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New Traditions Music
something of a manifesto
originally written in 1992 , Madison, WI
following a concept originally sketched in 1986
by Arthur Durkee
I coined the term “New Traditions” while producing and hosting
a weekly world music radio program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in
the early 1980s. I needed a term to describe the cross-cultural
musics I was encountering and broadcasting on a regular basis;
the term soon grew into a broad reference inclusive of everything
from new music created by contemporary musicians for traditional
instruments to “third stream” jazz to traditional musicians playing
their traditional musics on non-traditional instruments. As far
as I knew at the time, I had coined the term New Traditions myself;
since then, I have heard it used by people I do not know in contexts
other than my own, as well as in reference to cross-cultural music.
I suspect that this is one of those ideas whose “time has come,”
largely as a result of the increasing communications web that
spans the globe nowadays. I only gradually realized that New Traditions
could be a useful theoretical umbrella beneath which to group
many of the new hybrid musics appearing all over the world today
as a result of increasing cross-cultural contact and other factors
discussed below.
“New Traditions” describes music that crosses the traditional
boundaries of cultures and nations and links old elements in new
ways; or maintains traditional musical aesthetics while innovating
new techniques and new materials; or creates new music using traditional
materials and instruments. (Keeping in mind that a “tradition”
is sometimes only a theoretical construct existing in the minds
of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, while the reality is
much more fluid, this definition of “tradition” is biased towards
those styles and more-or-less coherent “common practices” with
the weight of some history behind them; this does not entirely
exclude self-conscious “art music,” however.) This process can
go far beyond the superficial borrowing of tunes, rhythms, and
styles that is sometimes associated with “Exoticism,” “Orientalism,”
“Post-Modernism,” or the like; it can become truly new music that
has grown beyond its original elements, becoming its own stylistically
coherent (new) tradition; it can take what is known and synergize
what is new, or until-now-unknown.
This process happened (and is still happening) with jazz in the
United States and Europe, and it has happened more than once;
it happened with some of the popular musics of West Africa that
have become internationally known via recordings (eg. juju, highlife,
etc.); it happened several times in the Carribean islands, as
descendants of African slaves blended what they ancestrally knew
with what they found in the New World (eg. calypso, reggae, etc.);
and it is happening now in several other world theatres, as more
and more people look to the international sphere of music-making.
There are several key factors involved in this process:
• the dissemination of foreign musics into new areas, first by
oral tradition, as music-making people migrate around the globe
as part of forced migrations (eg. slavery, bonded workforces,
transmigration) or voluntary emigration, often in search of a
better life than was possible at home. When people travel, they
take their cultures, and their musics, along with them. Changes
to a musical culture happen not only when there are individual
innovators, but through the processes of re-inventing and re-discovering,
as older people die and take parts of their knowledge with them;
or as someone forgets a part of the tradition, and must find something
to fill the gap; or through incomplete education. Part of the
tradition may be lost, and need to be re-created. Changes also
happen gradually over time inside an unbroken tradition, as part
of a slow process of evolution and/or growth.
• the modern recording industry, which is dominated by international
conglomerate corporations, and related commercial factors. (As
an example of this trend, CBS Records, which was the last of the
large domestically-owned U.S. record labels, has recently been
sold to Sony in Japan. This includes interests in subsidiary labels
in several different countries.) There are also the smaller, independently-owned
and operated recording companies, which are often responsible
for important initial creative innovations, and the dissemination
of unusual and hard-to-find musics that “no one else would put
out on recording.” Along with the export of recorded music and
the export of culture–a process often negatively described as
“cultural imperialism” or “cultural colonialism” (see below)–there
is the import of recorded music; an adventurous musician who hears
something he or she likes may find it working its way into his
or her own musical practice.
• thus exist the cheap availibility of recordings of international
musics, often to be found in the “foreign” or “international”
bins of your local record stores.
• the world-wide exportation of Euro-American popular culture
(i.e. “cultural colonization”) to the rest of the world, especially
the developing or “third” world. This particular trend prompts
a diatribe on ethnocentricity, cultural imperialism, and knee-jerk
liberalism–which I will postpone for another time.
• and, lastly and most importantly to the issue at hand, the
growing inter-linking and inter-dependency of the world–and the
accompanying growth in the awareness of interdependency that follows–via
television, radio, the recorded media, and the growing ease of
international travel. It is becoming ever easier to communicate
to one’s artistic peers who live in cultures other than one’s
own.
“New Traditions” music is a combination of “new” and “traditional”
musical elements combined. This can occur in several basic patterns:
New music, traditional aesthetics; traditional music, new aesthetics;
change one element and leave the rest the same; or, adopt an instrument
that is new to you, and adapt your music to it. Taking something
familiar (old) and doing something new with it. Moving contexts,
changing styles.
The simple act of ethnography and ethnomusicological transcription
may itself become the seed of New Traditions, if the ingathered
material is then used by the gatherer(s). For example, the famous
case of Bartok’s collection of Bulgarian songs and folk tunes
which he faithfully transcribed in the field, and many of which
later surfaced in his own compositions. (Not all are so faithful
to the original, in transcription or in spirit, as was Bartok.)
I have found with experience that I tend to restrict my use of
the term “New Traditions” to musics wherein the musicians are
(at some point) aware of what they are doing, what they are “borrowing”
or “mixing” or “taking inspiration” from. This practice tends
to eliminate the simplest level of appropriation: An American
popular music recording pirated in Africa, for instance, though
it contributes something to the overall soundscape, is not by
itself New Traditions music. But if you then do something with
the original, for example using your own local guitar or rhythm
style(s), instead of merely copying it, it then becomes New Traditions
music. (I often use the example of a cassette tape I heard in
Indonesia of John Denver’s greatest hits performed in English,
but accompanied by a native Indonesian dangdut ensemble and arrangement.
The experience of hearing the tape for the first time, at a friend’s
home in Surakarta, Central Java, was hilarious; but the more profound
point is that the original John Denver song was not recognizable
beyond the lyrics and the basic tune, the rest having been subsumed
into a popular Indonesian style of musical arrangement and instrumentation.
Dangdut, by the way, is musically descended from Indian film music
scores; the lyrics are often social commentary or love songs.
Dangdut is recognized to be a relatively successful protest music
that is generally tolerated by the political powers-that-be; the
content of early, original dangdut was often didactic Islamic
moralizing.)
New Traditions music is music that crosses the boundaries, that
ties other cultures and their musics together. It is usually created
by performers and composers outside the academic realm: practice
exists before theory. It is involved with the syncretism of mixing
cultures, as new elements enter or re-enter the soundscape. It
is also involved with the importation and exportation of musical
and electronic technology: new instruments, new ways of playing
old instruments, modifications of familiar instruments; adapting
familiar repretoire to new instruments, and vice versa; developing
new repretoire on instruments unfamiliar to you (“alien,” i.e.
not native to your birthplace); the introduction of electronic
amplification and reproduction technology into traditional contexts,
and the ways they affect the tradition; and so on. The bottom
line, once again, is the crossing of boundaries, the bringing
together of the New and the Traditional.
In closing, let me open up a few questions:
What will be next? Where does New Traditions music go from here?
That the musics discussed here are living, active traditions today
must have bearing on future discussions of New Traditions music,
and perhaps some influence on where and when the term is applied.
I do not see an end to the process: rather, thanks to the factors
discussed earlier, especially those of increasing mass inter-communication
and transportation, I see the process accelerating, with more
and more of this sort of musical adventuring to occur in the future.
We live in the beginning times, the times of hope, as well as
the ending times, the days of fear, the millenium. As ethnomusicologists,
musicians, and human beings, we would do well to stay abreast
of developments, and appreciate them for the things they can teach
us about ourselves, about what it means to be human. There may
one day be a single, world-wide synthesis, as the planet’s many
cultures come closer together. But I do not believe so: no one
culture can contain all the possible solutions to the human situation:
“all the maps are incomplete.” We need now to forge our own, new-traditional,
paths; we need now, more than ever, to find new ways to live in
harmony with each other and with our world(s). I believe that
New Traditions music will prove to be an important vehicle for
travelling those paths, those ways; it will be a valuable means
of inter-communication; and it will be a path in itself towards
gaining knowledge of self and others, and how we all relate together
in this interconnecting world.
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