Where traditional, popular and world music meet

This lesson asks you to analyse the interrelationships between traditional, commercial and art music. The museum offers three cases: a qawwal who reaches a record label, an album in which qawwali meets ambient music and Senegalese musicians, and a nasheed group that reaches distant audiences. The other examples the curriculum names are the work of your class. ¹

For each case, write who now receives an art that once belonged to its own community, and what carries it: a label, a festival or a broadcaster?

Compare what the records say of the original art with what is added in the recording. Do not judge; describe.

The record on Night Song, an album of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook, describes how it was built. The article says that Brook, having found on Mustt Mustt that Khan soared highest when given time to improvise, chose a new method: Khan recorded improvisations, some an hour long, onto multitrack tape, and Brook chose the best sections and built each track part by part, with no structure to aim for ². It was a manual process that predated easy digital editing, and Sound on Sound called it a "technological nightmare" ². Musicians from Baaba Maal's Senegalese band took part, among them the kora player Kauwding Cissokho, with Dildar Hussain on tabla and Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan on harmonium ². The album joins qawwali vocals to Brook's electronic ambient music ².

All three records rest on Wikipedia and Wikidata and on nothing else. Nusrat's cites the English article and a Wikidata item ^{3 4}, and Raihan's cites the English and the Malay articles and a Wikidata item ^{5 6 7}. Two articles can be set side by side, and here they differ: the English one dates the death of the founding member Azhari Ahmad to 29 August, after the Era Awards, the Malay one to 29 September, a week before the album Demi Masa ^{5 6}. The Night Song record reports its reception as chart positions, a magazine's ranking and a Grammy nomination ².

In Night Song, Brook builds each track from the best sections of recorded improvisations ². In 2008 Raihan launched Selawat, an album of salawat for the Mawlid sung without instruments ^{5 6}. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: when a devotional art reaches a label or a stage, is what carries it, the voice, the song or the community, the same in these two cases, or different?

• Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: his father's party, the labels and the collaborations, as one Wikipedia article lists them.
• Night Song: how the album was recorded, who played and how it was received.
• Raihan: the founding, the changes of line-up and the tours.
• Mustt Mustt: the earlier fusion album with Michael Brook.
• Real World Records: the label and what it set out to do.

Read the records on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Night Song and Raihan. Draw a chain of three links showing how an art moved from its community to a wider audience, and write under each link one sentence from the record.