions; artists including Planxty, The Chieftains and Altan introduced Irish traditional music to broad audiences from the 1970s onwards. For more on specific artists across all these traditions, the artists guide provides detail.
Comments