Alternate development of Western music?

How could the development of Western music diverge from OTL? And what would it look like?

To start, I think that most American music would be strikingly different without the British Invasion.
 
I always wondered what European music would look like without the american cultural hegemony/influx of the XX Century.

But i'm no expert, so i can just imagine classic music with modern instruments, something like the never ending epic music on youtube, or TSFH.
 
You could get some really interesting effects from delaying or averting the trend towards Orientalism in the late 19th/early 20th centuries- consider a world without The Pearl Fishers, The Mikado, Aida, Turandot, Madama Butterfly, Sheherezade, or most of the works of Borodin!
 
The British Invasion (of the 1960s) was re-introduction of an American style to the USA.
Gospel, blues and jazz music all have their roots in African rhythms brought over by slaves. However, the blues were limited to "race" radio stations until the 1960s.
A few white American musicians like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley where the firs tot gain air-time singing "negor songs."
Meanwhile, white, British rockers like Joe Cocker and Long John Baldry took up the blues, added their own licks and re-introduced the blues to the USA. In recent years, ERic Clapton et al have paid their respects to classic black blues musicians like BB King.
 
Don't have music as the main medium of liturgy in church and you can possibly retard the development of polyphonic and orchestral music for quite some time. Maybe the butterflies hamper with folk music as well because the powers that be have a religious precedence against music.
 
If the US didn't have so much Spanish influence in the South West the Guitar might not get anywhere near as popular as OTL.
 

jahenders

Banned
I think a larger one would be removing the African-American influences in spirituals and blues and the subsequent of those on rock, gospel, etc.

Another would be some different evolution of music of the frontiers, such that Country/Western takes a very different turn and, in turn, influences music/artists differently.

How could the development of Western music diverge from OTL? And what would it look like?

To start, I think that most American music would be strikingly different without the British Invasion.
 
Removing Arabo-Islamic influences, for exemple Arabo-Andalusian influences, would be a major change for not only western medieval lyric but as well epic.

We're talking on conceptions of rythms, thematic and instruments. I'm not too sure what would have replaced it, but you can bet on a more classical take (if not archaising) evolving more on its own with probably much more byzantine influence.
 
Have the Reformation succeed in more countries, e.g. France and Italy and have a puritan interpretation of it gain dominance and the development of Opera as we know it will likely be butterflied away. Have no Restauration in Britain and you'll never get George Frederick Handel moving there.
 
With French Louisiana surviving longer, Cajun might have been a real, big mainstream thing.

I always wondered what European music would look like without the american cultural hegemony/influx of the XX Century.

There were some musicians/producers who claimed that they were trying to do this sort of thing. The British label ZTT, with music writer Paul Morley and producer Trevor Horn, actually had this as a quasi-agenda in the mid-1980s with their acts Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda and The Art Of Noise. The basic idea was: What if the European expressionist traditions - Dadaism, futurism, Cubism, etc. - would have influenced pop culture instead of American rock'n'roll? Another band that went back to some aspects of alternative subcultures of the Weimar Republic were German wave band Malaria!. And there's of course early industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, whose founder Genesis P-Orridge wanted to deliberately create a European, post-Industrialisation sound, as he said that the European experience was a different one than the Afro-American one which influenced the blues/jazz/R&B/rock'n'roll lineage.


The British Invasion (of the 1960s) was re-introduction of an American style to the USA.
Gospel, blues and jazz music all have their roots in African rhythms brought over by slaves. However, the blues were limited to "race" radio stations until the 1960s.
A few white American musicians like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley where the firs tot gain air-time singing "negor songs."
Meanwhile, white, British rockers like Joe Cocker and Long John Baldry took up the blues, added their own licks and re-introduced the blues to the USA. In recent years, ERic Clapton et al have paid their respects to classic black blues musicians like BB King.

That'd make an interesting POD: if rock'n'roll wouldn't have developed in the first place, its "parents" country and R&B would take a different path. Musically, early blues and country records weren't a millions miles away, so it's not impossible that someone else would have taken up the Johnny Burnette/Elvis/Lewis-style formula.

Without American rock'n'roll and R&B, British popular music would have stayed in its trad jazz/swing and skiffle traditions, and, come the 1960s, Jamaican styles would have crossed over as well. So the quintessential British sound might not have been Mersey Beat, but a hybrid between folk, ska and skiffle.
 

Insider

Banned
How about alternative development of metal music? Could it sprung from classic? Perhaps a long lasting economic stagnation leading to low demand for attendies of musical schools?
 
What about musicals coming more directly from XVIIth comédie-ballets instead of operettas, with a more political/cultural Louis XIV"s France?
 
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