yasmin alibhai-brown in the indepenent: ‘the blending of cultures in the arts is not always a recipe for success’:

Fusion in art and popular culture is back. Arguably, it has really never gone away. Cross-fertilisation has gone on since human groups found or heard of others unlike themselves. Tim Bridgman, who has studied musical traditions, believes “pure music has not existed in western Europe since the middle ages”. In Vaughan Williams you find Celtic music and in English ballads traces linger of old black Delta work songs. The critic and broadcaster Alkarim Jivani takes a similarly long view. Britain’s culture perpetually evolves, is audaciously derivative and yet stubbornly denies this obvious truth. Nash’s Greek columns and Neoclassicism have been turned, for example, into the nation’s “traditional” aesthetic and scant attention is paid to Britannia’s irrepressible cultural promiscuity and her ingestion of, among others, Egyptian, Ottoman, Indian and Persian, Chinese, later Japanese colour, design, crafts and visual sense. All of our great museums are repositories of creative miscegenation yet some reputably deep thinkers today reject the flux and mix of history and insist that globalisation or multiculturalism or post modernism have ripped into chaste national narratives leaving them torn and fatally wounded. And as Fascism gains popularity in old and fatigued Europe, expect more vociferous calls for cleansing and purification. That, in turn, will, for sure, fire up a fresh counter offensive of subversive cross-breeding in art and culture.

even the claim of pure music existing in the middle ages is probably overstatement.

yasmin’s quote has obvious appeal to my universalist approach and puts nationalism so taken for granted today in a clearer historical perspective.

i like the rest of her article too. extrapolated summary: music / art; good sometimes, often not.

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