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In order to discuss modern revival and fusion processes from a broader perspective, this chapter presents the case study of the New St. George, an American English electric folk band. The interview with band leader Jennifer Cutting adds a relativizing angle to the specific situation of a hybrid music band, such as the musical selection process, the performance situation, and the business side. As the specifically marginal situation of American English bands reveals, hybrid bands often have to work with compromises much stronger than the dominant “Celtic” scenes, which can fall back on a much broader local and global network. While thus appearing as a highly specific genre, English electric folk is nevertheless also being revealed as a highly influential genre — be it with regard to the more successful “Celtic” branch — yet also with regard to folk rock approaches in neighboring countries like Scandinavia.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of music analysis and theory in universal and cross-cultural contexts, including: Analysis: Definitions and Perspectives; Choosing Perspectives for this Book; World Music as a Context for New Music; Categorizing Music; Periodicity and the Composer's Toolbox; Qualities of Periodicity; and Universals and a Future Music Theory.

As a re-evaluation of Bob Dylan's folk rock performance at Newport highlights, one central controversy of fusion music has been centered on the relationship between traditional and popular music. This discourse becomes especially apparent in the broader historical background of the partly strongly interrelated folk music revivals. The subsequent historical overview thus sketches the different Folk Revivals in America (1930s-1965) and American Folk Rock (1965-1970) and the Second British Folk Revival (1950s/60s), including the Skiffle Craze and the development of the folk club scene, which has strongly shaped the discourses regarding electric folk. As the focus of this study is set on electric folk from its emergence in the mid-1960s until its disappearance in the late 1970s, later developments after the re-emergence in the 1980s are only briefly sketched.

How does popular music reveal some of the tensions of urban 21st- century India? In Chennai, musicians combine elements of Western jazz, rock, and classical music with South Indian classical and film music. Musicians and audiences refer to this practice as “fusion,” which highlights the intentional mixing of musical genres. As a result, fusion is complexly situated between a series of politicized genre boundaries because it is at once popular, classical, Indian, and Western. It is therefore a contested musical practice with some champions and many naysayers, and presents a unique opportunity to learn how music-making and contemporary urban South India are linked through a relationship of irresolution. This chapter describes some of the tensions that characterize the practice of fusion in order to show how musicians synthesize omnipresent categories of Western and Indian music. I address the contemporary relevance of fusion by focusing on a single performance of fusion in Chennai in 2007. Bringing together ethnographic description with literature about cosmopolitanism and studies of the new Indian middle class, I highlight the ways fusion is contested by showing how music sounds the tensions that constitute debates about globalization. Overall, I show how the practice of fusion in Chennai reveals a transitional moment in Indian history that uses new materials to express old desires: Musicians use a range of musical sounds to expand and maintain Indian tradition, as well as celebrate distinctive local Indian identity, while also displaying a global, cosmopolitan savvy.

The Introduction presents the defining features of klezmer music as a professional and functional music of the transnational Ashkenazic Jewish ethnos of Eastern Europe. It brings up briefly the issue of gestural expression in Jewish language and dance, and referring to Max Weinreich’s understanding of Yiddish as a fusion language, presents a definition of klezmer music as a “fusion music.” It defines the five stocks out of which determinants were chosen as components in the klezmer fusion to be: 1) Renaissance dance music, 2) Baroque music of various genres, 3) Ashkenazic liturgy, 4) Greco-Ottoman dance and processional music, 5) Moldavian instrumental music.

This chapter discusses the legacy of the Miles Davis Quintet to jazz music. It describes how the members' longevity in the music industry helped make the quintet's compositions a part of the jazz standard repertory. It explores how Miles Davis and the other members who formed their own groups were essential to the development of fusion music in the 1960s and 1970s, with their use of electronic instruments, funk and rock rhythms, extended pedal point and ostinato figures, and sparer harmonic textures. It also considers the quintet's influence in the hard bop resurgence of 1980s, where groups that were indebted to the improvisational approaches of the quintet emerged.