Answer to Question 1
it is significant in its own right
it makes an important American contribution to international music
it has transformed popular music throughout the world
Answer to Question 2
I would try to immerse myself completely in the local culture, attempting to really understand the worldview of the particular group of Africans I was visiting. Language and culture shock would be formidable barriers to most Westerners, including me. I would have to learn to really understand viewpoints drastically different from some of the prevailing views of the Western culture I grew up in. In order to get a clear idea of the meaning of a local music-culture in Africa, I would suspend my disbelief and temporarily abandon my Westerner's penchant for rational, scientific reasoning and mechanistic explanations of all natural phenomena.
I would expect to find highly developed and respected traditions of musical performances at the communal center of the different ethnic groups of Africans discussed in the textbook. Participation in music by the entire community would be a natural, integrated part of everyone's daily life. I would expect to see music used as a powerful means of understanding and coping with some of life's biggest mysteries. I'm from a concert-music-culture and I would need to get over expecting all music to have some kind of frame around the sounds called Music Performance-Show. Another difficult thing for me to understand would be the spiritual relationships among music, inanimate objects, ancestral and other spirits.
I would immediately begin to learn how to play the music by studying with expert musician-teachers who are performing within the local music-culture. An important barrier to my understanding African music is that my Western background is more or less limited to metrical musicmost of the music I've played and lived with has been structured around consistent metrical patterns. I'm afraid it would take me considerable time and practice before I was comfortable playing music that was so polyphonic, polyrhythmic, and polymetric. The music I heard in the chapter had a profound sense of freedom, yet it was all intricately interlocked and related to repeating cycles of precise patterns and time-feels.
But I quite agree with the chapter's author, David Locke, a cross-cultural encounter such as this would greatly enhance my musical pleasure and allow me to create my own new and exciting music-culture.
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