East is East and West is West; and a good thing too!

President, Ladies and Gentlemen

May I say first that it is a great honour and privilege to have been invited to give this lecture. The opportunity to talk about aspects of the arts to such an international audience is a very special one and I hugely appreciate the occasion for doing so that your invitation has given me. 

At first glance, there may seem a contradiction between my presence here - indicating a readiness to exchange ideas between East and West - and the provocative nature of the title of my talk, suggesting - if read narrowly - a belief that east and west should mind their own business. Most discussions about international relations, foreign policy or world affairs assume that without an east/west coming together we shall end up in disaster, political or ecological. To appear to suggest otherwise, as I might appear to do, is either reactionary, foolhardy or plain obtuse.

Mr President, I hope I am none of the above - at least not intentionally. What I want to examine is the proposition that in the world of the arts at least, true creativity has an important local component to it; that regional and continental traditions deserve respect; that assumptions of cross fertilisation need to be examined with care and suspicion; and that a necessary distance between cultures is desirable, especially as an antidote to the commercially driven, globalised pap that is so often proffered in the name of multiculturalism. But let me insist too, I am not advocating isolation, exclusion or ignorance of the world beyond our particular borders. But how is commercialised globalism to be effectively resisted except on the basis of a strong local identity.

By way of reassurance that I do not stand in front of you as some sort of cultural isolationist, let me mention some of the projects over the last five years that demonstrate the Barbican's credentials as a major international programmer.

Yet before I do that, I should tell you something about the Barbican itself.  It is the largest integrated arts centre in the United Kingdom, possibly in Europe. Usually, the various performing arts forms keep to themselves. Typically, as in London, the National Theatre is one institution in its own building; the Royal Opera performs opera and ballet in its own building. The same can be said of English National Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Film Theatre.

The Barbican houses all these performing art forms in a concert hall, two theatres, three art galleries and three cinemas in a single, unified complex. With us, all the arts are under one roof.  More importantly still, all the art forms are under a single, united arts direction. While each art form - music, theatre, visual arts - has its own needs, its own priorities, they do not plan and perform in isolation from their colleagues and peers, still less without sympathy for them. Being aware of  the latest ideas and currents in other arts is a crucial way of keeping programmers alert, up to date, open minded, and aware.

The Barbican is still a young organisation - we will be 23 this year. The building stands in the middle of the City of London's financial district - the so-called Square Mile - and not in the West End, along the South Bank of the Thames  or in London's Theatre land. That marks us apart still further.

And there is one further key point of distinction that I must emphasise. All the other arts organisations I have mentioned are funded by the government, through an independent body called the Arts Council.  The Barbican is funded by the Corporation of London, which has for several hundred years run the local affairs of the heart of London. So in almost every way, the Barbican is distinct in the way it is funded, where it exists, the building it inhabits and how it approaches the arts.

In fact our very constitution and make up could explain the very international way we programme the arts. As I looked back over just the last five years of programming, this is what I found.

In the theatre programme we had companies from every continent on the globe; Deborah Colker's Dance Company from Brazil; African Dance companies from the South;  the Maly Theatre from St Petersburg; the Schaubuhne from Berlin; Third World Bunfight from Africa; Marionettes from Georgia;  Puppets from Canada; opera from China; Dance theatre from Taiwan; Strindberg's Dream play directed by Robert Wilson; Merce Cunningham from New York; theatre circus from Canada; multi media about the impact of call centres on the Indian sub-continent; and French classic eighteenth century opera directed by a great French choreographer.          

We have presented drama with video, drama with tv, with dance; drama where musicians become actors, where dancers dance with their electronic shadows; where ex miners dance in gumboots; where a string quartet moves as it plays. We have had mime, satire, cabaret, tragedy and every combination of the performing art forms you could imagine. We have learned a lot and so have our audiences.

And the music programming has been comparably outgoing and international. The Barbican has presented whole weekends of music from Mexico, Colombia, Ireland, Cuba, South Africa, and the Mediterranean Rim; there have been festivals of  Argentine Tango, music from the Gypsy World, sounds from the Urban Beats environment of Dakar, New York, Caraccas and London;  and jazz music in almost all their forms. It has celebrated the American Originals - such as Harry Partsch -  witnessed the return and revival of the classic Irish folk band, Planxty, and much, much more.

In the classical music arena, the Barbican has pushed the limits of the performance envelope with daring stretches across performance conventions. Contemporary dance set to Beethoven; a solo singer dancing and singing through Schubert's greatest song cycle; the director Peter Sellars dramatising Bach cantatas; orchestras playing with light shows, with film, with video.

You will, I hope, see from this record of presentation, that the Barbican is an international, outward looking, curious, open minded organisation. When I talk about the separation of forms of Eastern and Western expression, I am not therefore talking of isolationism, indifference, superiority, or any kind of cultural apartheid  or separate development. It is possible to retain a sense of distinctness in artistic identity while keeping the most open of minds to the way others do things. 

The experience is that many of  our audiences are equally open minded about others. They do not want to exist only in a world where all that is available is the great Western European musical canon. From Medieval Church plainchant - those haunting unaccompanied monks' choirs  exploring their devotion to God in Gothic buildings - through the peaks of  classicism under Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven; to the great C 19 Romantics such as Brahms and Tchaikovsky, to the C 20 masters such as Stravinsky, the European classical music tradition is an extraordinary achievement which will remain at the heart of  Western, American and increasingly Japanese music making. That place as a defining cultural experience is not under threat.

But recognition of the central nature of that experience does not mean that it is an exclusive one. It does not exclude curiosity about, or openness to, the arts and music of other cultures. I insist - for Europeans, cherishing the European tradition is the starting point for understanding other traditions and cultures, not a reclusive cul-de-sac for ignoring them.

Equally,  I would suggest - for here I must be on trickier ground - that cherishing Asian traditions and developing them is the necessary starting point for your journey of discovery and openness to other cultures. But I will turn to that more fully later.

Essentially, my argument is as follows. Recognising and owning your own cultural and artistic traditions is an essential aspect of cultural identity. Equally and essentially, openness to other cultures is a necessary part of modernity, a vital ingredient of innovation. But setting out to fuse those cultures, being ashamed of and undervaluing their unique characteristics, setting up that task of fusion as some kind of priority goal, usually produces an unconvincing, and undigested mess of  modish, cultural gestures. Even  if achieved, they contribute little in themselves, apart from making some people feel good and culturally inclusive. Worse still, globalisation of culture - as if economic globalisation were of itself a model to ape - which such activity often leads to, is a code word for domination and all too often suppresses or destroys local cultures.

Let me explain why I believe this to be the case. Take the experience and very different approach of two contemporary composers - the Chinese American, Tan Dun, and the German, Heiner Goebbels.  And I will also refer to the experience of the sculptor, Anish Kapoor, and the theatre director, Simon McBurney.

First though to the Chinese American composer, Tan Dun. He is perhaps the most public case of a composer who seek to blend his native Chinese tradition with the western school of western classical composition - he is the best example of the cultural fusionist. In a series of works - such as  Water Concerto for percussion, Marco Polo, Tea, a Mirror of the Soul - and in projects such as the Silk Road Project with Yo Yo Ma, he draws on, explores, fuses,  blends, takes forward these two contrasting - perhaps contradictory - musical traditions.

The impulse is clear, the intention admirable, the execution highly accomplished. And yet, and yet. Does it get us anywhere? Does it solve problems of artistic expression, of artistic innovation? Does it set a new path, offer a new resolution to the long lasting western dilemma of how to reconcile the harmonic/melodic tradition with the innovations of the cerebral/intellectual one? If harmony/melody in the post Romantic world have run their course, the evident failure of the intellectual, rationalist school of music to gain public support is glaringly obvious. Could West/East fusion provide a global answer to the western dead end?

My fear is that such stylistic homogenisation merges forms, colours and omits any real blending of  substance. Like fusion cooking,  the odd exotic flavour from one cuisine dropped into another becomes just a bit of palate tickling. Worse still, such a melange is too like the inter breeding of a horse  and a donkey - breeding the stubborn sterility of a mule. And as you know the mule cannot have offspring.

So my conclusion, a reluctant one in some ways, is that elegant stylistic crossing like Tan Dun's is a sterile process leading nowhere but doing so in a  highly professional accomplished way. East and West merge but perhaps all it shows is that their differences, their distinctness are too great for the blend to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Sadly, some musical observers believe they can detect in Tan Dun's continuing work evidence of a growing inclination to mix the ingredients of fusion music. Certainly it has its appeal to audiences, but whether it reflects a growing profundity in Tan's composition, or rather a growing dexterity at pleasing his listeners is regarded by many as a very open question.

One of the great miracles of cooking is when the egg yolk is stirred in with olive oil to create something totally new - mayonnaise. It is one of the great miraculous metamorphoses. Sadly, such a transformation into a new form does not - to my ears - occur in Tan Dun's works.

So what do I learn from the very different approach of the German composer, director and theatre creator, Heiner Goebbels?  It's worth saying  that he creates theatrical pieces for concert halls, concert type pieces for theatres, and operas  which are not quite operas. He creates forms that break across conventional ideas of what forms ought to be.

And Goebbels draws deeply on all forms of sound and music making from around the world.  In one theatre piece in particular, the mixture is as follows. Called "Hashirigaki", a Japanese word meaning "running, writing fluently, outlining". The performers are a Canadian musician, a very tall Swedish dancer, an actress and a Japanese classical musician. The text is by the American surrealist Gertrude Stein; and the music ranges from the Beach Boys' greatest hits to Japanese classical music.

While the strength, the originality of the piece is the extraordinary range of its references, Goebbels does not put a touch of Japonaiserie into the Beach Boys, or a touch of the surf into the Japanese classical. He is deeply opposed to the homogenisation of difference, to a search for an imposed, artificial and ultimately false synthesis.

When he introduces artistic elements from many cultures into his pieces he says:" I want to keep the elements transparent. I want to keep the different quotes or cultures or languages which come into a performance, I want to keep them transparent". And then he defines his approach more subtly still: "I don't want to paternalise or fraternise or cover them up; and I would rather keep them pretty much clear. And I might rather put something in opposition to them, but not in the way of making a melting pot".

I think this is an extremely revealing approach to artistic work using many cultures but respecting the integrity of all of them. I should say that the work in question - "Hashirigaki" - has an extraordinarily unified quality to it, a consistency of tone, a unity of purpose.

Curiously, Goebbels himself cannot explain why such apposition - placing side by side - has the mesmerising effect that it does. All he can do is to offer his own explanation: " I think there must be a possible link at the moment where these two cultures or where these two musics touch each other. There must happen something - not necessarily in the music maybe, in the lighting or in the costumes in the staging - there must happen something which makes it usable".  If that is an impressionistic explanation of an artistic process, well we should not be surprised.

But note the ingredients of Heiner Goebbels' approach. Each cultural element keeps its own integrity and identity. None is merely blended into the other so that they surrender their identity.  The originality of the work depends on the separateness of the elements, but that very separateness contributes to the distinct character of the whole. The difference from the Tab Dun approach could not be greater. In Goebbels' work, East and West, and North and South do meet but on the basis of strict equality.

Such a meeting allows for the possibility of learning, but relies even more so on the sheer awareness of the existence of other cultures. Without such awareness, such readiness to recognise the qualities and properties of other cultures, works such as Goebbels' could not be created. Can they be replicated? No. Do they set an example? Only of a very limited kind. Does this matter? No  because they demonstrate that a readiness to respect other cultures can vitalise work in other cultures. If this sounds a modest lesson, I think it is a precious one nevertheless. Great lessons do not have to be bombastic ones. New ways forward often point the way quietly and diffidently. 

And while I am here, I want to add another artist to the argument, one who has a perfect viewpoint from which to observe these matters of inter-cultural influences. He is the British sculptor, Anish Kapoor, though since he is Indian by birth and from part Iraqui, part Jewish origins, the Britishness is cultural. Kapoor has struggled with the identity that others place upon him for years.  In his early years, his works contained a lot of the intense pigments that you would readily see in any Hindu temple enclosure.

He was labelled with the tag, "exotic", a tag he considers synonymous with touristic, carrying with it the overtone of being peripheral and even ignorant. Kapoor draws on his Indian, Iraqui and Jewish background as you would expect. The question is how he does it? Kapoor rejects any idea of being some sort of cross cultural bridge. But when I raised this with him he defined his terms with great care.

"If what we're saying is that we're building a kind of bridge between one bank of cultural reality and another bank of a different cultural reality, then maybe there's some moment of crossing, there's some 'Mister In Between' over there, which is powerful and new, different". In fact Kapoor regards his very personal, distinctive but uncategorisable work as making him a 'Mister In Between' figure, a position that offers exciting possibilities.

But Kapoor is scathing about the approach that tries to blend cultures. This is how he puts it. "If there's a culture over there that is rather Madame Butterfly-like - it comes back to the conversation about exotics - from which one can extract those bits that are attractive and have them reside in a resident culture, then it's cheap and trivial".  The warning is well put.

A similar set of conclusions have been reached from a very different starting point by another British artist with a very eclectic range of artistic references. Simon McBurney is one of Britain's  most innovatory theatrical practitioners. His most recent work, "The Elephant Vanishes", is based on three short stories by the Japanese novelist, Murakami.  Though McBurney spoke no Japanese, he worked with a Japanese company in Tokyo to create the production which then played withh huge success in London. Its success derived from its mixture of the most advanced technical production techniques with an authentic Japanese sensibility.

McBurney insists how much he learned from working with Japanese actors, because he learned about different ways of seeing the world.  In the West, he says, "we come from a dualistic society, we divide everything into good and evil, and right and wrong, the mysterious and the prosaic. It's very binary".

By contrast, McBurney learned , "In Japanese society, everything is seen as part of the same whole. Therefore there is an understanding that meaning and emptiness can be part of the same thing.  I found an incredible release in the idea that meaning and nothing, meaning and no meaning were all part of the same thing". I believe that puts the case for keeping the integrity, the sheer difference of particular cultures very convincingly.

I will in a few minutes acknowledge some objections to the thesis I am developing, objections from various friends and colleagues who expressed them with varying degrees of scepticism.

But before I do that, I want to advance on my side of the argument, some comments and papers delivered in Singapore in June 2003 at the conference of the International Society of Performing Arts. As you might expect on such an occasion, the question of Asian and Western cultural identities - how separate, how intertwined - featured large in the papers and discussions.

Without addressing those themes directly, the Danish Ambassador to Singapore made some general observations which I think are worth noting.  "Global culture is enjoyable" he declared, "but local culture is far deeper". If we accept that observation, then we all need to think a good deal harder about how we preserve that local culture.

In defining the characteristics of internationalism in the arts, Jorgen Moller noted five aspects of internationalism of which we needed to be aware. First, the threat to diversity. Just as bio-diversity is threatened by commercial pressures on the planet, so artistic diversity is under pressure from global homogenisation. The case for maintaining artistic diversity is identical to, and just as powerful as the case for preserving bio-diversity. Fundamentally, you simply don't know what you are losing as you reduce diversity. 

Next, culture and technology. Culture is shaped, developed, transformed, perhaps debased in many ways by innovations in technology. There is a tendency to regard the impact of the innovations of technology with a kind of deterministic fatalism: they happen, they occur without thought for their effects on culture; but because they exist, we must accept them without complaint no matter what their consequences might be.

There should be, said  Jorgen Moller, a "propitious connection between culture and technology". Political systems, he went on, should be open and beneficial to their citizens. Economic systems should enable the young to nurture their talents. And to those who search for creativity, they should recall Schumpeter's famous theory of "Creative Destruction". Innovation cannot be achieved without some destruction of old ways of thinking or doing. (I do not believe, in passing, that Schumpeter would have regarded the destructive dominance of  an outside culture as offering the chance of the kind of creativity for which he was looking. But that is perhaps another matter.)

I believe that the Danish Ambassador's observations are valuable. They warn in general terms of the need for vigilance over the way that ideas and artistic expression should be handled. They suggest that without awareness of how major social trends  and policies impact on the arts, we may lose things by accident or inadvertence.

There was very wide agreement at the Singapore Conference that in two key areas at least, western and Asian sensibilities are quite markedly distinct - incidentally I use both continental collective adjectives with very large inverted commas around them.

Most notably, the idea that western notions of time and space in the arts are very different from Asian notions and artistic practice, was put forward by Professor Stanley Lai of the Taipei National University of the Arts. In detailed exploration of the creation of his eight hour theatre epic, "A Dream Like a Dream", Professor Lai noted that such a piece had its origins in Buddhist notions of the mandala, a graphic description of the spiritual path faced by a practitioner. In a mandala, he noted, all directions and pathways lead to the centre, or putting it another way, all things revolve around the centre.

Then the work depends on its existence for a performance space like a Buddhist stupa; this is about as unlike a western style theatre with proscenium as you could get. The proscenium, argues Professor Lai is a confrontational space, devoted to the confrontational forms of western theatre. The stupa is a philosophical and conceptual space, demanding a very different kind of drama. Perspective is shunned, because realism is placed second to symbolism.

According to Professor Lai, the consequence is that western narrative has a very specific notion of time, one that is linear, strictly defined, and as it were precisely measured and put into units of existence. In the Buddhist tradition, to quote Professor Lai, "time is much vaster in the Buddhist scheme of  cause, condition and effect, and to see how cause and effect really works, one must use a unit longer than a single lifetime". Ritual, too, plays a defining role in such art. Ritual requires extended time - hours, certainly, days possibly - to reach its goal of  transformation. Inevitably, drama that resides in a sense of such ritual will have a very particular sense of the space in which it is performed, the narrative process along which it moves, and the time within which it is understood and experienced.

If such awareness springs from a Buddhist aesthetic, an important element in that rough portmanteau term, the Asian aesthetic, Stanley Lai insists that it springs from the inner awareness of an artist with any claims to have an Asian aesthetic. It is not about forms or decorations. But it is about a distinct, cultural position that is valuable because it is its own, founded on a unique grounding in religion, philosophy, architecture and practice. In making these assertions, Professor Lai strongly supports my belief that such distinctive cultural characteristics are too important, too valuable to be swept in a tide of shallow well meaning homogeneity. In such active engagement with Asian theatre, the Taipei experience does support my view that "East is East", and a good thing too.

It is at this stage that my critics in Britain shout with a single cry, "What about Peter Brook's version of the 'Mahabharata'?" This was one of the seminal theatrical productions of the 1990s in Western Europe, an eight hour version of the intricate, polydeistic Hindu epic which had Western audiences rapt in a wholly different kind of theatrical experience. Drawing on an international cast, and after years of theatrical research across several continents, Peter Brook created a version of the epic that did not blur its distinctive ethos and character but realised it as fully as a western mind could. Stanley Lai reckons his own work and Peter Brook's share what he calls "Asian concepts of space, time and storytelling".

If that is the case, and it is a description that most critics would recognise, then the example of Brook's "Mahabharata" supports my belief that a partnership of mutual respect and acknowledgement of separate strengths is the most creative way to develop. To state the obvious, Brook could not have revealed to western theatre audiences the richness and differences in one part of the Asian experience had it not existed in its own right beforehand as a separate tradition.

And at this stage, a related and essential question emerges. If East and West are to retain their separate identities in order to work as equal partners, then how strong are they in their own terms?  From what I have already indicated, the Buddhist traditions deeply inform the work of Stanley Lai and others; Peter Brook's "Mahabharata" tapped into and fed at the still intensely powerful streams of Hindu consciousness and mythology.

I would add that some of the most powerful interpretations of Shakespeare - on stage and screen - have come from Japanese directors. Kurosawa's version of "King Lear" - his film, "Ran" - or his version of "Macbeth" -  "Throne of Blood" - have put these most English of artistic expressions through the transformative prism of Japanese psychology, aesthetic and stage traditions. They stood revealed as new not because Kurosawa tried to conceal the intensity of the Japanese imprint on these English works but because he did so without any attempt at concealment. To have made his films less Japanese would have rendered them artistically compromised and worthless.

On the British and American stage, Yukio Ninagawa has brought transformatory readings of Shakespeare to us - "Hamlet", revealed in a passionate, romantic frenzy as few native directors would attempt;  "A Midsummer's Night's Dream", where the Athenian ducal family are portrayed as samurai warlords, and the rude mechanicals as contemporary noodle sellers from back street contemporary Tokyo; and "Macbeth" where the fit between medieval Scotland and warlord Japan is almost too easy but visually overwhelming. Ninagawa puts the Japanese imprint on these plays with absolute mastery and total success. These productions do not compromise the artistic traditions of the plays or the production styles in which they are realised. By accepting the authentic strengths of both cultures, the result is greater than the sum of their parts.

To round off my argument that strong cultures have no fears about meeting on equal terms, I offer this further piece of evidence. On two occasions, Ninagawa has directed Shakespeare in English; "King Lear" for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and "Hamlet" for the Barbican. It was as if Ninagawa was reaching for a blend of the English and Japanese traditions, but delivered only a weak compromise. His creative instincts emerged blurred and compromised, revealing nothing about either tradition that was warring in his mind, and allowing neither tradition to make a decisive contribution. Such moments of compromise apart, the Japanese tradition of drama, history and design are easily strong enough to engage with western material on more than equal terms.

I should say here, by way of clarification, that my failure to offer any instances of interaction between the West and  Islamic Cultures reflects not indifference but simple lack of experience and awareness. I can only apologise for the personal shortcoming this reveals but no doubt you can put me right in the discussion afterwards.

But in questioning the particular strengths of various cultures in this context, that of China comes to the fore. In a speech in Shanghai in October 2004, my colleague, the Artistic Director of the Barbican, Graham Sheffield, worried at the weakness revealed by China in presenting its cultural traditions and artistic awareness.  What do we know of Chinese performing arts, he challenged his audience? Acrobats and Circus!

To the extent that we do know anything else of  the Chinese way, it is almost entirely filtered through the minds, eyes and ears of Chinese - American exiles such as Tan Dun, the film maker Zhang Yimou and the instrumentalist, Yo Yo Ma. While there is interest in any work by such considerable artists, the absence of the authentic Chinese mainstream is glaring. If these are the only available gateways into the Chinese artistic mind, says Graham Sheffield, then we should be grateful for what we have. But it is hardly the real thing.

In Sheffield's experience, the authenticity and appeal of  the Japanese and Taiwanese companies that visit London successfully is what he calls "a clarity and singularity of artistic vision.which respect their roots, hold to their originality and integrity, while finding a language in which to speak to an international audience". Underlying his view is the insistence that what determines the validity of the output is the quality of the imagination  of the artist concerned.

While I believe that Sheffield's analysis of the profound weakness of the current Chinese indigenous artistic tradition is acute and accurate, my only slight reservation would be that reaching out to an international audience can turn to fool's gold if it weakens the authenticity of the original culture. It is certainly true that my colleague has perhaps a more open minded view of the contributions that merging of cultures can have.

And here is where I put the question to you, to your experience of the way your own artistic cultures are evolving. I speak from little experience of contemporary Islamic Culture, and still more so of the Pakistani aspect of it. (I hope to learn more from this visit). But based on the positions I have advanced, I can only put a series of questions. I wonder how strong Islamic engagement with modernism artistically has been?  How deep are the traditional roots in which your own modernism exists?  How strong is your own sense of  artistic culture which allows you to define a contemporary art that is yours rather than western dominated?  Is your own culture strong enough to engage with western culture on equal terms?  Is your own culture resilient enough to resist the tide of shallowly rooted, commercially driven, globalised, so-called culture?

I do not see a nation, a culture, a continent retaining a worthwhile identity without its own artistic traditions, definitions, aesthetics and sensibilities. I do not see that being modern involves surrendering your own cultural knowledge and experience to the most commercially dominant forms of entertainment.  I do not believe that innovating within your own artistic traditions demands a forced merging with others. Awareness of others? Of course. Surrender to others? Where is the benefit?

I promised you earlier to present some of the cases that colleagues have argued undermine my thesis or destroy it altogether. They range from the creation and development of porcelain; to the political experience of the Norman Kingdoms in Sicily; to certain types of colonially influenced Indian music.  In each case, they argue, the constructive interplay between very different cultures - whether through trade, politics or foreign rule - produced a richer creation where both cultures benefited and blended. The result in these cases where East and West combined was of benefit to all. Let me sketch them in briefly.

They range across cultures and across activities. Anyone who experiences the intercultural connections of the Kingdom of Sicily in the  x x x, when the somewhat uncouth Normans of Northern Europe were softened, civilised, Arabised by their connections with the Islamic world. You can see it in the architecture, in the lay outs of their castles, in the records of the clothes and costumes that the Normans wore. The resulting culture seemed to combine the strength of the Norman north with the subtlety of the Arab south. To my eyes it has a real attraction, all the more so for being comparatively short lived.  But a real and productive fusion it was, in which each culture learned from the other.

Or you can take the example of the way in which the music of the British Raj was absorbed into Indian music to produce its own distinctive forms. South Indian classical music would not exist in its current forms without the "pirating" of the western violin (albeit played vertically) or the fixed pitch harmonium. In both cases, one cultural tradition has been absorbed into another with appropriate modifications determined by the character of the culture doing the absorbing.

Or perhaps you can take the example of Chinese porcelain as an exemplar of the way in which what began as the secret of one country - how to make porcelain - became a tradable east/west commodity, until finally the secrets of production became known to the west but oriental patterns continued as a trademark aspect of the manufactures.

 In the world of textiles, the Paisley pattern would be universally assumed to originate from Scotland. Yet the origins are subcontinental.

These and many others offer instances of those occasions where two distinct cultures found that a new, shared identity could be created by a fusion of equals partners.

Ultimately, I believe that it is the question of equality that concerns me; the equal strength of cultures to stay as they wish, to redefine as they wish, but in their own terms, seeking their own rewards by the process of doing so. For we need to keep the bio-diversity of thought, expression, forms, and culture as rich as possible. Nature is impoverished by the loss of bio diversity. Culture, ideas, aesthetics, sensibility need to be kept alive in all their variety because the world can't flourish on a restricted range of thoughts, propositions, ideas and expressions. We never know which lessons from  which culture may be the lesson we need to assist - if we cannot guarantee - human survival.

Besides, homogenised cultures are so deadly boring, so insufferably polite, so scared of difference, so terrified of offence that they cannot sustain the vigour, the creativity, the energy of the activities we associate with and expect from culture.

So long live the east!  Long live the west!  And as the French used to say "Vive la difference!".