Last March, one of the biggest stars of African pop music, Youssou N’Dour, cancelled a 38-date tour of North America to protest the US government’s policies toward Iraq. The singer said, in a press release: "I believe that coming to America at this time would be perceived in many parts of the world — rightly or wrongly — as support for this policy, and that, as a consequence, it is inappropriate to perform in the US at this juncture."

As any fan of African music here in the United States will recognize, the cancellation of a Youssou N’Dour performance is more than the loss of an evening of great music — it’s a lost opportunity for members of our own communities to discover one another. The "world music" concerts here in Boston draw crowds unlike any other in town; the mix of cultures represented by the events is mirrored by a mix of people in the audience who might otherwise never gather in the same room, though they live in the same city.

"It’s travel without an airplane ticket," is how Phoenix contributor Banning Eyre, author of In Griot Time, a memoir of his musical apprenticeship in Mali, describes the experience of watching African musicians perform here in the US, in the company of those to whom this same artist means home. "When you can be in the presence of a cultural audience interacting with a beloved musical act, there’s nothing like it — it’s an enriching experience in terms of sense of place."

A performance last January by the Angolan singer Bonga at the Somerville Theatre was exactly that. I had gone for the music, which was as thrilling as I had hoped (Bonga has one of the most powerfully moving voices on the planet). But among the marvels of the evening for me was that the Lusophone crowd — with its origins in Angola, Cape Verde, and East Cambridge — represented neighbors I hadn’t before had the occasion to meet. As they bantered with Bonga in Portuguese, as they clapped knowingly on the downbeat rather than the backbeat, as they whistled in anticipatory counterpoint to the band’s semba rhythms, they announced their own collective presence, in Boston, to one another and to everyone else who had assembled that night in Davis Square.

In other words, if the USA becomes the new Sun City, isolationism as an international policy will contribute to our isolation from one another, here within our own patchwork culture. Boston, famously divided by neighborhood, uses the impetus from abroad — Bonga, Youssou N’Dour — to breach lines of race, class, and religion that too often divide us. What could be more American than an African-music concert in an Irish/Italian neighborhood? Remove these opportunities and before long we may no longer understand why such experiences are integral to our identity as Americans.

"I feel so melancholic just thinking about how things were even two years ago — it was a golden age and we didn’t know it," says Cindy Byram, independent publicist and a board member of the World Music Institute in New York City. Promoters of world music took freedom of travel for granted as they worked for more than a decade to develop audiences for this music. And since the early ’90s, after the enormously successful tours of the great Sufi devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, there has been an explosion of interest in world music in the US.

Byram credits key promoters — in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington as well as New York — with working slowly and steadily at cultivating their local audiences, until extensive tours could be undertaken for practitioners of music that previously would have been considered too esoteric. "A few companies built up enough of a circuit that people could trust their taste, and people wanted to be introduced to other music. For example, there are musicians from Iran who had never performed here other than to exclusively Persian audiences, in shows advertised only to the local Iranian audience. But for the last five or 10 years, we have started to see more of those acts sponsored by American arts organizations, for an American audience. And these were so successful — if you are picking the best musicians in a tradition, it translates."

For Byram, this broadening of the audience for world music represents more than a commercial success (WMI, like many of the key world-music promoters around the country, is a nonprofit arts organization). "By building an audience, we were doing something that mattered — turning people on, expanding their boundaries, changing their world view. Worlds intersected, and everyone came out the better for it." Byram believes the "ethnic" audience for these acts benefitted as well: "People can be surprised to find that [other] Americans are interested — they are proud. It can make you value your own culture more, seeing it reflected back. They look around at intermission and are thrilled to see that their culture is speaking to more than their own community. It’s a great energy. But now, we’re back to the old publicist’s joke: you can’t get a world musician covered in the media unless we’re bombing their country. We were past that!"

At last count, nine WMI-sponsored tours had been cancelled as a result of the current political situation — from the Peking Opera to Gypsy singer Esma Redzepova. These cancellations eliminate a crucial tool that world-music promoters have used to develop their audiences: long-term planning. Some have been motivated by an artist’s politics, like Youssou N’Dour’s. But even more have been due to the visa issues that have developed in the wake of the US government’s reaction to September 11.

This problem hasn’t been confined to world music: over the past year, visa delays or denials have been blamed for cancellations of US appearances by pianist Eliso Virsaladze, conductor Jaap van Zweden, the Jerusalem Quartet, the Artemis Quartet, and singer Henk Smit, among others. But for world-music promoters, bureaucratic visa delays have been compounded by what some assert is prejudicial treatment of performers from Islamic countries. Dawn Elder, manager and producer of world-music acts from the Middle East and North Africa, says that as the war in Iraq loomed, the expediting service she used to process visa applications suddenly raised its fees for applications originating in the Arab world from $1500 to $20,000.

"I’m pretty tenacious . . . I’ve never had a visa turned down," says Elder, who in the face of recent events even managed to promote a US tour by Iraqi musician Kazem al Sahir. But obviously $20,000 per visa wasn’t going to happen. "The visa issue was looking pretty dismal," she admits. Then she met a sympathetic immigration lawyer, Brian Goldstein, at a meeting of the American Performing Arts Association. Goldstein’s law firm now processes applications for her, and though the fee for its services has increased tour overhead, she’s been able to continue to bring Arab musicians into the country.

And if the musicians themselves are reluctant to come to the US? "I have been known to get on a plane, go to their door, and hold their hand on the plane [back] to get them here," she says. "Artists have said to me that if they come here, they feel they might be showing support for war. I argue that it is now more important than ever for them to tour, because through music you can create a very special dialogue. Music is one of the best forms of communication — to understand there’s more to the people and cultures of these different countries than what you see generally on the news." Elder cites a performance in Chicago shortly after September 11 by Simon Shaheen, the Palestinian violinist and oud player, as particularly powerful; the tears that night were not of rage but of hope. "The end result is that musicians bring their communities together. It’s what keeps me going and keeps the artists coming. We’re not going to stop."

Not every musician is managed by Dawn Elder, however. And even her tenacity has not managed to surmount every difficulty. In San Francisco, a venue owner simply cancelled the contract for a performance by an Arab musician (she scrambled and moved the show farther left, to Berkeley). And she notes that since September 11, she’s been unable to include Boston on tours of her Arab acts.

Banned in Boston? Maure Aronson, executive director of World Music, the leading Boston promoter of the genre, says there is no reluctance on his company’s part to booking Arab music while acknowledging that World Music has promoted only one such performance since September 11. "It’s supply and demand. We’ve never been at the forefront of promoting music from the Middle East; we might do only one concert a year. We’re planning for next year a festival of sacred music — we hope to have musicians from Morocco for that — and a festival of Egyptian music."

Whatever the reason, it’s sad that since September 11, Boston has not had more opportunities for the kind of cultural encounter that concerts by Arab musicians can facilitate. And if the Bush Administration has its way, these cultural lacunae will broaden, until no one notices what’s missing anymore. The world beyond our borders will begin to look like an undifferentiated alien mass. And so will our neighbors.

Jordi Savall, the Spanish virtuoso of the viola da gamba, cancelled this spring’s North American tour of his influential early-music group Hesperion XXI, which was to include a local stop in April under the auspices of the Boston Early Music Festival, because, as the promoter put it in a press release, "Mr. Savall feels that under the current situation, he and others in the ensemble have a strong moral dilemma about touring the United States." Hesperion XXI specializes in music from Spain’s "golden age," that is, before the expulsion of the Moors in 1480 and the Jews in 1492. Savall is passionate about what was lost in the expulsion — a few years ago he titled a Hesperion XXI tour "Paradise Lost" because it featured mediæval Sephardic, Arabic, and Christian melodies. "These three civilizations have lived together," he explained when asked about the title at the time. "This was a paradise. If you could put the three back together, it would again be a paradise."