Ira Shankman: The Effects of World Music (3min)
For us, music was always world music, it wasn’t, forgive me, it wasn’t just music of dead white men. As I said before, my cousins were musicians; they were all musicians in Latin bands, so I always grew up listening to Latin music. I always was very excited by that. When you get into music of other countries, to hear whether it’s the polyrhythms of African music or the tiny tones of Indian music, listening to ragas and things. In New York City now, as in the United States, we are such a diverse country now, how can you not let the students who are going through the school system experience what their heritage is? What you will find out is that they will bring to the classroom such a wealth of material from their backgrounds. If teachers just opened up a little bit and let the kids do that, everybody’s experiencing so much more right now because it’s becoming a world community. The music of other cultures is so exciting and you talk about a feeling of self-worth, you have a child who has newly come into the country and may not speak English too well, but let them present something of their heritage and have the pride of that presentation and look what that’s going to do to that child.
You know, you talk about the “typical American music,” which is jazz, that’s certainly an American tradition. Granted, it was a mixture of other cultures but it grew up here and it blossomed here. Sure, as soon as the blossoming happened it went out to other countries but we have a typical American music in jazz. We also have some very fine American Composers. I don’t care if we’re talking about composers like Charles Ives who were in one genre, or some very wonderful tin pan alley people, like the Gershiwns and the Porters and the Currents, all of that is American music. So there is a tradition.