II.

Musical Diversity

Popular music (music produced and marketed on a mass-commodity basis) first emerged in the early 1900s, during which time numerous distinctive popular music styles began to develop around the world. The rise of such genres was linked to dramatic transformations—especially urbanization and modernization—occurring throughout the world. Such changes disrupted traditional attitudes, lifestyles, and forms of artistic patronage, while creating new urban social classes with new musical tastes. In addition, the emerging popular music styles were closely tied to the advent of mass media—especially the spread of recording technology in the 1920s and 1930s—that introduced new forms of mass production and dissemination of both local and imported music. Many of the new evolving popular music genres consisted of hybrids that combined indigenous folk traditions with modern stylistic features borrowed from abroad.

In many non-Western societies, the emerging popular music genres combined Western imports, such as the guitar and chordal harmony, with traditional features, such as indigenous musical form, and characteristic melody, rhythm, and vocal style. Such was the case, for example, in Hawaii in the early 20th century. In larger societies, the cultural mixes could be more complex, as in the emergence of popular Cuban dance music. The Cuban son, an urban style of dance music that evolved in the decades after 1900, combined aspects of Spanish-derived folk music (guitars, characteristic harmonies) with other features (rhythms, call-and-response singing) evidently adapted from the rumba, an Afro-Cuban style of dance music. In subsequent decades, Cuban dance musicians incorporated influences from jazz, developing styles such as the mambo, a fast dance genre for big band, and the bolero, a slow, sentimental song form. These Cuban dance-music styles became popular from Paris to cities in Africa. Meanwhile, African countries were developing their own syncretic (integrating both Western and indigenous influences) pop-music styles. In several cases, as with Ghanaian highlife, a popular genre of West Africa, the new music involved a synthesis of local creole guitar styles, Westernized brass-band music, and indigenous rhythms and song forms.

In some cases, as with jazz, Greek rebetika, and the Argentine tango, the emergent popular music styles came from the colorful underworlds of urban taverns and brothels. As such styles grew in sophistication, they came to attract the interest of cultural nationalists and middle-class enthusiasts. Eventually these styles shed their less reputable origins and developed into dynamic national genres.

With the worldwide growth of the motion-picture industry about 1930, some popular music styles developed in connection with films, especially in such countries as India and Egypt, where large segments of the population were unable to afford records and record players. By the 1960s India's motion-picture industry had grown to be the second largest in the world and Indian film music had evolved into an internationally popular genre.