In our age, when every kind of acoustic information is instantly available worldwide through the internet and the CD trade, sounds, grooves and melodies take root straight away in the ears of people who actually grew up with quite different kinds of music. But long before that, too, different musical styles were spread by radio and records and brought about a steady change in the way people hear.
“The intrusion of Afro-American rhythm music is the worst catastrophe in the history of European culture.” This remark by Herbert von Karajan makes clear what dramatic and irreversible processes we are taking part in. From his point of view, Karajan was right. European classical music will never again be heard and perceived as it was for centuries: as the self-evident centre and summit of musical feeling, from which the functional and entertainment music of each era derived. Of course young people today still like to play pieces by Bach or Mozart. But they experience classical music as one musical style among others – and, in the end, as one that is self-contained and dated. For all the beauty of the compositions in melody and form, the groove is missing.
I was once able to watch this process of one musical culture pushing into the territory of another in a completely different context: on a journey through Turkey in the mid-1980s that took me from Istanbul to the far east of the country. I travelled on the typical Turkish long-distance buses, where the drivers had their music playing all the time. This music was marked by the tension between the traditional Turkish scales, with their characteristic oriental quarter-tone steps, and the Western major-minor system.
In and around Istanbul the music was played almost entirely on Western instruments, and for that reason alone it was bound to the European tonal system: a keyboard simply has no quarter-tone steps. Only the singers kept the old Turkish scales and laid them over the Western instrumental accompaniment. The further east I went, the weaker the Western influences became. The instruments changed: instead of keyboard and electric guitar, the saz (a kind of guitar) and Turkish flutes and oboes were used, tuned to the traditional Turkish scales. So I was able to experience the process by which European major-minor tonality was spreading through the Turkish cultural sphere like a wave.
Is this process good or bad? I think that depends on how one deals with it. No doubt ethnomusicologists have tears in their eyes when they witness the change, or even the disappearance, of age-old musical styles. For the musicians themselves, though, the change is an advantage, or they would not make it. The European major-minor system, including chromaticism, was developed over centuries and makes polyphony, modulation and chordal playing possible. Why should a Turkish, African or Asian musician do without it? The Senegalese musician who tunes his kora (a kind of harp) the European way gains completely new possibilities for playing together with others and for shaping his music. The life force of African music in particular shows in the vitality and lightheartedness with which it absorbs foreign elements without losing its true roots.
The same of course applies the other way round to European musical culture. Compared with its highly sophisticated melody and harmony, the rhythmic element always led something of a shadow existence here, and was regarded with suspicion by a society that was sceptical of everything physical. The encounter with African-inspired musical styles confronts our own musical culture with a power and subtlety of rhythm that it has little to set against. It is only natural that European musicians, too, do not want to stay put in a museum labelled “classical”, but want to put the new influences to creative use. Only in this way can our own musical culture prove its vitality and creative power.
What matters is that this is not about creating a uniform music in which, under the banner of pop and consumer culture, all musical means are trivialised and brought down to the least demanding level possible. It is rather about learning from one another and, on the basis of one’s own cultural roots, creating authentic music that allows one’s own identity to go on developing in the 21st century as well.
Jazz plays a special role in this context. Here is a music that achieved a synthesis of different musical cultures a hundred years ago and was able to build its own stylistic history on that basis. Different forms of jazz form bridges to every kind of contemporary music, from rock and pop through African and South American styles and world music to European music, both of the classical period and of the 20th-century avant-garde.
So while jazz on the one hand has an identity and a history of its own to refer to, on the other hand it offers a platform for integrating different forms of music. In my view, then, the emergence of jazz and its spread in Europe is indeed a decisive turning point in European cultural history – but an extremely positive one. As a jazz musician I can relate to the roots of classical music in a completely new way, and develop European music further by opening it to influences from outside.
(See also: Jazz as an Encounter of European and African Musical Cultures; The Sense of Time in Jazz )
Postscript, July 2008:
In describing my journey through Turkey I tried to show how major-minor tonality and tempered tuning are spreading around the world. Recently, however, I have had some experiences which show that this process, too, is by no means clear-cut or one-dimensional. The Turkish pupils in the band I lead at a Hauptschule (a type of secondary school) are very good at oriental phrasing and intonation when they sing, even without being explicitly taught this technique; there are musicians of Turkish origin in Germany who make music with German lyrics and oriental musical influences. And above all: this music is also popular with the pupils who are not of Turkish descent.
I have also discovered that the largest shop for pop musical instruments in Cologne has a department of its own for “Oriental Keyboards”. These keyboards not only have samples of all the oriental instruments and accompaniment functions with oriental rhythms, but also a facility for setting quarter-tone steps on the keyboard. So there is a real demand for playing oriental music on Western instruments too.
Evidently many listeners, and by no means only those of oriental origin, find well-tempered tuning smooth and lacking in tension. The colourful and lively sound of the “makams” (as these scales are called in Turkey) thus makes up, in a certain sense, for their disadvantages where polyphony and harmony are concerned. Here too, once again, jazz musicians were ahead of their time: since the end of the nineties there have been projects, for example by the French guitarist Nguyen Lê or the Turkish ney player Kudsi Erguner, in which jazz improvisation is combined with oriental instruments and playing techniques.