Music of the UCNA

What does music sound like within the UCNA? It depends a bit on who's there to compose it.

The Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia is not a nation-state. In terms of its self-identity, it falls somewhere between the USA and a very lucky Habsburg Empire. Rather than establishing a national folk music corpus to assert its nonexistent common roots, the UCNA's musical voice is going to evolve as organically as its identity.

And at heart, that identity is formed from the intersection of the following groups:

• The Biladi core: The arbiters of high culture aren't from the Moorish diaspora; they're former khassa families of Seville, the equivalent of White Russian émigrés. They're extremely conservative, and have the money and connections to establish themselves as the arbiters of haute couture; preserving the old ways just so is all-important to a lot of them. Nonetheless, that kind of traditionalism is going to be another big ingredient in what comes out.
• The Maghrebi periphery: Independent of the Andalusis, there's also a fair number of Maghrebis. At its height, imperial Seville did achieve its historic destiny, completely controlling the Strait of Gibraltar and building an empire in northwest Africa. It is NOT wealthy, and NOT the arbiter of culture, but it's still an influence. Perhaps more importantly, that influence is also going to extend to West Africa - and may include the blues scale.
• Former French America: In addition to the Louisiana Purchase, France also controlled more of what IRL was the Anglophone Deep South. I'm not sure what this is like culturally, because while some of this is Guisard* and quite conventionally French (if from different regions thereof), other parts could very well be Farrellite. And French Farrellitism brings with it many cultural details that are uniquely its own - including, quite possibly, polyphonic singing.
• The Moorish diaspora: With the 19th-century implosion of Seville's empire, the UCNA is continually reinforced by immigration from across its diaspora. Most of the Iberian New World, Portuguese or Sevillan, is unstable at best, and there's a steady flow of refugees and guest workers who are sending money home to form a melting pot.
• Aboriginal populations: The UCNA isn't founded with manifest destiny in mind; it's founded as an exercise in reactionary pique. As such, the idea of supplanting the aboriginal populations isn't really on their agenda, so much as neatly subordinating them into the tapestry of Andalusian society. (In the beginning, in particular, the UCNA is quite happy to support the aborigines, to keep the European subjects from dominating the political landscape. It's cheaper to pay off the Cherokees than the French.)
• European (and Europeanizing) neighboring states: The UCNA has a lot of borders. I have only the vaguest idea what it's been exposed to in the Caribbean. On its southern border, it has Axamalia, a Hispano-Baltic Texas (a lot of Güntherites flee there after the Baltic crises of the late 18th century; they're why the G.P. of Mexico arose at all, and a second wave after the "Burning Thirties" leads to a successful war of independence in the early 1840s.) In the northeast, there's a Dutch-Anglo-Scottish confederal republic (on the model of the United Provinces) that congealed out of earlier turbulence. Up north is the big worry in the form of Canada*, including New Ireland (the Saint Lawrence River Valley; as Gaelic here as it is Francophone IRL) - oddly enough, a likely place to produce something recognizably akin to modern country music, if considerably more Celtic. Simply by convergence, osmosis, and cross-border exchanges of ideas (and immigrant populations), this is going to be the random element in the recipe.

So what does this blend into?
Basic thoughts are like so.

• This is very likely homophonic, possibly polyphonic. (I'm hesitant to speculate on that, because I can't say a priori if Andalusi music abandons vertical harmony with the rest of the Arab world.)
• A distinctive "Andalusian" music is going to congeal around musical exchanges between these disparate groups. Banal as it is, the best places for that exchange are between comparable instruments (and in the possible standardization of those instruments.) Bagpipes are one possible point of cross-pollination; realistically, a more likely one is the fiddle, which has probably evolved convergently in several ways.
• Two things that stand out as distinctly Andalusi-Maghrebi are guitars and microtony, neither of which are really prominent in the rest of the mix. (Again, how microtonal things get depends in large part on whether Andalusi music abandons vertical harmony.) I don't think the microtones will survive very well on their own, outside of specifically ethnic music; but I do suspect that they'll lead to a pronounced focus on melisma.

(Which may in turn lead to actual polyphony, if only between the backing vocals and the lead voice.)

More thoughts to come later. This, as always, is tentative.