Local Music Scenes And Globalization

While more than 80 percent of the world's commercial music is controlled by four multinational firms, most music is made and enjoyed in diverse situations divorced from such corporate behemoths. These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of "music scenes," those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few - New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hiphop - achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect. The editors distinguish between three types of scenes - local, translocal, and virtual - which provide the organizing framework for the essays. Aspects of local scenes, which are confined to specific areas, are explored through essays on Chicago blues, rave, karaoke, teen pop, and salsa. The section on translocal scenes, which involve the coming together of scattered local scenes around a particular type of music and lifestyle, includes articles on Riot Grrrls, goths, art music, and anarcho-punk. Aspects of virtual scenes, in which fans communicate via the internet, are illustrated using alternative country, the Canterbury sound, postrock, and Kate Bush fans. Also included is an essay that shows how the social conditions in places where jazz was made influenced that music's development.

This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut, looking at musicians working towards a new understanding of musical creativity and music culture in a country that is dominated by mass-mediated pop music, and propaganda. Burkhalter studies the generation of musicians born at the beginning of the Civil War in the Lebanese capital, an urban and cosmopolitan center with a long tradition of cultural activities and exchanges with the Arab world, Europe, the US, and the former Soviet Union. These Lebanese rappers, rockers, death-metal, jazz, and electro-acoustic musicians and free improvisers choose local and transnational forms to express their connection to the broader musical, cultural, social, and political environment. Burkhalter explores how these musicians organize their own small concerts for ‘insider’ audiences, set up music labels, and network with like-minded musicians in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. Several key tracks are analyzed with methods from ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, and contextualized through interviews with the musicians. Discussing key references from belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock in Beirut (1970s), the noises of the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990), and transnational Pop-Avant-Gardes and World Music 2.0 networks, this book contributes to the study of localization and globalization processes in music in an increasingly digitalized and transnational world. At the core, this music from Beirut challenges "ethnocentric" perceptions of "locality" in music. It attacks both "Orientalist" readings of the Arab world, the Middle East, and Lebanon, and the focus on musical "difference" in Euro-American music and culture markets. On theoretical grounds, this music is a small, but passionate attempt to re-shape the world into a place where "modernity" is not "euro-modernity" or "euro-american modernity," but where possible new configurations of modernity exist next to each other.

This book explores the ways in which Western-derived music connects with globalization, hybridity, consumerism and the flow of cultures. Both as local terrain and as global crossroads, cities remain fascinating spaces of cultural contestation and meaning-making via the composing, playing, recording and consumption of popular music.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary volume exploring the phenomenon of the "Westernization" of contemporary Chinese music

Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

The musical heritage of slavery : from Creolization to "world music" / Denis-Constant Martin My life in the bush of ghosts : "world music" and the commodification of religious experience / Steven Feld A place in the world : globalization, music, and cultural identity in contemporary Vanuatu / Philip Hayward Musicality and environmentalism in the rediscovery of Eldorado : an anthropology of the Raoni-Sting encounter / Rafael Jose? de Menezes Bastos "Beautiful blue" : Rara?muri violin music in a cross-border space / Daniel Noveck World music producers and the cuban frontier / Ariana Hernandez-Reguant Trovador of the Black Atlantic : Laba Sosseh and the Africanization of Afro-Cuban music / Richard M. Shain Slave ship on the infosea : contaminating the system of circulation / Barbara Browning World music of today / Timothy D. Taylor The promise of world music : strategies for non-essentialist listening / Bob W. White. Rethinking globalization through music / Bob W. White 1: Structured encounters The musical heritage of slavery : from Creolization to "world music" / Denis-Constant Martin My life in the bush of ghosts : "world music" and the commodification of religious experience / Steven Feld A place in the world : globalization, music, and cultural identity in contemporary Vanuatu / Philip Hayward Musicality and environmentalism in the rediscovery of Eldorado : an anthropology of the Raoni-Sting encounter / Rafael Jose? de Menezes Bastos 2: Mediated encounters "Beautiful blue" : Rara?muri violin music in a cross-border space / Daniel Noveck World music producers and the cuban frontier / Ariana Hernandez-Reguant Trovador of the Black Atlantic : Laba Sosseh and the Africanization of Afro-Cuban music / Richard M. Shain 3: Imagined encounters Slave ship on the infosea : contaminating the system of circulation / Barbara Browning World music of today / Timothy D. Taylor The promise of world music : strategies for non-essentialist listening / Bob W. White.

This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile ten-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mobilization of musical, economic, and social values as a component of branding discourses in neoliberal India, as a justification for new regimes of legitimate use and intellectual property, as a scene for the performance of cosmopolitanism by shopping, and as a site of anxiety about transformations in the marketplace. It relies upon ethnographic observation and interviews from a variety of sources within the Indian music industry, including perspectives of executives at music labels, family-run and corporate music stores, and hawkers in street markets selling counterfeit recordings. This ethnography of the practices, spaces, and anxieties of selling music in urban India will be an important resource for scholars in a wide range of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and South Asian studies.

Presenting the latest research in the area, this volume explores the fundamental concept of qupai 曲牌, melodic models upon which most traditional Chinese instrumental music (and some vocal music) is based. The greater part of the traditional instrumental repertoire has emerged from qupai models by way of well-established 'variation' techniques. These melodies and techniques are alive today and still performed in 'silk-bamboo' types of ensemble music, zheng 箏, pipa 琵琶 and other solo traditions, all opera types, narrative songs, and Buddhist and Daoist ritual music. With a view toward explaining qupai as a musical system, contributors explore the concept from multiple directions, notably its historic development, patterns of structural organization, compositional usage in Kunqu classical opera, influence on the growth of traditional ensemble and solo repertoires, and indeed on 19th-century European music as well. Related essays examine the use of shan'ge 山歌 folksongs as qupai models in one local opera tradition and the controversial relationship between qupai forms and the metrically-organized banqiang 板腔 forms of organization in Beijing opera. The final three essays are focused upon traditional suite forms in which qupai and non-qupai tunes are mixed, examples drawn from the Minnan nanguan 南管 repertoire, Jiangnan 'silk-bamboo' tradition and the ritual music of North China.This is the first Western-language study on the nature and background of the qupai tradition, and the methods by which model melodies have been varied in creation of repertoire. The volume is essential reading for East Asian music specialists and contributes to the fields of ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, music composition, and Chinese music and performing arts.