Western Music Isn't What You Think (opens in new tab)

>They are named after population groups, but who were the Aeolians, the Lydians, and the Phrygians?

>They were slave groups, conquered by the Greeks in Asia Minor.

This is incorrect. Each of these were separate civilizations and not names for a "group of slaves". This can easily be verified by a simple search so I don't even understand where such a misattribution comes from.

I do not mean to take anything away from black musicians, but the music people say started with blacks was massively changed by the music-executive types before it went mainstream.

The people who enjoyed the modified music would not recognize the pre-music-executive versions.

On a slightly related note, does anyone know of good articles written about the false dichotomy of "East" vs "West"?

On Spain, flamenco itself it's fusion based music before the 'fusion genre mix' was even a concept.

It mixes iberian, Gypsy, Arabic and who knows more genres under a very complex guitar tune (Paco de Lucia would be either the Alan Turing or Knuth of guitar players) with even more complex singings.

The rest of the country had jotas/aurreskus/muñeiras and so on, a kind of dance with hops, jumps and kicks to the sound of flutes/tambourines and drums, very different to flamenco and a far simpler structure, pretty common across Europe.

Nowadays, I'd recommend Medina Azahara, a group which mixes flamenco with progressive and psychodelic rock. But it wasn't the first one to do so; Triana did it before.

There are a lot of arguments of authority and _0_ empirical evidence, apart from "I've spent 30 years of my life on it"... There are no sources!?

And then, there are things that jump out to me as false, that could be true, but because the author cites ZERO sources, it's unclear if he's ignorant after 30?! years of research or has an interesting insight.

It's so unscientific, and it's sloppy useless writing like that that makes some people say that the social sciences aren't sciences.

That some ancient Greeks {allegedly, disputed} named modes after slaves is completely irrelevant today; we have a 12 tone system with a diatonic scale in which we just start/end on different notes to make modes. Their names could be anything. The underlying scale is related to the harmonic series, which is a universal that transcends humanity. Music history shapes how instruments are made. There are some tunes that are taught, usually no older than a couple hundred years at most, and beyond that, people just use their ears. Mostly, people tell their own stories with music in their own way, not stories from past generations, let alone distant cultures from centuries or millennia ago.

This is an interesting article but there’s a certain smugness in the presentation that’s off-putting. I’d love to see more citations and fewer claims of shocking originality.

What can be described as “Western Civilization” is a much bigger cultural zone than we define it. Historically people also never really divided the world this way. It’s just modern academics that screw these concepts up completely, have obvious agendas and lack context. Europe, North Africa and Middle East are all part of “The West”. The regions were only ever divided at various times by empires, language groups and religions. The author of this article is disingenuous with their argument at its core as a result. Musical traditions from Baghdad are still western. This is why music could influence other music because these were all western musical styles.

Edit: Wanted to add that the alphabet is a western linguistic concept that’s common to all western languages.