American Music? Qu'est-que-ce?

Allow me to begin with a question: what is American Culture? This was the question that I was attempting to answer last Friday. Today’s America does not have the traditional and ethnic cultures that can be found in China. Although we are a “Melting Pot”, in America assimilation is inevitable. So what could I say to these students who came half way around the world to find the essence of American Culture?

We broke the ice by talking about schools, as most students do when they first meet. Apparently they are at college studying economics and business type stuff, yet they all do some sort of fine art thing. And that was the first difference between Chinese and American culture. American respect art, but we are inclined to cut it out of eternally stretched budgets. I guess in Western cultures, there is a grater divide in between the “Fine Arts” and “the Sciences”. I did find it strange that they studied business and Classical Peeking Opera. For some reason, in my mind they are incompatible.

It was a shame that we could not play traditional American music. If we only had a few spare steel guitars handy. Our best approximations about what American music was were centered in the popular music of today and its roots in jazz and rhythm and blues. But here is a thought—what else could we talk about? America is a land of immigrants, thus any ethnic music can be considered American, as long as that ethnicity lives in America. So, popular music is definitely American, as it bound us all, despite our ancestry and thus gave us a common language from which to speak.