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MUSICAL INFLUENCES IN THE UNITED STATES

"They supposed the whole heaven to be a harmonica and a number," said Aristotle in describing music.1 Arthur Schopenhauer contended that music was concerned with the will itself, the nature of which it expresses directly and imediately.2 The significant role of music in life, thus, is well recognized and accepted.

In the United States, all musical forms may be found, and most of these forms may be found in a commercial context. Many of the more commercial forms of music found in this country, however, owe their origins to gospel music generally, and to black gospel music particularly.

Although it is often difficult to perceive (with evidence to the contrary seemingly around every corner one turns), American culture is becoming increasingly more integrated in

1 2the late1980s. In part, this phenomenon is occurring because of the rapid increase in immigration from countries whose peoples were not present in the United States in proportionately large numbers prior to 1980. The socalled fourth wave of American immigration is bringing into the country in ever increasing numbers the peoples of Asia and Latin America.3

There is, however, another significant causal factor for the increasing cultural integration which is occurring in the United States. However reluctant white America may be to accept cultural integration, and however unaware white Americans as a group may be of the process, many of the cultural values and characteristics of the country's longstanding ethnic and racial minorities are, in the 1980s, being incor porated into the cutlrual mainstream. This phenomenon is particularly strong with respect to the cultural values and characteristics of black Americans.4

While black cultural values and characteristics are broad in their spectrum, it is in music that they appear to be making the greatest inroads in the 1980s. The black influence in rock and ro...