Music and the Global Order (original) (raw)
Related papers
Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters
2012
In many ways the relatively recent phenomenon of “world music” has become the soundtrack for globalization, not only because it gives western consumers worry-free access to faraway places and sounds, but also because of the way that it mirrors the various sorts of extraction and appropriation that have come to be associated with late-industrial capitalism. The idea of music as a soundtrack, however, does not go far enough in terms of explaining how cultural products actually function in a global era. Like other forms of cultural production in the context of globalization, music is not merely a manifestation of global processes and dynamics, but one of the terrains on which globalization is produced.
Rethinking Globalization Through Music
World music-the umbrella category under which various types of traditional and non-Western music are produced for Western consumption-has been waiting to happen for a long time. At least since the invention of new technologies of reproduction at the turn of the twentieth century and the realization soon after that records, far from simply a means of selling phonographs, were in fact themselves a lucrative and renewable resource. Relatively little is known about the mar ket ing strategies of the first international record companies, but clearly these companies distinguished early on between "exotic" music for affluent European and North Ameri can audiences and music-perhaps no less exotic-intended for people elsewhere who wanted to hear the sounds of their own culture ). Yet today, listening to the various forms of music being marketed under the label "world music," something appears to be different about this historical moment. From our current perspective, world music gives the impression of opening our ears to a vast realm of cultural and po liti cal possibilities but at the same time seems to usher in vaguely familiar forms of cultural expansionism and exploitation. If world music has indeed become the soundtrack for globalization, then music is not merely a manifestation of global processes and dynamics but is the very terrain on which globalization is articulated.
The Conflicting Discourses of World Music and world music
tension expressed by may be clearly demonstrated in the following statement: Bohlman devoted much of the book to a history of the field and discourse of ethnomusicology, adding a brief and somewhat dismissive section on the genre-field. In order to form a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding these topics, a critical account of the discourses of 'World Music/world music' will be given, by discussing how such musics are altered due to different disciplinary traditions and ideologies. A new approach will also be discussed which will hopefully, draw some light on the complex, and much disputed, relationship these areas share with popular music. The second half of this paper will give a critical account regarding the impact such areas have had on the popular music realm, theoretically and also practically. Certain cultural process will also be highlighted, such as mass-mediation and colonization, which consequently, have lead to the acceleration of globalization, giving examples that highlight such processes.
2013
The advent of the category 'world music' led to both an unprecedented level of (re)discovery of local music scenes and to an assemblance of an intricate global musical platform in the contemporary age of globalization. The processes in which local cultures express and engage themselves with broader global networks and the other way around can be claimed to be indispensible sources of knowledge in the analytical approach of socio-political concerns, these being of small or large-scale societies. Extremely frequent in debates on globalization is after all the dichotomic struggle between the concrete and human 'local' against the abstract and dehumanizing 'global' (Wilson & Dissanayake, 1996: 22). In order to apprehend how this relationship has indeed been marked at times by oppression and domination, the critical theories of authors such as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Immanuel Wallerstein will be applied to cases of local and global music industry operations. This paper aims nonetheless, above all, to provide a concise yet consistent introduction to how this relation goes beyond the criticisms of cultural imperialism and Americanization, to how multifarious this relation can be. Key issues represented by the binary concepts of authenticity and homogeneity and of production, distribution and marketing of cultural products, will be referred to. Without trying to uphold a modernocentric view that admits the rise of globalization as a recent phenomenon, the commercial dynamics between the global and the local in world music approached, will be mostly from the 1950's onwards.
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Music Business Journal, 2001
Since the 1840's, the so-called "Third World" has played a significant and often understated role in the development of the global music industry, but its impact has been more that of a cultural and spiritual donor than as a commercial exporter deriving benefit from products originating from strongly developing economies. Little, Jonathan D. (2001), 'Exoticism Globalised in a New Century: The Forgotten Roots of World Music', in Music Business Journal (www.musicjournal.org). ISSN 1473-6233 [Initially published in 2001 in Music Business Journal - htttp://www.musicjournal.org - one of the world's first online music business journals (no longer extant).] KEYWORDS: World Music, Exoticism, Orientalism, First World, Second World, Third World, Fourth World, Eastern Music, Traditional Music, "Jonathan David Little"
World music: deterritorializing place and identity
Progress in Human Geography, 2004
Music has been neglected in geography, yet the rise of 'world music' exemplifies the multiple ways in which places are constructed, commodified and contested. Music from distant and 'exotic' places has long entered the western canon, yet the pace of diffusion to the west accelerated with the rise of reggae and the marketing of Paul Simon's Graceland (1986), which pointed to the modification and transformation of distant, 'other' musics for western tastes and markets. Fusion and hybridity in musical styles emphasized both the impossibility of tracing authenticity in musical styles and the simultaneous exoticism and accessibility of distant musics. 'Strategic inauthenticity', romanticization and the fetishization of marginality were central to the search for and marketing of purity and novelty: simplistic celebrations of geographical diversity and remoteness. The formal arrival of world music in 1987 was as a marketing category with commerce and culture entangled and inseparable, in a form of appropriation for western, cosmopolitan audiences. Yet, for musicians, world music was an expressive project, which created identities that fused the local and global, traditional and modern. For some, international success required artistic compromise, essentialized identities and the resources of transnational companies. Others simply resisted categorization. The expansion of world music exemplifies the deterritorialization of cultures and emphasizes how the rise of a particular cultural commodity (world music) is primarily a commercial phenomenon, but could not have occurred without the construction and contestation of discourses of place and otherness.