Exoticism Globalised: How 1840s Paris Launched World Music

Exoticism Globalised in a New Century: The Forgotten Roots of World Music

The so-called “Third World” has played a significant and often understated role in the development of the global music industry since the 1840s. Its impact has been more that of a cultural and spiritual donor than a commercial exporter benefiting from products originating from strongly developing economies.

Historians such as Lord Briggs have argued persuasively that all the great cultural movements and most remarkable technological innovations of the twentieth century and beyond have their roots firmly planted in the nineteenth century. This argument seems to be supported by the relatively recent phenomenon of World Music.

To verify this argument, we must look back to the beginning of the “modern period”—an age when railways and steamships were opening up the world to trade, mass travel, and tourism for the first time. A time-traveller visiting 1844 might be struck by the novel sounds that were catching the public's imagination. Sitting in a Paris concert hall that year, you might have heard a completely new and foreign kind of music that soon became immensely popular and made its composer famous overnight.

The work that caused this sensation was Félicien David's Desert Symphony, inspired by the composer's tour of the Middle East in 1833–35 and incorporating the call of the muezzin. When the Desert Symphony premiered in 1844, it was believed to be the first time non-Christian religious music had ever been heard on the Paris stage. Although forgotten today, David's work illustrates the tremendous vogue for exotic music that began in the 1840s, reached its peak in the 1890s, and was revived in a different form at the end of the twentieth century as World Music.

Western European colonisation of many countries today referred to as the Third World, or developing countries, stimulated an interest in these lands' musical cultures. Western Europeans labelled all music outside their own limited fields of knowledge “exotic”—the term deriving from the Greek “exo,” meaning “outside.” In the nineteenth century, most exotic music was also called “oriental.” While China, Japan, and India are still seen as oriental, the term once covered vast tracts of the globe: all of the Middle East—especially the ancient Biblical lands—the Near East (including Turkey and Greece), North Africa, Spain, and other countries subject to Islamic influence, including parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, among many other regions.

Ever since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, scholars had been researching Oriental languages, customs, and music extensively. Napoleon's team of artists and scholars documented the precise sort of instruments that intrigued them and that David later imitated in his Desert Symphony. The orchestral textures David created had a tremendous impact, influencing French and Russian colourist composers for years to come.

Western composers were fascinated not only by modern Oriental instruments but also by Ancient Eastern instruments recovered from Egyptian tombs. This influence can be heard in works such as Hector Berlioz's “Dance of the Nubian Slaves” from his opera Les Troyens (The Trojans) of 1863. In this exotic number, Berlioz calls for antique cymbals and a “tarbuka” drum onstage while four Nubian slaves sing in an “Oriental” language Berlioz invented himself.

That Berlioz could fabricate an Oriental language reveals just how fantastical and semi-imaginary a place the East was held to be by the European public in the nineteenth century. Later operas inspired by exotic Eastern sounds include Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah (1877), Massenet's Hérodiade (1881), and Delibes' Indian-inspired Lakmé (1888).

This great vogue for exotic music by Western industrialised nations can be interpreted as part of a general cultural “plunder” that occurred in the nineteenth century—an age of increasing trade and colonisation. The trading strength of the East India Company ultimately led Britain to assume complete control over India. Interestingly, European commentators in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Western culture as bloated but decaying, like a great supernova needing renewal and inspiration from more “primitive” or “underdeveloped” Oriental cultures. The West looked to the East—to the exotic lands where life began—to renew its spiritual life, which was supposedly being sapped by rampant commerce and capitalism. Commentators such as Oswald Spengler saw the early twentieth century as the era of the “Decline of the West.”

Ironically, the East was trading on its own decaying heritage. Western tourists bought any old pieces of the past, even as grim as the wares of bemused Egyptian salesmen who eagerly sold ancient mummies by the cartload.

By the 1930s, a new kind of enthusiasm for exotic music appeared in the vogue for jazz and dances such as the tango, showing the influence of North and South America respectively and heralding the rapidly increasing trading power of the “New World.” Improved travel and communications had shrunk the world considerably, and the colonial era was ending. Exotic music could no longer inspire in the same fantastical way. By the end of the twentieth century, realism rather than romanticism would triumph.

After the Second World War, with the coming of the Cold War, the world was divided and classified anew. In 1956, a French commentator first attempted to define the tiers monde, or “Third World.” The “First World” referred to the Western capitalist bloc, and the “Second World” to the Communist Soviet bloc. The “Third World” originally meant countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America aligned with neither the First nor Second Worlds, but this imprecise term soon took on economic rather than political connotations in the 1960s. Geographically, all of Africa, Asia, and Latin America were seen as Third World regions in the 1960s and 1970s, during which the term “developing countries” began to supersede “Third World.” Most developing countries still have virtually no industrial base, rely on commodities to generate foreign income, and are not far removed from their colonial past. Today, economists speak of OECD members as the First World, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as the Second World, and the Third World as comprising three sub-categories: upper-middle income countries such as Brazil, Malaysia, and Algeria; middle income countries such as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Bolivia; and low income countries such as China and India. A United Nations category of around 30 least developed countries is called the “Fourth World.”

Not all Third World economies have developed. Some remain stagnant, and some are even in decline, such as Somalia and Bangladesh. As other nations develop, the First World continues to develop faster, and such economic muscle gives it the power to influence and control the global music industry. The music industry is not truly global—the First World still produces and consumes much more than the Third World, particularly in recorded music. Aside from the recorded music industry, the First World dominates the concert industry, the musical instrument industry, the sheet music and text industries, and even the scholarly research industry.

In the late twentieth century, so-called “authentic” Eastern and exotic music came back into vogue in the West, partly through clever marketing and partly through a desire to embrace less familiar musical styles driven by a constant commercial hunger for new material. The Musicians of the Nile, recorded in the late 1980s on Peter Gabriel's Real World label, provide a fine example. The Real World series features music from Africa, North and South America, Asia, Oceania, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Indian Subcontinent. According to Peter Gabriel, its aim is “to record and promote a whole range of different artists, both traditional and modern, from around the world.” The growth of the Egyptian and other developing economies has little to do with stimulating such recording projects, their promotion, or their popularity. Once again, it is the West reaching out to draw inspiration from outside sources and profit commercially.

From David Fanshawe's seminal recording African Sanctus of 1972—when ethnomusicology was still a limited field—to Paul Simon's South African tour and hugely successful Graceland album of 1986, interest in music from around the globe has exploded. The Western world still acts as the greatest producer, promoter, and consumer of most of the world's commercial music performances and recordings. The Third World can only export the “raw materials” of its musical traditions in the new enthusiasm for World Music, while the industrialised nations continue to derive the greatest benefit and remuneration from this trade.

In rough figures, 80% of revenue from recorded music sales stays in the developed countries to which the Third World exports its musical raw materials. Approximately 12% goes to retailers, 14% in royalties and interest to First World companies, 13% in packaging materials, 11% in transport costs, with about 20% returning to the country of origin and mostly benefiting a select few—one continues to hope the musicians among them.

The global entertainment conglomerate AOL Time Warner owns the recording company featuring Djura, the Algerian singer who lives in exile in France after refusing to fulfil the traditional role of the Berber woman. Her music represents the perfect compromise between Eastern and Western styles, making it commercially saleable. Djura's musicians come from both North Africa and France, and her 1993 recording Voice of Silence forms part of a series entitled “Adventures in Afropea.” The overwhelming majority of successful record companies worldwide are either American or European, and even where manufacturing bases have shifted to Second and sometimes Third World countries—where low wages are paid—most income returns to the First World.

In recent years, the Western world has seized the opportunity to manufacture and sell mass-produced versions of traditional Eastern instruments, bringing once exotic and foreign instrumental sounds into the mainstream of Western music-making. The ancient Middle-Eastern goblet-shaped drum known as the darabuka is a prime example. First imitated by Félicien David in his Desert Symphony of 1844 and later by Berlioz in The Trojans (where the instrument is called a “tarbuka”), the darabuka was originally made from wood or clay with a goat or fish-skin head. Modern Western versions are often made of steel or copper with plastic heads.

The phenomenon of World Music seems to support the thesis that the roots of many of today's artistic trends—like trends in economics, politics, and technology—largely stem from nineteenth-century notions. The United States is the inheritor and debtor of all these traditions. America's great strength lies in its ability to export much of its recorded music for worldwide and domestic consumption, while other countries have relatively less success in exporting their musical products and deriving economic benefit. This pattern looks set to continue in the foreseeable future. The question remains: will a time come in this new century when a traditional artist from the developing world can dominate the global music market as a mainstream pop star can? At least one hurdle seems insurmountable. In marketing terms, artists today amount to much more than just their music. Without substantial further economic development in former Third World countries, music marketers are unlikely to be able to sell the artist's corresponding lifestyle alongside their music.