ABSTRACT
The popular-music marketplace—recording companies, distributors, retailers, broadcasters, critics, and consumers—has variously labeled the market sector that contains neotraditional forms of rural music. The postcolonial, global, mass-mediated market of the last decades of the twentieth century had spread beyond Europe and North America to embrace Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific—that is, the world. Generally European traditional music with a world-music appeal has been governed by a classical-music or a pop-rock-jazz sensibility both with the intent to reach a local audience. Though world music is a new marketing category in the music business, the impulse to make and embrace cross-category and international fusions is at least three centuries old in Europe. In Northern and Western Europe, courtly figure dances and their music entered rural practice. Composers in every corner of Europe created national musical styles by incorporating rural tunes into an otherwise international style of harmony, form, and orchestral and choral timbres.
