Christopher Shat

tarbucks plays it. Journalists write about it. They even give out a Grammy for it, but no matter how many times The New York Times mentions it, “traditional world music” will never be a real genre. It is merely a catch-all term for any music that does not fit Western musical norms and represents one way the music business and media mark the diverse set of “world” music artists as different from the West. Even though “world” music can be a platform for groups to express themselves, Western audiences often fail to question the music industry's representations of the musicians of this genre. Despite its focus on the Western world, the Core class Masterpieces of Western Music has the ability to provide the listening tools and critical skills for students to hear past the din of Western critics and the spin of the music industry. The excellent new album Savane, by the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, demonstrates how music can be used to bring attention to neglected areas of the world, but only if one is critical of the media portrayal of a region and an artist.

Ali Farka Touré died in March of this year, and his posthumous album, Savane, was released July 25th to rave reviews. With a gruff voice and a twangy guitar, The Village Voice compared Touré to Albert King, and The Guardian likened him to John Lee Hooker. The album cover even asserts that Touré is the “King of the Desert Blues Singers.” These reviewers who see Touré's work through American notions of the blues project a Western view onto his music that is not attuned to Touré's own perspective. Touré himself rejected the idea that he was merely an “African bluesman.” In an interview with Acoustic Guitar, Touré proclaimed, “I say the word 'blues' means nothing to me. I do not know blues; I know the African tradition. The music that you call blues, I can call by its proper name. I can call it agnani, I can call it djaba.” Instead of following in the traditions of American blues, Touré sings in the various musical traditions of northern Mali, and it is American blues that has grown out of Malian music.

The exact process that produced the blues is difficult to reconstruct exactly, because the blues and other newer genres like hip-hop and reggae have returned to Africa and cross-fertilized with more traditional forms of Malian music. However, the connections between many of the local styles of northern Mali and the blues are unmistakable. Taken together, the fact that many types of Malian music and early American blues use microtonal singing, emphasize melodic lines with little harmony, often use the pentatonic scale, and frequently employ 12/8 time strongly suggests a link between the two forms of music. One of Touré's central goals was to shed light on how, through cultural diffusion, Malian music has influenced musical culture across the world.

ven if neither American blues nor any Malian musical genres are on the Music Humanities syllabus, the class can provide the tools to listen critically to non-Western music as well. Mark Burford, a former Music Humanities instructor at Columbia, points to three primary ways in which the class is taught: “Some teachers want students to gain familiarity with repertory and stylistic history; some want their students to develop listening skills that can be brought to various styles of music, and others emphasize the connections between music, intellectual history, and culture.” The latter two methods clearly provide a more useful approach to understanding music like Touré's that lies outside of the Music Hum curriculum. Music Hum does not have to be about memorization; it can be an opportunity to reveal different cultural relationships to music and of new ways of listening to music. The chronological nature of the course allows students to see how the character and purposes of music are related to their cultural contexts and how these relationships between culture and music change over time. This insight into the dynamic nature of music underscores how the significance of musical elements can change but also how aspects of musical continuity are also maintained. Learning to hear differences and continuities in music is an integral part of Music Hum and helps one hear the connections between “world” music and Western music.

n Touré's case instead of highlighting how indebted certain forms Western music are to Malian music and rendering his music more familiar to a Western audience, critics regularly emphasize the aspects that make him and his music more alien. Ben Sisario of The New York Times wrote that Touré's record label consciously portrayed Savane and another posthumous album of Touré's, Boulevard de l'Indépendance, to fit a certain storyline by inventing a brand name for the pair, The Hôtel Mandé Sessions, which “conjures a romantic exoticism and emphasizes a back story that is not easily forgettable.” In this case, Savane has been spun as the recording of a wise African musician's final prophetic thoughts, the last masterwork of a self-taught guitar savant from Timbuktu. It is often mentioned that Touré was born into a noble family that discouraged his pursuit of music, and he spurned tradition by learning to play music by listening to spirit ceremonies. Another story that is oft repeated is that after a snake curled around his head at young age, people believed he could communicate with spirits. The significance of this event is rarely elaborated; it is merely inserted into his storyline as if to underscore his 'African-ness.' It is a marketing strategy that exoticizes Touré and establishes his “authenticity” to Western consumers, as if his old age and upbringing in Timbuktu inherently made him more real, more soulful, and more African.

n the one hand, releasing a “world” music album gives musicians the power to engage with a larger audience. For Touré, it allowed him to try to bring attention to the influence of traditional Malian music on various Western forms of music. However, the structures of capitalism and the music industry still contain unequal power relations that leave “world” artists vulnerable to recontextualization. Music can be used effectively to broadcast cultural and political messages to the world, but only to the extent to which artists are able to define their art and themselves. By making Touré's life seem more mysterious and unfamiliar, the music industry has made Savane more appealing to a Western audience. This led to critics naively mapping Western obsessions like a fixation on authenticity onto the practices of a non-Western artist and shifted the focus away from the music's more challenging features. Like many “world” music albums, Savane is being marketed to Westerners who want to validate their own sense cross-cultural awareness by consuming a product that is considered exotic. Ultimately, the complexity and richness of northern Mali is lost from the storyline.

However, learning listening skills demystifies the music and helps a person shuck Western assumptions of the exotic nature of “world” music. Thinking of people as exotic acts to distance a group from the self and all too often allows for exploitation and appropriation into a totalizing narrative. David Byrne, who started a “world” music record label Luaka Bop (though he abhors the term “world” music), wrote in The New York Times, “The fact is, after listening to some of this music for a while, it probably won't seem exotic any more & Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture  its music, for instance  you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself.” Learning to truly listen and leaving one's self open to be emotionally affected allows a person to move past the music industry's narrow constructions of different cultures. Touré himself said to Acoustic Guitar that his music contained “messages that one must bring to people, so that they can remain on the right road.” Without questioning the dominant representations of “world” music, the messages that artists try to communicate will be lost.