Traditional and Contemporary Music. Almost everywhere these days the distinction not only between West and East, Western civilization and Eastern civilization, but between each of those and global civilization rears its challenging head and obliges us to come to terms with it as best we can.  Take music.  It is common knowledge that there is a difference between Western music and Eastern music, though more of style than of kind, since in both cases we find a dichotomy, traditionally, between folk music and classical music, whether in relation to a distinction between harmony and melody on the one hand or, arguably where the East is concerned, rhythm and pitch on the other hand.  For it will not have escaped many people’s attention that the West is by and large more given, traditionally, to harmony and melody, those phenomenal, or corporeal, approaches to music, than to rhythm and pitch, their noumenal, or ethereal, counterparts.  Yet with all their respective forms of folk music and classical music, the West and the East remain distinct from what could be called the march of global music, which is neither specifically harmonic nor melodic, rhythmic nor pitchful, but a combination, in opposite ways, of all four ingredients to greater or lesser extents, thereby affirming a global dimension in which aspects of what one would have identified with Western music are combined with elements closer to the East in such fashion that the resulting form, whether with a bias for pitch and rhythm, as in the case of Jazz, or for harmony and melody, as in the case of Rock, signifies a marked progression over both folk and classical traditions which would not be intelligible except in relation to globalization.  But since globalization can be devolutionary or evolutionary, female or male, and we are as yet still in its devolutionary stage … from fascist totalitarianism to corporate liberalism on state-oriented terms, it is small wonder that global music reflects this regression in the overhauling, by and large, of Jazz by Rock and of the pre-eminence of the latter type of music to the contemporary global scene, a type of music which is more electronic than its global precursor but arguably of a lower overall calibre in its less noumenal and altogether more phenomenal presentation as a music biased towards, though not exclusively committed to, harmonic and melodic as opposed, with Jazz, to rhythmic and pitchful impulses.  Yet Rock could no more turn its back on rhythm and pitch and still remain credibly global than Jazz reject the more phenomenal elements, largely stemming from the West, of harmony and melody.  Neither would either music be quite as global without the benefit of electronic means – a factor applying no less to Modern Jazz than to Hard Rock or Rock ‘n’ Roll generally.  But if Rock is still at the cutting edge of contemporary global music, then that must indicate, whether we give it a folksy or a classical interpretation, depending, I guess, on the type of Rock music (something equally applicable to Jazz), that global music has yet to attain, on the heads side of the metaphorical coin, as it were, of global civilization, to a progression from Rock to Jazz in a kind of reverse order of its devolutionary regression that would signify an evolutionary advancement from pluralistic to monistic criteria, commensurate with a progression from liberalism to totalitarianism within a framework that was strictly global and probably Social Theocratic, meaning of a church-oriented character that revolved around societies founded in religious sovereignty as opposed to political sovereignty that could be expected, little by little, to encourage a gradual centro-complixification of society in line with evolutionary progress.  Then it would be a kind of progression, in reverse order, from Rock to Jazz that we would witness, as things climbed from the phenomenal towards the noumenal, from a bias, within a more comprehensive framework, towards harmony and melody to one favouring rhythm and pitch, albeit in both cases with a markedly centripetal rather than centrifugal disposition that contrasted each with whatever existed – and still exists – on the devolutionary side of the global divide as a manifestation, totalitarian or liberal, jazzy or rocking, of a centrifugal urge commensurate with particle-based and externalized criteria.  The coming forms of Rock and Jazz, some of which arguably already exist in a somewhat peripheral or informal capacity, will signify a switch to wavicle-centred and internalized criteria such that can only properly emerge in a stage of civilization, in this case global, committed, through religion, to inner values of an egoistic and, more importantly, psychoistic, or soulful, character.  Therefore we may anticipate a switch from manually performed instruments that require to be plucked or banged or blown or tapped or whatever to increasingly autonomous or synthetic instruments which will produce sound on a much more consistently subjective and interiorized string-like basis, whether on a pluralistic (New Rock) or a monistic (New Jazz) basis, with a corresponding advance from harmony and melody towards rhythm and pitch within a context which, being global, necessarily combines all elements to greater or lesser degrees, and this whether the type of global music in question be of a folk or a classical character within parameters broadly though not exclusively determined by ideological epoch.  For no less than Rock can be folksy or classical, without being equivalent to Folk music or Classical music, so, too, can Jazz show folksy or classical leanings without being in any way identifiable with Eastern or Western folk and classical traditions.  Probably this underlying dichotomy between folksy and classical tendencies in either type of global music simply reflects a more basic gender distinction between male and female such that is always to be found in society at one level or another, and which will probably continue to exist as global civilization switches, at some future time, from a devolutionary to an evolutionary stage of its advance, attaining to a classless/anti-upperclass dichotomy, in metaphysics and antimetachemistry, between folksy and classical, or anticlassical (Romantic), approaches to the reborn development of Jazz as it gradually supersedes its Rock counterpart in the evolution of global music from phenomenal to noumenal, corporeal to ethereal subjectivity in line with the centro-complexifying advance of religious values generally.  Hence the ultimate type of global music may well combine rhythm with pitchful or, more correctly, anti-pitchful ingredients to a degree which transcends anything we have heard before, and do so in completely the reverse fashion of how Jazz has hitherto been composed and performed, with a commitment, that is, to time and antispace as opposed, like its totalitarian antithesis, to space and antitime, the alpha and anti-omega beginnings of global civilization which has yet to be totally eclipsed, so to speak, by its omega and anti-alpha endings such that, far from literally ending, will signify an eternal culmination of values commensurate with Eternity.