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Globalization and the arrival of world music in Denmark have
created a new ressource, and a potential for development in
the multicultural area.
Is it being recognised, and if so to what extent? Is it blooming?
By Mik Aidt
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“Hello boys and girls! Please take your ears off.”
“How do we do that?”
“Simply like this. You just pretend. You take them off and put them in your pocket. Okay?”
“Okay.”“Fine. Then you put on some new ears on your head. New ears that you have never used before... – and now, kids, you are ready to listen to some strange music you never heard before!”
Guitarist Pierre Dørge of the New Jungle Orchestra is talking to a group of children in front of the stage in a Danish grammar school gymnasium before starting yet another school concert on their two week tour around the whole country.
Pierre Dørge’s point is to break down some prejudices among the children. In the Nordic countries, organizing school concerts with music of non-Western origin has become increasingly popular. In Denmark it has been promoted by a school project named ‘World.dk’ as well as the agency ‘Levende Musik i Skolen’.They hope to move some borders, most of all the borders inside people’s heads. After numerous strikes of terror from Middle Eastern fanatics, getting young people acquainted with aspects of the debate other than the one running in the medias appears to be more relevant than ever. Studies from Norway in the beginning of the 1990’s show that school concerts with world music orchestras actually have a significantly positive effect on the way the children perceive people of non-Western origin: in a more open way.
“Music can do something that words could never do,” said world music booker, Peter Hvalkof, who was previously the co-ordinator of the ‘World.dk’ project.
Absorbed in pop music
CDs of certain genres such as salsa are selling more than ever, and if you take a cruise around Copenhagen on a regular Saturday evening, you’ll have a choice of minimum five to ten concerts with world music bands. The salsa, reggae and tango dance stages are thriving. Not to mention that several Nordic world music festivals report on growing ticket sales from year to year.
Only that several of them refrain from using the term, “world music”. If it is salsa, they’ll talk about salsa. Not “world music”. Today, the “world music” label has a tendency to be understood as “folklore for third world enthusiasts in Icelandic sweaters and flat shoes”, and as such, new names are evolving for music trends that inspire young people of today. Non-Western melodies, sounds and rhythms mixed in an electronic landscape of keyboards and drum machines emerge with popular names such as “chill out”, “lounge”, and “ambient”.
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New Jungle Orchestra
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In 2002, the previously classical percussion group Safri Duo was the first Danish band ever to win an MTV award. They won the prize as ‘Best Nordic Act’ – mainly because of their huge radiohit, the instrumental percussion techno fusion ‘Played-A-Live’.
Now, have you ever listened to their album?
If you have an interest in world music, you actually ought to! It is oozing of ethnic elements and instruments, and the reviewer in a Danish world music magazine gave it five stars.
A new trend in pop music appears to be to bring a couple of immigrant musicians in and use the “ethnic sound” to spice up the tracks. Basically, this is nothing new. For centuries, the Nordic cultures have developed through impulses from the rest of the world. At the end of the 20th century, however, it has mainly been the American culture, and the American culture alone, that had a significant impact. Music and other art forms with a non-Western element have played – and still play – a very tiny role in this context, and for a long time, these expressions have been ignored by the established cultural environment.
However, in the past few years, globalization, as well as ethnic shifts in population, with an increased number of immigrants from the third world, have pulled the multicultural area increasingly into focus.
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Safri Duo
Photo: Thomas Skjold |
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Creating a platform
Globalization and the arrival of world music in Denmark has created a new resource, and a potential for development in the multicultural area which will bloom in coming years – once it has been recognised.
There are loads of talent and quality around. And be aware: there are also immigrant musicians who focus more on their ethnicity than artistic quality, and their reputation in particular ruins the chances of their high quality immigrant music colleagues to obtain the recognition they deserve. In general, there is a serious need of acknowledgement of immigrant artists – and an equal access to evaluation for their art rather than due to their background and which immigrant category they belong to.
We live in a world which is influenced not only by globalization, but also by a rapid technological development. Recording equipment and electronic sound engineering tools are getting cheaper by the day, opening up to new creative possibilities for the musicians at an individual level. Sound files of exotic instruments from remote third world villages are flying across the globe and being exchanged through the wires of the internet.
Globalization in music not only means that musicians from all over the world are travelling across the globe and exchanging new sources of inspiration, it also means that the characteristic elements of “world music” are increasingly being blended into mainsteam pop music to a level where it soon no longer makes sense to place it on a separate shelf. A “worldly” sound has entered the bloodstream of popular music in the Western world. The styles mix, and it becomes increasingly more difficult to label the music. Whether it sounds jazzy or not, Brazilian or Chinese, seems no longer to be the question in focus for the majority of music lovers. What matters now is whether the musicians have something to give of value.
The figures and numbers of the music industries in the countries on the northern rim of Europe are rising, and an increasing number of people in Denmark seem to be ready to enjoy the work of musicians who challenge their curiosity. They prefer to experience the music without classifying it, liberating the music from the tyranny of “genres” and “ghettos”. Instead, they search for music which is able to take them to another level.
World music in particular has that ability. It shows us that even though we are all different, we still have so much in common, so much to share. Music is the field of arts which, more than other art disciplines, have acknowledged the value of cultural diversity and inspiration across cultural borders as a rich element in the development of contemporary music.
Institutions, as well as grass root organizations are realizing that world music has a built-in message that stimulates and satisfies our curiosity for meeting different cultures than our own, even across the language barriers that separate us. It creates a platform for promoting integration with positiveness and cheerfulness, rather than worries and frustration.
The paradox of the success of world music in the North is that the more popular it gets, the harder it will be to keep it isolated in festivals, concert halls and radio programmes of its own.
So, if you are going to land in Denmark five years from now and people look strangely at you when you ask for where to go to listen to world music, don’t be disappointed. At that time – I predict – you will find it almost anywhere you go.
This is a shortened and updated version of an article printed in Nordic Sounds in 2002. Published at DanishMusic.info in February 2007.
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| The world music scene of Denmark |
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Denmark has more than 1,200 active performing musicians in the field, 400 of which have organized themselves in the association World Music Denmark. Once a year, it publishes a promotion-CD presenting 16 of Denmark’s leading world music bands in conjunction with the quarterly world music magazine ‘Djembe’. Founded in 1992, Djembe Magazine has close to 1,000 subscribers, a website with over 2,000 pages and several specialized e-newsletters which are free.
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| Danish World Music Resources on the Net |
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FESTIVALS
MAGAZINES, NEWSLETTERS, LINK LISTS & GUIDES
CATALOGUES OF WORLD MUSICIANS
INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANISATIONS
CONCERT PROMOTERS
RECORD SHOPS
NATIONAL RADIO
Radium, DR P2
DR World
More links to concert halls, meeting places, orchestras, etc: www.djembe.dk/links
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