From the archives: Authenticity, tradition, and the music of the world: Giving audiences what they don’t want

There is a bit of an ongoing debate about “world music” and whether or not it is obsolete as a term or a concept. Let me clue you in: it's not obsolete. It was never valid.

What kind of music is NOT world music? Take rock and roll. The guitar is a Spanish instrument, the rhythms are from Africa and the words and melodies are largely derived from British Isles folk music. Or jazz. John Coltrane was a man of African origin blowing on an instrument invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax and playing melodies he learned from the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar. The boundaries between musical cultures are fluid in the extreme, and great musicians have never acknowledged them. Like sex or food, you can't contain them even if you try. Unlike jazz (which is a word that means sex) or rock and roll (which is a term that means, well, sex), world music is meaningless. Nevertheless, the great jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman said, "World music is the new pop music." I won't even begin to try and define a meaningless term, because I hate defining the undefinable. But it is true that what people call world music is a big part of the present and future of music. 


Maybe part of the problem with the world music idea is that people in the west frequently define world music as music of the other. Other countries, other languages, other musical scales, whatever. I find this kind of thinking backwards. Take the musical scales for example. The western twelve note equal tempered scale is NOT a natural scale. Nature and the human ear do not divide the octave into twelve equal parts. But because of the hegemony of first the piano and more recently electronic keyboards this scale has become accepted as the norm. In fact the western scale has eroded music all over the world (so much for world music). To regard the musical scales of other cultures as exotic or bizarre when they are actually just natural is the result of ignorance.


“Roots music” is a similar, related misnomer. My roots are in punk music. That comes naturally to me. The modern hip-hop artist regards “old school” rap as roots. A death metal musician may consider Black Sabbath roots music. But people use the term roots music to indicate bluegrass, reggae, banging on djembes and blowing didgeridoos, something that's probably not really the musician’s roots unless they’re hillbillies, Jamaicans, Africans or Aboriginal. Music is a both a continuum and a pendulum. It is always moving, at the same time it is always swinging back and forth. This is why there are regular musical movements gravitating towards what they think of as roots. 


But as much as I hate categorising music, if terms like roots or world music give more people a seat at the table and the ability to bypass the gatekeepers, I’m all for it. What becomes a bit more problematic for me is when people attempt to police those categories. I’ve heard much talk about terms like ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ in world music. These are concepts I have thought about at length, but the more I look at it the more confusing it gets. To give a specific example, I work in many musical frameworks but I have been a long time practitioner of both American music and traditional Japanese music. When we are making music we can only express ourselves with the musical vocabulary we possess. When we study Japanese music the goal is to sound exactly like the teacher. That's the tradition. On the other hand in rock music, I would not be standing here talking to you right now if I sounded exactly like someone else. I would be playing in a cover band. The tradition in rock music is to find your own voice. When I studied Japanese music, I had to learn about 50 folk songs, 50 of the Zen meditation pieces, and 50 ensemble pieces. I also had to learn Japanese notation, which is calligraphy, and how to read the music upside down because when we teach, the student and teacher face each other with the notation between us. After seven years of playing only traditional Japanese music I was given the name Tairaku (which means "Big Music") and the obligation to teach. Here is another difference in mindset between Japanese and Western music. In Japanese music we must teach. If a conductor or composer is the pinnacle of Western music, in Japanese and many other Asian traditions the teacher is the pinnacle. Whereas in the West we have cruel expressions like, "Those who can't do, teach." 

People often tie racial identity into these cultural mindsets as well, a linkage I reject. Here’s an example from my own teaching practice to show the absurdity and profundity of this topic. There is a Japanese sushi chef in Tasmania where I live named Masaaki. I have a Japanese-style teahouse in Hobart called Chado and he hangs out there. I frequently play shakuhachi (bamboo end-blown flute) at Chado, so Masaaki had the opportunity to hear it. One day Masaaki came into the teahouse with a shakuhachi and said, “I want to take lessons.” He had gone back to Japan for a visit. Hearing me play shakuhachi rekindled memories of his grandfather, who had a shakuhachi in the house. Masaaki found it and went to a local teacher for a few lessons. Here's where it gets complicated. There's a great shakuhachi player in Australia named Riley Lee. He is an American who's been teaching here for several decades. The teacher Masaaki located in Japan had learned shakuhachi from Riley. So an American guy living in Australia taught a Japanese guy, who then starts another Japanese guy, who in turn goes back to Australia to study with yet another American guy living in Australia. This is the way the modern world works, and it forces us to re-examine our assumptions about tradition and authenticity. 

And yet, we need balance in our approach to the topic of authenticity. While the musical world is fluid and constantly changing, the purpose filled by tradition, by the specifics of a given musical vocabulary—that purpose can matter a great deal. Although I originally intended to play only traditional music on the shakuhachi, my personality eventually came through and I started to play jazz, blues and improvised music on the bamboo. However, I was recently reminded of the importance of tradition in a devastating way. A master of the Japanese Urasenke tea ceremony called me and said he was doing a unique ceremony and asked me to accompany him on shakuhachi. It was a memorial ceremony for an infant who died after living for only six days. We went to the home of the bereaved couple. We set up the room with tatami mats and an altar upon which was placed a photo of the baby. The tea master prepared the first bowl of matcha, powdered green tea, and placed it on the altar. The second and third bowls were offered to mother and father. All the while I was playing very austere Zen memorial pieces in the ancient style. It was one of the most powerful performing experiences in my life. At that moment I was happy that the tea master and I had the training to embody these traditions, because nothing else would have sufficed. 

At MONA FOMA (Museum of Old and New Art Festival of Music and Art), we are heading into our fifth year. The fourth edition of MONA FOMA (or MOFO as it is affectionately known) won the coveted Helpmann Award for Best Contemporary Music Festival. We've featured big name acts ranging from rockers Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to PJ Harvey, David Byrne, composers such as Philip Glass and John Cale, international visual artists like Christian Boltanski and Ryoji Ikeda. I guess we could be considered in part a world music festival because we've had artists from every continent, including Antarctica. MOFO have featured artists I've discovered playing on the streets. We've had a bike race where all the bicycles were kitted out as musical instruments. We've even featured performers that are not human, such as 30 finches playing prepared electric guitars in an installation and a pipe organ driven by the waves of the Derwent River. I choose artists and projects based on my gut feelings, instincts and desires. Fame, age, gender, race, religion, genre—these are things that don't enter my mind when choosing what goes into MOFO. Thus MOFO runs the gamut from opera to hip-hop, jazz, improvised music, sound art installations, pipe organ, spoken word with musical accompaniment, dance (always with strong sonic element) and onwards.

Curated festivals—such as the Calgary Folk Music Festival—are more unique and creative than those run by repeating formulas or through a committee process. I'm into breaking away from predictable expectations when possible. One idea I think should be consigned to the dustbin is 'Themes'. A lot of people think they need to 'understand' art. Hence a great deal of explanatory text in museums and critical review in all art forms. The idea that an audience can come to some sort of objective consensus on any performance or work is the antithesis of creativity. As soon as you tell the audience what they are supposed to see in the work, you erode their ability to experience it with a beginner's mind. We have themes within the festival and other recurrent themes which run on from one edition of the festival to another. But I prefer the audience discover it for themselves. This creates space for personal discovery. Another convention we avoid is grouping similar performers together. It may be commercial to stick a pile of similar bands on a stage and wait for the kids to show up. But it's materialistic. It reduces art to a product. The longer I create, the more I think in terms of process, rather than product. People respond more to the commitment an artist brings to their work than to superficial aspects like style or form. The journey is more important than the destination. More and more festivals are embracing this philosophy. Ironically, building a long-term audience requires giving people what they DON'T want. When you take an audience on a trip that is unpredictable, blow their minds, make them part of an adventure and then deposit them back to reality a bit more experienced and enlightened, you have a convert rather than a ticket holder.

Brian Ritchie started out as an acoustic punk rock busker on the streets of Milwaukee. He spent quite a bit of time being a rock star with the Violent Femmes. Now he is the curator at the southern hemisphere's largest private art gallery (the Museum of Old and New Art), artistic director of a crazy music and art festival (MONA FOMA), and licensed teacher and performer of Japanese traditional music. He performs music in a variety of settings, most of which never occurred to him as possibilities when he was growing up in the intellectual wasteland of the Midwestern United States.

Photos by Jarrett Edmund