How music migrated across borders over decades
Launch library · evergreen read
Music has always travelled considerably, carried by touring musicians, traders and, more recently, broadcast and recording technology, spreading styles and instrumentation well beyond the regions where they had originally developed in the first place, movement that predates recorded sound by many centuries in one form or another.
Each particular migration tended to produce new hybrid forms over time, as travelling musical ideas met and blended with existing local traditions rather than simply replacing them outright wherever they happened to arrive next, forms that often ended up sounding like neither tradition on its own.
This ongoing exchange means most contemporary genres carry traces of multiple, quite distant traditions, a reminder that musical borders have always been considerably more porous than fixed genre labels might initially suggest to a casual listener, a porousness worth remembering whenever a genre is described as belonging to one place alone, a lesson worth remembering whenever a sound is assumed to belong to just one place.