As someone who's both made strides in increasing inclusion in the HS sets and dislikes how this is done in many sets, I'll offer my input:
1. Quiz bowl is played in a western society, and that is okay. Sets that are written for audiences in other regions should 100% cater to the local histories, cultures, literary traditions, etc of those regions, as I believe they do (take a look at IHBB Asia for publicly available history sets written for other regions; they still have too much US content since they're recycled sets... but they also have what to an American would be absurdly hard 20th Century Asia content). Sets written for an American audience should focus on what the American tradition and modern American society have primarily focused on: Music from America, and music that directly influenced large generations of Americans historically. The question is now how much we should skew in the "Western" direction, not that there should be a substantial skew.
Also, the western musical tradition has actually been hugely influential on musicians from all backgrounds around the world, including myself, in positive ways. I find it puzzling why it is "imperialist" to acknowledge that western music has indeed been the most globally influential musical tradition for the past several centuries. As the world's cultural sphere slowly responds to the decolonization process, we Americans and quiz bowlers will evolve in turn. And we have; the late 20th century auditory fine arts that we ask about is overwhelmingly non classical, when you consider jazz, 20th century classical, 20th century popular music, world music, etc as a pool. [Side note: Please ask fewer questions about late 20th century classical music, considering its much lesser impact in even the western world; don't ask questions about it
just because it's in the classical tradition.]
2. The distribution should always somewhat start with classes, but it doesn't have to end there. The existence of primarily Western music groups/classes in school shouldn't necessarily change how we ask about music beyond the easiest of levels. It doesn't for other categories, and it shouldn't here.
3. I agree with Clark that opera is not easier than world music as currently written. Opera is also probably more inaccessible than most other areas of western music, from my experience, since a lot more people play instruments than watch opera, so this was an especially bad comparison. However, this is equally due to the nature of many world music questions as currently written, which I will get to, which makes this not actually very helpful of a comparison.
4. In terms of the player pool, I think that anecdotes about people's interactions with particular cultures of world music, while certainly relevant, miss the point. Do they interact with
multiple cultures in that way? Do they have close to the same amount of knowledge of the entire body of reasonably asked-on world music as the entire body of classical music of the same level? I think that applies to many fewer people. I have general understandings of Chinese music theory and some instruments, but I am far more clueless about, say, Indian music than about jazz, simply because I have grown up in a society where certain parts of jazz have been vaguely part of my world (I have a lot of classical but no jazz training whatsoever and do not really listen to jazz). It is not helpful to generalize the experiences of myself or other specific people growing up in dual cultures to a general person.
I also think that the canon can be stretched in a way that creates questions that are aesthetically good, playable, and inclusive. These questions will require a lot of work, and their introduction into the distribution will be slow and piecemeal by necessity.
Good, canon-expanding questions will take extra work (work that I sometimes didn't do in my younger days, but I've learned since then). When we normalize n world music questions, soon we will be at n + 1, then n + 2, until we reach a point where we finally believe that world music has the right balance with Western music in both quantity and quality of questions.
Problems with World Music as Often Written
What I take the complaints to have been was this: World music as currently written (in HS sets and probably anything below ACF Regs or so) is not a fun experience to play.
A lot of world music questions are on instrument families, materials, etc and turn into games of fraud based on answerline space. A lot of other ones are basically history/ethnography/culture questions that restrict themselves unnecessarily by only talking about music and turn into lingfraud contests. Almost none of them really engage with the actual music in a deep manner.
While yes, this drives up conversion, it also makes the questions profoundly unfun to actually play, because the way you get the question produces no feeling that the content actually coheres or matters in a deeper sense
as music.
"Encapsulation": the embedding of a relatively easier "substantive" clue within the context of a relatively harder clue; e.g., for "In Neo-Riemannian Theory, the R transformation exchanges the tonic for this scale degree, since R stands for Relative" the italicized clue is the "context," where the unitalicized clue constitutes the "substantive." **
Encapsulation is an excellent way to expand the canon but must be done with care and sparingly. The most draining type of set to play is the type where most of the words are not actually buzzable but are clearly put there just to talk about certain things. People cannot parse or remember that many clues at game speed, so if done in excess, encapsulation often just wastes people's time (since they don't actually remember or even pick up on the content) and results in questions that feel unsatisfyingly elementary once you think past the encapsulation. A set with a good amount of encapsulation is the best way to introduce topics; a set with too much is the best way to make people dismiss the topics as unimportant or dislike them.
Suggestions
Not at all exhaustive, but things that we can do:
"World music" need not only refer to music from outside of Europe and America; folk music and non-classical traditions within this region are also sorely lacking in content and seamlessly fit into the classical distribution as is, considering how many classical composers were influenced by it. Go into detail on Bach's quodlibet from the Goldbergs and his use of basically pop songs. Write about the Norwegian folk music that inspired Grieg, or what Bartok actually found and learned as a musicologist (more than him just being a musicologist). For examples from the great writers of LONE STAR (only HS regs!) on non-classical Western music, we included a bonus on Stephen Foster and a tossup on Eurovision.
As Aum said, cross-cultural interaction between classical and world music can also be done, and more easily than other world music due to named pieces and composers and coexistence with more "familiar" forms of music. Talk about transcriptions of classical pieces and performances by Lang Lang (who, for all his faults, has indeed made a modern form of classical music popular). Have a question about elements of the Yellow River Concerto in common with the great western Romantic composers. Or, on the other side of the world, clue some Piazzolla, who is amazingly popular and again bridges this gap, or the non-classical albums of Yo-Yo Ma. In the west itself, one could clue some notable traditional dances... flamenco and West Side Story, jigs/gigues and Scottish folk music (someone write that bagpipes question!), polkas and Strauss. There are surely many more possible examples. This is NOT to say that we should only ask about world music as it relates to western music, merely that that is one of the easiest places to introduce it.
When we do, often out of necessity, ask about world music in contexts outside of simply music (more in the history/culture world in general), we can simply classify these in the history distribution, feel more free to ask non-musical clues, and not feel constrained or artificial. Same goes for world art. Historians study material and artistic culture; there's no reason quiz bowl history can't have it too.
Do the most creative things in bonuses. Encapsulation, in particular,
works much better when done as a common link in a bonus than when done in tossup clues (or even bonus clues). First of all, it forces the common link to actually be important to the player in some way, if only by repetition and prominence in the question. Since encapsulation by definition means the content does not affect how you answer the question unless you are that very rare player who actually knows the clue, we must make the content important in other ways. Second of all, taking away clue space by using up a leadin + giving hints to the player is much less annoying for the player than taking away clue space in places that are expected to be clue-dense.
Above all, we must make our questions interesting in themselves, not simply for being "world music." I think a lot of the pushback on "diversity" in sets in all categories is actually a pushback on misguided question writing. I firmly believe that these topics that we are trying to add to the canon can be asked about in important ways. We should not expand the canon
just for diversity; we should do it because we are convinced we should include certain topics, independent of the diversity, and celebrate the inevitable diversity that results from the opening of our minds to the entire world. And we should write our questions accordingly.
Note: I talk about classical music a lot here. This is purely due to my familiarity with it. I'm sure that plenty of the same can be said about jazz, the other pillar of the canonical auditory fine arts distribution. Suggestions for expanding the jazz canon to be more diverse can largely mirror those for classical: bossa nova, Afro-Cuban jazz for "world music" that is cross-cultural with jazz, for example.