A non-comprehensive survey of musical traditions outside the Western art-music canon — its instruments, its grammars, and the people who carry it.
"World music" is a category invented by record-store managers in London in 1987 to file everything that wasn't classical, jazz, rock, or pop. The term is awkward; the music is real.
Music exists in every documented human society, organized in vastly different ways. Pitch is not always continuous (it is bent in Hindustani raga but quantized in Javanese gamelan). Meter is not always periodic (Bulgarian folk's 7/8 and 11/8; West African polyrhythm interlocking three- and two-against-four). Tone is not always equal-tempered (Turkish makam uses 53 commas to the octave; the gamelan's pélog and slendro tunings differ between every individual ensemble).
A fair approach: know one or two traditions deeply, and know that there are dozens more equally deep.
Two related but distinct classical systems — Hindustani in the north, Carnatic in the south — built on raga (melodic mode) and tala (metric cycle).
A raga is more than a scale: it is a melodic personality with characteristic phrases, ornaments, ascending and descending forms, a time of day or season, and an emotional register. Hindustani classical music descends from temple and court traditions of the Mughal era; Carnatic from the temples of South India and the trinity of 18th-century composers Tyagaraja, Muttuswami Dikshitar, and Syama Sastri.
The North's instruments: sitar (Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee), sarod (Ali Akbar Khan), tabla (Zakir Hussain), bansuri (Hariprasad Chaurasia), vocals (Bhimsen Joshi, Kishori Amonkar). The South: veena, mridangam, violin held downward like a cello (L. Subramaniam, Lalgudi Jayaraman), and a uniquely sophisticated vocal tradition (M. S. Subbulakshmi).
Ravi Shankar — Three Ragas (1956). Ali Akbar Khan — Morning & Evening Ragas (1955). Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — Shahen-Shah (Real World, 1989). T. M. Krishna — any concert recording. Ravi Shankar · Raga Jog →
From the Mande empires came the griot — hereditary poet, musician, oral historian.
The kora (21-string harp-lute) is the griot's signature instrument. Toumani Diabaté is the contemporary master; his father Sidiki Diabaté made the first kora LP in 1971. The balafon — a wooden xylophone of which the Sosso-Bala in Niagassola, Guinea is said to date to 1235 — is the same instrument American slaves carried west and built into the marimba and, eventually, the vibraphone.
Modern West African popular music: Salif Keita (Mali, descendant of the Sundiata Keita dynasty, partially albino, voice of his generation); Fela Kuti (Nigeria, inventor of Afrobeat 1971); Youssou N'Dour (Senegal, mbalax); Ali Farka Touré (Mali, the desert blues); Tinariwen (Tuareg, refugee camp roots). Mali's Festival au Désert, Bamako's clubs, Lagos's afrobeat scene.
Bronze percussion ensembles of Java and Bali. A gamelan is built and tuned as one instrument; you cannot move pieces between them.
A typical Central Javanese gamelan has roughly 20 to 80 players on bronze gongs, metallophones (saron, gendér), drums (kendang), bamboo flutes (suling), and bowed strings (rebab). Two tuning systems coexist within one orchestra: pentatonic slendro and seven-note pélog. The music interlocks at multiple stratified rates — slow gong cycles below, fast figuration above. Debussy heard a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition; it changed his harmonic thinking permanently.
Balinese gamelan is faster, more percussive — gamelan gong kebyar emerged in the early 20th century with sudden tempo shifts and dazzling unison passages. Composers like Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, and Evan Ziporyn have absorbed gamelan techniques into Western new music.
The Afro-Cuban son tradition — guajira, danzón, son, mambo, salsa — synthesizes Spanish guitar music with Yoruba and Kongo rhythmic principles. The clave (3-2 or 2-3) is its central five-stroke rhythmic figure. Beny Moré, Arsenio Rodríguez, the Buena Vista Social Club, Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri, Rubén Blades.
Brazil: samba (Rio, Carnival, the schools of Mangueira and Portela; Cartola, Beth Carvalho, Martinho da Vila), bossa nova (João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes, 1958–62), tropicália (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, 1968), MPB (Chico Buarque, Elis Regina). Argentina: tango (Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla's nuevo tango). Colombia: cumbia. Peru: chicha, huayno.
The maqam system — Arabic, Turkish, Persian, with regional variants — uses microtonal intervals smaller than the Western half-step. A maqam is built from joined trichord/tetrachord modules (jins) with prescribed melodic behavior at each pitch.
Egyptian classical: Umm Kulthum (1898–1975), the most famous singer in the Arab world; her monthly Thursday-night concerts emptied Cairo's streets. Mohammed Abdel Wahab, composer. The oud (fretless lute, Munir Bashir, Anouar Brahem) and qanun (plucked zither). Persian classical: radif tradition, setar, tar, tombak, kamancheh. Turkish: Tanbur, the Mevlevi Sufi tradition (whirling dervishes). Lebanese: Fairuz and the Rahbani brothers.
Each East Asian classical tradition rests on a different aesthetic. The Japanese shakuhachi (end-blown bamboo flute, Zen-influenced honkyoku repertoire), shamisen (three-stringed lute), koto (13-string zither, Yatsuhashi Kengyō, Sawai Tadao). The Chinese guqin (seven-string zither, 3,000-year-old repertoire, ritual silence between notes), pipa, erhu. The Korean gayageum, haegeum, the pansori dramatic narrative tradition (one singer + drummer, eight-hour performances).
Georgian polyphony (recognized by UNESCO 2001): three-voice male singing in chordal harmony built on harshly dissonant intervals that resolve. Listen to ensemble Rustavi or the Chakrulo sent on the Voyager Golden Record. Tuvan throat-singing (khoomei): one voice producing two or more pitches simultaneously, the upper a whistled overtone above a low fundamental. Mongolian long-song (urtiin duu) and the morin khuur (horsehead fiddle).
A schematic of the regions surveyed.
The album that introduced North Indian classical to the West.
Hindustani · sitarQawwali with full party. Real World Records.
Sufi devotionalThe desert-blues meeting that won a Grammy.
SahelRy Cooder reassembles the Havana son scene of the 1950s.
Son cubanoThe first bossa nova LP.
Bossa novaAn hour-long song that stops Cairo.
Maqam · vocalTango plugged into modernism.
Nuevo tangoMbalax pop synthesis.
West AfricaThroat-singing for the international concert circuit.
TuvanDavid Lewiston's Nonesuch Explorer recording — kebyar gamelan.
IndonesiaA representative sample. Each is a world.
Five terms that come up across traditions and don't translate cleanly.
A melodic personality — scale, characteristic phrases, ornaments, time of day, emotional register. Not a "key."
Hindustani / CarnaticA metric cycle of fixed length, divided into uneven groupings of beats marked by claps, waves, and finger counts.
Hindustani / CarnaticModal system using microtonal intervals built from joined tetrachordal modules (jins). Each maqam has prescribed melodic behavior.
Arabic / Turkish / PersianThe two tuning systems of a Javanese gamelan. Slendro: roughly equidistant pentatonic. Pélog: seven-note, asymmetric. No two gamelans tune identically.
Java / BaliThe five-stroke rhythmic figure (3-2 or 2-3) that organizes Afro-Cuban music. Salsa is "in clave" or it is wrong.
Cuban / LatinUntranslatable: a longing for what is lost, present, or has never been. The emotional center of fado.
Portuguese
From Wim Wenders' 1999 documentary; the song is by Compay Segundo, recorded in Havana for the 1997 Buena Vista LP that sold eight million copies and revived the careers of Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, and Omara Portuondo.