Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh The music of Asia and India is to be admired because it has reached a stage ofperfec tion, and it is this stage ofperfection that interests me. But otherwise the music is dead. PIERRE BOULEZ The least interestzngform of influence to my mind, is that of imitating the sound of some non-Western music.. . . Instead of imitation, the influences of non-Western mu sical structures on the thinking of a Western composer is likely to produce something genuinely new. STEVE REICH I got interested in world music as a failed drummer; I was able to lookfor fresher rhythms. It just seemed fresh, wonderfu4 more live and spiritual than most pop. PETER GABRIEL The study of world musics moved out of what would nowadays be called an Orien talist stance only in the 196os. Till then, few people seriously questioned the notion that beyond the Western classical tradition there were three kinds of music to be stud ied: Orienta4 folk, and primitive Oriental” of course referred to those Asian “high cultures” that had long-term, accessible internal histories and that could be “compared” with similar European systems. ‘Primitive” encompassed all the ‘prelit erate” peoples of the world, who had to rely on oral tradition for transmission and who had no highly profrssionalized “art musicians” in their midst. The ‘folk” were the internal primitives ofEuro-A merica. MARK SLOBIN How should we conceive of difference in music? The kind of difference in voked when music, that quintessentially nonrepresentational medium, is employed (paradoxically) so as to represent, through musical figures, an other music, another culture, an other? What is implied by attending to the boundaries of musical-aesthetic discourses inherent in this notion of rep resenting or appropriating another music or culture in music? Or in the notion that a music’s construction of its own identity may involve the ex clusion or repudiation of another music? Or in the concept of hybridity as I