The story of how the day came to be is worth knowing, because it says something about what the event is really trying to do. The idea originated with Jack Lang, then France’s Minister of Culture, and Maurice Fleuret, who wanted to create an all-day musical celebration coinciding with the summer solstice.

Fleuret had been thinking about the gap between musical practice and public life for years. When a 1982 study on the cultural habits of the French revealed that five million people, roughly one young person in every two, played a musical instrument, he began to dream of a way to bring people out on the streets. The result was the first Fête de la Musique, held in Paris that same year. The name itself was a deliberate pun: “fête de la musique” means music festival, but it is a near-homophone of “faites de la musique”, which means “make music”. The slogan is embedded right in the title.

What followed was one of those rare cases where a government cultural initiative actually caught on and spread organically. The festival has since become an international phenomenon, celebrated on the same day in more than 700 cities across 120 countries, including India, Germany, Italy, Greece, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Italy launched its own version, called the Festa della Musica, in 1985, and the UK introduced National Music Day in 1992. The United States formed a Make Music Alliance in 2014, and in 2023 alone, a total of 4,791 free concerts were held across 117 American cities.

The philosophy underlying all of this is disarmingly simple. On Music Day, citizens and residents are urged to play music outside, in their neighbourhoods or in public spaces and parks, and thousands of free concerts are staged throughout the day, making all genres of music accessible to the public. There are no entrance fees, no VIP sections, no ticketing queues. The point is not to produce a polished product for passive consumption but to dissolve, for one day, the line between performer and listener. A conservatory-trained cellist might play next to a teenager with a second-hand guitar, and both would be equally welcome.

That democratic spirit is exactly what makes World Music Day different from most large-scale cultural events. Most music festivals are, at their core, commercial ventures. They are curated, ticketed, and shaped around particular tastes or demographics. World Music Day, by design, does the opposite. It asks that music be treated as something that belongs to everyone, not as a product to be sold but as a form of expression that any person, regardless of training or talent, has the right to share publicly.

Bangladesh has been part of this global celebration for some years, and this year the occasion takes on a particularly visible form. The Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is set to organise a two-day music festival in Dhaka to mark the occasion, with events scheduled for June 21 and 22 at the National Theatre Hall, supported by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Formal proceedings will begin at 6:30 pm each day, followed by a special musical performance at 7:00 pm featuring artists from different generations of Bangladesh’s music industry. Organisers have said the festival will be open to the public, offering audiences an opportunity to celebrate World Music Day through performances spanning a variety of musical styles and traditions. That range matters. Bangladesh has an extraordinarily rich musical heritage, from classical ragas and baul folk traditions to adhunik and the contemporary sounds of its urban music scene, and a festival that brings generations of artists together on one stage reflects the same pluralism that World Music Day was built on.

That pluralism, incidentally, is worth sitting with for a moment, because it points to something genuinely worth celebrating: the sheer number of musical traditions that exist in the world. Most of us, even those who think of themselves as broad listeners, tend to cycle through a fairly narrow set of genres. The algorithms that power streaming platforms are very good at giving us more of what we already like, which means they are also very good at keeping us from accidentally stumbling upon something unexpected from a part of the world we had never musically visited. If you want to get a sense of just how vast the musical map actually is, the website Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com) is a genuinely staggering resource.

It is a sprawling, interactive map of thousands of music genres from across the world, each one linked to sample tracks, and it makes immediately clear that what most people call “world music” is not a genre at all but an almost infinite collection of distinct traditions, each with its own history and logic. It is a good place to start if World Music Day has made you curious about what else is out there.