​In my opinion, the three composers on the previous page did a fine job of creating scores that brought to life the Asian culture that the films at their hands portrayed.   However, when examining anthropologist Nitasha Sharma's opinions, things get a little sticky.

​

In her book, "Hip Hop Desis", Sharma brings up the idea of identity politics in relation to being Asian-American/Asian in combination with musical creation.  Can someone who is not Asian/Asian American truly produce music that is authentically Asian?  Consequently, this leads to the subject of the racialization of music.  But, that is a whole other conundrum.



How this relates to Williams, Goldsmith, Zimmer, and the countless other Western composers who have composed music in order to portray a musical sense of Asian culture is that their efforts have the possibility to come across as offensive.  While I could not gather any research as to whether or not these three composers had any negative feedback with their scores in THIS sense, that does not mean this possible confliction does not exist.  Given that Sharma brings up this idea of identity politics, it is hard to dismiss the hypothetical reality of Western composers getting flack for their efforts to imitate historically, culturally, and, for some, personally embedded music.  



For me, I believe that anyone can create any kind of music they want.  Music is music.  People will make of it what they will.  Because, the thing with music is that there is no way you can essentially label something as belonging to a certain group.  Everything that surrounds these labels I have been writing about on this website, whether its "Eastern", "Western", "Asian", "European", whatever, are people's opinions.  These labels are socially constructed.  

​

However, at the same time, I do believe that music has a place in cultural history.  So, when someone does identify something as "Asian" music, I can get an instant idea of what they mean.  Music is culturally rooted in history, as well as historically rooted in culture.  It goes both ways.  Yet, as I've been stressing, music is what people believe it to be to them.  If they want to take the historical and cultural aspect and apply it to their identity, that is their choice.  The same goes for if they only want to take out of it the musical elements like melody and harmony because of a personal aesthetic appreciation.  However, I would never hold that music should be used to confine people within a box, by saying that certain people can only authentically create certain "kinds" of music.  That would go against what I believe music to stand for in the first place:  a FREEDOM of CREATIVITY.