Ventsel, World music routes InterDisciplines 1 (2014) 189 World music routes: the modification of the Sakha musical tradition 1 Aimar Ventsel The end of the 1980s was also the beginning of the rise in »world music« and of WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), an arts festival founded by Peter Gabriel, Thomas Brooman, and Bob Hooton in 1980. While the first WOMAD festival had taken place in 1982, 2 the term »world music« was coined only in 1987. This happened at a meeting of independent record label representatives and music journalists whose goal was to launch a new marketing category for various music genres that existed outside the average Euro-American pop music scene, being recorded mainly in the Third World (Mitchell 1993, 310; Pietilä 2009, 4). In the meantime, world music had crossed over into the mainstream and become a soundtrack for both semi-alternative student parties and intellectual music hall events. On the other side of the former Iron Curtain, these were exciting times. Suddenly new music was every- where—on daytime radio, on TV, and in the emerging pirate cassette market via new private shops and market stalls. In this period, I was a passionate follower of the late night TV program »Programma A,« on Ostankino TV, the Russian central television channel, which was run by the famous Russian rock journalist Artemii Troitski and aired new underground music from all over the Soviet Union. For many Soviet music fans, »Programma A« developed into an important source for new music, for discovering new artists from both the West and Eastern Europe. I remember being thrilled one evening while watching 1 This research was supported by the European Union through the Euro- pean Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory CECT). 2 http://womad.org/about/.