Since I am an Ashkenazi Jew, I ought to love cantorial virtuosity a la Yossele Rosenblatt, but I don't. I also ought to love Klezmer music, which I enjoy listening to a lot less than to other kinds of music, including Andalusian music, with which I have absolutely no ethnic bond.
My jazz guru, Arnie Lawrence, quoted his jazz guru, Clark Terry, who said that the note doesn't know who played it. I love African-American music, even though I'm not African-American, and a lot of the masters of African-American music aren't of that persuasion either.
One is always surprised (though by now we should be over that) that so many brilliant performers of Western Classical music are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean - not immigrants from those countries to the West, but people like Lang Lang who grew up in China. I have read that Lang Lang regularly meets (or met) with Daniel Barenboim to deepen his understanding of certain aspects of the classical repertoire, but I imagine there are hundreds of classical pianists from European countries and North America who would also love to meet with Barenboim for a week of private consultation for the same purpose.
I also remember reading that Wynton Marsalis, who is now the elder statesman of jazz, was a fine classical trumpet player when he was in high school, and Gunther Schuller more or less discovered him and exposed him to jazz (this might be untrue).
It is true that music, such as Indian classical music, is deeply embedded in the culture that produced it, and while listening to it one feels connected to something essentially Indian, or that, as an outsider, one can never deeply understand the music the way an Indian does. Nevertheless, I'm positive that the mere fact of being one of the one billion Indians on the planet doesn't guarantee that you'll have a deep appreciation of this sitar music. Nor does it matter whether or not you have ever set foot in India to feel a deep affinity with the music and interest in it.
Music travels. And music is also a means of transportation. You can get into a culture through its music, and you can also get out of your own culture (or expand it) through different kinds of music. But the connection between a culture and its music is not straightforward.
Years ago I got to know an American jazz drummer who was in Israel for a year. He was curious about Middle Eastern ethnic music, and I mentioned a creative group called Bustan Abraham, which takes ethnic music and runs with it. Without listening to me (that's the kind of man he is), he dismissed the idea out of hand. He wanted to hear AUTHENTIC Middle Eastern music. Screw him.
The music of a performer who has grown up in a tradition and learned from its masters can be great, if the performer is great, or it can be mediocre, if the performer isn't so great. It can be authentically uninteresting.
My jazz guru, Arnie Lawrence, quoted his jazz guru, Clark Terry, who said that the note doesn't know who played it. I love African-American music, even though I'm not African-American, and a lot of the masters of African-American music aren't of that persuasion either.
One is always surprised (though by now we should be over that) that so many brilliant performers of Western Classical music are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean - not immigrants from those countries to the West, but people like Lang Lang who grew up in China. I have read that Lang Lang regularly meets (or met) with Daniel Barenboim to deepen his understanding of certain aspects of the classical repertoire, but I imagine there are hundreds of classical pianists from European countries and North America who would also love to meet with Barenboim for a week of private consultation for the same purpose.
I also remember reading that Wynton Marsalis, who is now the elder statesman of jazz, was a fine classical trumpet player when he was in high school, and Gunther Schuller more or less discovered him and exposed him to jazz (this might be untrue).
It is true that music, such as Indian classical music, is deeply embedded in the culture that produced it, and while listening to it one feels connected to something essentially Indian, or that, as an outsider, one can never deeply understand the music the way an Indian does. Nevertheless, I'm positive that the mere fact of being one of the one billion Indians on the planet doesn't guarantee that you'll have a deep appreciation of this sitar music. Nor does it matter whether or not you have ever set foot in India to feel a deep affinity with the music and interest in it.
Music travels. And music is also a means of transportation. You can get into a culture through its music, and you can also get out of your own culture (or expand it) through different kinds of music. But the connection between a culture and its music is not straightforward.
Years ago I got to know an American jazz drummer who was in Israel for a year. He was curious about Middle Eastern ethnic music, and I mentioned a creative group called Bustan Abraham, which takes ethnic music and runs with it. Without listening to me (that's the kind of man he is), he dismissed the idea out of hand. He wanted to hear AUTHENTIC Middle Eastern music. Screw him.
The music of a performer who has grown up in a tradition and learned from its masters can be great, if the performer is great, or it can be mediocre, if the performer isn't so great. It can be authentically uninteresting.
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