Music and Class Structure in the United States

THE PHENOMENA to which I shall direct attention seem to exhibit two large historical processes that have been taking place throughout the New World since the advent of Europeans. The first has accompanied prolonged contact of masses of individuals carrying different music-cultural traditions, or musics. To this process the term has been given. For lack of music-technical and culture-historical terms with which to designate such large, comparatively ill-defined, almost amorphous aggregates of tradition, we have no alternative for the moment but to distinguish them by the country or continent from which they entered the acculturative process. The second has accompanied the prolonged contact of these same individuals, but in their roles as members of social classes carrying different music-social traditions, or music idioms, that is, classes of music usage commonly referred to as primitives or tribal, folk, popular and fine arts. To present knowledge, no special designation has been given to this kind of sub-acculturation. Obviously, it crosscuts what is ordinarily referred to as acculturation, distinguishing in terms of social depth certain aspects of the total music-culture not always distinguishable in geographical terms; although, by and large, primitive and folk traditions are carried by rural, and those of popular and fine arts by urban, people. In the New World, this second process may have been a minor factor in the catastrophic phase of conquest, settlement and consolidation, but as colonialism has given way to political, economic and cultural independence, it has become the major factor in music activity, very much as it has been in the Old World for many centuries. For the sake of brevity, I shall not dwell upon acculturation within the