It’s a Smaller World

In 1892, when the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak arrived in New York to head the National Conservatory of Music, no one could say what American music was. Typically, American classical composers studied in Germany and wrote in a German style. But for Dvorak, a Bohemian nationalist, the authentic voice of a new land was contained in the songs of African Americans and Native Americans, and he wrote his “New World” Symphony to prove it.

The influence of America in that work, Dvorak insisted, could be felt by anyone with a nose. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” insinuates its way into the first movement, and the poetic rhythms of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” inspire later sections. But the “New World” can just as easily strike the modern listener as token Americana dressed up in European symphonic finery. A politically correct nose smells appropriation not assimilation and certainly not authenticity. Issues of appropriation, assimilation and authenticity are currently being discussed at a weeklong Dvorak in America festival hosted by Pacific Symphony in Orange County. It concludes Wednesday with the “New World” Symphony combined with “Hiawatha.”

But the questions Dvorak raises also lie at the heart of much, much more. Twentieth century music was launched with controversies about assimilation; the 21st century continues to grapple with the consequences.

The way of nature is hybridization, contemporary dean of multicultural California music Lou Harrison, likes to say, and music--sonic sponge that it is--is a prime example. At the turn of the last century, venturesome composers looked to borrowing as a way to create something new. Debussy was bowled over by the metal gongs and interlapping rhythms of the Javenese gamelan orchestra he heard at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Mahler made room for street and country sounds, and the ethnic Jewish music that pervaded his youth. A little later, Bartok was fixated on Hungarian folk music, and Stravinsky manipulated primitivistic Russian folk song. Then Leonard Bernstein celebrated American popular culture.

Now no one thinks twice about the melding of a culture or two. And three CDs released in the last few weeks are giddy examples of multiculturalism run amok. There is Yo-Yo Ma’s exhilarating “Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet.” It brings together 24 musical “strangers” from places like China, central Asia, India and America. John Williams’ entrancing “The Magic Box” finds the classical (and occasionally pop) guitarist in an easygoing jam with African musicians. Meanwhile, the Kronos Quartet--been there, done that when it comes to world-music collaboration, in “Caravan” (which explored central Asia) and “Pieces of Africa”--has moved on to Mexico in its sensationally inventive and joyous revel “Nuevo.”

Still, as influential as Debussy, Mahler and their compatriots were at expanding classical conventions 100 years ago, and as successful as the three new CDs are sure to be in this age (each is probably headed up the Billboard charts), it would be naive to claim that we are part of one happy world with music as its Esperanto. Stravinsky’s “primitivism” initially caused a riot; Bernstein’s pop influences were sneered at. In today’s climate, too much assimilation can lead to loss of identity. Too much agreement is not meaningful dialogue.

Earlier this month, a Palestinian oud player, Khaled Jubran, had angry words about the limits of assimilation for the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’aretz. Trained at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem and now head of the department of Arabic music and theory at the National Palestinian Conservatory of Music in Ramallah, he was once known for his collaborations with Israeli musicians.

But looking back, he now complains he was not being heard as an individual. And he resents that when he performed alone, he was invited because he was “exotic.”

“Some say music is an international language. It isn’t,” Jubran told the Israeli newspaper. “It’s the most culturally dependent thing I know. Beethoven is German, and Debussy is the embodiment of Frenchness ... and Abdul Wahab is Egyptian. Music has never brought hearts closer. Certainly not the hearts of two nations that despise each other.”

At this point, all Jubran wants is to be left alone. “We are the Third World--there is poverty and leaders who are dictators. But when the West comes with its money and cameras, the Third World starts to go crazy and preens itself and tries to satisfy the other side. You want to do something really effective? OK, let me first be who I am. After that we’ll be together.”

The multiyear, multinational Silk Road Project, with Ma as its lead player, is precisely the kind of collaboration that could make a Jubran suspicious. Its stated mission is to make music a means of cooperation and understanding between cultures. For funding, it relies upon the Aga Khan Foundation, Ford Motor Co., Siemens and Sony Classical. It is a commercial venture: The new CD is being heavily promoted, and the project, in one form or another, has been on the road all over the world for a year and a half (a week of Silk Road events began in Berkeley on Friday; Carnegie Hall is next; then it lands in Seattle and in early summer at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.). The restless Ma has a track record for trivializing what he champions, leaping from one crossover bandwagon--tango, bluegrass, early music, sentimental movie music--to another.

Yet the CD shows that the Silk Road Project is genuinely discovering what musical cultures have in common. Ma chose well when he tapped Dartmouth ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin, author of an illuminating book, “The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York),” as the project’s artistic director. In his extended visits to Tashkent, Bukhara and other parts of Uzbekistan as well as Tajikistan, Kyrgysztan and Kazakhstan, Levin discovered over and over that musical traditions are artificial solids made from fluid material. One revelation in fluidity and never-ending assimilation: The beginnings of formal Arabic music theory, in the 10th century, and the style of Arabic performance handed down through the centuries may well have their origins in Greek musical texts translated into Arabic.

“Silk Road Journeys” celebrates such commonality by including cosmopolitan musicians with a wide range of interests and a consistently high level of virtuosity. Iranian composer Kayhan Kalhor, Azerbaijani composer and pianist Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Chinese pipa player Wu Man will already be familiar to Kronos followers. One Chinese composer in the mix, Zhao Jiping, wrote the music for the films “Farewell My Concubine” and “Raise the Red Lantern.” Such eager virtuosos offer composers of all stripes a world of possibilities. The main impression of the CD is that almost anything goes, whether it is new music by Silk Road composers, traditional music, Western classical music reinterpreted or anything in between.

Ali-Zadeh, for instance, re-creates with astonishing naturalness native Azerbaijan music in a duet for cello and prepared piano, an instrument invented in Seattle in 1940 by John Cage. The CD ends with a spirited rendition of a Renaissance Italian madrigal played on Silk Road instruments, and the sound is closer to that of period Western instruments than to modern Western ones. The results, like Levin’s research, stand notions of authenticity on their head.

Likewise, Williams’ friendly African guitar safari is really no adventure at all. With pioneers such as Paul Simon and Kronos, we’ve long known how well Western and African musics get along. The international musical language of pop, and before that jazz, has its deepest roots in the African soil.

Both CDs display admirable mutual trust and respect (to say nothing of gainful employment) among the participants. The Silk Roadies have the benefit of Levin’s scholarship about what links these cultures. Williams has the benefit of building on long-broken ground. The collaborators are friendly strangers, not suspicious enemies.

But even in these best of circumstances, such arranged musical marriages are still too artificial to give the likes of Jubran much comfort. There is no escaping that Ma and Williams, though hardly cultural imperialists, nevertheless appear to give other cultures the “benefit” of their gorgeous, plush tones. There is no escaping the sonic--and celebrity--glamour they add to their projects.

Is there no means by which fragile identities can remain fully intact through the process of cultural mediation? Yes, and that is where Kronos’ “Nuevo” comes in, as does a surprising side effect of Dvorak’s trip to America.

In the end, Dvorak’s influence on America was mostly lamentable appropriation, leading as it did to the creation of an American “Indianist” school, leaving a legacy of such kitsch as Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “In the Land of Sky Blue Water.” But it also spawned one American original, Arthur Farwell, a composer and music collector whose work was on the Dvorak in America program Saturday.

Joseph Horowitz, the festival’s artistic consultant, calls Farwell “the first composer of prominence to articulate the idea that it wasn’t enough to be an American composer without thinking about what that meant. An American composer had to consciously sound American.”

Farwell was the Indianist who put real thought into what that meant. And although mostly forgotten today and thought of as something of a crank in his own day, he actually sowed the seeds for such projects as “Nuevo.”

Unlike the other Indianists, he didn’t dress up the sound of a Native American war dance with pleasant Viennese harmonies. He was an outright preservationist who attempted to be true to the spirit of complex work. Horowitz calls him the “American Bartok.”

Farwell’s interests extended beyond Native American music. On a 1904 lecture tour, Farwell, who was born in Massachusetts in 1872, visited Los Angeles, where he met Charles Lummis, a journalist who had become obsessed with recording the Spanish songs of old California on wax cylinders.

Listening to these trailblazing efforts in field recording, Farwell discovered a sensuality and formal freedom entirely different from the American folk music he knew. Rather than try to Anglicize the Spanish songs into the traditional boxy phrase structures of American song, he astutely transcribed the recordings and published the songs in the collection “Spanish Songs of Old California.”

Although Farwell died in obscurity in 1952 and his music awaits revival, his influence pervades our lives--he helped found the Hollywood Bowl, and he spent a year in Berkeley, where he had an impact on the fledgling studies of world music there that would later influence composer Henry Cowell (who would go on to influence Harrison) and whose own extensive efforts at combining global styles makes him the father of the world music movement.

The spirit of Farwell pervades “Nuevo,” as the Kronos Quartet, in one of the most exciting and original recordings of its ever-venturesome career, takes the next important step in viable cultural intermarriage.

“Nuevo,” a panoramic view of Mexican music during the past 100 years, is a riotous festival of individuality. Kronos’ members have always sought out music that was new and unusual to their ears, the stranger the better, and “Nuevo” celebrates otherness in every possible meaning of the word. The CD selections are not musics that get along with each other--they range, after all, from mariachi to Silvestre Revueltas to TV show themes to Juan Garcia Esquivel’s lecherous ping-ponging bachelor-pad soundtracks from the 1950s to Carlo Garcia, a one-armed street musician who plays “Perfidia” on a buzzing leaf with such haunting sweetness that it breaks your heart.

What we find on this compulsively listenable CD is no attempt at explanation, and no sign of collaboration in the usual sense. Instead, it’s pure, unconditional love. Kronos, giving its voice over entirely to the needs of each piece, insists that we love music whatever its form--avant-garde experiment, raucous pop or the saccharine soul of 101 Strings.

Behind much of “Nuevo” lies the arrangements of Osvaldo Golijov. Ever more, this Argentine-born American composer is coming to represent, along with Chinese-born American Tan Dun, the hope for a new global music of the 21st century.

Listen to an original piece for string quartet and marimba he contributes to “Nuevo.” “Festival for the Holy Mother Guadalupe” is a dreamy, spectral music overlaid with a 1970 field recording of an Indian ritual made in the town of Chamula. The strings contribute a warm, spiritual voice, heir to Dvorak. The rolling marimba adds a more conventionally Mexican flavor. The field recording makes it seem part of the real world, while the Indians’ quiet religious ardor also takes it out of this world.

Next month, “Festival for the Holy Mother Guadalupe” will provide the soundtrack for a new theater piece-video that Peter Sellars is developing for the Vienna Festival. Sellars sees it as an examination of the American war in Afghanistan, and makes use of awesomely demented texts on American cultural aggression by the late French avant-garde writer and theatrical revolutionary Antonin Artaud. And so the world circles back to the Silk Road via an improbable journey through Mexico, California, France and Vienna. With its radically demonstrative embrace of Mexico’s music in “Nuevo,” global music has turned a corner that leaves the concepts of assimilation, authenticity and appropriation back in the previous century. Where it leads no one knows.

But don’t even think about turning back.

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Dvorak in America Festival continues today, 7:30 p.m., and Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $21-56. (714) 755-5799.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.