Can we even imagine two expressions further apart than those of “world music” and “musica mundana”? In its most common usage—i.e., that adopted by the music industry—“world music” is a marketing concept, used to describe non-Western music. Meanwhile, “musica mundana” refers to the mathematical ratios that govern the harmony of the spheres. Even so, both these terms mean “music of the world.” It is clear that they have vastly different meanings in Latin and English, and that they are situated intime in the same way as the linguae francae that convey them. But is this difference in meaning not also linked to the polysemy of the notions of “music” and “world”?
“Music” describes an art, a production, and a practice, but it is also one of the four divisions of the liberal arts of the quadrivium, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. “World,” on the other hand, is more ambiguous. From an astronomical and planetary perspective, the term applies as much to the universe as it does to planet Earth, and all that is found and lives there. Socially, the word “world” describes the public, the people around us, secular life, fashionable society, and life as perceived by each one of us. Lastly, when used to refer to size and totality, it indicates something vast (“a whole world”)—but also a region or a milieu as a whole (the world of politics, the New World). The result of this is a distinction between a general meaning associated with a whole and a more specific meaning that concerns individuals, social groups, and cultural spheres in equal measure…