lindsmuse
It's about time I found out!
AlanRatcliffe
Generally it's music that incorporates the ethnic music of other cultures into Western music, be it Flamenco, Irish folk, Zulu Guitar, Indian ragas, Tibetan throat singing, Vietnamese boat people's songs, whatever...
Most commonly used as a description of various forms of muzak (AKA "elevator music") , but something as commercial Paul Simon's Graceland can - strictly speaking - also be included in the genre.
Bob-Dubery
The term got cooked up in the early 80s to describe anything that isn't rock 'n roll, or music derived from rock 'n roll. So things like cajun music, Cuban genres, African genres, European folk genres...
And crossovers. Paul Simon has done several things that crossed over into non-American traditional forms, most notably the Graceland album (by some people's estimation he was also the first artist to have a mainstream hit with a reggae song).
Locally you might take a good look at Steve Newman and particularly his work with Tananas.
Keira-WitherKay
world music is just the name given to a huge cross section of music.........
like the word jazz could include so many styles of jazz..... from traditional to swing to ragtime ect ....
the name world music just is an umberalla term to include music from all over the world and mostly ethnic........
but in fact ethnic music in parts of europe include celtic and i go as far as including flamenco and gypsy music and even classical into this genre ........ which maybe is not correct.......
so me .... i label myself as a "world acoustic fingerstyle guitarist & percussionist" and in my repetoire of acoutic music i have composed many songs with arabic feels, or indian influence, morrocan, classical, celtic, flamenco , latin american and of course african......
so if you see the term world music think mostly acoustic.... but not always ............and then think ethnic styles or maybe as in my case hybrid compositions which are strongly influenced by the enthic sounds of the countries i have lived in........ i am a world traveller too so it drew me to this.....
so a world music festival could include everything from say.... a sitar and tabla player to a marimba band to a steel drum band to tribal chanting celtic bands and even to include classical or flamenco or gypsy music too it's so broad ..........and even find that harp guitar music you mentioned in a post would fall under that label..........
but as i said it's too broad to specify................ hope that helps
peace and light
keira
Bob-Dubery
For me some of the earliest (if not the earliest) pioneers of "world music" (before that term was invented) were The Incredible String Band.
Producer/manager/discoverer Joe Boyd described their music as "sounding like it had gone from Glasgow to the Mississippi for a holiday, stopping off in Morocco and the Balkans." (or something like that, I'm paraphrasing)
I'd recommend some of their early releases to people with adventurous ears, notably The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion.
