IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD, MUSIC FRAGMENTS TAKE UNEXPECTED ROADS

At my son’s fourth birthday party, a classmate presented him with a toy recycling truck. Atop it was a button that, when pushed, uncorked a familiar tune with the words: “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump!” An adult nearby heard the melody and said, “Hey — that’s the ‘Lone Ranger’ theme song.”

Well, yes and no. It is indeed the fanfare to the famed 1950s TV series. But before that it was something even more venerable — the William Tell Overture, by a 19th-century Italian composer named Gioachino Rossini.

So goes the story of modern music. A century of near-continuous recording, packaging, repackaging, riffing and — more recently — the technical