International Journal of Cultural and Creative Industries The Music Workforce, Cultural Heritage, and Sustainability (original) (raw)
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The music workforce, cultural heritage and sustainability
Larger than any other creative industry, music is an intangible cultural asset whose sustainability is included in the United Nation’s fourth pillar of sustainability. Music contributes to both cultural heritage and also cultural sustainability. Despite this, not enough is known about the characteristics and dynamics of work and career for musicians or the relationships between these activities and cultural life. While there is some recent research describing the use of music for cultural heritage and sustainability in contemporary Indigenous contexts, little of this describes the importance of music for culture in urbanized communities. Writing from the perspective of Australia, in this paper we contend that the idea of ‘creolization’ – the development of a new culture from a combination of traditional ones – is a useful concept for broadening understanding of music for cultural heritage and sustainability. More practically, we argue that exploring musical artifacts and performance practices from different cultures and times can contribute to our understanding of cultural heritage and highlight cultural sustainability as an essential professional disposition.
Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint (2009)
The World of Music, 2009
Attempts to preserve music as cultural heritage put applied ethnomusicologists and public folklorists in a defensive posture of safeguarding property assets. By supporting the conservation of those assets with tourist commerce, heritage management is doomed to the paradox of constructing staged authenticities with music treated as a market commodity. Instead, best practices arise from partnerships among ethnomusicologists, folklorists and music culture insiders (community leaders, scholars, and musicians), with sustainability interventions aimed directly inside music cultures. These efforts should be guided by principles drawn from ecology, not economy; and specifically by four principles from the new conservation ecology-diversity, limits to growth, interconnectedness, and stewardship. First published in The World of Music in 2009, in a special issue on Music and Sustainability, it was reprinted in my book Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020).
Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures
Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures, 2016
In Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures, 14 specialists contribute to a tightly woven book illustrating diverse musical practices from around the world using a theoretical framework regarding the preservation of endangered traditions. The volume is the result of a five-year research project (2009-14) in Australia that linked scholars from England, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States. The concepts and concerns stem from international work beginning in the early twenty-first century as formulated in various UNESCO conventions and initiatives regarding intangible cultural heritage. The project has resulted in other publications and an associated website, which will continue the applied ethnomusicology demonstrated so well in the three theoretical chapters and nine case studies of this book. Other research using the same framework will likely follow, both from these authors and others providing comparable examples.
Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2013
The sustainability of music is an emerging – or rather, re-emerging – theme in ethnomusicological research. Early studies in that discipline centered on documenting musical traditions feared doomed to extinction, an approach scholars now refer to as salvage ethnomusicology. Spurred by UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and other national and international calls-to-arms, researchers and activists are increasingly re-engaging with the complex challenges of maintaining and revitalizing threatened music genres, particularly those of indigenous and minority peoples. Current approaches are more pragmatic than earlier ones. They typically acknowledge the natural emergence, change and decay of musical traditions as well as the many local and global processes that act upon all music genres, from technological developments and environmental shifts to rural-to-urban migration and economic and political pressures. Defining music sustainability as the ability of a music genre to endure, without implications of either a static tradition or a preservationist bearing, this article maps out a selection of scholarly publications, policy instruments, projects and initiatives, reports and online resources that relate to this topic.
Cultural heritage and sustainability as an essential disposition for music graduates
Music is one of the cultural industries, part of a group of intangible cultural assets whose sustainability is included in the fourth ‘pillar of sustainability’. For students of music, cultural heritage and sustainability form an important component of professional preparation. However, this graduate disposition is not much researched nor well understood. While there is some recent research describing the use of music for cultural sustainability in contemporary Indigenous contexts, there is very little that describes the importance of music for culture in urbanised communities. The idea of ‘creolisation’ – the development of a new culture from combination of traditional ones – is a useful concept for broadening the understanding of music for cultural sustainability. More practically, cultural heritage and sustainability can be explored pedagogically by looking at musical artefacts and performance practices from different cultures and times, and investigating their translation into contemporary professional music practice. Understanding the role of cultural heritage and sustainability as a graduate disposition will enable a productive pedagogical interplay between music pedagogy and students’ contribution to society in their working life.
Sustainable futures for music cultures: An ecological perspective
Oxford University Press, 2016
The sustainability of music and other intangible expressions of culture has been high on the agenda of scholars, governments and NGOs in recent years. However, there is a striking lack of systematic research into what exactly affects sustainability across music cultures. By analyzing case studies of nine highly diverse music cultures against a single framework that identifies key factors in music sustainability, the edited volume Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures offers an understanding of both challenges and the dynamics of music sustainability in the contemporary global environment, as well as breathing new life into the realm of comparative musicology, now from an emphatically non-Eurocentric perspective. Situated within the expanding field of applied ethnomusicology, this edited volume confirms some commonly held beliefs, challenges others, and reveals sometimes surprising insights into the dynamics of music cultures by examining, comparing and contrasting highly diverse co...
Cities as Cultural Ecosystems: Researching and Understanding Music Sustainability in Urban Settings
2016
From the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a rapid growth of interest in the preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), stimulated by a suite of UNESCO Conventions and Declarations (2001, 2003, 2005, and UNCHR 2007). Globally, this has led to impressive growth of awareness and efforts to preserve the world’s arts and crafts, and considerable investment by many countries in initiatives to preserve cultural diversity. A key element in these efforts is defining the nature of what needs to be preserved in consultation with communities, and devising strategies on how best to approach the particular challenges that entails. While globalization and urbanization are often painted as the enemies of sustainability, I argue that most struggles and celebrations of sustainability in the arts inevitably play out in contemporary urbanized, globalized, mediatized, and commodified environments, which may be part of the solution as much as they are part of the problem. Fo...
Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective, 2016
This chapter draws together the key themes, findings, and implications of the volume 'Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Approach', making cross-connections across the music cultures and across the five key domains of the book. It then reflects on the dynamics of sustainability and the scope for interventions, leading to a framework to approach ecosystems of music. The chapter concludes by giving concrete recommendations for facilitating web-based and hands-on practical and equitable strategies for working with communities to assist them in strengthening the music practices they want to sustain on their own terms
Economy, Ecology and Music: An Introduction (2009)
the world of music, 2009
If music is regarded as a renewable biocultural resource, then the current discourse surrounding sustainability contributes ways of thinking about music and cultural policy. Coming principally from developmental economists and conservation ecologists, sustainability provides a theoretical and practical framework for applied ethnomusicology. Cultural and musical rights and ownership, the circulation and conservation of music, the internal vitality of music cultures and the social organization of their music-making, music education and transmission, the roles of community scholars and practitioners, intangible cultural heritage, tourism, and the creative economy, preservation versus revitalization, partnerships among culture workers and community leaders, and good stewardship of musical resources, are among the issues discussed here. This essay is the i ntroduction to the special issue, "Music and Sustainability," in the journal the world of music, vol. 51, no. 1, 2009, edited by Jeff Todd Titon.
Sustainable futures for music practices: Opportunities for music education
Finnish Journal of Music Education, 2024
About fifty years ago, American folklorist and ethnographer Alan Lomax published an impassioned “appeal for cultural equity” (1972), prompted by the rapid and widespread extinction of musical and other cultural expressions. Cultural homogenisation, endangerment, and loss were not only leaving the world culturally and intellectually impoverished, Lomax argued, but also diminishing people’s capacity to enjoy rich and fulfilling cultural and social lives. Three decades later, UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Urgent Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage urged educators, researchers, governments, policymakers, and cultural organisations anew to urgently implement measures supporting the sustainable futures of musical and other cultural practices. Another twenty years on, music sustainability concerns remain largely peripheral to policies and practices in music education, although various tools now exist to help music teachers and their institutions make informed decisions and act in support of music sustainability. In this presentation, I present one such tool—the twelve-factor Music Endangerment and Vitality Framework (Grant 2014), based on a UNESCO model—and illustrate how it has been (and could be) employed by music education institutions to better support “small”, local music practices, especially those of minority and Indigenous peoples. I suggest that music education institutions more actively engage with music sustainability endeavours, for two main reasons: first, the moral imperative to support the continued rich diversity of musical expressions around the world, for the sake of cultural equity and cultural sustainability; and second, the considerable educational, cultural, and social benefits that may thereby accrue.