To put this in musical terms, consider the history of Western music, starting from Gregorian chant. Immediately we encounter the fact that the boundary between West and East is shifting, and also that the history of the boundary has been written in mostly in the 19th-century by colonialists. So, for example, Western music is said to begin with ancient Greek theorists, whose work arises in eastern Mediterranean, Turkic, and North African cultures...it doesn't matter, though, we still say that Western music somehow begins here. Then there is an interruption, as the Roman Empire rises and falls, because although Rome seems like a Western idea, it forgot to write its music down, or even to write much about its music. Western music begins again with Charlemagne and Pope Gregory, who standardized the Catholic mass in a project that included collecting melodies from Arab, Hebrew, North African, and various "near-eastern" sources. Precisely at this moment, the basis of Western music has its foundation on a pre-colonial project that resembles colonialism, resembles Western attempts to construct something universal, something trans-ethnic, trans-geographic, over which a Western power presides.
In most cases, "West" doesn't just mean "Western European, English, and American culture", but more specifically, only those aspects of those societies (and the societies that they influence) that are in some way modern, democratic, or progressive. So when journalists say "in the West", they are talking about the modern, democratic, progressive, or organized/capitalistic aspects of a society. Any number of interesting non-modern things about Western Europe, including polytheism, myths of the supernatural, courtship rituals, and any arcane (i.e. unusual, hidden, little-known) digressions from the normative history of "the west" are described in other ways -- usually they are associated with specific ethnic groups, "marginalized" as exceptions to the rule. Likewise, practices connected to feudalism, fascism, torture, slavery, and genocide are not described as Western, even if we are speaking of something that originates in Western Europe ... we associate it instead with something more specific, so that "the West" isn't implicated in them, or in their consequences.
I'm sure I don't need to innumerate the term "East" for you -- I can just point you to post-colonial theory from Said, Babha, Spivak, Yamamoto, etc. for the basic history of how the word "eastern" is used. It doesn't just mean the large geographical region between Turkey and Japan, but more particularly, it's invoked to describe aspects of those regions that Western institutions perceive to be different from their own self-images, or even (as Said has argued) those things that Westerners recognize in their own midst, but would like to purge, or distance themselves from.
This is what is meant when we describe West and East as a false duality -- it isn't just that the categories are oversimplifications, or that the West and East blur into one another, and influence each other. And it isn't just that the categories are stereotypes. It's that the categories themselves actually come into being, less to describe anything, than to fulfill a purpose. So the categories themselves can be tools of colonialism and imperialism.
It's only in the early 18th century the Europeans start to standardize major and minor scales, and tuning systems, and instrument technologies, in ways that will start to push aside the more flexible melodic practices that we now think of as being "Eastern." Well into the late 18th century, opera singers and dance musicians employed all kinds of ornaments, inflections, rhythms, and "non-Western" instruments that would later be thought-of as being Eastern, it was only a kind of musical industrialism, spurred on by the printing press and the cultivation of music "literature", that idiomatic and ethnically specific performance practices started to be considered "exotic." So now you can see that the distinction between West and East is, again, not a description of the differences between one geographic area and another, but a tool, by which to advance the notion of a progressive, sophisticated, objective West, and to cast off blurry complexities into history, or into the non-Western world.
What is happening in early 18th-century Japan, early 18th-century Persia, early 18th-century Egypt? In many cases, alternate modernities, alternate industrialisms, are producing their own new musical practices. But as each "non-Western" tradition encounters colonialism, the relationship between west and east has to be reinforced, and even at the expense of understanding the true complexity of the musics that are encountering one another. Persian music may have a more sophisticated approach to pitch and tuning than Italian music, and they may have some polyphony (i.e. "chords", and pitches overlapping or simultaneous) but because they do not build music primarily from chords and because they do not have rules of counterpoint, the sophistications are ignored. Instead, Persian music is defined according to its differences from Western music, i.e., that the musicians use lavish ornamentation, percussive rhythm instruments, and "unusual" melodic shapes. (And the melodic shapes are only unusual in the sense that they are using modes that fall outside the standard Western diatonic system.) Now Persian music is not described according to what it is, but according to what aspects of it are either (1) different from the most progressive/technologically advanced features of Western music, or (2) similar to those features of Western music that Westerns may feel they have left behind or cast aside.) The same is true of Westerners describing Japanese or Chinese music as "pentatonic" -- it ignores the fact that their scale systems often use many more notes than five, and it ignores the fact that countless oral traditions associated with specific ethnicities in the West (any of several on the British Isles and Scandanavia) are overtly pentatonic. (And one last point. The elite "Schenkerian" view of the most advanced compositions in the Western Art Music tradition is a view in which the seven notes of the western scale are essentially pared down to the same five as are found in most pentatonic systems, because the fourth and seventh scale degrees -- in melodic practice at least -- are seen as almost hopelessly unstable, always subordinated to their closest pentatonic neighbor.)
The notions of West and East comes at play in the Orientalist/Colonialist power dynamic above...but it gets even more messy and complicated, since, for consumers, the paradigmatic Western musics are the blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop
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