Music and Globalization

Description

Rethinking globalization through music

View accompanying multimedia for the book on the Critical World website.

"World music" emerged as a commercial and musical category in the 1980s, but in some sense music has always been global. Through the metaphor of encounters, Music and Globalization explores the dynamics that enable or hinder cross-cultural communication through music. In the stories told by the contributors, we meet well-known players such as David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Ry Cooder, Fela Kuti, and Gilberto Gil, but also lesser-known characters such as the Senegalese Afro-Cuban singer Laba Sosseh and Raramuri fiddle players from northwest Mexico. This collection demonstrates that careful historical and ethnographic analysis of global music can show us how globalization operates and what, if anything, we as consumers have to do with it.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rethinking Globalization through Music / Bob W. White

Part 1. Structured Encounters
1. The Musical Heritage of Slavery: From Creolization to "World Music" / Denis-Constant Martin
2. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: "World Music" and the Commodification of Religious Experience / Steven Feld
3. A Place in the World: Globalization, Music, and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Vanuatu / Philip Hayward
4. Musicality and Environmentalism in the Rediscovery of Eldorado: An Anthropology of the Raoni-Sting Encounter / Rafael José de Menezes Bastos

Part 2. Mediated Encounters
5. "Beautiful Blue": Rarámuri Violin Music in a Cross-Border Space / Daniel Noveck
6. World Music Producers and the Cuban Frontier / Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
7. Trovador of the Black Atlantic: Laba Sosseh and the Africanization of Afro-Cuban Music / Richard M. Shain

Part 3. Imagined Encounters
8. Slave Ship on the Infosea: Contaminating the System of Circulation / Barbara Browning
9. World Music Today / Timothy D. Taylor
10. The Promise of World Music: Strategies for Non-Essentialist Listening / Bob W. White

Index
Contributors

Sujets

• African Studies
• Popular Culture
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Ethnomusicology
• Anthropology
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 24 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9780253005410
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Music and Globalization
TRACKING GLOBALIZATION
Robert J. Foster, editor
Editorial advisory board:
Mohammed Bamyeh
Lisa Cartwright
Randall Halle
Music and Globalization
Critical Encounters
Edited by Bob W. White
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2012 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Steven Feld retains the copyright for his essay in this book.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Music and globalization : critical encounters / edited by Bob W. White.
p. cm. - (Tracking globalization)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35712-0 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22365-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00541-0 (e-book) 1. World music-History and criticism. 2. Music and globalization. I. White, Bob W., [date]
ML3545.M89 2012
780.9-dc23
2011031949
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Globalization through Music
Bob W. White
Part 1. Structured Encounters
1. The Musical Heritage of Slavery: From Creolization to World Music
Denis-Constant Martin
2. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: World Music and the Commodification of Religious Experience
Steven Feld
3. A Place in the World: Globalization, Music, and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Vanuatu
Philip Hayward
4. Musicality and Environmentalism in the Rediscovery of Eldorado: An Anthropology of the Raoni-Sting Encounter
Rafael Jos de Menezes Bastos
Part 2. Mediated Encounters
5. Beautiful Blue : Rar muri Violin Music in a Cross-Border Space
Daniel Noveck
6. World Music Producers and the Cuban Frontier
Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
7. Trovador of the Black Atlantic: Laba Sosseh and the Africanization of Afro-Cuban Music
Richard M. Shain
Part 3. Imagined Encounters
8. Slave Ship on the Infosea: Contaminating the System of Circulation
Barbara Browning
9. World Music Today
Timothy D. Taylor
10. The Promise of World Music: Strategies for Non-Essentialist Listening
Bob W. White
Contributors
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
This volume grows out of the work of Critical World, a virtual research laboratory that uses ethnographic research to explore the relationship between popular culture and globalization. A Web-based experiment in project-oriented teaching and research ( www.criticalworld.net ), Critical World provides resources for critical engagement with the products of global culture and creates the opportunity for debate about the role of globalization in our everyday lives. Professors, researchers, students, and artists from various cultural backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives participate in the project. Bringing them together is a common concern about the history and consequences of globalization and a shared interest in popular culture s potential to reveal something about the worlds that we inhabit. Critical World consists of a series of multimedia modules intended for use in university teaching and research permitting users to combine video, sound, images, and text in novel ways. In addition to providing basic information about the project, the website also allows visitors to correspond directly with the project s author, either to give feedback or make suggestions about potential contributions to the project.
The Critical World Project recieved financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The project was launched officially in 2004 during a three-day international workshop made possible with the assistance of the SSHRC Research Workshops and Conferences program as well as the Department of Anthropology and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Montreal, the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Memory (Laval University), l Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (Bureau Am rique du nord), and the Center for Research on Intermediality (University of Montreal). A number of the analyses presented in this volume were originally formulated in presentations at the workshop. This workshop would not have been possible without the participation of Prof. Bogumil Jewsiewicki of Laval University in Qu bec.
Critical World has benefited from the guidance of a steering committee that has been critical to the project s success: Steven Feld, Timothy Taylor, Denis-Constant Martin, Louise Meintjes, and Jocelyne Guilbault. Many thanks to the students, research assistants, and professionals who gave life to the project through their hard work and creative ideas, especially Nelson Arruda, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Sophie Le-Phat Ho, Charles Pr mont, Marc Lemieux, Camille Brochu, Yara El-Ghadban, Marc-Antoine Lapierre, Sebastien Ouellette, Kiven Strohm, Ribio Nzeza, Estelle Pr bolin, and Benjamin Tr panier. I would also like to recognize Charles Hamel for his patient and thorough approach to programming, Fran ois Beaudet for his ongoing technical support, and Lesley Braun and Julie D nomm e who helped with the final formatting of the manuscript. I would especially like to acknowledge Marcel Savard, co-founder of Critical World and coordinator for the first and longest phase of the project. As my primary collaborator on this project, Marcel deserves a great deal of credit for making this vision into a reality, and I am profoundly grateful for his intellectual and artistic contribution. I would like to dedicate this volume to Lucie, for getting me through.
Bob W. White
Montr al
September 2011
Music and Globalization
Introduction: Rethinking Globalization through Music
Bob W. White
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 being simply a means of selling phonographs, were in fact themselves a lucrative and renewable resource. Relatively little is known about the marketing strategies of the first international record companies, but clearly these companies distinguished early on between exotic music for affluent European and North American audiences and music-perhaps no less exotic-intended for people elsewhere who wanted to hear the sounds of their own culture (White 2002). 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 political 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.
To begin, we must consider whether there is something distinctive about music-and not just world music-that enhances our understanding of globalization. The chapters in this volume suggest that music is particularly mobile and therefore easily commodified; indeed, nothing seems more characteristic of global capitalism than its capacity to transform culture into a commodity. But music is also important to our understanding of globalization, because the nature of music is primarily social. Music is generally intended to be heard and often takes the form of a group activity, especially when one considers the way that communities of taste emerge and organize around particular styles and artists. Nonetheless, and despite all the feel-good promotional language about music being a universal language, musical practice is everywhere deeply embedded in culture and history, an observation that ethnomusicologists have been making for decades. This means that a complex understanding of the performance and promotion of music can provide a wealth of information about how people from different cultures and class backgrounds engage with one another and attempt to work through what it means to be simultaneously of the world and in the world. The phenomenon of world music, at least in terms of marketing, has only existed for about twenty years. But this is only a recent manifestation of a much older historical process, and the social science literature on globalization tends to focus more on the culture of globalization than on cultures in a time of globalization .
World Music and Globalization
The recent phenomenon of world music provides a window on human experience and social life during an era of globalization, but as a broadly diverse form of human expression music has always been global. The invention of new recording and reproduction technologies at the end