The Library of Congress > Linked Data Service > LC Subject Headings (LCSH)

World music


  • Here are entered collections of music from multiple regions or countries that cannot be described by specific music genres.
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    • Global music
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  • Closely Matching Concepts from Other Schemes

  • Narrower Concepts from Other Schemes

  • Sources

    • found: Work cat.: Spencer, P. World beat, 1992 : a listener's guide to contemporary world music on CD, 1992(World music)
    • found: Ox. dict. new world(World music)
    • found: The Garland encyclopedia of world music, 1988:v. 1, p. ix (The first encyclopedia devoted to the music of all the world's peoples. For several decades ethnomusicologists ... have been documenting the music of the world through fieldwork, recording, and analysis. Now, for the first time, they have created an encyclopedia that summarizes in one place the major findings that have resulted from the explosion in such documentation since the 1960's.)
    • found: World music : the rough guide. New ed., 1999:introd., v. 1 (The guide sets itself a clearly impossible task: to document and explain the popular, folk, and (excluding the Western canon) classical music traditions around the globe)
    • found: World music : the rough guide, 1994:introd. (World music as a concept is less than a decade old. The name was dreamed up in 1987 by the heads of a number of small London-based record labels who found their releases from African, Latin American, and other international artists were not finding rack space because records stores had no obvious place to put them.)
    • found: New Rolling Stone encyc. of rock & roll, 1995(The term world music was coined in the late eighties as a way to pigeonhole popular or contemporary musical styles from countries other than the United States or Great Britain, and refers primarily to styles and genres outside these musical traditions. World music is a sweeping category used to describe international styles that are neither art nor classical, nor artificially preserved folk music, but rather the living music of ordinary people. World beat, another term describing popular music from around the world, also refers to music by British or American jazz and rock groups that incorporate international sounds into their own work.)
    • found: All music guide to rock, 1995:under World beat (What world beat is depends to some degree on whom you're asking for a definition, but in general it could be said to refer to contemporary music produced from outside of mainstream American and European rock and pop forms, often incorporating rock, pop, and modern technology into indigenous traditional music. It wasn't until the beginning of the 1980's that world music began to exert a significant influence on Western rock culture.)
    • found: Taylor, T.D. Global pop : world music, world markets, 1997:p. 1 (One of the most notable trends in the music industry since the 1980s has been the rise in popularity of new music genres: world music, world beat, world fusion; in Germany, Weltbeat and Weltmusik; in other parts of the world, ethno pop, Afropop, Afro beat. Offshoots of these genres include: tribal, techno-tribal, and cyber tribal, as well as ambient trance, and new age.) p. 3 (World beat, when used at all, usually applies to popular musics from non-European cultures) p. 16 (World music: the rough guide looks at ethnic musics ...)
    • found: First steps in global music, 2020(OCoLC)1348995823
  • General Notes

    • Here are entered collections of music from multiple regions or countries that cannot be described by specific music genres.
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  • Scheme Membership(s)

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  • Change Notes

    • 2000-09-11: new
    • 2023-08-30: revised
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