Western logistics of form and instrumental forces. But it is arguable that, at least to Western ears, the intuition of time and the textural economy in the music of a Japanese composer such as Shinichi Yuize, for example, comes across much more vigorously because played on Japanese instruments. Therefore, if the medium can make a difference, is this due to the sound of the instrument and the attached cultural connotations, to the employed idiom (that is the scenario of pitch, genre and style-related matters) or to a combination of the two? And how far can cultural connotations be retained by detaching the medium from the idiom?

Asserting that instruments and their performance techniques reflect aesthetic and psychological notions inherent to a specific culture opens up a whole range of issues. But specific questions arise when instruments belonging to different cultures are put together in the same musical context. Is, first of all, an instrument’s cultural symbolism really inescapable? Would, for example, the inclusion of an African instrument in a typical work of European chamber music be enough to qualify that music as intercultural? A positive answer would imply that for the Japanese people a global music would have begun in 1874 when the court musicians of Gagaku introduced the first European instruments in their ensembles and, for the first time in Japanese history, European music was included in their repertoire under the baton of a foreign conductor.¹³

If it is not the presence of the instrument itself that makes the difference, we must then look at the overall context in which the instrument is used and the relation between the instrument and the context. By so doing, we may find that instruments’ cultural connotations may be there by default, as it were, but that they can be brought to the foreground or kept to the background according to the context established by the composer. And that it is the degree of the merging of such elements that determines the level of an inter-cultural, or at least hybrid, discourse.

Let us look at a very simple example in relation to the employment of the sitar in the music of the Beatles. By comparing two songs such as Norwegian wood and Within you without you we can observe how an explicit musical context may or may not be delineated by a specific instrument depending on the setting of the context itself, that is the chosen cultural idiom, and the degree of relation between the instrument and the overall context. In Norwegian wood, the setting is denoted by the structural, instrumental and content logistics which typifies the popular song genre of Western music (see Fig. 1).

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