Abstract
Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, attempts to define ‘music’ were shaped by the vanishing point of a European/‘Western’ understanding of music. For some time, however, a clear, self-imposed reticence towards attempting a scientific definition of music can be recognized. Such problematizing approaches correspond with a growing awareness that the concept of music has, over the course of history and in diverse cultural contexts, demarcated a constantly changing range of phenomena. These insights lend weight to the concept of ‘world music’ and, in the further course of globalization und digitization, to new exchange processes, which no longer necessarily depend on western production and distribution infrastructures. As a result, ‘music’ emerges, at least in part, from the contribution of local practices into globally networked processes of musical interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
Via the Mediterranean cultural area, the term is adopted into the Arabic (musiqi). From there, it later migrates into Hebraic and Persian. However, during this linguistic acquisition musiqi is assigned to different terms and thus loses its specific characteristics as an abstract concept which inherits various facets of a phenomenon—in other words: the term now follows an alternative logic of systematization which develops and arranges its objects in a fundamentally different manner. For instance, in the Arabian cultural area, musiqi solely refers to instrumental music and excludes forms of vocal music. From a cultural and historical perspective, correlatives for the term ‘music’ in other languages—for instance, balungan (Javanese), cadomblé (Afro-Brasilian), kriti (South Indian), ma (Japanese), qiraah (Islamic-Persian), rasa (Indian-Hindu), sama (Arabic), sangita (Brahmanic), ta’ameh (Hebraic), zikr (Sufi) (see Philipp V. Bohlman, World Music. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 7f.)—reveal stronger varying concepts. Often, only single facets of these concepts correspond to what is understood as ‘musik’ from a European-‘occidental’ perspective—especially with regard to the ‘aesthetic’ understanding developed towards the end of the eighteenth century.
- 2.
Gurlitt, Wilibald/Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich/Dahlhaus, Carl (eds.), Riemann Musik-Lexikon, 12th Edition in 5 Volumes, 1958-1975, Volume 3, Mainz: Schott’s Söhne, 1967, p. 601.
- 3.
Friedrich Blume (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), 1949-1987 in 17 Volumes, Volume 9, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1961, Column 970.
- 4.
Ludwig Finscher (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), Volume 6/Subject Encyclopedia, Kassel/Stuttgart: Bärenreiter/J.B. Metzler, 1994, Column 1197.
- 5.
Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis sive Artis Magnae de Consono & Dißono, edited by Andrea Hirschen, Laidigen: Bärenreiter 1988, p.150 (first Edition 1662).
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 253.
- 8.
Cf. for instance, Immanuel Kant’s differentiation between ‘beautiful’ and ‘pleasant art’ as referred to in Anthropology and Critique of Judgment.
- 9.
For the genesis of the concept in this sense: Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995, p. 170 and p. 210f.
- 10.
The lute can be regarded as one example for the successive acquisition of music-cultural elements of non-European origin and their gradual transformations into an ostensible original component of the own culture. During the sixteenth century, the lute—of Islamic origin (al-ūd)—travels from the Eastern Mediterranean region via the Iberian Peninsula and France and finds its way to the European Renaissance music, where it is especially popular in the Italian, German, and English Renaissance music.
- 11.
First notes of such observations date back to the proselytization in South America and were written by Jean de Léry in 1578; Cf. Philipp V. Bohlman, World Music. A Very Short Introduction, op. cit., pp. 2–5.
- 12.
For the first time, the recording and storage media (phonograph, phonograph cylinders, and gramophone records, which are nowadays collected in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv) were used systematically for music and field studies at the beginning of the twentieth century in relation with Carl Stumpf. From the very beginning, these recordings create an important corrective with regard to the so far unbroken ‘occidentally’/Western-shaped imagination of the ‘music of foreign people’. In 1893, music of indigenous and non-Western origin (for instance, from Java) is already presented on the phonograph at the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago, USA.
- 13.
‘Kultur [als Zweitkodierung der Beobachtung von Welt, B.S.] ermöglicht die Dekomposition aller Phänomene mit offenem Rekompositionshorizont’ (‘Culture [as a second encoding of the observations of the world, B.S.] allows the decomposition of all phenomena with an open recomposition framework’): Niklas Luhmann, Kultur als historischer Begriff, in: Idem, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenschaftssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft. Band 4, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 42.
- 14.
Cf. the introduction of the logarithmic unit of measurement cent for the acquisition of pitch movements and musical intervals by Alexander John Ellis in 1875. It allows the subdivision of semitones in 100 units and the recognition of pitch differences of these units as whole-number multiples.
- 15.
Cf., for instance, the ethnomusicological work of Charles Seeger (1886–1979), who identifies the stocks with North and South American origin he collected from the 1930s onwards as folk music as well, was the record label Folkways Records founded by Moses Asch and Marian Distler in 1948.
- 16.
Bohlmann underlines these transformations using an example of the republication of two anthologies written by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel during the first decades of the twentieth century in the 1960s and 1970s; cf. Philipp V. Bohlmann, World Music. A Very Short Introduction, op. cit., pp. 28–31.
- 17.
Cf. the renewed integration of African music idioms which was pronouncedly implemented by the 1960s Jazz, which located itself as return to the own ‘roots’ in the political context of the Afro-American civil rights movements; also, the musical language of Bob Marley, who enriches the English Ska with African-Jamaican elements, developed it to the musical style of Reggae and binds it via the Rastafarian faith decidedly to an (imagined) return to Ethiopia, respectively, Africa. Musical styles can—as long as their genesis remains visible—advance to an allegory of a political agenda which connects the historical awareness of a forced migration with an imagery of political protest and derives impulses for further musical as well as nonmusical action.
- 18.
Especially, the albums My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Eno/Byrne, Sire Records 1981) and Graceland (Simon/ Simon, Warner Bros 1986) are linked to the development and consolidation of the term ‘world music’, in which traditional non-European music is blended with elements of rock and pop music.
- 19.
Mozart Requiem—Tibetan Monks—Gregorian Requiem: Rituals of Transformation. Network 1996.
- 20.
Desert Blues. Network 1995.
- 21.
Cf., for instance, Ry Cooders successful album Buena Vista Social Club (World Circuit Productions 1996), which process of production is documented in the movie of the same name by Wim Wenders (D/USA/UK/F/Kuba 1999). During the last scene, the musicians unfold the Cuban Flag at the end of their concert in the Carnegie Hall, while the New York audience gives standing ovations. That these musicians mostly performed under the Batista-regime before their revival, is, at most, only represented by traces of nostalgic film aesthetics and the musical style of the Son Cubana, but it does not affect the symbolism of the documented moment.
- 22.
Cf., for instance, the album One World One Voice (Virgin Records 1990), a production with 50 musicians from around the world (together with a cinematic documentation of the preparations and the realization of the project).
- 23.
Cf. hereto, Gibb Schreffler, Migration Shaping Media. Punjabi Popular Music in a Global Historical Perspective, in: Popular Music and Society, Volume 35, Issue 3/2012, pp. 333–358.
- 24.
The marketing concept of the music industry of the Big Five aims at the genesis of stars and an attention economy that, instead of being directed to a wider range, is clearly focused on determined names and bands. International stars like Youssou N’Dour are, at least partly, products of this logic, as well as a large variety of music recordings which move traditional idioms strongly to popular music.
- 25.
Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music. Postcolonial notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 8ff.
- 26.
Cf., for instance, Giacomo Meyerbeer, L’Africaine (1865) or Georges Bizet, Les pêcheurs de perles (1863)
- 27.
For instance with regard to a cinematic documents cooperation of musicians.
- 28.
‘Wenn heute ein Musiker in Luanda einen Track ins Internet stellt, dann habe ich ihn Sekunden später bei mir auf dem Laptop. Und schon morgen lade ich vielleicht meinen Remix hoch’, erzählt der Berner Produzent und Musiker Wildlife!’ (‘If a musician in Luanda uploads a track to the internet today, I have it a few seconds later on my own laptop. And tomorrow I might already upload my remix’, tells the Bernese producer and musician Wildlife!’) Theresa Beyer, Thomas Burkhalter (ed.), Out of the Absurdity of Life: Globale Musik, [Norient 012], Unterentfelden: Traversion, 2012, Preface, p. 6.
- 29.
‘Die multi-kulturelle Truppe Chicha Libre aus Brooklyn spielt die peruanische Cumbia mit den kalifornischen Surf-Gitarrensounds der 1970er Jahre. Auf ihrer neuen LP ‚Cuatro Tigres’ stülpen die Musiker bekannten Stücken wie ‚Guns of Brixton’ von The Clash oder der Titelmelodie der Serie Simpsons ihr psychedelisches Soundkleid über. Hinzu kommen wie immer Neuvertonungen bekannter Popsongs aus den Anden. Eine Band für Retro-Fans’. (‘The multi-cultural group Chicha Libre from Brooklyn plays the Peruvian Cumbia with the Californian surf-guitar sounds of the 1970s. On their new LP ‘Cuatro Tigres’, they cover famous songs like ‘Guns of Brixton’ by The Clash or the Simpsons theme song with their psychedelic sounds. New scorings and recordings of famous popsongs from the Andes add up to this. A band for retro-fans.’) Norient, Retro-Sounds aus den Anden, 2013, online: www. norient.com/de/blog/chichalibre/.
- 30.
Concise examples are the works of Eric Whitacre, whose Virtual Choir with singers from around the world not only provided audio samples for his compositions, but he also integrated these thousands of vocal performances recorded as podcasts into the visual design of the performance (for instance, in Water Night on an oversized projection surface). With this technique he implies the impression of a real-time live performance.
- 31.
The so far most impressive example is given by the Gangnam-Style (a parody on the sociocultural milieu of the inhabitants of the same-named district of Seoul) developed by the South Korean musician Psy. On Youtube, the Gangnam-Style music clip registered one billion clicks until the end of 2012.
- 32.
For local and regional practices of appropriation of globally successful music—respectively dance styles like Gangnam-Style or Harlem Shake cf. Protest Memes, Gangnam & Harlem Shake, 03.03.2013, online at www.history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.de/2013/03/protest-memes-gangnam-harlem- shake.html or: Harlem Shake as Protest in Tunisia, Democratic Underground, online at www.democraticunderground.com/10022439884 (last accessed 28.11.2017).
- 33.
The term was coined by Thomas Burkhalter in 2011.
- 34.
Philipp V. Bohlman, World Music. A Very Short Introduction, op. cit., p. 145
- 35.
‘Discourse of diversity acquired positive value in the present day and enough strength so as to organize some of the global enunciations and even those which are proposed to be universal. Ethnomusicology has embodied this discourse of diversity, so as to propose the study of the musics of the world without hierarchies, comprehending these musics according to the system of thought of their own cultures’: Michel Nicolau Netto, The conditions of global discourse of diversity: Music Encyclopedias, Dictionaries and Ethnomusicology, 2006, online at www.musica.ufrj.br/posgraduacao/rbm/edicoes/rbm23-2/rbm23-2-06.pdf.
- 36.
‘If one were, however, to make a comprehensive census of all human cultures or culture-units, one would probably find exceptions to all characteristics proposed as universals’. Bruno Nettl, Music, in: New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, herausgegeben von Stanley Sadie, London: Oxford University Press, Volume 17, 2001, pp. 108–109.
- 37.
Especially in terms of the difference between the use of the singing voice as a substantial part of a religious ritual and variations of instrumental performances, which are assigned to a different range of phenomena and are closer located to the European idea of ‘music’.
- 38.
‘But that music is found in all human societies, that it is a cultural universal, seems never to have been seriously opposed among musicologists. Ethnomusicologists, in particular, regard music as a human universal and have argued widely about its universal characteristics’: Bruno Nettl, Music, in: New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, loc. cit.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
‘Indeed, looking at the literature of musicology over the past century, one sees a trend of increasing inclusiveness, perhaps even a kind of gluttony, in which all conceivable kinds of sound from the most central (such as Beethoven) to the most peripheral (elevated speech, sounds of whales, birdsong, industrial noise, background sounds for mass media advertizing, etc.) are all appropriate subjects for musicological study’. Ibid.
- 41.
Cf. Niklas Luhmann’s definition of ‘world’: ‘We employ the concept of a world as a concept for the unity of the difference between system and environment and use it as an ultimate concept, one free of further differences’ Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 208.
- 42.
‘Multiple meanings of the ‘world music’ concept, debating issues that include the appropriation and commodification of ethnic musics, cultural imperialism, the assimilation of foreign musical genres, sonic tourism, locality in music, power relations, and ethics’. Carole Pegg: ‘World Music’. In: Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001ff.
- 43.
Philipp V. Bohlman, World Music. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. xi.
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Schlüter, B. (2019). Music. In: Kühnhardt, L., Mayer, T. (eds) The Bonn Handbook of Globality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90382-8_15
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