Foreign music may be quite foreign indeed. It may also be relatively accessible through comparisons with the popular and classical music you already know. If you have an open mind and an interest in foreign music, you may just find out that it's not all that foreign at all.

Popular Foreign Music

It you want to ease into an acquaintance with foreign music, it may be reassuring to know that other nations have their pop stars, just like we have ours. Take Iran, for example: Googoosh is a female superstar with multi-million dollar sales, a successful movie career, and thousands of women imitating her fashion and hair styles. Further, in the case of Iran, many pop stars (including all women) were banned from performing on television or radio by the 1979 Revolution, so many Iranian pop stars actually relocated to the West, and there was an inevitable influence on their music, making it an even easier bridge into Persian music.

Other foreign music, however, might take a while to become acclimated to. Even if you know nothing about Western music theory, your ears and your brain have been trained your whole life to process music with certain properties. These properties exist on the level of basic physics, for example the relations of notes to each other, which is defined by frequencies of vibration of the two tones.

We use half tones and whole tones in the West, but traditional Arabic music also uses quarter tones. An interval that would jar us as "out of tune," can be a desired nuance in their music. Similarly, our scales are comprised of no more than twelve distinct tones, while theirs may employ up to 24. These differences take some getting used to, but the music in which they are featured is truly rich and beautiful.