ABSTRACT
The colonizers' cultural relationships with the colonized have had a long-term impact on the nature of immigrant music in Europe. Little scholarly research has addressed immigrant music in Europe. Ethnomtisicologists have focused on the traditional musics of discrete immigrant communities as windows to cultures left behind. Immigrant musical life encompasses musicians who come to Europe to perform, record, or visit immigrant communities there, and permanent immigrants who bring music to their new environment as part of their cultural heritage. The exchange of recordings between home and immigrant communities opens further avenues of communication, and recorded music flows from immigrant to home cultures, often as much as in the opposite direction. Much immigrant music is performed for the immediate immigrant community. As the religion of Rastafarianism permeated Jamaican music during the 1970s to form the new genre of reggae, West Indian immigrant culture in Britain underwent a transformation toward self-definition and cultural pride.
