ast week, World Music Day was celebrated at Alhamra, albeit only as a token gesture. It was a modest affair, as no big names were attached to it; nor had it been publicised in a manner that it should have been. It was more like going through the motions than making the best of an opportunity that had presented itself.

That said, celebrating ‘prescribed’ international/ world days isn’t the norm in our part of the world. There are a few exceptions, in non-artistic fields, where we have marches or seminars, but this does not percolate through to the common people where they would respond to it as they might do on other days with culturally significant connections. For instance, Basant and Holi are particularly associated with music, and then the classical ragas are supposed to be sung during monsoons, but the cultural purges have dealt much of what was in our culture, a cruel blow.

As one looks at the calendar these days, nearly all days of the year are dedicated to one thing or the other. In the past, particularities in our culture, certain things, or functions, or roles were taken for granted and no attention was paid to them. This could in present times be the outcome of both a compulsion to highlight an issue based on the assumption that it will generate some awareness around it, or it could be the rise of the individual over the norms associated with a family or clan, or the community at large.

In the last few years, the trend of dedicating days to different activities, art forms, and even human relationships has caught on big-time. The world now celebrates — or observes — such diverse things as environment, population, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and love by assigning a particular day of the year to each one of them. World Music Day is also one of those. It is celebrated on June 21 every year, and if one is not mistaken, the first of October has already been announced by the United Nations as the International Music Day.

The old definitions and distinctions of ‘world music’ don’t hold any longer; it can be Western or non-Western, acoustic or electronically mixed. The world of world music has no boundaries; therefore access to world music is open to all.

Music Day, or Fete de la Musique, gained importance gradually, as the media picked it up as a day that must be acknowledged and celebrated. It began in France as a music festival and has since spread over to a hundred countries and cities.

‘World Music,’ as we know it, can be folk music, popular music, or art music. Its practitioners may be amateurs or professionals. It may be sacred, secular, or commercial; and its performers may emphasise authenticity, while at the same time relying heavily on mediation to market it as widely as possible. The consumers may use it as they please; they may celebrate it as their own or revel in its strangeness. The old definitions and distinctions don’t hold any longer; world music can be Western or non-Western, acoustic or electronically mixed. The world of world music has no boundaries; therefore, access to world music is open to all.

here’s a dark side to world music as well: it can raise fears that we are losing much that’s close to home. Its homogenising effect threatens local practices, as it uses the spaces of the global village. Its dissemination across the globe depends on the appropriation of transnational recording companies whose primary interest is to exploit cultural resources. Fusion and border-crossing may enrich some world-music styles, but they impoverish others.

While harping on the importance of one’s cultural responses the world is changing fast, and the younger generation, through the social media, seems far more gelled into the debates and issues taking place in the world. The world that still informs us is “the Western world”; it floats an issue, instigates a debate and then imposes an imagined framework of its own preferences on it.

Taking our sights off this larger debate, Pakistanis are more exposed to international or Western culture through the American or British channels of communication which have monopolised the information highway. They are exposed to the forms and genres that are bracketed as ‘the West’ but are different from the American or British expression. There is a whole world out there in the various European cultures about which our understanding and knowledge is next to negligible.

The writer is a senior culture critic