Global Folk Music

It is often said that music is a language, and it's true that you can sometimes tell what country a piece of music comes from, especially with folk music, which by definition grows in a local context. One can almost hear a continuum from Eastern to Western Europe, with a dip down to North Africa, as the music evolved along the ancient trade routes.

In this sense rap is also a form of folk music, in this case growing out of the urban black community. And even commercial popular music can be understood as modern American folk music, but whose origins are not in a geographical locale but in the media: phonograph records, radio, TV, and now the Internet. One might even say this is global folk music, transcending ethnic groups and borders — virtually an international language.

And yet "language" is only a metaphor, an attempt to describe music in words; for music has no denotative meanings and does not record facts or describe the physical world. Music communicates, but it is the language of the soul, of feelings — the subjective world in which we all live, the virtual reality within every human being's brain. As such, it bypasses the restrictions of verbal language and communicates the secrets robots will never know.

Still many people cannot "understand" any music in the European classical tradition that has been written since the 19th Century. This probably has something to do with a lack of musical education and is perpetuated by such music not being heard by children at home or on the radio, despite its availability online. This may change, however, as composers around the world are using all kinds of music — classical, jazz, folk, etc. — in their work, and i think these incorporations will be heard more and more in popular music, the global folk music of the future and the one language that can unite all of humanity.

In front of the Nobel Museum: Old Town, Stockholm, 2012