Introduction
Intercultural music is, at its simplest, the fusion of musical elements drawn from different cultural traditions – rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, melodic vocabulary and form combining across borders into something that belongs to none of its sources alone. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, the fusion of music from multiple cultures has become increasingly recognised and globally popular, in part through movements such as the rise of Latin jazz in the 1940s and the wider world-music phenomenon that followed. Today, intercultural music ranges from chart-topping pop infused with Afro-Cuban, Afrobeat or Latin influences, to its integration into film scores, where composers regularly draw on regional musical languages to evoke setting, character and emotional resonance.
In modern composition, the line between cultural inheritance and creative borrowing has become increasingly difficult to draw. Composers working across traditions are no longer simply borrowing surface materials – melodic, harmonic or instrumental references – but are increasingly encouraged to engage deeply with the structural language of musical practices far removed from their own. It is reasonable to suggest that this shift reflects a wider awareness of cultural authorship in the modern industry: a recognition that musical traditions carry histories which cannot be respectfully invoked without first being understood. Furthermore, the concept of transculturation, originally proposed by Fernando Ortiz (Ortiz, 1940), describes intercultural exchange not as one tradition absorbing another, but as a third thing emerging from the contact – an idea that has become central to current debates around musical appreciation versus appropriation.
As an emerging film composer, learning about music from different cultures is crucial to my development in the industry. Projects may arrive that require knowledge of a particular cultural setting. In order to write music that accurately portrays the soundscape of a region – its rhythmic identity, its modal language, its instrumentation and its emotional codes – research into the tradition becomes essential, both to honour the music being referenced and to avoid the trap of inadvertent appropriation. This essay reflects on the research and compositional process behind two original pieces written across distant traditions: an Afro-Cuban jazz fusion piece drawing on African-diasporic and Latin musical languages, and an Eastern European-inspired soundtrack cue drawing on Klezmer folk tonality, asymmetrical meters and film-music traditions. Ultimately, the conclusion reflects on what working across two distant traditions has revealed about my own developing compositional voice, and on the lessons these projects have offered about engaging with musical practices beyond my own.
What is Intercultural Music?
The integration of music from different cultures is far older than the term intercultural music itself. Mark Hijleh, in Towards a Global Music History (2019), argues that the human musical story is best understood “from a global developmental perspective in the context of intercultural convergence, with travel and trade as the primary defining conditions and catalysts” (Hijleh, 2019). He identifies three pivotal historical convergences – the Silk Road, the rise of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula, and the Atlantic culture that emerged from the Americas after 1500 CE – each producing a new musical language from the meeting of previously separated traditions. The Atlantic culture is particularly relevant as it paved the way for the African, European and indigenous fusions from which Cuban music, and ultimately Afro-Cuban jazz, would emerge.
The conceptual groundwork for understanding such exchange was laid by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, whose Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azúcar (1940) introduced the idea of transculturation: a process in which intercultural exchange produces not assimilation but the emergence of a third, hybrid form. Hijleh extends this idea into the modern age, suggesting that the speed of intercultural convergence has accelerated as “developing technologies have enabled them over time, eventually approaching the level of instantaneous musical exchange, fusion, and global transculturality that we observe today”. Kimberlin and Euba (1995) similarly attribute this twentieth-century acceleration to scholarly cross-cultural interest, communications technology and the historical events that brought peoples into closer contact than ever before.
More recently, Bayley and Dutiro (2016) have argued that authentic intercultural music depends less on the surface combination of styles than on the dialogue underpinning it: “it’s not a hybrid or a fusion but new music if it’s done in a way that has a historical context” (Dutiro, 2016). It is reasonable to suggest that this principle – research and historical understanding as preconditions for cross-cultural composition – sits at the heart of any serious project of this kind, including the two original works discussed in this essay.
This emphasis on historical and structural grounding translates naturally to the first compositional project I took on: an Afro-Cuban jazz fusion piece informed by the transcultural lineage of Cuban music and its meeting with Western jazz.
Afro-Cuban/Latin Jazz Influences
To explore the Afro-Cuban genre, I went to its roots – both in West Africa and in Cuba itself – focusing initially on rhythm, instrumentation and structure as the three areas most likely to inform compositional decisions. Cuba’s musical identity is inseparable from the cultural histories transplanted there by the transatlantic slave trade. Fernandez observes that “during those four centuries, Cuba was also the recipient of the cultural heritage of much of sub-Saharan Africa”, noting that no other country in the Americas “would maintain links to Africa via the slave trade for as long a period” (Fernandez, 2006).
At the centre of this rhythmic lineage sits the clave, which is a two-bar pattern that Fernandez (2006) describes as functioning “like a heartbeat”, guiding the rest of the ensemble in pitch and time. It is usually performed one of two ways – the 3-2, with a strong syncopated first measure followed by a weaker metric second, and its inverse, 2-3. The choice between them is dictated by the melodic phrasing: accents falling on the syncopated side call for 3-2, while accents on the metric side call for 2-3, and a misaligned clave will, as practitioners phrase it, “cross” the song.
The instrumental architecture of these styles is remarkably consistent, and reflects the African polyrhythmic inheritance. Cuban music organises every instrument around a single rhythmic ostinato above which interlocking parts stratify. Fernandez notes that “the instrumental rhythmic format of the midcentury son was taken over completely by the modern salsa and Latin jazz ensembles”, with claves, bongos, congas, timbales, cowbells and güiros as “the flagship instruments of the son conjunto format” (Fernandez, 2006).
A vital aspect of this rhythmic architecture is its African inheritance, which extends far beyond instrumentation alone. Among the most significant traditions transplanted to Cuba were the drumming practices of the Yoruba, preserved in Cuba’s Santería religion through the batá ensemble, and the Kongo-derived rhythms of Palo Monte. Both retained their ritual function while gradually informing the secular music that grew around them. Arsenio Rodríguez, one of the great innovators of the modern son, drew explicitly on these traditions, producing what Fernandez describes as “a new synthesis of the son by incorporating the inflections and syncopations characteristic of the ritual music of the Cuban Palo Monte religion of Kongo origin” (Fernandez, 2006). Furthermore, the bell-pattern timeline that defines much of West African ensemble drumming – Including the Gankogui of Ewe music (Locke, 1998) – finds its direct equivalent in the clave, so it is plausible to presume that the rhythmic vocabulary of the Cuban ensemble functions less as a borrowing than as a continuation of African polyrhythmic principles.
The harmonic language of Afro-Cuban jazz emerged from the meeting of Cuban rhythm and the chord vocabulary of mid-twentieth-century jazz, and the choices it makes are themselves stylistically distinctive. Whereas straight-ahead jazz tends to organise itself around moving harmonic cycles, such as ii-V-I sequences, dominant chains and tritone substitutions, Latin jazz more often favours short, repeating vamps over which the rhythmic activity can take centre stage. Common rotations include the I-IV-V (or i-iv-V) cycle in a single key, the modal i-bVII vamp made famous by Oye Como Va, and the Andalusian cadence (i-bVII-bVI-V) inherited from Spanish folk practice. It is reasonable to suggest that the genre’s harmonic restraint is itself a structural choice as a static harmonic platform allows the rhythm section to take on the more complex polyrhythmic work that defines the music.
Oye La Tarea
Drawing on the research outlined in the previous section, I composed an Afro-Cuban jazz fusion piece that came to be called Oye La Tarea (Appendix 1 and 2). The title emerged from a process of researching Spanish phrases and songs alongside the rhythmic study, and it carries a deliberate double reference. Oye Como Va – literally “hey, how’s it going” – functions in Spanish as a casual greeting. It is also the title of Tito Puente’s 1962 cha-cha-chá, later popularised internationally by Santana in 1970 and now one of the most widely recognised Latin tracks in popular music. By naming the piece Oye La Tarea (“listen, it’s an assignment”), I wanted to play on Puente’s title and frame the work openly as a student response to the tradition: a question posed to the genre, and an answer offered back in the form of the piece itself.
This conceptual exchange is built into the music through a call-and-response chant that opens out of the introduction and returns later in the form. The Call voice delivers “Oye Como Va”; the Response answers first with “Oye La Tarea” and then with “Vamos a Jugar” – “let’s play” – a playful conclusion to the exchange that turns the assignment into an invitation. The chant is notated rhythmically rather than melodically, with the syllables aligned to the clave (See Appendix 2.1).
The introduction layers the rhythm section gradually, following the standard Cuban convention of building texture by accretion. The shaker enters first, supplying the continuous sixteenth-note bed that anchors the feel; the cowbell then states the clave-aligned bell pattern, followed by the drum kit, the conga and a second conga, with the bass arriving last on its anticipated tumbao. The “loop until all parts in” instruction in the score allows the build to find its own length in performance, which felt closer to the danzón and timba traditions of layered ensemble entry than a more strictly counted introduction would have done.
Once the chant has been stated, the rhythm section settles into its sustained groove. The bass underpins the piece consistently from this point on, locking the harmonic motion to its anticipated downbeats. The piano loosely follows the clave with chordal stabs that respond to but do not directly mirror the cowbell, and the kit plays a Mozambique-inspired pattern.
The body of the piece follows a head–solos–head architecture inherited from the Cuban son tradition. The trumpet states the melody first over a minor vamp, then takes a solo; this is followed by a passage of call-and-response trades between piano and trumpet, each phrase prompting an answer from the other instrument. A bridge section opens up next, in which the piano settles into a more sustained montuno pattern – denser, more melodically ostinato-driven, and giving the texture a brief lift before the chant returns. The reappearance of the vocal chant in the second half functions as a coro, restating the conceptual material from the opening before the piece resolves into its closing gesture.
Returning to the frameworks introduced earlier in the essay, Oye La Tarea sits comfortably within the criteria for functioning intercultural music as set out by both Ortiz and Bayley and Dutiro. Ortiz’s notion of transculturation describes the piece accurately; it is neither a Cuban work nor a Western jazz composition, but a third thing constructed from the meeting of the two. The conceptual hook in the title is explicitly attributive, framing the piece as a student response to Tito Puente rather than concealing its source. Furthermore, Dutiro’s notion that authentic intercultural music depends on “historical context” rather than surface fusion (Dutiro, 2016) is met by the rhythmic and structural decisions outlined previously. The clave-aligned chant, the anticipated tumbao, the Mozambique-inspired kit pattern and the layered ensemble entry are all drawn from the tradition’s structural language rather than its surface markers.
It is reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the piece operates as a transparent, research-led act of intercultural composition: one in which the source is named, the language is studied, and the resulting work belongs to neither tradition in isolation but to the contact between them.
Eastern European Influences
To explore the Eastern European tradition, I focused initially on the modal language, harmonic conventions, asymmetric rhythms and instrumental colour that distinguish its various regional styles. Although the term “Eastern European music” gathers together a wide range of national and ethnic traditions, such as Balkan, Romani, Klezmer, Hungarian, Slavic, they share enough common features, particularly in their modal and rhythmic vocabularies, to be treated as a recognisable musical region.
Several scales recur across these traditions. The most distinctive is the Phrygian dominant, also known as Hijaz in Middle Eastern theory and Freygish in Klezmer practice. This mode is built from the fifth degree of the harmonic minor, with a flattened second and major third producing the characteristic augmented-second interval that defines so much of the region’s vocal and instrumental ornament. In addition, the Hungarian minor (harmonic minor with a raised fourth), the Romanian minor (Dorian with a raised fourth), and harmonic minor itself appear with similar frequency, and their shared use of the augmented second is largely what gives the music its identifiable colour.
Harmony in these traditions is typically modal rather than functional, with static tonal centres and frequent use of drones or pedal tones beneath ornamented melodic lines. Furthermore, the use of Hijaz cadences – moving from a flat second down to the tonic – replaces the dominant-tonic resolution of Western art music with something more open and unresolved.
Rhythmically, Eastern European folk music is defined by its asymmetric, or additive, meters. Common examples include the Bulgarian Rachenitsa (7/8 grouped as 2+2+3), the Daichovo (9/8 as 2+2+2+3) and the Kopanitsa (11/8 as 2+2+3+2+2). These groupings are felt rather than counted, and produce a forward propulsion that has no real equivalent in mainstream Western popular music.
Instrumentation varies by region but shares a consistent focus on melodic-instrument soloists supported by drones and percussion. The Klezmer clarinet, the Balkan kaval and gadulka, the Hungarian cimbalom, the Romani violin and the Balkan brass band tradition all foreground ornamented melodic lines, with the harmonic accompaniment kept deliberately simple so as not to obscure the soloist.
It is plausible that these features have proved especially attractive to film composers, who deploy them to signify both geographic specificity and a heightened emotional register. The Hans Zimmer and Tina Guo collaboration on the Wonder Woman (2017) theme is one of the most prominent recent examples: Guo’s electric cello, playing a modal, Phrygian-dominant-inflected riff, supplies the score’s most identifiable hook. John Williams’ Schindler’s List (1993) takes a more lyrical approach, with Itzhak Perlman’s solo violin drawing on Klezmer melodic vocabulary – small motivic cells, expressive ornamentation and a limited harmonic palette – to construct what is, in essence, an extended single lament.
Two-Three-Four
Where Oye La Tarea approached its source through pastiche-aware homage, the Eastern European piece, titled Two-Three-Four (Appendix , was conceived from the outset as something more personal, sincere and filmic, leaning on my classical upbringing and on my ambition to write for screen. The brief I set myself was effectively the inverse of the Afro-Cuban piece: instead of a dance-driven ensemble work, a duo for piano and solo cello that would behave more like an underscored cue than a stand-alone piece.
The structural identity of the work, and the source of its title, is the time signature. Two-Three-Four is in 9/8 throughout, but the nine beats are grouped asymmetrically – primarily as 2+3+4, with passages that subdivide into 2+3+2+2 when the intensity rises. To internalise the asymmetric pulse, I used the South Indian Konnakol system, which provides syllabic patterns for irregular subdivisions; this proved especially useful in counting the opening chordal passage, where the 9/8 groupings have to be felt rather than counted. One could argue that this cross-cultural research method – applying an Indian rhythmic discipline to learn an Eastern European one – is itself a small act of intercultural composition, running in parallel to the larger one.
To make the pattern comprehensible to the performer as well as the listener, the piano ostinato is constructed so that the right hand returns to the root of A at the beginning of each grouping, providing a clear sonic anchor against which the asymmetric subdivisions can be heard and tracked. The ostinato sits within the Phrygian dominant scale, and the chordal voicings, the cello melody and the harmonic vocabulary are all drawn almost exclusively from the same mode, with slight chromatic deviations introduced only when variation in the line demanded it. This restraint draws directly on the research outlined above: the Klezmer-derived approach in Williams’ Schindler’s List (1993), where harmonic limitation lets melodic ornament carry the emotional weight.
The cello carries the melody throughout, marked at the outset to play “quite freely” against the piano’s stricter pulse. The line is procedural rather than improvised, but it grows progressively – beginning with long sustained pitches, then introducing rhythmic motion and finally a more ornamented contour by the closing pages, all within the same modal vocabulary. The final section thins to a sustained mezzo-piano texture with a freer tempo, allowing the piece to close with a similar cinematic register to its arpeggiated glissando opening. In retrospect, by holding both the harmonic and rhythmic vocabularies within tight limits, the music is freed to develop through melodic shape and dynamic shading alone. This is akin to the balance Williams achieves in Schindler’s List, and one of the more significant lessons I took from the Eastern European research.
Reflection and Conclusion
To conclude, the research underpinning Oye La Tarea and Two-Three-Four suggests that integrating cultural material into composition can become more meaningful through the discipline of studying that culture’s history first. One of the most striking observations to emerge is that no musical tradition exists in isolation: Cuban music carries the African diaspora, the Spanish colonial inheritance and the American jazz exchange; Eastern European folk music sits at the intersection of Balkan, Romani, Klezmer and Slavic traditions, each with its own further history. As Hijleh (2019) argues, any genre is already the product of earlier intercultural convergences.
What surprised me most was the combination of depth and accessibility – the structural principles of each tradition (clave, additive meter, modal vocabulary) proved entirely teachable once the research had been done, bearing out Euba’s argument that “talent is congenital while idiom is learnt” (Kimberlin and Euba, 1995).
Both pieces, on reflection, succeed most where the research showed through most clearly: in the clave-aligned chant and tumbao writing of Oye La Tarea, and in the modal and rhythmic restraint of Two-Three-Four. It is reasonable to suggest that each piece works because of the simple yet idiomatic use of common stylistic features of its respective genre – the clave, tumbao, montuno and call-and-response in the first; modal scales, additive meter and ostinato in the second. Rather than attempting innovation within these traditions, both compositions lean on what is most recognisable about them, as well as my own musical voice, allowing the cultural identity of each work to come through without strain.
Looking forward, I would like to explore further traditions – perhaps West African, South Asian or Middle Eastern – and to write for larger ensembles. Ultimately, for an emerging film composer expected to write convincingly across cultures, the discipline of studying a tradition before drawing on it is not optional, but central to the craft.
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